Narrative Poems Read online

  In those days the new psychology was just beginning to make itself felt in the circles I most frequented at Oxford. This joined forces with the fact that we felt ourselves (as young men always do) to be escaping from the illusions of adolescence, and as a result we were much exercised about the problem of fantasy or wishful thinking. The ‘Christiana Dream’, as we called it (after Christiana Pontifex in Butler’s novel), was the hidden enemy whom we were all determined to unmask and defeat. My hero, therefore, had to be a man who had succumbed to its allurements and finally got the better of them. But the particular form in which this was worked out depended on two peculiarities of my own history.

  (1) From at least the age of six, romantic longing—Sehnsucht—had played an unusually central part in my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing. But it throws off what may be called systems of imagery. One among many such which it had thrown off for me was the Hesperian or Western Garden system, mainly derived from Euripides, Milton, Morris, and the early Yeats. By the time I wrote Dymer I had come, under the the influence of our common obsession about Christiana Dreams, into a state of angry revolt against that spell. I regarded it as the very type of the illusions I was trying to escape from. It must therefore be savagely attacked. Dymer’s temptation to relapse into the world of fantasy therefore comes to him (Canto VII) in that form. All through that canto I am cutting down my own former ‘groves and high places’ and biting the hand that had fed me. I even tried to get the sneer into the metre; the archaic spelling and accentuation of countrie in vii. 23 is meant as parody. In all this, as I now believe, I was mistaken. Instead of repenting my idolatry I spat upon the images which only my own misunderstanding greed had ever made into idols. But ‘the heresies that men leave are hated most’ and lovers’ quarrels can be the bitterest of all.

  (2) Several years before I wrote the poem, back in my teens, when my mind, except for a vigilant rejection of Christianity, had no fixed principles, and everything from strict materialism to theosophy could find by turns an entry, I had been, as boys are, temporarily attracted to what was then called ‘the Occult’. I blundered into it innocently enough. In those days every one was reading Maeterlinck, and I wanted to improve my French. Moreover, from Yeats’s early poetry it was natural to turn to his prose; and there I found to my astonishment that Yeats, unlike other romantic poets, really and literally believed in the sort of beings he put into his poems. There was no question here of ‘symbolism’: he believed in magic. And so for a time Rosa Alchemica took its turn (along with Voltaire, Lucretius, and Joseph McCabe) among my serious books. You will understand that this period had ended a long time (years are longer at that age) before I set about writing Dymer. By then, so far as I was anything, I was an idealist, and for an idealist all supernaturalisms were equally illusions, all ‘spirits’ merely symbols of ‘Spirit’ in the metaphysical sense, futile and dangerous if mistaken for facts. I put this into vii. 8. I was now quite sure that magic or spiritism of any kind was a fantasy and of all fantasies the worst. But this wholesome conviction had recently been inflamed into a violent antipathy. It had happened to me to see a man, and a man whom I loved, sink into screaming mania and finally into death under the influence, as I believed, of spiritualism. And I had also been twice admitted to the upper room in Yeats’s own house in Broad Street. His conversation turned much on magic. I was overawed by his personality, and by his doctrine half fascinated and half repelled because of the fascination.

  The angel in the last canto does not of course mean that I had any Christian beliefs when I wrote the poem, any more (si parva licet componere magnis) than the conclusion of Faust, Part II, means that Goethe was a believer.

  This, I think, explains all that the reader might want explained in my narrative. My hero was to be a man escaping from illusion. He begins by egregiously supposing the universe to be his friend and seems for a time to find confirmation of his belief. Then he tries, as we all try, to repeat his moment of youthful rapture. It cannot be done; the old Matriarch sees to that. On top of his rebuff comes the discovery of the consequences which his rebellion against the City has produced. He sinks into despair and gives utterance to the pessimism which had, on the whole, been my own view about six years earlier. Hunger and a shock of real danger bring him to his senses and he at last accepts reality. But just as he is setting out on the new and soberer life, the shabbiest of all brides is offered him; the false promise that by magic or invited illusion there may be a short cut back to the one happiness he remembers. He relapses and swallows the bait, but he has grown too mature to be really deceived. He finds that the wish-fulfilment dream leads to the fear-fulfilment dream, recovers himself, defies the Magician who tempted him, and faces his destiny.

  The physical appearance of the Magician in vi. 6–9 owes something to Yeats as I saw him. If he were now alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality by such freedom. It was not done in malice, and the likeness is not, I think, in itself, uncomplimentary.

