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ee eSIntroduction Copyright, 1927, by

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First Modern Library Edition
1927

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|PREFACE

The twentieth century, like the sixteenth, seems
to be one of anthologies, and for so small a thing
as one more collection of verse, where so many
have been before, perhaps no apology is neces-
sary. Explanation, however, is not out of place;
and as the present selection from contemporary
American verse is by no means the first, it will be
as well to be clear about its purpose. That is
quite simple. | have not at all attempted, in the
following pages, to cover the entire field of con-
temporary American poetry, as any one acquainted
with the subject will readily perceive. In America,
as everywhere, the “‘one-poem poet” is a common
the usual anthology he takes

phenomenon, and in
One can, with a little trouble,

an important place.
discover a great many charming poems of this
order. But it has seemed to me more interesting,
for once, to leave these aside, and to compile an
anthology in which fewer poets might figure, and
in which they might, therefore, be more generously
and identifiably represented. Difficulties at once
arise—especially the embarrassing question as to
what it is, precisely, that constitutes importance.

VI can only answer that, though ‘n some cases my
attention has at the outset been directed by the
esteem in which this or that poet is generally held,
in the last analysis the arbiter has been my own
personal taste. I find these poets interesting; not
only for themselves, but also because they suggest,
taken together, that American poetry, at the
moment, is as vigorous and varied as any. I do
not think it is an exaggeration to say that at no
time in the history of American letters has there
been a poctic group so important or so hetero-
geneous. No one would presume to say that these
poets are great, or to predict too generously their
futures. But that is true of any contemporary
writer, and it is certainly not outrageous to sug-
gest that among these fourteen poets are a few,
at any rate, who are as likely to survive as any
poets now living; nor is it outrageous to imagine
that the others, whether they survive in that sense
or not, will have had an influence.

I feel that I must apologize for the absence of
Mr. Carl Sandburg, Mr. Ezra Pound, and Mr.
Edgar Lee Masters, an absence for which my own
critical perversity is alone responsible. The work
of these three poets interests me in the mass, if I
may put it so, but disappoints me in the item. For
the rest, I think it as well to present these poets
without comment, only begging the conservative
reader to be prepared for certain “differences,”
and not too hastily to put these down as inferi-
orities. It would be a strange, and perhaps a

vimelancholy thing, if the American did not, in his
new scene, develop a new manner of seeing, feel-
ing, and thinking. If in the work of these poets
this new manner can be detected and analyzed,
that ought to offer in itself an interesting study.
Certainly, poetry is no poorer for being uttered
now and again in a strange tongue, or with strange
‘ntonations. I do not mean to exaggerate the im-
portance of this strangeness, but merely to point
out that too often the English critic, observing it
as a departure from the English norm, fails to re-
member the number, importance, and inevitability
of the factors which bring it about. The European
who has settled in America, and who has become
the American, uses the English language; but
one must bear constantly in mind that although he
has worked few outward changes in the language,
he has none the less begun very distinctly to
charge it anew with emotional and temperamental
and tactile significances, which arise naturally out
of his adjustment to a new scene. One must be
careful not to ignore the poetry in one s preoccupa-
tion with the “strangeness. ” Furthermore, it is
a mistake, I think, to try to identify, as some critics
have done, the poetry with the strangeness. Let
the strangeness add its odd flavour, certainly. But
American poetry, like any, must obey the prin-
ciples of poetry; and they, whatever they may be,
are presumably constant.

It remains finally to be noted that one poet in
the present collection, Emily Dickinson, is not

Vilcontemporary. Emily Dickinson belongs to the
nineteenth century, and was a contemporary of
Walt Whitman. I include a small selection from
her work, partly because she is not nearly so well
known as she deserves to be, and partly because it
seems to me a wise thing to include, in an an-
thology of the contemporary, one poet of an earlier
generation: the contrast may be suggestive. And
in any case I cannot conceal my feeling that Emily
Dickinson is one of the most remarkable of Amer-
ican poets, and that her poetry is perhaps the
finest, by a woman, in the English language.

My thanks are due to the following publishers
for permission to reprint poems copyrighted by
them:

To the Macmillan Company, of New York, for
the poems of Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson,
selected from his Collected Poems.

To Messrs. Charles Scribners’ Sons, of New
York, for “For a Dead Lady,” from The Town
Down the River, by Mr. Edwin Arlington Rob-
ison.

To the Macmillan Company, of New York, for
the poems of Mr. Vachel Lindsay, selected from
the volumes entitled The Chinese Nightingale,
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven,
and The Congo.

To Harper Brothers, of New York, for Re-
nascence, by Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay.

To Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, of Boston, for the
poems of Miss Amy Lowell, from the volumes,

ViliMen, Women and Ghosts and Pictures of the
Floating World.

To Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, of Boston, for the
poems of Miss Anna Hempstead Branch, from the
volume, Rose of the Wind.

To Henry Holt and Company, of New York,
for the poems of Mr. Robert Frost, from North
of Boston and A Boy’s Will.

To Messrs. Houghton Mifflin, of Boston, for the
poems of Mr. John Gould Fletcher, from Jrradia-
tions: Sand and Spray, and Goblins and Pagodas.

To the Macmillan Company, for the poems of
Mr. John Gould Fletcher, from The Tree of Life.

To Messrs. Boni and Liveright, of New York,
for the poems of “H. D.,”’ from Collected Poems,
by HH. D.*

To Messrs. Little, Brown & Company, of Bos-
ton, for the poems of Emily Dickinson, from
Poems: First Series, Poems: Second Series, Poems:
Third Series, and The Single Hound.

To Mr. Nicholas L. Brown, of New York, for
the poems of Mr., Alfred Kreymborg, from Blood
of Things.

To the Pagan Publishing Company, of New
York, for the poems of Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim,
from Minna and Myself.

To Alfred A. Knopf, of New York, for the
poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot, from Poems.

Conrap AIKEN.CONTENTS

EMILY DICKINSON:

“In Winter,’ 3
The Chariot, 7

The Wind, 10

In the Garden, 11
The Snake, 12

The Storm, 14
Parting, 17

A Snake, 20
Evening, 22

Aurora, 23
Immortality, 24
Trying to Forget, 25

Dying, 27

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON :

Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford, 31
Fragment, 48

The Poor Relation, 50

Eros Turannos, 53

Jobn Gorham, 55

The Gift of God, 59

For a Dead Lady, 61
Flammonde, 62

The Man Against the Sky, 66

ANNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCH:

   

The Monk in the Kitehen, 81
the Golden Bowl is Broken, 86

xi

EreAMY LOWELL:

 

Vernal Equinox, 91

Solitaire, 92

Merchandise, 93

Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String, 94
1777, 96

The City of Falling Leaves, 98

A Lady, 104

ROBERT FROST:

The Road Not Taken, 107
Home Burial, 108

The Wood-Pile, 114

The Fear, 116

Birches, 122

The Sound of the Trees, 125
Hyla Brook, 126

The Oven Bitd, 127

VACHEL LINDSAY:

The Chinese Nightingale, 131
Poems about the Moon, 141

ALFRED KREYMBORG:

Under Glass, 149
Ants, 150
Yearning, 151
Springtime, 152
Convention, 153
Vista, 155

Ciree, 156

Ego’s Dream, 157
Arabs, 159
Threnody, 160
Nun Snow, 161
Manikin and Minikin, 165

WALLACE STEVENS:

   

Peter Quince at the Clavier, 185

Sunday Morning, 189

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, 193

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 200
Domination of Black, 204

X11WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:

   

The Wanderer, 209

JOHN GOULD FLETCHER:

H.

re

Irradiations, 225

Autumnal Clouds, 232

The Second Walk in the Garden, 236
Blue Symphony. 240

Green Symphony, 246

White Symphony, 252

Di:

S.

At Baia, 263
Simaetha, 265
“Not Honey,’ 267
Evadne, 269
Song, 270

The Garden, 271
The Shrine, 273

ELIOT :

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 28]
Portrait of a Lady, 285

Sweeney Among the Nightingales, 295
Whispers of Immortality, 297
Gerontion, 299

The Hollow Men, 303

CONRAD AIKEN:

   

Samadhi, 311

King Borborigmi, 316

And in the Hanging Gardens, 322
Chiaroscuro-Rose, 326

When Trout Swim Down Great Ormond Street,

329
This is the Shape of the Leaf, 330
Sea Holly, 332
Tetélestai, 335
The Room. 342
Sound of Breaking, 344
xii]KDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY:
Renaseence, 349

MAXWELL BODENHEIM:
Death, 359
Interlude, 360
Hill-side Tree, 361
Forgetfulness, 362
Soldiers, 363

Minna, 364EMILY DICKINSON“IN WINTER”

In Winter, in my room,

I came upon a worm,

Pink, lank, and warm.

But as he was a worm

And worms presume,

Not quite with him at home—
Secured him by a string

To something neighbouring,
And went along.

A trifle afterward

A thing occurred,

I’d not believe it if I heard—
But state with creeping blood;
A snake, with mottles rare,
Surveyed my chamber floor,

In feature as the worm before,
But ringed with power.

The very string

With which I tied him, too,
When he was mean and new,
That string was there.

»
vo“How fair you are!”
Propitiation’s claw—

“Afraid,” he hissed,

“Of me?

No cordiality?”

He fathomed me.

I shrank

 

Then to a rhythm slim
Secreted in his form,
As patterns swim,
Projected him.

That time I flew,
Both eyes his way,
Lest he pursue—
Nor ever ceased to run,
Till in a distant town,
Towns on from mine—
I sat me down:
This was a dream.II

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed ?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth—the two are one;

We brethren are,”’ he said.

And so. as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.Ill

I’ve seen a dying eye

Run round and round a room

In search of something, as it seemed,
Then cloudier become;

And then, obscure with fog,

And then he soldered down,
Without disclosing what it be,

*T were blessed to have seen.IV
THE CHARIOT

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused hefore a house that seemed
A swelling on the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,

The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day

I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity

~

;V

If I shouldn’t be alive
When the robins come,
Give the one in red cravat

A memorial crumb.

If I couldn’t thank you,

Being ust asleep,
You will know I’m trying
With my granite lip!VI

Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,

Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,

Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.

Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sun-
shine ;

Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;

Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant

Ah, what sagacity perished here!

>adence—

Grand go the years in the crescent above them;

Worlds scoop their ares, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,

Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.VII
THE WIND

Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There’s not a charge to me

Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,

Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,

And birds take places overhead,

To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,

He never heard that fleshless chant

Rise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,

Had broken rank,

Then knit, and passed

In seamless company.

10Vil

IN THE GARDEN

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;

He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew

From a convenient grass,

And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad—
They looked like frightened beads, I thought ;

He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
IT offered him a crumb,

And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,

Too silver for a seam,

Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.

11IX

THE SNAKE

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;

You may have met him—did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,

A floor too cool for corn.

Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun—

When, stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled, and was gone.

12Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality ;:

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.xX

THE STORM

There came a wind like a bugle;

It quivered through the grass,

And a green chill upon the heat

So ominous did pass

We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;

The doom’s electric moccasin

That very instant passed.

On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,

And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.

The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.

How much can come

And much can go,

And yet abide the world!

14XI

It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down;
It was not night, for all the bells

Put out their tongues, for noon.

It was not frost, for on my flesh

I felt siroceos craw!

Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.

And yet it tasted like them all;
The figures I have seen

Set orderly for burial,

Reminded me of mine,

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame,
And coul
And ’twas like midnight, some,
TW

d not breathe without a key;When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,

Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground.

But most like chaos—stopless, cool—
Without a chance or spar,

Or even a report of land

To justify despair.XII
PARTING

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unvell

A third event to me,

- So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.XII

To my quick ear the leaves conferred ;
The bushes they were bells;

I could not find a privacy

From Nature’s sentinels.

In cave if I presumed to hide,
The walls began to tell;

Creation seemed a mighty crack
To make me visible.XIV

Not any sunny tone

From any fervent zone

Finds entrance there.

Better a grave of Balm
Toward human nature’s home,
And Robins near,

Than a stupendous Tomb
Proclaiming to the gloom
How dead we are.XV

A SNAKE

Sweet is the swamp with its secrets,
Until we meet a snake:

*Tis then we sigh for houses,

And our departure take

At that enthralling gallop

That only childhood knows.

A snake is summer’s treason,

And guile is where it goes.I have a king who does not speak;

So, wonderi

I trudge

Half glad when it is night and sleep,
If, haply, through a dream to peep

In parlours shut by day.

And if I do, when morning comes
It is as if a hundred drums

Did round my pillow roll,
And shouts fill all my childish sky,

And bells keep saying ‘victory’

From st

And if I don’t. the little Bird

Within the orchard is not heard,
And I omit to pray,

‘Father, Thy will be done’ to-day,

For mv w1

And it were perjury!

  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
    

XVI

ng, through the hours meek

the day away—

eeples in my soul!

1] eoes the other way,

21XVII
EVENING

The cricket sang,

And set the sun,

And workmen finished, one by one
Their seam the day upon.

The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand. polite and new,
To stay as if, or go

‘ ’ SY:

A vastness, as a neighbour, came—
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home
And so the night became,XVIII

AURORA

Of bronze and blaze

The north, to-night!

So adequate its forms,

So preconcerted with itself,
So distant to alarms—

An unconcern so sovereign

To universe, or me,

It paints my simple spirit
With tints of majesty,

Till I take vaster attitudes,
And strut upon my stem,
Disdaining men and oxygen,
For arrogance of them.

My splendours are menagerie ;
But their competeless show
Will entertain the centuries
When I am, long ago,

An island in dishonoured grass,
Whom none but daisies know.

23XIX

IMMORTALITY

It is an honourable thought,
And makes one lift one’s hat,
\s one encountered gentlefolk
Upon a daily street,

That we’ve immortal place,
Though pyramids decay,

And kingdoms, like the orchard,
Flit russetly away,KX

TRYING TO FORGET

Bereaved of all, I went abroad,
No less bereaved to be
Upon a new peninsula—
The grave preceded :
ore preceded me,

Obtained my lodgings ere myself,
And when I sought my bed,
The grave it was, reposed upon

The pillow for my head.

I waked, to find it first awake,
I rose—it followed me;
I tried to drop it in the crowd,

T’o lose it in the sea,

In cups of artificial drowse
To sleep its shape away—

The grave was finished, but the spade

Remained in memory.

25en

 

XXI

I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,

Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum

Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul

With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,

And [ and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

26XXII
DYING

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air

Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry
And breaths were gathering sure

For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable—and then

There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;

And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

orXXII

A clock stopped—not the mantel’s ;
Geneva’s farthest skill

Can’t put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still.

An awe came on the trinket!
Thé figures hunched with pain,
Then quivered out of decimals

Into degreeless noon.

It will not stir for doctors,
This pendulum of snow;
The shopman importunes it,

While cool, concernless No

Nods from the gilded pointers,
Nods from the seconds slim,

Decades of arrogance between
The dial life and him.

28EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSONBEN JONSON ENTERTAINS A MAN
FROM STRATFORD *

You are a friend then, as I make it out,

Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass’s head in Fairyland

As he would add a shilling to more shillings,

All most harmonious—and out of his

 

Miraculous inviolable increase

Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like

Of olden time with timeless Englishmen;

And I must wonder what you think of him—

All you down there where your small Avon
flows

By Stratford, and where you’re an Alderman.

Some, for a guess, would have him riding back

To be a farrier there, or say a dyer;

Or maybe one of your adept surveyors ;

Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.

Not you—no fear of that; for I discern

In you a kindling of the flame that saves—

The nimble element, the true caloric;

*Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by E. A.
Robinson.

31I see it, and was told of it, moreover,
By our discriminate friend himself, no other.
Had you been one of the sad average,
As he would have it—meaning, as I take it,
The sinew and the solvent of our Island,
You’d not be buying beer for this Terpander’s
Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson;
He’d never foist it as a part of his
Contingent entertainment of a townsman
While he goes off rehearsing, as he must,
If he shall ever be the Duke of Stratford.
And my words are no shadow on your town—
Far from it; for one town’s as like another
As all are unlike London. Oh, he knows it—
And there’s the Stratford in him; he denies it,
And there’s the Shakespeare in him. So, God
help him!
I tell him he needs Greek; but neither God
Nor Greek will help him. Nothing will help
that man.
You see the fates have given him so much,
He must have all or perish—or look out
Of London, where he sees too many lords.
They’re part of half what ails him: I suppose
There’s nothing fouler down among the demons
Than what it is he feels when he remembers
The dust and sweat and ointment of his calling
With his lords looking on and laughing at him.
King as he is, he can’t be king de facto,
32And that’s as well, because he wouldn’t like it;

He’d frame a lower rating of men then

Than he has now; and after that would come

An abdication or an apoplexy.

He can’t be king, not even king of Stratford—

Though half the world, if not the whole of it,

May crown him with a crown that fits no king

Save Lord Apollo’s homesick emissary:

Not there on Avon, or on any stream

Where Naiads and their white arms are. no
more

Shall he find home again. It’s all too bad.

But there’s a comfort, for he’ll have that
House—

The best you ever saw; and he’ll be there

Anon, as you’re an Alderman. Good God!

He makes me lie awake o’ nights and laugh.

And you have known him from his origin,

You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin
He must have been to the few seeing ones—
A trifle terrifying, I dare say,

Discovering a world with his man’s eyes,
Quite as another lad might see some finches,
If he looked hard and had an eye for Nature.
But this one had his eyes and their foretelling,
And he had you to fare with, and what else?
He must have had a father and a mother—
In fact I’ve heard him say so—and a dog,— eG

 

As a boy should, I venture; and the dog,
Most likely, was the only man who knew him.
A dog, for all I know, is what he needs

As much as anything right here to-day,

To counsel him about his disillusions,

Old aches, and parturitions of what’s coming—
A dog of orders, an emeritus,

To wag his tail at him when he comes home,
And then to put his paws up on his knees
And say, “For God’s sake, what’s it all about?”

I don’t know whether he needs a dog or not—

Or what he needs. I tell him he needs Greek;

I’ll talk of rules and Aristotle with him,

And if his tongue’s at home he’ll say to that,

“T have your word that Aristotle knows,

And you mine that I don’t know Aristotle.”

He’s all at odds with all the unities,

And what’s yet worse it doesn’t seem to
matter ;

He treads along through Time’s old wilderness

As if the tramp of all the centuries

Had left no roads—and there are none, for
him ;

He doesn’t see them, even with those eyes—

And that’s a pity, or I say it 1s.

Accordingly we have him as we have him—

Going his way, the way that he goes best,

A pleasant animal with no great noise

34Or nonsense anywhere to set him off—
Save only divers and inclement devils
Have made of late his heart their dwelling-
place.
A flame half ready to fly out sometimes
At some annoyance may be fanned up in him,
But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out;
He knows how little room there is in there
For crude and futile animosities,
And how much for the joy of being whole,
And how much for long sorrow and old pain.
On our side there are some who may be given
To grow old wondering what he thinks of us
And some above us, who are, in his eyes,
Above himself—and that’s quite right and
English.
Yet here we smile, or disappoint the gods
Who made it so; the gods have always eyes
To see men scratch; and they see one down
here
Who itches, manor-bitten, to the bone,
Albeit he knows himself—yes, yes, he knows—
The lord of more than England and of more
Than all the seas of England in all time
Shall ever wash. D’ye wonder that I laugh?
He sees me, and he doesn’t seem to care;
And why the devil should he? I can’t tell you.
[ll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday,
Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman.

35“What, ho, my lord!” say I. He doesn’t hear
me ;

Wherefore I have to pause and look at him.

He’s not enormous, but one looks at him.

A little on the round if you insist,

For now, God save the mark, he’s growing old;

He’s five and forty, and to hear him talk

These days you'd call him eighty; then you’d
add

More years to that. He’s old enough to be

The father of a world, and so he is.

“Ben, vou’re a scholar, what’s the time of
day?”

Says he: and there shines out of him again

An aged light that has no age or station—

The mystery that’s his—a mischievous

 

Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame

For being won so easy, and at friends

Who laugh at him for what he wants the most,

And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire ;—

By which you see we’re all a little jealous.

Poor Greene! I fear the colour of his name

Was even as that of his ascending soul;

And he was one where there are many others—

Some scrivening to the end against their fate,

Their puppets all in ink and all to die there;

And some with hands that once would shade
an eye

That scanned Euripides and A¢schylus

36Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop
To slush their first and last of royalties.
Poor devils! and they all play to his hand;
For so it was in Athens and old Rome.
But that’s not here or there; ve wandered off.
Greene does it, or I’m careful. Where’s that
boy?

Yes, he’ll go back to Stratford. And we'll
miss him?

Dear sir, there’ll be no London here without
him.

We'll all be riding, one of these fine days,

Down there to see him—and his wife won’t like
US ;

And then we’ll think of what he never said

Of women—which, if taken all in all

With what he did say, would buy many horses.

Though nowadays he’s not so much for women:

es

“So few of them,” he says, “are worth the
guessing.”

3ut there’s a worm at work when he says that,

And while he says it one feels in the air

A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus.

They’ve had him dancing till his toes were
tender,

And he can feel ’em now, come chilly rains,

There’s no long cry for going into it,

However, and we don’t know much about it.

37But you in Stratford, like most here in London,

Have more now in the Sonnets than you paid
for;

He’s put one there with all her poison on,

To make a singing fiction of a shadow

That’s in his life a fact, and always will be.

But she’s no care of ours, though Time, I fear,

Will have a more reverberant ado

About her than about another one

Who seems to have decoyed him, married him,

And sent him scuttling on his way to London—

With much already learned, and more to learn,

And more to follow. Lord! how I see him now,

Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us.

Whatever he may have meant, we never had
him;

He failed us, or escaped, or what you will—

And there was that about him (God knows
what—

We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)

That made as many of us as had wits

More fond of all his easy distances

Than one another’s noise and _ clap-your-
shoulder.

But think you not, my friend, he’d never talk!

Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened—

Thereby acquiring much we knew before

About ourselves, and hitherto had held

Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose.

38And there were some, of course, and there: be
now,
Disordered and reduced amazedly
To resignation by the mystic seal
Of young finality the gods had laid
On everything that made him a young demon;
And one or two shot looks at him already
As he had been their executioner;
And once or twice he was, not knowing it—
Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay
And saying nothing... Yet, for all his
engines,
You’ll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who strut and sun themselves and see around
"em
A world made out of more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;
Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit
But we mark how he sees in everything
A law that, given that we flout it once too
often,
Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.
To me it looks as if the power that made him,
For fear of giving all things to one creature,
Left out the first—faith, innocence, illusion,
Whatever *tis that keeps us out o’? Bedlam—
And thereby, for his too consuming’ vision,
Empowered him out of nature; though to see
him,
39You’d never guess what’s going on inside him.

