Chapter 3
You are lovely, your face is soft Like a flower in bud On a mountain croft.
This is Noël for me. To-night is a woman born Of the man in me.
_RABBIT SNARED IN THE NIGHT_
WHY do you spurt and sprottle like that, bunny? Why should I want to throttle you, bunny?
Yes, bunch yourself between my knees and lie still. Lie on me with a hot, plumb, live weight, heavy as a stone, passive, yet hot, waiting.
What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? What is the hot, plumb weight of your desire on me? You have a hot, unthinkable desire of me, bunny.
What is that spark glittering at me on the unutterable darkness of your eye, bunny? The finest splinter of a spark that you throw off, straight on the tinder of my nerves!
It sets up a strange fire, a soft, most unwarrantable burning a bale-fire mounting, mounting up in me.
'Tis not of me, bunny. It was you engendered it, with that fine, demoniacal spark you jetted off your eye at me.
_I_ did not want it, this furnace, this draught-maddened fire which mounts up my arms making them swell with turgid, ungovernable strength.
'Twas not _I_ that wished it, that my fingers should turn into these flames avid and terrible that they are at this moment.
It must have been _your_ inbreathing, gaping desire that drew this red gush in me; I must be reciprocating _your_ vacuous, hideous passion.
It must be the want in you that has drawn this terrible draught of white fire up my veins as up a chimney.
It must be you who desire this intermingling of the black and monstrous fingers of Moloch in the blood-jets of your throat.
Come, you shall have your desire, since already I am implicated with you in your strange lust.
_PARADISE RE-ENTERED_
THROUGH the strait gate of passion, Between the bickering fire Where flames of fierce love tremble On the body of fierce desire:
To the intoxication, The mind, fused down like a bead, Flees in its agitation The flames' stiff speed:
At last to calm incandescence, Burned clean by remorseless hate, Now, at the day's renascence We approach the gate.
Now, from the darkened spaces Of fear, and of frightened faces, Death, in our awful embraces Approached and passed by;
We near the flame-burnt porches Where the brands of the angels, like torches Whirl,--in these perilous marches Pausing to sigh;
We look back on the withering roses, The stars, in their sun-dimmed closes, Where 'twas given us to repose us Sure on our sanctity;
Beautiful, candid lovers, Burnt out of our earthy covers, We might have nestled like plovers In the fields of eternity.
There, sure in sinless being, All-seen, and then all-seeing, In us life unto death agreeing, We might have lain.
But we storm the angel-guarded Gates of the long-discarded, Garden, which God has hoarded Against our pain.
The Lord of Hosts, and the Devil Are left on Eternity's level Field, and as victors we travel To Eden home.
Back beyond good and evil Return we. Eve dishevel Your hair for the bliss-drenched revel On our primal loam.
_SPRING MORNING_
AH, through the open door Is there an almond tree Aflame with blossom! --Let us fight no more.
Among the pink and blue Of the sky and the almond flowers A sparrow flutters. --We have come through,
It is really spring!--See, When he thinks himself alone How he bullies the flowers. --Ah, you and me
How happy we'll be!--See him He clouts the tufts of flowers In his impudence. --But, did you dream
It would be so bitter? Never mind It is finished, the spring is here. And we're going to be summer-happy And summer-kind.
We have died, we have slain and been slain, We are not our old selves any more. I feel new and eager To start again.
It is gorgeous to live and forget. And to feel quite new. See the bird in the flowers?--he's making A rare to-do!
He thinks the whole blue sky Is much less than the bit of blue egg He's got in his nest--we'll be happy You and I, I and you.
With nothing to fight any more-- In each other, at least. See, how gorgeous the world is Outside the door!
SAN GAUDENZIO
_WEDLOCK_
I
COME, my little one, closer up against me, Creep right up, with your round head pushed in my breast.
How I love all of you! Do you feel me wrap you Up with myself and my warmth, like a flame round the wick?
And how I am not at all, except a flame that mounts off you. Where I touch you, I flame into being;--but is it me, or you?
That round head pushed in my chest, like a nut in its socket, And I the swift bracts that sheathe it: those breasts, those thighs and knees,
Those shoulders so warm and smooth: I feel that I Am a sunlight upon them, that shines them into being.
But how lovely to be you! Creep closer in, that I am more. I spread over you! How lovely, your round head, your arms,
Your breasts, your knees and feet! I feel that we Are a bonfire of oneness, me flame flung leaping round you, You the core of the fire, crept into me.
