SCENE II.: _Evening before Thebes. The Pyramids are being built.
Swarms of Hebrews labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two Hebrews are furtively talking._ KOELUE _passes by singing_.
KOELUE
The vague viols of evening Call all the flower clans To some abysmal swinging And tumult of deep trance; He may hear, flower of my singing, And come hither winging.
OLD HEBREW
[_Gazing after her in a muffled frenzy._]
Hateful harlot! Boils cover your small cruel face. O, fine champion Moses: O, so good to us: O, grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer, Her father, born to us since you kissed her. Our champion, O so good to us!
YOUNG HEBREW
For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed: For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now; And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril. Be still, old man; wait a little.
OLD HEBREW
Wait! All day some slow dark quadruped beats To pulp our springiness: All day some hoofed animal treads our veins, Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out: All agonies created from the first day Have wandered hungry searching the world for us, Or they would perish like disused Behemoth. Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?
YOUNG HEBREW
Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,
Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me, He came by and bore me into the shade: O, what a furnace roaring in his blood Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own Raging through me like a strong cordial. He spoke! Since yesterday Am I not larger grown? I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul, Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight, And to their shop only heroes come; But all were cripples to this speed Constrained to the stables of flesh. I say there is a famine in ripe harvest When hungry giants come as guests: Come knead the hills and ocean into food, There is none for him. The streaming vigours of his blood erupting From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust Out of a madman’s piteous craving for A monstrous balked perfection.
OLD HEBREW
He is a prince, an animal Not of our kind; who perhaps has heard
Vague rumours of our world, to his mind An unpleasant miasma.
YOUNG HEBREW
Is not Miriam his sister, Jochabed his mother? In the womb he looked round and saw From furthermost stretches our wrong: From the palaces and schools Our pain has pierced dead generations Back to his blood’s thin source. As we lie chained by Egyptian men He lay in nets of their women, And now rejoices he has broken their meshes. O! His desires are fleets of treasure He has squandered in treacherous seas, Sailing mistrust to find frank ports; He fears our fear and tampers mildly For our assent to let him save us. When he walks amid our toil With some master-mason His tense brows, critical Of the loose enginery, Hint famed devices flat, his rod Scratching new schemes on the sand: But read hard the scrawled lines there— Limned turrets and darkness, chinks of light,
Half beasts snorting into the light, A phantasmagoria, wild escapade To our hearts’ clue; just a daring plan To the honest mason. What swathed meanings peer From his work-a-day council, washed to and from Your understanding till you doubt That a word was said— But a terror wakes and forces your eyes Into his covertly, to search his searching; Startled to life, starved hopes slink out Cowering, incredulous.
OLD HEBREW
[_To himself._] His youth is flattered at Moses’ kind speech to him.
[_To the_ YOUNG HEBREW.]
I am broken and grey, have seen much in my time, And all this gay grotesque of childish man Long passed; half blind, half deaf, I only grumble I am not blind or deaf enough for peace. I have seen splendid young fools cheat themselves Into a prophet’s frenzy; I have seen So many crazed shadows puffed away, And conscious cheats with such an ache for fame
They’d make a bonfire of themselves to be Mouthed in the squares, broad in the public eye: And whose backs break, whose lives are mauled, after It all falls flat? His tender airs chill me— As thoughts of sleep to a man tiptoed night-long Roped round his neck, for sleep means death to him. Oh, he is kind to us! Your safe teeth chatter when they hear a step: He left them yours because his cunning way Would brag the wrong against his humane act By Pharaoh; so gain more favour than he lost.
YOUNG HEBREW
Help him not then, and push your safety away: I for my part will be his backward eye, His hands when they are shut. Ah! Abinoah! Like a bad smell from the soul of Moses dipt In the mire of lust he hangs round him; And if his slit-like eyes could tear right out The pleasure Moses on his daughter had, She’d be as virgin as ere she came nestling Into that fierce unmanageable blood, Flying from her loathed father. O, that slave Has hammered from the anvil of her beauty
A steel to break his manacles: hard for us Moses has made him overseer. O, his slits Pry—pry.... For what?... To sell to Imra....
[ABINOAH _is seen approaching_.]
Sh! The thin-lipped abomination! Zig-zagging haschish tours in a fine style: It were delightful labour making bricks, Knowing they would kiss friendly with his head.
ABINOAH
[_Who has been taking haschish; and who has one obsession, hatred of Jews._]
Dirt-draggled mongrels, circumcised slaves, You puddle with your lousy gibberish The holy air, Pharaoh’s own tributary: Filthy manure for Pharaoh’s flourishing, I’ll circumcise and make holy your tongues, And stop one outlet to your profanation.
[_To the_ OLD HEBREW.]
I’ve never seen one beg so for a blow; Too soft am I to resist such entreaty. [_Beats him._] Your howling holds the earnest energies You cheat from Pharaoh when you make his bricks.
AN AGED MINSTREL
[_Sings from a distance._]
Taut is the air and tied the trees, The leaves lie as on a hand; God’s unthinkable imagination Invents new tortures for nature.
And when the air is soft and the leaves Feel free and push and tremble, Will they not remember and say How wonderful to have lived?
[_The_ OLD HEBREW _is agitated and murmurs_.]
Messiah, Messiah.... That voice.... O, he has beaten my sight out.... I see Like a rain about a devouring fire....
[_The Minstrel sings._]
Ye who best God awhile, O hear: your wealth Is but His cunning to see to make death more hard, Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy although you die to sell.
OLD HEBREW
I am crazed with whips.... I hear a Messiah.
YOUNG HEBREW
The venerable man will question this.
ABINOAH
[_Overhearing._] I’ll beat you more, and he’ll question The scratchiness of your whining; or, may be, Thence may be born deep argument With reasons from philosophy, That this blow, taking longer, yet was but one, Or perhaps two; or that you felt this one— Arguing from the difference in your whine— Exactly, or not, like the other.
MINSTREL
You labour hard to give pain.
ABINOAH
[_Still beating._] My pain is ... not ... to labour so.
MINSTREL
What is this greybeard worth to you now, All his dried-up blood crumbled to dust?
[_Motions_ ABINOAH _to desist, but not in time to prevent the old man fainting into the hands of the_ YOUNG HEBREW.]
