Collected Poems of Laurence Binyon

I remember a night of my youth, I remember a night
Soundless!
The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened
Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height
Boundless
With stars, with stars, with stars.
I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled
Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty
Out of the ends of the air and the unscaled darkness
Poured in a rain, in a river,
Into my marrow,—thro' all the veins of delight
Poured into me.
O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!
I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;
I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,
Born to be free.
In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,
A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;

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For they came to me as lovers,
Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,
I felt more than heard, like a whisper
Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting
Sound
Of waves, of waves, of waves.
And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,
That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:
In the midst of the worlds I trembled,
I in the night a mortal
Found!
What was I? What was I? Nothing
But a Moment, aware
Of the ruins of Time!
Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,
Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,
From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir
In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,
Rose to claim
This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;
To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.
And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,
For I was the word on Earth's lips
That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,
Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,
Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,
The earth-child?

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To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,
To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,
Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling
Earth-exiled?

But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,
In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,
As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind
At its core,
This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,
And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth
Shelter me more.
I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:
I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,
And feel within me, for this mortality's answer,
Sea without shore.

I. THE VICTORIES

[I.1]

Masters of the known and found,
Singers of a world completed,
All to a time and end ordained,
Powers foredestined to their bound
And truth immutably contained,
A dominion mapped and meted,—
Like as in Egyptian noon
Gods of granite throned august
Gaze on old realms round them strewn
Far as the horizon dust,—
All beneath that searching sky
Gathered into wisdom's eye!
Prophets of the found and known,
Chanters of the Laws unchanging,
Comes not an hour that undoes all
With a whispered homelessness,

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With a sudden touch estranging?
Certainties you deemed your own,
Housing with a friendly wall,
Glide into a doubt and guess
Swift as when, the low light going,
Darkness on the wind comes flowing
Out of nothing; and surmise,
Dream, desire, are frontierless;
And the unroofed mind has skies
To breathe of, where a rumour sings
Of other mind and vaster things
Wooed to wilder destinies.
Thought throbs: there a power entices
(Like, on a wonder-night, all June
In a draught of stolen spices)
Not to stay, not to stay,
But to embark for the outer dark.
Only charms the untrodden way,
Only the unspelt secret rune.

Conqueror with foot superb
Planted on the last step won,
Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim
Destiny's accepted son,
Robed in a resounding name,
What profounder pangs disturb
Something that's unquarried yet
In the deep soul? All the gain
Weighs but as an ashy grain
In the world those pangs beget.
Fierce fruitions but betray
And deliver to the hard
Hope of things unhazarded.
Where that world is, who shall say?
Under western evening starred
Black waves tempt to far-away
Visioned walls of a wide shore,
Lands the only-coveted,
Gleaming as they gleamed before
Alexander's dying eyes

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In the tent at Babylon.
Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,
Dumb'd with grief that only saw
The pillar of the world undone,
Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw
The unsated mind with cruelties,—
Ramparts where Time's jealous spies,
Sentinelled afar, deride him,
Mocking all that passion willed
With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.
O the inexorable Lure
Spur to the demon hearts of men!
Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,
And the empire-storming Saracen,
Fate's infuriate charioteers,
Fly from a whisper in their ears
(Earth before them, Time behind)
Whispering, “Haste ere blood be chill,
Storm and scatter, work your will!”
Hunters hunted in the mind,
Hunting what they cannot name,
Thunder over earth, to find
Nothing. Though the harvest black
Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,
There's a thing they cannot tame.
Still they keep their torrent-track,
Maddened by a shadowy song
Sung beyond the reach of sense.
What song is this which wastes the worth
Of human things, and distastes earth,
And fevers with magnificence
Of swiftness, trampling, ruin-crowned,
Toward a goal that none has found?
Is it the song the Adventurer stole
Body-bound upon the mast
For the enchantment of his soul?
Over farthest foam of waves
That are sailors' restless graves,
He heard exulting as he passed
Perilous voices challenging

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The mortal heart of him, and fear
Became a glory, so to hear
Secure as an immortal, sing
The Sirens.

I.2

Whither is she gone, wing'd by the evening airs,
Yon sail that draws the last of light afar,
On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares
Than her own errand and her guiding star?
She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads
Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth.
She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms,
The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust,
And generations of men asleep in the old earth.
Between two solitudes she glides and fades,
And round us falls the darkness she invades.

Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters!
What have your wastes to do
With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail
Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens;
Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds,
And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass
In soil his fathers knew?
What shall he hope for from your careless desolation,
Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath?
What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers
But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage? ...
Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.

I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon,
Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air,
Cry down the secret waters of the world,
Under the far sea-streams, to summon there
The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships.

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In their ribb'd ruin and age-long sleep they heard,
Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed,
Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound;
Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread
In corners of all oceans, where the light
Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize:
And shapes at last were stirred
On glimmerless abysses' oozy floors
Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;—
Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth
Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores,
Or questing up the white gloom of the North,
Or shattered in the glory of old wars,
The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!

I saw them clouding up over the verge,
Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave,
Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon
And strange to the idle glitter of the wave.
Magically re-builded, rigged and manned,
They stole in their slow beauty toward the land.
Mariners, O mariners!
I heard a voice cry; Home, come home!
Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here
Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace
Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb.
Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India?
Are not children's kisses dearer than ivory and pearls?
And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water
And the cold, wandering foam?
Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer,
Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet
The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin.

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But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music;
And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn;
We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go.
We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes,
But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win;
Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow,
And a world to wander in.

I.3

O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!
O alone soaring over care and stain!
Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?
Or who your spaciousness of light attain?
Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,
When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,
Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard
Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,
Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—
Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,
Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,
Silent in glory as of chanting choirs.
Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences
In apparition from some world august,
Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy
That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.
Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,
And mid the void as on some dazzling shore
Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,
Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.

Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion
Surpassing all the measures of his kind,
He, a free rider of the undulating silences,

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Has in himself begotten a new mind;
Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling
Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,
Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him
Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,
Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,
A soundless vapour that he pulses through,
Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again
And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—
Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery
Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire
Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,
A daring, a defiance, a desire!

Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,
Invading far and far the virgin sky,
Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man
(O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!
Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle's ways
Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting
Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries
Of his condition, being so brief a thing,
Being a creature perishable and passionate,
To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo
Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,
A lover, else to his own faith untrue,
Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice
Upon the untried way that he must tread,
So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,
Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.
Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance
From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,
Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible,
He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone,
Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning

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A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare?
Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate
World, and exulting to be native there?

I.4

Hymn the Finders! Hymn the bold
Trusters of Earth, those patient ones,
That listen to the subtle words
Of Silence in the streams and stones;
Ponderers of the secret-souled
Bodies quick with ignorant being;
Followers of the clues that thread
Differences and accords;
Wooers of what powers agreeing
May the hands of man bestead;
Seers who have turned aside
From the greeds that ask and ache
Blinded to all else beside,—
Letting the clear spirit take
Truth from vision open-eyed.
Breaks the bud for him that sees
In a world of promises.

Hymn the breaker of the dark,
Hymn the finder of the flame,
Troubler of the essential spark
Lurking in the withered pith
Or from stony prison freed,
Friend and fury, holy need
And fierce destroyer, hard to tame,
Risen, a God to wrestle with!
Hymn the bender of the wheel,
Mother of the shapes of speed!
Hymn the launcher of the keel
Carrying thought's arrow-aim
Beyond the sundown,—sowing seed
Of man on coasts untrod before,
To widen memory's haunted shore
And add the nearness of a name.

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Far-descended old desire!
That stirred in swarming forest-ages,
Prowled by fear whose stealthy eye
Watched from glooms, where hunger-rages
Ravened; see at last the Hand
Emerging human, stretched to try
Shapes of things with wondering pleasure,
When its strength forgets to kill;
Tempted on to understand,
Serving ways of secret will,—
Fit and fashion, poise and measure.
Hymn the hand that builds the wall
And spans the river, and arches over
Man the worshipper and lover
Song-like stone; the hand so strong
To strike, yet in whose touch is all
Life's mystery that wooes from things
Their strength, as music from the strings,—
Touch of the mind that seeks behind
The world for the befriending Mind.

Hymn the openers of the gates!
Hymn the changers of the fates!
Hymn the seekers! them that saw,
Past the seeming starry roof
Of human earth, in mazy plan
Bright eternities of law;
Them that neared those orbs to man,
Unafraid, and put to proof
Divination's ancient scheme;
Stept into the timeless stream,
Star-like spirits among the stars!
Hymn the seekers! Chosen souls,
Grapnel'd in the very marrow
By a thought that night and day
Draws them whither their unknown
Mighty lover far away
Beckons them to the frore Poles
Or new meridians; like to him
Who climbed in Panama the tree,

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And splendour of untravelled sea
Smote him like a glorious arrow:
Never shall he rest again
Till he sail that virgin main!
Or like him who quietly
Sitting in his Polar tent
Found so great a way to die;
Hope-forsaken, famine-spent,
Wrote his words of faith and cheer
Till the pen dropt from the hand
That wrote them.

