The North Star and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The North Star and Other Poems

By Laurence Binyon

Binyon, Laurence (1869-1943)

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IN HOSPITAL

I

Nothing of itself is in the still'd mind, only
A still submission to each exterior image,
Still as a pool, accepting trees and sky,

A candid mirror that never a breath disturbs
Nor drifted leaf,—as if of a single substance
With every shape and colour that it encloses,—

When, alone and lost in the morning's white silence,
Drowsily drowsing eyes, empty of thought,
Accept the blank breadth of the opposite wall.

Lying in my bed, motionless, hardly emerged
From clouds of sleep,—a solitary cloud
Is not more vague in the placeless blue of ether

Than I, with unapportioned and unadjusted
Senses, that put off trouble of understanding,
Even the stirring of wonder, and acquiesce.

The early light brims over the filled silence.
Memory stirs not a wave or a shadow within me.
Only the wall is the world; there stops my sight.

II

If he should bend his bow, that great Archer
There before me, if tautened and all erect
Slowly he should draw the arrow back to his ear,

Suddenly I should see the curve of his tense body
Alter, and O at the leap of the sighted arrow
The arms descend, shoulder and hip relax.

But hidden in his face, hidden the bow behind him.
I see the square of the buckle that clasps embossed
The belt girding the slenderness of his loins,

The smooth and idle energy of his arms,
And under the mould of breast and flank I feel
The invisible veins and warm blood pulsing through them.

But why is his face hidden? And why does my heart
Beat with a fear that he may be all disclosed
Terrible in calm, terrible in beauty and power?

For his eyes must surely be filled with the far mountains,
Rivers and great plains be his eyes' possession;
And full in the centre of his concentred vision

Stands his victim, he who is soon to be stricken,
Soon to fall, with the arrow pouncing upon him,
The arrow that carries the light and scorn of his eyes.

Why do you hide your face, glorious Archer?
If I could see you, then though the arrow pierced me
Gazing upon you, it were a glory to fall.

Will you at last, seizing the bow, bend it?
Now, as I gaze? A thrilling of fear rushes
Blind in my veins: fear? is it fear, or hope?

As if all my gaze were fixt on a drop of water
Suspended, about to fall and still not falling,
A liquid jewel of slowly increasing splendour

As the rain retreats and the shadow of cloud is lifted
And all light comes to enclose itself in the circle
Of a single drop, so is this suspended moment.

III

The stillness moves. Tripping of feet; shadows;
Voices. The hospital wakes to its ritual round.
The moment breaks; the drop, the bright drop falls.

A sponge has prest its coldness over my spirit.
Shape and colour abandon their apparition,
Subside into place in the order of usual things.

And another mind returns with the day's returning,
Weaving its soft invisible meshes around me.
This is the daylight, bald on the plain wall.

Cracks in the paint, a trickle of random lines,
A trailing scrawl that a child might trace with a stick
As he runs idly about the ebb-tide sands—

Is it out of these I supposed a towering image
There on the blankness? Are you gone, my Archer,
You who were living more than the millions waking?

No, you are there still! It was I released you
Out of the secret world wherein you are hidden.
You are there, there; and the arrow is flying, flying....

And yet patient, as if nothing were endangered,
We do small things and keep the little commandments,—
We and our doings a scribble upon the wall.

ANNIVERSARY

(November 11)

I

Thunder in the night! Vague, ghostly, remote
It rolls. The world sleeps. Suddenly splitting the air,
Stumbles a crash: and a million sleepers awake,
Each in his silence menaced, and all aware.

The aroused and secret spirit in each listens,
Companioned by an invisible listening host,
And sees the blackness gashed with quaking light,
Surrendered then to sounds of a world lost

In a heart-shaking convulsion of senseless force,
Wandering and warring blasts of a monstrous breath,
Legendary Chaos throned in heaven and dealing
Purposeless darts, and the air vivid with death.

But we, we are men, that walk upright in the sun,
That judge, question, remember, and foresee.
What have we to do with blind demons of air?
We choose and act; aim, reason, and are free.

Thunder in the night! As stupefying and sudden,
The stumbling crash of the nations into flame
Woke us aghast! We looked, we heard; we knew
That from us men the inhuman chaos came.

From reason, frenzy; from knowledge, blindness; from pity,
Cruelty! Trapped in Necessity's iron net,
To be free, to be free, we battled, and hoped the dawn,
Nor counted cost, if flesh could pay the debt.

O beauty broken! O glory of thought exiled!
O flowers in a furnace tossed! O joy defaced!
O sense and soul grown used in the fire, assenting
To brute futility, torture, and waste, waste!

The Spirit of Man in anguish amid the cloud
And the antiphons of thunder, and earth upheaved,
Beheld amazed the deeds of its body, and rose
In them to a splendour strange and unconceived.

II

They who simply heard the call of their own land,
The fields, the hills, the hamlets that they knew,
Hurt and in peril, and questioned not, but went,
To a fibre deep in the very body true;

They who high in hope of youth and flame of faith
Streamed to the storm with a beating heart of pride
Because that threat towered black against the sun,
Who fell, and made a radiance where they died;

They who would not for their soul's sake stand apart,
They who took upon themselves the world's red stain,
Who saw, who loathed, yet would not bear to watch
The struggle of others in unpartner'd pain;

They who still, when the mind sickened, and faith darkened,
And falsehood clung as the mud clung, and the cloud
Confused, and horror gnawed, endured to death,
Still seeing the star to which their course was vowed;

Them we name over, them we recall to-day,
Whose dear bodies in foreign earth are laid.
Ours is the light to breathe, and a world to mould:
But over them all is sleep; their hands are stayed.

Have we only remembering tears, and flowers to strew?
They are crying to us with the cry of the unfulfilled,
Like the earth aching for spring, when frosts are late.
Are we the answer? Or shall they twice be killed?

Their pain is upon us, pain of hope imperilled.
They are crying to us with the spirit's untold desires.
Heart, brain, and hand, the will and the vision—all,
And more than all, the Cause of Man requires.

We stumble and plod; by little and little we gain.
Old folly tempts, old habit about us twines.
But to-day our eyes are lifted, and hearts with them;
And near, as the stillness falls, the Vision shines.

1928

MEDITERRANEAN VERSES

[I]

The desert sand at day's swift flight
Drank of the dew-cold vivid night
Where Nile flows as he flowed
When first men reaped and sowed

As though his stream since Time began
Bore all the history of Man,
Vast ages lapsing brief
As noiseless as a leaf.

