Poems Read online

  The first hope sank behind.

  THE DAY WITH A WHITE MARK

  All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:

  Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part

  Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave

  Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart?

  My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;

  The plann’d and unplann’d miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.

  Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.

  It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

  Yet I—I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of

  My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole

  Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew

  Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

  As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,

  And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,

  So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard

  Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

  Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible

  Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,

  Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling

  Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children’s tale.

  Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?

  No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends

  On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself

  Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

  DONKEYS’ DELIGHT

  Ten mortal months I courted

  A girl with bright hair,

  Unswerving in my service

  As the old lovers were.

  Almost she had learned to call me

  Her dear love. But then,

  One moment changed the omens,

  She was cold again.

  For carelessly, unfairly,

  With one glance of his eyes,

  A gay, light-hearted sailor

  Bore away the prize,

  Unbought, which I had sought with

  Many gifts and sighs.

  In stern disdain I turned to

  The Muses’ service then,

  To seek how the unspeakable

  Could be fixed by a pen,

  Not to flinch though the ink that

  I must use, they said,

  Was my dearest blood, nearest

  My heart, the richest red.

  I obeyed them, I made them

  Many a costly lay,

  Till carelessly, unfairly,

  A boy passed that way

  Who set ringing with his singing

  All the fields and lanes;

  They gave him their favour,

  Lost were all my pains.

  Then I passed to a Master

  Who is higher in repute,

  Trusting to find justice

  At the world’s root.

  With rigid fast and vigil,

  Silence, and shirt of hair,

  The narrow way to Paradise

  I walked with care.

  But carelessly, unfairly,

  At the eleventh hour there came,

  Reckless and feckless,

  Without a single claim,

  A dare-devil, a ne’er-do-well

  Who smelled of shag and gin;

  Before me (and far warmer

  Was his welcome) he went in.

  I stood still in the chill

  Of the Great Morning,

  Aghast. Then at last

  —Oh, I was late learning—

  I repented, I entered

  Into the excellent joke,

  The absurdity. My burden

  Rolled off as I broke

  Into laughter; and soon after

  I had found my own level;

  With Balaam’s Ass daily

  Out at grass I revel,

  Now playing, now braying

  Over the meadows of light,

  Our soaring, creaking Gloria,

  Our donkeys’ delight.

  THE SMALL MAN ORDERS HIS WEDDING

  With tambourines of amber, queens

  In rose and lily garlanded

  Shall go beside my noble bride

  With dance and din and harmony,

  And sabre clash and tabor crash

  And lantern-light and torches flash

  On shield and helmet, plume and sash,

  The flower of all my armoury;

  Till drawn at length by tawny strength

  Of lions, lo! her chariot;

  Their pride will brook no bridle—look,

  No bit they bear, no farrier

  Ere shod those feet that plod the street

  Silent as ghosts; their savage heat

  Is gentled as they draw my sweet,

  New tamed herself, to marry me.

  New swell from all the belfries tall,

  Till towers reel, the revelry

  Of iron tongue untiring swung

  To booms and clangs of merriment!

  While some prepare with trumpet blare

  Before my gates to greet us there

  When home we come; and everywhere

  Let drum be rumbled steadily.

  Once in, the roar and din no more

  Are heard. The hot festivity

  And blazing dies; from gazing eyes

  These shadowy halls deliver her.

  Yet neither flute nor blither lute

  With pluck of amorous string be mute

  Where happy maids their queen salute

  And candle flames are quivering.

  With decent stealth o’er fleecy wealth

  Of carpets tripping soberly,

  Depart each maid! Your part is played

  And I to all her nobleness

  Must mate my bare estate. How fair

  The whole room has become! The air

  Burns as with incense everywhere

  Around, beneath, and over her.

  What flame before our chamber door

  Shines in on love’s security?

  Fiercer than day, its piercing ray

  Pours round us unendurably.

  It’s Aphrodite’s saffron light,

  And Jove’s monarchal presence bright

  And Genius burning through the night

  The torch of man’s futurity.

  For her the swords of furthest lords

  Have flashed in fields ethereal;

  The dynasts seven incline from heaven

  With glad regard and serious,

  And ponder there beyond our air

  The infinite unborn, and care

  For history, while the mortal pair

  Lie drowned in dreaming weariness.

  THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

  Hard light bathed them—a whole nation of eyeless men,

  Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long

  Process, clearly, a slow curse,

  Drained through centuries, left them thus.

  At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few,

  No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date,

  Normal type had achieved snug

  Darkness, safe from the guns of heav’n;

  Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their

  Great-grandsires, unabashed, talking of light in some

  Eunuch’d, etiolated,

  Fungoid sense, as a symbol of

  Abstract thoughts. If a man, one that had eyes, a poor

  Misfit, spoke of the grey dawn or the stars or green-

  Sloped sea waves, or admired how

  Warm tints change in a lady’s cheek,

  N
one complained he had used words from an alien tongue,

  None question’d. It was worse. All would agree. ‘Of course,’

  Came their answer. ‘We’ve all felt

  Just like that.’ They were wrong. And he

  Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words—

  Sold, raped, flung to the dogs—now could avail no more;

  Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,

  With glib confidence, easily

  Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set

  Fools concocting a myth, taking the words for things.

  Do you think this a far-fetched

  Picture? Go then about among

  Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,

  Opaque, carved in divine forms, irremovable,

  Dread but dear as a mountain-

  Mass, stood plain to the inward eye.

  ON BEING HUMAN

  Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence

  Behold the Forms of nature. They discern

  Unerringly the Archtypes, all the verities

  Which mortals lack or indirectly learn.

  Transparent in primordial truth, unvarying,

  Pure Earthness and right Stonehood from their clear,

  High eminence are seen; unveiled, the seminal

  Huge Principles appear.

  The Tree-ness of the tree they know—the meaning of

  Arboreal life, how from earth’s salty lap

  The solar beam uplifts it, all the holiness

  Enacted by leaves’ fall and rising sap;

  But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance

  Of sun from shadow where the trees begin,

  The blessed cool at every pore caressing us

  —An angel has no skin.

  They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it

  Drink the whole summer down into the breast.

  The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing

  Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.

  The tremor on the rippled pool of memory

  That from each smell in widening circles goes,

  The pleasure and the pang—can angels measure it?

  An angel has no nose.

  The nourishing of life, and how it flourishes

  On death, and why, they utterly know; but not

  The hill-born, earthy spring, the dark cold bilberries

  The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot,

  Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate

  Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf’s billowy curves,

  Nor porridge, nor the tingling taste of oranges—

  An angel has no nerves.

  Far richer they! I know the senses’ witchery

  Guards us, like air, from heavens too big to see;

  Imminent death to man that barb’d sublimity

  And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be.

  Yet here, within this tiny, charm’d interior,

  This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares

  With living men some secrets in a privacy

  Forever ours, not theirs.

  THE ECSTASY

  Long had we crept in cryptic

  Delights and doubts on tiptoes,

  The air growing purer, clearer

  Continually; and nearer

  We went on to the centre of

  The garden, hand in hand, finger on lip.

  On right and left uplifted

  The fountains rose with swifter

  And steadier urgence, argent

  On steely pillars, larger

  Each moment, spreading foamy plumes

  Thinner and broader under the blinding sun.

  The air grows warmer; firmer

  The silence grips it; murmur

  Of insect buzz nor business

  Of squirrel or bird there is not—

  Only the fluttering of the butterflies

  Above the empty lawns, dance without noise.

  So on we fared and forded

  A brook with lilies bordered,

  So cold it wrung with anguish

  Bitterly our hearts. But language

  Cannot at all make manifest

  The quiet centre we found on the other side.

  Never such seal of silence

  Did ice on streams or twilight

  On birds impose. The pauses

  In nature by her laws are

  Imperfect; under the surface beats

  A sound too constant to be ever observed.

  From birth its stroke with equal

  Dull rhythm, relentless sequence,

  Taps on, unfelt, unaltered,

  With beat that never falters—

  Now known, like breathing, only when

  It stopped. The permanent background failed our ear.

  Said the voice of the garden, heard in

  Our hearts, ‘That was the burden

  Of Time, his sombre drum-beat.

  Here—oh hard to come by!—

  True stillness dwells and will not change,

  Never has changed, never begins nor ends.’