ABINOAH
Harper, are you envious of the old fool? Go! Hug the rat who stole your last crumbs, And gnawed the hole in your life which made time wonder Who it was saved labour for him the next score of years. We allowed them life for their labour—they haggled. Food they must have, and (god of laughter!) even ease; But mud and lice and Jews are very busy Breeding plagues in ease.
[_The Minstrel pulls his beard and robe off._]
ABINOAH
Moses!
MOSES
You drunken rascal!
ABINOAH
A drunken rascal! Isis, hear the Prince! Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal.
MOSES
You may think it your duty to get drunk; But get yourself bronze claws before You would be impudent.
ABINOAH
When a man’s drunk he’ll kiss a horse or king, He’s so affectionate. Under your words There is strong wine to make me drunk; you think, The lines of all your face say, “Her father, Koelue’s father.”
MOSES
This is too droll and extraordinary. I dreamt I was a prince—a queer droll dream Where a certain slave of mine, a thing, a toad, Shifting his belly, showed a diamond Where he had lain; and a blind dumb messenger Bore syllabled messages soaked right through with glee: I paid the toad, the blind man; afterwards They spread a stench and snarling. O, droll dream!
I think you merely mean to flatter me, You subtle knave, that, more than prince, I’m _man_ And worth to listen to your bawdy breath.
ABINOAH
Yet my breath was worth your mixing with.
MOSES
A boy at college flattered so by a girl Will give her what she asks for.
ABINOAH
Osiris! Burning Osiris! Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair....
[_He looks inanely at_ MOSES, _saying to himself_.]
Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards: Isis, to let a Jew have her for nothing!
[_He sings under his breath._]
Night by night in a little house A man and woman meet; They look like each other, They are sister and brother; And night by night at that same hour A king calls for his son in vain.
MOSES
[_To himself._] So, sister Miriam, it is known then. Slave, you die. [_Aloud._] O, you ambiguous stench, You’ll be more interesting as a mummy I have no doubt.
ABINOAH
I’m drunk, yes—drenched with the thought Of a certain thing. [_Aside._] I’ll sleep sounder to-night Than all the nights I’ve followed him about Worrying each slight clue, each monosyllable To give the word to Imra: the prince is near, And Moses’ eyes shall blink before next hour To a hundred javelins. I’ll tease him till they come. [_Aloud._] On Koelue’s tears I swam to you, in a mist Of her sighs I hung round you; As in some hallucination I’ve been walking A white waste world, we two only in it.
MOSES
Doubtless the instinct balked to bully the girl, Making large gapings in your haschish dreams,
Led you to me in whom she was thoroughly lost. Pah, you sicken me!
[_He is silent awhile, then turns away._]
ABINOAH
Prince Imra is Pharaoh’s choice now, and Koelue’s.
[MOSES _turns back menacingly_.]
MOSES
Silence, you beast!
[_He changes his tone to a winning softness._]
I hate these family quarrels: it is so Like fratricide. I am a rebel, well? Soft! You are not, and we are knit so close It would be shame for a son to be so honoured And the father still unknown: come, Koelue’s (so _my_) father, I’ll tell my plans—you’ll beg to be rebel then. Look round on the night— Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done; She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of the sun, Yet only dawn divides; could a miracle
Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with light, No night or light would be, but a new thing: So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom, Egypt was in the way; I’ll strike it out With my ways curious and unusual. I have a trouble in my mind for largeness, Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours lack: Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew; Here are the springs, primeval elements, The roots’ hid secrecy, old source of race, Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct. I’d shape one impulse through the contraries Of vain ambitious men, selfish and callous, And frail life-drifters, reticent, delicate— Litheness thread bulk, a nation’s harmony: These are not lame nor bent awry, but placeless With the rust and stagnant. All that’s low I’ll charm, Barbaric love sweeten to tenderness, Cunning run into wisdom, craft turn to skill; Their meanness, threaded right and sensibly, Change to a prudence envied and not sneered; Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing
Ineffable and useable, as near Solidity as human life can be: So grandly fashion these rude elements Into some newer nature, a consciousness Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul, Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny Until they take it thus—or die.
[_While speaking, he places his hand on the unsuspecting Egyptian’s head and gently, caressingly, pulls his hair back until his chin is above his forehead, and holds him so till he is suffocated. In the darkness ahead is seen the glimmer of javelins and spears: it is Prince Imra’s cohorts come to arrest_ MOSES.]
THE END.
POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH
And like the artist who creates From dying things what never dies.... _Fragment._
DAUGHTERS OF WAR
Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs, Their naked dances with man’s spirit naked By the root side of the tree of life (The under side of things And shut from earth’s profoundest eyes).
I saw in prophetic gleams These mighty daughters in their dances Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse To mix in their glittering dances: I heard the mighty daughters’ giant sighs In sleepless passion for the sons of valour And envy of the days of flesh, Barring their love with mortal boughs across— The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life. The old bark burnt with iron wars They blow to a live flame To char the young green days And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure, No softer lure than the savage ways of death.
We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth— These maidens came—these strong everliving Amazons, And in an easy might their wrists Of night’s sway and noon’s sway the sceptres brake, Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes.
Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights; Driving the darkness into the flame of day With the Amazonian wind of them Over our corroding faces That must be broken—broken for evermore, So the soul can leap out Into their huge embraces. Though there are human faces Best sculptures of Deity, And sinews lusted after By the Archangels tall, Even these must leap to the love-heat of these maidens From the flame of terrene days, Leaving grey ashes to the wind—to the wind.
One (whose great lifted face, Where wisdom’s strength and beauty’s strength And the thewed strength of large beasts Moved and merged, gloomed and lit) Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men’s earth fell away; Whose new hearing drank the sound Where pictures, lutes, and mountains mixed With the loosed spirit of a thought, Essenced to language thus—
“My sisters force their males From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee And hankering of hearts. Frail hands gleam up through the human quagmire, and lips of ash Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings Far-sunken and strange. My sisters have their males Clean of the dust of old days That clings about those white hands And yearns in those voices sad: But these shall not see them, Or think of them in any days or years; They are my sisters’ lovers in other days and years.”
ON RECEIVING THE FIRST NEWS OF THE WAR
Snow is a strange white word; No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost.
Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know; No man knows why.
In all men’s hearts it is: Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould.
Red fangs have torn His face, God’s blood is shed: He mourns from His lone place His children dead.
O ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume; Give back this universe Its pristine bloom.
_Cape Town, 1914._
SPRING, 1916
Slow, rigid, is this masquerade That passes as through a difficult air: Heavily—heavily passes. What has she fed on? Who her table laid Through the three seasons? What forbidden fare Ruined her as a mortal lass is?
I played with her two years ago, Who might be now her own sister in stone; So altered from her May mien, When round the pink a necklace of warm snow Laughed to her throat where my mouth’s touch had gone. How is this, ruined Queen?
Who lured her vivid beauty so To be that strained chill thing that moves So ghastly midst her young brood Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow? Where are the strong men who made these their loves? Spring! God pity your mood!
THE TROOP SHIP
Grotesque and queerly huddled Contortionists to twist The sleepy soul to a sleep, We lie all sorts of ways And cannot sleep. The wet wind is so cold, And the lurching men so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Winds’ fumble or men’s feet Are on your face.
MARCHING
(AS SEEN FROM THE LEFT FILE).
My eyes catch ruddy necks Sturdily pressed back— All a red-brick moving glint. Like flaming pendulums, hands Swing across the khaki— Mustard-coloured khaki— To the automatic feet.
We husband the ancient glory In these bared necks and hands. Not broke is the forge of Mars; But a subtler brain beats iron To shoe the hoofs of death (Who paws dynamic air now). Blind fingers loose an iron cloud To rain immortal darkness On strong eyes.
BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES
The darkness crumbles away— It is the same old druid Time as ever. Only a live thing leaps my hand— A queer sardonic rat— As I pull the parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies (And God knows what antipathies). Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German— Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver—what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe, Just a little white with the dust.
KILLED IN ACTION
Your “Youth”[2] has fallen from its shelf, And you have fallen, you yourself. They knocked a soldier on the head, I mourn the poet who fell dead. And yet I think it was by chance, By oversight you died in France. You were so poor an outward man, So small against your spirit’s span, That Nature, being tired awhile, Saw but your outward human pile; And Nature, who would never let A sun with light still in it set, Before you even reached your sky, In inadvertence let you die.
Footnote 2:
“Youth,” a volume of poems by I. Rosenberg.
RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS
Sombre the night is: And, though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know This poison-blasted track opens on our camp— On a little safe sleep.
But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy. Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks: Music showering on our upturned listening faces.
Death could drop from the dark As easily as song— But song only dropped, Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand By dangerous tides; Like a girl’s dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES
They left their Babylon bare Of all its tall men, Of all its proud horses; They made for Lebanon.
And shadowy sowers went Before their spears to sow The fruit whose taste is ash, For Judah’s soul to know.
They who bowed to the Bull god, Whose wings roofed Babylon, In endless hosts darkened The bright-heavened Lebanon.
They washed their grime in pools Where laughing girls forgot The wiles they used for Solomon. Sweet laughter, remembered not!
Sweet laughter charred in the flame That clutched the cloud and earth, While Solomon’s towers crashed between To a gird of Babylon’s mirth.
THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE
Fierce wrath of Solomon, Where sleepest thou? O see, The fabric which thou won Earth and ocean to give thee— O look at the red skies.
Or hath the sun plunged down? What is this molten gold— These thundering fires blown Through heaven, where the smoke rolled? Again the great king dies.
His dreams go out in smoke. His days he let not pass And sculptured here are broke, Are charred as the burnt grass, Gone as his mouth’s last sighs.
HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE
Wan, fragile faces of joy, Pitiful mouths that strive To light with smiles the place We dream we walk alive,
To you I stretch my hands, Hands shut in pitiless trance In a land of ruin and woe, The desolate land of France.
Dear faces startled and shaken, Out of wild dust and sounds You yearn to me, lure and sadden My heart with futile bounds.
THE IMMORTALS
I killed them, but they would not die. Yea, all the day and all the night For them I could not rest nor sleep, Nor guard from them nor hide in flight!
Then in my agony I turned And made my hands red in their gore. In vain—for faster than I slew They rose more cruel than before.
I killed and killed with slaughter mad; I killed till all my strength was gone; And still they rose to torture me, For Devils only die for fun.
I used to think the Devil hid In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse; I called him Satan, Balzebub; But now I call him dirty louse.
LOUSE HUNTING
Nudes, stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire; For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his throat With oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice, And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.
Then we all sprang up and stript To hunt the verminous brood. Soon like a demons’ pantomime This plunge was raging. See the silhouettes agape, See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the baffled arms on the wall. See Gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness. See the merry limbs in that Highland fling Because some wizard vermin willed To charm from the quiet this revel When our ears were half lulled By the dark music Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.
GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE
I love you, Titan lover, My own storm-days’ Titan. Greater than the son of Zeus, I know whom I would choose.
Titan—my splendid rebel— The old Prometheus Wanes like a ghost before your power: His pangs were joys to yours.
Pallid days, arid and wan, Tied your soul fast: Babel-cities’ smoky tops Pressed upon your growth
Weary gyves. What were you But a word in the brain’s ways, Or the sleep of Circe’s swine? One gyve holds you yet.
It held you hiddenly on the Somme Tied from my heart at home: O must it loosen now? I wish You were bound with the old, old gyves.
Love! You love me—your eyes Have looked through death at mine. You have tempted a grave too much. I let you—I repine.
SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY
I love you, great new Titan! Am I not you? Napoleon and Cæsar Out of you grew.
Out of unthinkable torture, Eyes kissed by death, Won back to the world again, Lost and won in a breath,
Cruel men are made immortal. Out of your pain born, They have stolen the sun’s power With their feet on your shoulders worn.
Let them shrink from your girth, That has outgrown the pallid days When you slept like Circe’s swine Or a word in the brain’s ways.
THE JEW
Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men.
The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, With the same heaving blood, Keep tide to the moon of Moses. Then why do they sneer at me?
THE DYING SOLDIER
“Here are houses,” he moaned, “I could reach, but my brain swims.” Then they thundered and flashed, And shook the earth to its rims.
“They are gunpits,” he gasped, “Our men are at the guns. Water!... Water!... Oh, water! For one of England’s dying sons.”
“We cannot give you water, Were all England in your breath.” “Water!... Water!... Oh, water!” He moaned and swooned to death.
DEAD MAN’S DUMP
The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear.