But when the first high star, concealed
Itself by shadowing boughs, revealed
The glinting ripple, it seemed
As the great water streamed

That ears attuned might hear the strings
Plucked by the harpist for those kings
Who in persistence fond
Would be companion'd

Through the faint under-world, and still
Press the firm-clustered grape, and feel
Wind from the fanning plume
Sweetened with incense-fume;

Still watch the honey-coloured grain
Stiffen to ripeness on the plain,
Or dancers with slim flanks
Circle in chiming ranks.

For Time, so old, must abdicate:
Eyes and a smile that have no date
Respond from chiselled stone
Young as, each day, the dawn;

And pulsings of the carver's wrist
So subtly in those curves persist,
The presence in the form
To touch is almost warm.

But like the pictures dreams make glow
On darkness, that in daylight go
So soon, except they find
Some lodging in the mind,

Only by beauty can these cross
The dark stream of the dead to us.
Only the hot sun dwells
'Mid those long parallels

Of broken pillars, roofed with air,
In temples of unanswered prayer;
And Gods unfeasted own
Naught but a granite throne.

II

Rain and the scolding wind's uproar
And the black cloud befitted more
The towering walls that hem
Teeming Jerusalem;

City of wailing, wrath, and blood,
The city of the grave and shroud,
Whence arose the Word
That brought so sharp a sword.

O city stubbornly enthroned!
The city that the prophets stoned,
Over which Jesus wept,
And proud Rome vainly swept!

But as from heavens of brooding love
A peace unearthly beamed above
The hill-surrounded sea
Of lonely Galilee.

And we beneath those silent skies
Walked among flowers of paradise,

As if their happier seed
Knew peace on earth indeed.

Peace, by the world praised and eschewed,
Lived in that ageless solitude
And with no phrases deckt
Shone richer in neglect.

And under stony hills severe,
Where sounds are few, we still could hear
The shepherd from the rock
Pipe to his wandering flock.

Remote beyond the Syrian bay
At close of a long burning day
Into the dusk still shone
The snows of Lebanon.

III

Morning came dancing, Morning warmed
The blue sea-circle, whence she charmed
Isle after isle to rise
Rock-pointed toward the skies,

Whose names transfigured strand and cape
Into a legendary shape
Re-peopled from afar
But to be brought more near;

As if old ships and oar'd galleys
Still swept along the silent seas;
Sailors of Tyre in quest
Of the remoter West;

Athenians racing to undo
Their own decree, before it slew;
And Cleopatra's sail
From Actium flying pale;

And traffickers with rich Byzance
Past Patmos fading, lost in trance;
And Paul, on fire within
The sad world's soul to win;

And Rudel in love's dear duress
Turned eastward to his Far Princess,
To die for that one bliss,
The first and the last kiss;

And doomed Othello Cyprus-bound.—
The islands rose and sank around,
And when the day declined
Their shadows filled the mind.

Dim in the dawn stood Hector's ghost
Upon the mound where Troy lies lost.
But through the straits we sped
Turned to our dearer dead.

IV

The hills divide, the seas unite
The valleys of a land of light,
But O how bare beside
That Hellas glorified

Which, wasted, clan by warring clan,
Yet made a splendour shine in Man
By that inquiring will
Whose way we follow still;

Built in the mind his palace rare,
Towered high as thought can dare
And thronged with images
Of joys and agonies,

Confronting destiny and wrong
With the high-symbol'd scene, and song

Threading its music through
The tale of wrath and rue.

But Time, so tender to a thought
That branches up from living root,
Has here unbuilt, defaced,
And Beauty dispossessed,

Conniving with men's minds inert,
Brute blows, and stupid skill to hurt,
As if 'twere half their joy
To maim and to destroy.

O Delphi, where all Hellas came
To hear the awful Voice proclaim
Fate, how beneath your steep
Is all-forgetting sleep!

No voice, no votary, no shrine;
Though the long vale be still divine
From that blue bay below
To the far mountain snow,

And soundless noon that idly warms
The scattered stones and shattered forms
Only the shadow brings
Of wheeling eagles' wings.

V

In the last light some column glows
Where once a white perfection rose
Imperfectly divined
By the rebuilding mind,

Which treasures up a shape, a thought,
From footprint or from echo caught;
Hard gleanings, that attest
Oblivion has the best.

Fade coasts and isles, where the seed sown
Still flowers in all we are and own.
A future presses near
Clouds of unshapen fear.

And now the ghostly, vast night-fall
Like an age closing past recall
Seems, and this darkening sea
The wastes of history;

The sea that no proud trophy claims
For sunken ventures, foundered fames,
Dishevelled navies tost,
Ships like a bubble lost;

That keeps no sure abiding form
And rises in unconscious storm
Whipt by an ignorant blast,
And when the fury's past,

Sleeking its waves, mile after mile,
Into the image of a smile.
Is this what Time does still,
Working a witless will?

But through the dark, stopt by no seas,
Pass other Powers and Presences
Unseen from shore to shore,
Armed and at conscious war,

Ideas, mightier than men,
That seize and madden, free or chain.
The things unprophesied
Our prophecies deride;

But end is none, though the storms break
And the mind pale, and the heart shake.
Out of that future ring
Far trumpets challenging.

1935

AUGUST AFTERNOON

Thump of a horse's hoof behind the hedge;
Long stripes of shadow, and green flame in the grass
Between them; discrowned, glaucous poppy-pods
On their tall stalks; a rose
With its great thorns blood-red in the slant light;
Round apples swelling on the apple-boughs:—
Over these, over the rich quiet, comes
Out of no-where a 'plane in the high blue
Driving its angry furrow across the sky,
Outstrips the slow clouds, throbs, an urgent roar,
Right overhead, and fiercely vanishes.
The quiet has become strange. Like from pools
A noiseless water issuing, memories,
Surmises, apprehensions, traceless thoughts,
Glide with brief visions on the mind, drifting
From shadow into shadow; and then a pang
Sudden as when a meteor scars the night:
See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
Dead faces of the young, that see nothing...
The unknown wounds, everywhere, everywhere...
And then from the inner to the outer sense
Returns the sun-warm quiet on the grass,
The poppy charged with sleep, the red, red thorns,
The stamping of the horse behind the hedge,
The strong slow patience of the living earth
And the apple ripening on the apple-tree
Almost as if I felt it in my flesh.

1936

THE NORTH STAR

I was contented with the warm silence,
Sitting by the fire, book on knee;
And fancy uncentred, afloat and astray,
Idled from thought to thought
Like a child picking flowers and dropping them
In a meadow at play.
I was contented with the kind silence,
When there invaded me—
Not a sound, no, there was no sound,
But awareness of a menace
Creeping up round
The little island of my mind;
A creeping up of gradual waves out of a sea,
With storm coming behind;
Wave on pale wave, smile on inhuman smile,
Driven on by the black force of alien will
To drown my world, to be the burial
Of joy, beauty, and all
That seemed impossible to kill;
Even the secret home that hope inherited.
I sat in an unreal room alone.
Befriending and familiar shapes were gone:
And I was seized with dread.

