Chapter 2
O, but I would face all these Indian fears, The horror of the huge power of life, The beasts all fierce and venomous, the men With cruel souls, learned to invent pain, All these and more, if I had any hope That, braving them, Lord Christ prosper'd through me. If Christ desired India, He had sent The band of us, solder'd in one great purpose, To strike His message through those dark vast tribes But one man!--O surely it is folly, And we misread the lot! One man, to thrust, Even though in his soul the lamp was kindled At God's own hands, one man's lit soul to thrust The immense Indian darkness out of the world! For human flesh there breeds as furiously As the green things and the cattle; and it is all, All this enormity of measureless folk, Penn'd in a land so close to the devil's reign The very apes have faith in him.--No, no; Impetuous brains mistake the signs of God Too easily. God would not have me waste My zeal for Him in this wild enterprise, Of going alone to swarming India;--one man, One mortal voice, to charm those myriad ears Away from the fiendish clamour of Indian gods, One man preaching the truth against the huge Bray of the gongs and horns of the Indian priests! A cup of wine poured in the sea were not More surely lost in the green and brackish depths, Than the fire and fragrance of my doctrine poured Into that multitudinous pond of men, India.--Shipman! Master of the ship!-- I have thought better of this journey; now I find I am not meant to go.
Captain: Not meant?
Thomas: I would say, I had forgotten Indian air Is full of fevers; and my health is bad For holding out against fever.
Captain: As you please. I keep your fare, though.
Thomas: O, 'tis yours.--Good sailing!
[As he makes to depart, a Noble Stranger is seen approaching along the quay.]
Captain: Well, here's a marvel: 'Tis a king, for sure! 'Twould take the taxes of a world to dress A man in that silken gold, and all those gems. What a flash the light makes of him; nay, he burns; And he's here on the quay all by himself, Not even a slave to fan him!--Man, you're ailing! You look like death; is it the falling sickness? Or has the mere thought of the Indian journey Made your marrow quail with a cold fever?
The Stranger: (to the Captain)
You are the master of this ship?
Captain: I am.
Stranger: This huddled man belongs to me: a slave Escaped my service.
Captain: Lord, I knew not that. But you are in good time.
Stranger: And was the slave For putting out with you? Where are you bound?
Captain: To India. First he would sail, and then Again he would not. But, my Lord, I swear I never guesst he was a runaway.
Stranger: Well, he shall have his mind and go with you To India: a good slave he is, but bears A restless thought. He has slipt off before, And vexes me still to be watching him. We'll make a bargain of him.
Captain: I, my Lord? I have no need of slaves: I am too poor.
Stranger: For twenty silver pieces he is yours.
Captain: That's cheap, if he has skill. Yes, there might be Profit in him at that. Has he a trade?
Stranger: He is a carpenter.
Captain: A carpenter! Why, for a good one I'ld give all my purse.
Stranger: No, twenty silver pieces is the price; Though 'tis a slave a king might joy to own. I've taught him to imagine palaces So high, and tower'd so nobly, they might seem The marvelling of a God-delighted heart Escaping into ecstasy; he knows, Moreover, of a stuff so rare it makes Smaragdus and the dragon-stone despised; And yet the quarries whereof he is wise Would yield enough to house the tribes of the world In palaces of beautiful shining work.
Captain Lo there! why, that is it: the carpenter I am to bring is needed for to build The king's new palace.
Stranger: Yea? He is your man.
Captain: Come on, my man. I'll put your cunning heels Where they'll not budge more than a shuffled inch. My lord, if you'll bide with the rascal here I'll get the irons ready. Here's your sum.--
Stranger: Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear; Easily may a man crouch down for fear, And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face The hailing storm of the world with graver courage. But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin, And one that groweth deep into a life, With hardening roots that clutch about the breast. For this refuses faith in the unknown powers Within man's nature; shrewdly bringeth all Their inspiration of strange eagerness To a judgment bought by safe experience; Narrows desire into the scope of thought. But it is written in the heart of man, Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire. Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight To pore only within the candle-gleam Of conscious wit and reasonable brain; But search into the sacred darkness lying Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast Measureless fate, full of the power of stars, The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul. Keep thy desire closed in the room of light The labouring fires of thy mind have made, And thou shalt find the vision of thy spirit Pitifully dazzled to so shrunk a ken, There are no spacious puissances about it, But send desire often forth to scan The immense night which is thy greater soul; Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it Into impossible things, unlikely ends; And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire Grow large as all the regions of thy soul, Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being, And of created purpose reach the ends.