Hymn the lost, who never
Found, but kept high heart to steer
Onward toward the mark they meant,
Sailing out of sight of land.
Wail not them, nor lost endeavour,
For they heard what tranced the ear,
Filled the exulting soul, the song
Pale and prudent mortals fear,
Song of those who, out of Time,
Sing the heights the immortals climb,
The Sirens.

II. PENUMBRA

[II.1]

Hearken to the hammers, endlessly hammering,
The din of wheels, the drone of wheels, the furnaces
Panting, where Man as in a demon-palace toils
To forge the giant creatures of his brain.
He has banished the spring and the innocence of leaves
From the blackened waste he has made; the infected sky
Glooms with a sun aghast, and the murk of the night
Is peopled with tall flames like spirits insane.

He strips himself to the heat, not of the jovial sun,
But of the scorch of furnaces; with naked breast
Sweating beneath the iron and blear glass, amid
The hammers' hammering and the wheels' roar.

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Not with grapes of October trodden underfoot
Spurting juices of ripeness in runnels, his vats
Brim, but with gushes flickered-over and blinding,
Unshapen spilth and blaze of molten ore.

With a finger he lifts the weight of mountain-sides
Poised; the metal mass he shears red-hot in a trice;
He has given to the animate iron thews of force,
A Titan's pulse, and breath of fiery draught.
Monsters mightier far than himself he creates
To swim storming seas, and to mount in miles of air,
To deride Space and the old opposition of Time:
Their speed is like strong drink that he has quaffed.

He has the tamed lightning to do his bidding, draws
Energies out of the veins of earth; he is armed
From all elements, woven as in a magic web;
He has stolen seeds of Death, wherewith to fight.
He holds fabled terrors of the ancient gods in his hand—
In a handful of dust, earthquake and pestilence;
He exults to destroy, to obliterate, to be
Lord of the powers of the engulfing night.

Deafened with the hammers, inebriate with the sound
Of the powers he has raised out of their jealous lair,
He has fever within him, he becomes dizzy,
And craves, and knows not whither he is bound.
Shall he attain god-like felicity of ease,
Supreme articulate voice of nature's striving,
Or builds he a vast prison for himself, a slave
With iron of his own strong forging crowned?

Insatiable of ransacked worlds, and exulting
Furiously in feet-supplanting speed, the proud-eyed
Victor, he who has come so far, so far, looks forth
To achieve the eluded glory of his goal.
What solitude is this that suddenly he enters?
Voices of earth no more with anchoring kindness call.

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The fevered hammers throb; but deep within he knows
The desert he has made in his own soul.

O where is now the dew-dropt radiance of morning,
That sistered with him leafing tree and rippling stream,
When simple of heart in the sun with a free body
He accepted all the boundaries of his mind?
Full of fears he was then, shadowed with helpless need
To propitiate Powers that threatened each footstep.
Has he escaped from those old terrors, to be prey
Of fears more terrible because less blind?

II.2

Ah, did men feign you once, triumphant Sirens,
Omnipotent in your lure
On a far spice-island over legendary surges
Singing, and divine you with the famished eyes of mariners,
Listen in a trance to your voices, but listen
In a dream secure?

Lost amid strange and hungry waters
They fabled the storm-worn sailor stung
By a vision of arms outstretched at the end of the world,—
Eternal woman, wonderful, with a bosom
Heaved as with love, and with warm, white eyelids
Over eyes cruel and young.
From those voluptuous throats, magical throats,
As out of a coral-lipped, an ivory-coloured
Dazzling flower, tormenting sweetness floats,
Sweetness of voices, odour of strange, strange longing
Felt on the flesh like trail of perfumed hair,
In sound that stole like soft arms round the soul
Drawn thither and inescapably aware
Of nothing but the extreme ache to press
Lips on those lips, that thirst to suck the breath,
The heart's blood, into theirs, till eyes grow dull,

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Till lips be lips no longer, and only a skull
Roll from your feast of death,
O sated Sirens!

But what if it be that fond perfidious Voices
With different music lure
Even us who have cast far from us the fables of old?
If the pride of our quest undo us, and they enchant us
Simple as those lost mariners, but no longer
In dream secure?

If not with sorcery of song in a scarlet mouth
And with eyes of desire
You ensnare the easy senses and perishing flesh,
But with spiritual lure you hunger to entice us
Beyond the borders of knowledge, O evilly enamoured,
O terrible choir?
If shadowy at the end of time you wait,
Wooing subtly the while Man's spirit, tempted
On ever more extravagant quest, and bait
His blood with charm of secrecy and peril,
Ay, and waylay the longings of his mind,
Yielding by dear degrees what he exults to seize,
Until he glows to seem the unconfined
Master of earth, the world's sole will, but only
That you may taste his glory, spent and shared,
Before you press upon his lips the last
Kiss of annihilation, and he be cast
Into the void prepared,
Malignant Sirens!

II.3

“Whither, Whither?” I heard a crying
That asked of Night, and there was none replying.
“Whither, into what land of change and wrack,
Into what time out-racing thought and will,
With feet borne onward and mind beaten back

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Over an earth that our lost loves has buried,
Against a dark wind blowing chill,
Whither are we driven, whither hurried?

“Lovely vales of our youth, where haunted
Peace of the ripening years, and hope that vaunted
Its strength so rooted in earth's purposes
That children's children should possess peace there!
O sunny vales, and corn, and guardian trees,
Shut off by the blind rain's down-dropping curtain,—
Vanished, as if they never were,
And doubt alone were certain!

“Heaven we feigned in a time perfecting
Our missed design, and beauty of our neglecting.
There should we live completed in an age
Wise from our loss and rich with all our spoil,
A race redeeming its lost heritage,
Not by vain fears checked, nor by vain hopes cheated.
—If that heaven fade, and futureless we toil,
And battle already defeated?

“Words of beauty, words of assuaging
Majesty saw we on high above time's raging
Inscribed as over some vast porch serene;
Pardon: the heart flowed out on tides of peace.
Justice: the soiled soul hasted to be clean.
One word we feared not, dreamed not, named not even,
The end.—If All utterly cease;
Earth, Time, Desire, Hell, Heaven?”

Titan spirit of god-like stature;
Star-measurer, holder of deep clues of nature;
Maker, but half-aware of what he makes,
Of what the extravagant flame in him devours,
And what unshapen Vastness he awakes,—
Toiled in the terrible webs his mind invented,
And caught in flame that twists and towers,
Man strives with himself tormented.

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Born for ever to move, the Dancer
Of dark Creation's dream, its destined answer,—
Joy were those limbs created to express!
Now like one darkly stumbling, while his brain
Puzzles each motion with too anxious stress,
Under the glory of stars that move unhalting
He burns with the old need onward still to strain,
Mis-timed, way-lost, defaulting.

II.4

Hearken to the eternal lovers rejoicing!
A sunrise in their hearts, a music in their veins,
Their bodies make sweet singing to one another;
They bathe in beams from one another's eyes.
They rejoice to belong to the Eternal Delight
Upon whose universe of buoyance they are launched,
That questions not of its way nor of its haven
But is both way and haven where it hies.

They marvel to be born in a new element,
To meet like streams as they go chiming to the sea,
To move like flames that touch and tremble; and marvelling
They look back on the voided shell they quit.
Dawn within dawn, light within light, unfolds for them
The secret of the world, that flowing overflows
The sun and the moon and the farthest of the stars,
And it abounds in them, and they in it.

Beautiful are their fears as the shy-footed fawns
Safe only in wildness from the old hunter, Time,
To be assured in shadow of the heart's solitude,
Where joy finds joy that never Time records.
They have made virgin words of that soiled alphabet
Wherewith have been written histories of sorrow,
Labour and long defeat, and proud and vain conquest;
And all their lore is those sufficing words.

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Magnificent they match the music of a name
Against abhorred Silence and terrors of the abyss,
The trust of a smile against all-ignoring Night,
And one low voice against Oblivion's greed.
Difference drew them to the enamoured wrestle,
Chosen, inevitable dear antagonists;
They cry one to the other; “Alone I was not I,”
“O lovely danger!” and “O my angel need!”

“Because thy sweetness is so troubling and so sharp,
Full of blood-thrilling strangeness, unexplored peril,
Never to be possessed, always to be desired,
Thou unknown world, I will dare all for thee.”
“Though in a moment thou hast made me to forget
All that I was and had, triumphing I hold thee;
To thy darkness of strength I give and commit me;
Here is thy world, O sail upon my sea!”