Then I became restless,
As if in bonds that must at any cost be burst.
The very peace seemed to oppress:
I was imprisoned and athirst,
And rose, and crossed the floor,
Craving to front the naked outer night.
At the opened door
Stood a thin mist, ghostly and motionless.

Smell of the leaves rotting
Breathed through a cold vapour
Bitter to the nostril.
My feet stumbled;
In my heart was a cry:

O for some single point of certitude!
I lifted up my face, and saw the sky.

There where I stood
Low mist clung to the earth.
But above, pale and diminished,
Only the larger lights pierced the dim air.
I faced the North.
And far and faint over a shadowy pine
That rose out of the mist
I saw the North Star shine.

I remembered sailors of old
For whom unclouded night
Was stretched above the dark Mediterranean,
A blue tapestry pricked with powdery gold,
Where legendary presences shone bright,
Each with a memory and a name;
And under the luminous maze
Steering by the North Star
Ships to their harbour came.

And now through thick silence
On the stifled fog-possessed Atlantic
I was hearing, distant or near,
Muffled answer of horn to horn,
The rocking clang of the buoy-bell,—
Sound crossing sound, to warn
Steamers, that on their blinded motion still
Unfaltering over seas invisible
Held to a silent clue
Because with the assurance of that star
The needle points them true.

There was a voice whispered:
Ascend, ascend!
Out of the earthy vapour, out
Of the invading doubt,
Into deliverance, into bare
Heights of unmeasured air.

Utterly stilled I stood,
Climbing in dizzying thought without an end
To that magnetic light,
That affirmation of old certitude.
And pinnacled alone in the vast night
My thought was there.

Oh, earth is gone.
My earth is lost.
North Star, North Star,
Dost thou fail me?
Thou art not what thou wast,
And all I was is taken from my mind:
For there is neither path nor direction
For any thought to find,
No North, nor South, nor East, nor West,
But homelessness suspended out of time,
Where I had sought to climb.
North Star, it was no shroud
Of mist, nor glory of overflowing sun;
It was no blotting curtain of blank cloud,
But a thought in the mind that deposed thee.

Down, down I sink:
Earth again holds me.
Again, North Star, I see thee shine.
But from the naked night I will not shrink;
And privately I take
A courage for thy sake,
Because thou hast thy place and I have mine;
Because I still need thee;
Because thou need'st not me.

1938

SOWING SEED

As my hand dropt a seed
In the dibbled mould
And my mind hurried onward
To picture the miracle
June should unfold,

On a sudden before me
Hanging its head,
With black petals
Rotting and tainted,
Stood a flower, dead;

As if all the world's hope
Were rotting there,
A thing to weep for,
Ripe for burial,
Veined with despair.

Yet I cannot prevent
My ignorant heart
From trust that is deeper
Than fear can fathom
Or hope desert.

The small twy-bladed
Shoot will thrust
To brave all hazards.
The seed is sown
And in Earth I trust.

THE TREMBLING TREE

On greenest grass the lace of lights
Beneath the shadowing tree
Trembles, as when eyes more than lips
Are smiling silently.

Its motion all but motionless
Is like a dancer's feet
Half-stirred, half-stilled, ere music throb
To float them on its beat.

Is it a music ears can hear?
Or in a world so jarred
With inward wrong, is it a sound
Too happy to be heard?

O tell me, tell me! Could I slip
The time's perversity,
There would be music in the air
And I that trembling tree.

A spirit smiling to itself
Seems in those leaves to live;
And for a moment, lost in it,
I can this world forgive.

THERE IS STILL SPLENDOUR

I

O when will life taste clean again? For the air
Is fouled: the world sees, hears; and each day brings
Vile fume that would corrupt eternal things,
Were they corruptible. Harsh trumpets blare
Victory over the defenceless; there
Beauty and compassion, all that loves the light,
Is outcast; thousands in a homeless night
Climb misery's blind paths to the peak, Despair.
Not only martyr'd flesh, but the mind bleeds.
There's nothing left to call inhuman, so
Defaced is man's name by the things men do.
O worse, yet worse, if the world, seeing this,
The hideous spawn of misbegotten creeds,
Grow used, drugged, deadened, and accept the abyss.

II

There is still splendour: the sea tells of it
From far shores, and where murder's made to lurk
In the clean waters; there, men go to work
Simply, upon their daily business, knit
Together in one cause; they think no whit
Of glory; enough that they are men. To those
Who live by terror, calmly they oppose
What wills, dares, and despises to submit.
And the air tells of it: out of the eye's ken
Wings range and soar, a symbol of the free,
In the same cause, outspeeding the swift wind.
Millions of spirits bear them company.
This is the splendour in the souls of men
Which flames against that treason to mankind.

December 1939

ENGLISH EARTH

As over English earth I gaze,
Bare down, deep lane, and coppice-crowned
Green hill, and distance lost in blue
Horizon of this homely ground,

A light that glows as from within
Seems glorifying leaf and grass
And every simple wayside flower
That knows not how to say Alas!

O Light, by which we live and move,
Shine through us now, one living whole
With dear earth! Arm us from within
For this last Battle of the Soul!

1940

AIRMEN FROM OVERSEAS

Who are these that come from the ends of the oceans,
Coming as the swallows come out of the South
In the glory of Spring? They are come among us
With purpose in the eyes, with a smile on the mouth.

These are they who have left the familiar faces,
Sights, sounds and scents of familiar land,
Taking no care for security promised aforetime,
Sweetness of home and the future hope had planned.

A lode-star drew them: Britain, standing alone
Clear in the darkness, not to be overcome,
Though the huge masses of hate are hurled against her.—
Wherever the spirit of freedom breathes, is Home.

Soon are they joined with incomparable comrades,
Britain's flower, Britain's pride,
Against all odds despising the boastful Terror;
On joyous wings in the ways of the wind they ride.

From afar they battle for our ancient island,
Soaring and pouncing, masters of the skies,
They are heard in the night by the lands betrayed and captive
And a throbbing of hope to their thunder-throb replies.

To dare incredible things, from the ends of ocean
They are coming and coming over the perilous seas.
How shall we hail them? Truly there are no words
And no song worthy of these.

