what will survive, against the mediocre and the half alive

Lee Miller, 'Revenge on Culture', from Grim Glory (1940)

'Wo aber sind die Freunde? Bellarmin
Mit dem Gefahrten...'
                                        HOLDERLIN


Not in my lifetime, the love I envisage:
Not in this century, it may be. Nevertheless inevitable.
Having experienced a foretaste of its burning
And of its consolation, although locked in my aloneness
Still, although I know it cannot come to be
Except in reciprocity, I know
That true love is gratuitous, and will race through
The veins of the reborn world's generations, free
and sweet, like a new kind of electricity.

The love of heroes and of men like gods
Has been for long a strange thing on the earth
And monstrous to the mediocre. They
In whom such love is luminous can but transcend
The squalid inhibitions of those only half alive.
In blind content they breed who never loved a friend.


David Gascoyne, 'Eros Absconditus' in Selected Poems (London: Enitharmon, 1994), pp.160.