Part 5
How beautiful is the world's delight, How trivial, yet as sweet as a passing dream That makes the harassed sleeper in the night Smile, and on waking sigh. Forever the stream Of time moves onward; as in coloured boats A thousand souls go sailing, And stilly down the tide my spirit floats Singing or wailing To the tune the waters make. Here we forget a space The crawling sins of man that sting and gloat, The pain and fear that haggers every face, But vaguely and remote The strident trumpet and the clamorous voices sound-- Grief doth forget to curse her Gods or pray, While pagan follies squander all around Their brief gay hours in holiday; For all prayers die when laughter is on the lips.-- How frail the moods of joy, how sweet to see them pass Like bubbles on the tide, like coloured ships Sailing on glass!
1918
The leaves are singing, and the sea, And the sand in the wind, Blown grass and hurrying people; Full of melodious strings and lutes and flutes Rustling and whispering forever. The sad music of Life is in my ears, Never ceasing, never asleep, And my heart is strung between chord and chord Like a crucifix in a rosary.
1918
How soundly sleepeth the fool, With profane snore taunting the solemn-pillared night-- He hath no dreams of restless, subtle forms That shift across a feverish vacancy; Nor doth he hear the drums of time Beating against oblivion tunes of war, Goading the crippled hours on their endless march-- But waketh to yawn in the face of the sun, Then turneth back to sleep....
How soundly the wise man sleepeth, Couched royally in the purple of the dark With his white mistress, Peace-- And when the morning stealeth on his rest, As a rose he doth pluck her from the spreading tree of days, And reviveth his heart With the perfume of the world.... But 'twixt the wise and the foolish Many nights shed sorrow and fear, And nets are spread for timid feet, And the waves beat on the shifting sand....
1918
Moonlit lilacs under the window, And the pale smell of their falling blossoms, And the white floating beams like luminous moths Fluttering from bloom to bloom. Sprays of lilac flowers Frothing at the green verge of midnight waves, Frozen to motionless icicles. Moonlight flows over me, Spreads her bright watery hair over my face, Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes Wreathed with syringa and plaited with hyacinths; Hair of the moonlight falling about me, Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain.
1918
Old woman forever sitting Alone in the large hotel under the fans, Infinitely alone where around you spin So many lives like painted tops, Smearing the void a moment with their hues, Giddily catching at balance as they pause. What crime was yours, old woman, What sin against the Earth That she should give you now A cap of dust and furrows on your cheeks, And at the end A hole dug in the mould? Is death the promise of Fate's last rebound, Revenge of Time that waits within the clock And laughs awry at life, For a kiss, for a dream, for a child that you bore, For a fresh rose pinned to your bosom? The owl is in your spirit, Blinking through the oldest tree of wisdom-- And now your fingers are weaving The cold pale invisible blossoms of death Into a waxen wreath, And Time Sits down beside you knitting with quick hands Grey counterpanes to cover up a grave!
1918
Loneliness I love, And that is why they have called me forth into the streets. Loneliness I love, But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands,... My spirit speaks In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy Murmuring the tunes For which my dreams are the delicate instruments. The shadowy silences Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities, And that is why The noise of tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing, And I am clad In the lust-lipped whispering of furtive caresses. Holiness I love, And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs, The crucified feet Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles. Holiness I love And the melodious absolution falling on my sins. But that is why Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear The vesture of secrecy Which hides the human nakedness of God.
* * * * *
1918
I met an Indian underneath a tree, under a ragged tree, His face was yellow and wrinkled like some stone whereon a God had writ And his emaciated fingers drew circles in the dust.... I bent my mouth to his ear, crying "O father, O Prophet! I have wandered far over the earth troubled with doubts that will not let me rest, Canst thou not tell me with all thy wizardries and meditations The purpose of our lives upon this world, The secret truth Earth shelters in her womb?"
But he was listening to the whispering of the mountains, To the boom of God's paces on the rocks, And the swishing steps of his followers in the rivers. Then suddenly he pointed to the arched doorway in between the hills, And the mysterious purple curtain of the dusk that drooped from cliff to cliff. I saw in his eyes the vision of highborn ghosts, Of divine ivory faces wreathed with the flowers of wisdom-- And I knew that he had found only the half-spoken promises of Heaven....
* * * * *
I saw a drunkard laughing in a tavern, His cup was tilted and the wine spilt crimson on the sprawled arms and distracted hair of a woman fallen asleep, I watched him there and wondered If ever the bubbling goblins of wine had whispered him life's secret. But he raised the cup of his carousals and gazed at emptiness, Toasting some wild, irreverent dream, Some flame-red salamander pirouetting among the dead waste ashes of time-- And I knew that he had found only the secrets of sleep....
