Poems Read online

  And though I starve of hunger it is plainly seen

  That I have eaten nothing common or unclean.

  I have by fasting purged away the filthy flesh,

  Flesh the hot, moist, salt scum, the obscenity

  And parasitic tetter, from my noble bones.

  I have torn from my breasts—I was an udder’d beast—

  My child, for he was fleshly. Flesh is caught

  By a contagion carried from impure

  Generation to generation through the body’s sewer.

  And now though I am barren, yet no man can doubt

  I am clean and my iniquities are blotted out.

  I have made my soul (once filthy) a hard, pure, bright

  Mirror of steel: no damp breath breathes upon it

  Warming and dimming: it would freeze the finger

  If any touched it. I have a mineral soul.

  Minerals eat no food and void no excrement.

  So I, borrowing nothing and repaying

  Nothing, neither growing nor decaying,

  Myself am to myself, a mortal God, a self-contained

  Unwindowed monad, unindebted and unstained.

  POSTURING

  Because of endless pride

  Reborn with endless error,

  Each hour I look aside

  Upon my secret mirror

  Trying all postures there

  To make my image fair.

  Thou givest grapes, and I,

  Though starving, turn to see

  How dark the cool globes lie

  In the white hand of me,

  And linger gazing thither

  Till the live clusters wither.

  So should I quickly die

  Narcissus-like of want,

  But, in the glass, my eye

  Catches such forms as haunt

  Beyond nightmare, and make

  Pride humble for pride’s sake.

  Then and then only turning

  The stiff neck round, I grow

  A molten man all burning

  And look behind and know

  Who made the glass, whose light makes dark, whose fair

  Makes foul, my shadowy form reflected there

  That self-Love, brought to bed of Love may die and bear

  Her sweet son in despair.

  DECEPTION

  Iron will eat the world’s old beauty up.

  Girder and grid and gantry will arise,

  Iron forest of engines will arise,

  Criss-cross of iron crotchet. For your eyes

  No green or growth. Over all, the skies

  Scribbled from end to end with boasts and lies.

  (When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou

  Saw’st beyond death the resurrection of the dead.)

  Clamour shall clean put out the voice of wisdom,

  The printing-presses with their clapping wings,

  Fouling your nourishment. Harpy wings,

  Filling your minds all day with foolish things,

  Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings

  Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.

  (When Israel descended into Egypt, Thou

  Didst purpose both the bondage and the coming out.)

  The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,

  And fools crying, Because it has begun

  It will continue as it has begun!

  The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run

  Faster for ever. The old age is done,

  We have new lights and see without the sun.

  (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,

  Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

  DEADLY SINS

  Through our lives thy meshes run

  Deft as spiders’ catenation,

  Crossed and crossed again and spun

  Finer than the fiend’s temptation.

  Greed into herself would turn

  All that’s sweet: but let her follow

  Still that path, and greed will learn

  How the whole world is hers to swallow.

  Sloth that would find out a bed

  Blind to morning, deaf to waking,

  Shuffling shall at last be led

  To the peace that knows no breaking.

  Lechery, that feels sharp lust

  Sharper from each promised staying,

  Goes at long last—go she must—

  Where alone is sure allaying.

  Anger, postulating still

  Inexcusables to shatter,

  From the shelter of thy will

  Finds herself her proper matter.

  Envy had rather die than see

  Other’s course her own outflying;

  She will pay with death to be

  Where her Best brooks no denying.

  Pride, that from each step, anew

  Mounts again with mad aspiring,

  Must find all at last, save you,

  Set too low for her desiring.

  Avarice, while she finds an end,

  Counts but small the largest treasure.

  Whimperingly at last she’ll bend

  To take free what has no measure.

  So inexorably thou

  On thy shattered foes pursuing,

  Never a respite dost allow

  Save what works their own undoing.

  THE DRAGON SPEAKS

  Once the worm-laid egg shattered in the wood.

  I came forth shining into the trembling wood;

  The sun was on my scales, dew upon the grasses,

  The cold, sweet grasses and the sticky leaves.

  I loved my speckled mate. We played at druery

  And sucked warm milk dropping from the ewes’ teats.

  Now I keep watch on the gold in my rock cave

  In a country of stones: old, deplorable dragon,

  Watching my hoard. In winter night the gold

  Freezes through tough scales my cold belly;

  Jagged crowns, cruelly twisted rings,

  Icy and knobb’d, are the old dragon’s bed.

  Often I wish I had not eaten my wife

  (Though worm grows not to dragon till he eats worm).

  She could have helped me, watch and watch about,

  Guarding the gold; the gold would have been safer.

  I could uncoil my tired body and take

  Sometimes a little sleep when she was watching.