II
AND oh, my little one, you whom I enfold, How quaveringly I depend on you, to keep me alive, Like a flame on a wick!
I, the man who enfolds you and holds you close, How my soul cleaves to your bosom as I clasp you, The very quick of my being!
Suppose you didn't want me! I should sink down Like a light that has no sustenance And sinks low.
Cherish me, my tiny one, cherish me who enfold you. Nourish me, and endue me, I am only of you, I am your issue.
How full and big like a robust, happy flame When I enfold you, and you creep into me, And my life is fierce at its quick Where it comes off you!
III
MY little one, my big one, My bird, my brown sparrow in my breast. My squirrel clutching in to me; My pigeon, my little one, so warm So close, breathing so still.
My little one, my big one, I, who am so fierce and strong, enfolding you, If you start away from my breast, and leave me, How suddenly I shall go down into nothing Like a flame that falls of a sudden.
And you will be before me, tall and towering, And I shall be wavering uncertain Like a sunken flame that grasps for support.
IV
BUT now I am full and strong and certain With you there firm at the core of me Keeping me.
How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed.
I wonder what it will be, What will come forth of us. What flower, my love?
No matter, I am so happy, I feel like a firm, rich, healthy root, Rejoicing in what is to come.
How I depend on you utterly My little one, my big one! How everything that will be, will not be of me, Nor of either of us, But of both of us.
V
AND think, there will something come forth from us. We two, folded so small together, There will something come forth from us. Children, acts, utterance Perhaps only happiness.
Perhaps only happiness will come forth from us. Old sorrow, and new happiness. Only that one newness.
But that is all I want. And I am sure of that. We are sure of that.
VI
AND yet all the while you are you, you are not me. And I am I, I am never you. How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are!
Yet I am glad. I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope, Something that stands over, Something I shall never be, That I shall always wonder over, and wait for, Look for like the breath of life as long as I live, Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am, I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.
And you will always be with me. I shall never cease to be filled with newness, Having you near me.
_HISTORY_
THE listless beauty of the hour When snow fell on the apple trees And the wood-ash gathered in the fire And we faced our first miseries.
Then the sweeping sunshine of noon When the mountains like chariot cars Were ranked to blue battle--and you and I Counted our scars.
And then in a strange, grey hour We lay mouth to mouth, with your face Under mine like a star on the lake, And I covered the earth, and all space.
The silent, drifting hours Of morn after morn And night drifting up to the night Yet no pathway worn.
Your life, and mine, my love Passing on and on, the hate Fusing closer and closer with love Till at length they mate.
THE CEARNE
_SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH_
NOT I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time. If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me! If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift! If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted; If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge Driven by invisible blows, The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul, I would be a good fountain, a good well-head, Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
_ONE WOMAN TO ALL WOMEN_
I DON'T care whether I am beautiful to you You other women. Nothing of me that you see is my own; A man balances, bone unto bone Balances, everything thrown In the scale, you other women.
You may look and say to yourselves, I do Not show like the rest. My face may not please you, nor my stature; yet if you knew How happy I am, how my heart in the wind rings true Like a bell that is chiming, each stroke as a stroke falls due, You other women:
You would draw your mirror towards you, you would wish To be different. There's the beauty you cannot see, myself and him Balanced in glorious equilibrium, The swinging beauty of equilibrium, You other women.
There's this other beauty, the way of the stars You straggling women. If you knew how I swerve in peace, in the equi- poise With the man, if you knew how my flesh enjoys The swinging bliss no shattering ever destroys You other women:
You would envy me, you would think me wonder- ful Beyond compare; You would weep to be lapsing on such harmony As carries me, you would wonder aloud that he Who is so strange should correspond with me Everywhere.
You see he is different, he is dangerous, Without pity or love. And yet how his separate being liberates me And gives me peace! You cannot see How the stars are moving in surety Exquisite, high above.
We move without knowing, we sleep, and we travel on, You other women. And this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone In a motion human inhuman, two and one Encompassed, and many reduced to none, You other women.
KENSINGTON
_PEOPLE_
THE great gold apples of night Hang from the street's long bough Dripping their light On the faces that drift below, On the faces that drift and blow Down the night-time, out of sight In the wind's sad sough.