As the East that quickens and flushes to the height
Answering the ardour of the West, and as a rose
Quivers on the western cloud before the dayspring,
Divided as the East and West they are:
But upon ways invisible to mortal sense
Moves their bright union, where was created new
Love's wondrous world; from the darkness it emerges;
It is their Evening and their Morning Star.

Out of the hollows of unpenetrated Night
From afar calls to them, though they have known it not,
A voice that is theirs, yet is not theirs, a new voice
Never yet heard, yet older than all things;
Laughter of a child's voice, sweeter than any sound
On the earth or in the air, voice of eternal joy,
Victorious over the bowed wisdom of mortals,
A well beyond the world, that springs and sings.

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III. THE UNDISCOVERED WORLD

[III.1]

O in a living stream to bathe
That runs its course from spring to sea!
And O to cast this aching mesh
Of iron bands that starkly swathe
Limbs that labour, neck to knee!
To feel the wind upon the flesh,
Wind that was before man was,
Blowing out of blue divine;
Feel the feet on morning grass
Lightly firm, and body bare
Over-showered with beams so fine
As cleanse the very heart of care!
Sages, had you found but this
For the mind, so it could use
What the body knows of bliss
When all thought it loves to lose
Merely poising in the sun,
Sure of powers a-spring within it
Rippling out to leap and run,—
Like for memory's waiting ear
Silence, ere the music win it:—
When unreasoned joy alone
Brims the body, itself its own
Infinity unquestioning;
Careless, Life is O so near,
Death a legendary thing,
Breath and blood like bells that ring;—
Sages, had you art to find
Such a glory for the mind,
Not with eyes that are too wise
But the lover's wonder-vision
Seeing far and seeing near
As within one radiant sphere
All things living, joined and whole,
Bloomed with light of Paradise;
Sages, then—but who has taught
Such an end for labouring thought,
Such a nakedness of soul;—

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What but probing, doubting, and division?
Hark, on iron iron's endless clamour!
The hours, the hours, drive swifter than we strain—
Earth changes not, but who has changed us,
As if a Fury with a shadowy hammer
Nailed the nails into the fiery brain?
Who has estranged us?

What dark enemy within
Makes of Earth an enemy?
Is it not he who sought of old
Secrets of her wealth to win,
Hot with greed and overbold,
Aching to possess her? he,
Searching labyrinthine veins,
Thirsted for yet rarer gains,
And through patient nights perused
Each divided element,
Curious of that pregnant dust
Which with intent hand he bruised;
Crucibled in fire the grains
That should subtly be cajoled
In the end to yield his lust
Feasts of gold—a continent
Molten into dazzling gold!
(Were not heard the Sirens then
Deriding the poor dreams of men?)
Nay, but he would scrutinize
Even Night's deep-ordered scheme,
And spell his own proud destinies
In scripture of the starry stream.
Coveting what power those skies
Might enthrone, he sought a charm
That should warp them and should woo
To his use, and by such aid
To disimperil of one harm
This brief body, would undo
A universe. And he arrayed
In a constellated robe
His heaven-projected effigy,

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Because his spirit was afraid
Of its nakedness, nor dared
Terrors of the truth to probe;
Rather chose itself to ensky
In a dream. But no night bared
To him her grandeur, swerved no spheres
To the wrench of human fears.
Earth and Night to crave of lust
Yield but fruitlessness and dust;
Dust to lust, to greed a weed!
Mockers rise from those forgotten years:
“This is he, the self-dupe, still the same
Vaunter of a world of his defiling!
Claiming heavens, with only will to maim.
Who is this to own an earth's empire,
In whose blood is mud, and this aviling
Squalor of desire?”

Lo, with feet on fiery ashes
Earth's foiled master casts his eyes
Round his world-abode. Time's heir,
Freed by blood of martyrs, wise
With myriad lives of thought and care,
Into Doubt's dim future gropes,
Black with omen, lit with flashes!
Lo, beneath his heaven of hopes
Falling palaces of dream,
Proudly pillared; regions wreckt,
Peopled with stray flames that seem
Hot greeds from his burning brain
And the very earth infect.
Lo, like bodies for his fear
Shadowy shapes of force insane
Menacing in murk appear,
Primed with energy to kill,—
Engines of his intellect,
Incarnations of his will!
Those old siren-songs of air
Change into a song abhorred,
Chanting softly, Revel, Lord!

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Triumph, Master! This you sought!
This your own proud hands have wrought!
Now the lover's loathing taste
Comes on him for what he burned
So imperiously to clutch.
Where is now the bliss embraced,
Where the conquest? At a touch
All's to desolation turned.
Is it he, or Earth, betrays?
She that seemed to sting him on
To possession, once possessed,
Dispossesses him. Her breast
Stony grows, and hard her gaze.
—Yet, oh, could she again be wooed
In her own, her chosen ways,
Shall she not transform her mood,
Glorify with truth his quest,
Give, as lovers give, entire
Body to body, mind to mind,
Ay, and more than these can find,—
Spirit to spirit? Beauty of Desire,
Beauty beyond possession still is breathing,
Beauty in us defaced!
O secret spring eternal, muddied here,
Soiled and sunken, troubled into seething!
Torrent of Desire, by greed and fear
Spilled into waste!

III.2

Be still! Wash out this dull roar from the ear
That fevers Time; be emptied the hot brain
Of clamorous, intricately-teasing toil.
Let spiritual Silence brim again
The mind's well to a mirror virgin-clear;
All these invented cares smoothe and uncoil.

Contemplate Silence; the wild Silence, ere
Music or word was; waste, unshapen sound;

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Crying of wind; moaning of sea; stammer of storm;
Gropings as for a being nowhere found;
Mateless desires, frustrated throbs of air,
Without home, without form.

They sought a lodge in haunted flesh, they sought
The inward tingling sense's touched accord;
To be delivered, to be born perfect
On shapes of lips, a breathed, a living word,
A flower that seeds its riches, thought from thought,
Incarnate sound, mysterious and elect.

Contemplate Silence! The unwithered womb
Of all music infinite as desire;
All words, releasing tears and bliss; all song,
That wins at last a universe for choir,
And there the enlarged spirit has full room,
There its desires and its delights belong.

All speech, all song, all music still unborn,
Waits there for its futurity of mind
To become human; yet it holds some tone
Drawn from a something vaster than mankind,
As from profounder heart-strings torn,
And yet complete in man alone;

As if behind him travailing, the whole
Dark world were seeking in this eloquent flesh
Some other self, and sighing here to be
Born afresh, born afresh;
To win a world yet undiscovered in the soul:
“O Voice,” it cries, “utter; O Hands, deliver me!”

With such a dark quest in desirous eyes,
From the ancient East, as through a silent gate
In the mind's city and labyrinth of thought,
Those Magian Kings, of knowledge satiate,
Of riches satiate, and forlornly wise,
Down desert gorges brought

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Gifts for the Unknown: nay, but Earth from far
In yearning sent them, her ambassadors.
Rocks opened veins of gold, trees oozed their blood,
Spices sighed, gems burned up from cavern-floors,
The very Night had made Desire a star,
That over against them, strange and certain, stood;

And thither laden with Earth's hope and want,
Her symbol'd sighs and riches of her pain,
Down separate passes of the mountain streaming
Wound onward each amid his marvelling train,
Those sages drawn from towers of midnight haunt
By their prophetic dreaming;

And trumpet thrilled to trumpet thro' the night,
And torches told of glistering strange attire,
Where met those three kings on one errand led.
What image shaped they of the World's Desire,
What presence throned in majesty and might,
As they went musing, deep in hope and dread,

And under vast cope of the wheeling skies
Found but a naked child, a child new-born?
Wisdom resigned the crown of her enthroning;
All her impassioned question was forsworn:
In wonder she saw all things with new eyes.
Then, there were songs of joy; now, sound of a world groaning.

III.3

Mystery of Dawn, ere yet the glory streams
Risen over earth, and pauses in that hush
When far, as from an ecstasy, clouds flush,
And hills lift up their pureness into dreams
Of light that not yet colours the cold flower,
And the earth-clasping, heaven-desiring tree
Trembles in virginal expectancy—
What breath of the unknown Power
Is this that, spirit to spirit, as with a spousal kiss

347

Comes seeking us, even us, through shadow and dew,—
Seeking in this soiled flesh what undiscovered world
Beyond tears, beyond bliss, beyond wisdom, beyond
Time? what recaptured harmony of earth and heaven?
What world made new?