1940

THE VOICES OF HELLAS

Time, that has crumbled to impotent nothingness
Empire on empire, towering in arrogance,
Time, at whose finger invisibly commanding
Their bannered battalions marched to oblivion,

Time stays motionless when are heard the voices
Of Hellas, proclaiming over a wondering world
Wisdom and joy and the radiance of reality
Disclosed as in an eternal sunrise.

Clear as the mountain-peaks (O many-mountained
Hellas!) soar in the morning splendour
When the valleys below them drowse in shadow,
Those voices into the light uplift us.

Now in the hour of menacing malignity
Hellas, holding the ancient passes
Stands for the world's cause, knowing it invincible,
Knowing that beside her stand the Immortals.

November 1940

KOYA SAN

Koya San (Mount Koya) is a sacred mountain near Osaka in Japan. On it are many temples, and at the top is a cemetery surrounding the grave of the famous Buddhist saint Kobo, before whose shrine a light perpetually burns.

High on the mountain, shrouded in vast trees,
The stillness had the chastity of frost.
I trod the fallen pallors of the moon.
The path was paven stone: I was not lost,
But followed whither it should lead me soon
Into the mountain's midmost secrecies.

Wandering into the mind, sweet, luminous, warm
Remembrances of the body,—
Smell of the woods in the irradiated noonday,
Flushes of foliage,
The ridged horizon opening far and blue,—
Came with a breathing of colour, and then sank
Remote as flames gleam in a dark pane glassed.
Earth had rolled onward into regions new,
And all the darkness at my senses drank,
Aware now, subtly, as of a frontier passed.

On either side the trees unending rose.
No shadowy sound stirred amid all their plumes.
Each seemed a separate and a soaring night,
Black canopies of cold uncounted tombs.
Pilgrims had here fallen on their repose:
Graven with names, their tablets gleamed upright.

And softly as the fallen lightness of a willow-leaf
On the liquid stealing
Of water unrippled, profound, my spirit was stolen
By the crystal silence.
And with me it seemed invisible others went,
Spirits unhistoried, of such dim surmise
As in the dark the tremble of a leaf.
With them I went, and Night was eloquent
Of things that are not in the day's belief,
And made me of those things, like a blind man, wise.

Obscurity at last relented round
A glimmering space: the inmost Shrine appeared.
Before it, motionless as any tree,

Praying, a pilgrim stood. There was a sound
Of water in the distance hardly heard:
But most that living man astonished me.

Many stone lanterns made a clustered shining
As if in a wondrous
Cavern of lost and intricate shadows, enclosing
The light's clear vigil;
But the air behind that solitary form
Was trembling like a veil of trembling light,
Where from an urn rose endless incense-fume
That left a ghostly fragrance on the night.
It seemed a spirit sighing to resume
The touch of what was breathing, human, warm.

Bare-headed, sandalled, still that pilgrim prayed,
Unconscious of all else but his heart's prayer.
Out of his breast a broken murmur deep
Came with his frosted breathing on the air
Before the shrine in its tree-guarded shade
Where that great Saint continued in his sleep.

It seemed that from Time's beginning he had stood there
In a hushed vastness,
Solitary, erect, amid the unimagined motion
Of worlds unnumbered,
Absorbed, secure in his small star of light.
And now that ceaseless, fugitive frail smoke
Appeared to me like shadowy souls in flight
Woven together into a veil of breath
That wavered as their little life awoke
And passed for ever into birth or death.

What prayer was his that mingled with the mist
Of the forgotten sighings of the dead?
I knew not; yet in him I seemed to share
Longings that still were patient to persist
Through Time and Death from lips that once were red.
In that one image all my kind stood there.

Lover of the body, lover of the divine sun,
Of earth's replenished
Fullness and change and savour of life rejoicing
Careless of all care,
Me now the Silence for its vessel chose
And filled from wells unsounded by the mind.
No other need I had, and could not less
Than to be wholly to this spell resigned
And dark communion with the spirit that knows
Vigil and frost and solitariness.

Fragments we are, and none has seen the whole.
Only some moment wins us to restore
The touch of infinite companionship.
I that had journeyed from so far a shore
Found at the world's end the same pilgrim soul,
And the old sorrow, no flight can outstrip.

Now in the midst of the irradiated noonday
Suddenly absent,
While in my ear is the sound of familiar voices,
Light talk and laughter,
My thought has in an instant flown the seas;
A great remoteness occupies my heart;
And there arises on my inward sight
The shadowy apparition of vast trees.
A pathway opens; I am stolen apart,
And I ascend a mountain in the night.

MATSUSHIMA

O paradise of waters and of isles that gleam,
Dark pines on scarps that flame white in a mirrored sky,
A hundred isles that change like a dissolving dream
From shape to shape for them that with the wind glide by!
Many celestial palaces, gardens of scented song,
Have hearts of men imagined for lost happiness;
But merely around these isles, the live sea streams among
Salt with a pulsing tide, no languid lake's caress,
To sail and ever sail, with not a sound to feel
In the clean blue, but silence vivid with delight,
A silence winged with rush of the dividing keel,
As if the world's sorrow and folly had taken flight,
Suspended pale as that faint circle far-away
Of mountain, and remote as ocean's murmuring miles,
This, only this, for me were paradise to-day,
O paradise of waters, paradise of isles.

MIYAJIMA

Miyajima is a small island covered with trees and rising to a peak, in Japan's Inland Sea. Neither birth nor death is permitted to take place on its sacred soil.

All paths lead upward to the sky
In this green isle, which mounts on high
Through slumbrous valleys, veiled in light
From waters dancing blue and bright.

And on those leafy paths appear
Delicately stepping deer
That move in wild and silent grace,
The very spirits of the place.

Whether by old pine-roots they stand
Or print small hoof-marks on sea-sand,
Their liquid eyes, their gentle tread,
Are innocent of human dread.

Beneath the ancient boughs they seem
Strayed from the memory or the dream
Or hope of man, the Golden Age,
His unrecovered heritage.

This sacred isle has banished death;
And yet I would that my last breath
Might amid ocean-murmur cease
On such an isle, in such a peace.

ANGKOR

The famous remains of the vast temple at Angkor in Cambodia are still magnificent. At a little distance from it are the ruins of the city, held in the strangling grip of the tropical vegetation. The “Stone Faces” are the fourfold image of Siva on the temple called the Bayon.

I

Out of the Forest into a terrible splendour
Of noon, the pinnacles of the temple-portals,
Stone Faces, immense in carven ruin
Above the trembling of giant trees emerge.

