 | A Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues |  |
13
LAMMAS
Herbert Percy Sandy Ninian
PercyA health, in cider, golden, racy, rough—
The harvest and the harvesters!
Sandy
I drink
In amber spirit that enshrines the heart
Of an old Lothian summer.
Percy
Summers old
And Gules of August!—to their memory
I drink, and to the memory of those
Who wielded shining sickles. Forth they went,
The gaunt and ragged heralds of the morn:
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Behind, the tardy sun arose and struck
All day on men and women obstinate
Against the stubborn ranks, the golden horde:
Silent and set, as their long-sworded sires
Who fought the crashing rollers on the strand
And stared athwart the ocean wistfully
Into the moaning storm, the reapers reaped:
And they grew lean; and the sun burnt them black:
A sea of living gold poured round their feet
And rose in crested shocks; still and anon
The whetstone shrieked against the curving blade.
I drink the swarthy harvesters of old!
Herbert
To them all honour! But I also drink
The merry singing wheels that lighten toil.
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And drive men into cities where they rot!
Nor do they lighten toil—
Ninian
A truce to this!
Let us see things and say them. Why debate?
Sandy
Debate? The sergeant-major of the tongue!
Rather we should invite his discipline.
Percy
Well said, indeed! It is this same Debate
That overmasters armies; that distils
From rancorous commotion amity;
It is the proof, sifter and alkahest
Of all opinion, and the ordeal keen
Of knowledge, reason and intelligence;
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Camp, castle and estate of liberty.
The sword did never yet perpetuate
The work it reared—too sharp a trowel, still
With bloody mortar building on the sand.
The word alone endures; but prophecy
Being now invalid, we exalt Debate.
Sandy
The blare of personal and party aims
In parliaments and journals seems indeed
No substitute for Sinai; but it serves:
And from the vehement logomachy
Of interest and cabal, something humane
At happy intervals proceeds.
Ninian
How now!
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A meagre output for your demiurge!
Percy
Debate, like every energy divine,
Careless of centuries, elaborates
Events effectual for eternity.
The cavillers, impatient of delay,
Like little boys that violate the earth
To see if seedlings sprout, resent the mode,
When they descry the immaterial
Advancement in a decade; but we know,
We, ponderers devout of secular years,
How this most tedious Cyclops, this Debate,
Laborious long in darkness and distress,
Hammered and forged the adamantine chains
That shackle tyranny, and now begins
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A kingly crown for every child of man.
Ninian
I see no hope in wrangling. Nations pass
From panic into panic; all men seem
Fools or fanatics.
Percy
Well? ... Proceed; discuss.
Ninian
Not I; for now you put me on my guard
Sometimes when I forget myself I talk
As though I were persuaded of the truth
Of some received or unreceived belief;
But always afterwards I am ashamed
Of such lewd lapses into bigotry.
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Intolerantly tolerant, I say!
Sandy
This is debauchery: defend yourself!
Ninian
I cannot; I have tried it many a time,
And always failed, because the thing I say
Seems not more just than that which I deny;
Nor would I if I could, because to me
It now appears inept to take a side.
I know that silence would become me best,
And I endeavour to be quiet.
Sandy
Oh!
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Indeed I do.... Now I shall say no more.
Herbert
Why do you take offence so readily?
Ninian
I am not well: I am haunted. Lo, I stand
On Arthur's Seat. The chill and brindled fog
That plumed the Bass and belted Berwick Law,
That hung with ghostly tapestry the stones
Of bleak Tantallon, from the windy Forth,
Noiseless and dim, speeds by the pier of Leith,
And by Leith Walk, its dreary channel old,
To flood the famous city, Edinburgh.
Then, like the spectre of an inland sea
By wanton sorcerers troubled and destroyed,
It foams with whitening surges through the vale,
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And rises clasping every gentle slope,
Uneven scar, and fairy-girdled knoll,
Till with the hungry passion of the dead
It hugs the high earth, frantic to supply
Its own lean misty ribs, and live again
Terrestrial, with the mountain for a soul.
I stand and watch. The fog begins to ebb;
And sunset weaves of all the waning wreaths
A veil of lace, investing goldenly
The rock-piled castle—plinth and monolith
Of ruby deep and dark in soaring groups;
The Monument aflame with chrysolite;
St Giles's garland-crown studded with gems.
