Part 9

But kermesse is for them a festival, Even for the dirtiest, the stingiest, There go the lads to keep the wenches warm. A huge meal, greased with bacon and hot sauces, Makes their throats salty and enflames their thirst. They roll in the inns, with rounded guts, and hearts Aflame, and break the jaws and necks of those Come from the neighbouring town, who try, by God! To lick the village girls too greedily, And gorge a plate of beef that is not theirs.

Savings are squandered--for the girls must dance, And every chap must treat his mate, until The bottles strew the floor in ugly heaps. The proudest of their strength drain huge beer-mugs, Their faces fire-plated, darting fright, Horrid with bloodshot eyes and clammy mouth, In the dark rumbling revels kindle suns. The orgy grows. A stinking urine foams In a white froth along the causey chinks. Like slaughtered beasts are reeling topers floored. Some are with short steps steadying their gait; While others solo bawl a song's refrain, Hindered by hiccoughing and vomiting.

In brawling groups they ramble through the town, Calling the wenches, catching hold of them, Hugging them, shoving at them, Letting them go, and pulling them back in rut, Throwing them down with flying skirts and legs. In the taverns--where the smoke curls like grey fog And climbs to the ceiling, where the gluing sweat Of heated, unwashed bodies, and their smells Dull window-panes and pewter-pots with steam-- To see battalions of couples crowd In growing numbers round the painted tables, It looks as if their crush would smash the walls. More furiously still they go on swilling, Stamping and blustering and raging through The cries of the heavy piston and shrill flute. Yokels in blue smocks, old hags in white bonnets, And livid urchins smoking pipes picked up, All of them jostle, jump, and grunt like pigs. And sometimes sudden wedges of new-comers Crush in a corner the quadrille that looks, So unrestrained it is, like a mixed fight. Then try they who can bawl the loudest, who Can push the tidal wave back to the wall, Though with a knife's thrust he should stab his man. But the band now redoubles its loud din, Covers the quarrelling voices of the lads, And mingles all in leaping lunacy. They calm down, joke, touch glasses, drunk as lords. The women in their turn get hot and drunk, Lust's carnal acid in their blood corrodes, And in these billowing bodies, surging backs, Freed instinct grows to such a heat of rut, That to see lads and lasses wriggling and writhing, With jostling bodies, screams, and blows of fists, Crushing embraces, biting kisses, to see them Rolling dead drunk into the corners, wallowing Upon the floor, knocking themselves against The panels, sweating, and frothing at the lips, Their two hands, their ten fingers ransacking And emptying torn corsages, it seems-- Lust is being lit at the black fire of rape. Before the sun burns with red flames, before The white mists fall in swaths, the reeking inns Turn the unsteady revellers out of doors. The kermesse in exhaustion ends, the crowd Wend their way homewards to their sleeping farms, Screaming their oaths of parting as they go. The aged farmers too, with hanging arms, Their faces daubed with dregs of wine and beer, Stagger with zigzag feet towards their farms Islanded in the billowing seas of wheat.

FOGS.

You melancholy fogs of winter roll Your pestilential sorrow o'er my soul, And swathe my heart with your long winding-sheet, And drench the livid leaves beneath my feet, While far away upon the heaven's bounds, Under the sleeping plain's wet wadding, sounds A tired, lamenting angelus that dies With faint, frail echoes in the empty skies, So lonely, poor, and timid that a rook, Hid in a hollow archstone's dripping nook, Hearing it sob, awakens and replies, Sickening the woeful hush with ghastly cries, Then suddenly grows silent, in the dread That in the belfry tower the bell is dead.

ON THE COAST.

A blustering wind the scattered vapour crowds And shakes the horizon, where the dawn bursts, by A charge that fills the ashen azure sky With rearing, galloping, mad, milky clouds.

The whole, clear day, day without mist or rain, With leaping manes, gilt flanks, and fiery croups, In a flight of pallid silver and foam, their troops Career across the ether's azure plain.

