Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

– W. B. Yeats

*

Do you know what you want? — Have you never been plagued by the fear that you might be completely incapable of knowing the truth? The fear that your mind may be too dull and even your subtle faculty of seeing still much too coarse? Have you not noticed what kind of will rules behind your seeing? For example, how yesterday you wanted to see more than another, today differently from another, or how from the very first you longed to find what others fancied they had found or the opposite of that! Oh shameful craving! How you sometimes looked for something which affected you strongly, sometimes for what soothed you — because you happened to be tired! Always full of secret predeterminations of how truth would have to be constituted if you would consent to accept it! Or do you believe that today, since you are frozen and dry like a bright morning in winter and have nothing weighing on your heart, your eyes have somehow improved? Are warmth and enthusiasm not needed if a thing of thought is to have justice done to it? — and that precisely is seeing! As though you were able to traffic with things of thought any differently from the way you do with men! In this traffic too there is the same morality, the same honourableness, the same reservations, the same slackness, the same timidity — your whole lovable and hateful ego! When you are physically tired you will bestow on things a pale and tired coloration, when you are feverish you will turn them into monsters! Does your morning not shine upon things differently from your evening? Do you not fear to re-encounter in the cave of every kind of knowledge your own ghost — the ghost which is the veil behind which truth has hidden itself from you? Is it not a horrible comedy in which you so thoughtlessly want to play a role? —

– Nietzsche