CANTO I

Chapter 11,804 wordsPublic domain

You stranger, long before your glance can light Upon these words, time will have washed away The moment when I first took pen to write, With all my road before me--yet to-day, Here, if at all, we meet; the unfashioned clay Ready to both our hands; both hushed to see That which is nowhere yet come forth and be.

This moment, if you join me, we begin A partnership where both must toil to hold The clue that I caught first. We lose or win Together; if you read, you are enrolled. And first, a marvel--Who could have foretold That in the city which men called in scorn The Perfect City, Dymer could be born?

There you’d have thought the gods were smothered down Forever, and the keys were turned on fate. No hour was left unchartered in that town, And love was in a schedule and the State Chose for eugenic reasons who should mate With whom, and when. Each idle song and dance Was fixed by law and nothing left to chance.

For some of the last Platonists had founded That city of old. And mastery they made An island of what ought to be, surrounded By this gross world of easier light and shade. All answering to the master’s dream they laid The strong foundations, torturing into stone Each bubble that the Academy had blown.

This people were so pure, so law-abiding, So logical, they made the heavens afraid: They sent the very swallows into hiding By their appalling chastity dismayed: More soberly the lambs in springtime played Because of them: and ghosts dissolved in shame Before their common-sense--till Dymer came.

At Dymer’s birth no comets scared the nation, The public crèche engulfed him with the rest, And twenty separate Boards of Education Closed round him. He was passed through every test, Was vaccinated, numbered, washed and dressed, Proctored, inspected, whipt, examined weekly, And for some nineteen years he bore it meekly.

For nineteen years they worked upon his soul, Refining, chipping, moulding and adorning. Then came the moment that undid the whole-- The ripple of rude life without a warning. It came in lecture-time one April morning --Alas for laws and locks, reproach and praise, Who ever learned to censor the spring days?

A little breeze came stirring to his cheek. He looked up to the window. A brown bird Perched on the sill, bent down to whet his beak With darting head--Poor Dymer watched and stirred Uneasily. The lecturer’s voice he heard Still droning from the dais. The narrow room Was drowsy, over-solemn, filled with gloom.

He yawned, and a voluptuous laziness Tingled down all his spine and loosed his knees, Slow-drawn, like an invisible caress. He laughed--The lecturer stopped like one that sees A Ghost, then frowned and murmured, “Silence, please.” That moment saw the soul of Dymer hang In the balance--Louder then his laughter rang.

The whole room watched with unbelieving awe, He rose and staggered rising. From his lips Broke yet again the idiot-like guffaw. He felt the spirit in his finger-tips, Then swinging his right arm--a wide ellipse Yet lazily--he struck the lecturer’s head. The old man tittered, lurched and dropt down dead.

Out of the silent room, out of the dark Into the sum-stream Dymer passed, and there The sudden breezes, the high hanging lark The milk-white clouds sailing in polished air, Suddenly flashed about him like a blare Of trumpets. And no cry was raised behind him. His class sat dazed. They dared not go to find him.

Yet wonderfully some rumour spread abroad-- An inarticulate sense of life renewing In each young heart--He whistled down the road: Men said: “There’s Dymer”--“Why, what’s Dymer doing?” “I don’t know”--“Look, there’s Dymer,”--far pursuing With troubled eyes--A long mysterious “Oh” Sighed from a hundred throats to see him go.

Down the white street and past the gate and forth Beyond the wall he came to grassy places. There was a shifting wind to West and North With clouds in heeling squadron running races. The shadows following on the sunlight’s traces Crossed the whole field and each wild flower within it With change of wavering glories every minute.

There was a river, flushed with rains, between The flat fields and a forest’s willowy edge. A sauntering pace he shuffled on the green, He kicked his boots against the crackly sedge And tore his hands in many a furzy hedge. He saw his feet and ankles gilded round With buttercups that carpeted the ground.

He looked back then. The line of a low hill Had hid the city’s towers and domes from sight; He stopt: he felt a break of sunlight spill Around him sudden waves of searching light. Upon the earth was green, and gold, and white Smothering his feet. He felt his city dress An insult to that April cheerfulness.

He said: “I’ve worn this dust heap long enough, Here goes!” And forthwith in the open field He stripped away that prison of sad stuff: Socks, jacket, shirt and breeches off he peeled And rose up mother-naked with no shield Against the sun: then stood awhile to play With bare toes dabbling in cold river clay.