The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched; Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman; And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.
Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended—stopped and held.
What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! Have they gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their souls’ sack, Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled?
None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth.
What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop.
The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, These dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called “An end!” But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.
A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness.
They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye; The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences.
Here is one not long dead. His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said; The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight, “Will they come? Will they ever come?” Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight.
So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face.
IN WAR
Fret the nonchalant noon With your spleen Or your gay brow, For the motion of your spirit Ever moves with these.
When day shall be too quiet, Deaf to you And your dumb smile, Untuned air shall lap the stillness In the old space for your voice—
The voice that once could mirror Remote depths Of moving being, Stirred by responsive voices near, Suddenly stilled for ever.
No ghost darkens the places Dark to One; But my eyes dream, And my heart is heavy to think How it was heavy once.
In the old days when death Stalked the world For the flower of men, And the rose of beauty faded And pined in the great gloom,
One day we dug a grave: We were vexed With the sun’s heat. We scanned the hooded dead: At noon we sat and talked.
How death had kissed their eyes Three dread noons since, How human art won The dark soul to flicker Till it was lost again:
And we whom chance kept whole— But haggard, Spent—were charged To make a place for them who knew No pain in any place.
The good priest came to pray; Our ears half heard, And half we thought Of alien things, irrelevant; And the heat and thirst were great.
The good priest read: “I heard....” Dimly my brain Held words and lost.... Sudden my blood ran cold.... God! God! It could not be.
He read my brother’s name; I sank— I clutched the priest. They did not tell me it was he Was killed three days ago.
What are the great sceptred dooms To us, caught In the wild wave? We break ourselves on them, My brother, our hearts and years.
THE DEAD HEROES
Flame out, you glorious skies, Welcome our brave; Kiss their exultant eyes; Give what they gave.
Flash, mailed seraphim, Your burning spears; New days to outflame their dim Heroic years.
Thrills their baptismal tread The bright proud air; The embattled plumes outspread Burn upwards there.
Flame out, flame out, O Song! Star ring to star; Strong as our hurt is strong Our children are.
Their blood is England’s heart; By their dead hands It is their noble part That England stands.
England—Time gave them thee; They gave back this To win Eternity And claim God’s kiss.
FRAGMENTS OF “THE UNICORN”
I THE AMULET
LILITH. SAUL. AMAK. NUBIAN.
LILITH _sits under pomegranate trees watching her child_ AMAK _playing with Saul his father’s helm and spear. A light smoke is ascending from the chimney of their hut, and through the doorway a naked Nubian man is seen stirring the embers._ SAUL _sleeps_.
LILITH
Amak, you’ll break your father’s sleep: Come here and tell me what those spices are This strange man bakes our cakes with. It makes the brain wild. Be still, Amak: I’ll give you the strange man your father brought, And he will run with you upon his back to-day.
Come from your father or you’ll get no cake; He’s been a long journey. Bring me the pictured book he brought for you. What! Already cut to pieces? Put away that horn from your father’s ear, And stay that horrid noise: come, Amak.
[_Amak runs to his mother with a jade amulet, shouting._]
AMAK
Look, mother, what I’ve found.
[_He runs back again, making great shouts._]
LILITH
It dances with my blood: when my eyes caught it first I was like lost, and yearned and yearned and yearned, And strained like iron to stay my head from falling Upon that beggar’s breast where the jade stone hung. Perhaps the spirit of Saul’s young love lies here Strayed far and brought back by this stranger near. Saul said his discourse was more deep than Heaven.
For the storm trapped him ere he left the town Loaded with our week’s victuals: the slime clung And licked and clawed and chewed the clogged dragging wheels Till they sunk right to the axle: Saul, sodden and vexed, Like fury smote the mules’ mouths, pulling but sweat From his drowned hair and theirs, while the thunder knocked And all the air yawned water, falling water, And the light cart was water, like a wrecked raft, And all seemed like a forest under the ocean. Sudden the lightning flashed upon a figure Moving as a man moves in the slipping mud, Singing, but not as a man sings, through the storm, Which could not drown his sounds. Saul bawled “Hi! Hi!” And the man loomed, naked, vast, and gripped the wheels; Saul fiercely dug from under; he tugged the wheels; The mules foamed straining, straining. Suddenly they went. Saul and the man leaped in: Saul, miserably sodden,
Marvelled at the large cheer in a naked glistening man; Yet soon fell in with that contented mood, That when our hut’s light broke on his new mind He could not credit it—too soon it seemed: The stranger man’s talk was witchery. I pray his baking be as magical; The cakes should be nigh burnt.
[_She calls the_ NUBIAN. _He answers from within._]
NUBIAN
They are laid by to cool, housewife.
LILITH
Bring me the sherbet from the ledge and the fast-dried figs.
[_The_ NUBIAN _brings sherbet, figs, and a bowl of ice, and lays them down_.]
[_She looks curiously at him. He is an immense man with squat, mule-skinned features: his jet-black curled beard, crisp hair, glistening nude limbs, appear to her like some heathen idol of ancient stories._]
[_She thinks to herself._]
Out of the lightning In a dizzying cloven wink This apparition stood up, Of stricken trunk or beast’s spirit, Stirred by Saul’s blasphemies; So Saul’s heart feared, aghast. But lo, he touched the mischance and life ran straight! Was it the storm-spirit, storm’s pilot, With all the heaving débris of Noah’s sunken days Dragged on his loins; Law’s spirit wandering to us Through Nature’s anarchy, Wandering towards us when the Titans yet were young? Perhaps Moses and Buddha he met.
[_She speaks aloud._]
The shadow of these pomegranate boughs Is sweet and restful; sit and ease your feet. Eat of these figs; You have journeyed long.
NUBIAN
All my life, housewife.
LILITH
You have seen men and women, Soaked yourself in powers and old glories, In broken days and tears and glees, And touched cold hands— Hands shut in pitiless trances where the feast high. I think there is more sorrow in the world Than man can bear.
NUBIAN
None can exceed their limit, lady: You either bear or break.
LILITH
Can one choose to break? To bear, Wearily to bear, is misery. Beauty is this corroding malady.
NUBIAN
Beauty is a great paradox— Music’s secret soul creeping about the senses To wrestle with man’s coarser nature. It is hard when beauty loses.