  Who would not stay there, blither

  Than memory knows? but either

  Whisper of pride essayed us

  Or meddling thought betrayed us,

  Then shuddering doubt—oh suddenly

  We were outside, back in the wavering world.

  THE SABOTEUSE

  Pity hides in the wood,

  The years and tides,

  The earth, the bare moon,

  Death and birth,

  The freezing skies, the sun

  And the populous seas

  Against her, one and all,

  Are furiously incensed.

  They have clashed spears to drown

  The noise of her tears;

  They have whetted swords. Still

  They cannot forget.

  Her faint noise in the wood

  Destroys all,

  A soul-tormenting treason

  Threatening revolt.

  They beat with clamorous gongs

  And din with hammers

  To stun so light a noise.

  They fear if once

  Pity were heard aloud

  In the strong city,

  Topless towers would fall,

  Engines stop.

  Horribly alarmed, they have levied

  Their war and armed

  All natural things against her.

  From horns and stings,

  Mandibles, claws and paws

  And the human hand,

  From suns and ice, like a deer

  Pity runs;

  Lest, if she wept in peace,

  While they slept,

  (So they believe) the slow-

  Descending stream

  Would grow to a pool, spread,

  Widen and overflow

  And creep forth from the wood,

  Grown strong and deep.

  And they would wake at morning

  And find a lake

  Lapping against their walls,

  Mining, sapping,

  Patiently eating away

  The strong foundations

  Of the towers of pain, rising

  An inch in an hour;

  Till the compassionate water

  Would ripple and plash

  Far overhead, and the Powers

  Lay drowned and dead

  Below, sharing the dark

  With shark and squid

  And the forgotten shapes

  Of rotting wheels.

  Therefore they woke destruction

  Against her and invoked

  The Needs of the Sum of Things

  And the Coming Race

  And the Claims of Order—oh all

  The holiest names

  Known in our hearts. They even

  Included her own.

  THE LAST OF THE WINE

  You think if we sigh
, drinking the last decanter,

  We’re sensual topers, and thence you are ready to prose

  And read your lecture. Need you? Why should you banter

  Or badger us? Better imagine it thus; suppose

  A man to have come from Atlantis eastward sailing—

  Lemuria has fallen in the fury of a tidal wave,

  The cities are drowned, the pitiless all-prevailing

  Inhuman sea is Numinor’s salt grave.

  To Europe he comes from Lemuria, saved from the wreck

  Of the gilded, loftily builded, countless fleet

  With the violet sails. A phial hangs from his neck,

  Holding the last of a golden cordial, subtle and sweet.

  Unnamed is Europe, untamed; wet desolation

  Of unwelcoming woods, the elk, the mammoth and the bear,

  The fen and the forest. Men of a barbarous nation

  On the sand in a circle standing await him there.

  Horribly ridged are their foreheads. Weapons of bone,

  Unhandy and blunt, they brandish in their clumsy grips.

  Their females set up a screaming, their bagpipes drone;

  They gaze and mumble. He raises the flask to his lips.

  It brings to his mind the strings, the flutes, the tabors,

  How he drank with poets at the banquet, robed and crowned,

  He recalls the pillared halls carved with the labours

  Of curious masters, (Lemuria’s cities lie drowned),

  The festal nights; the jest that flashed for a second

  Light as a bubble, bright with a thousand years

  Of nurture; the honour and virtue, the grace unreckoned

  That sat like a robe on the Atlantean peers.

  It has made him remember ladies, proud glances,

  Fearless and peerless beauty, flower-like hair,

  Ruses and mockery, the music of grave dances

  (Where musicians played, huge fishes goggle and stare).

  He sighs, like us; then rises and turns to meet

  Those naked men. Will they make him their spoil and prey

  Or salute him as god and brutally fawn at his feet?

  And which would be worse? He pitches the phial away.

  AS ONE OLDSTER TO ANOTHER

  Well, yes the old bones ache. There were easier

  Beds thirty years back. Sleep, then importunate,

  Now with reserve doles out her favours;

  Food disagrees; there are draughts in houses.

  Headlong, the down night train rushes on with us,

  Screams through the stations . . . how many more? Is it

  Time soon to think of taking down one’s

  Case from the rack? Are we nearly there now?

  Yet neither loss of friends, nor an emptying

  Future, nor England tamed and the ruin of