He’ll break out some day like a keg of ale

With too much independent frenzy in it;

And all for cellaring what he knows won’t
keep,

And what he’d best forget—but that he can’t.

You’ll have it, and have more than I’m fore-
telling ;

And there’ll be such a roaring at the Globe

As never stunned the bleeding gladiators.

He’ll have to change the colour of its hair

A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra.

Black hair would never do for Cleopatra.

But vou and I are not yet two old women,

And you’re a man of office. What he does

Is more to you than how it is he does it—

And that’s what the Lord God has never told.
him.

They work together, and the Devil helps ’em;

They do it of a morning, or if not,

They do it of a night; in which event

He’s peevish of a morning. He seems old;

He’s not the proper stomach or the sleep—

And they’re two sovran agents to conserve
him

Against the fiery art that has no mercy

But what’s in that prodigious grand new
House.

I gather something happening in his boyhood

40Fulfilled him with a boy’s determination

To make all Stratford ’ware of him. Well,
well,

I hope at last he’ll have his joy of it,

And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves,

And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover,

Be less than hell to his attendant ears.

Oh, past a doubt we’ll all go down to see him.

He may be wise. With London two days off,

Down there some wind of heaven may yet re-
vive him:

But there’s no quickening breath from any-
where

Shall make of him again the young poised faun

From Warwickshire, who’d made, it seems,
already

A legend of himself before I came

To blink before the last of his first lightning.

Whatever there be, there’ll be no more of that;

The coming on of his old monster Time

Has made him a still man; and he has dreams

Were fair to think on once, and all found
hollow.

He knows how much of what men paint them-
selves

Would blister in the light of what they are;

He sees how much of what was great now
shares

4)— pee

An eminence transformed and ordinary;

He knows too much of what the world has
hushed

In others, to be loud now for himself ;

He knows now at what height low enemies

May reach his heart, and high friends let him
fall ;

But what not even such as he may know

Bedevils him the worst: his lark may sing

At heaven’s gate how he will, and for as long

As joy may listen, but he sees no gate,

Save one whereat the spent clay waits a little

Before the churchyard has it, and the worm.

Not long ago, late in an afternoon,

I came on him unseen down Lambeth way,

And on my life I was afear’d of him:

He gloomed and mumbled like a soul from
Tophet,

His hands behind him and his head bent
solemn.

“What is it now,” said I, “another woman?”

That made him sorry for me, and he smiled.

“No, Ben,” he mused; “it’s Nothing. It’s all
Nothing.

We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re
done;

Spiders and flies

 

we’re mostly one or t’other—
We come, we go; and when we’re done, we’re
done ;”’

42“By God, you sing that song as if you knew
it

Said I, by way of cheering him; “what ails
ve?”’

“J think I must have come down here to think,”

Says he to that, and pulls his little beard,

“Your fly will serve as well as anybody,

And what’s his hour? He flies, and flies, and
flies,

And in his fly’s mind has a brave appearance;

And then your spider gets him in her net,

And eats him out, and hangs him up to dry.

That’s Nature, the kind mother of us all.

And then your slattern housemaid swings her

broom,

And where’s your spider? And that’s Nature,
also.

It’s Nature, and it’s Nothing. It’s all Noth-
ing.

It’s all a world where bugs and emperors
Go singularly back to the same dust,

Each in his time: and the old, ordered stars
That sang together, Ben, will sing the same

Old stave to-morrow.”

When he talks like that,
There’s nothing for a human man to do
But lead him to some grateful nook like this
Where we be now, and there to make him
drink.
45He’ll drink, for love of me, and then be sick;

A sad sign always in a man of parts,

And always very ominous. The great

Should be as large in liquor as in love—

And our great friend is not so large in either:

One disaffects him, and the other fails him;

Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it,

He’s wondering what’s to pay in his insides;

And while his eyes are on the Cyprian

He’s fribbling all the time with that damned
House.

We laugh here at his thrift, but after all

It may be thrift that saves him from the devil;

 

God gave it, anyhow—and we'll suppose

He knew the compound of His handiwork.

To-day the clouds are with him, but anon

He'll out of ’em enough to shake the tree

Of life itself and bring down fruit unheard-of—

And, throwing in the bruised and whole to-
gether,

Prepare a wine to make us drunk with wonder;

And if he live, there’ll be a sunset spell

Thrown over him as over a glassed lake

That yesterday was all a black wild water.

God ‘send he live to give us, if no more,
What now’s a-rampage in him, and exhibit,
With a decent half-allegiance to the ages
An earnest of at least a casual eye

+4Turned once on what he owes to Gutenberg,

And to the fealty of more centuries

Than are as yet a picture in our Vision.

“There’s time enough—lI’!! do it when I’m old;

And we’re immortal men,” he says to that;

And then he says to me, “Ben, what’s ‘im-
mortal’?

Think you by any force of ordination

It may be nothing of a sort more noisy

Than a small oblivion of component ashes

That of a dream-addicted world was once

A moving atomy much like your friend here?”

Nothing will help that man. To make him
lauch.

I said then he was a mad mountebank—

And by the Lord I nearer made him cry.

I could have eat an eft then, on my knees,

Tails, claws, and all of him; for I had stung

The king of men, who had no sting for me,

And I had hurt him in his memories;

And I say now, as I shall say again,

I love the man this side idolatry.

He’!] do it when he’s old, he says. I wonder.

He may rot be so ancient as all that.

For such as he the thing that is to do

Will do itself—but there’s a reckoning;

The sessions that are now too much his own,

The roiling inward of a still outside,

The churning out of all those blood-fed lines,

ASThe nights of. many schemes and little sleep,

The full brain hammered hot with too much
thinking,

The vexed heart over-worn with too much
aching—

This weary jangling of conjoined affairs

Made out of elements that have no end,

And all confused at once, I understand,

Is not what makes a man to live forever.

O, no, not now! He’ll not be going now:

There’ll be time yet for God knows what ex-
plosions

Before he goes. He'll stay awhile. Just wait:

Just wait a year or two for Cleopatra,

For she’s to be a balsam and a comfort;

And that’s not all a jape of mine now, either.

For granted once the old way of Apollo

Sings in a man, he may then, if he’s able,

Strike unafraid whatever strings he will

Upon the last and wildest of new lyres;

Nor out of his new magic, though it hymn

The shrieks of dungeoned hell, shall he create

A madness or a gloom to shut quite out

A cleaving daylight, and a last great calm

Triumphant over shipwreck and all storms.

He might have given Aristotle creeps,

But surely would have given him his katharsis.

He’ll not be going yet. There’s too much yet

Unsung within the man. But when he goes,

46I’d stake ye coin o’ the realm his only care

For a phantom world he sounded and found
wanting

Will be a portion here, a portion there,

Of this or that thing: or some other thing

That has a patent and intrinsical

Equivalence in those egregious shillings.

And yet he knows, God help him! ‘Tell me, now,

If ever there was anvthing let loose

On earth by gods or devils heretofore

Like this mad, careful, proud, indifferent
Shakespeare!

Where was it, if it ever was? By heaven,

"T'was never yet in Rhodes or Pergamon

In Thebes or Nineveh, a thing like this!

No thing like this was ever out of England;

And that he knows. I wonder if he cares.

Perhaps he does. ....O Lord, that House

in Stratford!FRAGMENT *

Faint white pillars that seem to fade
As you look from here are the first one sees
Of his house where it hides and dies in a shade
Of beeches and oaks and hickory trees.
Now many a man, given woods like these,
And a house like that, and the Briony gold,
Would have said, “There are still some gods to
please,
And houses are built without hands, we’re
told.”

There are the pillars, and all gone grey.
Briony’s hair went white. You may see
Where the garden was if you come this way.
That sun-dial scared him, he said to me;
“Sooner or later they strike,” said he,
And he never got that from the books he
read.
Others are flourishing, worse than he,
But he knew too much for the life he led.

* Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by E. A.
Robinson.

| eR LO

4:5And who knows all knows everything
That a patient ghost at last retrieves;
There’s more to be known of his harvesting

When Time the thresher unbinds the sheaves:
And there’s more to be heard than a wind that
grieves
For Briony now in this ageless oak,
Driving the first of its withered leaves
Over the stones where the fountain broke.THE POOR RELATION *

No longer torn by what she knows

And sees within the eyes of others,

Her doubts are when the daylight goes,
Her fears are for the few she bothers.
She tells them it is wholly wrong

Of her to stay alive so long;

And when she smiles her forehéad shows
A crinkle that had been her mother’s.

Beneath her beauty, blanched with pain,
And wistful yet for being cheated,

A child would seem to ask again

\ question many times repeated ;

But no rebellion has betrayed

Her wonder at what she has paid

For memories that have no stain,

For triumph born to be defeated.

To those who come for what she was—

The few left who know where to find her—
She clings, for they are all she has;

And she may smile when they remind her,
As heretofore, of what they know

Of roses that are still to blow

“Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The

Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by E. A.
Robinson.

50By ways where not so much as grass
Remains of what she sees behind her.

They stay awhile, and having done
What penance or the past requires,
They go, and leave her there alone

To count her chimneys and her spires.
Her lip shakes when they go away,
And yet she would not have them stay;
She knows as well as anyone

That Pity, having played, soon tires.

But one friend always re-appears,

A good ghost, not to be forsaken;
Whereat she laughs and has no fears

Of what a ghost may re-awaken,

But welcomes. while she wears and mends
The poor relation’s odds and ends,

Her truant from a tomb of years—

Her power of youth so early taken.

Poor laugh, more slender than her song

It seems: and there are none to hear it
With even the stopped ears of the strong
For breaking heart or broken spirit.

The friends who clamoured for her place,
And would have scratched her for her face,
Have lost her laughter for so long
That none would care enough to fear it.

51None live who need fear anything
From her. whose losses are their pleasure;
The plover with a wounded wing

Stays not the flight that others measure;
So there she waits, and while she lives,
And death forgets, and faith forgives,

Her memories go foraging

For bits of childhood song they treasure.

And like a giant harp that hums

On always, and is always blending

The coming of what never comes

With what has passed and had an ending,
The City trembles, throbs, a nd pounds
Outside, and through a thousand sounds
The small intolerable drums

Of Time are like slow drops descending.

sereft enough to shame a sage

And given little to long sighing,

With no illusion to assuage

The lonely changelessness of dying—
t

Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard,

She sings and watches like a bird,

Safe in a comfortable cage
j

‘
4

rom which there will be no more flying.EROS TURANNOS *

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs

Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost.—
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;

Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;

And all her doubts of what he says

Are dimmed with what she knows of days—

Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.

 
 
 

*Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by Si.

Robinson.

53The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion:
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbour side

Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be—
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen—
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.JOHN GORHAM *

“Tell me what you’re doing over here, Johu
Gorham,

Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when
vow re not;

Make me laugh or let me go now, for long
faces in the moonlight

Are a sign for me to say again a word that you

forgot.”—

“I’m over here to tell you what the moon
already

May have said or maybe shouted ever since a
year ago;

I’m over here to tell you what you are, Jane
Wayland,

And to make you rather sorry, I should say,
for being so.”—

* Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by E. A.
Robinson.

55“Tell me what you’re saying to me now, John
Gorham,

Or you'll never see as much of me as ribbons
any more;

I’ll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and
fingers,

And you'll not follow far for one where flocks

have been before.”—

“I’m sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane
Wayland,

But you’re the one to make of them as many
as you need.

And then about the vanishing. It’s I who
mean to vanish;

And when I’m here no longer you'll be done

with me indeed.”—

“That’s a way to tell me what I am, John
Gorham!

How am I to know myself until you make me
smile?

Try to look as if the moon were making faces
at you,

And a little more as if you meant to stay a
little while.””—

“You are what it is that over rose-blown

gardens

56Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun;

You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane
Wayland,

Catches him and lets him go and eats him up

for fun.’”’—

“Sure I never took you for a mouse, John
Gorham:

All you say is easy, but so far from being true

That I wish you wouldn’t ever be again the
one to think so:

For it isn’t cats and butterflies that I would

be to you.’”—

“All your little animals are in one picture—

One I’ve had before me since a year ago to-
night :

And the picture where they live will be of you,
Jane Wayland,

Till you find a way to kill them or to keep

them out of sight.”—

‘“‘Won’t you ever see me as I am, John Gorham,

Leaving out the foolishness and all I never
meant?

Somewhere in me there’s a woman if vou know
the way to find her.

Will you like me any better if I prove it and

ora:

repent“T doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane
Wayland ;

And I daresay all this moonlight lying round

us might as well

Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns
that are forgotten,

As on two that have no longer much of any-
thing to tell.”THE GIFT OF GOD*

Blessed with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so—
That her degree should be so great
Among the favoured of the Lord
That she may scarcely bear the weight
Of her bewildering reward.

As one apart, immune, alone,
Or featured for the shining ones,
And like to none that she has known
Of other women’s other sons—
The firm fruition of her need,

He shines anointed; and he blurs
Her vision, till it seems indeed

A sacrilege to call him hers.

She fears a little for so much

Of what is best, and hardly dares
To think of him as one to touch

With aches, indignities, and cares;
She sees him rather at the goal,

Still shining; and her dream foretells

*Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by K. A.

Robinson.

59The proper shining of a soul
Where nothing ordinary dwells.

Perchance a canvass of the town

Would find him far from flags and shouts,
And leave him only the renown

Of many smiles and many doubts ;
Perchance the crude and common tongue

Would havoc strangely with his worth;
But she, with innocence unwrung,

Would read his name around the earth.

And others, knowing how this youth
Would shine, if love could make him great,
When caught and tortured for the truth
Would only writhe and hesitate ;
While she, arranging for his days
What centuries could not fulfil,
Transmutes him with her faith and praise,
And has him shining where she will.

She crowns him with her gratefulness,
And says again that life is good;
And should the gift of God be less
In him than in her motherhood,
His fame, though vague, will not be small,
As upward through her dream he fares,
Half clouded with a crimson fall
Of roses thrown on marble stairs.

60FOR A DEAD LADY

No more with overflowing light

Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another’s fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
No more shall quiver down the days
The flowing wonder of her ways,
Whereof no language may requite
The shifting and the many-shaded.

The grace, divine, definitive,

Clings only as a faint forestalling;

The laugh that love could not forgive
Is hushed, and answers to no calling;
The forehead and the little ears

Have gone where Saturn keeps the years;
The breast where roses could not live
Has done with rising and with falling.

The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,

Or over children that are sleepmg;
And we who delve in beauty’s lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause

Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.

61FLAMMONDE *

The man Flammonde, from God knows where,
With firm address and foreign air,

With news of nations in his talk

And something royal in his walk,

With glint of iron in his eyes,

But never doubt nor vet surprise,

Appeared, and stayed, and held his head

As one by kings accredited.

Erect, with his alert repose

About him, and about his clothes,
He pictured all tradition hears

Of what we owe to fifty years.

His cleansing heritage of taste
Paraded neither want nor waste:
And what he needed for his fee

To live, he borrowed graciously.

He never told us what he was,
Or what mischance, or other cause,
Had banished him from better days
To play the Prince of Castaways.
“Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The

Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by E. A.
Robinson.Meanwhile he played surpassing well
A part, for most, unplayable ;
In fine, one pauses, half afraid
To say for certain that he played.

For that, one may as well forego
Conviction as to yes or no;

Nor can I say just how intense
Would then have been the difference
To several, who, having striven

In vain to get what he was given,
Would see the stranger taken on
By friends not easy to be won.

Moreover many a malcontent

He soothed and found munificent ;

His courtesy beguiled and foiled
Suspicion that his years were soiled ;
His mien distinguished any crowd,
His credit strengthened when he bowed ;
And women, young and old, were fond
Of looking at the man Flammonde.

There was a woman in our town

On whom the fashion was to frown;
But while our talk renewed the tinge
Of a long-faded scarlet fringe,

The man Flammonde saw none of that,
And what he saw we wondered at—
63That none of us in her distress,
Could hide or find our littleness.

There was a boy that all agreed

Had shut within him the rare seed

Of learning.. We could understand,

But none of us could lift a hand.

The man Flammonde appraised the youth,
And told a few of us the truth;

And thereby, for a little gold,

A flowered future was unrolled.

There were two citizens who fought

For years and years, and over nought;
They made life awkward for their friends,
And shortened their own dividends.

The man Flammonde said what was wrong
Should be made right; nor was it long
Before they were again in line,

And had each other in to dine.

And these I mention are but four

Of many out of many more.

'so much for them. But what of himn—
So firm in every look and limb?

What small satanic sort of kink

Was in his brain? What broken link
Withheld him from the destinies

That came so near to being his?

64What was he, when we came to sift
His meaning, and to note the drift
Of incommunicable ways

That make us ponder while we praise?
Why was it that his charm revealed
Somehow the surface of a shield?
What was it that we never caught?
What was he, and what was he not?

How much it was of him we met

We cannot ever know; nor yet

Shall all he gave us quite atone

For what was his, and his alone;

Nor need we now, since he knew best,
Nourish an ethical unrest;

Rarely at once will nature give

The power to he Flammonde and live.

We cannot know how much we learn
From those who never will return,
Until a flash of unforeseen
Remembrance falls on what has been.
We've each a darkening hill to climb;
And this is why, from time to time
In Tilbury Town, we look beyond
Horizons for the man Flammonde.THE MAN AGAINST THE SKY *

Between me and the sunset, like a dome

Against the glory of a world on fire,

Now burned a sudden hill,

Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height
made higher,

With nothing on it for the flame to kill

Save one who moved and was alone up there

To loom before the chaos and the glare

As if he were the last god going home

Unto his last desire.

Dark, marvellous, and inscrutable he moved on

Till down the fiery distance he was gone,

Like one of those eternal, remote things

That range. across a man’s imaginings

When a sure music fills him and he knows

What he may say thereafter to few men —

The touch of ages having wrought

An echo and a glimpse of what he thought

A phantom or a legend until then;

For whether lighted over ways that save,

Or lured from all repose,

If he go on too far to find a grave,

Mostly alone he goes.

“Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected. Poems, by HB. A.
Robinson.

66Even he, who stood where I had found him,

On high with fire all round him,

Who moved along the molten west,

And over the round hill’s crest

That seemed half ready with him to go down,

Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,

As if there were to be no last thing left

Of a nameless unimaginable town—

Even he who climbed and vanished may have
taken

Down to the perils of a depth not known,

From death defended, though by men for-
saken,

The bread that every man must eat alone:

He may have walked while others hardly dared

Look on to see him stand where many fell;

And upward out.of that as out of hell,

He may have sung and striven

To mount where more of him shall yet be
given,

Bereft of all retreat,’

To sevenfold heat—

As on a day when three in Dura shared

The furnace, and were spared

For glory by that king of Babylon

Who made himself so great that God, whe
heard,

Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.

67Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
Possessed already of the promised land,

Far stretched and fair to see:

A good sight, verily,

And one to make the eyes of her who bore him
Shine glad with hidden tears.

Why question of his ease of who before him,
In one place or another where they left
Their names as far behind them as their bones,
And yet bv dint of slauchter, toil, and theft,
And shrewdly sharpened stones,

Carved hard the wavy for his ascendancy
Through deserts of lost years?

Why trouble him now who sees and hears
No more than what his innocence requires,
And therefore to no other height aspires
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?
He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities ;

He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest.

Or with an even likelihood,

He may have met with atrabilious eyes

The fires of time on equal terms and passed
Indifferently down, until at last

65His only kind of grandeur would have been,

Apparently, in being seen.

He may have had for evil or for good

No argument; he may have had no care

For what without himself went anywhere

To failure or to glory, and least of all

For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;

He may have been the prophet of an art

Immovable to old idolatries ;

He may have been a player without a part,

Annoyed that even the sun should have the
skies

For such a flaming way to advertise;

He may have been a painter sick at heart

With Nature’s toiling for a new surprise;

He may have been a cynic, who now, for all

Of anything divine that his effete

Negation may have tasted,

Saw truth in his own image, rather small,

Forbore to fever the ephemeral,

Found any barren height a good retreat

From any swarming street,

And in the sun saw power superbly wasted ;

And when the primitive old-fashioned stars

Came out again to shine on joys and wars

More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,

He may have proved a world a sorry thing

In his imagining,

And life a lighted highway to the tomb.

69Or, mounting with unfirm unsearching tread,

His hopes to chaos led,

He may have stumbled up there from the past,

And with an aching strangeness viewed the last

Abysmal conflagration of his dreams—

A flame where nothing seems

To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;

And while it all went out,

Not even the faint anodyne of doubt

May then have eased a painful going down

From pictured heights of power and lost re-
nown,

Revealed at length to his outlived endeavour

Remote and unapproachable forever ;

And at his heart there may have gnawed

Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed

And long dishonoured by the living death

Assigned alike by chance

To brutes and hierophants :

And anguish fallen on those he loved around
him

May once have dealt the last blow to confound
him,

And so have left him as death leaves a child,

Who sees it all too near;

And he who knows no young way to forget

May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.

Whatever suns may rise and set

There may be nothing kinder for him here

70Than shafts and agonies ;
And under these

He may cry out and stay on horribly;

Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,
He may go forward like a stoic Roman
Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie

 

Or. seizing the swift logic of a woman,

Curse God and die.

Or maybe there, like many another one

Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead,
Black-drawn against wild red,

He may have built unawed by fiery gules
That in him no commotion stirred,

A living reason out of molecules

Why molecules occurred,

And one for smiling when he might have sighed
Had he seen far enough,

And in the same inevitable stuff

Discovered an odd reason too for pride

In being what he must have been by laws
Infrangible and for no kind of cause.
Deterred by no confusion or surprise

He may have seen with his mechanic eyes

A world without a meaning, and had room,
Alone amid magnificence and doom,

To build himself an airy monument

That should, or fail him in his vague intent,
Outlast an accidental universe—

71To call it nothing worse—

Or, by the burrowing guile

Of Time disintegrated and effaced,

Like once-remembered mighty trees go down

To ruin, of which by man may now be traced

No part sufficient even to be rotten,

And in the book of things that are forgotten

Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.

He may have been so great

That satraps would have shivered at his frown,

And all he prized alive may rule a state

No larger than a grave that holds a clown;

He may have been a master of his fate,

And of his atoms—ready as another

In his emergence to exonerate

His father and his mother;

He may have been a captain of a host,

Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,

Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,

And then give up the ghost.

Nahum’s great grasshoppers were such as
these,

Sun-scattered and soon lost.