Stone Faces, of secret and eternal smile,
Ruined Faces, perilously towering
Over the waving of the wilderness, a fourfold
Gaze, opposing the slow strength of Time;

Visible afar, stony serenity, crown
Of the builders' labour of imagination,
Last and loftiest thought of a little dust,
That once, robed in authority, moved commanding,

When overseeing his busy-handed companies
Of workmen, and elephants hoisting obedient,
A King magnificent, satiate of victory,
Builded his vision of the eternal Peace;

Have you not heard, alone in your abandonment
Since the last echoing vibrations vanished
Of tremulous fame diminishing, have you not
'Mid the resplendent silence of the noon

Heard the cry of the little seed in the earth
Prisoned and crying to the mighty Sun in heaven
With his strong beams to find and to deliver her?
Through million miles of air is heard her cry;

The cry of Desire, that aches with a blind throbbing,
Ignorant of all but the aching of its desire,
Desire inappeasable, cruel as a desert thirst,
Desire born of desire, breeding desire?

In lust of light it springs from the little seed,
Climbing out of the hot suffocation of darkness,
Multiplying, bursting, swelling to burst afresh,
Writhing and wrestling to mount into the light.

And up from the furnaces of its own corruption
As with a trample of triumph, to the imperious
Sting of the Sun and the prodigally spending
Wanton rain, surges the sap in answer.

As if it were red blood boiling in the suddenness
Of panther's sinewy and ungovernable spring;
As if it were an invisible conflagration
Glorying up into a momentary splendour,

The sap presses, stronger than spirting fountains,
Reasonless, wild as the doubled strength of madmen;
Invisible and unheard, it races into
The boughs, and the boughs stream out into the leaves.

Roots thrust downward into the black heat of earth;
Boughs descend, thicken, and root themselves afresh;
The builded fabric is seized and is enfolded
In the tightening of those fibres, passive as a victim.

Supplanting the jamb, a root upholds the lintel;
Cracking the rounded column and delicately-carved
Frieze, with slow muscle the serpent-folds
Fasten increasing, crush or twist awry;

Invented order and scruple of willed proportion,
The strong square, all the lineaments of reason,
Lost in the green extravagance, the strangling
Young embraces of a pitiless desire.

Vast blocks, upheaved as by an elephant's
Shouldering force, are incredibly suspended
By vast stems, that swelling slow like pythons
Capture a purchase for their upward towering.

The ancient meditation of the Gods is prisoned
As in the clasp of heavy and voluptuous arms.
The still presence of Peace is broken in fragments:
Ruined and fabulous is the eternal smile.

The Stone Faces look from a lost battle
Over the ascending wilderness, the nearing
Waves of Time re-conquering Eternity,
As a beaten rock left on a crumbling strand.

II

Images people the shadows and throng the sun-soaked
Porches; demon forms, and the armed striding
Of warriors; frowns of scorn and limbs of anger;
And 'mid their conflict, shapes of young delight.

Ah, Heavenly Dancer, motioned by an ecstasy
Breathed into stone, O time-delivered vision,
Image of celestial joy everlasting
Sung by the body to the Spirit's flute!

Now like a shipwreckt remnant of security
Drifted to shore by the negligent ocean-streams,
Thou hidest, shaped into the image of humanity,
As lips hide speech, the Spirit's profound desire.

In a trance the eye can behold the hands that formed thee,
Supple hands, chiselling the stone's resistance
To a thought in the fingers' pressure and smooth relentings
Transfiguring ancient stone to breathing mind

Like as the distant gaze and sky-divining
Will of the helmsman, with touches light as breath
Shape the speed of a winged keel to union
With the firm wind's invisible inspiration.

The hand traces; the blood thinks and pauses;
Fingers marry and divide; perfecting motions,
Delicately measuring, shape into significance
Dreams: But hands have purpose, these have none,

These strong fibres, strong as the whole body
Of a wrestler locked in an obstinate tenacity
Of effort, clutch of innumerable tendrils,
Never relaxing their terrible embrace!

Live, Live! they cry, as they mount exuberant—
Whither? O whither the seething, savage ardour
Craving, and riotous in its own destruction?
Answers only the silence of the Sun.

The silence of the Sun possesses the still cranny.
Smooth lizards flicker across the abraded wall.
High amid molten splendour in topmost trees
The indolent gibbon swings from branch to branch;

Song of birds, rippling an airy and strange chime,
And shrilled unceasing chorus of cicalas
Crown the ruined history of proud peoples.
The Forest burns in the crucible of the Sun.

III

Out of the moulder of Time and great oblivion
Shines the remoteness of legendary majesties,
Willed to remain high over farthest sundown,
Now in a memory melting insubstantial.

Solomon the King built a temple in Jerusalem
For the glory of the Lord to inhabit for eternity.
Lebanon from her forests gave him cedar and cypress;
These became pillar and beam and coffered ceiling

Carved with lily and gourd and palm and pomegranate;
And all overlaid was the house within with gold.
Stone was the foundation; in the midmost was the oracle:
There Solomon ascended to the secrecy of the Lord.

It was told to Solomon: There is a queen in Saba,
In Saba of sweet valleys, of spices and precious stones.
Young she is and comely; and she seeks after wisdom.
Great pity it is that she worshippeth the Sun.

Balkis the queen had grave men for her counsellors,
Warriors stood before her to execute her bidding.
She was wise in her body's secret wisdom of beauty:
But none knew her wisdom; it flowed not from her lips.

It was told in the ears of Balkis: Solomon the King
Is wiser than all men, even the sages of Egypt.
Also he has riches beyond computation;
Armies he has and navies, and seven hundred wives.

Learned is he in the tongues of beast and bird,
In the hearts of the fishes and of all creeping things.
And Balkis was seized with a marvelling curiosity:
I will see this Solomon, said Balkis, and arose,

And with heavy-laden camels she journeyed to Jerusalem.
And Solomon accepted her Arabian spice: he showed her
The splendour of his house, his servants and all his horsemen,
And the temple founded to be the Lord's for ever.

Solomon and Balkis sat upon lofty thrones
Together; the bright birds of the air thronged round them,

Many-coloured plumage; and the King knew their voices,
The lion in the desert also he heard afar.

Solomon spoke not of his own magnificence
And the things he had shown her, surpassing belief and rumour,
Till her heart was faint; he had shown her all these marvels,
And not a question asked he had not answered.

But he spoke of the Temple wherein he had newly housed
The glory of the invisible God, creator
Of all men, even of Solomon and his wisdom;
The temple built to endure for everlasting.

Then were they silent. Evening descended on them;
And the low sun smote that high place in Jerusalem
Over against all the splendour of the Temple
That seemed eternity flaming before their eyes.

In the gaze of Solomon was a great contentment
With all he had willed and all he had performed.
But still in the unreasonable memory of Balkis
Was the cry of the seed to the glory of the Sun.

