Part 3

Look on this crowd now, calm now, look. Remember now that each one drew Woman's milk (which you partook) And year by year in wonder grew. Scorn not them, nor scorn not their feasts (Which you partake) nor call them beasts. These be children of one Power With you, nor higher you nor lower. They also hear the harp and fiddle, And sometimes quail before the riddle. They also have hot blood, quick thought, And try to do the things they ought, They also have hearts that ache when stung. And sigh for days when they were young, And curse their wills because they falter, And know that they will never alter. See these men in a world of men. Material bodies?--yes, what then? These coarse trunks that here you see Judge them not, lest judged you be, Bow not to the moment's curse, Nor make four walls a universe. Think of these bodies here assembled, Whence they have come, where they have trembled With the strange force that fills us all. Men and beasts both great and small. Here within this fleeting home Two hundred men have this day come; Here collected for one day, Each shall go his separate way. Self, you can imagine nought Of all the battles they have fought, All the labours they have done, All the journeys they have run. O, they have come from all the world, Borne by invisible currents, swirled Like leaves into this vortex here Flying, or like the spirits drear Windborne and frail, whom Dante saw, Who yet obeyed some hidden law.

* * * * *

Is it not miraculous That they should here be gathered thus, All to be spread before your view, Who are strange to them as they to you? Soul, how can you sustain without a sob, The lightest thought of this titanic throb Of earthly life, that swells and breaks Into leaping scattering waves of fire, Into tameless tempests of effort and storms of desire That eternally makes The confused glittering armies of humankind, To their own heroism blind, Swarm over the earth to build, to dig, and to till, To mould and compel land and sea to their will... Whence we are here eating... Standing here as on a high hill, Strain, my imagination, strain forth to embrace The energies that labour for this place, This place, this instant. Beyond your island's verge, Listen, and hear the roaring impulsive surge, The clamour of voices, the blasting of powder, the clanging of steel, The thunder of hammers, the rattle of oars... For this one meal Ten thousand Indian hamlets stored their yields, Manchurian peasants sweltered in their fields, And Greeks drove carts to Patras, and lone men Saw burning summer come and go again And huddled from the winds of winter on The fertile deserts of Saskatchewan. To fabricate these things have been marchings and slaughters, The sun has toiled and the moon has moved the waters, Cities have laboured, and crowded plains, and deep in the earth Men have plunged unafraid with ardour to wrench the worth Of sweating dim-lit caverns, and paths have been hewn Through forests where for uncounted years nor sun nor moon Have penetrated, men have driven straight shining rails Through the dense bowels of mountains, and climbed their frozen tops, and wrinkled sailors have shouted at shouting gales In the huge Pacific, and battled around the Horn And gasping, coasted to Rio, and turning towards the morn, Fought over the wastes to Spain, and battered and worn, Sailed up the Channel, and on into the Nore To the city of masts and the smoky familiar shore.

So, so of every substance you see around Might a tale be unwound Of perils passed, of adventurous journeys made In man's undying and stupendous crusade. This flower of man's energies Trade Brought hither to hand and lip By waggon, train or ship, Each atom that we eat.... Stare at the wine, stare at the meat. The mutton which these platters fills Grazed upon a thousand hills; This bread so square and white and dry Once was corn that sang to the sky; And all these spruce, obedient wines Flowed from the vatted fruit of vines That trailed, a bright maternal host, The warm Mediterranean coast, Or spread their Bacchic mantle on That Iberian Helicon Where the slopes of Portugal Crown the Atlantic's eastern wall.

O mighty energy, never-failing flame! O patient toils and journeys in the name Of Trade! No journey ever was the same As another, nor ever came again one task; And each man's face is an ever-changing mask. From the minutest cell to the lordliest star All things are unique, though all of their kindred are. And though all things exist for ever, all life is change, And the oldest passions come to each heart in a garment strange. Though life be as brief as a flower and the body but dust, Man walks the earth holding both body and spirit in trust; And the various glories of sense are spread for his delight, New pageants glow in the sunset, new stars are born in the night, And clouds come every day, and never a shape recurs, And the grass grows every year, yet never the same blade stirs Another spring, and no delving man breaks again the self-same clod As he did last year though he stand once more where last year he trod. O wonderful procession fore-ordained by God! Wonderful in unity, wonderful in diversity. Contemplate it, soul, and see How the material universe moves and strives with anguish and glee!