  Since his great name here comes before us, let me take the opportunity of saluting his genius: a genius so potent that, having first revivified and transmuted that romantic tradition which he found almost on its deathbed (and invented a new kind of blank verse in the process), he could then go on to weather one of the bitterest literary revolutions we have known, embark on a second career, and, as it were with one hand, play most of the moderns off the field at their own game. If there is, as may be thought, a pride verging on insolence in his later work, such pride has never come so near to being excusable. It must have been difficult for him to respect either the mere Romantics who could only bewail a lost leader or the mere moderns who could see no difference between On Baile’s Strand and the work of Richard le Gallienne.

  Some may be surprised at the strength of the anti-totalitarian feeling in a poem written so long ago. I had not read Brave New World or Land Under England or The Aerodrome: nor had we yet tasted the fruits of a planned economy in our own lives. This should be a warning for critics who attempt to date ancient texts too exactly on that kind of internal evidence.

  C.S.L.

  1950

  CANTO I

  1

  You stranger, long before your glance can light

  Upon these words, time will have washed away

  The moment when I first took pen to write,

  With all my road before me—yet to-day,

  Here, if at all, we meet; the unfashioned clay

  Ready to both our hands; both hushed to see

  That which is nowhere yet come forth and be.

  2

  This moment, if you join me, we begin

  A partnership where both must toil to hold

  The clue that I caught first. We lose or win

  Together; if you read, you are enrolled.

  And first, a marvel—Who could have foretold

  That in the city which men called in scorn

  The Perfect City, Dymer could be born?

  3

  There you’d have thought the gods were smothered down

  Forever, and the keys were turned on fate.

  No hour was left unchartered in that town,

  And love was in a schedule and the State

  Chose for eugenic reasons who should mate

  With whom, and when. Each idle song and dance

  Was fixed by law and nothing left to chance.

  4

  For some of the last Platonists had founded

  That city of old. And masterly they made

  An island of what ought to be, surrounded

  By this gross world of easier light and shade.

  All answering to the master’s dream they laid

  The strong foundations, torturing into stone

  Each bubble that the Academy had blown.

  5

  This people were so pure, so law-abiding,

  So logical, they made the heavens afraid:<
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  They sent the very swallows into hiding

  By their appalling chastity dismayed:

  More soberly the lambs in spring-time played

  Because of them: and ghosts dissolved in shame

  Before their common-sense—till Dymer came.

  6

  At Dymer’s birth no comets scared the nation,

  The public crêche engulfed him with the rest,

  And twenty separate Boards of Education

  Closed round him. He passed through every test,

  Was vaccinated, numbered, washed and dressed,

  Proctored, inspected, whipt, examined weekly,

  And for some nineteen years he bore it meekly.

  7

  For nineteen years they worked upon his soul,

  Refining, chipping, moulding and adorning.

  Then came the moment that undid the whole—

  The ripple of rude life without a warning.

  It came in lecture-time one April morning

  —Alas for laws and locks, reproach and praise,

  Who ever learned to censor the spring days?

  8

  A little breeze came stirring to his cheek.

  He looked up to the window. A brown bird

  Perched on the sill, bent down to whet his beak

  With darting head—Poor Dymer watched and stirred

  Uneasily. The lecturer’s voice he heard

  Still droning from the dais. The narrow room

  Was drowsy, over-solemn, filled with gloom.

  9

  He yawned, and a voluptuous laziness

  Tingled down all his spine and loosed his knees,

  Slow-drawn, like an invisible caress.

  He laughed—The lecturer stopped like one that sees

  A Ghost, then frowned and murmured, ‘Silence, please.’

  That moment saw the soul of Dymer hang

  In the balance—Louder then his laughter rang.

  10

  The whole room watched with unbelieving awe.

  He rose and staggered rising. From his lips

  Broke yet again the idiot-like guffaw.

  He felt the spirit in his finger-tips,

  Then swinging his right arm—a wide ellipse

  Yet lazily—he struck the lecturer’s head.

  The old man tittered, lurched and dropt down dead.

  11

  Out of the silent room, out of the dark

  Into the sun-stream Dymer passed, and there

  The sudden breezes, the high-hanging lark,

  The milk-white clouds sailing in polished air,

  Suddenly flashed about him like a blare

  Of trumpets. And no cry was raised behind him,

  His class sat dazed. They dared not go to find him.

  12

  Yet wonderfully some rumour spread abroad—

  An inarticulate sense of life renewing

  In each young heart—He whistled down the road:

  Men said: ‘There’s Dymer’—‘Why, what’s Dymer doing?’

  ‘I don’t know’—‘Look, there’s Dymer,’—far pursuing

  With troubled eyes—A long mysterious ‘Oh’

  Sighed from a hundred throats to see him go.