  Last night under the moonset a fox barked,

  Startled me; then I knew I had been sleeping.

  Often an owl flying over the country of stones

  Startles me; then I think that I must have slept,

  Only a moment. That very moment a Man

  Might have come from the towns to steal my gold.

  They make plots in the towns to take my gold,

  They whisper of me in the houses, making plans,

  Merciless men. Have they not ale upon the benches,

  Warm wives in bed, and song, and sleep the whole night?

  I leave my cave once only in the winter

  To drink at the rock pool; in summer twice.

  They have no pity for the old, lugubrious dragon.

  Lord that made the dragon, grant me thy peace,

  But say not that I should give up the gold,

  Nor move, nor die. Others would have the gold.

  Kill rather, Lord, the Men and the other dragons;

  Then I can sleep; go when I will to drink.

  DRAGON-SLAYER

  I have come back with victory got—

  But stand away—touch me not

  Even with your clothes. I burn red-hot.

  The worm was bitter. When she saw

  My shield glitter beside the shaw

  She spat flame from her golden jaw.

  When on my sword her vomit spilt

  The blade took fire. On the hilt

  Beryl cracked, and bubbled gilt.

  When sword and sword arm were all fla
me

  With the very heat that came

  Out of the brute, I flogged her tame.

  In her own spew the worm died.

  I rolled her round and tore her wide

  And plucked the heart from her boiling side.

  When my teeth were in the heart

  I felt a pulse within me start

  As though my breast would break apart.

  It shook the hills and made them reel

  And spun the woods round like a wheel.

  The grass singed where I set my heel.

  Behemoth is my serving man!

  Before the conquered hosts of Pan

  Riding tamed Leviathan,

  Loud I sing for well I can

  RESVRGAM and Io PAEAN,

  Io, Io, Io, PAEAN!

  Now I know the stake I played for,

  Now I know what a worm’s made for!

  LILITH

  When Lilith means to draw me

  Within her secret bower,

  She does not overawe me

  With beauty’s pomp and power,

  Nor, with angelic grace

  Of courtesy, and the pace

  Of gliding ships, comes veiled at evening hour.

  Eager, unmasked, she lingers

  Heart-sick and hunger sore;

  With hot, dry, jewelled fingers

  Stretched out, beside her door,

  Offering with gnawing haste

  Her cup, whereof who taste,

  (She promises not better) thirst far more.

  What moves me, then, to drink it?

  —Her spells, which all around

  So change the land, we think it

  A great waste where a sound

  Of wind like tales twice told

  Blusters, and cloud is rolled

  Always above yet no rain falls to ground.

  Across drab iteration

  Of bare hills, line on line,

  The long road’s sinuation

  Leads on. The witch’s wine,

  Though promising nothing, seems

  In that land of no streams,

  To promise best—the unrelished anodyne.

  A PAGEANT PLAYED IN VAIN

  Watching the thought that moves

  Within my conscient brain,

  I learn how often that appearance proves

  A pageant played in vain.

  Holding what seems the helm,

  I make a show to steer,

  But winds, for worse and better, overwhelm

  My purpose, and I veer.

  Thus, if thy guidance reach

  Only my head, then all

  Hardest attempt of mine serves but to teach

  How oddly the dice fall.

  To limbs, and loins, and heart,

  Search with thy chemic beam,

  Strike where the self I know not lives apart,

  Beneath the surface dream.

  Break, Sun, my crusted earth,

  Pierce, razor-edged, within,

  Where blind, immortal metals have their birth,

  And crystals clear begin.

  Thy spirit in secret flows

  About our lives. In gloom,

  The mother helping not nor hindering, grows

  The child within the womb.

  WHEN THE CURTAIN’S DOWN

  I am not one that easily flits past in thought

  The ominous stream, imagining death made for nought.

  This person, mixed of body and breath, to which concurred

  Once only one articulation of thy word,

  Will be resolved eternally: nor can time bring

  (Else time were vain) once back again the self-same thing.

  Therefore among the riddles that no man has read

  I put thy paradox, Who liveth and was dead.

  As Thou hast made substantially, Thou wilt unmake

  In earnest and for everlasting. Let none take

  Comfort in frail supposal that some hour and place

  To those who mourn recovers the wished voice and face.

  Whom Thy great Exit banishes, no after age

  Of epilogue leads back upon the lighted stage.

  Where is Prince Hamlet when the curtain’s down? Where fled

  Dreams at the dawn, or colours when the light is sped?

  We are thy colours, fugitive, never restored,

  Never repeated again. Thou only art the Lord,

  Thou only art holy. In the shadowy vast

  Of thine Osirian wings Thou dost enfold the past.