And still their ardour grows, until the eve's Black gesture cuts the vast of space, and heaves Their masses towards the squall that landward blares,

While the ample sun of June, fallen from Heaven's vault, Writhes, bleeding, in their vehement assault, Like a red stallion in a rut of mares.

HOMAGE.

I.

To heap in them your heavinesses fair, By double, frugal, savoury breasts embossed, The rosy skin by which your arms are glossed, Your belly's curly fleece of reddish hair,

My verses I will weave as, at their doors Seated, old basket-makers curb and twine White and brown osiers in a clear design, Copying enamelled tesselated floors,

Until your body's gold within them teems; And like a garland I will wear them, spun In massive blonde heaps on my head, in the sun, Haughtily proud, as a strong man beseems.

II.

Your rich flesh minds me of the centauresses, Whose arms Paul Rubens rounded in his dyes Of fire beneath a weight of sun-washed tresses, Pointing their breasts to lion-cubs' green eyes.

Your blood was theirs, when in the mazy gloaming, Under some star that bit the brazen sky, They heard a stranger in the sea-fog roaming, And hailed some Hercules astray and shy;

And when with quivering senses hot for kisses, And belly for the unknown gaping, their Arms they were twisting, calling to mad blisses Huge, swarthy eaters of rut on a body bare.

CANTICLES.

I.

Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires Of gold, with great wide eyes and bronze-nailed feet, Crawl towards your body my long, green desires.

In the full torrid noon of summer heat I have bedded you in a nook at a field's edge, Where the tanned meslin shoots a shivering wedge.

Heat is suspended o'er us like a dais; The sky prolongs the vast expanse, gold-plated; Afar the Scheldt a dwindling, silver way is;

Lascivious, huge, you lie there yet unsated; Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires Of gold, crawl back to you my spent desires.

II.

My love shall be the gorgeous sun that robes With torrid summer and with idlenesses Your body's naked slopes and hilly globes,

Showering its light upon you in caresses, And this new brazier's contact shall be in Tongues of an ambient gold that lick your skin.

The tragic, rolling red of dawn and eve, And the day's beauty you shall be; with hues Of splendour you a billowy robe shall weave;

Your flesh shall be like fabulous statues, Which in the desert sang, and shone like roses, When morning burned their blocks with apotheoses.

III.

I would not choose the sunflowers that unclose In daylight; nor the lily long of stem; Nor roses loving winds to fondle them; No, nor great nenuphars whose pulp morose,

And wide, cold eyes, charged with eternity, Upon their imaging pond yawn idle-lipped Their stirless dreams; nor flowers despotic, whipped By wrath and wind along a hostile sea,

To symbolize you. No, but shivering wet Under the dawn, with great red calyx leaves Mingling as jets of blood are fused in sheaves, A group of garden dahlias closely set,

Which, in voluptuous days of autumn, bright With matter's hot maturity and heats, Like monstrous and vermilion women's teats, Grow stiff beneath the golden hands of light.

DYING MEN.

Sharp with their ills, and lonely in their dying, The sceptic sick watch by their chamber fire, With haggard eyes, the evening magnifying The house-fronts, and the blackening church-spire.

The hour is dead where in some never-crowded City by time extinguished, desolate, They live immured in walls by mourning shrouded, And hear the monumental hinges grate.

Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten, Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick; Life and its days identic they have eaten, Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.

But shaken in their cynical assurance, And in their haughtiness and pale disgust, They ask: "Is happiness not in endurance Of wilful suffering, suffering loved with lust?"

Of old they felt their hearts go out to others; Benevolent, they pitied alien griefs; And, like apostles, loved their suffering brothers, And feared their pride, cabined in dead beliefs.

But now they think that love is more cemented By cruelty than kindness, which is vain. What of the few, chance tears they have prevented? How many more have flowed? Decreed is pain.

Empty the golden islands are, where lingers In golden mist Dream in a mantle spun Of purple, skimming foam with idle fingers From silent gold rained by a teeming sun.