A world so strange, the spirit thrills to flame,
Transfigured in a wonder of release!
A world so near, it has no other name
Than light and breath! Where lost we, then, this peace?
Wanting what charm to cleanse
Our eyes? To see; is this the last of gifts,
That, as the scales drop, the heart so uplifts?
O world where no possession is of men's,
Where the will rages not with fever to destroy
Differing wills, or warp another life to its use,
But each lives in the light of its own joy!
In one wide vision all have share, and we in all,
Infinitely companioned with the stars, the dust,
Beasts of the field, and stones, and flowers that fall!

This body that we use seems in that air
Marvellous; secret from ourselves; a power
Without which were no speech, nor deed done anywhere,
Nor could thought range and tower,
Nor seed be sown for the unborn time to reap;
Whose natural motion was ordained to be
Beautiful as a wave out of a sea
Boundless as mind asleep;
So passionately shaped, in every part perfect,
Universes are wounded in its abasement,
Crying from stone to star;
The unimagined height, the immeasurable deep,
Hungers, abysses, heavens, millions of ghosts from far
Meet in this body born to laugh and weep.

348

Weep; not for the endured, ancestral ill,
Perils and plagues, that ambush all our ways,
Time's injury, and pain's deep-wandered maze;
These need not eyes to see, but only flesh to feel.
But of the eternal vision to partake,
And see what we have done, and what refused,
To what accepted blindness we grow used,
And what marred shapes of one another make,
This is to weep such tears as no flesh-throes have cost,
Weep for our loves, our loves, that we ourselves have slain,
The powers of loveliness that we have left forlorn.
Eyes we had and saw not, ears and we did not hear!
Ah, when the heart, full-visioned, breaks in shame and pain,
Then is the world's hope born.

The cry of desolation turns to praise.
If falsehood first enchant the eager mind,
And if desire be cruel, being blind,
Each by its own infirmity betrays,
And some profounder, more imperious need
Drives through all smart, whatever world to lose,
The pure vision to choose,
And tho' Truth kill, there in the end be freed.
Open, open, gates of deliverance, open!
See, liberated spirits, see, victorious ones,
For testimony of us from homes of glory shine,
Vindicators of this brief flesh, they mingle us,—
Soiled and despoiled,—with beauty and with felicity,
And sting us from afar with the Divine.

Hands of men stretched out in so dark a craving!
Baffled heart, clouded vision; filled with ache
To know you have maimed the world you sought to make
Your instrument and minister, enslaving
Powers of earth and air—Hands that have wrought
So glorious things, the thoughts of joy to house!

349

Heart that has pulsed so ardent for its vow's
Accomplishment,—O heart so hardly taught!
O stretched-out hands! of you Eternity has need.
Give but your sacred passion and your shaping art,
The hunger of Eternity is there,—
Barren else, barren: chaos and a wilderness
Of feud and everlasting greed devouring greed,
The unshapen dream's despair!

Spirit of Man, dear spirit, sore opprest
With self-estrangement, and mis-choosing will,
And all satiety of gainful skill,—
Possession that was never yet possessed,—
You that have been so great a lover, giving
In innocency all for sacrifice;
Whom neither Time nor earth's regions suffice—
You too are sought, where still your dream is living.
Over the secret oceans of uncharted mind
Who knows what voyagers, what sails invisibly
Press on, for all the lost, the foundered hopes untrue?
Who knows, through ignorant mists and storm upon that sea
What Lover, what unweariable Adventurer,
Makes still his quest of you?

O world that is within us, yet must still
Out of the eternal mystery be wooed
Ere it be ours and, breathing in the blood,
Live in its beauty, as the miracle
Of the divine colour of flowers in night
Was not, and is not of themselves alone
Nor of the dawn-beam, but of both made one,—
A marriage-mystery of earth and light!
O undiscovered world that all about us lies
When spirit to Spirit surrenders, and like young Love sees
Heaven with human eyes!
World of radiant morning! Joy's untravelled region!
Why lies it solitary? and O why tarry we?
Why daily wander out from Paradise?

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III.4

World-besieging Storm, from horizon heaped and menacing
Rear up the walls of thunder, till they tower
Shattering over earth, and from heart to heart reverberate,
Lancing that bright fear through the ruin-shower!
Revel, Winds, severing the bough of leafy promises
With rages from returning chaos sent!
Mockers and Destroyers, come; here is Man, predestinate
To all your arrows at his bosom bent.
Strip him of his splendours, of his conquests and dominions,
His secure boast to be earth's lord enthroned,
Humble him: he stands forth greater in his nakedness
Than in the wealth and safety that he owned.
He that has so loved peril in all experience,
He that has gone with Sorrow all her way,
Will not now refuse or shrink; prove him to the innermost,
With worse than worst confront him: come what may,
Lo, you awake, O Trumpets of Calamity,
Some fragment of old Darkness in his breast;
Lo, to him fraternal is the stony and the terrible place:
His stricken Genius out of deeps unguessed
Rises up, grappling his reality to reality,
And still the secret in himself explores,
Bound beyond fear, the discovered and discoverer,
And in his own soul touches farthest shores.
Though he be stript of all, Powers from far replenish him,
Powers of the streaming worlds that through him stream.
O throbbing heart, O lifted arms, O tenderness,
O only capable of grief supreme!
O earth for ever mingled with unearthliness

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Because the eternal with the brief is twined!
Wonder of breath that is momentary and tremulous
Suffices him who breathes eternal mind.
Vision that dawns beyond knowledge shall deliver him
From all that flattered, threatened, foiled, betrayed.
Lo, having nothing, he is free of all the universe,
And where light is, he enters unafraid.

THE IDOLS

AN ODE

Luce intellettual, piena d' amore

PRELUDE

Lo, the spirit of a pulsing star within a stone
Born of earth, sprung from night!
Prisoned with the profound fires of the light
That lives like all the tongues of eloquence
Locked in a speech unknown!
The crystal, cold and hard as innocence,
Immures the flame; and yet as if it knew
Raptures or pangs it could not but betray,
As if the light could feel changes of blood and breath
And all-but-human quiverings of the sense,
Throbs of a sudden rose, a frosty blue,
Shoot thrilling in its ray,
Like the far longings of the intellect
Restless in clouding clay.

Who has confined the Light? Who has held it a slave,
Sold and bought, bought and sold?
Who has made of it a mystery to be doled,
Or trophy, to awe with legendary fire,
Where regal banners wave?
And still into the dark it sends Desire.
In the heart's darkness it sows cruelties.
The bright jewel becomes a beacon to the vile,

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A lodestar to corruption, envy's own:
Soiled with blood, fought for, clutched at; this world's prize,
Captive Authority. Oh, the star is stone
To all that outward sight,
Yet still, like truth that none has ever used,
Lives lost in its own light.

Troubled I fly. O let me wander again at will
(Far from cries, far from these
Hard blindnesses and frozen certainties!)
Where life proceeds in vastness unaware
And stirs profound and still:
Where leafing thoughts at shy touch of the air
Tremble, and gleams come seeking to be mine,
Or dart, like suddenly remembered youth,
Like the ache of love, a light, lost, found, and lost again.
Surely in the dusk some messenger was there!
But, haunted in the heart, I thirst, I pine.—
Oh, how can truth be truth
Except I taste it close and sweet and sharp
As an apple to the tooth?

I.1

On a starr'd, a still mid-night
Lost I halted, lost I gazed about.
Great shapes of trees branched black into the sky:
There was no way but wandered into doubt;
There was no light
In the uncertain desert of dim air
But such as told me of all that was not I,—
Of powers absorbed, intent, and active without sound,
That rooted in their unimagined might,
Over me there ignoring towered and spread.
Homeless in my humanity, and drowned
In a dark world, I listened, all aware;
And that world drew me.
The shadowy crossing of the boughs above my head

353

Enmeshed me as with undecipherable spells:
The silence laid invisible hands upon my heart,
And the Night knew me.

She put not forth her full power, well I knew:
She only toyed
With reason, used to sunshine flatteries,
The praise of happy senses, trusted true,
And smile of stable Earth's affirming ease.
Yet even in this her ante-room I felt,
Near me, that void
Without foundation, roof, or bound, or end,
Where the eyes fast from their food, the heavenly light,
The untallied senses falter, being denied,
The mind into itself is pressed, is penned,
Even memoried glories of experience melt
Into one mapless, eyeless, elemental Night.
It was so near
That like a swimmer toiled in a full-streaming tide
Drawing him unawares down the unsounded seas,
My soul sank into fear.

O for one far beam of the absenting sun!
O for a voice to assure me, and to release
Out of this clutching silence! There is none:
Shadow on shadow, and stillness on stillness
Enclose me, and fasten round.
Is this a world which Day never has known?
A world made only of doubt and dream and dread?
Is this the interior Night of the dark human soul,
And the immaterial blackness branching from the ground
A fearful forest that itself has sown
Against the stars to tower,—
Stars that dispense their faint uncertain dole
Of light, that darkness may the more abound?
Whither am I come? Where have my wandered feet
Brought me on circling steps, led by what furtive power?