Whatever the dark road he may have taken,
This man who stood on high

And faced alone the sky,

Whatever drove or lured or guited him—
A vision answering a faith unshaken,

ae

aAn easy trust assumed by easy trials,
A sick negation born of weak denials,
A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,

A blind attendance on a brief ambition—
Whatever stayed him or derided hin,

His way was even as ours;

And we, with all our wounds and all our powers,
Must each await alone at his own height
Another darkness or another light;

And there, of our poor self dominion reft,
If inference and reason shun

Hell, Heaven. and Oblivion,

May thwarted will (perforce precarious,

But for our conservation better thus)

Have no misgivings left

Of doing yet what here we leave undone?

Or if unto the last of these we cleave,
Believing or protesting we believe

In such an idle and ephemeral

Florescence of the diabolical—

If. robbed of two fond old enormities,

Our being had no onward auguries,

What then were this great love of ours to say
For launching other lives to voyage again

A little farther into time and pain,

A little faster in a futile chase

For a kingdom and a power and a Race

That would have still in sight

A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
13Is this the music of the toys we shake
So loud—as if there might be no mistake
Somewhere in our indomitable will?

Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along our blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?

If this we say, then let us all be still

About our share in it, and live and die
More quietly thereby.

Where was he going, this man against the sky?
You know not, nor do I.

But this we know, if we know anything:
That we may laugh and fight and sing
And of our transcience here make offering
To an orient Word that will not be erased,
Or, save in incommunicable gleams

Too permanent for dreams,

Be found or known.

No tonic or ambitious irritant

Of increase or of want

Has made an otherwise insensate waste

Of ages overthrown

A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste
Of other ages that are still to be

Depleted and rewarded variously

Because a few, by fate’s economy,

74

-Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;

No soft evangel of equality,

Safe-cradled in a communal repose

That huddles into death and may at last

Be covered well with equatorial snows—

And all for what. the devil only knows—

Will aggregate an inkling to confirm

The credit of a sage or of a worm,

Or tell us why one man in five

Should have a care to stay alive

While in his heart he feels no violence

Laid on his humour and intelligence

When infant Science makes a pleasant face

And waves again that hollow toy, the Race;

No planetary trap where souls are wrought

For nothing but the sake of being caught

And sent again to nothing will attune

Itself to any key of any reason

Why man should hunger through another
season

To find out why ’twere better late than soon

To go away and let the sun and moon

And all the silly stars illuminate

A place for creeping things,

And those that root and trumpet and have
ings,

And herd and ruminate,

Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,

Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees

~
15I

 

Hang screeching lewd victorious derision

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

Of man’s immortal vision.

Shall we, because Eternity records
Too vast an answer for the time-born words
We spell, whereof so many are dead that once
In our capricious lexicons

Were so alive and final, hear no more

The Word itself, the living word

That none alive has ever heard

Or ever spelt,

And few have ever felt

Without the fears and old surrenderings

And terrors that began

When Death let fall a feather from his wings
And humbled the first man?

Because the weight of our humility,
Wherefrom we gain

A little wisdom and much pain,

Falls here too sore and there too tedious,

Are we in anguish or complacency,

Not looking far enough ahead

To see by what mad couriers we are led

Along the roads of the ridiculous,

To pity ourselves and laugh at faith

And while we curse life bear it?

And if we see the soul’s dead end in death,
Are we to fear it?

What folly is here that has not yet a name
Unless we say outright that we are liars?
76What have we seen beyond our sunset fires
That lights again the way by which we came?
Why pay we such a price, and one we give
So clamouringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?

If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought—

If there be nothing after Now,

And we be nothing anyhow,

And we know that—why live?

‘Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress

To suffer dungeons where so many doors

Will open on the cold eternal shores

That look sheer down

To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.ANNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCHTHE MONK IN THE KITCHEN

I

Order is a lovely thing;

On disarray it lays its wing,

Teaching simplicity to sing.

It has a meek and lowly grace,

Quiet as a nun’s face.

Lo—I will have thee in this place!
Tranquil well of deep delight,

All things that shine through thee appear
As stones through water, sweetly clear.
Thou clarity,

That with angelic charity

Revealest beauty where thou art,

Spread thyself like a clean pool,

Then all the things that in thee are,
Shall seem more spiritual and fair,
Reflection from serener air—

Sunken shapes of many a star

In the high heavens set afar.

81II

Ye stolid, homely, visible things,
Above you all brood glorious wings
Of your deep entities, set high,
Like slow moons in a hidden sky.
But you, their likenesses, are spent
Upon another element.

Truly ye are but seemings—
The shadowy cast-off gleamings
Of bright solidities. Ye seem
Soft as water, vague as dream;
Image, cast in a shifting stream.

Ill

What are ye?

IT know not.

Brazen pan and iron pot,

Yellow brick and gray flag-stone
That my feet have trod upon—
Ye seem to me

Vessels of bright mystery.

For ye do bear a shape, and so
Though ye were made by man, I know
An inner Spirit also made,

And ye his breathings have obeyed.
82IV

Shape, the strong and awful spirit,
Laid his ancient hand on you.

He waste chaos doth inherit;

He can alter and subdue.

Verily, he doth lift up

Matter, like a sacred cup.

Into deep substance he reached, and lo
Where ye were not, ye were; and so
Out of useless nothing, ye

Groaned and laughed and came to be.
And I use you, as I can,

Wonderful uses, made for man,

Iron pot and brazen pan.

What are ye?

I know not;

Nor what I really do

When I move and govern you.
There is no small work unto God.
He required of us greatness ;

Of His least creature

A high angelic nature,

Stature superb and bright completeness,
He sets to us no humble duty.

83Each act that He would have us do
Is haloed round with strangest beauty ;
Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks

Of His plainest child He asks.

When I polish the brazen pan

I hear a creature laugh afar

In the gardens of a star,

And from his burning presence run
Flaming wheels of many a sun.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.

When I cleanse this earthen floor

My spirit leaps to see

Bright garments trailing over it,

A cleanness made by me.

Purger of all men’s thoughts and ways,
With labour do I sound Thy praise,
My work is done for Thee.

Whoever makes a thing more bright,

He is an angel of all light.

Therefore let me spread abroad

The beautiful cleanness of my God.

vo

One time in the cool of dawn
Angels came and worked with me.
The air was soft with many a wing.

84They laughed amid my solitude
And cast bright looks on everything.
Sweetly of me did they ask

That they might do my common task.
And all were beautiful—but One

With garments whiter than the sun

Had such a face

Of deep, remembered grace;

That when I saw I cried—“Thou art

The great Blood-Brother of my heart.
Where have I seen Thee?”—And He said,
“When we are dancing round God’s throne,
How often thou art there.

Beauties from thy hands have flown

Like white doves wheeling in mid air.
Nay—thy soul remembers not?

Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot.”

Vil

What are we? I know not.ERE THE GOLDEN BOWL IS BROKEN

He gathered for His own delight
The sparkling waters of my soul.

A thousand creatures, bubbling bright—
He set me in a golden bowl.

From the deep cisterns of the earth
He bade me up—the shining daughter—
And I am exquisite with mirth,

A brightening and a sunlit water.

The wild, the free, the radiant one,

A happy bubble I did glide.
I poised my sweetness to the sun

And there I sleeked my silver side.
Sometimes I lifted up my head

And globed the moonlight with my hands,
Or thin as flying wings I spread

Angelic wildness through the sands.
86Then, woven into webs of light,
I breathed, I sighed, I laughed aloud,
And lifting up my pinions bright
I shone in Heaven, a bird-white cloud.

Then did I dance above the mead,

And through the crystal fields would run,
And from my scarlet splendours breed

The golden thunders of the sun.

Beneath the whitening stars I flew
And floated moon-like on the breeze,
Or my frail heart was piercéd through
With sharp sweet flowers of the trees.

Of giant crags I bear the scars,
And I have swept along the gale,

Such multitudes as are the stars,
My myriad faces rapt and pale.

As savage creatures strong and free
Make wild the jungle of the wood,

The starry powers that sport in me
Habit my silver solitude.

From out my smallness, soft as dew,
That utter fastness, stern and deep,
Terrible meanings look at you
Like vision from the eyes of sleep.

87I cannot leap—I cannot run—
I only glimmer, soft and mild,
A limpid water in the sun,
A sparkling and a sunlit child.

What stranger ways shall yet be mine
When I am spilled, you cannot see.
But now you laugh to watch me shine,
And smooth the hidden stars in me.

Lightly you stroke my silver wing—
The folded carrier of my soul.

A soft, a shy, a silent thing,

A water in a golden bowl.AMY LOWELLVERNAL EQUINOX

The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, hes
between me and my book;

And the South Wind, washing through the
room,

Makes the candles quiver.

My nerves sting at a spatter of rain on the
shutter,

And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green
shoots

Outside, in the night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with

your tense and urgent love?SOLITAIRE

When night drifts along the streets of the
city,

And sifts down between the uneven roois,

My mind begins to peek and peer.

It plays at ball in old, blue Chinese gardens,

And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples

Amid the broken flutings of white eee

It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in
its hair,

And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched
orasses.

How light and laughing my mind is,

When all the good folk have put out their
bedroom candles,

And the city is still !MERCHANDISE

I made a song one morning,

Sitting in the shade under the hornbeam hedge.

I played it on my pipe,

And the clear notes delighted me,

And the little hedge-sparrows and the chip-
munks

Also seemed pleased.

So I was very proud

That I had made so good a song.

Would you lke to hear my song?

[ will play it to you

As I did that evening to my Beloved,
Standing on the moon-bright cobbles
Underneath her window.

But you are not my Beloved,

You must give me a silver shilling,
Round and glittering like the moon.
Copper I will not take,

How should copper pay for a song
All made out of nothing,

And so beautiful !

93LITTLE IVORY FIGURES PULLED
WITH STRING

Is it the tinkling of mandolins which disturbs
you?
Or the dropping of bitter-orange petals among
the coffee-cups?
Or the slow creeping of the moonlight between
the olive-trees?
Drop! -drop! the rain
Upon the thin plates of my heart.

String your blood to chord with this music,
Stir your heels upon the cobbles to the rhythm
of a dance-tune.
They have slim thighs and arms of silver;
The moon washes away their garments ;
They make a pattern of fleeing feet in the
branch shadows,
And the green grapes knotted about them
surst as they press against one another.
The rain knocks wpon the plates of my heart,
They are crumpled with its beating.

94Would you drink only from your brains, Old

Man?

See, the moonlight has reached your knees,

It falls upon your head in an accolade of silver.

Rise up on the music,

Fling against the moon-drifts in a whorl of
young light bodies:

Leaping grape-clusters,

Vine leaves tearing from a grey wall.

You shall run, laughing, in a braid of women,

And weave flowers with the frosty spines of
thorns.

Why do you gaze into your glass,

And jar the spoons with your finger-tapping?

The rain is rigid on the plates of my heart.
The murmur of it is loud—loud.I
THE TRUMPET-VINE ARBOUR

The throats of the little red trumpet-flowers
are wide open,

And the clangour of brass beats against the
hot sunlight.

They bray and blare at the burning sky.

Red! Red! Coarse notes of red,

Trumpeted at the blue sky.

In long streaks of sound, molten metal,

The vine declares itself.

Clang!—from its red and yellow trumpets.

Clang'—from its long nasal trumpets,

Splitting the sunlight into ribbons, tattered
and shot with noise.

I sit in the cool arbour, in a green-and-gold
twilight.

It is very still, for I cannot hear the trumpets,

I only know that they are red and open,

And that the sun above the arbour shakes with
heat.

m a

96My quill is newly mended,

And makes fine-drawn lines with its point.

Down the long white paper it makes little limes,

Just lines—up—down—criss-cross.

My heart is strained out at the pin-point of my
quill ;

It is thin and writhing like the marks of the
pen.

My hand marches to a squeaky tune,

It marches down the paper to a squealing of
fifes.

My pen and the trumpet-flowers,

And Washington’s armies away over the smoke-
tree to the Southwest.

“Yankee Doodle,’ My Darling! It is you
against the British,

Marching in your ragged shoes to batter down
King George.

What have you got in your hat? Not a
feather, I wager.

Just a hay-straw, for it is the harvest you are
fighting for.

Hay in your hat, and the whites of their eyes
for a target!

Like Bunker Hill, two years ago, when I
watched all day from the house-top

Through Father’s spy-glass.

The red city, and the blue, bright water,

And puffs of smoke which you made.

97Twenty miles away,
Round by Cambridge, or over the Neck,
But the smoke was white—white!

To-day the trumpet-flowers are red—red—

 

And I cannot see you fighting,

But old Mr. Dimond has fled to Canada,

And Myra sings “Yankee Doodle” at her milk-
ing.

The red throats of the trumpets bray and clang
in the sunshine,

And the smoke-tree puffs dun blossoms into
the blue air.

II
THE CITY OF FALLING LEAVES

Leaves fall,
Brown leaves,
Yellow leaves streaked with brown.
They fall,

Flutter,

Fall again.

The brown leaves,

And the streaked yellow leaves,
98Loosen on their branches

And drift slowly downwards.

One,

One, two, three,

One, two, five.

All Venice is a falling of Autumn leaves—
Brown,

And yellow streaked with brown.

“That sonnet, Abate,

Beautiful,

I am quite exhausted by it.

Your phrases turn about my heart
And stifle me to swooning.

Open the window, I beg.

    
  
 
 
  
  
  
 
  
 

Lord! What a strumming of fiddles and man-

dolins !
"Tis really a shame to stop indoors.

  
 
 

Call my maid, or I will make you lace me your-

self.
Fie, how hot it is, not a breath of air!

See how straight the leaves are falling.

   
 

Marianna, I will have the yellow satin caught

up with silver fringe,

  

It peeps out delightfully from under a mantle.

Am I well painted to-day, caro Abate mio?
You will be proud of me at the Ridotto, hey?

 
 
 

Proud of being Cavalier Servente to such a
>

lady?”
99“Can you doubt it, Bellessima Contessa?

4 pinch more rouge on the right cheek,

And Venus herself shines less. . .”

“You bore me, Abate,

I vow I must change you!

A letter. Achmet?

Run and look out of the window, Abate.

I will read my letter in peace.”

The little black slave with the yellow satin
turban

Gazes at his mistress with strained eyes.

His yellow turban and black skin

Are gorgeous—harbaric.

The yellow satin dress with its silver flashings

Lies on a chair

Beside a black mantle and a black mask,

Yellow and black,

Gorgeous—harbaric.

The lady reads her letter,

And the leaves drift slowly

Past the long windows.

“How silly you look, my dear Abate,

With that great brown leaf in your wig.

Pluck it off, I beg you,

Or I shall die of laughing.”

A yellow wall

Aflare in the sunlight,

Chequered with shadows,

100Shadows of vine leaves,

Shadows of masks.

Masks coming, printing themselves for an in-
stant,

Then passing on,

More masks always replacing them.

Masks with tricorns and rapiers sticking out
behind

Pursuing masks with plumes and high heels,

The sunlight shining under their insteps.

One,

One, two,

One, two, three,

There is a thronging of shadows on the hot
wall,

Filigreed at the top with moving leaves.

Yellow sunlight and black shadows,

Yellow and black,

Gorgeous—barbarice.

Two masks stand together,

And the shadow of a leaf falls through them,

Marking the wall where they are not.

From hat-tip to shoulder-tip,

From elbow to sword-hilt,

The leaf falls.

The shadows mingle,

Blur together,

Slide along the wall and disappear.
101Gold of mosaics and candles,
And night blackness lurking in the ceiling

beams.
Saint Mark’s glitters with flames and reflec-
tions.

A cloak brushes aside,

And the yellow of satin

Licks out over the coloured inlays of the pave-
ment.

Under the gold crucifixes

There is a meeting of hands

Reaching from black mantles.

Sighing embraces, bold investigations,

Hide in confessionals,

Sheltered by the shuffling of feet.

Gorgeous—barbaric

In its mail of jewels and gold,

Saint Mark’s looks down at the swarm of black
masks ;

And outside in the palace gardens brown leaves
fall,

Flutter,

Fall.

Brown.

And yellow streaked with brown.

Blue-black, the sky over Venice,

With a pricking of yellow stars.

There is no moon,

102And the waves push darkly against the prow

Of the gondola,

Coming from Malamocco

And streaming toward Venice.

It is black under the gondola hood,

But the yellow of a satin dress

Glares out like the eye of a watching tiger.

Yellow compassed about with darkness,

Yellow and black,

Gorgeous—barbaric.

The boatman sings,

It is Tasso that he sings;

The lovers seek each other beneath their
mantles,

And the gondola drifts over the lagoon, aslant
to the coming dawn.

sut at Malamocco in front,

In Venice behind,

Fall the leaves,

Brown,

And yellow streaked with brown.

They fall,

Flutter,

Fall.A LADY

You are beautiful and faded

Like an old opera tune

Played upon a harpsichord;

Or like the sun-flooded silks

Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes

Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul

Is vague and suffusing,

With the pungence of sealed spice-Jjars.
Your half-tones delight me,

And I grow mad with gazing

At your blent colours.

My Vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.ROBERT FROSTTHE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.
107HOME BURIAL

 

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: “What is it you see
From up there always—for I want to know.”
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that.
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: “What is 1t you see?”
Mounting until she cowered under him,
“JT will find out now—you must tell me, dear.”
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least stiffening of her neck and si-
lence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,
Blind creature; and a while he didn’t see.
But at last he murmured, “Oh,” and again,
SOhe-
“What is it—what?” she said.

“Just that I see.”
108“VY oue aon’ t.

it 1s.”

she challenged. ‘Tell me what

“The wonder is I didn’t see at once.

I never noticed it from here before.

I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.

The little graveyard where my people are!

So small the window frames the whole of it.

Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?

There are three stones of slate and one of
marble,

Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sun-
light

On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.

But I understand: it i$ not the stones,

But the child’s mound———”

“Don’t. don’t, don’t. don’t,” she cried.

She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm

That rested on the banister, and slid down-
stairs:

And turned on him with such a daunting look,

He said twice over before he knew himself:

“Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”

“Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t
need it!

I must get out of here. I must get air.

109I don’t know rightly whether any man can.”

“Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.
Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.”
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
“There’s something I should like to ask you,

dear.”
“You don’t know how to ask it.”

“Help me, then.”
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.

“My words are nearly always an offence.

I don’t know how to speak of anything

So as to please you. But I might be taught

I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.

A man must partly give up being a man

With women-folk. We could have some ar-
rangement

By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off

Anything special you’re a mind to name.

Though I don’t like such things *twixt those
that love.

Two that don’t love can’t live together with-
out them.

But two that do can’t live together with them.”

She moved the latch a little. “Don’t, don’t

go.

110Don’t carry it to someone else this time.

Tell me about it if it’s something human.

Let me into your grief. I’m not so much

Unlike other folks as your standing there

Apart would make me out. Give me my chance,

I do think, though, you overdo it a little.

What was it brought you up to think it the
thing

To take your mother-loss of a first child

So inconsolably—in the face of love.

You’d think his memory might be satisfied —”

“There you go sneering now!”

“T’m not, I’m not!

You make me angry. I’ll come down to you.

God, what a woman! And it’s come to this.

A man can’t speak of his own child that’s

dead.”

“You can’t because you don’t know how.

Ii you had any feelings, you that dug

>"

 

With your own hand
little crave:

~

how could you?—his

[ saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
1]

=
iI thought, who is that man? I don’t know

you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lft-
ing.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling
voice
Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your
shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw Th”

“JT shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”
“TI can repeat the very words you were saying.
‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day

Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with that was in the darkened parlour.
You couldn’t care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all,

No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.

112Friends make pretence of following to the
grave,

But before one is in it, their minds are turned

And making the best of their way back to life

And living people, and things they understand.

But the world’s evil. I won’t have my grief so

If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!”

“There, you have said it all and you feel better.

You won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the
door.

The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up.

Amy! There’s someone coming down the road!”

““You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must
Oa

Somewhere out of this house. How can I make
you—”

*“If—you—do!” She was opening the door
wider.

“Where do you mean to go? First tell me
that.

Pll follow and bring you back by force. I

wul!|—”> emt

 

 

     
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
  
   

THE WOOD-PILE

Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day

I paused and said, “I will turn back from
here.

No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”

The hard snow held me, save where now and
then

One foot went down. The view was all in lines

Straight up and down of tall slim trees

Too much alike to mark or name a place by

So as to say for certain I was here

Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

A small bird flew before me. He was careful

To put a tree between us when he lighted,

And say no word to tell me who he was

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather—

The white one in his tail; like one who takes

Everything said as personal to himself:

One flight out sideways would have undeceived
him.

114And then there was a pile of wood for which

I forgot him and let his little fear

Carry him off the way I might have gone,

Without so much as wishing him good-night.

He went behind it to make his last stand.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split

And piled—and measured, four by four by
eight.

And not another like it could I see.

No runner tracks in this Year’s snow looped
near it.

And it was older sure than this year’s cutting,

Or even last year’s or the year’s before.

The wood was grey and the bark warping
off it

And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis

Had wound strings round and round it like a
bundle.

What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labour of his axe,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.THE FEAR

A lantern light from deeper in the barn

Shone on a man and woman in the door

And threw their lurching shadows on a house

Near by, all dark in every glossy window.

A horse’s hoof pawed once the hollow floor,

And the back of the gig they stood beside

Moved in a little. The man grasped a wheel,

The woman spoke out sharply, “Whoa, stand
still!’

“T saw it just as plain as a white plate,”

She said, “as the light on the dashboard ran

a man’s face.

 

Along the bushes at the roadside
You must have seen it too.”

“T didn’t see it.

393

 

Are you sure
‘Ves, I’m sure!”
a it was a face?”

 

“Joel, I'll have to look. I can’t go in,
I can’t, and leave a thing like that unsettled.

116Doors locked and curtains drawn will make no
difference.

I always have felt strange when we came home

To the dark house after so long an absence,

And the key rattled loudly into place

Seemed to warn someone to be getting out

At one door as we entered at another.

What if I’m right, and someone all the time—

Don’t hold my arm!”

“T say it’s someone passing.”

“You speak as if this were a travelled road.
You forget where we are. What is beyond
That he’d be going to or coming from

At such an hour of night, and on foot too.
What was he standing still for in the bushes?”

“It’s not so very late—it’s only dark.
There’s more in it than you’re inclined to say.

Did he look like

;
293

 

“He looked like anyone.
I'll never rest to-night unless I know.
Give me the lantern.”

“You don’t want the lantern.”

She pushed past him and got it for herself.
D7“You're not to come,” she said. “This is my
business.

If the time’s come to face it, ’m the one

To put it the right way. He’d never dare—

Listen! He kicked a stone. Hear that, hear
that!

He’s coming towards us. Joel, go in—please.

Work!—I don’t hear him now. But please go
ries,

“In the first place you can’t make me believe

as

 

“Tt js—-or someone else he’s sent to watch.
And now’s the time to have it out with him
While we know definitely where he is.
Let him get off and he'll be everywhere
Around us, looking out of trees and bushes
Tull I shan’t dare to set a foot outdoors.