Broken the proud masts, and the waves are churning! Steer to extinguished ports the vessel's prow: No lighthouse stretches its immensely burning Arm to the great stars--dead the fires are now.

Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten, Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick; Life and its days identic they have eaten, Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.

With nails of wood they beat hot foreheads. Cages Of bones for fevers are their bodies. Blind Their eyes, their lips like withered parchment pages. A bitter sand beneath their teeth they grind.

Now in their extinct souls a longing blazes To sail, and in a new world live again, Whose sunset like a smoking tripod raises The God of shade and ebony in its brain;

In a far land of tempests raging madly, In lands of fury hoarse and livid dreams, Where man can drown, ferociously and gladly, His soul and all his heart in fiery streams.

They are the tragic sick sharp with diseases; Haggard and lone they watch the town fires fade; And pale facades are waiting till it pleases Their crumbling bodies have their coffins made.

THE ARMS OF EVENING.

While the cold night stories its terrace, gored And dying evening throws upon the heath, And forest fringed with marshes underneath, The gold of his armour and the flash of his sword,

Which wave to wave go floating on, too soon Yet to have lost day's flaunting ardent glow, But kissed already by the shadowed, slow Lips of the pious, silver-handed moon,

The lonely moon remembering the day, Whose brandished weapons made a golden glare, A pale wraith in the paleness of the air, The moon for ever pale and far away!

THE MILL.

Deep in the evening slowly turns the mill Against a sky with melancholy pale; It turns and turns, its muddy-coloured sail Is infinitely heavy, tired, and ill.

Its arms, complaining arms, in the dawn's pink Rose, rose and fell; and in this o'ercast eve, And deadened nature's silence, still they heave Themselves aloft, and weary till they sink.

Winter's sick day lies on the fields to sleep; The clouds are tired of sombre journeyings; And past the wood that gathered shadow flings The ruts towards a dead horizon creep.

Around a pale pond huts of beechwood built Despondently squat near the rusty reeds; A lamp of brass hung from the ceiling bleeds Upon the wall and windows blots of gilt.

And in the vast plain, with their ragged eyes Of windows patched, the suffering hovels watch The worn-out mill the bleak horizon notch,-- The tired mill turning, turning till it dies.

IN PIOUS MOOD.[1]

The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.

And I uplift my heart, my night-worn heart in turn, O Lord, my heart! to thy pale, infinite Inane, And yet I know that nought the implenishable urn May plenish, that nought is, whereof this heart dies fain; And I know thee a lie, and with my lips make prayer And with my knees; I know thy great, shut hands averse, Thy great eyes closed, to all the clamours of despair; It is I, who dream myself into the universe; Have pity on my wandering wits' entire discord; Needs must I weep my woe towards thy silence, Lord!

The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven. --OSMAN EDWARDS.

[1] _The Savoy_, No. 4, August 1896.

THE FERRYMAN.

With hands on oars the ferryman Strove where the stubborn current ran, With a green reed between his teeth.

But she who hailed him from the bank, Beyond the waves, among the rushes rank That rim the rolling heath, Into the mists receded more and more.

The windows, with their eyes, And the dials of the towers upon the shore, Watched him, with doubled back, Straining and toiling at the oar,

And heard his muscles crack. Of a sudden broke an oar, Which the current bore On heavy waves down to the sea.

And she who hailed him from the mist, In the blustering wind, appeared More madly still her arms to twist, Towards him who never neared.

The ferryman took to the oar remaining With such a might, That all his body cracked with straining, And his heart shook with feverish fright.

A sudden shock, the rudder tore, And the current bore This remnant to the sea.

The windows on the shore, Like eyes with fever great, And the dials of the towers, those widows straight That in their thousands throng A river bank, were obstinately staring At this mad fellow obstinately daring His crazy voyage to prolong.

And she who hailed him there with chattering teeth, Howled and howled in the mists of night, With head stretched out in frantic fright To the unknown, the vast, and rolling heath.