A bell rings faintly: curled and braided smoke
O'erhangs the humming Canongate, and flings
Dusky festoons that wither as they fall
About the wasted towers of Holyrood.
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The ample crimson west; behind, the night
In silent legions troops into the air.—
Masses of vision overwhelm me thus:
I am haunted by the heavens and the earth—
Darkness and light; and when I am addressed
I answer from the point, or petulantly,
Or say the opposite of what I would,
And am most awkward, helpless, and forlorn.
Wherefore I shun the company of men,
Not fearing them, but fearful of myself;
Surely to strive to please and still to fail
Is to be wretched in the last degree.
Sandy
Then do not strive to please: contemn contempt,
And trust yourself.
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But I mistrust myself:
A word, a glance, a cloud, a beam of light,
A perfume from its orbit shakes my soul.
Sandy
This weakness comes because you look without.
Ninian
I look without: you look within: what then?
You are possessed; I, obsessed: that is all.
I am besieged by things that I have seen:
Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held
In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;
Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun;
Environed and beset by moon and stars;
Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.
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What do you note now?
Ninian
By a Kentish road,
Across the down where poles in ricks repose,
Delivered from the burden of the bines,
And golden apples on their twisted boughs
Illumine ancient orchards, descend,
Watching and wondering to the Medway's bank.
The alder and the hazel dip their leaves;
The grass-green willow shakes; the spiny thorn,
Embossed and lustrous with its load of haws,
Shines in the water like a burning bush;
And broad and deep, muttering outlandish things,
The heavy river rolls its umber flood.
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Pallid or watchet-hued, and still as bells
That in a trance imagine tuneful chimes
Of virtue to enchant a moonlit mere.
On river lawns with emerald velvet spread
The ewes sedately browse the three-piled nap.
A distant clang of shouts and laughter rings
Across the valley from the gleaming tents
Of sunburnt hoppers at their evening meal;
And fainter voices from the roadside inn
Echo about the air, and dwell and die.
Crowned by the yellow oasthouse from whose cowl
Banners and scarfs of fleecy smoke hang out,
And busked with serried, tawny-clustered vines,
Far-reaching slopes lean up along the sky.
The drowsy wind touches a fitful stop;
The Medway mutters dreaming as it rolls;
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Autumnal tokens birds at leisure pipe;
While the sun, shut within a donjon high
Of massive cloud, through secret loopholes flings
His moted beams that quiver visibly
Broadcast; or seem ethereal lances, stacked
By the celestial watchmen who patrol
The world at night, and on their silent rounds
Move to the ghostly music of the spheres.
Herbert
And whence comes this obsession?
Ninian
Hark! Behold!
The floor is flooded with the tide. I lounge
Upon a shingle bolster. Dimly seen
Beyond the weathergleam a pennon'd mast,
A drift of smoke, hover and disappear;
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Over a reach of water, brown as tan,
Dance, deftly tripping the uneven waves.
Nearer, a yellow width unwinds; between,
A point of emerald glows, and suddenly
Shoots out and burns its way towards the west—
A spark in tinder, then a stripe of fire,
And last a sheet of phosphorescent green
Fuming with white waves. Listen! at my feet
The uplifted shuddering rollers headlong fall,
And jangle on the beach as the surf breaks
In silver chains and shekels; while the wind
Out of the southwest sings across the deep.
Straightway a new sky makes another sea.
Occultly gifted, light upon the waves
Juggles with hidden beams behind a cloud
Bright but impenetrable. Near the shore
A vein of saffron shines; beyond, a band
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Further away, wine-coloured water heaves
Against a high sea-wall of swarthy fog.
Is it the sea that gleams in merging breadths
Of colour dark and wet? Or do the powers,
That decorate the quarters of the world,
In some vast crucible dissolve and fuse
Virginal mines of ruby, malachite,
Jacinth and chrysoprase to pave the floor
Of ocean rough with wrecks and skeletons?
Nature is now about some mystery!
But while I watch, ere I can mark the change,
The passionate sun flames through the shrivelled cloud,
And all the crisp and curling water wakes,
Blue as the naked sky that bathes in it.