And I can’t stand it. Joel, let me go!”
“But it’s nonsense to think he’d care enough.”

‘You mean you couldn’t understand his caring.
Oh, but you see he hadn’t had enough—
Joel, I won’t—I won’t—I promise you.
We mustn’t say hard things. You mustn’t

either.”

118“Til be the one, if anybody goes!
But you give him the advantage with this light
What couldn’t he do to us standing here!
And if to see was what he wanted, why

He has seen all there was to see and gone.’

He appeared to forget to keep his hold,

But advanced with her as she crossed the grass

“What do you want?” she cried to all the
dark.

She stretched up tall to overlook the light

That hung in both hands hot against her skirt

“There’s no one; so you’re wrong,” he said.
“There 1s—
What do you want?” she cried, and then her-
self

Was startled when an answer really came.

“Nothing.” It came from well along the road,
She reached a hand to Joel for support:

The smell of scorching woollen made her faint.
“What are you doing round this house at

night?”

“Nothing.” A pause: there seemed no more
to say.

And then the voice again: “You seem afraid.

119I saw by the way you whipped up the horse.
I'll just come forward in the lantern light

 

And let you see.”

“Yes, do—Joel, go back!”
She stood her ground against the noisy steps
That came on, but her body rocked a little.

“You see.” the voice said.

“Oh.” She looked and looked.
“You don’t see—lI’ve a child here by the hand.”

‘“What’s a child doing at this time of night—?”

“Qut walking. Every child should have the
memory

Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.

What, son?”

“Then I should think you’d try to find

399

 

Somewhere to walk

“The highway as it happens—
We’re stopping for the fortnight down at
Dean’s.”
“But if that’s all—Joel—you realize—
You won’t think anything. You understand?
120You understand that we have to be careful.
This is a very, very lonely place.

She spoke as if she couldn’t turn.
The swinging lantern lengthened to the ground,
It touched, it struck, it clattered and went out.

Joel !”a

 

 

BIRCHES

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen
them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal
shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snowcrust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had
fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by
the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they
are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

122

and seeYears afterwards, trailing their leaves on the
ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their
hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

(Now am I free to be poetical?)

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the
ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

123It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the
cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed it open.

I’d like to get away from earth a while

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for
love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a high birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white
trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no
more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming
back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.THE SOUND OF THE TREES

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place?

We suffer them by the day

Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,

And acquire a listening air.

They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay.

My feet tug at the floor

And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

125HYLA BROOK

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow )—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.THE OVEN BIRD

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in
showers

On sunny davs a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.VACHEL LINDSAYThe Macmillan Company stipulate that credit be
given to Mr. Lindsay, to the book from which the
hemselves as the publishers.

poems are taken, and to tTHE CHINESE NIGHTINGALE *

A Song in Chinese Tapestries

“How, how,” he said. “Friend Chang,” I said,
“San Francisco sleeps as the dead—

Ended license, lust and play:

Why do you iron the night away?

Your big clock speaks with a deadly sound,
With a tick and a wail till dawn comes round.
While the monster shadows glower and creep,

What can be hetter for man than sleep?”

“YT will tell von a secret.22> Chane replied:

‘“My breast with vision is satisfied,

And I see green trees and fluttering wings,

And my deathless bird from Shanghai sings.”

Then he lit five fire-crackers in a pan.

“Pop, pop,” said the fire-crackers, “cra-cra-
crack.”

He lit a joss stick long and black.

* Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, from Collected Poems, by Vachel
Lindsay.

131—

   

   

Then the proud grey joss in the corner stirred ;
On his wrist appeared a grey small bird,
And this was the song of the grey small bird:
“Where is the princess, loved forever,

Who made Chang first of the kings of men?”

And the joss in the corner stirred again ;

And the carved dog, curled in his arms, awoke,

Barked forth a smoke-cloud that whirled and
broke.

It piled in a maze round the ironing-place,

And there on the snowy table wide

Stood a Chinese lady of high degree,

With a scornful, witching, tea-rose face... -

Yet she put away all form and pride,

And laid her glimmering veil aside

With a childlike smile for Chang and for me.

The walls fell back, night was a flower,

The table gleamed in a moonlit bower,

While Chang, with a countenance carved of
stone,

Ironed and ironed, all alone.

And thus she sang to the busy man Chang:

“Have you forgotten... .

Deep in the ages, long, long ago,

I was your sweetheart, there on the sand—

Storm-worn beach of the Chinese land?

We sold our grain in the peacock town

132Built on the edge of the sea-sands brown—
Build on the edge of the sea-sands brown.

“When all the world was drinking blood

From the skulls of men and bulls

And all the world had swords and clubs of
stone,

We drank our tea in China beneath the sacred
spice-trees,

And heard the curled waves of the harbour
moan.

And this grey bird, in Love’s first spring,

With a bright-bronze breast and a_bronze-
brown wing,

Captured the world with his carolling.

Do you remember, ages after,

At last the world we were born to own?

You were the heir of the yellow throne

The world was the field of the Chinese man

And we were the pride of the Sons of Han?

We copied deep books and we carved in jade,

And wove blue silks in the mulberry shade.
99

 

“T remember, I remember

That Spring came on forever,

That Spring came on forever,”

Said the Chinese nightingale.

My heart was filled with marvel and dream,
Though I saw the western street-lamps gleam,

133aa

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  

Though dawn was bringing the western day,

Though Chang was a laundryman ironing
away.

Mingled there with the streets and alleys,

The railroad-yard and the clock-tower bright,

Demon clouds crossed ancient valleys:

Across wide lotus-ponds of light

I marked a giant firefly’s flight.

And the lady, rosy-red,

Flourished her fan, her shimmering fan,
Stretched her hand toward Chang, and said:
“To vou remember,

Ages after,

Our palace of heart-red stone?

Do you remember

The little doll-faced children

With their lanterns full of moon-fire,

That came from all the empire

Honouring the throne?
The loveliest féte and carnival

Our world had ever known?

The sages sat about us

With their heads bowed in their beards,
With proper meditation on the sight.
Confucius was not born;

We lived in those great days

Confucius later said were lived aright. . ...

134And this grey bird, on that day of spring,

With a bright bronze breast, and a bronze-
brown wing,

Captured the world with his carolling.

Late at night his tune was spent.

Peasants,

Sages,

Children,

Homeward went,

And then the bronze bird sang for you and me.

We walked alone. Our hearts were high and
free,

I had a silvery name, I had a silvery name,

I had a silvery name—do you remember

The name you cried beside the tumbling sea?”

Chang turned not to the lady slim—

He bent to his work, ironing aAWay ;

But she was arch, and knowing and glowing,

And the bird on his shoulder spoke for him.

Warlinm... |. Adanling sna tline
darling 9

Said the Chinese nightingale.

The great grey joss on a rustic shelf,
Rakish and shrewd, with his collar awry,
Sang impolitely, as though by himself,
Drowning with this bellowing the nightingale’s

cry:“Back through a hundred, hundred years
Hear the waves as they climb the piers,
Hear the howl of the silver seas,
Hear the thunder.
Hear the gongs of holy China
How the waves and tunes combine
In a rhythmic clashing wonder,
Incantation old and fine:
‘Dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons,
Red fire-crackers, and green fire-crackers,
And dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons.’ ”

Then the lady, rosy-red,

Turned to her lover Chang and said:

“Dare you forget that turquoise dawn

When we stood in our mist-hung velvet lawn,

And worked a spell this great joss taught

Till a God of the Dragons was charmed and
caught?

From the flag high over our palace home

He flew to our feet in a rainbow-foam—

A king of beauty and tempest and thunder

Panting to tear our sorrows asunder.

A dragon of fair adventure and wonder.

We mounted the back of that royal slave

With thoughts of desire that were noble and
grave.

We swam down the shore to the dragon-moun-

tains,

136We whirled to the peaks and the fiery fountains.

To our secret ivory house we were borne.

We looked down the wonderful wing-filled
regions

Where the dragons darted in glimmering
legions.

Right by my breast the nightingale sang;

The old rhymes rang in the sunlit mist

That we this hour regain—

Song-fire for the brain.

When my hands and my hair and my feet you
kissed,

When you cried for your heart’s new pain,

What was my name in the dragon-mist,

In the rings of rainbowed rain?”

‘Sorrow and love, glory and love,”
Said the Chinese nightingale.
“Sorrow and love, glory and love,”

Said the Chinese nightingale.

And now the joss broke in with his song:
“Dying ember, bird of Chang,

Soul of Chang, d« you remember?—

Ere you returned to the shining harbour
There were pirates by ten thousand
Descended on the town

In vessels mountain-high and red and brown,

137Moon-ships that climbed the storms and cut

the skies.
On their prows were painted terrible bright

   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
   
 
 
  
  
  

eyes

But I was then a wizard and a scholar and a
priest ;

I stood upon the sand;

With lifted hand I looked upon them

And sunk their vessels with my wizard eyes,

Md the stately lacquer-gate made safe again.

Deep, deep below the bay, the sea-weed and
the spray,

Embalmed in amber every pirate lies,

Embalmed in amber every pirate lies.”

Then this did the noble lady say:

“Bird, do you dream of our home-coming day
When you flew like a courier on before

From the dragon-peak to our palace- -door,
And we drove the steed in your singing path—
The ramping dragon of laughter and wrath:
And found our city all aglow,

And knighted this joss that decked it so?
There were golden fishes in the purple river
And silver fishes and rainbow fishes.

There were golden junks in the laughing river,
And silver junks and rainbow junks:

There were golden lilies by the bay and river,
And silver lilies and tiger-lilies,

138And tinkling wind-bells in the gardens of the
town

By the black-lacquer gate

Where walked in state

The kind king Chang

And his sweet-heart mate. ..s

With his flag-born dragon

And his crown of pearl... and... jade,

And his nightingale reigning in the mulberry
shade,

And sailors and soldiers on the sea-sands brown,

And priests who bowed them down to your

 

song
By the city called Han, the peacock town,
By the city called Han, the nightingale town,

The nightingale town.”

Then sang the bird, so strangely gay,
Fluttering, fluttering, ghostly and grey,

A vague, unravelling, final tune,

Like a long unwinding silk cocoon;
Sang as though for the soul of him

Who ironed away in that bower dim:—
“T have forgotten

Your dragons great,

Merry and mad and friendly and bold.
Dim is your proud lost palace-gate.

I vaguely know

There were heroes of old,

139_— =
ass iA RE, we

  
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  

Troubles more than the heart could hold,

There were wolves in the woods

Yet lambs in the fold,

Nests in the top of the almond tree... - -

The evergreen tree... and the mulberry
tree .

Life and hurry and joy forgotten,

Years on years I but half-remember .. .

Man is a torch, then ashes soon,

May and June, then dead December,

Dead December, then again June.

Who shall end my dream’s confusion?

Life is a loom, weaving illusion .. .

I remember, I remember

There were ghostly veils and laces .. -

In the shadowy bowery places ..- -

With lovers’ ardent faces

Bending to one another,

Speaking each his part.

They infinitely echo

In the red cave of my heart.

‘Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart,’

They said to one another.

They spoke, I think, of perils past.

They spoke, I think, of peace at last.

One thing, I remember :

Spring came on forever,

Spring came on forever,”

Said the Chinese nightingale.

140POEMS ABOUT THE MOON *
lr. BUCHID
Old Euclid drew a circle

On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much

Of are and of circumference,
Diameter and such.

A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon.

Il. YET GENTLE WILL THE
GRIFFIN BE

(What Grandpa told the Children)

The moon? It is a griffin’s egg,

Hatching to-morrow night.

And how the little boys will watch
With shouting and delight

* Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Mac-
millan Company, from Collected Poems, by Vachel

Lindsay.

141To see him break the shell and stretch
And creep across the sky.

The boys will laugh. The litle girls,
I fear, may hide and cry.

Yet gentle will the criffin be,

Most decorous and fat,

And walk up to the milky way
And lap it like a cat.

Ill. A SENSE OF HUMOUR
No man should stand before the moon
To make sweet song thereon,

With dandified importance,

His sense of humour gone.

Nay, let us don the motley cap,
The jester’s chastened mien,
If we would woo that looking-glass

And see what should be seen.

QO mirror on fair Heaven’s wall,
We find there what we bring.
So. let us smile in honest part
And deck our souls and sing.

142Yea, by the chastened jest alone
Will ghosts and terrors pass,

And fays, or suchlike friendly things,
Throw kisses through the glass.

IV. WHAT SEMIRAMIS SAID

The moon’s a steaming chalice
Of honey and venom-wine.

A little of it sipped by night
Makes the long hours divine.
But oh, my reckless lovers,
They drain the cup and wail,
Die at my feet with shaking limbs
And tender lips all pale.

Above them in the sky it bends
Empty and grey and dread.
To-morrow night ’tis full again,
Golden, and foaming red.

VY. THE SCISSORS-GRINDER
(What the Tramp Said)

The old man had his box and wheel
For grinding knives and shears.
No doubt his bell in village streets
Was joy to children’s ears.

143And I bethought me of my youth
When such men came around,
And times I asked them in, quite sure
The scissors should be ground.

The old man turned and spoke to me,
His face at last in view.

And then I thought those curious eyes
Were eyes that once T knew.

 

“The moon is but an emery-wheel

To whet the sword of God,”

He said. ‘And here beside my fire

I stretch upon the sod

Each night, and dream, and watch
the stars

And watch the ghost-clouds go.

And see that sword of God in Heaven

A-waving to and fro.

T see that sword each century, friend,

Tt means the world-war comes

With all its bloody, wicked chiefs

And hate-inflaming drums.

Men talk of peace, but I have seen

That emery-wheel turn round.

The voice of Abel cries again

To God from out the ground.

The ditches must flow red, the plague

Go stark and screaming by

144Each time that sword of God takes edge

Within the midnight sky.

And those that scorned their brothers here

And sowed a wind of shame
Will reap the whirlwind as of old
And face relentless flame.”

And thus the scissors-grinder spoke,

His face at last in view.

And there beside the railroad bridge

I saw the W andering J CW.

VI. ALADDIN AND THE JINN

“Bring me soft song.”
> >

said Aladdin.

“This tailor-shop sings not at all.

Chant me a word of the twilight,
Of roses that mourn in the fall.

Bring me a song like hashish

That will comfort the stale and the sad,

For I would be mending my spirit,
Forgetting these days that are bad,

Forgetting companions too shallow,

Their quarrels and arguments thin,

Forgetting the shouting Muezzin :”?—

**I AM YOUR SLAVE,” said the Jinn.

“Bring me old wines,”
“I have been a starved pauper too long.
145

said Aladdin.Serve them in vessels of jade and of shell,
Serve them with fruit and with song :—
Wines of pre-Adamite Sultans

Digged from beneath the black seas :—
New- gathered dew from the heavens

Dri a down from Heaven’s sweet trees,
Cups from the angels’ pale tables

That will make me aie handsome and wise,
For I have beheld her, the princess,
Firelight and starlight her eyes.

Pauper I am, I would woo her.

And—let me drink wine, to begin,

Though the Koran expressly forbids it.”
“T AM YOUR SLAVE,” said the Jinn.

“Plan me a dome,” said Aladdin,
“That is drawn like the dawn of the MOON,
When the sphere seems to rest on the moun-

tains,
Half-hidden, yet full-risen soon.
Build me a dome,” said Aladdin,

“That shall cause all young lovers to sigh,
The fullness of life and of beauty,

Peace beyond peace to the eye—

A palace of foam and of opal,

Pure moonlight without and within,
Where I may SO my sweet lady.”

“JT am YouR SLAVE,” said the Jinn.

146ALFRED KREYMBORGUNDER GLASS

If I could catch that moth,

That fluttering, wayward thing

That beats about inside me all the day and
half the night

(An insignificant net could certainly do it)

I'd stick him through the head

With a pin that’s long and thin,

A pin that’s long and strong enough to mount
him under glass

(An insignificant pin could certainly do it);

I’'d discover him once for all,

The colour of his wings,

The nature of those crazy things that fooled
me all these years:

Purple, red or blue,

Yellow, white, or black,

Or whether they’re one and all of these and a
shade or two besides

(An insignificant harmony or dissonance they
could be);

I'd learn them once for all,

I’d know them, every vein,

So clear to all my neighbours, so invisible—to
me.

149ANTS

Who made the world, sir?
I don’t know, son—
See the ants on that hill, with a fly.

Who made the world, sir?

Some say that God—

The fly is dead, son.

Theyre dragging him to their hole.

Who made God, sir?

I don't know—

Now he’s gone, son.

The ants are an indefatigable race.

Who made God, sir?
Observe how they swarm all over the hall.
Theyre hunting another fly.

They’re funny, sir.
They are.YEARNING

 

Funny, solemn, little old grey owl,
Perched beside me in this dreary cage:
If you and I could see.

We could see the sun,

A bright yellow nut, so they say !

We can see the moon. you say,

But he’s so gloomy, funny owl;

The dark, vou say,

But he’s so black.

We can see the stars. you say,

But they’re so weary, funny owl;

And hear the birds, you say,

But they’re so sad.

The sun that we smell every day, funny owl,
A bright yellow nut, as they say—

If we could only see, we might snatch him!

Do not nudge me, funny, solemn, little old grey
owl.

Don’t be angry, I but ponder here beside you.

The moon, yes, the dark,

Yes, the stars in our cage,

We ourselves, are real, are great.

But if you and I could see,

We might eat the sun.

A bright yellow nut, so they say!

151SPRINGTIME

Willow: Why do you bend so low
With your staring into the stream?
Only to see how deep it is!

Fool: Do you think you’re beardless still
And meditating suicide?

Only to find if one might wade !

Lilies and cat-tails belong to the young,
And the water is cold this time of year?
Only to touch my love over there!

Your love? your love? and which is she?
That wrinkled, gnarled, old bandy-leg?
The one with the gay white limbs!

Dotard: What could she see in you?
She’d yank your beard and laugh away?
She’s nodding her head at me!

152CONVENTION

  
  
    
   
   
  
  
   
  
   

Beware of a pirate who will scuttle your ship,
A cross-eyed, toothless pirate!

Pll blow my great horn, carved of dead men’s
skulls,

Right down your ear and freeze you.

I'll stick my big thumb into your eye
And my knife clean through your throat.

Pll pull out my goblet and drink your blood
While my foot rests on your belly.

Pll laugh a loud laugh that’ll shunt your soul
to hell
And spit on your face for an epitaph.

Pll kick your carcass to its coffin, the sea,
A sea that won’t sing even a dirge for you.

Then [ll yank down the flag that you hoisted
up so high
And raise the devil’s own instead. .

153Beware of a pirate who will scuttle your ship,

A cross-eyed, toothless pirate!

I crawl aboard when your sails begin to fail—
The sails that are blown by the strength of
your will,The snow,
Ah, yes; ah, yes, indeed,

Is white and beautiful, white and beautiful,
Verily beautiful—

From my window.

The sea,

Ah, yes; ah, yes, indeed,

Is green and alluring, green and alluring,
Verily alluring—

From the shore.

Love?
Ah, yes; ah, yes; ah, yes, indeed,
Verily yes, ah yes, indeed!CIRCE

Voice, marvellous voice:

Come back to me!

Pelt me with fresher wild roses;

Caress me with bluer anemones;

Bruise me with thornier thistles;

Embrace, imprison, smother me

With the merriest of buttercups and daisies!

Come back for a superlative moment,

And I will be all your swine in one,

Your lowest groveller, your funniest of mire-
lings !

Come back ere I run mad

Inside this miserable, yearning, incomprehen-
sible,

Beauty-worshipping I of mine!EGO’S DREAM

Oh what delirious fun this is,

This juggling of crazy balloons!

Up with the crimson one,

Down comes the blue;

Up with the copper one,

Down comes the gold;

Up with the cinnamon—

Up with them, each of them, all of them here:

The evening star and Venus and Mars,

The morning star and the whole milky way!

I am tossing and catching them, catching and
tossing them,

Hundreds of worlds at one time!

Toss and catch, catch and toss, toss and catch,
catch and toss,

More than a child am [!

Oh what delirious fun this is!

Up with Minerva and down with the moon;

Up with old Saturn and down with the sky;

Up with the blistering sun!

LbWho ever played with balloons and balloons,

Such hundreds of worlds at one time?

Big strong Atlas—he had but one,

The one he was doomed to carry,

While I toss and catch, catch and toss, toss and
catch, catch and toss,

All at one time—Great Jove, great Zeus, great
Jupiter, save us !—

I almost dropped that little brown ball,

That little brown ball, the earth!

Had I dropped that ball, that little brown ball,

That little brown ball, the earth?ARABS

Melancholy lieth dolorously ill,

One heel full fatally smitten:

Melancholy twitcheth and sigheth:

“Must such as I, because of an itch,

Move from the cheery sloth of a couch,

From watching my valorous nomad musings
Coming and passing like pilgrims en route
From mooning philosophy on to the sun—
Must such as I, almost ready to follow them,

 

Legs follow musings as sheep follow hells
Must such as I, because of a scratch
Imprinted by small ignominious teeth

Of a small, black, common, effeminate witch,
Surely not one of my bidding—move?

What way is this, God, to make a man move?”
And his bed-fellow,

Happiness, petrified, groaneth:

“What way is this, God, to make a man stone?”THRENODY

I have been a snob to-day.

Scourge me with a thousand thongs!
The crowds were atoms passing by.
Plunge me into a vat of tar!

Love was dead all day.

Tyrant ‘I’ had a feast of self.
Hang me from the city gallows!
His harem, pride and vanity.
Throw my body to Doodle Dandy!
Love was dead all day.

Let him tear my ‘I’ from me.

Let him stick it on a pike.

Let him dance through every street.
For all to jeer, for all to damn.
Love was dead all day.

Let him fling the selfish thing

Into the public pool of shame.

And raise a stone that all may read,
Those that live and those to come:
““Love was dead all day.”

160NUN SNOW

A Pantomime of Beads

Earth Voice

Is she

Thoughtless of life,
A lover of imminent death,

Nun Snow

Touching her strings of white beads?
Is it her unseen hands

Which urge the beads to tremble?
Does Nun Snow,

Aware of the death she must die alone,
Away from the nuns

Of the green beads,

Of the ochre and brown,

Of the purple and black—

Does she improvise

Along those soundless strings

In the worldly hope

That the answering, friendly tune,
The faithful, folk-like miracle,

Will shine in a moment or two?

161Moon Voice

Or peradventure,

Are the beads merely wayward,

On an evening so soft,

And One Wind

Is so gentle a mesmerist

As he draws them and her with his hand?

