Merry Andrew:
Jack's the boy!
Ay, he's the proper figure of a man.
But he'll grow fat and flabby and scant of breath.
He'll miss his hoop some day.
Gentleman John:
But what are words
To shape the joy of form? The Greeks did best
To cut in marble or to cast in bronze
Their ecstasy of living. I remember
A marvellous Hermes that I saw in Athens,
Fished from the very bottom of the deep
Where he had lain two thousand years or more,
Wrecked with a galleyful of Roman pirates,
Among the white bones of his plunderers
Whose flesh had fed the fishes as they sank —
Serene in cold, imperishable beauty,
Biding his time, till he should rise again,
Exultant from the wave, for all men's worship,
The morning-spring of life, the youth of the world,
Shaped in sea-coloured bronze for everlasting.
Ay, the Greeks knew: but men have forgotten now.
Not easily do we meet beauty walking
The world to-day in all the body's pride.
That's why I'm here — a stable-boy to camels —
For in the circus-ring there's more delight
Of seemly bodies, goodly in sheer health,
Bodies trained and tuned to the perfect pitch,
Eager, blithe, debonair, from head to heel
Aglow and alive in every pulse, than elsewhere
In this machine-ridden land of grimy, glum
Round-shouldered, coughing mechanics. Once I lived
In London, in a slum called Paradise,
Sickened to see the greasy pavements crawling
With puny flabby babies, thick as maggots.
Poor brats! I'ld soon go mad if I'd to live
In London, with its stunted men and women
But little better to look on than myself.
Yet, there's an island where the men keep fit —
St Kilda's, a stark fastness of high crag:
They must keep fit or famish: their main food
The Solan goose; and it's a chancy job
To swing down a sheer face of slippery granite
And drop a noose over the sentinel bird
Ere he can squawk to rouse the sleeping flock.
They must keep fit — their bodies taut and trim —
To have the nerve: and they're like tempered steel,
Suppled and fined. But even they've grown slacker
Through traffic with the mainland, in these days.
A hundred years ago, the custom held
That none should take a wife till he had stood,
His left heel on the dizziest point of crag,
His right leg and both arms stretched in mid air,
Above the sea: three hundred feet to drop
To death, if he should fail — a Spartan test.
But any man who could have failed, would scarce
Have earned his livelihood or his children's bread
On that bleak rock.
Merry Andrew (drowsily):
Ay, children — that's it, children!
Gentleman John:
St Kilda's children had a chance, at least,
With none begotten idly of weakling fathers.
A Spartan test for fatherhood! Should they miss
Their hoop, 'twas death, and childless. You have still
Six lives to take unending hoops for you,
And you yourself are not done yet ...
Merry Andrew (more drowsily):
Not yet.
And there's much comfort in the thought of children.
They're bonnie boys enough; and should do well,
If I can but keep going a little while,
A little longer till ...