The Book of Kells: To Willy Pogany

FIRST, make a letter like a monument:
An upright like the fast-held hewn stone
Immovable, and half-rimming it
The strength of Behemoth, his neck-bone,
And underneath that yoke, a staff, a rood
Of no less hardness than the cedar-wood.

Then on a page made golden as the crown
Of sainted man, a scripture you enscroll,
Blackly, firmly, with the quickened skill
Lessoned by famous penmen in our school,
And with an ink whose lustre will keep fresh
For fifty generations of our flesh.

And underneath it, the Evangelist
In raddled coat, on bench abidingly,
Simple and bland; Matthew, his name, or Mark,
Or John, or Luke; the book is at his knee,
And thereby its similitudes — Lion,
Or Calf, or Eagle, or Exalted Man.

The winds that blow about the world, the four
Winds on these pages have their colors join:
The Northern Wind — its blackness interpose;
The Southern Wind — its blueness gather in;
In redness and in greenness manifest
The splendour of the winds of East and West.

And with these colors, on a ground of gold
Compose a circuit will be seen by men
As endless patience, but is nether web
Of endless effort — a strict pattern:
Through knots and scrolls and loops your line keeps on,
The going-forth and the return one.

Axal, our angel, has sustained you so,
In hand, in brain: now to him seal that thing
With figures many as the days of man,
And colors like the fire’s enamelling—
That baulk, that letter you have greatly reared
To stay the violence of the entering Word.