Earth Voice

Was it Full Moon,

Who contrives tales of this order,
And himself loves the heroine,
Nun Snow—

Wind Voice

Do you see his beads courting hers ?—

Lascivious monk !—

Earth Voice

Was it Full Moon,

Slyly innocent of guile,
Propounder of sorrowless whimseys,
Who breathed that suspicion?

Is it One Wind,

The wily, scholarly pedant—

Is it he who retorts—

162Wind Voice

 

Like olden allegros

In olden sonatas,

All tales have two themes,

She ts beautiful,

He is beautiful,

With the traditional movement.
Their beads court each other,
Revealing a cadence as fatally true

As the sum which follows a one-plus-one—
So, why inquire further?

Nay, inquire further,

Deduce it your fashion!

Nun Snow,

As you say,

Touches her strings of white beads,
Full Moon,

Let you add,

His lute of yellow strings ;

And, our Night

Is square, nay,

Our Night

Is round, nay

Our nicht

Is a blue haleony—

And therewith close your inquisition!Earth Voice

Who urged the beads to tremble?
They’re still now!

Fallen, or cast over me!

Nun, Moon, and Wind are gone!
Are they betraying her?—

Moon Voice

Ask our Night—

Earth Voice

Did the miracle appear?—

Moon Voice

Ask our Night,

Merely a child on a balcony,
Letting down her hair and
Black beads, a glissando—
Ask her what she means,
Dropping the curtain so soon!MANIKIN AND MINIKIN *

A Bisque-Play

(Seen through an oval frame, one of the walls
of a parlour. The wallpaper is a convention-
alized pattern. Only the shelf of the mantel-
piece shows. At each end, seated on pedestals
turned slightly away from one another, two
aristocratic bisque figures, a boy in delicate
cerise and a girl in cornflower blue. Their
shadows join in a grotesque silhouette. In the
centre, an ancient clock whose tick acts as the
metronome for the sound of their high voices.
Presently the mouths of the figures open and
shut after the mode of ordinary conversation. )

She—Manikin !
He—Miunikin?

“This play is fully protected under the Copyright
Laws of the United States of America, Great Britain,
including the Dominion of Canada, and all other coun-
tries of the Copyright Union, and is subject to roy-
alty. In its present form this play is dedicated to
the reading public only, and no performance, produc-
tion, recitation, public reading or radio broadcasting
may be given except by special arrangement with
Samuel French, 25 West Forty-fifth Street, New York,
N. Y. Copyright, 1925, by Samuel French.

165She—That fool of a servant has done it again.
He—I should say she’s more than a fool.
She
He—A brittle-fingered noddy!
She—Which way are you looking? What do
you see?
He—The everlasting armchair,
The everlasting tiger skin,
The everlasting yellow, green, and purple

 

A meddlesome bus ybod y—

books,
The everlasting portrait of milord—
She—Oh these Yankees!

The everlasting rattan rocker

and I see

 

The everlasting samovar,

The everlasting noisy piano,

The everlasting portrait of milady—
He—Simpering spectacle!
She—What does she want, always dusting?
He—I should say—

That is, I’d consider the thought—
She—yYou’d consider a lie—

Oh Manikin—

You’re trying to defend her!
He—I’m not defending her—
She—You’re trying to—
He—I’m not trying to—
She—Then what are you trying to—
He—Well, I'd venture to say,

If she’d only stay away some morning—
166She—That’s what I say in my dreams!
He

She—Her everlasting broom—

She and her broom—

 

He—She wouldn’t be sweeping—

 

 

 

She—Every corner, every cranny, every crev-
ice—

He—And the dust wouldn’t move—

She—wW ouldn’t crawl, wouldn’t rise, wouldn’t
fly—

He—And cover us all over—

She—Like a spider-web—ugh !

He—Everlasting dust has been most of our
life—

She—Everlasting years and years of dust!

He

She—And you on your manly pink cloak.

 

You on your lovely blue gown—

He—lIf she didn’t sweep, we wouldn’t need dust-
ing—

She—Nor need taking down, I should say—

He—W ith her stupid, clumsy hands—

She

He—And we wouldn’t need putting back—

 

Her crooked, monkey paws—

She—I with my back to you—
He—I with my back to you.
She—lIt’s been hours, days, weeks—
By the sound of that everlasting clock—
And the coming of day and the going of
day—
Since I saw you last!

167He—What’s the use of the sun
With it’s butterfly wings of light—
What’s the use of a sun made to see by—
If I can’t see you!

She—Manikin!

He—Minikin?

She—Say that again!

He—Why should I say it again—don’t you

know?

 

She—I know, but sometimes I doubt—
He—Why do you, what do you doubt?
She—Please say it again!
He—What’s the use of a sun—
She—What’s the use of a sun?
He—That was made to see by—
She—That was made to see by?
He—If I can’t see you!

She—Oh, Manikin!

He—Minikin?

She—If you hadn’t said that again,

My doubt would have filled a balloon.
He—yYour doubt, which doubt, what doubt?
She—And although I can’t move,

Although I can’t move unless somebody

shoves me,

One of these days when the sun isn’t here,

I would have slipped over the edge

Of this everlasting shelf—

He—Mninikin!
168She—And fallen to that everlasting floor
Into so many fragments,
They’d never paste Minikin together
again!
He—Minikin, Minikin!
She—They’d have to set another here—
Some Ninikin, I’m assured!
He—Why do you chatter so, prattle so?
She—Because of my doubt—
Because I’m as positive as I am
That I sit here with my knees in a knot—
That that human creature
He—Loves me?

 

loves you.

She—And you her!

He—Minikin!

She—When she takes us down she holds you
much longer.

He—Minikin!

She—I’m sufficiently feminine

 

And certainly old enough—
I and my hundred and seventy years—
I can see, I can feel
By her manner of touching me
And her flicking me with her mop—
The creature hates me—
She’d like to drop me, that’s what she
would!
He—Minikin!
She—Don’t you venture defending her!

169Booby—you don’t know live women!
When I’m in the right position

I can note how she fondles you,
Pets you like a parrot with her finger tip,
Blows a pinch of dust from your eye
With her softest breath,

Holds you off at arm’s length

And fixes you with her spider look,
Actually holds you against her cheek—

 

Her rose-tinted cheek—

Before she releases you!

If she didn’t turn us apart so often,

I wouldn’t charge her with insinuation:
But now I know she loves you—

She’s as jealous as I am—

And poor dead me in her live power:
Manikin?

Minikin?

She—If you could see me—

The way you see her—

He—But I see you—

See you always—
See only you!

She—If you could see me

   

The way you see her,

You’d still love me,

You’d love me the way you do her!
Who made me what I am?

Who dreamed me in motionless clay?

170He—Minikin?
She—-Manikin?
He—Will you listen to me?

 

She—No!
He—wWill you listen to me?
She—No.

He—Will you listen to me?
She—Y es.

He—I love you—

She—No!

He—I’ve always loved you—
She—No.

He—You doubt that?
She—Yes!

He—yYou doubt that?
She—Yes.

He—You doubt that?

She—No.
You’ve always loved me—
Yes—
But you don’t love me now—
No—

Not since that rose-face encountered
your glance—
No.
He—Miaiunikin!
She—If I could move about the way she can—

If I had feet—Dainty white feet which could twinkle and
ee twirl—
I’d dance you so prettily
You’d think me a sun butterfly—
If I could let down my hair
And prove you it’s longer than larch
hair—
If I could raise my black brows
Or shrug my narrow shoulders,
Like a queen or a countess—
If I could turn my head, tilt my head,
This way and that—like a swan—
Ogle my eyes, like a peacock,
Till you’d marvel,
They’re green, nay, violet, nay, yellow,
nay, gold—
If I could move, only move,
Just the moment of an inch—
You would see what I could be!
It’s a change, it’s a change,
You men ask of women!
He—A change?
She—You’re eye-sick, heart-sick
Of seeing the same foolish porcelain thing,
A hundred years old,
A hundred and fifty,
And sixty, and seventy—
I don’t know how old I am!
172He—wNot an exhalation
Not an inhalation younger!
Minikin?

She—Manikin?

He—Will you listen to, me?

She—No!

He—Will you listen to me?

She—No.

He—Will you listen to me?

She—Yes.

He—I don’t love that creature—

She—You do.

He—I can’t love that creature—

She—You can.

He—Will you listen to me?

She—Y es—

If you'll tell me—

If you'll prove me—

So my last particle of dust—
The tiniest speck of a molecule
The merest electron—

He—Are you listening?

She—Yes!

He—To begin with—

I dislike, suspect, deplore—
I had best say, feel compassion
For what is called, humanity—

 

 

older than I—

Or the animate, as opposed to the inani-

mate—
173She-—You say that so wisel y—

 

ea You’re such a philosopher
. Say it again! .
He—That which is able to move
Can never be steadfast, you understand?
Let us consider the creature at hand
To whom you have referred
With an undue excess of admiration
Adulterated with an undue excess of
envy—
She—Say that again!
He—To begin with—
I can only see part of her at once.
She moves into my vision;
She moves out of my vision;
She is doomed to be wayward.
She—Yes, but that which you see of her—

He

 

Is ugly, commonplace, unsightly.
Her face a rose-face?
t’s veined with blood and the skin of it

wrinkles—

Her eyes are ever so near to a hen’s—
Her movements,
If one would pay such a gait with regard—
Her gait is unspeakably ungainly—
Her hair—

She—Her hair?

He

 

Luckily I’ve never seen it down—
I daresay it comes down in the dark,
174When it looks, most assuredly, like tangled
weeds——
She—Again, Manikin, that dulcet phrase!
He—Even were she beautiful,
She were never so beautiful as thou!
She—Now you’re a poet, Manikin!

He

 

Even were she so beautiful as thou—
Lending her your eyes,
And the exquisite head which holds them—
Like a cup two last beads of wine,
Like a stone two last drops of rain,
Green, nay, violet, nay, yellow, nay,

gold—
She—Faster, Manikin!
He—I can’t, Minikin!

Words were never given to man

 

To phrase such a one as you are—
Inanimate symbols

Can never embrace, embody, hold

The animate dream that you are—
I, must cease.

 

 

She—Manikin!

He—And even were she so beautiful as thou,
She couldn’t stay beautiful.

She—Stay beautiful?

 

He—Humans change with each going moment.
That is a grey-haired platitude.
Just as I can see that creature
Only when she touches my vision,

175

nn aaanemensann

aeSo I could only see her once, were she
beautiful—

At best, twice or thrice—

You’re more precious than when you came!

She—And you!
He—Human pathos penetrates still deeper

When one determines their inner life,
As we’ve pondered their outer.
Their inner changes far more desperately.

She—How so, wise Manikin?

He—They have what philosophy terms, moods,

   

And moods are more pervious to modula-
tion

Than pools to idle breezes.

These people may say, to begin with—

I love you.

This may be true, ’m assured—

As true as when we say, I love you.

But they can only say,

I love you,

So long as the mood breathes,

So long as the breezes blow,

“

So long as water remains wet.

 

They are honest
They mean what they say—
Passionately, tenaciously, tragically—
But when the mood languishes,

They have to say,

If it be they are honest—

176I do not love you.
Or they have to say,
I love you,
To somebody else.
She—To somebody else?
He—Now, you and I—
We’ve said that to each other
We’ve had to say it

For a hundred and seventy years—

 

And we’ll have to say it, always.
She—Say always again!
He—tThe life of an animate—
She—Say always again!
He—Always!
The life of an animate
Is a procession of deaths
With but a secret sorrowing candle,
Guttering lower and lower,
in the path to the grave—
The life of an inanimate
Is as serenely enduring—
As all still things are.
She—Still things?
He—Recall our childhood in the English mu-
seum=—}
Ere we were moved,
From place to place,
To this dreadful Yankee salon—
Do you remember

eeThat little old Greek tanagra

Of the girl with a head like a bud—

That little old Roman medallion

Of the girl with a head lke a
She—Manikin, Manikin—

Were they so beautiful as I—

Did you love them too—

 

Why do you bring them back?
He—They were not so beautiful as thou—
I spoke of them—
Recalled, designated them—
Well. because they were ages old—
And—and—
She—And

He—And we might live as long as they—

ie
andar

 

As they did and do!
I hinted their existence
Because they’re not so beautiful as thou,
So that by contrast and deduction—
She—And deduction?
He—yYou know what I’d say—
She—But say it again!
He—I love you.
She—Manikin?
He—Minikin?
She—Then even though that creature has

 

turned us apart,
Can you see me?

 

. He

I can see you.She

Even though you haven’t seen me

 

For hours, days, weeks—
With your dear blue eyes—
You can see me—
With your hidden ones?
He—I can see you.
She—Even though you are still,
And calm, and smooth,

 

And lovely outside—
You aren’t still and calm
And smooth and lovely inside?

       

 

H rely, yes—
But not still and calm and smooth!
She—Which way are you looking? What do

you see?

He—I look at you.

I see you.
She—And if that fool of a servant—

Oh, Manikin—

Suppose she should break the future—

Our great happy centuries ahead—

By dropping me, throwing me down?
He—I should take an immediate step

Off this everlasting shelf—
She—But you cannot move!
He—The good wind would give me a blow!
She—Now you’re a punster !

And what would your fragments do?
He—They’d do what Manikin did.
179She-—Say that again!
He—They’d do what Manikin did... .
She—Manikin?

He—Minikin?

She—Shall I tell you something?
He—Tell me something.

 

She—Are you listening?

He—With my inner ears.

She—I wasn’t jealous of that woman-
He—yYou weren’t jealous?

She—I wanted to hear you talk—
He—yYou wanted to hear me talk?
She—You talk so wonderfully!

He—Do I, indeed? What a booby I am!
She—And I wanted to hear you say—
He—You cheat, you idler, you—
She—W oman—

He—Dissembler!

She—Manikin?

He—Minikin?

She—Everlastingly?

He
She—Say it again!

He—I refuse—

She—Y ou refuse?

He—Well—

She—wW ell?

He—You have ears outside your head—

 

Everlastingly.

I'll say that for you—
180But they'll never hear—
What your other ears hear!
She—osay 1t—
Down one of my ears—
Outside my head?
He—I refuse.
She—You refuse?
He—Leave me alone.
She—Manikin?
He—I can’t say it!
She—Manikin!

 

(The clock goes on ticking for a moment.
Its mellow chimes strike the hour. Curtain. )WALLACE STEVENSReprinted from Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens,
hy permission of and special arrangement with Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., authorized publishers.PETER QUINCE AT THE CLAVIER

I

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds

On my spirit make a music too.

Music is feeling then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,

Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna:

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while

The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their being throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

185II

In the green evening, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed

For so much melody.

Upon the bank she stood
In the cool

Of spent emotions.

She felt, among the leaves,
The dew

Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.

The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,

Fetching her woven scarves,

Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.

She turned—

A cymbal clashed,

And roaring horns.

186III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side:

And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon their lamps’ uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then the simpering Byzantines,
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.

187So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.

So maidens die to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.

Now in its immortality, it plays

On the clear viol of her memory,

And makes a constant sacrament of praise.SUNDAY MORNING

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug, mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,

As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries: “The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering;

It is the grave of Jesus, where He lay.”

189We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness ;

And in the isolation of the sky,

At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Iit

She says: “I am content when wakened birds,

Before they fly, test the reality

Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings ;

But when the birds are gone, and their warm
fields

Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”

There is not any haunt of prophecy,

Nor any old chimera of the grave,

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

Nor visionary South, nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endures; or will endure

190Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

LY

She says, “But in contentment I still feel

The need of some imperishable bliss.”

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires. Although she strews the
leaves

Of sure obliteration on our paths—

The path sick sorrow took, the many paths

Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love

Whispered a little out of tenderness—

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to bring sweet-smelling pears

And plums in ponderous piles. The maidens
taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

V

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

191Their boisterous devotion to the sun—
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like seraphim, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn—
And whence they came and whither they shall
£9,

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE

I

‘Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,

O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”
And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.
Or was it that I mocked myself alone?

I wish that I might be a thinking stone.
The sea of spuming thoughts foists up again
The radiant bubble that she was. And then
A deep up-pouring from some saltier well
Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

It

A red bird flies across the golden floor.

It is a red bird that seeks out his choir
Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.
A torrent will fall from him when he finds.
Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?
193I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;
For it has come that thus I greet the Spring.
These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.
No Spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss

To make believe a starry connaissance.

Ifl

Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese

Sat titivating by their mountain pools

Or in the Yangste studied out their beards?

I shall not play the flat historic scale.

You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought
The end of love in their all-speaking braids.
You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.
Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain
That not one curl in Nature has survived?
Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,
Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

IV

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.
When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air—
194An apple serves as well as any skull

To be the book in which to read a round,

And is as excellent, in that it is composed

Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to
ground.

But it excels in this that as the fruit

Of love, it is a book too mad to read

Before one merely reads to pass the time.

V

In the high .West there burns a furious star.
It is for fiery boys that star was set

And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.
The measure of the intensity of love

Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.

For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke
Ticks tediously the time of one more year.
And you? Remember how the crickets came
Out of their mother grass, like little kin.

In the pale nights, when your first imagery
Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

VI

If men at forty will be painting lakes
The ephemeral blues must merge for them in
one,

195— iene ma =

ss

is eee a Se
2 "
a: wie

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  

The basic slate, the universal hue.

There is a substance in us that prevails.

But in our amours amorists discern

Such fluctuations that their secrivening

Is breathless to attend each quirky turn.
When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink
Into the compass and curriculum

Of introspective exiles, lecturing.

It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.

VII

The mules that angels ride come slowly down

The blazing passes, from beyond the sun.

Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive.

These muleteers are dainty of their way.

Meantime centurions guffaw and beat

Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.

This parable, in sense, amounts to this:

The honey of heaven may or may not come,

But that of earth both comes and goes at
once.

Suppose these couriers brought amid their
train

A damsel heightened by eternal bloom. . . .

196VIII

Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,

An ancient aspect touching a new mind.

It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.

This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.

Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.

Two golden gourds distended on our vines,

We hang like warty squashes, streaked and
rayed,

Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,

Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.

The laughing sky will see the two of us

Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

IX

In verses wild with motion, full of din,
Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure
As the deadly thought of men accomplishing
Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate
The faith of forty, ward of Cupido.

Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit

Is not too lusty for your broadening.

197I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything
For the music and manner of the paladins
To make oblation fit. Where shall I find
Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

x

'

The fops of fancy in their poems leave
Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,
Spontaneously watering their gritty soils.

I am a yeoman, as such fellows go.

I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs,
No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits.

But, after all, I know a tree that bears

A semblance to the thing I have in mind.

It stands gigantic, with a certain tip

To which all birds come sometime in their time.
But when they go that tip still tips the tree.

XI

If sex were all, then every trembling hand

Could make us speak, like dolls, the wished-for
words,

But note the unconscionable treachery of fate,

That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan,
and shout

198Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth
From madness or delight, without regard
To that.first foremost law. Anguishing hour!
Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink,
Clippered with lilacs, scudding the bright
chromes,

Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog
Boomed from his very belly, odious chords.

XII

A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky,

On side-long wing, around and round and
round.

A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground,

Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I

Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,

In lordly study. Every day, I found

Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.

Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,

And still pursue, the origin and course

Of love, but until now I never knew

That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING
AT A BLACKBIRD

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of a blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

Ill

Wo The blackbirds whirled in the autumn
: winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

200IV

A man and a woman
Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

 
  
 
 

I do not know which to prefer—

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable course.
201Vil

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

Vill

I know noble accents

And lucid inescapable rhythms ;
But I know, too,

The blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

x

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
202XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing

And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.DOMINATION OF BLACK

At night, by the fire,

The colours of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves,

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the colour of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding—

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colours of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the
hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry—the peacocks.

204Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire,

Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks ?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the colour of the heavy

hemlocks.
I felt afraid—

  
 
    

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS“The Wanderer,” by William Carlos Williams, is
taken from his volume Al Que Quiere, copyright,
1917, by the Four Seas Company and here published
expressly by their permission.THE WANDERER

A Rococo Study

ADVENT

Even in the time when as yet

I had no certain knowledge of her

She sprang from the nest, a young crow,

Whose first flight circled the forest.

I know now how then she showed me

Her mind, reaching out to the horizon,

She close above the tree tops.

I saw her eyes straining at new distance

And as the woods fell from her flying

Likewise they fell from me as I followed—

So that I strongly guessed all that I must put
from me

To come through ready for the high courses.

But one day, crossing the ferry

With the great towers of Manhattan. before me,
Out at the prow with the sea wind blowing,

I had been wearying many questions

Which she had put on to try me:

209:
1
.
i

 

How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?
When lo! in a rush, dragging

A blunt boat on the yielding river—
Suddenly I saw her! And she waved me
From the white wet in midst of her playing!
She cried me, “Haia! Here I am, son!

See how strong my little finger is!

Can I not swim well?

I can fly too!” And with that a great sea-gull
Went to the left, vanishing with a wild cry—
But in my mind all the persons of the godhead
Followed after.

CLARITY

“Come!” cried my mind and by her might
That was upon us we flew above the river
Seeking her, grey gulls among the white—
In the air speaking as she had willed it:

“T am given,” cried I, “now I know it!

I know now all my time is forespent!
For me one face is all the world!

For I have seen her at last, this day,

In whom age in age is united—
Indifferent, out of sequence, marvellously!

Saving alone that one sequence
Which is the beauty of all the world, for surely
210Either there in the rolling smoke spheres be-
low us

Or here with us in the air intercircling,

Certainly somewhere here about us

I know she is revealing these things!”

And as gulls we flew and with soft cries
We seemed to speak, flying, “It is she
The mighty, recreating the whole world,
This the first day of wonders!

 

She is attiring herself before me
Taking shape before me for worship,

A red leaf that falls upon a stone!

It is she of whom I told you, old
Forgiveless, unreconcilable ;

That high wanderer of by-ways

Walking imperious in beggary!

At her throat is loose gold, a single chain

From among many, on her bent fingers

Are rings from which the stones are fallen,
Her wrists wear a diminished state, her ankles
Are bare! Toward the river! Is it she there?”
And we swerved clamorously downward—

“T will take my peace in her henceforth!”

BROADWAY

It was then she struck—from behind,
In mid air, as with the edge of a great wing!

211And instantly down the mists of my eyes

There came crowds walking*—men as visions
With expressionless, animate faces;

Empty men with shell-thin bodies

Jostling close above the gutter,
Hasting—nowhere! And then for the first time
I really saw her, really scented the sweat

fell back sickened!

Ominous, old, painted—

 

Of her presence and

With bright lips, and lewd Jew’s eyes

Her might strapped in by a corset

To give her age youth, perfect

In her will to be young she had covered

The godhead to go beside me.

Silent, her voice entered at my eyes

And my astonished thought followed her easily:

“Well, do their eyes shine, do their clothes fit?