* * * * *

I was born for that reason, With muscles, heart and eyes, To watch each following season, To work and to be wise; Not body and mind to tether To unseen things alone, But to traverse together The known and the unknown. My muscles were not welded To waste away in sleep, My bones were never builded To throw upon a heap. "Man worships God in action," Senses and reason call, "And thought is putrefaction, If thought is all in all!"

Most of the guests are gone; look over there, Against a pillar leans with absent air A tall, dark, pallid waiter. There he stands Limply, with vacant eyes and listless hands. He dreams of some small Tyrolean town, A church, a bridge, a stream that rushes down. A frustrate, hankering man, this one short time Unconscious he into my gaze did climb; He sinks again, again he is but one Of many myriads underneath the sun, Now faint, now vivid.... How puzzling is it all! For now again, in spite of all, The lights, the chairs, the diners, and the hall Lose their opacity. Fool! exert your will, Finish your whisky up, and pay your bill.

FAITH

When I see truth, do I seek truth Only that I may things denote, And, rich by striving, deck my youth As with a vain unusual coat?

Or seek I truth for other ends: That she in other hearts may stir, That even my most familiar friends May turn from me to look on her?

So I this day myself was asking; Out of the window skies were blue And Thames was in the sunlight basking; My thoughts coiled inwards like a screw.

I watched them anxious for a while; Then quietly, as I did watch, Spread in my soul a sudden smile: I knew that no firm thing they'd catch.

And I remembered if I leapt Upon the bosom of the wind It would sustain me; question slept; I felt that I had almost sinned.

A FRESH MORNING

Now am I a tin whistle Through which God blows, And I wish to God I were a trumpet --But why, God only knows.

INTERIOR

I and myself swore enmity. Alack, Myself has tied my hands behind my back. Yielding, I know there's no excuse in them-- I was accomplice to the stratagem.

ON A FRIEND RECENTLY DEAD

I

The stream goes fast. When this that is the present is the past, 'Twill be as all the other pasts have been, A failing hill, a daily dimming scene, A far strange port with foreign life astir The ship has left behind, the voyager Will never return to; no, nor see again, Though with a heart full of longing he may strain Back to project himself, and once more count The boats, the whitened walls that climbed the mount, Mark the cathedral's roof, the gathered spires, The vanes, the windows red with sunset's fires, The gap of the market-place, and watch again The coloured groups of women, and the men Lounging at ease along the low stone wall That fringed the harbour; and there beyond it all High pastures morning and evening scattered with small Specks that were grazing sheep.... It is all gone, It is all blurred that once so brightly shone; He cannot now with the old clearness see The rust upon one ringbolt of the quay.

II

And yesterday is dead, and you are dead. Your duplicate that hovered in my head Thins like blown wreathing smoke, your features grow To interrupted outlines, and all will go Unless I fight dispersal with my will... So I shall do it ... but too conscious still That, when we walked together, had I known How soon your journey was to end alone, I should not, now that you have gone from view, Be gathering derelict odds and ends of you; But in the intense lucidity of pain Your likeness would have burnt into my brain. I did not know; lovable and unique, As volatile as a bubble and as weak, You sat with me, and my eyes registered This thing and that, and sluggishly I heard Your voice, remembering here and there a word.

III

So in my mind there's not much left of you, And that disintegrates; but while a few Patches of memory's mirror still are bright Nor your reflected image there has quite Faded and slipped away, it will be well To search for each surviving syllable Of voice and body and soul. And some I'll find Right to my hand, and some tangled and blind Among the obscure weeds that fill the mind. A pause.... I plunge my thought's hooked resolute claws Deep in the turbid past. Like drowned things in the jaws Of grappling-irons, your features to the verge Of conscious knowledge one by one emerge. Can I not make these scattered things unite? ... I knit my brows and clench my eyelids tight And focus to a point.... Streams of dark pinkish light Convolve; and now spasmodically there flit Clear pictures of you as you used to sit:-- The way you crossed your legs stretched in your chair, Elbow at rest and tumbler in the air, Jesting on books and politics and worse, And still good company when most perverse. Capricious friend! Here in this room not long before the end, Here in this very room six months ago You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so. Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough, You saw books, pictures, as I see them now, The sofa then was blue, the telephone Listened upon the desk, and softly shone Even as now the fire-irons in the grate, And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying... And then you never had a thought of dying.