IV

Lips imperious, bosom superb! Eyes
Smiling with all persuasion to all adventure!
Veins that leap in the lightning of ecstasy! Spirit
Of splendour and storm, peril of Caesar and sage!

Whether to charm the eagle mind from form its solitude
And wondrously to enter the secret and strange places
Of wisdom, passionately importuning that ultimate
Possession, satiate of all else beside;

Or with subtle tendrils of pleasure serpentining
About the strength of the stony will, and weaving
Nets invisible, merciless, inescapable,
Softly to master the mastery of the strong;

Or stung by profounder hunger of satisfaction,
Incarnate Flame, to tower a rapturous moment
Over an empire fallen in ashes, exulting
To vanish in legend, having destroyed a world;

From what seed sown in the ignorant immensity
Of existence, ascend you into agonies and furies,
Not joy, not pain, but necessity of deliverance,
To enchant, to burn into victory and perish?

These dead doorways, black squares of emptiness,
Framed in vivid stone that scorches the hand
And dazzles the sight, are not so hollow
As the sockets that housed the brilliance of your eyes;

And this palsy of twisted and whitened fibre,
Dangling inert athwart the interior blackness,
Is not so wasted as the suppleness of arms
Moulded to be chains about the necks of conquerors.

All that interior triumph of the throbbing heart
Throbbing through wall and pillar and through the hardness
Of men, dissolving fortresses, is quieter
Than dust in the corner; earth from you has peace.

O Stone Faces, was it a far-off vision
Of Peace that the builder imagined when he shaped you,
That shadowy King, to endure beyond his memory
And awe with eternal mask the children of Time?

Surely in his heart was a vision of Life the Destroyer
Dancing the dance of Desire, the all-creating

All-destroying; Power from Power proceeding,
Or Death from Death issuing, who shall know,

Or who distinguish the inconceivable riches
From the inconceivable ruin, the victory crowned with
Annihilation? Afraid of his own vision,
He lent it human lineaments of Peace.

V

Here in the forest, under a roof of mats,
Cross-legged sitting, with a bowl beside him,
Waited the Hermit in his still persistence,
Motionless contemplating the eternal motion.

Come back, thou Hermit, here in the fierce forest
To thine own station—whether from a handful
Of dust remoulded, or from the wandered worlds
Of air, an essence into Time resumed!

Still as a flame is still in a windless place,
Seeking thy far and invisible affinity,
I see thee, careless of emperors and captains
As of the tree-tops towering above thee;

Hearing not clash of arms, nor the resounding
Triumph, nor cry of the vanquished, but with senses
Unfeasted, sure of that foreknown subsiding
Into the silence where thy thought is native.

Round thy ribs slowly fasten the serpent-roots;
Over thee meshes that insatiate voracity
As with mouths thirsting for life's fierce savour,
As with limbs lusting for the pleasures of the Sun.

Still art thou there, like the emptiness a whirlpool
Furiously encompasses, O indestructible
Emptiness! Only the communion of silence
Fills thee, and light that the evening dims not.

O naked Hermit, seated in thy mystery
Of patience, gazing down the ruin of Time,
Thou to the ravaging forest that rejoices
To teem and perish, perish and teem again,

Thou art no more than a fallen fragment of stone
Only to be seized by the implacable fibres,
Lifeless, without share in the green upsurging
That streams about thee and climbs above thy head.

But to thee, dipt into a central stillness,
All this enormity of violent abundance,
All the strength of the serpent-roots, and the wild
Energy leaping into boughs and leaves,

Are but obstructing shadow and apparition,
Vapours ascending from vain desires of Time,
Drawn as a mist is drawn from the wandering rivers,
The stream into the cloud, and the cloud into the stream.

But from what desire, O Solitary, dost thou come?
From what seed sown in the abysses of the stars
Was the strong engendering of the passion of thy stillness,
Desire surpassing all the desires of mortals,

Secret in the anchored body's immense surrender,
A strange, transforming vision, a strange excess,
Prisoned in the heart's beat, and out of its prison
Crying to the glory of the Universal Sun?

INHERITANCE

I

To a bare blue hill
Wings an old thought roaming,
At a random touch
Of memory homing.

The first of England
These eyes to fill
Was the lifted head
Of that proud hill

As lion-fronted
Alone it warded
The vale, and the far
Bright West regarded.

Who knows what wells
Are a child's unthinking
Eyes? What skies
Thro' the clear of them sinking

Have for ever coloured
A mind that springs
From buried hope, dumb prayer,
Prized small things

Precious to dust that once
Throbbed in hearts, now
Crumbled, where ignorant
Passes the plough?

II

I have walked by streams
In shadowy places
Where wild-rose June
With the moon embraces,

And smelt the magic
Of dew-drenched herbs
In a hush that trances,
Delights, disturbs.

I have roamed in a frail mist's
Filtered gold
The Downs, so cleanly
And smooth and old.

I know how the shower-light
Touches gray spires
In the slumbrous bosom
Of the elmy shires;

And lying on warm thyme
Watched at the sheer
Black cliff the grand wave
Lunge and rear,

When the whole Atlantic
Amassed recoils
And in indolent thunder
Bursts and boils.

I have followed the Romans'
Wall that wound
Over lone moors, leaving
The Druid mound

In the secret hills
Where the lost race lies,
Dreaming the dream
That the world denies;

A dream that the voices
Of England have sung,
That is born in the blood
And the eyes of the young.

III

O English earth
'Mid the blown seas lying
Green, green,
When the birds come flying

Out of the empty south
To the old willow,
Ash, thorn, chestnut—
Boughs that they know—

Sweet, sweet, sweet to be
Back in May bowers
When the grass grows tall
Round the English flowers.

O the light on tost clouds
As you take to your breast
Your stormy lover,
The strong South-West,

That breathes a wild whisper
In youth's thrilled ear,
Of strange things, of far things,
Of glory and fear!

But the things that are dearest
You have told them never;
They are deep in our veins
For ever and ever;

They come over the mind
When the world's noise is still
As to me comes the vision
Of one blue hill,

Beautiful, dark,
And solitary,
The first of England
That spoke to me.

GIFTS OF SILENCE

No sound in all the mountains, all the sky!
Yet hush! one delicate sound, minutely clear,
Makes the immense Silence draw more near,—
Some secret ripple of running water, shy
As a delight that hides from alien eye:
And the encircling mountains seem an ear
Only for this; the still clouds hang to hear
All music in a sound small as a sigh.

Far below rises to the horizon rim
The silent sea. Above, those gray clouds pile;
But through them tremblingly escape, like bloom,
Like buds of beams, for sleepy mile on mile,
Wellings of light, as if heaven had not room
For the hidden glory and must overbrim.