* * * * *
GORDON BOTTOMLEY
THE END OF THE WORLD
The snow had fallen many nights and days; The sky was come upon the earth at last, Sifting thinly down as endlessly As though within the system of blind planets Something had been forgot or overdriven. The dawn now seemed neglected in the grey Where mountains were unbuilt and shadowless trees Rootlessly paused or hung upon the air. There was no wind, but now and then a sigh Crossed that dry falling dust and rifted it Through crevices of slate and door and casement. Perhaps the new moon's time was even past. Outside, the first white twilights were too void Until a sheep called once, as to a lamb, And tenderness crept everywhere from it; But now the flock must have strayed far away. The lights across the valley must be veiled, The smoke lost in the greyness or the dusk. For more than three days now the snow had thatched That cow-house roof where it had ever melted With yellow stains from the beasts' breath inside; But yet a dog howled there, though not quite lately. Someone passed down the valley swift and singing. Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning; But if he seemed too tall to be a man It was that men had been so long unseen, Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow. And he was gone and food had not been given him. When snow slid from an overweighted leaf, Shaking the tree, it might have been a bird Slipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings; Yet never bird fell out, save once a dead one-- And in two days the snow had covered it. The dog had howled again--or thus it seemed Until a lean fox passed and cried no more. All was so safe indoors where life went on Glad of the close enfolding snow--O glad To be so safe and secret at its heart, Watching the strangeness of familiar things. They knew not what dim hours went on, went by, For while they slept the clock stopt newly wound As the cold hardened. Once they watched the road, Thinking to be remembered. Once they doubted If they had kept the sequence of the days, Because they heard not any sound of bells. A butterfly, that hid until the Spring Under a ceiling's shadow, dropt, was dead. The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepened As a sound deepens into silences; It was of earth and came not by the air; The earth was cooling and drew down the sky. The air was crumbling. There was no more sky. Rails of a broken bed charred in the grate, And when he touched the bars he thought the sting Came from their heat--he could not feel such cold ... She said 'O, do not sleep, Heart, heart of mine, keep near me. No, no; sleep. I will not lift his fallen, quiet eyelids, Although I know he would awaken then-- He closed them thus but now of his own will. He can stay with me while I do not lift them.'
BABEL: THE GATE OF THE GOD
Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat: Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up And rhythms of change within the heart begun By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters; Pylons and monoliths went on by ages, Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about; Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex; Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdom Standing on Carthage must get nearer still; While in Chaldea an altitude of god Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed Upon a mountain stirring a surmise Of floods and alterations of the sea, A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaar Temple and escape to god the ascertained. These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth, Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows And memories of man's earliest theme of towers.
Space--the old source of time--should be undone, Eternity defined, by men who trusted Another tier would equal them with god. A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations, Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder That glowed upon their under sides by night And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil. Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remained In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves; While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers Knelt on a flank to clip its sweaty coat.
A builder leans across the last wide courses; His unadjustable unreaching eyes Fail under him before his glances sink On the clouds' upper layers of sooty curls Where some long lightning goes like swallows downward, But at the wider gallery next below Recognise master-masons with pricked parchments: That builder then, as one who condescends Unto the sea and all that is beneath him, His hairy breast on the wet mortar, calls 'How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!' On the next eminence the orgulous king Nimroud stands up conceiving he shall live To conquer god, now that he knows where god is: His eager hands push up the tower in thought ... Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides down Among the carpenters because he has seen One shape an eagle-woman on a door-post: He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted day.
Little men hurrying, running here and there, Within the dark and stifling walls, dissent From every sound, and shoulder empty hods: 'The god's great altar should stand in the crypt Among our earth's foundations'--'The god's great altar Must be the last far coping of our work'-- It should inaugurate the broad main stair'-- 'Or end it'--'It must stand toward the East!' But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out 'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altar Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?' Then one 'It is a pedestal for deeds'-- ''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow'-- 'It has the nature of a woman's bosom'-- 'The tortoise, first created, signifies it'-- 'A blind and rudimentary navel shows The source of worship better than horned moons.' Then a lean giant 'Is not a calyx needful?'-- 'Because round grapes on statues well expressed Become the nadir of incense, nodal lamps, Yet apes have hands that cut and carved red crystal'-- 'Birds molten, touchly talc veins bronze buds crumble Ablid ublai ghan isz rad eighar ghaurl ...' Words said too often seemed such ancient sounds That men forgot them or were lost in them; The guttural glottis-chasms of language reached, A rhythm, a gasp, were curves of immortal thought.