* * * * *
A woman sat within a little house, Scolding and singing ballads to her child, And all around came the quarrel of children's voices. Yet one boy sat apart within the furthest corner of the room Painting an animal with coloured chalks. I lingered by the fire thinking of life, its vanities and mysteries, But the woman did not heed me, Nor her pale son that sat so hunched and still, Painting his visions with the broken chalks, For they had discovered the absorbing painful secrets of giving birth....
* * * * *
It was evening as I wandered, By a lake two lovers leaned, smiling to see their faces in the water, For they had found within each other's souls An argent flattering mirror wherein to gaze and see their faces change with all the moods and shadows of the day.... Not here should I discover the answer to bring light into my darkness, Into the dim psychic crystals of my soul opalled with the changing colours of unrest-- So I went away into the loneliness, asking the forests and the mountains and the sea The knowledge of life's baffling mysteries. But they were roaring in a wind of memories, Gathering the rain into their bodies to make them fierce and strong, Heaving their shoulders upward to the morning, Crowning their foreheads with sunlight. And I knew that they were Life itself, The pushing vehemence that rushes from the strangling arms of Death, Nor could they guess The purpose of God's beauty in their joy....
1918
From the fathomless depth of my boredom, from the last room of its emptiness, an elf has come to play with me.
As comes a little gold spider to a prison cell teasing the criminal from his darkness to tear at a thread of sunlight, and kiss the mouth of a shy morning whispering through the window.
An elf has come to dance with me, blown like a leaf on the path of my autumn lassitude.
Sprightly one, dervish! You are the living adventure born of my dead childhood, you are the small god in the temples of my unbelief, you are the bird that nests in ruined temples, laying your silver eggs by moonlight and singing when the pagan birds are still.
You are the dream-sower in the fields of sleep, you have jingled the star-bells on the hood of darkness, and from the knarled, stark tree of time have flung me the apple of eternal laughter.
1919
Lolling in snow, like kings in ermine coats, the gilt-crowned bottles lie.... Our thoughts are dangled in a laughter of leaves as bunches of blue and yellow grapes for faery beggars, for ragged fancies to pluck and taste.
Our music shall be the minstrelsy of ghostly ballad-mongers that have stolen from the ashen banquets of death to bless our revels.
Our spirits shall flit like those winged faces of cherubs that never can alight, but swing forever on the azure ribbons of the sky.
And all our dreams and kisses shall be as the rose-leaves falling on ancient festivals, as the shadows of rose-leaves falling on phantom lovers in the sleep-pillared temples of our first archaic passion.
1918
The roots of our longing are probing the heart of night, delving and twining together that our ultimate truth may grow out of the darkness that bewilders and nourishes. Out of the earth, the dust, the crystals of frost that bind themselves like a tight crown over our heads.
Through the mould and the frost our hair and fingers shall prick their spears of pallor and flame, and in the green ardour of our up-rushing leaves the red goblets of fire shall open, and masses of white flowers, milky as the star-sprays that droop over Heaven, shall splash their bright foam from the darkness, as waves that rise and break into a fountain of blossoms.
1919
VAHDAH
Sun-aureoled lilies are your priestesses, They stand like choirs in silver surplices, Melodious streams of silence fill the room, And pensive listeners lean within the gloom Of purple quietness. A laughter full of holiness-- Like the wild bells of lilies ringing in the loneliness Of star-reflected gardens walled with night,-- Thrills from your soul which empties its delight As rain on lilies, or as sunlight falling slenderly To gild their ivory temples, and as moonlight shutting tenderly Their alabaster doors.... A white peace grows, And love, within your spirit like a lily and a rose.
1918
Starlit silences! Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths, With separations, burdens, and despairs, Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain ... Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory Clasped in their praying hands, And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses ... Forgotten days are painted on the night In parables and symbols of remorse That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries. The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake Out of the death-coloured waters, While the black barges pass Funereal, Carrying doom from mist to mist.... And madmen steal about the wintry parks Under the high glum walls of an asylum, With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies, With fumbling hands That grope for things invisibly obscene. Even the clock Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes.... Silence embalms the dead with scented bands And is the watchman to deserted houses, And draws the violet curtain on the day, And fits a mask of silver to the moon. Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory And sits them round us in the empty chairs, Opens the secret chambers of our hopes And shows us there in awful pantomime Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes, And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival, And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood. It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us Within its stifled virid twilight....
