SOURCE: Auden, W. H. “Timon of Athens.” In Lectures on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Kirsch, pp. 255-69. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, constructed from lectures delivered in 1946 and 1947, Auden calls Timon a “pathological giver” whose giving is motivated by selfishness and a desire to feel superior to others. The critic contends that when Timon's power—his ability to give—is taken away, he falls into “a state of powerless hatred.”]

Timon of Athens is an interim work between the great tragedies and the last batch of Shakespeare's plays, which are usually known as the romance comedies. It is rash to draw inferences from an author's works about his life. Timon is not a personal work, as Hamlet may be. The five masterpieces Shakespeare wrote in four years were succeeded by three plays—Timon, Cymbeline, and Pericles—that were only partly by him, followed by his two final plays, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. During the period in which he wrote Timon, Cymbeline, and Pericles, Shakespeare was either ill or exhausted, and he worked on plays that he didn't finish.

The verse in Timon is of his late period, but the play is imperfectly constructed. The Alcibiades subplot is perfunctory—we don't know whom Alcibiades is defending. In the last scene Alcibiades changes character and style without warning, and throughout the play he has little relation to the main plot. When the senators come and plead with Timon in the cave, there is a sudden suggestion that he is a military leader. The bad senators die for no good reason. And the play is not strictly a tragedy, for Timon's death is unmotivated. He just passes away.

Timon of Athens is a psychological study of a pathological condition, showing a maniac in two phases: in the first, he gives money, and in the second, he gives curses. Timon is a pathological giver. There have been many studies of the miser, but few of the spendthrift. There was a man who was sent to Bellevue for giving away money on the Bowery at Christmas. People are divisible into those who find it easier to give and those who find it easier to take. Only those men Timon thought of as friends, those who take, have clearly motivated conduct in the play.

There are two parts to Timon of Athens. The first takes place in a banquet hall, with lights and music. The second takes place in wild nature, in a cave in the woods, where Timon eats roots, and finally at the verge of the sea, which has its own music. In the first phase of the action, Timon gets Ventidius out of jail for debt. He pays Ventidius's debt and vows “to support him after” (I.i.108), like the good Samaritan, who not only helped a man up, but paid an innkeeper two pence, with the promise of more, to care for him. Next, Timon arranges a match between his servant, Lucilius, and a free girl. In a gesture of contempt, her father, an old man, protests to Timon that having “from my first been inclin'd to thrift,” he won't be stingy if his daughter, his only child, marries without his consent, he will give his money to a beggar (I.i.116-39). To secure the old man's consent, Timon agrees to match the girl's dowry and makes the love match possible. Timon meets the painter and poet and acts as patron to the painter. In an interesting scene, Ventidius arrives with money and offers to repay Timon. Timon refuses, saying,

                                                                                                    You mistake my love.
I gave it freely ever; and there's none
Can truly say he gives, if he receives.
If our betters play at that game, we must not dare
To imitate them. Faults that are rich are fair.

(I.ii.9-13)

Timon feasts, he gives jewels, and people give him presents. He tells his servant that in welcoming newly arriving senators, “let them be receiv'd, / Not without fair reward” (I.ii.196-97), and in the following scene, a senator notes that gifts to Timon breed still more valuable gifts in return:

If I would sell my horse and buy twenty moe
Better than he—why, give my horse to Timon.
Ask nothing, give it him—it foals me straight,
And able horses.

(II.i.7-10)

During the banquet, Timon, offers a toast to his friends:

O you gods, think I, what need we have any friends if we should ne'er have need of 'em? They were the most needless creatures living, should we ne'er have use for 'em; and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases, that keep their sounds to themselves. Why, I have often wish'd myself poorer, that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes.

(I.ii.97-109)

“Methinks,” he says in wild exaltation, “I could deal kingdoms to my friends / And ne'er be weary” (I.ii.226-27). At the end of the feast, Timon calls out “Lights, more lights!” (I.ii.234), as if afraid of the dark.