The ripeness of these apples of night Distilling over me Makes sickening the white Ghost-flux of faces that hie Them endlessly, endlessly by Without meaning or reason why They ever should be.
_STREET LAMPS_
GOLD, with an innermost speck Of silver, singing afloat Beneath the night, Like balls of thistle-down Wandering up and down Over the whispering town Seeking where to alight!
Slowly, above the street Above the ebb of feet Drifting in flight; Still, in the purple distance The gold of their strange persistence As they cross and part and meet And pass out of sight!
The seed-ball of the sun Is broken at last, and done Is the orb of day. Now to the separate ends Seed after day-seed wends A separate way.
No sun will ever rise Again on the wonted skies In the midst of the spheres. The globe of the day, over-ripe, Is shattered at last beneath the stripe Of the wind, and its oneness veers Out myriad-wise.
Seed after seed after seed Drifts over the town, in its need To sink and have done; To settle at last in the dark, To bury its weary spark Where the end is begun.
Darkness, and depth of sleep, Nothing to know or to weep Where the seed sinks in To the earth of the under-night Where all is silent, quite Still, and the darknesses steep Out all the sin.
_"SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME"_
SHE said as well to me: "Why are you ashamed? That little bit of your chest that shows between the gap of your shirt, why cover it up? Why shouldn't your legs and your good strong thighs be rough and hairy?--I'm glad they are like that. You are shy, you silly, you silly shy thing. Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come out of their covers. Like any snake slipping into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into your clothes. And I love you so! Straight and clean and all of a piece is the body of a man, such an instrument, a spade, like a spear, or an oar, such a joy to me--" So she laid her hands and pressed them down my sides, so that I began to wonder over myself, and what I was.
She said to me: "What an instrument, your body! single and perfectly distinct from everything else! What a tool in the hands of the Lord! Only God could have brought it to its shape. It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the breasts and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow.
"When I was a child, I loved my father's riding- whip that he used so often. I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him. So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk. Something seemed to surge through me when I touched them.
"So it is with you, but here The joy I feel! God knows what I feel, but it is joy! Look, you are clean and fine and singled out! I admire you so, you are beautiful: this clean sweep of your sides, this firmness, this hard mould! I would die rather than have it injured with one scar. I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord, and have you--"
So she said, and I wondered, feeling trammelled and hurt. It did not make me free.
Now I say to her: "No tool, no instrument, no God! Don't touch me and appreciate me. It is an infamy. You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat. Your hand would not be so flig and easy. Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the sunshine like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity. And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono- lith, arrested, static.
"Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate? I tell you there is all these. And why should you overlook them in me?--"
_NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH_
I
AND so I cross into another world shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespass on.
I am very glad, and all alone in the world, all alone, and very glad, in a new world where I am disembarked at last.
I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in. I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is nobody to know.
And whosoever the unknown people of this un- known world may be they will never understand my weeping for joy to be adventuring among them because it will still be a gesture of the old world I am making which they will not understand, because it is quite, quite foreign to them.
II
I WAS so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself.
When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering. When I went in a train, I knew it was myself travelling by my own invention. When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction. When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body. It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh.
III
I SHALL never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end when everything was me, I knew it all already, I anticipated it all in my soul because I was the author and the result I was the God and the creation at once; creator, I looked at my creation; created, I looked at myself, the creator: it was a maniacal horror in the end.
I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved, and God of horror, I was kissing also myself. I was a father and a begetter of children, and oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body.
IV
AT last came death, sufficiency of death, and that at last relieved me, I died. I buried my beloved; it was good, I buried myself and was gone. War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder! Very good, very good, I am a murderer! It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a multitude one on another, and then in clusters together smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them the murdered bodies of youths and men in heaps and heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps; thousands and thousands of gaping, hideous foul dead that are youths and men and me being burned with oil, and consumed in corrupt thick smoke, that rolls and taints and blackens the sky, till at last it is dark, dark as night, or death, or hell and I am dead, and trodden to nought in the smoke-sodden tomb; dead and trodden to nought in the sour black earth of the tomb; dead and trodden to nought, trodden to nought.
V
GOD, but it is good to have died and been trodden out trodden to nought in sour, dead earth quite to nought absolutely to nothing nothing nothing nothing.