Cry out, sing, make noises, Bacchantes, revellers, clowns! Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes That spill the wine of light into our gloom; Pressing against our lips The red grape-kisses of pleasure. Bring the hounds, The garlanded white ones, To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags Of stillness shadowing away! Lean over me, O Life, And whisper all thy lying flatteries That drag me back from Silence and her dead. I have kept vigil on my soul too long Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep, Languidly gathering The cold grey lilies of the stars To slip between her passive waxen hands....
1918
The mountain is an Emperor. The clouds are his beard, and the stars his diadem; His bauble is the moon; He is dressed in silver forests, and the mist his train; His feet are two white rivers.
1917
I know what happiness is-- It is the negation of thought, The shutting off Of all those brooding phantoms that surround As dank trees in a forest Cutting the daylight into rags, Caging the sun In rusted prison bars. Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge And make no song, But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom, The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together, The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill; Opening wide the violet-petalled doors Of every shy and cloistered sense, That all the scent and music of the world May rush into the soul. And happiness expands The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams, For moth-like fancies winged with evening, For dove-breasted silences, For shadowy reveries And starry pilgrims.... I know what happiness is-- It is the giving back to Earth Of all our furtive thefts, The lurid jewels that we stole away From passion, sin and pain, Because they glittered strangely, luring us With their forbidden beauty. Because our childish fingers curiously Crave the pale secrets of the moon And grope for dangerous toys. Happiness comes in giving back to Earth The things we took from her with violent hands, Remembering only That her dust is our garment, Her fruits our endeavour, Her waters our priestess, Her leaves our interpreters to God, Her hills our infinite patience.
1918
Long hath the pen lain idle in my hand, Or traced slow sentences without a rhyme, Words strung at random to beguile the time As children threading beads upon a strand. I have strayed far away from fairyland Whose little hills grow steep and hard to climb; I creep along the valleys in the slime, Or hide me like an ostrich in the sand.
For I have sought a mellow idleness, To be forever buried as a fly Lies casketed in amber; where the stress Of peril, hunger, Death can never cry To wake me from my sanguine weariness, Or cloud the lucid stillness with a sigh.
1918
I laid my heart on a stone And stood in the wood to watch. Presently a priest came by; He hid it in his cowl And buried it in the graveyard. Now is it grown into a cyclamen tree, Clustering over the wall, Beckoning far along the twilight road; Nodding and singing where the cypress moans, Ringing its little bells while the great bell tolls. Whiter than ghosts are its flowers, And its scent is sweeter than ghostly music-- All the men and priests that pass In the night when the stars lean down, Smell the heavy fragrance there And feel the gentle touch of dripping dew. Then they cross themselves and go Hurriedly, warily, Dreaming of pale women, Under the pale stars.
1918
The cold light steals into my soul Revealing its emptiness, The cold winds batter at my heart And make its lonely tenant shake with fear-- The raindrops slide across the window-glass Like sighs that fall from patient weariness; And coldly smiling time Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain The pulse of a monotonous remorse.
1918
The caravans of spring are in the town, Lighting their brilliant torches in the park, Dangling their bells, engirdling each stark Black tree with coloured rings. The houses frown Against the beryl sky, yet wear a crown Of hazy dream, or flash a golden spark Of sun-fire in their windows glum and dark; The people blow like petals up and down.
But London tires at evening, each grey street Mourns as the slow procession passes by, Traffic and crowd, and Time on loitering feet. Spring droops his lute, the slender echoes sigh, And wistfully the jaded revellers meet, Their pomp in tatters and their wreaths awry.
1918
I dread the beauty of approaching spring Now the old month is dead and the young moon Has pierced my heart with her sharp silver horns. My tired soul is startled out of sleep By all the urging joy of bud and leaf, And in the barren yard where I have paced Content with prison and despair's monotony, The trees break into music wild and shrill, And flowers come out like stars amid the dust, Bewildering my loneliness with beauty.... For winter with her melancholy face Shone back my miseries as in a glass, And wept and whined in harmony with me; And I could listen by the withering ashes To the ill-omened drum of dropping rain, And sighing harken sighs and mute feel silence, And cold stretch forth my hand into the snows, And hating, hear the laughter of the wind Whose mad hands tear the sky. But now again the promise of the spring Shall lift my martyred spirit from the dust, To where the lilied altar shines with peace, And the white priestess comes Crowning each candle with a gold desire Engirdling with pallors The forehead of a divine ghost. Ah, but they die, these gods, the candles dwindle And spring is but a radiant beckoning To death that follows slowly, silently....
