Poem: ‘The Porcelain Truth’

“Particularly I recall the fate of a French gentleman, my nearest neighbour at Seville who, having killed a compatriot in a duel about Saint John’s Day, was cursed by the widow in this form: that he should die when the last apple fell from the tree under which the fatal blow had been struck. This tree was within view of his bed-chamber and he took the words so deeply to heart that he fell sick and every morning counted the apples remaining on the boughs. ‘Alas, Jacques,’ he would say to his servant, ‘only five are left,’ or, ‘Only three are left,’ and grew daily weaker. The devoted servant sent into town for a china apple which, under cover of darkness, he fastened to a twig. Then, though winter gales blew and the rain poured down in torrents, the apple neither fell nor rotted. My ailing neighbour was greatly encouraged by the seeming miracle of its hanging there so staunchly on the bare boughs: he recovered his appetite and strength and at Epiphany, the day being sunny and dry, he rose and walked in the garden to view the fruit that had saved his life; but, becoming aware of the fraud, he suddenly put his hand to his heart and died all at once, before even a priest could be called to his soul’s aid.” [Robert Graves, The Isles of Unwisdom (1949), 321]

The apple tied with twine upon this bough
Is no more over-ripened then than now;
Is no more false today than falsity itself;
Will stay, a round and unpronounced fresh alph,
As long as human inattention lives.

What’s given rarely answers to ‘what gives?’
Just so Pandora’s story is retold:
Watch vaguely from afar and still grow old —
Step close, learn porcelain’s truth, and die.
We live by what we don’t identify.