Penmaenmawr

THULE

Random rock
And the stain of the rain,
Smell of bracken,
The windy moor
And the wild cloud,

And rising blurred
In the showery gray
A nameless mound
Of the perished people
Who built nothing,—

Content I savour
My Northern earth,
Till memory's shuttle
Darts across it
A far picture;

A little temple
Long deserted
Warming its honey-pale
Gracious columns
In the soft South.

Remote the mountains
In blue noon;
Before the temple
A spring bubbles
In vivid grass.

There once approaching
To enter the sacred
Dimness, youth
Beheld gleaming
The breasts of Venus;

Vanished! only
The morning sun

Comes to the marble
Warm as the touch
Of youthful lips.

Am I there,
Where the vines redden
Beneath white towers
And dark the cypress
Points aloof,

Where Beauty brought forth
Wondrous children
To smile down Time
And the passing, passing
Trouble of the world?

Or here, where rooted
Ancient fibre
Stirs to the wind
And the blood in answer
Deeply stirs;

To the wind that smells
Of ocean spray,
That blows as the spirit
Blows, and finds
Upon earth no home?

LYCABETTUS

Lycabettus is the rocky pinnacle which dominates Athens on its eastern side.

Lycabett at every steep street's ending
Is there
Surprising the eyes, and ascending
Aloof, pointed bare
Into the bluest blue
That ever the live light
Poured pulsing through.
O spiring, tawny-caverned, crested white,
Pine-skirted Lycabett!
Lifting above spread roofs this craggy height,
What have you to do
With the sprawled city's modern swarm and hum,
You that have seen the ages go and come
From the first sun-rise to the last sun-set?
When Athens wore her wondrous bloom,
Her dateless violet,
You had no ornament nor dress;
And who had eyes for you?—
Wild earth, rude rock,
What history? Only solitariness.

WINDOWS AT CHARTRES

Spiritual colour in dimness angel-high,
The very Light made flesh! It is as though
Blood throbbed and blanched and fired to feel the flow
Of thought within the veins, or ecstasy
Live in one still drop. What leaf's juice could dye
That clear, clear green of paradise, what glow
Within the vine's black purples deepen so,
Meshed in the blue of coldly-burning sky?

Light for its crystal body has put on
Unearthly glory of verdure and of air
At dawn, and bright in mystery the flame
As of a heart eternal pulsing there.
O, earth and sky were needing a new name
When I came out into the simple sun.

HISTORY

Time has stored all, but keeps his chronicle
In secret, beyond all our probe or gauge.
There flows the human story, vast and full;
And here a muddy trickle smears the page.

The things our hearts remember make a sound
So faint; so loud the menace and applause.
The gleaners come, with eyes upon the ground
After Oblivion's harvest, picking straws.

What is man, if this only has told his tale,
For whom ruin and blunder mark the years,
Whom continent-shadowing conquerors regale
To surfeiting, with glory of blood and tears?

He flaunts his folly and woe in a proud dress:
But writes no history of his happiness.

STRAY SEED

A far look in absorbed eyes, unaware
Of what some gazer thrills to gather there;
Happy voice, singing to itself apart,
That pulses new blood through a listener's heart;
Bowed fortitude; and in an hour of dread
The scorn of all odds in a proud young head:
These are themselves, and being but what they are,
Of others' praise or pity have no care;
Yet still are magnets to an unknown need.
Invisible as the wind, sowing stray seed,
Life breathes on life, ignorant what it brings,
And spirit touches spirit on the strings
Where music is; courage from courage glows;
Shy powers in secret to themselves unclose;
And unbefriended hope in the cold dark
Nursing its patient solitary spark
Among the ashes of a world to-day
Will be to-morrow kindled far away
In young bosoms. O we have failed and failed
And never known if we or the world ailed,
Clouded and thwarted; yet perhaps the best
Of all we have done and dreamed of lives unguessed.

WHEN I AM ONLY I

When I am only I,
The secret battle-ground
Of world and will, wherein
Self is so strictly bound,

Then am I condemned;
Then can I understand
The heart crumbling to dust
And the eyes stopt with sand.

But when, self fallen asleep,
Quickens through all my veins
The entrancing light, and stream
The rivers and the rains,

Though to the wondrous earth
The tendril senses cling
And amid living leaves
I, as a bird, sing.

The breath comes of a world
Beyond all human moan.
There I am lost, and there
I am come into mine own.

GOSSAMERS

In the breathing of a breath—
How, who shall say?
Ghostly mist has flowered
Into flaming day.

Dewy from furze to furze
Gossamers are spun,
Frail forgotten threads
Of moonshine in the sun.

As I stray, I stop;
And suddenly I seem
With all I am on earth
To have become a dream,

And mingle with the dreams
Wandering silent air
Out of the souls of men,
None knows nor guesses where.

No human voice is heard;
Yet the air is full, full
Of sighs, desires, and want,
And hope invisible.

Each thinks to be alone;
Yet separate is none.
Of such a quivering web
The human soul is spun.

Loose as the idle clouds
My thoughts float as they may.
Now I am here, and now
Ten thousand miles away.

THE JUNIPERS

Gray the slow sky darkens
Over the downland track
Where the long valley closes
Under a smooth hill's back.

The slope is darkly sprinkled
With ancient junipers,
Each a small, secret tree:
There not a breath stirs.

I fear those waiting shapes
Of wry, blue-berried wood.
They make a twilight in my mind,
As if they drained my blood,

As if a spirit were prisoned
Within each writhen stem,
And no one knows their kindred
Nor what frustrated them.

Along the empty valley
Like a ghost go I;
My footsteps and my beating heart
Nothing signify,

Lost into nameless ages
That come, slow cloud on cloud,
From history's beginning
And all the future shroud.

MAY MORNING

Over all the watered vale
Shadows of the clouds trail:
Then the sun laughs out, and sheen
Runs like joy across the green.
Young the leaf is, young the flower;
Radiant the beeches tower,
A million tremblings all as one
Dancing forth into the sun.
Above the sound of hidden brooks
Birds sprinkle songs on coppice-nooks,
Each his private happy note,
With small bright eye and rippled throat.

England, through whose fields I stray
In this heavenly-coloured May,
England, lost in histories
Older than her oldest trees,
With nested hamlets, each of them
Flavoured like its ancient name;
England, where my blood began
And moulded childhood into man,
Comes to-day before my eyes
Like a new-found paradise.

Yet I wonder not at this
Wonder, that is half of bliss.
I have looked into Love's eyes
Long, and Love has made me wise.
As when first one face I knew
And our lips together drew,
Old in love, my heart to-day
Is young as the young leaves of May.