LILITH
I think beauty is a bad bargain made of life. Men’s iron sinews hew them room in the world And use deceits to gain them trophies: O, when our beauty fails us did we not use Deceits, where were our room in the world— Only our room in the world? Are not the songs and devices of men Moulds they have made after my scarlet mouth, Of cunning words and contours of bronze And viols and gathered air? They without song have sung me Boldly and shamelessly. I am no wanton, no harlot; I have been pleased and smiled my pleasure, I am a wife with a woman’s natural ways. Yet through the shadow of the pomegranates Filters a poison day by day, And to a malady turns The blond, the ample music of my heart: Inward to eat my heart My thoughts are worms that suck my softness all away. I watch the dumb eyeless hours Drop their tears, then shapeless moaning drop.
Unfathomable is my mouth’s dream Do not men say? So secret are my far eyes, Weaving for iron men profound subtleties.
Sorceress they name me; And my eyes harden, and they say, “How may those eyes know love If God made her without a heart?
“Her tears, her moaning, Her sad profound gaze, The dishevelled lustres of her hair Moon-storm like” they say, “These are her subtleties” men say. My husband sleeps, The ghosts of my virgin days do not trouble him: His sleep can be over-long, For there is that in my embers Pride and blushes of fire, the outraged blood, His sleep makes me remember.
Sleep, hairy hunter; sleep! You are not hungry more, Having fed on my deliciousness; Your sleep is not adultery to me,
For you were wed to a girl And I am a woman. My lonely days are not whips to my honour.
[_She dries her tears with her hair, then fingers the amulet at her throat._]
Yours, friend.
NUBIAN
[_Eagerly._] My amulet! My amulet!
[_He speaks gravely._] Small comfort is counsel to broken lives; But tolerance is medicinal. In all our textures are loosed Pulses straining against strictness Because an easy issue lies therefrom. (Could they but slink past the hands holding whips To hunt them from the human pale Where is the accident to cover? Spite fears bias.) I am justified at my heart’s plea; He is justified also.
For the eyes of vanity are sleepless—are suspicious. Are mad with imaginings Of secret stabs in words, in looks, in gestures.
Man is a chimera’s eremite, That lures him from the good kindness of days Which only ask his willingness.
There is a crazed shadow from no golden body That poisons at the core What smiles may stray: It mixes with all God-ancestralled essences, And twists the brain and heart. This shadow sits in the texture of Saul’s being, Mauling your love and beauty with its lies: I hold a power like light to shrivel it— There, in your throat’s hollow—that green jade.
[_He snatches at it as she lets it fall. He grows white and troubled, and walks to where_ AMAK _is playing, and sees minutely strewn pieces of paper_.]
[_He mutters._] Lost—lost. The child has torn the scroll in it, And half is away. It cannot be spelt now.
LILITH
God, restore me his love. Ah! Well!
[_She rises._]
I will go now; prepare our evening meal; And waken my husband, my love once.
NUBIAN
[_Musing._] The lightning of the heavens Lifts an apocalypse: The dumb night’s lips are scared and wide, The world is reeling with sound: Was I deaf before, mute, tied? What shakes here from lustre-seeded pomegranates Not in the great world, More vast and terrible? What is this ecstasy in form, This lightning That found the lightning in my blood, Searing my spirit’s lips aghast and naked? I am flung in the abyss of days, And the void is filled with rushing sound From pent eternities: I am strewn as the cypher is strewn. A woman—a soft woman! Our girls have hair Like heights of night ringing with never-seen larks, Or blindness dim with dreams: Here is a yellow tiger gay that blinds your night. Mane—Mane—Mane!
Your honey spilt round that small dazzling face Shakes me to golden tremors; I have no life at all, Only thin golden tremors. Light tender beast! Your fragile gleaming wrists Have shaken the scaled glacier from under me, And bored into my craft That is now with the old dreamy Adam With other things of dust.
LILITH
You lazy hound! See my poor child.
[_He turns to see_ LILITH _drop the bowl and cakes and run to_ AMAK—_who is crying, half stifled under_ SAUL’S _huge shield_.]
[SAUL _opens his eyes_.]
* * * * *
II THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN
Small dazzling face! I shut you in my soul; How can I perish now?
But thence a strange decay— Your fragile gleaming wrists Waver my days and shake my life To golden tremors. I have no life at all, Only thin golden tremors That shudder over the abyss of days Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison walls That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid beauty—
Towering and widening till The sad moonless place Throngs with a million torches And spears of flaming wings.
III THE TOWER OF SKULLS
MOURNERS
These layers of piled-up skulls, These layers of gleaming horror—stark horror! Ah me! Through my thin hands they touch my eyes.
Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth, And here in death’s land is a pregnant birth. Your own crying is less mortal Than the amazing soul in your body. Your own crying yon parrot takes up And from your empty skull cries it afterwards.
Thou whose dark activities unenchanted Days from gyrating days, suspending them To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating days Which have gone widening on and left us here, Cast derelicts lost for ever.
When aged flesh looks down on tender brood; For he knows between his thin ribs’ walls The giant universe, the interminable Panorama—synods, myths and creeds, He knows his dust is fire and seed.
EARLIER POEMS
I have heard the Gods In their high conference As I lay outside the world Quiet in sleep.... _Fragment._
He was an artist and a dreamer—that is, one whose delight in the beauty of life was an effective obstacle to the achievement of the joy of living.
(_Circa 1913._)
EXPRESSION
Call—call—and bruise the air: Shatter dumb space! Yea! We will fling this passion everywhere; Leaving no place
For the superb and grave Magnificent throng, The pregnant queens of quietness that brave And edge our song
Of wonder at the light (Our life-leased home), Of greeting to our housemates. And in might Our song shall roam
Life’s heart, a blossoming fire Blown bright by thought, While gleams and fades the infinite desire, Phantasmed naught.
Can this be caught and caged? Wings can be clipt Of eagles, the sun’s gaudy measure gauged, But no sense dipt
In the mystery of sense: The troubled throng Of words break out like smothered fire through dense And smouldering wrong.
FROM “NIGHT AND DAY”
I IN THE WORKSHOP
Dim watery lights gleaming on gibbering faces, Faces speechful, barren of soul and sordid, Huddled and chewing a jest, lewd and gabbled insidious: Laughter, born of its dung, flashes and floods like sunlight, Filling the room with a sense of a soul lethargic and kindly, Touches my soul with a pathos, a hint of a wide desolation.