Timon has always been a person who wants to give more than he receives. Behind this behavior we see certain things that are not wholly unselfish: a desire to be in a superior position and play the mother, as well as a fear that one is in a weak position, unworthy of being loved for oneself. One must not take because one does not deserve. In sex relations, the giving of presents is a way of showing contempt and reproach. Nietzsche remarks that “In affability there is no hatred of men, but precisely on that account a great deal too much contempt of men.” Timon's subsequent violent reaction shows that there was a great deal of aggression in the form of misgiving, which comes out in naked form when he can't any longer give. He wants to be related to others only as a giver, a rich man who has inherited his wealth. But as Flavius his steward says, in a sense nothing is his, he gives borrowed money. Timon is like the kleptomaniac who takes things and gives them back to the same people as presents. Lenders, like the senator who remarks on Timon's breeding gifts, begin to realize that Timon is already bankrupt, and they not unnaturally think they'd better get their money back. One basic theme of the play is that one cannot take without giving or give without taking. For better or for worse, we are all members of one society. Credit is a social and communal relation that has no objective factor, it is based on how people feel.

When he is threatened with bankruptcy, Timon approaches three friends for help. One servant goes to Lucullus, who had been expecting another gift. Lucullus says he had expected this trouble and had warned Timon: “Many a time and often I ha' din'd with him and told him on't, and come again to supper to him of purpose to have him spend less; and yet he would embrace no counsel, take no warning by my coming” (III.i.24-29). Lucullus's excuse for refusing to help may be true, but it is base. When Lucius hears Lucullus has refused Timon, he is shocked, but then refuses to give aid himself because he is afraid he won't get his money back. Strangers observe Lucius's behavior—they are not asked to help and are therefore free to profess shock at his ingratitude. Finally, Sempronius is approached. He has heard that all Timon's friends have refused him, and he, in the most base reaction, pretends to be insulted because he should have been asked first: “Who bates mine honour shall not know my coin” (III.iii.26). What is shocking is not that these friends refuse Timon, but their excuses, their lack of frankness. Timon had been trying to buy their affections, and affections cannot be bought. Either they had affection for Timon or they didn't. If they did, they should have refused Timon's gifts because he couldn't afford them. If they didn't, they shouldn't have eaten his meals, which were a test of affection.

Suddenly, Timon is without power, the power to give, which is the only relation to others that is conceivable to him, and so he severs all relations. He holds a second banquet in which he offers a prayer to the gods not to trust men:

For these my present friends, as they are to me nothing, so in nothing bless them, and to nothing are they welcome.
                                                                                Uncover, dogs, and lap.
[The dishes are uncovered, and seen to be full of warm water.]

(III.vi.92-95)

We pass to the second half of the play, the depiction of Timon in a state of powerless hatred. Nothing can happen at all. Timon can make a lot of very fine speeches, but nothing can happen, except that he dies. He makes a plea for anarchy:

                                                            Matrons, turn incontinent!
Obedience fail in children! Slaves and fools,
Pluck the grave wrinkled Senate from the bench
And minister in their steads! To general filths
Convert o' th' instant, green virginity!
Do't in your parents' eyes. Bankrupts, hold fast!
Rather than render back, out with your knives
And cut your trusters' throats! Bound servants, steal!
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are
And pill by law. Maid, to thy master's bed!
Thy mistress is o' th' brothel. Son of sixteen,
Pluck the lin'd crutch from thy old limping sire:
With it beat out his brains!

(IV.i.3-15)

The fact that in his curse Timon has to tell matrons to be unfaithful shows that there must be some love and affection in society to make the curse meaningful. Timon giving curses is like Lear and Caliban filling the air with words. His message to all who visit: give others hell. He tells Alcibiades to kill and rape:

                                                                                                              Spare not the babe
Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy.
Think it a bastard whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounc'd thy throat shall cut,
And mince it sans remorse.

(IV.iii.118-22)

Again, his curse suggests that mercy must exist. He tells the whores who accompany Alcibiades to give diseases, and to the bandits he says, steal and be confounded. Timon's message to all: behave worse.

When Flavius, the good servant arrives, Timon believes that there is one honest man left and he calls on the gods to forgive him for his rashness, but the speech shows equal rashness in assuming that the world consists only of people he knows. He gives Flavius treasure, but advises him to shut himself off from men:

Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,
But let the famish'd flesh slide from the bone
Ere thou relieve the beggar.