354

Alas! in this dumb gloom wherein my spirit gropes
Only myself I meet.

Only myself; but in what strange image
Encountered and phantasmally surprised!
This thing of stealth that rises from the shrouds of sleep,
I know it, I with shuddering guess presage
An enemy,—the native of the night
That in me was disguised.
Hollow-echoing caverns where blind rivers creep
With soundless motion; ice-cold, sudden breath
Of climbing cloud, at whose abstracting touch
The upholding rock seems baseless as the mist;
Black silence in the eagle's captive stare
Empty of all but the baulked lust of death,
Could not oppress so much.
Even that which in the dark brain says “I am,”
Desperate in its faltering to persist,
Flickers like an expiring lamp's last leap of flame
To leave me I know not where.

Let not the beautiful world perish and cease!
My heart cries, freezing in its secret cells.
Let me not be extinguished in the abyss,
Losing the blessèd touch and taste of things,
Earth's heaven of hues and smells!
I am so far from worlds where any fountain springs,
Sunken into this placeless dungeon-dream,
That holds me without wall, or roof, or door.
The light is only legend: I begin
To give away my being like a stream
Wandering among unshapen shapes, that spin
A world of unintelligible dread;
And this world seeks me for its own!
All is dissolved, nothing has meaning more.
Each moment heaps an age of time above my head.
It is the very Mind of Darkness I am in,
Lost, and alone, alone!

355

I.2

The Forests of the Night awaken blind in heat
Of black stupor; and stirring in its deep retreat,
I hear the heart of Darkness slowly beat and beat.

As if Earth, shrouded dense in gloom,
Shuddered in her guilty womb;
As if a power from under earth
Would bring some monstrous spirit to birth;
As if a spirit ran pursued
And sobbing through the shadowy wood;
Ghostly throbs of sound begin
To circle from the distance in,
A phantom beating, dulled, remote,
With madness in its fever-note.

I know not what about me or what above me oppresses
The suffocating air; but fear within me guesses
A peopling of the caverned glooms, miasma-cold recesses.

Leaves depending still, still,
Bronzed to blackness, spill
Dead light from a sinking moon,
Wholly to be sunken soon,
Wandering down a desert coast
At the horizon's end, a lost
Eternal exile from the Day,
Whence she stole a perished ray
That falls from off those fingered fronds,
Black as vipers, cold as bronze.

O is it from my heart or from the darkness round,
The far reverberation, the dull throb of sound,
A pulse, a fearful pulse, in air or underground?

Closer, quicker, through the heat
Drones, insists, the incessant beat.

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Round in shuddering circle comes
Beat on frenzied beat of drums,
Nearer in from every side
Thudding, madly multiplied,
To seize the heart and blind the brain
With a monotone insane.
Terrible, terrible in continuance,
It holds me fastened in a trance.

O for a spirit that is not mine, to bear
This weight of the unfathomable night!
O for a spirit of more than mortal might
To take upon him this my load
Of infinitely wide world-quivering fear!
O for a Demon or a God
In saving presence to appear!

What is it that my eyes amid the gloom divine
There in the furtive filterings of the ghast moonshine?
What bodies sway and cry and to the ground incline?

The fear that held me falls apart,
But leaves a horror in my heart.
Stony, stony, of blank stone,
Fixt on that secret altar-throne,
Inhuman human Shape, with hands on knees,
With remote stare that nothing, nothing sees,
Yet is a magnet to a thousand eyes,
A thousand forms that crouch, scenting the scent of blood,
Beat breasts and writhe before you with ejected cries,—
Unbrothered beast, abominable God!
Who made you, and shaped you into more than breath
Can give a will to? What power drove the hand
With terror strong as lust, to shape you there
Immovable as Death,
And carve the rock of darkness in the mind
To horrible resemblance of my kind?

357

Lost Light, sunken Light!
From what I am, save me!
The fever-beat of sound is in my veins.
I breathe the black, blood-smelling air.
The ecstasy of fear, the blind throb in the breast,
I share it, I must share.
It is not I, I cry;
Yet it is I.
These are the powers that crave me;
This is the full dominion of the Night.

The victims, ah, the victims shriek and die:
And on them the eternal Idol stares.
But they have made him incense of their prayers,
Voluptuously have knelt before their own
Black terror, bodied into stone.
Not the expiring cry
So lacerates my mind, while without end
Through ages up the altar-fumes ascend,
And fading into shadow, from their bodies rent,
Stream spirits without number to conceive,—
But this, O victims, this, that you consent,
That you believe!

They were all human. My heart falters: how
That infinite bond refuse?
Like last reverberations of a bell
That in their ebb and last expiry tell
Of stupefying clamour, when it heaved
And shook its tower to the foundation,—now
Whispers out of the dark accuse, accuse:
I have consented, I have believed.

I.3

There is singing of brooks in the shadow, and high in a stainless
Solitude of the East
Ineffable colour ascends like a spirit awaking:
Slowly Earth is released.

358

It is dawn, it is dawn, the light is budding and breaking.

Earth is released, flowing out from the void of the darkness
Into body and bloom;
Flowing out from the nameless immensity, night, where she waited
Myriad forms to resume,
Gloriously moulded, as if in her freshness created.

The lineaments of the hills, serene in their order,
Arise, and the trees
With their motionless fountains of foliage, perfect in slumber;
And by lovely degrees
The blades of the grass re-appear, minute without number.

The rounded rock glistens and warms, where the water slips by it,
Familiar of old.
The tree stretches up to the air its intimate branches
Bathing in gold;
And the dew-dazzle colours in fire the lichen it blanches.

Each is seen in its beauty of difference, deeply companioned,
Leaf, root, and the stone,
And drawn by the light from their dream in earth's prison, emerging
Distinct in their own
Form, from the formless a million natures are urging.

I see them, I know them, I name them, I share in their being;
I am not betrayed:
I feel in my fibre the touch of a spirit that knows me;

359

For this was I made;
In a world of delight and of wonder my senses enclose me.

Whence come they, the water-brooks? Out of the mountainous darkness,
Where no life is seen,
From caverns of night are they come, but because of their springing
Meadows laugh to be green;
And hearing the voice of their carol, the children go singing.

The children go singing, they read in the books of the Light
Things hidden from the sage.
Unschooled are their bodies, that run like a ripple and fear not
Coming of grief and age:
The sighs of the night, the doubt in the shadow, they hear not.

Lo, single mid grasses a flower upspringing before me
In delicate poise
Takes the light like a kiss from an innocent mouth, as it quivers
Confiding its joys
To the air, and my heart from its prison of self it delivers.

I stand in the dew and the radiance, my shadow behind me,
Lost out of thought.
The bright beams ascend, and ascending, from earth they uncover
The secret they sought.
Enter me; make me afresh, O Light, my lover!

360

I.4

Why are these beams so twined with sweetness and with pain,
Injury and anger, fear, and all desire,
Whose purity should stream through pulse and brain
Not thickened in dull fume or frayed with fire
But absolute and whole
Into the central soul
Disclouded from those lures and all their train,
Knowing what is and is not; white and bare
As the bathed body quit of day's disguise?
But the only truth is coloured with the secret stain
Of our mortality, that unaware
Infects the farthest vision of the eyes
And region of invisible thought: Vain, vain
That throbbing search! The Light
Is more profound, more secret than the Night.

Who has built an airy mansion for the unresting mind
To inhabit and rejoicing contemplate,—
A many-pillared universe, designed
In order clear, complete and intricate,
Intelligible wonder, not
Too vast to hold man's lot,—
But he has waked on some malignant morn to find
The certainty, too certain to be true,
Distasted, and that palace only a maze
Wherein he wanders and is still confined,
The pillars of it fallen, and no clue,
But through the ruin penetrates a blaze
Of glory beyond glory and of light behind
The light: and the strength fails in him; he knows
Himself lost in a world that overflows.

Yet no power stills the ache or stops the springing need.
The dark creative spiritual Desire
Seizes upon his heart which holds that seed
And straightway, till the last of breath expire,

361

Like tool upon the wheel
Sharpened the more to feel,
He counts all else waste,—honour, wealth, a weed:
The burden of the beauty is too great,
The eternal mystery in the heart a wound,
Until his vision in the end be freed,
Until he has spent his all to incarnate
An airy spirit upon earthly ground,—
Forms for a God to dwell in and exceed
This fading flesh. Alas! from godlike shapes
Some yet diviner essence still escapes.