II
I saw the face of God to-day, I heard the music of His smile, And yet I was not far away, And yet in Paradise the while.
I lay upon the sparkling grass, And God’s own mouth was kissing me, And there was nothing that did pass But blazed with divinity.
Divine—divine—upon my eyes, Upon mine hair—divine—divine, The fervour of the golden skies, The ardent gaze of God on mine.
III
Then spake I to the tree, “Were ye your own desire What is it ye would be?”
Answered the tree to me, “I am my own desire, I am what I would be.
“If you were your desire Would you lie under me, And see me as you see?”
“I am my own desire While I lie under you, And that which I would be Desire will sing to you.”
IV
I wander—I wander—O will she wander here Where’er my footsteps carry me I know that she is near, A jewelled lamp within her hand and jewels in her hair; I lost her in a vision once and seek her everywhere.
My spirit whispers she is near, I look at you and you: Surely she has not passed me, I sleeping as she flew. I wander—I wander, and yet she is not here, Although my spirit whispers to me that she is near.
ZION[3]
She stood—a hill-ensceptred Queen, The glory streaming from her; While Heaven flashed her rays between, And shed eternal summer.
The gates of morning opened wide On sunny dome and steeple; Noon gleamed upon the mountain-side Thronged with a happy people;
And twilight’s drowsy, half closed eyes Beheld that virgin splendour Whose orbs were as her darkening skies, And as her spirit, tender.
Girt with that strength, first-born of right, Held fast by deeds of honour, Her robe she wove with rays more bright Than Heaven could rain upon her.
Footnote 3:
Written at the age of sixteen.
Where is that light—that citadel? That robe with woof of glory? She lost her virtue and she fell, And only left her story.
SPIRITUAL ISOLATION: A FRAGMENT
My Maker shunneth me: Even as a wretch stricken with leprosy, So hold I pestilent supremacy. Yea! He hath fled far as the uttermost star, Beyond the unperturbed fastnesses of night And dreams that bastioned are By fretted towers of sleep that scare His light.
Of wisdom writ, whereto My burdened feet may haste withouten rue, I may not spell—and I am sore to do. Yea, all (seeing my Maker hath such dread), Even mine own self-love, wists not but to fly To Him, and sore besped Leaves me, its captain, in such mutiny.
Will, deemed incorporate With me, hath flown ere love, to expiate Its sinful stay where He did habitate. Ah me, if they had left a sepulchre; But no—the light hath changed not, and in it Of its same colour stir Spirits I see not but phantasmed feel to flit.
Air, legioned with such, stirreth, So that I seem to draw them with my breath, Ghouls that devour each joy they do to death, Strange glimmering griefs and sorrowing silences Bearing dead flowers unseen whose charnel smell Great awe to my sense is Even in the rose-time when all else is well.
* * * * *
FAR AWAY
By what pale light or moon-pale shore Drifts my soul in lonely flight? Regions God had floated o’er Ere He touched the world with light?
Not in Heaven and not in earth Is this water, is this moon; For there is no starry birth, And no dawning and no noon.
Far away—O far away, Mist-born—dewy vapours rise From the dim gates of the day Far below in earthly skies.
SPRING
I walk and I wonder To hear the birds sing; Without you, my lady, How can there be Spring? I see the pink blossoms That slept for a year, But who could have waked them While you were not near?
Birds sing to the blossoms, Blind, dreaming your pink; These blush to the songsters, Your music they think: So well had you taught them To look and to sing, Your bloom and your music, The ways of the Spring.
SONG
A silver rose to show Is your sweet face; And like the heavens’ white brow, Sometime God’s battle-place, Your blood is quiet now.
Your body is a star Unto my thought; But stars are not too far, And can be caught— Small pools their prisons are.
HEART’S FIRST WORD. I.
To sweeten a swift minute so With such rare fragrance of sweet speech, And make the after hours go In a blank yearning each on each; To drain the springs till they be dry, And then in anguish thirst for drink; So but to glimpse her robe thirst I, And my soul hungers and I sink.
There is no word that we have said Whereby the lips and heart are fire; No look the linked glances read That held the springs of deep desire. And yet the sounds her glad lips gave Are on my soul vibrating still; Her eyes that swept me as a wave Shine my soul’s worship to fulfil.
Her hair, her eyes, her throat and chin— Sweet hair, sweet eyes, sweet throat, so sweet, So fair because the ways of sin Have never known her perfect feet— By what far ways and marvellous May I such lovely heaven reach? What dread, dark seas and perilous Lie ’twixt love’s silence and love’s speech?
HEARTS FIRST WORD. II.
And all her soft dark hair Breathed for him like a prayer, And her white lost face Was prisoned to some far place. Love was not denied— Love’s ends would hide, And flower and fruit and tree Were under its sea. Yea, its abundance knelt Where the nerves felt The springs of feeling flow And made pain grow! There seemed no root or sky, But a pent infinity Where apparitions dim Sculptured each whim In flame and wandering mist Of kisses to be kist.
LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD
Lady, you are my God— Lady, you are my Heaven.
_If I am your God Labour for your Heaven._
Lady, you are my God, And shall not love win Heaven?
_If love made me God Deeds must win my Heaven._
If my love made you God, What more can I for Heaven?
IF YOU ARE FIRE
If you are fire and I am fire, Who blows the flame apart So that desire eludes desire Around one central heart?
A single root and separate bough, And what blind hands between That make our longing’s mutual glow As if it had not been?
IN THE UNDERWORLD
I have lived in the underworld so long: How can you, a creature of light, Without terror understand the song And unmoved hear what moves in night?
I am a spirit that yours has found, Strange, undelightful, obscure, Created by some other God, and bound In terrible darkness, breathing breath impure.
Creature of light and happiness, Deeper the darkness was when you, With your bright terror eddying the distress, Grazed the dark waves and shivering further flew.
O, IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN
O, in a world of men and women, Where all things seemed so strange to me, And speech the common world called human For me was a vain mimicry,
I thought—O, am I one in sorrow? Or is the world more quick to hide Their pain with raiment that they borrow From pleasure in the house of pride?
O joy of mine, O longed-for stranger, How I would greet you if you came: In the world’s joys I’ve been a ranger, In my world sorrow is their name.