  There sit in throne antediluvian, cruel kings,

  There the first nightingale that sang to Eve yet sings,

  There are the irrecoverable guiltless years,

  There, yet unfallen, Lucifer among his peers.

  For thou art also a deity of the dead, a god

  Of graves, with necromancies in thy potent rod;

  Thou art Lord of the unbreathable transmortal air

  Where mortal thinking fails: night’s nuptial darkness, where

  All lost embraces intermingle and are bless’d,

  And all die, but all are, while Thou continuest.

  DIVINE JUSTICE

  God in His mercy made

  The fixed pains of Hell.

  That misery might be stayed,

  God in His mercy made

  Eternal bounds and bade

  Its waves no further swell.

  God in His mercy made

  The fixed pains of Hell.

  EDEN’S COURTESY

  Such natural love twixt beast and man we find

  That children all desire an animal book,

  And all brutes, not perverted from their kind,

  Woo us with whinny, tongue, tail, song, or look;

  So much of Eden’s courtesy yet remains.

  But when a creature’s dread, or mine, has built

  A wall between, I think I feel the pains

  That Adam earned and do confess my guilt.

  For till I tame sly fox and timorous hare

  And lording lion in my self, no peace

  Can be without; but after, I shall dare

  Uncage the shadowy zoo and war will cease;

  Because the brutes within, I do not doubt,

  Are archetypal of the brutes without.

  THE METEORITE

  Among the hills a meteorite

  Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,

  And wind and rain with touches light

  Made soft, the contours of the stone.

  Thus easily can Earth digest

  A cinder of sidereal fire,

  And make the translunary guest

  Thus native to an English shire.

  Nor is it strange these wanderers

  Find in her lap their fitting place,

  For every particle that’s hers

  Came at the first from outer space.

  All that is Earth has once been sky;

  Down from the Sun of old she came,

  Or from some star that travelled by

  Too close to his entangling flame.

  Hence, if belated drops yet fall

  From heaven, on these her plastic power

  Still works as once it worked on all

  The glad rush of the golden shower.

  TWO KINDS OF MEMORY

  Oh still vacation, silver

  Pause and relaxing of severer laws,

  Oh Memory the compassionate,

  Forever in dim labyrinths of reverie

  The cruel past disarming and refashioning!

  But iron Memory, tyrant

  Importunate by night, with lucid torture

  Still back into the merciless

  Unalterable fact, the choking halter of

  The finished past, where nothing grows, coercing us!

  Well did our brooding elders

  Appoint both king and queen, two powers with joint

  Authority in the underworld;

  Persephone, the lost and found, the ineffable

  Daug
hter of the buried spring, the wise, the wonderful;

  But made her consort Hades

  Stern and exact, whom no one’s prayer can turn

  Nor length of years can mitigate.

  On Orpheus when, the second time, he forfeited

  Eurydice, he gazed, correct and pitiless.

  His mercies ev’n are cursèd

  Mockeries of life, cold, cold as lunar rock,

  And all his famed Elysium

  Worthless, if former joys in all their earthliness

  Are there repeated, manically, dizzily,

  And round forever, bound for

  No goal, upon a circling track, the soul

  Re-lives her past;—Orion on

  His quarry, and upon his foe the warrior,

  Ever pursuing or forever triumphing.

  In her the heaviest burthen

  Grows light; old shame or sorrow or heart-blight

  Seen in her glass turn magical;

  A splendour, a rich gloom, a dewy tenderness

  Silently overgrows the graves of tragedy.

  And joys remembered, poising

  A moment on the past which was their home,

  Soon without longer tarrying

  Take flight and never rest until they light upon

  The branches of the deep-leaved woods of Paradise.

  Who calls such magic falsehood

  Must swear the mummy tells of the dead Pharaoh

  More truth than all the merriment

  And gold of all the harvests ever told us of

  The seed that yearly breaks from yearly burial.

  RE-ADJUSTMENT

  I thought there would be a grave beauty, a sunset splendour

  In being the last of one’s kind: a topmost moment as one watched

  The huge wave curving over Atlantis, the shrouded barge

  Turning away with wounded Arthur, or Ilium burning.

  Now I see that, all along, I was assuming a posterity

  Of gentle hearts: someone, however distant in the depths of time,

  Who could pick up our signal, who could understand a story. There won’t be.

  Between the new Hominidae and us who are dying, already

  There rises a barrier across which no voice can ever carry,

  For devils are unmaking language. We must let that alone forever.

  Uproot your loves, one by one, with care, from the future,

  And trusting to no future, receive the massive thrust

  And surge of the many-dimensional timeless rays converging

  On this small, significant dew drop, the present that mirrors all.