O that the form which once kindled to ecstasy
The rapt gazer, and freed him, should become
A cold thing to appraise with leisure's eye,
A beauty disinherited and dumb!
Whither is the spirit flown
From the forsaken stone
That seemed our sunken selves to deify?
O that the thought, the word, which into the heart leapt
Pregnant with light and troubling even to tears,
Should fade and wither, should grow old and dry,
By repetition dulled upon the ears
Like cheapened courtesies the lips accept,
And falsehood, custom cares not to deny;
A scumm'd and stirless pool, a frozen rut,
A path deserted, a door shut.

But that the life should be less living than the dead,
This is the worst; that perfect form and word
Should perish of perfection, yet be fed
With incense still, and duteously adored;
A name prostrate the throng
The presence moved among
Unrecognized; neglected and forsaken bled!
Time's treachery sleeks and glozes to our use
The bright eternal bareness: dearer grows
To mortals what is mortal, comforted
Mid alteration rather to keep truce

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With the ancestral darkness than oppose
Too arduous scrutiny: by dreams we are led
Content: to pleasure us, our truth decays.
The God departs, the Idol stays.

II.1.

I have heard voices under the early stars
Where, among hills, the cold roads glimmer white,—
Voices of shadows passing, each to the other,
Clear in the airy stillness
Call their familiar greeting and Good-night.

Were they not come as guests to a remembered room,
Those words, surrounded by the befriending silence?
But words, ah, words—who can tell what they are made of,
Or how inscrutably shaped to colour and bloom?
Sharp odours they breathe, and bitter and sweet and strong,
Born from exultation, endurance, and desire;
Flying from mind to mind, to bud a thought again,
Spring, and in endless birth their wizard power prolong.

There was a voice on a sun-shafted stair
That sang; I heard it singing:
The very trees seemed listening to their roots
Out in the sunshine, and like drops in light
The words rained on the grasses greenly springing.

Ah, lovely living words, what have we done to you?
Each infant thought a soul exulting to be born
Into a body, a breath breathed from the lips, a word
Dancing, tingling, pulsing, a body fresh as dew!
Once in the bonds of use manacled and confined
How have we made you labour, thinned from beauty and strength,

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Dulled with our dullness, starved to the apathy of a serf,
Outcast in streets, abandoned foundlings of the mind!

Yet once, in stillness of night's stillest hour,
Words from the page I read
Rose like a spirit to embrace my spirit.
Their radiant secret shook me: earth was new;
And I throbbed, like one wakened from the dead.

O swift words, words like flames, proud as a victor's eye,
Words armed and terrible, storming the heart, sending
Waves of love, and fear, and accusation over
Peoples,—kindling, changing! Alas, but can you die,
Hardened to wither round the thought wherein you grew?
Become as the blind leading with slow shuffle the blind,
Heavy like senseless stones the savage kneels before?
O shamed, O victim words, what have we done to you?

II.2

The Presses are awake. Under the midnight cloud,
Mid labyrinthine silence of the spectral streets,
Sound upon darkness beats,
A pulse, quivering aloud
Insanely, as if a fever throbbed in stone,
As if a demon plied in palpitating gloom
The hurry of his loom
To weave that tissue, white for an instant, then
Populated with words, shadows of thought and act,
Death, birth, fear, madness, joy, disaster, packed
Headlong into a medley, a monotone
Indifferently echoing alike
Laughter and the moan of men!

364

In the avaricious gloom a secret Ear
Sucks with a whirlpool greed out of the skies
Words, voiceless words, drawn in from far and near,
Bubble-blown rumour, whisperings like spies,
The knife-stab in the night, the fall of thrones,
Alarm of nations like a beating bell,
Jubilant feat, and misery grey,
Caught from all corners of the air pell-mell
In a voice that no man owns,
That a multitude of brazen masks shall shout
To the multitudes of Day.

The few stars, solitary in heights of night
Thieved by the cloud, shine and are dimmed again,
Though none puts out their light.
So solitary in the heart is pain,
Solitary the Dream,
Solitary the Vow, solitary the Deed!
There is no room for these
In that invisible cloud, woven of things that seem,
Sure of accepting softness and the greed
That it shall cling to and make cheaply wise,—
An all-uniting web of lies and of half-lies
And lying silences.

Into my ear, remote, remote, is blown
Out of the darkness and across the seas
Sound of a forest falling, young bodies of trees
One by one falling prone,
To be tamed to a helpless tissue, and to feed
The insatiate Presses' need.
Oh, did they spring to scent the blue silence of air
And sway slow to the wind, launching the light-winged birds?
Ghosts only are there,
The ghosts of trees that shoot no fresh leaf any more
But, drones of darkness, in the midnight bear
Black myriads of words.

365

Invisibly the night thickens with words that glide
Driven thronging on blind errands, soon to fall
Into a million minds, and glorified
To be their momentary oracle,
Glitter, and then—they are like the innumerable snow
Chance-timed, indifferent, random, swift and slow
That falls to a stillness out of whirling flurry;
And workers heavy-eyed
That under the chill cloud of morning hurry,
Muffled against the shiver in the blood,
Soil it at every stride,
Till each articulate crystal whiteness is confused,
And where the moment's wonder shone is mud,
Trodden, stale, and used.

II.3

Hewn and heavy, of granite hewn
Heavy and hard, the walls ascend
Bare, without measure to the eye:
Indifferent to night or noon,
Over pavement they impend.
Locked, impassive, huge, the Door
Stands caverned in the midst: on high,
Ruled and squared, the lintel stone
Bears the carven Janitor,
Justice, blind upon her throne.
Her no praying hands implore:
To her bound eyes no eyes plead.
Reason's idol, calm she sits,
Weighing only the gross deed,
Scrupulous with mind unsoiled
Not to know the thoughts that bleed
In the dumb soul, fluttering, beating
Hither, thither in its cage
Of ancestral ignorance foiled,
Rushing blinded into rage
And its own desire defeating.

366

Behind the door, within the wall
Locked, they sit, the numbered ones,
Secret from each other, all
Lost to name, like spectres passed
From the region of the sun's
Changeful glory on young limbs
Free to dance and free to leap.
From the acted thought they fast:
Them a roof of silence dims.
The midnight stars move over them;
They move not; but ruled times they keep
With the shadows on the floor.
They are mortised in a scheme,
Where the walls and fastened door,
Built of words that are become
Stones, are like their spirits dumb.

In ripened rustle of the corn
The wind becomes a flowing flame;
As swift it curves and slow relents
The body of a wave is born.
It passes—whither? No one knows;
But in the vision that consents
It is the beauty it became.
The wind blows and the spirit blows,
No moment ever yet the same,
And fresher than a sparkling spring
The unrepeated beauty flows;
And in the child that claps his hands
To see the daisy on the green,
And in the young man where he stands
Poised for the naked plunge; and in
The invisible bursting of the bud,
The leafing of the bough, that sends
Lightness like laughter through the blood
Of dancing girls, its wave is seen;
It flows and sings and never ends!
And flowers, trembling heavenly hues
In a lonely mountain place,

367

And chiming water's liquid curve,
The torrent's white, rock-ruffled race
Freed for splendour of its swerve,
And clouds that steal the solemn blues
Of noon, unregioned in their trace,
Or, ghostly travellers, invade
The mountains they dissolve in dream;
And mazes of the stars that fade
At dawn, still moving, lost in light;—
All, all the threads of music bind
Together in the visioned mind:
Eternity has imaged them.

O lovely is their secret Law
Timing all their motions true.
They know it not, yet they obey
Without thought and without awe,
Of that fountain unaware
Which they spring from and renew,
Finding out their missioned way,
Everywhere, oh, everywhere!
It is wild as a wild rose
And fearful as the weltering wave.
It is courage to the brave,
Wisdom to the eye that knows.
But we have bound it as with cords,
We have built it into stone,
All its motions frozen stark
Round a hidden human moan.
We have made it old and dark
Out of maiming thought and fears,
And the things our fears forbid,
Out of self-hurt and of rue.
We have built it into words,
And the words are stones! We did
What we could not help but do,—
We, the eternal Prisoners.

Break the word and free the thought!
Break the thought and free the thing!

368

But who in any net has caught
The wind, or in a sieve the spring?
As soon shall he dissever these,
Through which the life-blood single streams
From germ unknown to fruit unguessed,
Nourished with wonder and with dreams,
In its deep essence unpossessed
And smiling out of mysteries.
The flower is in the bud, the bud
Within the seed, beneath the ground.
But all is flowing of one flood
That is not seen, that is not bound.