The ferryman, as a statue stands, Bronze in the storm that paled his blood, With the one oar firm in his hands, Beat the waves, and bit the flood. His old hallucinated eyes See the lit distances rejoice, Whence reaches him the lamentable voice, Under the freezing skies.

His last oar breaks, His last oar the current takes, Like a straw, down to the sea.

The ferryman exhausted sank Upon his bench, with sweat that poured, His loins with vain exertion sore, A high wave struck on the lee-board, He looked, behind him lay the bank: He had not left the shore.

The windows and the dials gazed, With eyes they opened wide, amazed, Where all his strength to ruin ran; But the old, stubborn ferryman Kept all the same, for God knows when, The green reed in his teeth, even then.

THE RAIN.

As reeled from an exhaustless bobbin, the long rain, Interminably through the long gray day, Lines the green window pane With its long threads of gray, The reeled, exhaustless rain, The long rain, The rain.

It has been ravelling out, since last sunset, Rags hanging soft and low From sulky skies of jet. Unravelling, patient, slow, Upon the roads, since last sunset, On roads and streets, Continual sheets.

Along the leagues that wind Through quiet suburbs to the fields behind, Along the roads interminably bending, In funeral procession, drenched, resigned, Toiling, bathed in sweat and steam, Vehicles with tilted coverings are wending; In ruts so regular, And parallel so far By night to join the firmament they seem, The water drips hour after hour, The spouts gush, and the trees shower, With long rain wet, With rain tenacious yet.

Rivers o'er rotten dikes are brimming Upon the meadows where drowned hay is swimming; The wind is whipping walnut trees and alders, And big black oxen wading stand Deep in the water of the polders, And bellow at the writhen sky; And evening is at hand, Bringing its shadows to enfold the plain, and lie Clustered at the washed tree's root; And ever falls the rain, The long rain, As fine and dense as soot.

The long rain, The long rain falls afresh; And its identic thread Weaves mesh by mesh A raiment making naked shred by shred The cottages and farmyards gray Of hamlets crumbling fast away; A bunch of linen rags that hang down sick Upon a loosely planted stick; Here a blue dovecote to the roof that cleaves; Sinister window panes Plastered with paper rank with mildew stains; Dwellings whose regular eves Form crosses on their gable ends of stone; Uniform, melancholy mills, Standing like horns upon their hills; Chapels, and spires with ivy overgrown; The rain The long rain Winter-long beneath them burrows.

The rain, in lines, The long, gray rain untwines Its watery tresses o'er its furrows, The long rain Of countries old, Torpid, eternally unrolled.

THE FISHERMEN.

Up from the sea a flaky, dank, Thickening fog rolls up, and chokes Windows and closed doors, and smokes Upon the slippery river bank.

Drowned gleams of gas-lamps shake and fall Where rolls the river's carrion; The moon looks like a corpse, and on The heaven's rim its burial.

But flickering lanterns now and then Light up and magnify the backs, Bent obstinately in their smacks, Of the old river fishermen, Who all the time, from last sunset, For what night's fishing none can know, Have cast their black and greedy net, Where silent, evil waters flow.

Deep down beyond the reach of eye Fates of Evil gathering throng, Which lure the fishers where they lie To fish for them with patience strong, True to their task of simple toiling In contradictory fogs embroiling.

And o'er them peal the minutes stark, With heavy hammers peal their knells, The minutes sound from belfry bells, The minutes hard of autumn dark, The minutes list.

And the black fishers in their ships, In their cold ships, are clad in shreds; Down their cold nape their old hat drips And drop by drop in water sheds All the mist.

Their villages are numb and freeze; Their huts are all in ruin sunk, And the willows and the walnut-trees The winds of the west have whipped and shrunk; And not a bark comes through the dark, And never a cry through the void midnight, That floated, humid ashes blight.

And never helping one another, Never brother hailing brother, Never doing what they ought, For himself each fisher's thought: And the first draws his net, and seizes All the fry of his poverty; And the next drags up, as keen as he, The empty bottoms of diseases; Another opens out his net To griefs that on the surface swim; And another to his vessel's rim Pulls up the flotsam of regret.