  13

  Down the white street and past the gate and forth

  Beyond the wall he came to grassy places.

  There was a shifting wind to West and North,

  With clouds in heeling squadron running races.

  The shadows following on the sunlight’s traces

  Crossed the whole field and each wild flower within it

  With change of wavering glories every minute.

  14

  There was a river, flushed with rains, between

  The flat fields and a forest’s willowy edge.

  A sauntering pace he shuffled on the green,

  He kicked his boots against the crackly sedge

  And tore his hands in many a furzy hedge.

  He saw his feet and ankles gilded round

  With buttercups that carpeted the ground.

  15

  He looked back then. The line of a low hill

  Had hid the city’s towers and domes from sight;

  He stopt: he felt a break of sunlight spill

  Around him sudden waves of searching light.

  Upon the earth was green, and gold, and white,

  Smothering his feet. He felt his city dress

  An insult to that April cheerfulness.

  16

  He said: ‘I’ve worn this dustheap long enough;

  Here goes!’ And forthwith in the open field

  He stripped away that prison of sad stuff:

  Socks, jacket, shirt and breeches off he peeled

  And rose up mother-naked with no shield

  Against the sun: then stood awhile to play

  With bare toes dabbling in cold river clay.

  17

  Forward again, and sometimes leaping high

  With arms outspread as though he would embrace

  In one act all the circle of the sky:

  Sometimes he rested in a leafier place,

  And crushed the wet, cool flowers against his face:

  And once he cried aloud, ‘O world, O day,

  Let, let me,’—and then found no prayer to say.

  18

  Up furrows still unpierced with earliest crop

  He marched. Through woods he strolled from flower to flower,

  And over hills. As ointment drop by drop

  Preciously meted out, so hour by hour

  The day slipped through his hands: and now the power

  Failed in his feet from walking. He was done,

  Hungry and cold. That moment sank the sun.

  19

  He lingered—Looking up, he saw ahead

  The black and bristling frontage of a wood,

  And over it the large sky swimming red,

  Freckled with homeward crows. Surprised he stood

  To feel that wideness quenching his hot mood,

  Then shouted, ‘Trembling darkness, trembling green,

  What do you mean, wild wood, what do you mean?’

  20

  He shouted. But the solitude received

  His noise into her noiselessness, his fire

  Into her calm. Perhaps he half believed

  Some answer yet would come to his desire.

  The hushed air quivered softly like a wire

  Upon his voice. It echoed, it was gone:

  The quiet and the quiet dark went on.

  21

  He rushed into the wood. He struck and stumbled

  On hidden roots. He groped and scratched his face.

  The little birds woke chattering where he fumbled.

  The stray cat stood, paw lifted, in mid-chase.

  There is a windless calm in such a place:

  A sense of being indoors—so crowded stand

  The living trees, watching on every hand:

  22

  A sense of trespass—such as in the hall

  Of the wrong house, one time, to me befell.

  Groping between the hat-stand and the wall—

  A clear voice from above me like a bell,

  The sweet voice of a woman asking ‘Well?’

  No more than this. And as I fled I wondered

  Into whose alien story I had blundered.

  23

  A like thing fell to Dymer. Bending low,

  Feeling his way he went. The curtained air

  Sighed into sound above his head, as though

  Stringed instruments and horns were riding there.

  It passed and at its passing stirred his hair.

  He stood intent to hear. He heard again

  And checked his breath half-drawn, as if with pain.

  24

  That music could have crumbled proud belief

  With doubt, or in the bosom of the sage

  Madden the heart that had
outmastered grief,

  And flood with tears the eyes of frozen age

  And turn the young man’s feet to pilgrimage—

  So sharp it was, so sure a path it found,

  Soulward with stabbing wounds of bitter sound.

  25

  It died out on the middle of a note,

  As though it failed at the urge of its own meaning.

  It left him with life quivering at the throat,

  Limbs shaken and wet cheeks and body leaning,

  With strain towards the sound and senses gleaning

  The last, least, ebbing ripple of the air,

  Searching the emptied darkness, muttering ‘Where?’

  26

  Then followed such a time as is forgotten

  With morning light, but in the passing seems

  Unending. Where he grasped the branch was rotten,

  Where he trod forth in haste the forest streams

  Laid wait for him. Like men in fever dreams

  Climbing an endless rope, he laboured much

  And gained no ground. He reached and could not touch.

  27

  And often out of darkness like a swell

  That grows up from no wind upon blue sea,

  He heard the music, unendurable