(IV.iii.534-36)

Flavius is the worst experience for Timon, because Timon can't bear to “take” pity.

Flavius advises the senators who come to solicit Timon's help, truly, that Timon isn't interested:

It is in vain that you would speak with Timon;
For he is set so only to himself
That nothing but himself which looks like man
Is friendly with him.

(V.i.119-22)

The senators invite Timon to resume his former self and come back to Athens. He refuses. Note that Timon doesn't kill himself. In his last words, he tells the senators to “say to Athens,”

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come,
And let my gravestone be your oracle.
Lips, let sour words go by and language end.
What is amiss, plague and infection mend!
Graves only be men's works, and death their gain.
Sun, hide thy beams! Timon hath done his reign.

(V.i.217-26)

Alcibiades says that people will weep for Timon in spite of his forbidding it and that he will be spectacularly mourned by nature, by the salt sea:

Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
Scorn'dst our brine's flow and those our droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.

(V.iv.75-79)

But other people must see his grave, and other people must read the epitaph saying he doesn't like them.

Timon talks a great deal to visitors. Apemantus is his shadow throughout the play. At the beginning he tests Timon's generosity. He comes to Timon's banquet and tells him, “I come to observe, I give thee warning on't” (I.ii.33), and the grace he says at the feast advises Timon to trust nobody:

Immortal gods, I crave no pelf.
I pray for no man but myself.
Grant I may never prove so fond
To trust man on his oath or bond,
Or a harlot for her weeping,
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping,
Or a keeper with my freedom,
Or my friends, if I should need 'em.
Amen. So fall to't.
Rich men sin, and I eat root.

(I.ii.63-72)

Apemantus also mocks the “Masque of Ladies [as] Amazons”:

Hoy-day! What a sweep of vanity comes this way!
They dance? They are mad women.
Like madness is the glory of this life,
As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.
We make ourselves fools to disport ourselves,
And spend our flatteries to drink those men
Upon whose age we void it up again
With poisonous spite and envy.
Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?

(I.ii.137-45)

What is the difference between Timon and Apemantus? Apemantus is a professional preacher of self-sufficiency, of the Greek idea of a god as a self-sufficient being. Timon, on the other hand, wants to be a god on whom others depend. As a professor, however, Apemantus requires an audience, he can't go into the woods as Timon later does. He's related to others by repulsion. Nietzsche remarks that “He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself thereby, as a despiser.”

In the scene between Apemantus and Timon in the woods, both are just in their criticisms of each other. Apemantus comes in jealous. He doesn't want another professor to compete with him, and he rails at Timon for behaving as he does only because of disappointment. Apemantus sees that Timon is not interested in self-sufficiency and tells him that nature won't serve him. But he admits, “I love thee better now than e'er I did,” to which Timon responds,

TIM.
I hate thee worse.
APEM.
Why?
TIM.
Thou flatter'st misery.
APEM.
I flatter not, but say thou art a caitiff.
TIM.
Why dost thou seek me out?
APEM.
To vex thee.
TIM.
Always a villain's office or a fool's.

(IV.iii.233-37)

Apemantus then says to Timon, and truly,

If thou didst put this sour cold habit on
To castigate thy pride, 'twere well; but thou
Dost it enforcedly. Thou'dst courtier be again,
Wert thou not beggar.

(IV.iii.239-42)

Timon tells Apemantus that if he had been rich, he wouldn't have had to seek a position as a professor, and that he himself has

                              had the world as my confectionary;
The mouths, the tongues, the eyes, and hearts of men
At duty, more than I could frame employment.

(IV.iii.260-62)

This is what Timon thought he had gotten with his giving, but Apemantus points out to him that

The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy gilt and thy perfume, they mock'd thee for too much curiosity; in thy rags thou know'st none, but art despis'd for the contrary.

(IV.iii.300-305)

Timon's last curse against Apemantus (IV.iii.330-49) reveals that he is disappointed that the beasts aren't self-sufficient either.