This palace-prison of the mind
How in the youthful morn it glows!
Its windows flame with angel-light,
Auroral flushes of the rose,
And all the airs of heaven invite
With miracle of breathing blue
And shifting glory of sun and showers
To ecstasy and song,—and who
Remembers how therein confined
In sunken cells are captive powers,
Powers that a jailer fetters close
With chains of the invisible hours,
To one another hardly known
In furtive glimpse, and each alone?
O marvel of the world, O bright
And luminous palace, built to hold
The light of heaven within its walls
Precious with glory as of gold,
Why comes the night, why comes the night,
When, as about it the sky falls
Filled with the dark, it seems to stand
A dark tower in a lonely land!

II.4

In the wonder of dreams on a wave of the sky buoyed
My body was the body of a wish, the word of a thought

369

Uttered whole from a throb of the heart in a cry's delight.
Never bird out of Africa beating a golden void,
Shifting the coloured regions that Spring has caught,
Pursued the desire of its being in flight
Happier: Time an idle ruin gleamed
Where vision flamed or flowered or streamed.

Slow, slow the mind gropes back to curb and term
Of this strange world; to Time that's used, and all
The enclosing, age-descended ritual,
The invisible garment, cobweb-fine and firm,
Wherein the limbs move to the ancestral call,
And hands repeat what dead hands did before,
And the mind lingers as behind a door.
The hinted glory of liberty is fled,
And in its stead
Is only the shadow of Man's ancient nurse,
Dear Custom, at whose knees he learnt the ways
Of his uncounted tribe, schooled to rehearse
Cruelty and folly, and, ere he comprehend,
Make these his virtue, so to earn her praise.

Massive as mountain to his childish gaze
Is that unmoved authority of power,
His fibre trembles to offend.
And slow as the Earth is in her seasons, she
Befriends and punishes like sun and shower;
Well-used to tears and the heart-broken hour,
Smoulder of mutiny and anger, tamed in the end,
Indulgent of a laughter brief as those,
For all come back at night-fall to her knee,
When the old shadows descend.
With mutter upon her lips, with eyes half blind,
Buried mysteries she knows.
With dark fountains of ignorance in her mind,
How wise she seems, amassed in ancient certitudes!
Her silences, how comfortably kind!
The human slowly grows
Inhuman, where she broods.

370

And if a solitary spirit would wrest
His wrongs away from what so closely cleaves,
And break into the world that he believes,
Betrayers from within, crying Traitor! seek
To pull him back, securely weak,
In passiveness: he sucked it from her breast.

O away and away and afar from this alien home,
Where spirits are woven together in words of fear,
Released into innocence let me have being and breath!
But is it alone by mercy of dreams that I roam,
Liberated to joy's essential sphere,
In an antechamber of birth or beyond death?
All flushes around me and then dissolves away.
The heavenly dawning closes gray.

II.5

Once, only once, never again, never,
The idle curve my hand traces in air,
The first flush on the cloud, lost in the morning's height,
Meeting of the eyes and tremble of delight,
Before the heart is aware
Gone! to return, never again, never!

Futurity flows toward me, all things come
Smooth-flowing, and ere this pulse beat they are bound
In fixity that no repenting power can free;
They are with Egypt and with Nineveh,
Cold as a grave in the ground;
And still, undated, all things toward me come.

Why is all strange? Why do I not grow used?
The ripple upon the stream that nothing stays,
The bough above, in glory of warm light waving slow,
Trouble me, enchant me, as with the stream I flow

371

Lost into the endless days.
Why is all strange? Why do I not grow used?

Eternity! Where heard I that still word?
Like one that, moving through a foreign street,
Has felt upon him bent from far some earnest look,
Yet sees not whence, and feigns that he mistook,
I marvel at my own heart-beat.
Eternity! how learnt I that far word?

III.1

Not for pity and pardon, for Judgment now I cry!
To be seen, that I may see; known, that I may know,
For this I cry.
Dwelling among dear images dream-created,
Flattered or daunted by a deluding mirror
That is not I,—
O to taste the light as my body tastes the air,
Let fall defence, cast off the obstinately excusing
Pleas, and myself be my only vindication!
Nothing but this in the end can satisfy.

Why does this desire pursue me and so possess me?
Is not breath sweet, and the young smile of the morning?
Yet inly to know
That I am bound in a net of minutes and of hours,
Inheriting bondages of habit, and fear,
And ancient woe;
To be rooted so deep in lost ages of time,
With tendrils of hope and want and frail repining,
The ignorant accomplice of purposes abhorred:
This thought is my companion and my foe.

Sometimes to fly to some remoteness of the air
To perceive with different senses, a new body,
I pine and ache;
As on this bed of self, whereon I am bound, I toss

372

Day and night, filled with ineffectual longing
That bond to break.
O yet, enslaved, I know not to what I am enslaved:
Only this husk and shard of what I am, this fond
Dreamer of dreams, eater and drinker of untruth,
This only I know, and this cannot forsake.

Wondrous glories crowd into the eye's treasure-chamber,
Wondrous harmonies linger in the ear's recesses,
Stored for delight.
But beyond the ear's compass what modulations fine
Tremble, and what marvels unapprehended sparkle
Beyond the sight!
Oh, and beyond the mind's capacity of conceiving,
Much less of measuring, amplitudes of wisdom,
Fit to sustain eternal serenity and courage,
While we go clouded, faltering, finite!

Were I stationed in the sun, to behold the worlds
Not nightly in declension but in dance triumphant
And timeless rolled;
Had I the vision, closed to the eye's horizon,
Labyrinths of an unimagined minuteness
In the mind to hold;
Could I attain the greatest and assume the least,
Shrink to be a blade of the innumerable grass,
Soar eagle-winged amid the altitudes of noontide,
Then might I measure, and what I am behold.

But rained over with riches of hours and moments,
Meshing me as a lily, thick with honeyed light,
The drunken bee;
Intoxicated with wild sweetnesses of sense,
Fullness of the opened heart, glory of earth, and beauty
Enamouring me,—
Roofed in a den I am, a poor captive rather
Who sits in fetters eyeing the barred, the precious blue,

373

Where high in the envied air a cloud lingers in light
And wings fly whither they desire to be.

Lying in the night I hear from graves unnumbered,
Under stars that have seen all history passing,
The indignant cry:
Must we only in effigy and phantom be remembered,
Malignly obscured or mocked with gilded pretences,
Wherefrom we fly?
Will none unwind these cerements? none lift up from us
This load of false praise and false fortune's betrayal?
Let us be known in nakedness of our nature!
Deliver us from dominion of the lie!

As if they wandered in deserts and groped in caves,
I hear the exclaiming of disenchanted spirits
In bitter lament
Beholding the barren things for which they wasted
The world, the pitiable causes whereon their breath
And blood were spent!
Was this the Light, this little candle at noon? This loathed
Cruelty, the righteousness for which they thirsted,
Sacrificing to invisible idols of the mind?
They see. But who hears? This world is content.

Perfect Experience! Is not the mind worthy
This, when for glimpses only and shining fragments
The martyrs bled?
Majesty and splendour of overcoming vision,
Vision all-judging, certain and universal,
Not this I dread,
But to remain banished into a parcelled being,
Eternized in all these faculties of error!
Better a perfect oblivion in Earth's vastness,
By that eternal ignorance comforted.

Yet does my heart not cease from its supplication,
Yet I remember and cannot be satisfied,

374

By Time oppressed.
And, as if summoned and drawn whither I know not,
Clinging into earth with strong fibres of nature,
In dark unrest
I burn like a seed that in burial forgotten
Pushes its hope up, growing in blind affiance
Toward the light shining over an unconceived world,
There to be lost, illumined and released.

III.2

In my dream there was a Door.
Dark on my musing path it stood
Before me, and straightway I knew
(The certainty ran through my blood)
That, did I open and pass through,
I should know all for evermore.
Those slow hinges, and that weight
Relenting on them, would unroll
The hidden map of all my fate
And all the world and the world's soul.

Who has trembled not at doors?
Motionless, they shake the heart.
Hope and menace on them hang:
They are the closed lips' counterpart
Wherein the sentence is concealed
For leaping joy or lancing pang.
Ah, what answer will they yield?
Will it be barren as the shores
That endless waves beat, like a knell
Slowly repeated to Time's end?
Or will it be the ineffable
Still radiance that shall all amend,
Melting out Time's ancient stain?
Will they open on sunrise
Everlasting, or will they
Close upon the light again,
Like eyelids closing over eyes
That see for the last time the day?

375

Is it not by such ancient dread
Inspired,—the warning doubt of what
Our prospering spirits has full-fed
With certainties by hope begot—
That on his progress proud we raise
For the returning conqueror
The arch, the immaterial door,
So he may pass, amid the blaze
And loud acclaim at glory's height,
Beneath a shadow of the night,
Where the hinted powers take toll
Of what is mortal in the soul?