Forward again, and sometimes leaping high With arms outspread as though he would embrace In one act all the circle of the sky: Sometimes he rested in a leafier place, And crushed the wet, cool flowers against his face: And once he cried aloud, “Oh world, oh day, Let, let me,”--and then found no prayer to say.

Up furrows still unpierced with earliest crop He marched. Through woods he strolled from flower to flower, And over hills. As ointment drop by drop Preciously meted out, so hour by hour The day slipped through his hands: and now the power Failed in his feet from walking. He was done, Hungry and cold. That moment sank the sun.

He lingered--Looking up, he saw ahead The black and bristling frontage of a wood And over it the large sky swimming red Freckled with homeward crows. Surprised he stood To feel that wideness quenching his hot mood, Then shouted, “Trembling darkness, trembling green, What do you mean, wild wood, what do you mean?”

He shouted. But the solitude received His noise into her noiselessness, his fire Into her calm. Perhaps he half believed Some answer yet would come to his desire. The hushed air quivered softly like a wire Upon his voice. It echoed, it was gone: The quiet and the quiet dark went on.

He rushed into the wood. He struck and stumbled On hidden roots. He groped and scratched his face. The little birds woke chattering where he fumbled. The stray cat stood, paw lifted, in mid-chase. There is a windless calm in such a place. A sense of being indoors--so crowded stand The living trees, watching on every hand:

A sense of trespass--such as in the hall Of the wrong house, one time, to me befell. Groping between the hatstand and the wall-- A clear voice from above me like a bell, The sweet voice of a woman asking “Well?” No more than this. And as I fled I wondered Into whose alien story I had blundered.

A like thing fell to Dymer. Bending low, Feeling his way he went. The curtained air Sighed into sound above his head, as though Stringed instruments and horns were riding there. It passed and at its passing stirred his hair. He stood intent to hear. He heard again And checked his breath half-drawn, as if with pain.

That music could have crumbled proud belief With doubt, or in the bosom of the sage Madden the heart that had outmastered grief, And flood with tears the eyes of frozen age And turn the young man’s feet to pilgrimage-- So sharp it was, so sure a path it found, Soulward with stabbing wounds of bitter sound.

It died out on the middle of a note, As though it failed at the urge of its own meaning. It left him with life quivering at the throat, Limbs shaken and wet cheeks and body leaning, With strain towards the sound and senses gleaning The last, least, ebbing ripple of the air, Searching the emptied darkness, muttering “Where?”

Then followed such a time as is forgotten With morning light, but in the passing seems Unending. Where he grasped the branch was rotten, Where he trod forth in haste the forest streams Laid wait for him. Like men in fever dreams Climbing an endless rope, he laboured much And gained no ground. He reached and could not touch.

And often out of darkness like a swell That grows up from no wind upon blue sea, He heard the music, unendurable In stealing sweetness wind from tree to tree. Battered and bruised in body and soul was he When first he saw a little lightness growing Ahead: and from that light the sound was flowing.

The trees were fewer now: and gladly nearing That light, he saw the stars. For sky was there, And smoother grass, white flowered--a forest clearing Set in seven miles of forest, secreter Than valleys in the tops of clouds, more fair Than greenery under snow or desert water Or the white peace descending after slaughter.

As some who have been wounded beyond healing Wake, or half wake, once only and so bless Far off the lamplight travelling on the ceiling. A disk of pale light filled with peacefulness And wonder if this is the C.C.S., Or home, or heaven, or dreams--then sighing win Wise, ignorant death before the pains begin:

So Dymer in the wood-lawn blessed the light, A still light, rosy, clear, and filled with sound. Here was some pile of building which the night Made larger. Spiry shadows rose all round, But through the open door appeared profound Recesses of pure light--fire with no flame-- And out of that deep light the music came.

Tip-toes he slunk towards it where the grass Was twinkling in a lane of light before The archway. There was neither fence to pass Nor word of challenge given, nor bolted door, But where it’s open, open evermore, No knocker and no porter and no guard, For very strangeness entering in grows hard.

Breathe not! Speak not! Walk gently. Someone’s here, Why have they left their house with the door so wide? There must be someone.... Dymer hung in fear Upon the threshold, longing and big-eyed. At last he squared his shoulders, smote his side And called, “I’m here. Now let the feast begin. I’m coming now. I’m Dymer,” and went in.