Alcibiades might have been an interesting character. Timon, unloved by the people he has helped, cuts himself off from society. Alcibiades, too, has done exceptional deeds for society as a soldier, and he demands special treatment for his friends from society in return. Society owes him something. He makes a plea to the senators for a friend who had killed a man, a friend who had fought for the state and had been brave in battle. When he is refused and banished, he doesn't cut himself off from society, but fights back. Society would be unbearable with such special treatment, but civilization is impossible without it, if extralegal entities like the state show in their behavior that civilization is incomplete. The senators judge manslaughter harshly because it does not tempt them, but they are tempted by usury. The reverse is true of Alcibiades. In a change parallel to Timon's, he wishes to turn into a tyrant god:

                                                                                                                        I'll cheer up
My discontented troops and lay for hearts.
'Tis honour with most lands to be at odds.
Soldiers should brook as little wrongs as gods.

(III.v.114-17)

Alcibiades needs money for his rebellion, and Timon in the woods gives him the gold he has found. In the last scene, however, without warning, Alcibiades turns into a righteous judge, the senators become reasonable, and the right things are said about giving and taking. The senators invite Alcibiades into the city and offer him “decimation, and a tithed death” (V.iv.31), but dissuade him from wanton bloodshed. Alcibiades agrees and says:

Those enemies of Timon's and mine own
Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof
Fall, and no more. And, to atone your fears
With my more noble meaning, not a man
Shall pass his quarter or offend the stream
Of regular justice in your city's bounds
But shall be render'd to your public laws
At heaviest answer.

(V.iv.56-63)

The relation of giving and getting is a major theme of the play. In How To Read a Page, I. A. Richards talks of the ideas of giving and getting and of the union of “give” and “get”

in the word Agape, standing for what it is tempting to call the Christian concept of love. But we should not call it that—since, from the earliest days of Christianity, this word has been the focus of a tremendous struggle to reconcile what have seemed to most people at most times to be opposite senses of Give and Get. The history of Christian dogma is the record of this intellectual-moral struggle. Orthodoxy has wavered between different adjustments and heresy after heresy might be described as a leaning toward one extreme or another. …

Over against Agape as the rival concept of love is Eros, which is best studied in Plato's Symposium. Eros is that love which comes from lack. We desire or want because we are in want. He who desires something is in want of it (200). Our desires mount from bodily pleasures and beauties to the beauties of the mind, to institutions or laws, to the sciences, and at last to the all-encompassing knowledge or Idea of the Good (210-11), the final cause of the ascent. At each stage there is rebirth—a new need takes the place of the old needs. But all is need—the fulfilling of what is wanting. All desire, whatever its guise, is a striving to Get, and love, as Eros, whether it seeks pleasure or knowledge or a perfection still higher than knowledge (Republic V, 509), is still an effort to gain.

This concept of love seemed to Plato to span all desire from its humblest stirrings to its noblest flights. When Christianity first broke with it and made an equally extreme identification of Love with Give, the opposition was recognized by men of both parties. It came to a head with St. Paul. It has often been remarked that Plato and St. Paul would have made little enough of one another. To St. Paul a new world picture had come into being with a new conception of God.

To Plato, the more self-sufficient a man is the more perfect (Republic II, 381). And if we may let Aristotle in an early work speak for him, a perfect being would be without needs: “One who is self-sufficient can have no need of the service of others, nor of their affection, nor of social life, since he is capable of being alone. This is especially evident of God. Clearly since he is in need of nothing, God can have no need of friends, nor will he have any” (Eudemian Ethics, 1244b).

It is perhaps harsh to read into the last clause all that we might. Nonetheless, there is a repugnancy between this “self-absorbed object of unreciprocated love” (to use a phrase from Ross) and most Christian concepts: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John III:16).

It is true that Eros, for Plato, did convey prophecies and such from God to man as well as man's love and desire to God. Nonetheless, Eros is a stream of Getting and Agape is a stream of Givings. As Eros, man's love to God is acquisitive, a desire to Get him for ourselves. It is the most enlightened form of self-love; the bad fail to love themselves. In it we seek our own good, and we must love him for nothing else, for no other gains than that self-fulfillment. But, as Agape, Love is all outgoing, and pure Giving. It is not acquisitive; Charity “seeketh not her own” (First Corinthians XIII:5). And of this love God is the source, not, as with Eros, the object. All love is from God—overflowing in man's love for other men. It lends all value to men, who are all otherwise worthless. Our love to God is not desire for him but surrender to his love. In place of love for him we have participation in his love for other men.