The river churns, league after league, Along the dikes, and runs away, As it has done so many a day, To the far horizon of fatigue; Upon its banks skins of black clay By night perspire a poison draught; The fogs are fleeces far to waft, And to men's houses journey they.

Never a lantern streaks the dark, And nothing stirs in the fisher's bark, Save, nimbusing with halos of blood, The thick white felt of the clustering fogs, Silent Death, who with madness clogs The brains of the fishermen on the flood.

Lonely at the fog's cold heart, Each sees not each, though side by side; Their arms are tired, their vessels ride By sandbanks marked on ruin's chart.

Why in the dark do they not hail each other? Why does a brother's voice console not brother?

No, numb and haggard they remain, With vaulted back and heavy brain, With, by their side, their little light Rigid in the river's night. Like blocks of shadow there they arc, And never pierce their eyes afar Beyond the acrid, spongy wet; And they suspect not that above, Luring them with a magnet's love, Stars immense are shining yet.

These fishers in black torment tossed, They are the men immensely lost Among the knells and far aways And far beyonds where none can gaze; And in their souls' monotonous deeps The humid autumn midnight weeps.

SILENCE.

Since last the summer broke above her A flash of lightning from his thunder-sheath, Silence has never left her cover In the heather on the heath.

Across her refuge peers the steeple, And with its fingers shakes its bells; Around her prowl the vehicles, Laden with uproarious people; Around her, where the fir-trees end, In its rut the cart-wheel grates; But never a noise has strength to rend The tense, dead space where silence waits.

Since the last loud thunder weather, Silence has stirred not in the heather; And the heath, wherein the evenings sink, Beyond the endless thickets, and The purple mounds of hidden sand, Lengthens her haunts to heaven's brink.

And even winds stir not the slim Larches at the marsh's rim, Where she will glass her abstract eyes In pools where wondering lilies rise; And only brushes her the clouds' Shadow when they rush in crowds, Or else the shadow of a flight Of hovering hawks at heavens' height.

Since the last flash of lightning streaked the plain, Nothing has bitten, in her vast domain.

And those who in her realm did roam, Whether it were in dawn or gloam, They all have felt their hearts held fast In spells of mystery she has cast. She, like an ample, final force, Keeps on the same unbroken course;

Black walls of pinewoods gloom and bar The paths of hope that gleam afar; Clusters of dreamy junipers Frighten the feet of wanderers; Malignant mazes intertwine With paths of cunning curve and line, And the sun every moment shifts The goal to which confusion drifts.

Since the lightning that the storm forged bit, The bitter silence at the corners four Of the heath, has changed no whit.

The shepherds with their hundred years worn out, And the spent dogs that follow them about, See her, on golden dunes where shadows flit, Or in the noiseless moorland, sometimes sit, Immense, beneath the outspread wing of Night; Then waters on the wrinkled pond take fright; And the heather veils itself and palely glistens, And every leaf in every thicket listens, And the incendiary sunset stills The last cry of his light that o'er her thrills.

And the hamlets neighbouring her, beneath Their thatch of hovels on the heath, Shiver with terror, feeling her Dominant, though she do not stir; Mournful, and tired, and helpless they Stand in her presence as at bay, And watch benumbed, and nigh to swoon, Fearing, when mists shall lift, to see, Suddenly opening under the moon, The silver eyes of her mystery.

THE ROPE-MAKER.

At the dike's foot that wearily Curves along the sinuous sea, The visionary, silver-haired Rope-maker with arms bared, Pulling backwards as he stands, Rolls together, with prudent hands, The twisting play of endless twine, Coming from the far sky-line.

Down yonder in the sunset sheen, In the twilight tired and chill, A busy wheel is whizzing still, Moved by one who is not seen; But, parallel on stakes that space The road from equal place to place, The yellow hemp that the roper draws Runs in a chain that never flaws.