IV

You are not here, and all the things in the room Watch me alone in the gradual growing gloom. The you that thought and felt are I know not where, The you that sat and drank in that arm-chair Will never sit there again. For months you have lain Under a graveyard's green In some place abroad where I've never been. Perhaps there is a stone over you, Or only the wood and the earth and the grass cover you. But it doesn't much matter; for dead and decayed you lie Like a million million others who felt they would never die, Like Alexander and Helen the beautiful, And the last collier hanged for murdering his trull; All done with and buried in an equal bed.

V

Yes, you are dead like all the other dead. You are not here, but I am here alone. And evening falls, fusing tree, water and stone Into a violet cloth, and the frail ash-tree hisses With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain. And a steamer softly puffing along the river passes, Drawing a file of barges; and silence falls again. And a bell tones; and the evening darkens; and in sparse rank The greenish lights well out along the other bank. I have no force left now; the sights and sounds impinge Upon me unresisted, like raindrops on the mould. And, striving not against my melancholy mood, Limp as a door that hangs upon one failing hinge, Limp, with slack marrowless arms and thighs, I sit and brood On death and death and death. And quiet, thin and cold, Following of this one friend the hopeless, helpless ghost, The weak appealing wraiths of notable men of old Who died, pass through the air; and then, host after host, Innumerable, overwhelming, without form, Rolling across the sky in awful silent storm, The myriads of the undifferentiated dead Whom none recorded, or of whom the record faded. O spectacle appallingly sublime! I see the universe one long disastrous strife, And in the staggering abysses of backward and forward time Death chasing hard upon the heels of creating life. And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over, Onward and never returning, leaving no mark behind. There's nothing to hope for. Blank cessation numbs my mind, And I feel my heart thumping gloomy against its cover, My heavy belly hanging from my bones.

VI

Below in the dark street There is a tap of feet, I rise and angrily meditate How often I have let of late This thought of death come over me. How often I will sit and backward trace The deathly history of the human race, The ripples of men who chattered and were still, Known and unknown, older and older, until Before man's birth I fall, shivering and aghast Through a hole in the bottom of the remotest past; Till painfully my spirit throws Her giddiness off; and then as soon As I recover and try to think again, Life seems like death; and all my body grows Icily cold, and all my brain Cold as the jagged craters of the moon.... And I wonder is it not strange that I Who thus have heard eternity's black laugh And felt its freezing breath, Should sometimes shut it out from memory So as to play quite prettily with death, And turn an easy epitaph?

I can hear a voice whispering in my brain: "Why this is the old futility again! Criminal! day by day Your own life is ebbing swiftly away. And what have you done with it, Except to become a maudlin hypocrite?" Yes, I know, I know; One should not think of death or the dead overmuch; but one's mind's made so That at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death, And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breath Is clouded in winter's air, And all the faith one may have Lies useless and dead as a body in the grave.

THE MARCH

I heard a voice that cried, "Make way for those who died!" And all the coloured crowd like ghosts at morning fled; And down the waiting road, rank after rank there strode, In mute and measured march a hundred thousand dead.

A hundred thousand dead, with firm and noiseless tread, All shadowy-grey yet solid, with faces grey and ghast, And by the house they went, and all their brows were bent Straight forward; and they passed, and passed, and passed, and passed.

But O there came a place, and O there came a face, That clenched my heart to see it, and sudden turned my way; And in the Face that turned I saw two eyes that burned, Never-forgotten eyes, and they had things to say.

Like desolate stars they shone one moment, and were gone, And I sank down and put my arms across my head, And felt them moving past, nor looked to see the last, In steady silent march, our hundred thousand dead.

PROLOGUE: IN DARKNESS

With my sleeping beloved huddled tranquil beside me, why do I lie awake, Listening to the loud clock's hurry in the darkness, and feeling my heart's fierce ache That beats one response to the brain's many questionings, and in solitude bears the weight Of all the world's evil and misery and frustration, and the senseless pressure of fate?

Is it season of ploughing and sowing, this long vigil, that so certainly it recurs? In this unsought return of a pain that was ended, is it here that a song first stirs? Can it be that from this, when to-night's gone from memory, there will spring of a sudden, some time, Like a silver lily breaking from black deadly waters, the thin-blown shape of a rhyme?