Christianity teaches that “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Who is thy neighbor? He who has need of thee. Only God is able to give in an absolute sense. One can't give without someone who needs, and one can't entirely dissociate oneself from selfishness. In the “Book of Thel,” William Blake suggests two definitions of love, one the charitable generative love we find in the world of nature, the other the more selfish sexual love of human beings. He also treats the subject in “I heard an Angel singing”:

I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing,
“Mercy, Pity, Peace
Is the world's release.”
Thus he sung all day
Over the new mown hay,
Till the sun went down
And haycocks looked brown.
I heard a Devil curse
Over the heath & the furze,
“Mercy could be no more,
If there was nobody poor;
“And pity no more could be,
If all were as happy as we.”
At his curse the sun went down
And the heavens gave a frown.
And Miserie's increase
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.

What are our needs? At the bottom are physical needs: hunger and thirst, which are the purest and are necessarily acquisitive. I destroy a steak and can't share it. For that very reason a meal can be a symbol of the other extreme, love as giving. Why? Eating unites us all—rich, poor, stupid, clever, male, female, black or white. If you want to know someone, the first thing you do is to ask him to dinner. Eating is purely selfish, so a shared feast becomes a symbol of generosity and love. The symbol of Agape is not the act of sex but the act of nutrition. Just because eating is the one primal act common to all living organisms irrespective of species, race, age, sex, or consciousness, the one act in which, since we demand all and give nothing, we are necessarily completely alone, therefore only this act can testify to the utter dependence of all creatures on each other, to the fact that everyone is our neighbor.

Somebody eating another is a symbol of aggression, and Timon is filled with such oral imagery. When Timon invites Apemantus to dine with him, Apemantus answers, “No, I eat not lords” (I.i.207). The other guests wish “to taste Lord Timon's bounty” (I.i.285). Apemantus remarks on “what a number of men eats Timon” (I.ii.40). Timon says to Alcibiades, “You had rather be at a breakfast of enemies than a dinner of friends,” and Alcibiades answers, “So they were bleeding new, my lord, there's no meat like 'em. I could wish my best friend at such a feast” (I.ii.78-82). Later, in the woods, when Alcibiades offers him gold, Timon says, “Keep it. I cannot eat it” (IV.iii.100), and as he gnaws at a root, he says, “That the whole life of Athens were in this! / Thus would I eat it” (IV.iii.281-82). Beasts eat each other, as Timon tells Apemantus at length:

If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee. If thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee. If thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when peradventure thou wert accus'd by the ass. If thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou liv'dst but as a breakfast to the wolf. If thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner. Wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury. Wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be kill'd by the horse; wert thou a horse, thou would'st be seiz'd by the leopard; wert thou a leopard, thou wert germane to the lion, and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life. All thy safety were remotion, and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast? And what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!

(IV.iii.330-49)

What is theft? Taking things that belong to others by right, things that by nature can't be shared. If you eat what doesn't belong to you, you steal. When the bandits come to take Timon's gold, he tells them, “Your greatest want is, you want much of meat. / Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots,” and when they tell him they “cannot live on grass, on berries, water, / As beasts and birds and fishes,” he answers, “Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds and fishes; / You must eat men” (IV.iii.419-20, 424-27). Timon then urges them to remain thieves:

                                                            I'll example you with thievery.
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun,
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From gen'ral excrement. Each thing's a thief.

(IV.iii.438-45)

We have to encroach on others in living. Owning something is a deprivation of others. Sex is particularly difficult. It's a hunger and also a love that wishes to give. When Timon asks Apemantus to dine with him, he answers:

APEM.
No, I eat not lords.
TIM.
An thou shouldst, thou'dst anger ladies.
APEM.
O, they eat lords. So they come by great bellies.

(I.i.207-10)

The Fool in the play says to the usurer's servants:

I think no usurer but has a fool to his servant. My mistress is one, and I am her fool. When men come to borrow of your masters, they approach sadly and go away merry; but they enter my mistress' house merrily and go away sadly.