Man with his bricks was building, building yet, Where dawn and midnight mingled and woke no birds, In the last courses, building past his knowledge A wall that swung--for towers can have no tops, No chord can mete the universal segment, Earth has not basis. Yet the yielding sky, Invincible vacancy, was there discovered-- Though piled-up bricks should pulp the sappy balks, Weight generate a secrecy of heat, Cankerous charring, crevices' fronds of flame.
* * * * *
RUPERT BROOKE
THE OLD VICARAGE, GRANTCHESTER
[Cafe des Westens, Berlin]
Just now the lilac is in bloom, All before my little room; And in my flower-beds, I think, Smile the carnation and the pink; And down the borders, well I know, The poppy and the pansy blow ... Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through, Beside the river make for you A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep Deeply above; and green and deep The stream mysterious glides beneath, Green as a dream and deep as death.-- Oh, damn! I know it! and I know How the May fields all golden show, And when the day is young and sweet, Gild gloriously the bare feet That run to bathe ... 'Du lieber Gott!'
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot, And there the shadowed waters fresh Lean up to embrace the naked flesh. 'Temperamentvoll' German Jews Drink beer around; and 'there' the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold. Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where 'das Betreten's' not 'verboten' ...
[Greek: eithe genoímaen] ... would I were In Grantchester, in Grantchester!-- Some, it may be, can get in touch With Nature there, or Earth, or such. And clever modern men have seen A Faun a-peeping through the green, And felt the Classics were not dead, To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head, Or hear the Goat-foot piping low ... But these are things I do not know. I only know that you may lie Day long and watch the Cambridge sky, And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, Hear the cool lapse of hours pass, Until the centuries blend and blur In Grantchester, in Grantchester ... Still in the dawnlit waters cool His ghostly Lordship swims his pool, And tries the strokes, essays the tricks, Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx; Dan Chaucer hears his river still Chatter beneath a phantom mill; Tennyson notes, with studious eye, How Cambridge waters hurry by ... And in that garden, black and white Creep whispers through the grass all night; And spectral dance, before the dawn, A hundred Vicars down the lawn; Curates, long dust, will come and go On lissom, clerical, printless toe; And oft between the boughs is seen The sly shade of a Rural Dean ... Till, at a shiver in the skies, Vanishing with Satanic cries, The prim ecclesiastic rout Leaves but a startled sleeper-out, Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, The falling house that never falls.
* * * * *
God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of 'that' district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange of mouth; At Over they fling oaths at one, And worse than oaths at Trumpington, And Ditton girls are mean and dirty, And there's none in Harston under thirty, And folks in Shelford and those parts Have twisted lips and twisted hearts, And Barton men make cockney rhymes, And Coton's full of nameless crimes, And things are done you'd not believe At Madingley on Christmas Eve. Strong men have run for miles and miles When one from Cherry Hinton smiles; Strong men have blanched and shot their wives Rather than send them to St. Ives; Strong men have cried like babes, bydam, To hear what happened at Babraham. But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester! There's peace and holy quiet there, Great clouds along pacific skies, And men and women with straight eyes, Lithe children lovelier than a dream, A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream, And little kindly winds that creep Round twilight corners, half asleep. In Grantchester their skins are white, They bathe by day, they bathe by night; The women there do all they ought; The men observe the Rules of Thought. They love the Good; they worship Truth; They laugh uproariously in youth; (And when they get to feeling old, They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)...
Ah God! to see the branches stir Across the moon at Grantchester! To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten Unforgettable, unforgotten River smell, and hear the breeze Sobbing in the little trees. Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand, Still guardians of that holy land? The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream, The yet unacademic stream? Is dawn a secret shy and cold Anadyomene, silver-gold? And sunset still a golden sea From Haslingfield to Madingley? And after, ere the night is born, Do hares come out about the corn? Oh, is the water sweet and cool Gentle and brown, above the pool? And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill? Say, is there Beauty yet to find? And Certainty? and Quiet kind? Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain? ... oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?
DUST
When the white flame in us is gone, And we that lost the world's delight Stiffen in darkness, left alone To crumble in our separate night;
When your swift hair is quiet in death, And through the lips corruption thrust Has stilled the labour of my breath-- When we are dust, when we are dust!--
Not dead, not undesirous yet, Still sentient, still unsatisfied, We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit, Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun, And light of foot, and unconfined, Hurry from road to road, and run About the errands of the wind.