These live I tell you! Old men with red cheeks,

Young men in gay suits! See them!

Dogged, quivering, impassive—

Well—are these the ones you envied?”

At which I answered her, “Marvellous old
queen,

Grant me power to catch something of this
day’s

Air and sun into your service!

That these toilers after peace and after
pleasure

May turn to you, worshippers at all hours!”
212But she sniffed upon the words warily—
Yet I persisted, watching for an answer:
“To you, horrible old woman,
Who know all fires out of the bodies
Of all men that walk with lust at heart!
To you, O mighty, crafty prowler
After the youth of all cities, drunk
With the sight of thy archness! All the youth
That come to ‘you, you having the knowledge
Rather than to those uninitiate—
To you, marvellous old queen, give me always
A new marriage—”’

But she laughed loudly—
“A new grip upon those garments that brushed

me

In days gone by on beach, lawn, and in forest!
May I be lifted still, up and out of terror,
Up from before the death living around me—
Torn up continually and carried

Whatever way the head of your whim is,
59

 

A burr upon those streaming tatters
But the night had fallen, she stilled me
And led me away.

PATERSON—THE STRIKE

At the first peep of dawn she roused me!
I rose trembling at the change which the night
saw !

213- em ie
— neil eenteat

(
¥

 

 

For there, wretchedly brooding in a corner

From which her old eyes glittered fiercely—
“Go!” she said, and I hurried shivering
Out into the deserted streets of Paterson.

That night she came again hovering
In rags within the filmy ceiling—
“Great Queen, bless me with thy tatters !”’
“You are blest, go on!”
“Hot for savagery,

Sucking the air! I went into the city,
Out again, baffled onto the mountain!
Back into the city!

Nowhere
The subtle! Everywhere the electric!

“A short bread-line before a hitherto empty
tea shop:

No questions—all stood patiently,

Dominated by one idea: something

That carried them as they are always wanting
to be carried,

‘But what is it,’ I asked those nearest me,

‘This thing heretofore unobtainable

That they seem so clever to have put on now?’

“Why since I have failed them can it be any-
thing but their own brood?
Can it be anything but brutality?
214On that at least they’re united! That at least
Is their bean soup, their calm bread and a few
luxuries !

“But in me, more- sensitive, marvellous old
queen,

It sank deep into the blood that I rose upon

The tense air enjoying the dusty fight!

Heavy drink were the low, sloping foreheads

The flat skulls with the unkempt black or blonde
hair,

The ugly legs of the young girls, pistons

Too powerful for delicacy!

The women’s wrists, the men’s arms, red

Used to heat and cold, to toss quartered beeves

And barrels, and milk-cans, and crates of fruit!

“Faces all knotted up like burls on oaks,
Grasping, fox-snouted, thick-lipped,
Sagging breasts and protruding stomachs,
Rasping voices, filthy habits with the hands.
Nowhere you! Everywhere the electric!.

“Ugly, venomous, gigantic!

Tossing me as a great father his helpless
Infant till it shriek with ecstasy

And its eyes roll and its tongue hangs out !—

“IT am at peace again, old queen, I listen clearer
now.”

215ABROAD

Never, even in a dream,

Have I winged so high nor so well

As with her, she leading me by the hand,

That first day on the Jersey mountains!

And never shall I forget

The trembling interest with which I heard

Her voice in a low thunder:

“You are safe here. Look, child, look open-
mouth !

The patch of road between the steep bramble
banks;

The tree in the wind, the white house there, the
sky!

Speak to men of these, concerning me!

For never while you permit them to ignore me

In these shall the full of my freed voice

Come grappling the ear with intent!

Never while the air’s clear coolness

Is seized to be a coat for pettiness ;

Never while richness of greenery

Stands a shield for prurient minds;

Never, permitting these things unchallenged

Shall my voice of leaves and vari-coloured bark
come free through!”

At which, knowing her solitude,

I shouted over the country below me:

“Waken! my people to the boughs green

216With ripening fruit within you!
Waken to the myriad cinquefoil
In the waving grass of your minds!
Waken to the silent phoebe nest
Under the eaves of your spirit!”

But she, stooping nearer the shifting hills

Spoke again. ‘“‘Look there! See them!

There in the oat field with the horses,

See them there! bowed by their passions

Crushed down, that had been raised as a roof
beam!

The weight of the sky is upon them

Under which all roof beams crumble.

There is none but the single roof beam:

There is no love bears against the great firefly !”’

At this I looked up at the sun

Then shouted again with all the might I had.

But my voice was a seed in the wind.

Then she, the old one, laughing

Seized me and whirling about bore back

To the city, upward, still laughing

Until the great towers stood above the marsh-
land

Wheeling beneath: the little creeks, the mallows

That I picked as a boy, the Hackensack

So quiet that seemed so broad formerly:

The crawling trains, the cedar swamp on the
one side—

217All so old. so familiar—so new now

To my marvelling eyes as we passed
Invisible.

SOOTHSAY

Eight days went by, eight days

Comforted by no nights, until finally:

“Would you behold yourself old, beloved ?”

I was pierced, yet I consented gladly

For I knew it could not be otherwise.

And she—“Behold yourself old!

Sustained in strength, wielding might in gript
surges !

Not bodying the sun in weak leaps

But holding way over rockish men

With fern tree fingers on their little crags,

Their hollows, the new Atlas, to bear them

For pride and for mockery! Behold

Yourself old! winding with slow might—

A vine among oaks—to the thin tops:

Leaving the leafless leaved,

 

+

Bearing purple clusters! Behold

Yourself old! birds are behind you.

You are the wind coming that stills birds,
Shakes the leaves in booming polyphony—
Slow, winning high way amid the knocking
Of boughs, evenly crescendo,

The din and bellow of the male wind!

Cas
218Leap then from forest into foam!

Lash about from low into high flames

Tipping sound, the female chorus—

Linking all lions, all twitterings

To make them nothing! Behold yourself old!”

As I made to answer she continued,

A little wistfully yet in a voice clear cut:

“Good is my overlip and evil

My underlip to you henceforth:

For I have taken your soul between my two
hands

And this shall be as it is spoken.”

ST. JAMES’ GROVE

And so it came to that last day

When, she leading by the hand, we went out
Early in the morning, I heavy of heart
For I knew the novitiate was ended

The ecstasy was over, the life begun.

In my woollen shirt and the pale blue necktie
My grandmother gave me, there I went

With the old queen right past the houses

Of my friends down the hill to the river

As on any usual day, any errand.

Alone, walking under trees,

I went with her, she with me in her wild hair,
By Santiago Grove and presently

219\
i
o

\

 

She bent forward and knelt by the river,
The Passaic, that filthy river.

And there dabbling her mad hands,

She called me close beside her.

Raising the water then in the cupped palm
She bathed our brows wailing and laughing:
‘River, we are old, you and I,

We are old and by bad luck, beggars.

Lo, the filth in our hair, our bodies stink!
Old friend, here I have brought you

The young soul you long asked of me.
Stand forth, river, and give me

The old friend of my revels!

Give me the well-worn spirit

For here I have made a room for it,

And I will return to you forthwith

The youth you have long asked of me:
Stand forth, river, and give me

The old friend of my revels!”

And the filthy Passaic consented!

Then she, leaping up with a firece cry:

“Knter, youth, into this bulk!

Enter, river, into this young man!”

Then the river began to enter my heart,

Eddying back cool and limpid

Into the crystal beginning of ‘its days.

But with the rebound it leaped forward:
220Muddy, then black and shrunken
Till I felt the utter depth of its rottenness
The vile breadth of its degradation

And dropped down knowing this was me now.
But she lifted me and the water took a new tide
Again into the older experiences,

And so, backward and forward,

It tortured itself within me

Until time had been washed finally under,
And the river had found its level

And its last motion had ceased

And I knew all—it became me.

And I knew this for double certain

For there, whitely, I saw myself

Being borne off under the water!

I could have shouted out in my agony

At the sight of myself departing
Forever—but I bit back my despair

For she had averted her eyes

By which I knew well what she was thinking—
And so the last of me was taken.

Then she, “Be mostly silent!’

And turning to the river, spoke again:
“For him and for me, river, the wandering,
But by you I leave for happiness

 

Deep foliage, the thickest beeches
Though elsewhere they are all dying—
Tallest oaks and yellow birches

221i

p ;

a TID

“cence

 

That dip their leaves in you, mourning,

As now I dip my hair, immemorial

Of me, immemorial of him,

Immemorial of these our promises!

Here shall be a bird’s paradise,

They sing to you remembering my voice:

Here the most secluded spaces

For miles around, hallowed by a stench

To be our joint solitude and temple;

In memory of this clear marriage

And the child I have brought you in the late
years.

Live, ‘river, live in luxuriance

Remembering this our son,

In remembrance of me and my sorrow

And of the new wandering!”JOHN GOULD FLETCHER\IRRADIATIONS

I

The spattering of the rain upon pale terraces

Of afternoon is like the passing of a dream

Amid the roses shuddering ’gainst the wet green
stalks

Of the streaming trees—the passing of the wind

Upon the pale lower terraces of my dream

Is like the crinkling of the wet grey robes

Of the hours that come to turn over the urn

Of the day and spill its rainy dream.

Vague movement over the puddled terraces:

a pomp of solemn gar-

 

Heavy gold pennons
dens

Half hidden under the liquid veil of spring:

Far trumpets like a vague rout of faded roses

Burst ’gainst the wet green silence of distant
forests:

A clash of cymbals—then the swift swaying
footsteps

Of the wind that undulates along the languid
terraces.

225Pools of rain—the vacant terraces
Wet, chill and glistening
Towards the sunset beyond the broken doors

of to-day.

II

The iridescent vibrations of midsummer light

Dancing, dancing, suddenly flickering and
quivering

Like little feet or the movement of quick
hands clapping,

Or the rustle of furbelows or the clash of
polished gems.

The palpitant mosaic of the midday light

Colliding, sliding, leaping and lingering:

O, I could lie on my back all day,

And mark the mad ballet of the midsummer sky.

lif

Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds;
Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down
the street.

a Whirlpools of purple and gold,
Winds from the mountains of cinnabar,

226a eeeeeenl

a ——— -- :

       
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
   

Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins
swaying and balancing

Amid the vermilion pavilions, against the jade
balustrades,

Glint of the glittering wings of dragon-flies in
the light:

Silver filaments, golden flakes settling down-
wards,

Rippling, quivering flutters, repulse and sur-
render,

The sun broidered upon the rain,

The rain rustling with the sun.

Over the roof-tops race the shadows of clouds;

Like horses the shadows of clouds charge down

the street.

Li

The balancing of gaudy broad pavilions
Of summer against the insolent breeze:
The bellying of the sides of striped tents,
Swelling taut, shuddering in quick collapse,
Silent under the silence of the sky.

Earth is streaked and spotted

With great splashes and dapples of sunlight:

The sun throws an immense circle of hot light
upon the world,

227Rolling slowly in ponderous rhythm
Darkly, musically forward.
All is silent under the steep cone of afternoon:
The sky is imperturbably profound.

The ultimate divine union seems about to be
| accomplished,

All is troubled at the attaimment

Of the inexhaustible infinite.

The rolling and the tossing of the sides of
immense pavilions
Under the whirling wind that screams up the

cloudless sky.

V

Flickering of incessant rain

On flashing pavements:

Sudden scurry of umbrellas:

Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm.

The winds came clanging and clattering

From long white highroads whipping in ribbons
up summits:

They strew upon the city gusty wafts of apple-
blossom,

And the rustling of innumerable translucent

leaves.Uneven tinkling, the lazy rain
Dripping from the eaves.

VI
The fountain blows its breathless spray
From me to vou and back to me.

Whipped, tossed, curdled,

Crashing, quivering:

I hur! kisses like blows upon your lips.
The dance of a bee drunken with sunlight:
Irradiant ecstasies, white and gold,

Sigh and relapse.

The fountain tosses pallid spray
Far in the sorrowful, silent sky.

VII
The trees, like great jade elephants,
Chained, stamp and shake ’neath the gadflies
of the breeze;
The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants:
The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies,
The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a
Shah.
Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of
those trees.
229

feeVill

Brown bed of earth, still fresh and warm with
love,

Now hold me tight:

Broad field of sky, where the clouds laughing
move,

Fill up my pores with light :

You trees, now talk to me, chatter and scold
or weep,

Or drowsing stand:

You winds, now play with me, you wild things
creep,

You boulders, bruise my hand!

I now am yours and you are mine: it matters
not

What gods herein I see:

You grow in me, I am rooted to this spot,

We drink and pass the cup, immortally.

IX

O seeded grass, you army of little men

Crawling up the long slope with quivering,
quick blades of steel :

You who storm millions of graves, tiny green
tentacles of earth,

Interlace yourselves tightly over my heart,

And do not let me go:
230For I would lie here forever and watch with

one eye

The pilgrimaging ants in your dull, savage
jungles,

The while with the other I see the stiff lines of
the slope

Break in mid-air, a wave surprisingly arrested,

And above them, wavering, dancing, bodiless,
colourless, unreal,

The long thin lazy fingers of the heat.

xX

To-day you shall have but little song from me,
For I belong to the sunlight.
This I would not barter for any kingdom.

I am a wheeling swallow,

Blue all over is my delight.
I am a drowsy grass-blade
In the greenest shadow,ne

  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

AUTUMNAL CLOUDS

Autumnal clouds,

Giant sheers of sunlight!

In the evening poise your vaporous pinnacles

Above the low horizon of October plains

And wait there until morning.

Then leap forward, 0 hollow-flanked hounds of
the sky,

Upon your prey, and bite it in red joy!

Long have I searched for you, O clouds of
change,

Tiger-stripéd clouds that in the sunset

Open your scarlet mouths and clash your teeth
of flame!

Long have I expected you, O clouds, to spit
your rain

Upon the trees bored with too long a blos-

soming,
my Sending showers of fallen leaves reeling upon
| the grass,

To lie there like fallen kisses.
232Autumnal clouds,

Giant gods of sunset!

See, beneath you, gardens full of hollow voices

Of passion crying wearily for each other;

See, beneath vou, lakes like blue eyes where in
mist

The somnolent trees cover hidden whispers of
love;

See, beneath you, white swans diving and flash-
ing

Like dreams of hands that meet and clasp and
part from each other.

Come shake the woods and fill its trees with
voices

Menacing and full of evil;

You shall not destroy this one immortal heart

Which I pour out to you, autumnal clouds,

To you and to the winter that shall be.

Soon shall I see you now, magnificent clouds,
Move rank on rank in armour of pearl and gold
Across the noisy earth shaken with tempest!
Soon shall your batteries break upon my heart,
Where it waits calm wrapt in a dream of peace,
Amid the city hurling its towers at the sky.
Soon shall I hear your feet upon the roof-
tops ;
Soon shall I see your hands beat at the win-
dows:

 

233Soon shall your great arms clasp me; I shall
die ;
Die in a dream which cannot be of the earth.

Autumnal clouds,

Look! far there in the sunlight !

The glory floods you now, I see you plainly:
You are no more clouds to me, you are @

.

woman,
White and rosy and gold and blue and beau-

tiful.
You move across the sky, the dusk is at your

feet,

The night is in your arms, the moon is on your
breast,

The stars are in your eyes, the dawn is on your
hair.

Drench me, drown me, darken me, make me
drunken with deep red torrents of joy,

Till I forget all things in the world but this,

The glory of God everlasting, the fire of pas-

sion and death.THE SECOND WALK IN THE GARDEN

When we entered into the eastern gate,

Like a wall of flame

Pink peach-blossoms ran to the gate to welcome
us,

With the bright blue speedwell underneath.

Like white doves clustered,

Great flowers dreamed in the grass;

And daffodils shook out yellow bells

All over the lawns for me.

Such was our garden:

Our garden made perfect and new in the spring,

When the last cloud had vanished.

We entered into it the same yet altered,

With the knowledge of suffering dark in our
hearts,

And with hands a little more weary.

We went into it tooether,

And saw the flowers and spoke no word

But turned reluctantly homewards;

235Yet it was as the promise of new life to us,

 

Or like the breath of a faint perfume
Stolen into the emptiness
Of the unclouded sky.

Beyond the eastern gate there was a fountain,
asting its scarf of white spray up in the air
Amid the evergreen trees.

The wind struck it and it fell

Clashing

Hither and thither:

And as it swayed, there came

A broad rainbow band of colour

Vibrating downwards—

Crimson, our passion’s waking;

Orange, its autumn sunset;

Golden, the new dawn that came for us;
Green, the returning springtide ;

Blue, the fair dream of a rainy summer;
Deep blue, an autymn sky at evening ;

Violet, a regal death.

And beyond the pool of the fountain

There was thick heavy rain of plum blossom,
Like millions of red kisses scattered

On the grasses for you and for me.

Such was the garden of our dreams,

But there was another garden yet for us,
An inner garden we had never entered,
236Held close in pale crystalline walls—
Whereto the sun pieiving

Made a cool mellow reflection of itself,
Diffused as through dark blue water.
There was not either day or night for us,
3ut only afternoon in midsummer,

And there always blossomed

Trees holding torches of scarlet flame,
Whorls of crimson bloom

Emerging from glossy-green leaves ;

Vast evergreen boughs

That puffed out violet trumpets to us;
And towers of verdure

Crackling with unreal white stars.

It was as the promise of new life to us
From some mountainous Eastern region
Which has been hidden forever since the first of
all earth’s dawns.

We went back to the eastern gate,

Through an avenue of live-oaks ;

Where here and there a far cedar jutted out
against the sky,

In dark biae remembrance

Of some impossible dream

Far in the past, and of gardens beyond our
desire.

Then from the garden far away we journeyed,

Breaking our vision with clamour,

237- SE
een

With the tedious jangle and tumult of another
life:

Once more. and for love’s sake only,

We bound ourselves in slavery

To the wearisome necessities of our day.

Yet did the vague garden remain in our souls,

Despite the too noisy high-roads

Whose dust we had to trample;

Despite the fetid prisons

In which we bound ourselves day and night ;

Despite the great black silence

Of motionless boughs towards evening ;

Despite the pale stars glimmering

Far beyond our longing and our despair.

And it was as a promise of new life to us

When the darkness gathered over the roof-tops,

And the last glimmer of sunlight died far away
in the west.

For all the night long there were dreams,

Moon-gardens filled with great white flowers,

Moon-terraces swimming 1n still white mist,

Whercon the stars sparkled in bare branches.

Millions of pallid fountains

Swirled and fell ’mid the cry of the nightin-
gales ;

And out of the darkness rising,

Slowly stept forth some perfect tree

238Oiiering marvellous silver and gold foliage to

us:

Like the promise of a new life,

When we had slept and dreamed our last sad

dream,

And all our kisses had fallen into darkness:

A promise of new joy,

When the morning stars sang together from
heaven’s golden battlements,

And all the desirable earth lay new made in the
dawn.Se

    
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
  
   

BLUE SYMPHONY

I

The darkness rolls upward.
The thick darkness carries with it
Rain and a ravel of cloud.
The sun comes forth upon earth.

Palely the dawn

Leaves me facing timidly
Old gardens sunken:

And in the walks is water.

Sombre wreck—autumnal leaves;
Shadowy roofs

In the blue mist,

And a willow-branch that is broken.

Oh, old pagodas of my soul, how you glittered
across green trees!

240Blue and cool:
Blue, tremulously,

Blow faint puffs of smoke

Across sombre pools.

The damp green smell of rotted wood ;

And a heron that cries from out the water.

II

Through the upland meadows
I go alone.
For I dreamed of someone last night

Who is waiting for me.

Flower and blossom, tell me, do you know of

her?

Have the rocks hidden her voice?

They are very blue and still.

Long upward road that is leading me,
Light hearted I quit you,
For the long loose ripples of the meadow-grass

Invite me to dance upon them.

Quivering grass
Daintily poised
For her foot’s tripping.

241Oh, blown clouds, could.I only race up like you,
Oh, the last slopes that are sun-drenched and

 

steep !

Look, the sky!

Across black valleys

Rise blue-white aloft

Jagged unwrinkled mountains, ranges of death

Solitude. Silence.

iit

One chuckles by the brook for me:
One rages under the stone.
One makes a spout of his mouth.

One whispers—one is gone.

One over there on the water
Spreads cold ripples

For me

Enticingly.

The vast dark trees
Flow like blue veils
Of tears

Into the water.Sour sprites,
Moaning and chuckling,
What have you hidden from me?

“In the palace of the blue stone she lies forever

Bound hand and foot.”

Was it the wind

That rattled the reeds together?
Dry reeds,

A faint shiver in the grasses.

IV

On the left hand there is a temple:
And a palace on the right-hand side.
Foot passengers in scarlet

Pass over the glittering tide.

Under the bridge
The old river flows
Low and monotonous
Day after day.

I have heard and have seen
All the news that has been:
Autumn’s gold and Spring’s green!
243Now in my palace

 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
     

I see foot passengers
Crossing the river:
Pilgrims of autumn

In the afternoons.

Lotus pools:
Petals in the water.

These are my dreams.

For me silks are outspread.
I take my ease, unthinking.

V

And now the lowest pine-branch

Is drawn across the disc of the sun.
Old friends who will forget me soon,
I must go on,

Towards those blue death-mountains

I have forgot so long.

In the marsh grasses

‘here hes forever

With the hopes of my heart.
The ice is glazing over,
Torn lanterns flutter,

On the leaves is snow.

» AA,

so xIn the frosty evening
Toll the old bell for me

Once, in the sleepy temple.

Perhaps my soul will hear.

Afterglow :
Before the stars peep
I shall creep out into darkness,GREEN SYMPHONY

I

The glittering leaves of the rhododendrons
Balance and vibrate in the cool air;
While in the sky above them

White clouds chase each other.

Like scampering rabbits,

Flashes of sunlioht sweep the lawn;
They fling in passing

Patterns of shadow,

Golden and green.

With long cascades of laughter,

The mating birds dart and swoop to the turf:
’Mid their mad trillings

Glints the gay sun behind the trees.

Down there are deep blue lakes:
Orange blossom droops in the water.
In the tower of the winds,

{ll the bells are set adrift:

7 Jingling

> 1? q
‘or tne aawn.Thin fluttering streamers
Of breeze lash through the swaying boughs,
Palely expectant

The earth receives the slanting rain.

I am a glittering raindrop

Hugged close by the cool rhododendron,

I am a daisy starring

The exquisite curves of the close-cropped turf.

The glittering leaves of the rhododendron
Are shaken like blue-green blades of grass,
Flickering, cracking, falling:

Splintering in a million fragments.

The wind runs laughing up the slope
Stripping off handfuls of wet green leaves,
To fling in peoples’ faces.