A GIRL’S THOUGHTS
Dim apprehension of a trust Comes over me this quiet hour, As though the silence were a flower, And this, its perfume, dark like dust.
My individual self would cling Through fear, through pride, unto its fears: It strives to shut out what it hears, The founts of being murmuring.
O! Need, whose hauntings terrorize; Whether my maiden ways would hide, Or lose and to that need subside, Life shrinks and instinct dreads surprise.
A BALLAD OF WHITECHAPEL
God’s mercy shines; And our full hearts must make record of this, For grief that burst from out its dark confines Into strange sunlit bliss.
I stood where glowed The merry glare of golden whirring lights Above the monstrous mass that seethed and flowed Through one of London’s nights.
I watched the gleams Of jagged warm lights on shrunk faces pale: I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams Or Hell’s harsh lurid tale.
The traffic rolled, A gliding chaos populous of din, A steaming wail at doom the Lord had scrawled For perilous loads of sin.
And my soul thought: “What fearful land have my steps wandered to? God’s love is everywhere, but here is naught Save love His anger slew.”
And as I stood Lost in promiscuous bewilderment, Which to my mazèd soul was wonder-food, A girl in garments rent
Peered ’neath lids shamed And spoke to me and murmured to my blood. My soul stopped dead, and all my horror flamed At her forgot of God.
Her hungered eyes, Craving and yet so sadly spiritual, Shone like the unsmirched corner of a jewel Where else foul blemish lies.
I walked with her Because my heart thought, “Here the soul is clean, The fragrance of the frankincense and myrrh Is lost in odours mean.”
She told me how The shadow of black death had newly come And touched her father, mother, even now Grim-hovering in her home,
Where fevered lay Her wasting brother in a cold, bleak room, Which theirs would be no longer than a day, And then—the streets and doom.
Lord! Lord! Dear Lord! I knew that life was bitter, but my soul Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword, Grieving such body’s dole.
Then grief gave place To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke; For I could catch the glimpses of God’s grace, And a desire awoke
To take this trust And warm and gladden it with love’s new fires, Burning the past to ashes and to dust Through purified desires.
We walked our way, One way hewn for us from the birth of Time; For we had wandered into Love’s strange clime Through ways sin waits to slay.
Love’s euphony, In Love’s own temple that is our glad hearts, Makes now long music wild deliciously; Now Grief hath used his darts.
Love infinite, Chastened by sorrow, hallowed by pure flame— Not all the surging world can compass it. Love—Love—O tremulous name!
God’s mercy shines; And my full heart hath made record of this, Of grief that burst from out its dark confines Into strange sunlit bliss.
TESS
The free fair life that has never been mine, the glory that might have been, If I were what you seem to be and what I may not be! I know I walk upon the earth, but a dreadful wall between My spirit and your spirit lies, your joy and my misery.
The angels that lie watching us, the little human play, What deem they of the laughter and the tears that flow apart? When a word of man is a woman’s doom do they turn and wonder and say, “Ah! Why has God made love so great that love must burst her heart?”
THE NUN
So thy soul’s meekness shrinks, Too loth to show her face— Why should she shun the world? It is a holy place.
Concealèd to itself If the flower kept its scent, Of itself amorous, Less rich its ornament.
Use—utmost in each kind— Is beauty, truth in one, While soul rays light to soul In one God-linkèd sun.
IN PICCADILLY
Lamp-lit faces, to you What is your starry dew? Gold flowers of the night blue!
Deep in wet pavement’s slime Mud-rooted is your fierce prime, To bloom in lust’s coloured clime.
The sheen of eyes that lust, Which dew-time made your trust, Lights your passionless dust.
A MOOD
You are so light and gay, So slight, sweet maid— Your limbs like leaves in play, Or beams that grasses braid; O! Joys whose jewels pray My breast to be inlaid.
Frail fairy of the streets; Strong, dainty lure; For all men’s eyes the sweets Whose lack makes hearts so poor; While your heart loveless beats, Light, laughing, and impure.
O! Fragrant waft of flesh, Float through me so— My limbs are in your mesh, My blood forgets to flow; Ah! Lilied meadows fresh, It knows where it would go.
FIRST FRUIT
I did not pluck at all, And I am sorry now: The garden is not barred But the boughs are heavy with snow, The flake-blossoms thickly fall And the hid roots sigh, “How long will our flowers be marred?”
Strange as a bird were dumb, Strange as a hueless leaf. As one deaf hungers to hear, Or gazes without belief, The fruit yearned “Fingers, come!” O, shut hands, be empty another year.
A CARELESS HEART
A little breath can make a prayer, A little wind can take it And turn it back again to air: Then say, why should you make it?
An ardent thought can make a word, A little ear can hear it, A careless heart forget it heard: Then why keep ever near it?
DAWN
O tender first cold flush of rose, O budded dawn, wake dreamily; Your dim lips as your lids unclose Murmur your own sad threnody. O as the soft and frail lights break Upon your eyelids, and your eyes Wider and wider grow and wake, The old pale glory dies.
And then, as sleep lies down to sleep And all her dreams lie somewhere dead, The iron shepherd leads his sheep To pastures parched whose green is shed. Still, O frail dawn, still in your hair And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips, The ghosts of all the dreams are there, To fade like passing ships.
AT NIGHT
Crazed shadows, from no golden body That I can see, embrace me warm; All is purple and closed Round by night’s arm.
A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices, Wild lost voices of shadows white: See the long houses lean To the weird flight.
Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time (Because the sun spreads wide like a tree With no good fruit for them) Thrill secrecy.
Pale horses ride before the morning, The secret roots of the sun to tread, With hoofs shod with venom And ageless dread;
To breathe on burning emerald grasses And opalescent dews of the day, And poison at the core What smiles may stray.
CREATION
As the pregnant womb of night Thrills with imprisoned light, Misty, nebulous-born, Growing deeper into her morn, So man, with no sudden stride, Bloomed into pride.
In the womb of the All-spirit The universe lay; the will Blind, an atom, lay still. The pulse of matter Obeyed in awe And strove to flatter The rhythmic law. But the will grew; nature feared, And cast off the child she reared, Now her rival, instinct-led, With her own powers impregnated.