And every mote, on earth or air, Will speed and gleam, down later days. And like a secret pilgrim fare By eager and invisible ways,
Nor ever rest, nor ever lie, Till, beyond thinking, out of view, One mote of all the dust that's I Shall meet one atom that was you.
Then in some garden hushed from wind, Warm in a sunset's afterglow, The lovers in the flowers will find A sweet and strange unquiet grow
Upon the peace; and, past desiring, So high a beauty in the air, And such a light, and such a quiring, And such a radiant ecstasy there,
They'll know not if it's fire, or dew, Or out of earth, or in the height, Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue, Or two that pass, in light, to light,
Out of the garden, higher, higher ... But in that instant they shall learn The shattering fury of our fire, And the weak passionless hearts will burn
And faint in that amazing glow, Until the darkness close above; And they will know--poor fools, they'll know!-- One moment, what it is to love.
THE FISH
In a cool curving world he lies And ripples with dark ecstasies. The kind luxurious lapse and steal Shapes all his universe to feel And know and be; the clinging stream Closes his memory, glooms his dream, Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides Superb on unreturning tides. Those silent waters weave for him A fluctuant mutable world and dim, Where wavering masses bulge and gape Mysterious, and shape to shape Dies momently through whorl and hollow, And form and line and solid follow Solid and line and form to dream Fantastic down the eternal stream; An obscure world, a shifting world, Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled, Or serpentine, or driving arrows, Or serene slidings, or March narrows. There slipping wave and shore are one, And weed and mud. No ray of sun, But glow to glow fades down the deep (As dream to unknown dream in sleep); Shaken translucency illumes The hyaline of drifting glooms; The strange soft-handed depth subdues Drowned colour there, but black to hues, As death to living, decomposes-- Red darkness of the heart of roses, Blue brilliant from dead starless skies, And gold that lies behind the eyes, The unknown unnameable sightless white That is the essential flame of night, Lustreless purple, hooded green, The myriad hues that lie between Darkness and darkness! ...
And all's one, Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun, The world he rests in, world he knows, Perpetual curving. Only--grows An eddy in that ordered falling, A knowledge from the gloom, a calling Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud-- The dark fire leaps along his blood; Dateless and deathless, blind and still, The intricate impulse works its will; His woven world drops back; and he, Sans providence, sans memory, Unconscious and directly driven, Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.
O world of lips, O world of laughter, Where hope is fleet and thought flies after, Of lights in the clear night, of cries That drift along the wave and rise Thin to the glittering stars above, You know the hands, the eyes of love! The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging, The infinite distance, and the singing Blown by the wind, a flame of sound, The gleam, the flowers, and vast around The horizon, and the heights above-- You know the sigh, the song of love!
But there the night is close, and there Darkness is cold and strange and bare; And the secret deeps are whisperless; And rhythm is all deliciousness; And joy is in the throbbing tide, Whose intricate fingers beat and glide In felt bewildering harmonies Of trembling touch; and music is The exquisite knocking of the blood. Space is no more, under the mud; His bliss is older than the sun. Silent and straight the waters run, The lights, the cries, the willows dim, And the dark tide are one with him.
TOWN AND COUNTRY
Here, where love's stuff is body, arm and side Are stabbing-sweet 'gainst chair and lamp and wall. In every touch more intimate meanings hide; And flaming brains are the white heart of all.
Here, million pulses to one centre beat: Closed in by men's vast friendliness, alone, Two can be drunk with solitude, and meet On the sheer point where sense with knowing's one.
Here the green-purple clanging royal night, And the straight lines and silent walls of town, And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad white Undying passers, pinnacle and crown
Intensest heavens between close-lying faces By the lamp's airless fierce ecstatic fire; And we've found love in little hidden places, Under great shades, between the mist and mire.
Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you've heard Night creep along the hedges. Never go Where tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird, And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow!
Lest--as our words fall dumb on windless noons, Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneath Unheeding stars and unfamiliar moons, Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death,--
Unconscious and unpassionate and still, Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare, And gradually along the stranger hill Our unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air,
And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss, And your lit upward face grows, where we lie, Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is, And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky.
DINING-ROOM TEA
When you were there, and you, and you, Happiness crowned the night; I too, Laughing and looking, one of all, I watched the quivering lamplight fall On plate and flowers and pouring tea And cup and cloth; and they and we Flung all the dancing moments by With jest and glitter. Lip and eye Flashed on the glory, shone and cried, Improvident, unmemoried; And fitfully and like a flame The light of laughter went and came. Proud in their careless transience moved The changing faces that I loved.