For when it is quite, quite nothing, then it is everything. When I am trodden quite out, quite, quite out every vestige gone, then I am here risen, and setting my foot on another world risen, accomplishing a resurrection risen, not born again, but risen, body the same as before, new beyond knowledge of newness, alive beyond life proud beyond inkling or furthest conception of pride living where life was never yet dreamed of, nor hinted at here, in the other world, still terrestrial myself, the same as before, yet unaccountably new.
VI
I, IN the sour black tomb, trodden to absolute death I put out my hand in the night, one night, and my hand touched that which was verily not me verily it was not me. Where I had been was a sudden blaze a sudden flaring blaze! So I put my hand out further, a little further and I felt that which was not I, it verily was not I it was the unknown.
Ha, I was a blaze leaping up! I was a tiger bursting into sunlight. I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown. I, new-risen, resurrected, starved from the tomb starved from a life of devouring always myself now here was I, new-awakened, with my hand stretching out and touching the unknown, the real unknown, the unknown unknown.
My God, but I can only say I touch, I feel the unknown! I am the first comer! Cortes, Pisarro, Columbus, Cabot, they are noth- ing, nothing! I am the first comer! I am the discoverer! I have found the other world!
The unknown, the unknown! I am thrown upon the shore. I am covering myself with the sand. I am filling my mouth with the earth. I am burrowing my body into the soil. The unknown, the new world!
VII
IT was the flank of my wife I touched with my hand, I clutched with my hand rising, new-awakened from the tomb! It was the flank of my wife whom I married years ago at whose side I have lain for over a thousand nights and all that previous while, she was I, she was I; I touched her, it was I who touched and I who was touched.
Yet rising from the tomb, from the black oblivion stretching out my hand, my hand flung like a drowned man's hand on a rock, I touched her flank and knew I was carried by the current in death over to the new world, and was climbing out on the shore, risen, not to the old world, the old, changeless I, the old life, wakened not to the old knowledge but to a new earth, a new I, a new knowledge, a new world of time.
Ah no, I cannot tell you what it is, the new world I cannot tell you the mad, astounded rapture of its discovery. I shall be mad with delight before I have done, and whosoever comes after will find me in the new world a madman in rapture.
VIII
GREEN streams that flow from the innermost continent of the new world, what are they? Green and illumined and travelling for ever dissolved with the mystery of the innermost heart of the continent mystery beyond knowledge or endurance, so sump- tuous out of the well-heads of the new world.-- The other, she too has strange green eyes! White sands and fruits unknown and perfumes that never can blow across the dark seas to our usual world! And land that beats with a pulse! And valleys that draw close in love! And strange ways where I fall into oblivion of uttermost living!-- Also she who is the other has strange-mounded breasts and strange sheer slopes, and white levels.
Sightless and strong oblivion in utter life takes possession of me! The unknown, strong current of life supreme drowns me and sweeps me away and holds me down to the sources of mystery, in the depths, extinguishes there my risen resurrected life and kindles it further at the core of utter mystery.
GREATHAM
_ELYSIUM_
I HAVE found a place of loneliness Lonelier than Lyonesse Lovelier than Paradise;
Full of sweet stillness That no noise can transgress Never a lamp distress.
The full moon sank in state. I saw her stand and wait For her watchers to shut the gate.
Then I found myself in a wonderland All of shadow and of bland Silence hard to understand.
I waited therefore; then I knew The presence of the flowers that grew Noiseless, their wonder noiseless blew.
And flashing kingfishers that flew In sightless beauty, and the few Shadows the passing wild-beast threw.
And Eve approaching over the ground Unheard and subtle, never a sound To let me know that I was found.
Invisible the hands of Eve Upon me travelling to reeve Me from the matrix, to relieve
Me from the rest! Ah terribly Between the body of life and me Her hands slid in and set me free.
Ah, with a fearful, strange detection She found the source of my subjection To the All, and severed the connection.
Delivered helpless and amazed From the womb of the All, I am waiting, dazed For memory to be erased.
Then I shall know the Elysium That lies outside the monstrous womb Of time from out of which I come.
_MANIFESTO_
I
A WOMAN has given me strength and affluence. Admitted!
All the rocking wheat of Canada, ripening now, has not so much of strength as the body of one woman sweet in ear, nor so much to give though it feed nations.
Hunger is the very Satan. The fear of hunger is Moloch, Belial, the horrible God. It is a fearful thing to be dominated by the fear of hunger.
Not bread alone, not the belly nor the thirsty throat. I have never yet been smitten through the belly, with the lack of bread, no, nor even milk and honey.