O flitting swallows, fleeting laugh of wind, O flash of silver in the wings of dawn That are spread out and closed. O hush of night Breathless with love, oh swish of whispering tide That swells and shrinks upon the dreaming shore. O gentle eyes of children wonder-wide That grow too soon to weariness and close; O scuttling run of rabbit on the hills, And flight of lazy rooks above the elm; O birds' eggs frail, tinged faintly, nestled close, And mystery of flower in the bud. O burning galaxy of buttercups, And drone of bees above the pouting rose,-- O twilit lovers stilled with reverie And footprints of them swerving on the sand And darkness of them clasped against the sky! I see beyond the glory of your days The grey days marching one behind the other To the bleak tunes of silence. When mists shall smear the radiance of the moon And the lean thief shall pass, Snatching the glittering toys away from love, Plucking the feathers from the wings of peace. And Life herself, grown old and crooked now, Shall go the way that her long shadow points, Her long black shadow down the roads of sleep.
1918
TO MY FATHER
I cannot think that you have gone away, You loved the earth--and life lit up your eyes, And flickered in your smile that would surmise Death as a song, a poem, or a play. You were reborn afresh with every day, And baffled fortune in some new disguise. Ah! can it perish when the body dies, Such youth, such love, such passion to be gay?
We shall not see you come to us and leave A conqueror--nor catch on fairy wing Some slender fancy--nor new wonders weave Upon the loom of your imagining. The world is wearier, grown dark to grieve Her child that was a pilgrim and a king.
1917
TO MY MOTHER
At evening when the twilight curtains fall, Before the lamps are lit within my room, My memories hang bright upon the gloom, Like ancient frescoes painted on the wall.
And I can hear the call of birds and bells And shadowy sound of waves, and wind through leaves And wind that rustles through the burnished sheaves, And far off voices whispering farewells.
I dream again the joy I used to know While straying by the sea that hardly sighed A sorrow in my singing, as the tide Crept up to clasp me, smiled, and let me go.
And I remember all the glad lost hours, The racing of brown rabbits on the hill, The winds that prowled around the lonely mill, Laburnum laughter, music of the flowers.
The berries plucked with loitering delight, Staining the dusk with purple, till the thought Of starry little ghosts behind us caught Our hearts and made us fearful of the night.
The London evenings huddled in the rain Whose misty prisms shone with lamplight pale, Making our hearts seem sinister and frail, Fainting our thoughts with mystery and pain.
I have a world of memories to dream, To touch with loving fingers as a sigh Revives a little flame and lets it die. Ah, were the days as lovely as they seem
Now that they look so peaceful lying dead? And is it all the hope of Joy we have, The broken trophies of the things she gave And took away to give us dreams instead?
The things we love and lose before we find The way to love them well enough and keep, That now are woven on the looms of sleep That now are only music of the wind.
1918
London grows sad at evening, And we at the windows sit To watch her moods, Wearying with her. Even a noise of laughter from the street Sounds in our ears Like something dropped and shattered on the stone. Then her musician comes, A wandering, malicious spirit; The organ grinder, playing those old tunes We know too well, That hurt us with fatigue. Till Hope like a harlequin, His glitter hidden in a ragged coat, The lamplighter, goes by, Planting his pale flames in the dusk.
1918
Ah! the spring, Sudden, surprising, Melting the iron scales around the heart As the earliest sun Melts the cold case of dew on leaves-- Ah! the streets like odorous rivers Chanting the echoes of seas-- Ah! the flowers in shop-windows Beseeching, persuasive, Reluctant to let their beauty flow away From thoughts that mirror them in passing-- Beautiful exiles Fluttering in their chains, Thrilled with the noise of bees, The music of meadows Still hovering around them-- Flower fingers, flower-touches, Passional, reminiscent, Rippling the soul's still waters-- Flower galaxies, Enamelled bridges arching from dream to dream, Garlands splashing over the eyes of satyrs, The furtive woodland eyes, The pointed inquisitive ears-- Pallid flowers foaming on hill-crests, Gushing heavenwards From a sea of stormy mountains-- Opening and shutting exquisite doors, As the senses open to music, Shut upon silence, Open to beauty, Close their caskets upon love-- Ah! the flowers in the windows, Amorous of poets Making a chaplet of song!
1919
THE UNDERTONE OF THE VOLGA BOAT SONG