Toller Porcorum

A COLLOQUY

Why hurt so hard by little pricks,
By chasing cares so clouded over,
Heart of mine?
Holding what no storm can unfix
Nor time corrupt, O tender lover!
Why repine?
In you so deep a fountain springs
Of faith and joy beyond all speech,
O happy heart!
How should those meanly thwarting things
Men do, the petty creeds they preach,
In you have part?

It is because, my heart replies,
There is such beauty to adore
Within, for ever,—
Because I dwell in paradise,
That the world's chafing is a sore,
A fret, a fever.
Were there no fountain welling strong
In me, no vision heavenly-rare
Before my eyes,
There'd be for me no world of wrong
Without, lamenting to compare
With paradise.

WHEN ALL THE WORLD IS HIDDEN

When all the world is hidden
And there is only you,
When bosom beats to bosom
As if the heart broke through,

O never speech nor language
Song nor music told
The wonder more than all the world
That in my arms I hold.

Day is a dream abolished,
Sweet madness only true.
The night is burning beauty
Where there is only you.

AUTUMN SONG

All is wild with change,
Large the yellow leaves
Hang, so frail and few.
Now they go, they too
Flutter, lifted, lying,
Everywhither strewn.
All is wild with change.

Nothing shrinks or grieves.
There's no time for sighing.
Night comes fast on noon,
Dawn treads after soon;
Days are springing, dying,
We with them are flying.
All is wild with change.

LOVERS

Stars beyond number or imagination
Silent in the sky;
Shadowy valleys and dark woods over them,
Still, without a sigh;
A house, lost in vastness and in silence,
With no house nigh;
A room apart, with not a whisper in it
As the hours steal by:
Sleeping in our star-surrounded darkness,
You and I.

THE WAY HOME

Many dreams I have dreamed
That are all now gone.
The world, mirrored in a dark pool,
How unearthly it shone!

But now I have comfort
From the things that are,
Nor shrink too ashamed from the self
That to self is bare.

More than soft clouds of leaf
I like the stark form
Of the tree standing up without mask
In stillness and storm,

Poverty in the grain,
Warp, gnarl, exposed,
Nothing of nature's fault or the years'
Slow injury glozed.

From the thing that is
My comfort is come.
Wind washes the plain road:
This is the way home.

SHELLEY'S PYRE

[_]

Written for choric and solo speaking. Performed at the Oxford Festival of Spoken Poetry, July, 1938, by Dulcie Bowie, Gwynneth Thurburn, Nancy Brown, and Helena Moore

The Spirit of Earth, robed in green; The Spirit of Air, robed in blue; The Spirit of Water, robed in silver; The Spirit of Fire, robed in red. Each steps forward in turn.
Spirit of Earth
I am the Spirit of Earth.

Spirit of Air
I am the Spirit of Air.

Spirit of Water
I am the Spirit of Water.

Spirit of Fire
I am the Spirit of Fire.

All
[together]
This is the shore of the sea. Stillness and hot noon;
Stillness after storm. The sun scorches the sand.
On the sand of the sea is a pyre:
On the pyre a young man's body,
White and naked,

Spirit of Earth
A child of Earth,

Spirit of Water
Out of the sea he is come

Spirit of Earth
To the last shore.

All
Ringed with flames this body lies; flames shining, flames entwining,

Spirit of Fire
Vaulting,

Spirit of Air
Assaulting,

Spirit of Fire
Dancing,

All
Lancing
On the noon intenser light,
Branding on the air a fierier fire.

Spirit of Water
The slow sea-ripple sparkles up the sand.

All
Afar the mountains look down on the land.

Spirit of Air
He was swiftness.

Spirit of Earth
He is still.

Spirit of Water
A wave breaking; a wave broken.
At the sea's will.

All
His eyes drank of the world's beauty;
His eyes wept for the world's wrong.

Spirit of Fire
His eyes shine on the world no more.

All
Out of his mouth came forth song,
Wondering, trembling, triumphing, lamenting.

Spirit of Earth
His mouth will utter songs no more.

All
A Power breathed, a Power filled, a Power kindled and made strong
The heart this mortal throbbed with. O whence came it? O whence came
Power to frailty, hope to anguish? He was swift and he was strange,
Swift as stream, swift as wind; strange to all he came among.

Spirit of Fire
Leap, my flames! tower and quiver!

All
So into the world he came.

Spirit of Fire
No wind blows, the fire to bend.
It springs right upward to the sun.
Mount, my flames, ascend, ascend!

Spirit of Earth
Out of me this spirit rose,
His cradle green and sleepy earth;
A seed sown in a chance place,
Where-from, who knows?
Yet from my womb was his birth.

Spirit of Water
He was my lover. In river and sea
He plunged his body; his ardour flowed
With the flow of the streams, and the rain and the cloud.
Now I have rendered up my lover.

Spirit of Fire
Higher, higher, higher
In wild dishevelled blaze
Single plumes of light aspire
To be lost in the noon's haze.

All
These flames are your thoughts, these fires your desires, O Mortal!
Speeding before you, as you, the far forerunner
Outstript, O spirit arrayed in the sanguine colour
Of cloud at dawn, the laggard, the lulled and dulled,
Announcing a dawn too dazzling for your kind.

Spirit of Fire
You left them behind!

All
And winged in a radiant mist of love, you flew
Onward, alone: not on earth was a home for you,
Where men oppressed and trafficked, and hope was foiled,
Soiled, despoiled! Yet hope was the breath you drew.

Spirit of Air
The white body is changing: it has taken the swift shape
Of fire, and the fire passes, dazzling the noon,
Shedding all but swiftness and the ecstasy of flight,
Of the light into light.

Spirit of Fire
Sink my flames!

Spirit of Water
As a falling fountain
The flames sink down,

Spirit of Earth
But the heart remains
Unconsumed; it is mine in earth.

All
Out of the fire, O spirit, come forth
To us, who have been from the beginning.
Bond by bond, chain by chain,
Our hands are untwisting what bound you; we free you,
Release you from Time
And the harsh taste of the cold world,
Custom, calumny, ignorance, pain.
Come away! Noon is silent in heat that trembles,
Silent the sea that took you, and all the winds,
Silent the shadowy mountains; they look down;
And the stars that are known but in darkness to men,
They also, the true stars.
They are the silence; you the voice!
And the voice soars upward, singing,
From where the sparks expire
And the embers of fire darken,
A fountain cascading in drops as of light,
Flowing over, invading the silence, in joy to be free.
It ascends in its radiance, singing, singing; and we,
We hearken.

THE END

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