(II.ii.103-8)

Giving as a physical need: Baudelaire remarks that “There are only two places where one pays for the right to spend: women and public latrines.” Since love is more than simply getting, prostitution is not considered respectable. But Baudelaire sees prostitution as nonpossessive, as a symbol of Agape:

Love is the desire for prostitution. There is, indeed, no exalted pleasure which cannot be related to prostitution. At the play, in the ballroom, each one enjoys possession of all. … Love may spring from a generous sentiment, the desire for prostitution, but it is soon corrupted by the desire for ownership. Love wishes to emerge from itself, to become, like the conqueror with the conquered, a part of its victim, yet to preserve, at the same time, the privileges of the conqueror. The sensual delights of one who keeps a mistress are at once those of an angel and a landlord. Charity and cruelty. Indeed, they are independent of sex, of beauty and of the animal species.

“The most prostitute of all beings is the Supreme Being, God Himself,” Baudelaire writes, “since for each man he is the friend above all others; since he is the common, inexhaustible fount of Love.”

We all have physical needs. We all demand food—we pray for it: “Give us this day our daily bread.” If I have food to give, I give. If I haven't, I can't do anything. Love can't be priced. Parents are able to give love to their children without demanding love in return. It is never purely selfless, but it is most nearly so. Timon can't buy love—it has to be freely given. Love is unpriceable, whereas putting a price on food is easy. In between are works of art—for which it is very hard to decide on pricing and on the relation of giving and taking. The Poet in Timon thinks of himself as a giver: “Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes / From whence 'tis nourish'd” (I.i.21-22). He thinks that nature and experience are given to him first, and that he simply transmits them. But art does give something, and it fills some kind of need: a need for pleasure and truth. A subjective value also enters. What does my neighbor need? When one is hungry and thirsty what one feels one wants and what one should want are the same. In the arts, it's not so easy. Flattery is a problem. An artist can't demand both praise and money for his product. Timon makes a magnificent speech with conventional sentiments about the corrupting power of gold (IV.iii.24-44). But Timon has attempted to use money to coerce money in return. What he says about the corruption that gold can bring is true, but not because money itself is evil. It has a reverse side of virtues that can extend liberty. Men can have a corrupt will to break from society or to coerce others, but money can also extend Agape. If Ventidius discovered turnips, only a farmer could help him. It is difficult to price art, and impossible to price love and prestige, which involve a desire that has spiritual as well as physical grounds. Money, like science, can save lives or destroy them. Money increases relatedness, either for heaven or hell.

Some verse by Charles Williams, a poet you won't know, is relevant to Timon of Athens:

They laid the coins before the council.
Kay, the king's steward, wise in economics, said:
“Good; these cover the years and the miles
and talk one style's dialects to London and Omsk.
Traffic can hold now and treasure be held,
streams are bridged and mountains of ridged space
tunnelled; gold dances deftly across frontiers.
The poor have choice of purchase, the rich of rents,
and events move now in a smoother control
than the swords of lords or the orisons of nuns.
Money is the medium of exchange.”
Taliessen's look darkened; his hand shook
while he touched the dragons; he said, “We had a good thought.
Sir, if you made verse, you would doubt symbols.
I am afraid of the little loosed dragons.
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words
escape from verse they hurry to rape souls;
when sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant;
the brood of carriers levels the good they carry.
We have taught our images to be free; are ye glad?
are we glad to have brought convenient heresey to Logres?”
The Archbishop answered the lords;
his words went up though a slope of calm air:
“Might may take symbols and folly make treasure,
and greed bid God, who hides himself for man's pleasure
by occasion, hide himself essentially: this abides—
that the everlasting house the soul discovers
is always another's; we must lose our own ends;
we must always live in the habitation of our lovers,
my friend's shelter for me, mine for him.
This is the way of this world in the day of that other's;
make yourselves friends by means of the riches of iniquity,
for the wealth of the self is the health of the self exchanged.
What saith Heracleitus?—and what is the City's breath?—
dying each other's life, living each other's death.
Money is a medium of exchange.”