THE LILY OF MALUD

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud. It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen, And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen.

It blooms once a year in summer moonlight, In a valley of dark fear full of pale moonlight: It blooms once a year, and dies in a night, And its petals disappear with the dawn's first light; And when that night has come, black small-breasted maids, With ecstatic terror dumb, steal fawn-like through the shades To watch, hour by hour, the unfolding of the flower.

When the world is full of night, and the moon reigns alone And drowns in silver light the known and the unknown, When each hut is a mound, half blue silver and half black, And casts upon the ground the hard shadow of its back, When the winds are out of hearing and the tree-tops never shake, When the grass in the clearing is silent but awake 'Neath a moon-paven sky: all the village is asleep And the babes that nightly cry dream deep: From the doors the maidens creep, Tiptoe over dreaming curs, soft, so soft, that not one stirs, And stand curved and a-quiver, like bathers by a river, Looking at the forest wall, groups of slender naked girls, Whose black bodies shine like pearls where the moonbeams fall. They have waked, they knew not why, at a summons from the night, They have stolen fearfully from the dark to the light, Stepping over sleeping men, who have moved and slept again: And they know not why they go to the forest, but they know, As their moth-feet pass to the shore of the grass And the forest's dreadful brink, that their tender spirits shrink: They would flee, but cannot turn, for their eyelids burn With frenzy, and each maid, ere she leaves the moonlit space, If she sees another's face is thrilled and afraid.

Now like little phantom fawns they thread the outer lawns Where the boles of giant trees stand about in twos and threes, Till the forest grows more dense and the darkness more intense, And they only sometimes see in a lone moon-ray A dead and spongy trunk in the earth half-sunk, Or the roots of a tree with fungus grey, Or a drift of muddy leaves, or a banded snake that heaves.

And the towering unseen roof grows more intricate, and soon It is featureless and proof to the lost forgotten moon. But they could not look above as with blind-drawn feet they move Onwards on the scarce-felt path, with quick and desperate breath, For their circling fingers dread to caress some slimy head, Or to touch the icy shape of a hunched and hairy ape, And at every step they fear in their very midst to hear A lion's rending roar or a tiger's snore.... And when things swish or fall, they shiver but dare not call.

O what is it leads the way that they do not stray? What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm? What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yield Over dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are met With a thinning of the darkness? And the foremost faintly cries in awed surprise: And they one by one emerge from the gloom to the verge Of a small sunken vale full of moonlight pale. And they hang along the bank, clinging to the branches dank, A shadowy festoon out of sight of the moon; And they see in front of them, rising from the mud A single straight stem and a single pallid bud In that little lake of light from the moon's calm height.

A stem, a ghostly bud, on the moon-swept mud That shimmers like a pond; and over there beyond The guardian forest high, menacing and strange, Invades the empty sky with its wild black range.

And they watch hour by hour that small lonely flower In that deep forest place that hunter never found.

It shines without sound, as a star in space.

And the silence all around that solitary place Is like silence in a dream; till a sudden flashing gleam Down their dark faces flies; and their lips fall apart And their glimmering great eyes with excitement dart And their fingers, clutching the branches they were touching, Shake and arouse hissing leaves on the boughs.

And they whisper aswoon: Did it move in the moon? O it moved as it grew! It is moving, opening, with calm and gradual will, And their bodies where they cling are shadowed and still And with marvel they mark that the mud now is dark For the unfolding flower, like a goddess in her power, Challenges the moon with a light of her own, That lovelily grows as the petals unclose, Wider, more wide with an awful inward pride, Till the heart of it breaks, and stilled is their breath, For the radiance it makes is as wonderful as death.

The morning's crimson stain tinges their ashen brows As they part the last boughs and slowly step again On to the village grass, and chill and languid pass Into the huts to sleep. Brief slumber, yet so deep That, when they wake to day, darkness and splendour seem Broken and far away, a faint miraculous dream; And when those maidens rise they are as they ever were Save only for a rare shade of trouble in their eyes. And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see. But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies, And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green: A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour, Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen: Something holy in the past that came and did not last.

But she knows not what it was.

A HOUSE

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, In clouds of hyacinth the sun retires, And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him Keep but in memory their borrowed fires.

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, From that faint exquisite celestial strand, And turn and see again the only dwelling-place In this wide wilderness of darkening land.