Herbert
How does it happen you are so beset?
29
I shall attempt to tell you honestly.
It was engraven deeply on my mind
In daily lessons from my infancy
Until I left my father's house, that not
Ability and knowledge, beauty and strength,
But goodness only can avail. I watched,
And thought I understood that beauty, strength
And knowledge ought to reign, they being indeed
The trinity of goodness; but I claimed
That this should be revealed to me, that I
Should be directly warned by God Himself
In the old fashion. Strange it seems; and yet
It was not very strange. Each morn and eve,
Year after year, I heard the prophets read,
Heard strong believing prayer: the atmosphere
Was not allied more nearly to my breath
30
Of deity; a living, active God.
On hill-tops, by the sea, in storm, in calm
I cried to Him to speak to me; with tears
Solicited a sign. Sleepless and pale
I wandered like a ghost, and day and night
Waited upon a message from on high.
Sunset and sunrise came; the seasons past;
The years went slowly by; but still to me
The universe was dumb. Books helped me not,
Except for pleasure or to gain command
Of words: I would have God's own voice or none
At last I ceased to hope and found content
In roaming through the land. The magic sun
Drew pictures on my sight. Wondering I watched;
Nor could the secular fairy ever change
My wonder into curiosity.
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Were of the finest tissue that is woven
From sense and thought. No well-thumbed page appeared
In the hard book of memory when I woke:
Amazed I trembled newly into life:
I seemed to be created every morn.
A golden trumpet pealed along the sky:
The sun arose; the whole earth rushed upon me.
Sometimes the tree that stroked my window-pane
Was more than I could grasp; sometimes my thought
Absorbed the universe, which fell away
And dwindled from my ken, as if my mind
Had been the roomy continent of space.—
My way of life led me to London town,
And difficulties—which I overcame,
Equipped with patience and necessity.
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Resurgent from the living tomb of care
And dip their wings in dawn, about me clung
The slimy folds of sin: its nether coils
Are hidden in the sepulchre of time,
The glutted past; the pallid future strains
In travail with its fiery eyes and fangs:
I peer from out the slippery middle wreaths
And see blurred visions of the world, or watch
The flashing scenes that haunt my memory.
When heedfully I viewed my latter days—
Considering for the first time in my life
The naked facts of my affairs and me—
I found that underneath indifference
To every aim saving a livelihood
And leisure to enjoy nature and art,
My source of strength, though never to myself
Confessed before, had been the lurking thought
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Could stop the unendurable ecstasy
Of pain or pleasure, at whichever pole
Of passion I determined to forsake
The orb of life, on my acceptance thrust
In ignorance and disregard of me,
My temperament and fitness for the gift;
But now that refuge of despair is shut,
For other lives have twined themselves with mine.
And yet.... How shall I seize you with due dread
Of the offensive tide that stifles me,
The worm obscene in whose close coils I writhe? ...
Now I conceive it clearly; you shall mark
Fate's way with me! A tedious decade hence
My son shall come and pitifully cry,
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‘I cannot do the things that others do;
‘I take no place in work or play; my brains
‘Are unelastic: something in my head
‘Snaps when I fain would study; visions rise
‘Unsummoned; phantom tongues mumble strange news;
‘And when I would contend in games, my bones
‘Grow pithless, and my sinews shrink; my heart!—
‘Who wore it out with sensual drudgery
‘Before it came to me? what warped its valves?
‘It has been used: my heart is secondhand!
‘Why had I not the force to be born great,
‘Fit for a splendid stage, a noble part,
‘A crisis in the world? Why must I think
‘Such things at seventeen? Why think at all
‘When love should lap me in a constant dream?
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‘No reservoir profound of energy;
‘No fathomless resource; no central fire;
‘No passionate aroma in my blood
‘Filling the world with fragrance where I come;
‘No rapt imagination to transmute
‘All pallor into glory. Life you gave:
‘Where is my birthright, sir, beauty and strength?’
What can I say to him?
Herbert Percy Sandy
The truth!
Ninian
This then:—
‘My son, your ancestors supplanted you:
‘You are my child; hence are your teeth on edge.
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‘Fades at the top. Two of our family
‘Have died insane in my time: one I saw
‘Go mad. The sounds and sights that visit you
‘Attend me too, foretellers of our doom.
