1564

It has no meaning in itself, but may offer one:
To the incidence that Shakespeare was born
In the year Michelangelo died, it’s fair to say
“So what?” Plainly, it’s not as if they ever met,
Nor do the natural events – a birth, a death –
Reach into each other. Simply, one colossus
Comes down and the foundations of another
Are set in course, merely, say, as a tower
Above a city is reduced to rubble, blowing dust,
And another edifice rises, or as homes give way
To offices, and these empty amid familiar spires
That stand in their ebbing concept and utility.

But such similes of transience and the real
Do not entirely hold, for these were builders
Whose materials of marble, pigment, word –
The tangibles ready to perception – stand in for,
Are representative of, what cannot be seen,
Are creations, architectures, made of, and for
The imagination, in which unreality they remain,
And into which we, in our various wretchedness
And nobility, are welcomed and are housed
In company with all the varieties of our gods –
The august and the worse – and housed not
In steel, cement, glass, nor stone, language, paint.

The structures they have left to us, like those
Of another very few – artistry being less prodigal
Than affluence in raising the conspicuous –
Stand above the dominant in our surrounds,
Yet their presence, in their excelling distinction,
Is not in the outward, but in interiors, which
Are our interiority too, and it is thus in given
Lobbies, basements, lifts – being those we have
Within – that we meet the totality and miscellany
Of the persons, figures, Horatios and Iagos,
Perditas, Ophelias, Caesars and Snugs, whose
Characters we play in the theatre of our lives.

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