Brain and heart, blood-fervid flowers, Creation is each act of yours. Your roots are God, the pauseless cause, But your boughs sway to self-windy laws. Perception is no dreamy birth And magnifies transfigured earth. With each new light, our eyes receive A larger power to perceive.
If we could unveil our eyes, Become as wise as the All-wise, No love would be, no mystery: Love and joy dwell in infinity. Love begets love; reaching highest We find a higher still, unseen From where we stood to reach the first; Moses must die to live in Christ, The seed be buried to live to green. Perfection must begin from worst. Christ perceives a larger reachless love, More full, and grows to reach thereof. The green plant yearns for its yellow fruit. Perfection always is a root, And joy a motion that doth feed Itself on light of its own speed, And round its radiant circle runs, Creating and devouring suns.
OF ANY OLD MAN
Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness With alien uproar and rude jolly cries, Which (satyr-like to a mild maiden’s pride) Ripen not wisdom but a large recoil; Give them their withered peace, their trial grave, Their past youth’s three-scored shadowy effigy. Mock them not with your ripened turbulence, Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath, When, edging your boisterous thunders, shivers one word (Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth, The feigned rampart of bleak ignorance) “Experience”—crown of naked majesties, That tells us naught we know not, but confirms. O think, you reverend shadowy austere, Your Christ’s youth was not ended when he died.
THE ONE LOST
I mingle with your bones; You steal in subtle noose This lighted dust Jehovah loans And now I lose.
What will the Lender say When I shall not be found, Safe-sheltered at the Judgment Day, Being in you bound?
He’ll hunt through wards of Heaven, Call to uncoffined earth “Where is this soul, unjudged, not given Dole for good’s dearth?”
And I, lying so safe Within you, hearing all, To have cheated God shall laugh, Freed by your thrall.
WEDDED
They leave their love-lorn haunts, Their sigh-warm floating Eden; And they are mute at once, Mortals by God unheeden, By their past kisses chidden.
But they have kist and known Clear things we dim by guesses— Spirit to spirit grown: Heaven, born in hand-caresses. Love, fall from sheltering tresses.
And they are dumb and strange: Bared trees bowed from each other. Their last green interchange What lost dreams shall discover? Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover.
DON JUAN’S SONG
The moon is in an ecstasy, It wanes not nor can grow; The heavens are in a mist of love, And deepest knowledge know: What things in nature seem to move Bear love as I bear love? And bear my pleasures so?
I bear my love as streams that bear The sky still flow or shake: Though deep within, too far on high. Light blossoms kiss and wake The waters sooner than the sky; And if they kiss and die God made them frail to break.
ON A LADY SINGING
She bade us listen to the singing lark In tones far sweeter than its own: For fear that she should cease and leave us dark We built the bird a feignèd throne, Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways From sceptred hands of starred humility— Praising herself the more in giving praise To music less than she.
BEAUTY
As a sword in the sun— A glory calling a glory— Our eyes, seeing it run, Capture its gleam for our story.
Singer, marvellous gleam Dancing in splendid light, Here you have brought us our dream— Ah, but its stay is its flight!
A QUESTION
What if you shut your eyes and look, Yea, look with all the spirit’s eyes, While mystic unrevealèd skies Unfold like pages of a book
Wherein new scenes of wonder rare Are imaged, till the sense deceives Itself, and what it sees believes— Even what the soul has pictured there?
CHAGRIN
Caught still as Absalom, Surely the air hangs From the swayless cloud-boughs Like hair of Absalom Caught and hanging still.
From the imagined weight Of spaces in a sky Of mute chagrin my thoughts Hang like branch-clung hair To trunks of silence swung, With the choked soul weighing down Into thick emptiness. Christ, end this hanging death, For endlessness hangs therefrom!
Invisibly branches break From invisible trees: The cloud-woods where we rush (Our eyes holding so much), Which we must ride dim ages round Ere the hands (we dream) can touch, We ride, we ride—before the morning The secret roots of the sun to tread— And suddenly We are lifted of all we know, And hang from implacable boughs.
THE BLIND GOD
Streaked with immortal blasphemies, Betwixt His twin eternities The Shaper of mortal destinies Sits in that limbo of dreamless sleep, Some nothing that hath shadows deep.
The world is only a small pool In the meadows of Eternity, And men like fishes lying cool; And the wise man and the fool In its depths like fishes lie. When an angel drops a rod And he draws you to the sky Will you bear to meet your God You have streaked with blasphemy?
THE FEMALE GOD
We curl into your eyes— They drink our fires and have never drained; In the fierce forest of your hair Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.
In your eyes’ subtle pit, Far down, glimmer our souls; And your hair like massive forest trees Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.
Like a candle lost in an electric glare Our spirits tread your eyes’ infinities; In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses?
Queen! Goddess! Animal! In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls? When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow Do not our jealous pulses wake between?
You have dethroned the ancient God, You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days; Yea, every moment is delivered to you, Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God!
Our souls have passed into your eyes, Our days into your hair; And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world, Your world.
GOD
In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls: The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay—a bullying hulk—to crush them more; But when one fearless turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after.
Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard, Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep, And when the cats come out the rats are sly, Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.
But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange; and strange things are forgetful. Ah! If the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us; but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it, And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through Where blind farewells are taken easily.
Ah, this miasma of a rotting God!
SLEEP
Godhead’s lip hangs When our pulses have no golden tremors, And his whips are flicked by mice And all star-amorous things.
Drops, drops of shivering quiet Filter under my lids. Now only am I powerful. What though the cunning gods outwit us here In daytime and in playtime, Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them In our sleep.
O, subtle gods lying hidden! O, gods with your oblique eyes! Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists Bright with the afternoon, Do you not shake when a mortal slides Into your own unvexed peace?
When a moving stillness breaks over your knees (An emanation of piled æons’ pressures), From our bodies flat and straight, And your limbs are locked, Futilely gods, And shut your sinister essences?
MY DAYS
My days are but the tombs of buried hours; Which tombs are hidden in the pilèd years; But from the mounds there spring up many flowers, Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears. Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould, Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high; But from the dust there fall some grains of gold, And the dead corpse leaves what will never die— It may be but a thought, the nursling seed Of many thoughts, of many a high desire; Some little act that stirs a noble deed, Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire: They only live who have not lived in vain, For in their works their life returns again.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED, GUILDFORD AND ESHER
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.