‘The ultimate iniquity is mine;
‘But from a root in distant ages sunk
‘The loathsome filaments entangle you.
‘And I impeach the smooth conniving world,
‘The bland accomplice that has made and makes
‘A merit of defect, a cult of woe,
‘Sowing exhausted land with seed that's foul,
‘To harvest tares of madness, impotence,
‘Uncomeliness in wasteful granaries—
‘I mean asylums, prisons, hospitals.
‘If only nineteen hundred years ago
‘A gospel of the pride of life had rung
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‘In nature's choice of beauty and of strength
‘Had then been shown to man, how had the world
‘Approved the excellent expedient,
‘With voluntary euthanasia
‘Weeded humanity at once, and made
‘A race of heroes in a golden age! ...
‘This helps not. All the blame is mine, my son,
‘Who never should have been’ ... It palsies me;
I cannot comfort him; he stands and stares
Defeated ere he was begot.—Behold
The ancient snake that pinions me! Like one
Chained to a column in a turbid stream,
About my ears a sluggish billow flaps,
And chokes and daubs me with its ropy wash.
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Escape! I know the manner! Live at speed;
And call your least caprice the law of God;
Disdain the shows of things, and every love
Whose stamen is not hate; self-centred stand;
Accept no second thought; in every throb
Your heart gives, every murmur of your mind,
Listen devoutly to the trump of doom.
You are your birthright; let it serve you well:
Be your own star, for strength is from within,
And one against the world will always win!
Ninian
I cannot act. The subtle coils grow tense,
And crush my limbs, my heart, my throat, my head.
I am the sufferer, the endurer, I.
Yet God who gives no presage hitherto,
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I am not thinking solely of myself,
But of the groaning cataract of life,
The ruddy stream that leaps importunate
Out of the night, and in a moment vaults
The immediate treacherous precipice of time,
Splashing the stars, downward into the night.
Meanwhile for me no lulling opiate,
No dream, no mystic solvent: I must watch
Hopeless, unhelped, till I go mad or die.
Herbert
But you have hope and help.
Ninian
I? Show me them!
Herbert
You went forth seeking God and found the world
40
The canopy and state of day and night:
The pageant of the year; the changing moods,
The loyal constancy and testament
Of Nature—her asides, her hints, and smiles,
Her clear ideas of repose and toil,
Her covenant and noble ministry
Of light and darkness, and of life and death,
Are the true salve for your distempered mind.
Blame not yourself too much; admit no fear
Of madness with the sunrise in your blood;
And hold your own intelligence in awe
As the most high: there is no other God—
No God at all; yet God is in the womb—
A living God, no mystic deity.
With idols in its infancy the world
Deceived itself as maidens do with dolls,
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That what it should bring forth already reigned.
Now is its hour come, but it only knows
The sick dismay and anguish, ignorant
Of birth-pangs and an offspring more divine
Than man has yet imagined. I have woes,
As you and all men have in their degree;
So let us think we are the tortured nerves
Of Being in travail with a higher type.
I know that I shall crumble back to dust,
And cease for evermore from sense and thought,
But this contents me well in my distress:—
I, being human, touch the highest reach
Attained by matter, and within me feel
The motion of a loftier than I:
Out of the beast came man; from man comes God.
Deepest delight is in the certainty
42
Wherein the universe disports a while,
Ethereal oblivion, my deeds
And I eternally belong.
Ninian
Yes... See,
They throng the room!—no spectres, but themselves:
Sibilant depths of darkness; avenues
Of latticed light; ambrosial, pine-strewn glades;
Ravines and waterfalls; the grass-green turf,
Where primroses by secret alchemy
Distil from buried treasure golden leaves,
And where forget-me-nots above the tombs
Of snow-drops hang their candelabra, trimmed
With azure light—turquoise by magic roots
Drawn from the bowels of the earth and changed
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Sunrise and sunset like a glowing vice
Bloodstained that grips the world; the restless moon
Swung low to light us; clouds; the limpid sky;
The bourdon of the great ground-bee, athwart
A lonely hill-side, vibrant on the air,
And subtler than the scent of violets;
Sonorous winds, storm, thunder, and the sea.
| A Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues | |