The Ancient Sage, by Lord Tennyson

Lord Tennyson · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 9 pages

Nine pages carrying Tennyson's The Ancient Sage complete. The poem alternates between two voices set out differently on the page — the young man's sceptical verses printed indented and in quotation marks, and the Sage's replies in continuous blank verse around them.

The setting is given in the opening lines: a thousand summers before the time of Christ, a Seer comes out of his ancient city followed by a richly dressed young man, worn from wasteful living, who loves and honours him without being a disciple and who carries a scroll of verse. At a cavern from which a fountain pours out of darkness into daylight the old man turns and speaks, and the image he begins with sets the whole argument — this wealth of waters may seem to come from the dark cave, but the source is higher, the summit higher still, the cloud that hides it higher again, and the heavens by which the cloud was moulded higher than that: force is from the heights. The young man's verses press the sceptical case: how bright the nightingale's music and the summer skies, and yet what sign of anything lying behind the green and blue, when the nameless Power or Powers that rule were never heard or seen. The Sage's answer is the passage the file exists for. If you would hear the Nameless, dive into the Temple-cave of your own self, where brooding by the central altar you may learn that the Nameless has a voice — one to abide by if you are wise, as if you knew, though you cannot know. Knowledge is likened to the swallow on the lake, which sees and stirs the surface-shadow but has never dipped into the abysm beneath. The poem ends by turning from metaphysics to conduct: since the key to that weird casket is in the hand of what is more than man, let be thy wail and help thy fellow men, make thy gold thy vassal not thy king, fling free alms into the beggar's bowl, and send the day into the darkened heart.

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