O Door, like sealed fatal decree,
Image of death, image of birth,
Ever uncertain certainty!
O silence as of silent earth,
O silence into substance built,
O night projected into day,
O still unspoken Yea or Nay,
O brimming vessel still unspilt,
O end that meets us on the way!
What lies behind your blank accost?
Is it the treasure we have lost
And laboured wearily to recover?
Or something that we never knew,—
Another mind with other measures
Laughing to scorn our pangs and pleasures?
Is it at last the only true,
The unknown Love, the unknown Lover?

With all my soul at earnest gaze
Fixed upon that silent Door,
I stretched my hand the latch to raise,
I lifted up my hand, and then
Some power forbade me, and I forbore.

In the changes of my dream
I was borne to a far place

376

Empty and wide, and all a-gleam
With sunlit quivering of the grass.
There rose before me, vast and blind,
A towered prison, walled and old;
It seemed a prison-house so great
It could have held all human-kind.
In the midst there was a gate.
And as I dreamed my dream, behold
I saw the prisoners released.
The gates rolled back; and forth they came
Stumbling in the light that smote
Full on them from the dazzling East.
Like knives it stabbed them; like a flame
It seared them; with their hands they hid
Their faces, or as if by rote
Stretched out vain arms, to touch and feel
Familiar walls closing around;
Then, lacking fetters, halted lame
Waiting to do what they were bid.
Their helpless motions made as though
They would run back, or fall, or kneel
Or hide themselves beneath the ground.
This way and that they looked to go.
O never may I see again
Such looks of blank and empty pain!
They were looks of men betrayed
And of their naked souls afraid.
But some there were, a few, that stood
And stretched their arms up to the sun,
As if the light streamed through their blood,
As if their breath was now begun;
As if their spirits till then had slept,
As if they never yet had known
The world of life that was their own.
These it was, not those, who wept.
Was it for pity of all that sad
Throng, or the extreme joy they had?
O that on earth I could have sight
Of those faces, and that light!

377

III.3

I am laid within a place of summer leaves.
Solid boles mount through foliage out of sight.
No shadow lacks some intimacy of light,
No penetrating radiance but receives
Shadowy immersion. Dream
Is on me, is on the hushed, the thronged and drowsing glow.
Even the thoughts emerging from the mind,
Like voices in a sleeping city, seem
Reproved. This is old Earth, so old and kind,
That she is lenient in her overflow
To all things human. Why, why tease the sense
For a hope to a fear unmated?
Why rend the rich seam of experience?
Why toss upon thoughts frustrated?

Each way appears a closing avenue,
Leading, among warm scents, I know not where.
But Whither is to the idle mind no care,
For always there is fragrance of some clue
Neglected, that might guide
As in a trance the veiled soul to its unknown peace:
Peace such as comes like lips laid upon lips,
A brimmed oblivion of all else beside;
Like anchorage to tempest-blinded ships
When the thwart waves resign, and the winds cease.
Earth with warm arms embrace me, and let me feel,
Feel only, a wonder working,
Until the tender and still sense reveal
The secrets round me lurking.

Now might you come back, old divinities,
Earth-born, from cradling green and lost recess,
Serene in your unclouded nakedness,
To enrich the mirror of my musing eyes.
As fruit on the rough bough
Globes itself, the last golden glory of the tree,

378

Smooth from wild earth the human image rose;
And what diviner shape should hear the vow
Of mortals, or what else their secret knows,
Though past the ache of our mortality?
Shall I not sacrifice unrest and fume
On an altar here secluded?
Let the vext mind re-open like a bloom
Upon which the light has brooded?

Delay me from the sight that only sees!—
Frost of a dawn disclosing the world bare,
And, stript of splendour, all things as they are,
When stiffened grasses and stark branches freeze
And the mind shrinks apart
With all the living colours famished out of it.
O kindly mediation, interpose
Images of those forms that hold the heart,
Warm, wondrous forms whereinto the world flows
To bloom and to perfect them: O admit
Certitude to obscurity awhile,
As cloud in the light suspended.
Gracious is Earth; not far her secret smile:
And here is the soul befriended.

Only such sorrow as lingered in the gaze
Of Proserpine, returning from the dark,
Such tears as filled her, listening to the lark
And looking on the flower that springs and sways,—
All humanized for her
As even the shadows were, when she was throned in night;
No more than these, to enhance the glowing day
Shall enter where the green leaves are astir!
Shall I not be sufficed, and charm away
Perplexities to soft and shadowy flight?
Shall I not now—O whence is this breath come
Of Time in a stealing chillness?
Why cries my heart out? Why are all things dumb,
And strange, strange the stillness?

379

III.4

Whisper to me, whisper! I have listened and have not heard.
Whisper to me, you leaves; have you not more to say?
Now at the ebb of the low evening ray
Whisper some word left over from the day,
The one word, the lost word!—
So I cried; and then was stilled.
For suddenly, unsought, unwilled,
I knew not how, I knew not whence,
There came a lightening of the sense;
I found an answer from within,
That made me to the stars akin;
My pulse obeyed the lovely Law;
With ears I heard, with eyes I saw;
And one leaf, veined with green, indwelling light
Seemed the world's secret and absorbed me quite.
Eternity through a moment
Sparkled; I could not turn away my sight.

What thing, long contemplated, alters not
Its seeming substance, as the deepening mind
By contemplation passes out of thought,
Immenser worlds to find?
The Mother as she clasps her infant boy,
Bent over him with the deep looks of joy,
Becomes her own hope; oh, she stays
Not with the idol of her gaze,
But she is gone beyond her farthest prayer
And Time's last injury, to meet him there.
All that distracts him from her bosom now,—
White butterflies, a waving bough—
Presages the usurping world: she grows
To something more than fear and hope forebode,
Wide as the sky. He goes
Out of her heart's possession;
Yet in her arms he lies, that stranger and that God.

Free on its wings the mind can hover, worlds away,
To where the vast Atlantic stream

380

Dwindles to a watery gleam,
And like a star in bright noonday
The body's home is lost.
The mind can tell me that these mossed
Gray boulders in green shadow deep,
Appearing sunk and socketed in sleep,
Beneath their image of repose
Are all a dizzy motion whirled,
A streaming dust our sight so gross
Confuses to a solid world.
Never mortal eye has seen
Those minim motes, no thought can lodge between,
So restless in their secret fever
They dance invisibly for ever.
Alone the soul has knowledge of release;
Only in the soul is stillness,
Poised to receive a universe in peace.

Only in the soul is stillness! I remember an hour,—
It was the May-month and wild throats were singing
From bough to bough that breathed in bud and flower,
And the full grass was springing
Beneath an old gray tower—
I remember those blue, scented airs,
And how I came at unawares
Beside the daisied border of a mead
Upon a pool so magically clear,
It made each coloured pebble and furry weed
And star-grained sand within its depth appear
Like things of Paradise, unearthly bright;—
No surface seemed to intervene
Fairy floor and eye between,
Save for a traceless quivering of the light,
Gentle as breathing sleep, where stole
Up from its pregnant darkness
The living spring, as private as the soul.

Love from its inward well, a secret wonder, arising
Clear as the trembling water-spring,

381

A spirit that knows not anything,
Simple in the world and nought despising,
Changes all it meets,—the stone
Becomes a gem, the weed a rose;
But oh, within itself it grows
By all it touches, all it makes its own,
Vast and multitudinous, a Power
To act, to kindle and to dower
In pain's and fear's despite
With glory of unending light.
O fountain in my heart, I feel you now
Full and resistless, so I nothing scorn.
How could I lose you, how
Ever for an hour forget you?
This is the world whereinto I was born.

Why did I tread long roads, seeking, seeking in vain?
Why did I make lament of the dark night?
Why crouch with images of old affright?
Eternal Moment, hold me again, again,
Bathe me in wells of light!
It is now and it is here
The something beyond all things dear,
The miracle that has no name!
When I am not, then I am:
Having nothing, I have all.
It was my hands that built my prison-wall,
It was my thought that did my thought confine,
It was my heart refrained my heart from love.
Now I am stilled as in a gaze divine,
Now I flow upward from my secret well,
Now I behold what spirit I am of.
The Body is the Word; nothing divides
This blood and breath from thought ineffable.
Hold me, Eternal Moment!
The Idols fade: the God abides.

University of Virginia Library

BOOK V

(1920–1928)

THE SIRENS

AN ODE

PRELUDE

I. THE VICTORIES

[I.1]

I.2

I.3

I.4

II. PENUMBRA

[II.1]

II.2

II.3

II.4

III. THE UNDISCOVERED WORLD

[III.1]

III.2

III.3

III.4

THE IDOLS

AN ODE

PRELUDE

I.1

I.2

I.3

I.4

II.1.

II.2

II.3

II.4

II.5

III.1

III.2

III.3

III.4