Wallowing on the daisy-powdered turf,
Clutching at the sunlight,

Cavorting in the shadow.

Like baroque pearls,

Like cloudy emeralds,

The clouds and the trees clash together ;
Whirling and swirling,

In the tumult

Of the spring,

And the wind.II

The trees splash the sky with their fingers,

A restless green rout of stars.

With whirling movement

They swing their boughs

About their stems:

Planes on planes of light and shadow
Pass among them,

Opening fan-like to fall.

The trees are like a sea;

Tossing,

Trembling,

Roaring,

W allowing,

Darting their long green flickering fronds up at
the sky,

Spotted with white blossom-spray.

The trees are roofs:
Hollow caverns of cool blue shadow,
Solemn arches

In the afternoons.

The whole vast horizon

In terrace beyond terrace,

Pinnacle above pinnacle,

Lifts to the sky

Serrated ranks of green on green.
248They caress the roofs with their fingers,
They sprawl about the river to look into it;
Up the hill they come

Gesticulating challenge:

They cower together

In dark valleys;

They yearn out over the fields,

Enamelled domes
Tumble upon the grass,
Crashing in ruin

Quiet at last.

The trees lash the sky with their leaves,
Uneasily shaking their dark green manes.

III
Far let the voices of the mad wild birds be

calling me,
I will abide in this forest of pines.

When the wind blows

Battling through the forest,

I hear it distantly,

The crash of a perpetual sea.

When the rain falls,
I watch silver spears slanting downwards
From pale river-pools of sky,

Enclosed in dark fronds.
249When the sun shines,
I weave together distant branches till they en-
i close mighty circles,

a I sway to the movement of hooded summits,

I swim leisurely in deep blue seas of air.

I hug the smooth bark of stately red pillars
And with cones carefully scattered

I mark the progression of dark dial-shadows
Flung diagonally downwards through the after-

noon.

This turf is not like turf:

It is a smooth dry carpet of velvet,

Embroidered with brown patterns of needles
and cones.

These trees are not like trees:

They are innumerable feathery pagoda-
umbrellas,

Stiffly ungracious to the wind,

Teetering on red-lacquered stems.

In the evening I listen to the winds’ lisping,
While the conflagrations of the sunset flicker
Ty and clash behind me,

a) Flamboyant crenellations of glory amid the
charred ebony boles.

250In the night the fiery nightingales
Shall clash and trill through the silence:
Like the voices of mermaids crying
From the sea.

Long ago has the moon whelmed this uncom-
pleted temple.

Stars swim like gold fish far above the black
arches.

Far let the timid feet of dawn fly to catch me:

I will abide in this forest of pines:

For I have unveiled naked beauty,

And the things that she whispered to me in the
darkness,

Are buried deep in my heart.

Now let the black tops of the pine-trees break
like a spent wave,

Against the grey sky:

These are tombs and memorials and temples and

altars sun-kindled for me,WHITE SYMPHONY

Forlorn and white,

Whorls of purity about a golden chalice,
Immense the peonies

Flare and shatter their petals over my face.

They slowly turn paler,

They seem to be melting like blue-grey flakes
of ice,

Thin greyish shivers

Fluctuating ’mid the dark green lance-thrust of

the leaves.

Like snowballs tossed,
Like soft white butterflies,

The peonies poise in the twilight.

And their narcotic insinuating perfume
Draws me into them

Shivering with the coolness,

252Aching with the void.

 

They kiss the blue chalice of my dreams
Like a gesture seen for an instant and then lost

forever.

Outwards the petals

Thrust to embrace me,

Pale daggers of coldness

Run through my aching breast.

Outwards, still outwards,

Till on the brink of twilight
They swirl downwards silently,
Flurry of snow in the void.

Outwards, still outwards,

Till the blue walls are hidden,
And in the blinding white radiance
Of a whirlpool of clouds, I awake.

Like spraying rockets
My peonies shower

Their glories on the night.
253Wavering perfumes,
Drift about the garden;

Shadows of the moonlight,

Drift and ripple over the dew-gemmed leaves.

Soar, crash, and sparkle,

Shoal of stars drifting

Like silver fishes,

Through the black sluggish boughs.
Towards the impossible,

Towards the inaccessible,

Towards the ultimate,

Towards the silence,

Towards the eternal,

These blossoms go.

The peonies spring like rockets in the twilight,
And out of them all I rise.

II

Downwards through the blue abyss it slides,

The white snow-water of my dreams,

Downwards crashing from slippery rock

Into the boiling chasm:

In which no eye dare look, for it is the chasm
of death.

254Upwards from the blue abyss it rises,

The chill water-mist of my dreams;

Upwards to greyish weeping pines,

And to skies of autumn ever about my heart,

It is blue at the beginning,

And blue-white against the grey-greenness ;

It wavers in the upper air,

Catching unconscious sparkles, a rainbow-glint
of sunlight,

And fading in the sad depths of the sky.

Outwards rush the strong pale clouds,

Outwards and ever outwards:

The blue-grey clouds indistinguishable one from
another :

Nervous, sinewy, tossing their arms and bran-
dishing,

Till on the blue serrations of the horizon

They drench with their black rain a great peak
of changeless snow.

As evening came on, I climbed the tower,

To gaze upon the city far beneath:

I was not weary of day; but in the evening

A white mist assembled and gathered over the
earth

And blotted it from sight.

255it But to escape:

(Aira To chase with the golden clouds galloping over
the horizon:

Arrows of the northwest wind

Singing amid them,

Ruffling up my hair!

As evening came on the distance altered,
Pale wavering reflections rose from out the city,
Like sighs or the beckoning of half-invisible

hands.
Monotonously and sluggishly they crept up-
wards

A river that had spent itself in some chasm,
And dwindled and foamed at last at my weary
feet.

Autumn! Golden fountains,

And the winds neighing

Amid the monotonous hills:

Desolation of the old gods,

Rain that lifts and rain that moves away;
In the green-black torrent

Scarlet leaves.

de a It was now perfectly evening:

+ , And the tower loomed like a gaunt peak in mid-
_ air

far Above the city: its base was utterly lost.

| 256It was slowly coming on to rain,
And the immense columns of white mist
Wavered and broke before the faint-hurled
spears.

I will descend the mountains like a shepherd,

And in the folds of tumultuous misty cities,

I will put all my thoughts, all my old thoughts,
safely to sleep.

For it is already autumn,

O whiteness of the pale southwestern sky!

O wavering dream that was not mine to keep!

In midnight, in mournful moonlight,
By paths I could not trace,

I walked in the white garden,

Each flower had a white face.

Their perfume intoxicated me: thus I began my
dream.

I was alone; I had no one to guide me,
But the moon was like the sun: —

It stooped and kissed each waxen petal,
One after one.

257Green and white was that garden: diamond rain
hung in the branches,
You will not believe it!

In the morning, at the dayspring,
I wakened, shivering; lo,
The white garden that blossomed at my feet

Was a garden hidden in snow.

It was my sorrow to see that all this was a

dream.

III

Blue, clogged with purple,
Mists uncoil themselves:
Sparkling to the horizon,

IT see the snow alone.

In the deep blue chasm,

Boats sleep under gold thatch;
Icicle-like trees fret

Faintly rose-touched sky.

Under their heaped snow-eaves,
Leaden houses shiver.

Through thin blue crevasses,
Trickles an icy stream.
258The pines groan white-laden.
The waves shiver. struck by the wind;
Beyond from treeless horizons,

Broken snow-peaks crawl to the sea.

Wearily the snow glares,

Through the grey silence, day after day,
Mocking the colourless cloudless sky
With the reflection of death.

There is no smoke through the pine tops,
No strong red boatmen in pale green reeds,
No herons to flicker an instant,

No lanterns to glow with gay ray.

No sails beat up to the harbour,
With creaking cordage and sailors’? song.
Somnolent, bare-poled, indifferent,

They sleep, and the city sleeps.

Mid-winter about them casts

Its dreary fortifications:

Each day is a gaunt grey rock,
And death is the last of them all.Over the sluggish snow,
Drifts now a pallid weak shower of bloom:

. Boredom of fresh creation,

Death-weariness of old returns.

White, white blossom,

Fall of the shattered cups day on day:

Is there anything here that is not ancient,
That has not bloomed a thousand years ago?

Under the glare of the white-hot day,
Under the restless wind-rakes of the winter,
White blossom or white snow scattered,

And beneath them, dark, the graves.

Dark graves never changing,

White dream, drifting, never changing above
them:

O that the white scroll of heaven might be
rolled up,

And the naked red lightning thrust at the

smouldering earth!AT BATA

I should have thought

In a dream you would have brought
Some lovely perilous thing, |
Orchids piled in a great sheath,

As who would say (in a dream)

I send you this,

Who left the blue veins

Of your throat unkissed.

Why was it that vour hands
(That never took mine)

Your hands that I could see
Drift over the orchid heads

So carefully,

Your hands, so fragile, sure to lift
So gently, the fragile flower stuff—
Ah, ah, how was it

You never sent (in a dream)
The very form, the very scent,

263Not heavy, not sensuous,
Md But perilous—perilous—
Of orchids, piled in a great sheath,
And folded underneath on a bright scroll
Some word:

Flower sent to flower;
For white hands, the lesser white,

Less lovely of flower leaf,

Or

Lover to lover, no kiss,
No touch, but forever and ever this.SIMAETHA

Drenched with purple,

Drenched with dye, my wool,
Bind you the wheel-spokes—
Turn, turn, turn my wheel!

Drenched with purple,
Steeped in the red pulp
Of bursting sea-sloes—
Turn, turn, turn my wheel!

(Ah, did. he think
I did not know,

I did not feel—
What wrack, what weal for him:

Golden one, golden one,

Turn again Aphrodite with the yellow zone,
I am cursed, cursed, undone!

Ah, and my face, Aphrodite,

Beside your gold,

Is cut out of white stone!)

265Laurel blossom and the red secd
Of the red vervain weed,

Burn, crackle in the fire,
Burn, crackle in the fire,

Burn, crackle for my need!
Laurel leaf, O fruited

Branch of bay,

Burn, burn away

Thought, memory and hurt!

(Ah, when he comes,
Stumbling across my sill,

Will he find me still,

Fragrant as the white privet,

Or as a bone,

Polished in wet and sun,

Worried of wild beaks,

And of the whelps’ teeth—

Worried of flesh,

Left to bleach under the sun,

White as ash bled of heat,

White as hail blazing in sheet-lightning,
White as forked hghtning

Rending the sleet?)“SNOT HONEY”

Not honey,

Not the plunder of the bee
From meadow or sand-flower
Or mountain bush;

From winter-flower or shoot
Born of the later heat:

Not honey, not the sweet

Stain on the lips and teeth:

Not honey, not the deep

Plunge of soft belly

And the clinging of the gold-edged

Pollen-dusted feet.

Not so—
Though rapture blind my eves,
And hunger crisp
Dark and inert my mouth,
Not honey, not the south,

267Not the tall stalk
Of red twin-lilies,
Nor light branch of fruit tree

Caught in flexible light branch.

Not honey, not the south;

Ah, flower of purple iris,

Flower of white,

Or of the iris, withering the grass—
For fleck of the sun’s fire,
Gathers such heat and power,
That shadow-print is light,

Cast through the petals

Of the yellow ivis flower.

Not iris—old desire—old passion—
Old forgetfulness—old pain—
Not this, nor any flower,

But if you turn again,

Seek strength of arm and throat,
Touch as the god:

Neglect the lyre-note ;

Knowing that you shall feel,
About the frame,

No trembling of the string

But heat more passionate

Of bone and the white shell
And fiery tempered steel.

268I first tasted under Apollo’s lips
Love and love
I, Evadne;

My hair is made of crisp violets

Or hyacinths which the wind combs back

 

EVADNE

sweetness,

Across some rock shelf:

I, Evadne,

Was mate of the god of light.

His hair was crisp to my mouth

As the flower of the crocus.

Across mv cheek.

Cool as the silvar cress

On Erotos bank:

Between my chin and throat
His mouth slipped over and over.

Still between my arm and shoulder,

I feel the brush of his hair,

And my hands keep the gold they took
As they wandered over and over

That great armful of yellow flowers.

 

269SONG

You are as gold

As the half-ripe grain

That merges to gold again,
As white as the white rain
That beats through

The half-opened flowers

Of the great flower tufts
Thick on the black limbs
Of an Illvrian apple bough.

Can honey distil such fragrance
As your bright hair—

For your face is as fair as rain,
Yet as rain that lies clear

On white honey-comb,

Lends radiance to the white wax,
So your hair on your brow

Casts light for a shadow.THE GARDEN

I

You are clear,
O rose, cut in rock.

I could scrape the colour
From the petals,
Like spilt dye from a rock.

If I could break you

I could break a tree.

If I could stir
I could break a tree,
I could break you.

IT

O wind, rend open the heat,
Cut apart the heat,

Slit it to tatters.
Pal) |Fruit cannot drop
Through this thick air;
Fruit cannot fall into heat
That presses up and blunts

The points of pears,

And rounds grapes.

Cut the heat:

Plough through it,
Turning it on either side
Of your path.THE SHRINE

“She watches over the Sea”

I

Are your rocks shelter for ships?—

= *

Have you sent galleys from your beach
Are you graded—a safe crescent—
Where the tide lifts them back to port?
Are you full and sweet,

Tempting the quiet

To depart in their trading ships?

Nay, you are great, fierce, evil—
You are the land-blight.

You have tempted men

But they perished on your cliffs.

Your lights are but dank shoals,
Slate and pebble and wet shells
And sea-weed fastened to the rocks.

273It was evil—evil

When they found you,

When the quiet men looked at you.
They sought a headland

Shaded with ledge of cliff

From the wind-blast.

But you—you are unsheltered,
Cut with the weight of wind.

You shudder when it strikes,
Then lift, swelled with the blast.
You sink as the tide sinks,

You shrill under hail and sound,
Thunder when thunder sounds.

You are useless:

When the tides swirl

Your boulders cut and wreck
The staggering ships.

II

You are useless,

O grave, O beautiful.

The landsmen tell it—I have heard—
You are useless.

274And the wind sounds with this
And the sea

Where rollers shot with blue
Cut under deeper blue.

Oh, but stay tender, enchanted

Where wave-lengths cut you

Apart from all the rest—

For we have found you,

From the splendour of your ragged coast.
We thread throat on throat of freesia
For your shelf.

You are not forgot,

O plunder of lilies,

Honey is not more sweet

Than the salt stretch of your beach.

III

Stay—stay—

But terror has caught us now.

We passed the men in ships,

We dared deeper than the fisher-folk:
And you strike us with terror,

O bright shaft.

Flame passes under us
And sparks that unknot the flesh—
275ti Sorrow, splitting bone from bone,
+ Splendours thwart our eyes

Ae a | And rifts in the splendour,

eit Sparks and scattered light.

Many warned of this,

Men said:

“There are wrecks on the fore-beach,
Wind will beat your ship,

There is no shelter in that headland ;
It is useless waste, that edge,

That front of rock—

Sea-gulls clang beyond the breakers,

None venture to that spot.”

IV

But hail—

As the tide slackens,

As the wind beats out,

We hail this shore—

We sing ‘to you,

Spirit between the headlands
And the further rocks.

P Though oak-beams split,

' P| Though boats and sea-men flounder,

. And the strait grind sand with sand
| And cut boulders to sand and drift—
2'76Your eyes have pardoned our faults,
Your hands have touched us:

You have leaned forward a little
And the waves can never thrust us back
From the splendour of your ragged coast,T. S. ELIOTReprinted by arrangement with and permission of

T. S. Eliot and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED
PRUFROCK

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table:

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question. .. .
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

281The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the
window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the
window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the eve-
ning,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from
chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the
street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes ;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you
meet ;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate ;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

282And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing

thin !”’)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to
the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a
simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs
are thin!”’)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will
reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them
all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them
all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

283And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and
ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known
them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown
hair !)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a
shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow
streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of
windows?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

284:And the afternoon, the evening,
peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep . . . tired or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me,

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its
crisis ?

sleeps so

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and
prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly
bald) brought in upon a platter,

I'am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my
coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade. the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you
and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

285Should say: “That was not what I meant
at all;
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the
sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the
skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in
patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to
be ;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous ;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

286At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ...Igrowold...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat
a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk
upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and
brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.PORTRAIT OF A LADY

Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

“The Jew of Malta.”

I

Among the smoke and fog of a December after-
noon

You have the scene arrange itself—as it will
seem to do—

With “I have saved this afternoon for you” ;

And four wax candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb

Prepared for all the things to be said, or left
unsaid.

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and
finger-tips.

288*‘So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul
Should be resurrected only among friends
Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert
room,”

—And so the conversation slips
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
Mingled with remote cornets

And begins.

“You do not know how much they mean to
me, my friends,

And how, how rare and strange it is, to find

In a life composed so much, so much of odds
and ends,

(For indeed I do not love it... you knew?
you are not blind!

How keen you are!)

To find a friend who has these qualities,

Who has, and gives

Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

How much it means that I say this to you—

Without these friendships—life, what
cauchemar !”

Among the windings of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins
289Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,
Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite “false note.”
—lLet us take the air, in a tobacco trance,
Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct our watches by the public clocks,
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

II

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not
know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.’

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

3

‘Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow
recall

My buried life; and Paris in the Spring,

290I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the
world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.”

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

“I am always sure that you understand

My feelings, always sure that you feel,

Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’
heel.

You will go on, and when you have prevailed

You can say: at this point many a one has
failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,

To give you, what can you receive from me?

Only the friendship and the sympathy

Of one about to reach her journey’s end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends . . .”

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly
amends

For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page.
Particularly I remark

An English countess goes. upon the stage.
291A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

Another bank defaulter has confessed.

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street piano, mechanical and
tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?

III

The October night comes down; returning as
before,

Except for a slight sensation of being ill at
ease,

I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the
door

And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and
knees.

“And so you are going abroad; and when do
you return?

But that’s a useless question.

You hardly know when you are coming back,

You will find so much to learn.”

My smile falls heavily among the bric-a-brac.

YG“Perhaps you can write to me.”

My self-possession flares up for a second;

This is as I had reckoned.

“T have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends )

Why we have not developed into friends.”

I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall
remark

Suddenly, his expression in a glass,

My self-possession gutters: we are really in the

dark.

“For everybody said so, all our friends,
They were all sure our feelings would relate
So closely! [I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.

You will write at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression . . . dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance—

Well! and what if she should die some after-

noon,
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and
rose ;

293Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

With the smoke coming down above the house-
tops;

Doubtful, for quite a while

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon...

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

This music is successful, with a “dying fall”

Now that we talk.of dying—

And should I have the right to smile?SWEENEY AMONG THE
NIGHTINGALES

OO! méemAnyuat Kalolay mAnynv gow.

Why should I speak of the nightingale? The
nightingale sings of adulterous wrong.

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward to the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornéd gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog

Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape

Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees

Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee cup,

Reorganized upon the floor

She yawns and draws a stocking up;
295* ———
—$—$—$ -—nthgmaamreer ay

 

 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
   

The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges

Bananas, figs and hot-house grapes,

The silent vertebrate exhales,

Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch

Tears. at the grapes with murderous paws;

She and the lady in the cape

Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,

Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;

The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,

The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,

And let their liquid siftings fall

To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
296WHISPERS OF IMMORTALITY

  
       
    
 
   
   
  
  
      
 

Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin:
And breastless creatures underground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense
To seize and clutch and penetrate,
Expert beyond experience.

He knew the anguish of the marrow
The ague of the skeleton:

No contact possible to flesh

Allayed the fever of the bone.

   

297Grishkin is nice; her Russian eye
Is underlined for emphasis ;
Uncorseted, her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

The couched Brazilian jaguar
Compels the scampering marmoset
With subtle effluence of cat;
Grishkin has a maisonette:

The sleek and sinuous jaguar
Does not in his arboreal gloom
Distil so rank a feline smell

As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even abstracter entities
Circumambulate her charm;
But our lot crawls between dry ribs
To keep its metaphysics warm.GERONTION

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cut-
lass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

My house is a decayed house,

And the Jew squats on the window sill, the
owner,

Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in
London.

The goat coughs at night in the field overhead ;

Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.

The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,

Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

I an old man,

A dull head among windy spaces.
299Signs are taken for wonders. ‘“‘We would see a

   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
  
 
  
  

sign !”

The word within a word, unable to speak a
word,

Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of
the year

Came Christ the tiger.

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flow-
ering judas,

To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk

Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero

With caressing hands, at Limoges

Who walked all night in the next room;

By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians ;

By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room

Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp

Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door.
Vacant shuttles

Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,

An old man in a draughty house

Under a windy knob.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think
now

History has many cunning passages, contrived
corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

300She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple
confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives
too late

What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives
too soon

Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dis-
pensed with

Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatu-
ral vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing

tree.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he de-
vours. Think at last

We have not reached conclusion, when I

Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last

I have not made this show purposelessly

And it is not by any concitation

Of the backward devils.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

I that was near your heart was removed there-
from

To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

301I have lost my passion: why should I need to
keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and
touch:

How should I use it for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit, of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has
cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the
spider do,

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammell,
whirled

Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in
the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,

White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

And an old man driven by the Trades

To a sleepy corner.

Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
302THE HOLLOW MEN
A penny for the Old Guy.
I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind’s singing

More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me: be no nearer

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer—

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images

304Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone

At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone.

AY

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star

305Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Vv,

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear, prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
306And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom.

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This ts the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.CONRAD AIKENSAMADHI

Take then the music; plunge in the thickest of
it,—

Thickest, darkest, richest: call it a forest,

A million boles of trees, with leaves, leaves,

Golden and green, flashing like scales in the

sun,

Tossed and torn in the tempest, whirling and
streaming,

With the terrible sound, beneath, of boughs
that crack.

- . Again, a hush comes; and the wind’s a

whisper.

One leaf goes pirouetting. You stand in the
dusk

In the misty shaft of light the sun flings faintly

Through planes of green; and suddenly, out of
the darkest

And deepest and farthest of the forest, wavers

That golden horn, cor anglais, husky-timbred,

Sending through all this gloom of trees and
silence

311Its faint half-mute nostalgia. . . . How the
soul
Vlies from the dungeon of you to the very
portals
To meet that sound! There, there, is the secret
Singing out of the darkness,—shining, too,
For all we know, if we could only see!
But if we steal by footpaths, warily,—
| Snap not a twig, nor crush a single leaf;
Or if, in a kind of panic, like wild beasts,
We rend our violent way through vines and
briars,
Crash through a coppice, tear our flesh, come
bleeding
To a still pool, encircled, brooded over
all’s one! We reach but si-

 

By ancient trees
lence,

We find no horn, no hornsman. . . . There the
beeches

Out of the lower dark of ferns and mosses

Lift, far above, their tremulous tops to the
light.

Only an echo hear we of that horn,

Cor anglais, golden, husky-timbred, crying

| Half-mute nostalgia from the dark of

7 | CHS Sori «
Then, as we stand bewildered in that wood,

With leaves above us in sibilant confusion,

312And the ancient ghosts of leaves about our
feet
Listen !—the horn once more, but farther now,

 

Sings in the evening for a wing-beat space;

Makes the leaves murmur, as it makes the
blood

Burn in the heart and all its radiant veins:

And we turn inward, to seek it once again.

Or, it’s a morning in the blue portal of sum-
mer.

White shoals of little clouds, like heavenly fish,

Swim softly off the sun, who rains his light

On the vast hurrying earth. The giant poplar

Sings in the light with a thousand sensitive
leaves,

Root-tip to leaf-tip he is all delight:

And, at the golden core of all that joy,

One sinister grackle with a thievish eye

Secrapes a harsh cynic comment. How he
laughs,

Flaunting amid that green his coffin-colour!

We, in the garden a million miles below him,

At paltry tasks of pruning, spading, watching

Black-stripéd bees crawl into foxglove bells

Half-filled with dew—look! we are lightly
startled

By sense or sound; are moved; lose touch with
earth;

313And, in the twinkling of the grackle’s eye,

Swing in the infinite on a spider’s cable.

What is our world? It is a poplar tree

Immense and solitary, with leaves a thousand,

Or million, countless, flashing in a light

For them alone intended. He is great,

His trunk is solid, and his roots deceive us.

We shade our eyes with hands and upward
look

To see if all those leaves indeed be leaves,

So rich they are in a choiring down of joy,

Or stars. And as we stand so, small and
dumb,

We hear again that harsh derisive comment,

The grackle’s laughter; and again we see

His thievish eye, aware amid green boughs.

Touch earth again: take up your shovel: dig

In the wormy ground. That tree magnificent

Sways like a giant dancer in a garment

Whose gold and green are naught but tricks
of light.

And at the heart of all that drunken beauty

Is a small lively cynic bird who laughs.

Who sees the vision coming? Who can tell
What moment out of time will be the seed
To root itself, as swift as lightning roots

Into a cloud, and grow, swifter than thought,

314And flower gigantic in the infinite?

Walk softly through your forest, and be ready
To hear the horn of horns. Or in your garden
Stoop, but upon your back be ever conscious
Of sunlight, and a shadow that may grow.KING BORBORIGMI

You say you heard King Borborigmi laugh?

Say how it was. Some heavenly body moved
him?

The moon laughed first? Dark earth put up
a finger

Of honeysuckle, through his moonlit window,

And tickled him?

—King Borborigmi laughed

Alone, walking alone in an empty room,

. g Bo
Thinking, and yet not thinking, seeing, yet

blind.
One hand was on his chin, feeling the beard
That razors could not stay; the other groped ;
For it was dark, and in the dark were chairs ;

5

Midnight, or almost midnight; Aldebaran
Hanging among the dews.

—King Borborigmi
Laughed once or twice at nothing, just as mid-
night

Released a flock of bells?
316Not this alone;
Not bells in flight toward Aldebaran:
Nor the immitigable beard; nor dews
Heavily pattering on the pent-house roof:
Nor chairs in shadow which his foot disturbed.
Yet it was all of these, and more: the air
Twirling the curtain where a red moth hung:
The one bell flying later than the others

Into the starstrung silence: the garden break-

ing

To let a thousand seedlings have their way:
An eye-tooth aching, and the pendulum

That heavily ticked upon the leftward swing.

—These trifles woke the laughter of a king?

—Much less than these, and more! He softly
stepped

Among the webby world, and felt it shudder.

Under the earth

He saw his father’s bones, fallen apart,

a strand or two of web—

 

The jawbone sunken and the skull caved in.
Among his mother’s bones a cactus rooted,
And two moles crept, and ants held carnival.
Above the obscene tomb an aloe blossomed:
Dew glistened on the marble. This he saw,
And at the selfsame moment heard the cook
Wind the alarm-clock in her bedroom, yawn,

317And creak the bed. And it was then, sur-
prised,

He touched a chair, and laughed, and twitched
the curtain,—

And the moth flew out.

—Alas, poor Borborigmi,
That it should be so little, and so sorry
A thing to make him laugh!

—Young Borborigmi,
Saw more than this. The infinite octopus
With eyes of chaos and long arms of stars,
And belly of void and darkness, became clear
About him, and he saw himself embraced
And swept along a vein, with chairs and teeth,
Houses and bones and gardens, cooks and

clocks ;

The midnight bell, a snoring cook, and he,

Mingled and flowed like atoms.

—It was this
That made him laugh—to see himself as one
Corpuscle in the infinite octopus? . .
And was this all, old fool, old turner of
leaves? 2...

—Alone, thinking alone in an empty room
Where moonlight and the mouse were met
together,

318And pulse and clock together ticked, and dew

Made contrapuntal patter, Borborigmi

Fathomed in his own viscera the world,

Went downward, sounding like a diver, holding

His peakéd nose; and when he came up,
laughed.

These things and others saw. But last of all,

Ultimate or penultimate, he saw

The one thing that undid him!

—What was this?
The one grotesquer thing among grotesques?
Carrion, offal, or the toothbrush ready
For carnal fangs? Cancer, that grasps the
heart,
Or fungus, whitely swelling in the brain?
Some gargoyle of the thought?

—King Borborigmi,
Twitching the curtain as the last bell flew
Melodious to Aldebaran, beheld
The moth fly also. Downward dropped it
softly
Among dropped petals, white. And there one
rose
Was open in the moonlight! Dew was on it;
The bat, with ragged wing, cavorting, sidling,
Snapped there a sleeping bee—

—And crunched the moth?...
319—It was the rose in moonlight, crimson, yet

Blanched by the moon; the bee asleep; the bat

And fallen moth—but most the guileless rose.

Guileless! . . . King Borborigmi struck his
foot

Against a chair, and saw the guileless rose

Joining himself (King Bubblegut), and all

Those others—the immitigable beard;

Razors and teeth; his mother’s bones; the
tomb:

The yawning cook; the clock; the dew; the
bells

Bursting upward like bubbles

 

; all so swept

Along one vein of the infinite octopus

With eyes of chaos and long arms of stars

And belly of void and darkness. It was then

He laughed; as he would never laugh again.

For he saw everything; and, in the centre

Of corrupt change, one guileless rose; and
laughed

For puzzlement and sorrow.

—Ah, poor man,
Poor Borborigmi, young to be so wise!

i i —Wise? No. For what he laughed at was
fe just this:
That to see all, to know all, is to rot.

320So went to bed; and slept; is sleeping still,
If none has waked “him.

—Dead? King Borborigmi
Is dead? Died laughing? Sleeps a dreamless
sleep
Till cook’s alarm clock wakes him?

Sleeps like Hamlet,
King of infinite space in a walnut shell—

But has bad dreams; I fear he has bad dreams.AND IN THE HANGING GARDENS

And in the hanging gardens there is rain

From midnight until one, striking the leaves

And bells of flowers, and stroking boles of
planes,

And drawing slow arpeggios over pools,

And stretching strings of sound from eaves to

ferns.
> - cc 7O¢ . b! $
The princess reads. ‘phe knave of diamonds
sleeps.

The fang - Omur ak, and flings a golden goblet
Bown om ’ ae turret window (curtained with
rain?
J
Into te lilacs.
And at one o’clock
The vulean under the garden wakes and beats
The gong upon his anvil. Then the rain
Ceases, but gently ceases, dripping still,
And sound of falling water fills the dark
As leaves grow bold and upright, and as eaves
Part with water. The princess turns the page
322Beside the candle, and between two braids
Of golden hair. And reads: “From there I went
Northward a journey of four days, and came
To a wild village in the hills, where none
Was living save the vulture and the rat,
And one old man, who laughed, but could not
speak.
The roofs were fallen in; the wel] grown over
With weed; and it was there my father died.
Then eight days further, be
The cold wind blowing sand against our faces,
The food tasting of sand. And as we stood
By the dry rock that marks the highest point
My brother said: ‘Not too late js jt yet
To turn, remembering home.? And we were
silent
Thinking of home.” The princess shuts her
eyes

aring slightly west,

And feels the tears forming beneath her eye-
lids

And opens them, and tears fall on the page.

The knave of diamonds in the darkened room

Throws off his covers, sleeps, and snores again.

The king goes slowly down the turret stairs

To find the goblet.

And at two o’clock
The vulean in his smithy underground
Under the hanging gardens, where the drip

323Of rain among the clematis and ivy

Still falls from sipping flower to purple flower,

Smites twice his anvil, and the murmur comes

Among the roots and vines. The princess
reads:

“As I am sick, and cannot write you more,

Nor have not long to live, I give this letter

To him, my brother, who will bear it south

And tell you how I died. Ask how it was,

There in the northern desert, where the grass

Was withered. and the horses, all but one,

Perished” . . . The princess drops her golden”
head

Upon the page between her two white arms

And golden braids. The knave of diamonds
wakes

And at his window in the darkened room

Watches the lilacs tossing, where the king

Seeks for the goblet.

And at three o’clock
The moon inflames the lilac heads, and thrice
The vulean, in his root-bound smithy, clangs
His anvil; and the sounds creep softly up
Among the vines and walls. The moon is round,
Round as a shield above the turret top.
The princess blows her candle out, and weeps
In the pale room, where scent of lilac comes,
324Weeping, with hands across her eyelids,
thinking

Of withered grass, withered by sandy wind.

The knave of diamonds, in his darkened room,

Holds in his hands a key, and softly steps

Along the corridor, and slides the key

Into the door that guards her. Meanwhile.
slowly,

The king, with raindrops on his beard and
hands,

And dripping sleeves, climbs up the turret
stairs,

Holding the goblet upright in one hand:

And pauses on the midmost step, to taste

One drop of wine, wherewith wild rain has

mixed,CHIAROSCURO: ROSE

HE

Fill your bowl with roses: the bowl, too, have
of crystal.

Sit at the western window. Take the sun

Between your hands like a ball of flaming
crystal,

Poise it to let it fall, but hold it still,

And meditate on the beauty of your existence;

The beauty of this, that you exist at all.

SHE

The sun goes down,—but without lamentation.
I close my eyes, and the stream of my sensation
In this, at least, grows clear to me:

Beauty is a word that has no meaning.
Beauty is naught to me.

HE

| | | | The last blurred raindrops fall from the half-
| | clear sky,

326Eddying lightly, rose-tinged, in the windless
wake of the sun.
The swallow ascending against cold walls of

cloud

Seems winging upward over huge bleak stairs
of stone.

The raindrop finds its way to the heart of the
leaf-bud.

But no word finds its way to the heart of you.

SHE

This also is clear in the stream of my sensation:

That I am content, for the moment. . . . Let
me be.

How light the new grass looks with the rain-
dust on it!

But heart is a word that has no meaning,

Heart means nothing to me.

HE

To the end of the world I pass and back again

In flights of the mind; yet always find you here,

Remote, pale, unattached . . . © Circe too.
clear-eyed,

Watching amused your fawning tiger-thoughts,

Your wolves, your grotesque apes—relent, re-
lent!

Be less wary for once: it is the evening.

290%

) =SHE

But if I close my eyes what howlings greet me:
Do not persuade. Be tranquil. Here is flesh
With all its demons. Take it, sate yourself.
But leave my thoughts to me.WHEN TROUT SWIM DOWN GREAT
ORMOND STREET

When trout swim down Great Ormond Street
And sea-gulls cry above them lightly

And hawthorns heave cold flagstones up

To blossom whitely

Against old walls of houses there,
Gustily shaking out in moonlight
Their country sweetness on sweet air;
And in the sunlight

By the green margin of that water
Children dip white feet and shout,
Casting nets in the braided water
To catch the trout:

Then I shall hold my breath and die,
Swearing I never loved you; no,
“You were not lovely!’ I shall cry,
‘I never loved you so.’

329THIS IS THE SHAPE OF THE LEAF

This is the shape of the leaf, and this of the
flower,

And this the pale bole of the tree

Which watches its bough in a pool of unwaver-
ing water

In a land we never shall see.

The thrush on the bough is silent, the dew falls
softly,

In the evening is hardly a sound.

And the three beautiful pilgrims who come

here together
Touch lightly the dust of the ground,

Touch it with feet that trouble the dust but as
wings do,

Come shyly together, are still,

Like dancers who wait, in a pause of the music,
for music

The exquisite silence to fill.
330This is thé thought of the first, and this of the
second,

And this the grave thought of the third:

‘Linger we thus for a moment, palely expectant,

And silence will end, and the bird

‘Sing the pure phrase, sweet phrase, clear
phrase in the twilight

To fill the blue bell of the world;

And we, who on music so leaflike have drifted
together,

Leaflike apart shall be whirled

‘Into what but the beauty of silence, silence for-
everr . . .

= + his, 1s: the shape of the tree,

And the flower, and the leaf, and the three pale
beautiful pilgrims ;

This is what you are to me,SEA HOLLY

Begotten by the meeting of rock with rock,

The mating of rock and rock, rocks gnashing
together ;

Created so, and yet forgetful, walks

The seaward path, puts up her left hand, shades

Blue eyes, the eyes of rock, to see better

In slanting light the ancient sheep (which
kneels

Biting the grass) the while her other hand,

Hooking the wicker handle, turns the basket

Of eggs. The sea is high to-day. The eggs

Are cheaper. The sea is blown from the south-
west,

Confused, taking up sand and mud in waves,

The waves break, sluggish, in brown foam, the

wind

Disperses (on the sheep and _ hawthorn)
spray,—

And on her cheeks, the cheeks engendered of
rock,

And eyes, the colour of rock. The left hand
Falls from the eyes, and undecided slides

332Over the left breast on which muslin lightly
Rests, touching the nipple, and then down
The hollow side, virgin as rock, and bitterly
Caresses the blue hip.

It was for this,
This obtuse taking of the seaward path,
This stupid hearing of larks, this hooking
Of wicker, this absent observation of sheep
Kneeling in harsh sea-grass, the cool hand
shading
The spray-stung eyes—it was for this the rock
Smote itself. The sea is higher to-day,
And eggs are cheaper. The eyes of rock take
in
The seaward path that winds toward the sea,
The thistle-prodder, old woman under a bonnet,
Forking the thistles, her back against the sea,
Pausing, with hard hands on the handle, peering
With rock eyes from her bonnet.

It was for this,
This rock-lipped facing of brown waves, half
sand
And half water, this tentative hand that slides
Over the breast of rock, and into the hollow
Soft side of muslin rock, and then fiercely
Almost as rock against the hip of rock—

9]
OoIt was for this in midnight the rocks met,
And dithered together, cracking and smoking.

It was for this
Barren beauty, barrenness of rock that aches
On the seaward path, seeing the fruitful sea,

Hearing the lark of rock that sings, smelling

The rock-flower of hawthorn, sweetness of
rock—

It was for this, stone pain in the stony heart,

The rock loved and laboured; and all is lost.TETELESTAI

I

How shall we praise the magnificence of the
dead,

The great man humbled, the haughty brought
to dust?

Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly

For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days,

Guarding his heart from blows, to die ob-
scurely?

I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,

Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs

Of weeping women through long walls of trum-
pets ;

Say rather, I am no one, or an atom:

Say rather, two great gods, in a vault of star-
light,

Play ponderingly at chess, and at the game’s
end

One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor

And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece

Forgotten there, left motionless, is I.

335Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,

Am only one of millions, mostly silent;

One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,

Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.

Say that the fates of time and space obscured
me,

Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,

Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders

Dispatched me at their leisure. . . . Well,
what then?

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,

The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

II

Morning and evening opened and closed above
me:

Houses were built above me; trees let fall

Yellowing leaves upon me, hands of ghosts;

Rain has showered its arrows of silver upon
me

Seeking my heart; winds have roared and
tossed me;

Music in long blue waves of sound has borne
me

A helpless weed to shores of unthought silence;

Time, above me, within me, crashed its gongs

Of terrible warning, sifting the dust of death;

336And here I lie. Blow now your horns of Be y

Harshly over my flesh, you trees, you w

You stars and suns, Canopus, Deneb, Rigel,

Let me, as I lie down, here in this dust,

Hear, far off, your whispered salutation!

Roar now above my decaying flesh, you winds,

Whirl out your earth-scents over this body, tell
me

Of ferns and stagnant pools, wild roses, hill-
sides !

Anoint me, rain, let crash your silver arrows

On this hard flesh! I am the one who named
you,

I lived in you, and now I die in you.

I your son, your daughter, treader of music.

Lie broken, conquered . . . Let me not fall in

silence.

III

I, the restless one: the circler of circles ;

Herdsman and roper of stars, who eaua not
capture

The secret of self: I who was tyrant to weak-
lings,

Striker of children; destroyer of women; cor-
rupter

337

ater Ss- ———— -

Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty;
I,

Too easily brought to tears and weakness by
music,

Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder

Of the war in my heart of desire with desire,
the struggle

Of hatred with love, terror with hunger; I

Who laughed without knowing the cause of my
laughter, who grew

Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own

body ;

Loved without reason the laughter and flesh of
a woman,

Enduring such torments to find her! I who at
last

Grow weaker, struggle more feebly, relent in
my purpose,

Choose for my triumph an easier end, look
backward

At earlier conquests; or, caught in the web,
cry out

In a sudden and empty despair, ‘Tetélestai

Pity me, now! I, who was arrogant, beg you!

Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.

Blow horns of victory now, as I reel and am
vanquished.

Shatter the sky with trumpets above my grave.

338IV

- - » Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust
and is blown!

These bones, how they grind in the granite of
frost and are nothing!

This skull, how it yawns for a flicker of time in
the darkness,

Yet laughs not and sees not! It is crushed by
a hammer of sunlight,

And the hands are destroyed. . . . Press down
through the leaves of the jasmine,

Dig through the interlaced roots—nevermore
will you find me;

I was no better than dust, yet you cannot re-
place me. . .

Take the soft dust in your hand—does it stir:
does it sing?

Has it lips and a heart? Does it open its eyes
to the sun?

Does it run, does it dream, does it burn with a
secret, or tremble

In terror of death? Or ache with tremendous
decisions? . . .

Listen! . . . It says: ‘I lean by the river. The
willows

Are yellowed with bud. White clouds roar up
from the south

339And darken the ripples ; but they cannot darken

my heart,

Nor the face like a star in my heart! .. . Rain
falls on the water

And pelts it, and rings it with silver. The
willow trees glisten,

The sparrows chirp under the eaves; but the
face in my heart

Is a secret of music. .. . I wait in the rain
and am silent.’

Listen again! . . . It says: “I have worked, I
am tired,

The pencil dulls in my hand: I see through the
window

Walls upon walls of windows with faces be-
hind them,

Smoke floating up to the sky, an ascension of
sea-gulls.

I am tired. I have struggled in vain, my de-
cision was fruitless,

Why then do I wait? with darkness, so easy,
at hand)! . «: .

But to-morrow, perhaps . . . I will wait and
endure till to-morrow!’

Or again: ‘It is dark. The decision is made.
I am vanquished

By terror of life. The walls mount slowly
about me

340In coldness.
forsaken.

I cried out, was answered by silence . . . Teté-
festa! . .

 

I had not the courage. I was

V

Hear how it babbles!—Blow the dust out of
your hand,

With its voices and visions, tread on it, for-
get it, turn homeward

With dreams in your brain. . . . This, then, is
the humble, the nameless.—

The lover, the husband and father, the
struggler with shadows,

The one who went down under shoutings of
chaos, the weakling

Who cried his ‘forsaken! like Christ on the
darkening hilltop!

This, then, is the one who implores, as he
dwindles to silence,

A fanfare of glory. ... And which of us

dares to deny him?THE ROOM

Through that window—all else being extinct

Except itself and me—I saw the struggle

Of darkness against darkness. Within the
room

It turned and turned, dived downward. Then
I saw

How order might—if chaos wished—become:

And saw the darkness crush upon itself,

Contracting powerfully; it was as if

It killed itself: slowly: and with much pain.

Pain. The scene was pain, and nothing but

pain.
What else, when chaos draws all forces inward
To shape a single leaf? ...

For the leaf came
Alone and shining in the empty room;
After a while the twig shot downward from ibis
And from the twig a bough; and then the
trunk,
Massive and coarse; and last the one black

root.

342The black root cracked the walls.
burst the window:
The great tree took possession.

Boughs

Tree of trees!
Remember (when time comes) how chaos died

To shape the shining leaf. Then turn, have
courage,

Wrap arms and roots together, be convulsed

With grief, and bring back chaos out of shape.

I will be watching then as I watch now.

I will praise darkness now, but then the leaf.SOUND OF BREAKING

Why do you cry out, why do I like to hear you

Cry out, here in the dewless evening, sitting

Close, close together, so close that the heart
stops beating

And the brain its thought? Wordless, worth-
less mortals

Stumbling, exhausted, in this wilderness

Of our conjoint destruction! Hear the grass

Raging about us! Hear the worms applaud!

Hear how the ripples make a sound of chaos!

Hear now, in these and the other sounds of
evening,

The first brute step of God!

About your elbow,
Making a ring of thumb and finger, I
Slide the walled blood against the less-walled
blood,

Move down your arm, surmount the wrist-bone,
shut
Your long slim hand in mine. Each finger-tip

Is then saluted by a finger-tip:;
344The hands ineet back to back, then face to
face;

Then lock together. And we, with eyes averted,

Smile at the evening sky of alabaster,

See nothing, lose our souls in the maelstrom,
turning

Downward in rapid circles.

Bitter woman,
Bitter of heart and brain and blood, bitter as I
Who drink your bitterness—can this be beauty?
Do you cry out because the beauty is cruel?
Terror, because we downward sweep so swiftly?
Terror of darkness?

 

It is a sound of breaking,

The world is breaking, the world is a sound of
breaking,

Many-harmonied, diverse, profound,

A shattering beauty. See, how together we
break,

Hear what a crashing of disordered chords and
discords

Fills the world with falling, when we thus lean

Our two mad bodies together!

It is a sound
Of everlasting grief, the sound of weeping,
The sound of disaster and misery, the sound
Of passionate heartbreak at the centre of the
world.
345EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAYFrom Renascence and Other Poems, published by
(larper & Brothers. Copyright, 1917, by Edna St.
Vincent Millay.RENASCENCE

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood ;
I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I started from:

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see:

These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,—
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;

Miles and miles above my head;

So here upon my back I’ll lie

And look my fill into the sky.

And so I looked, and, after all,

The sky was not so very tall.

349The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top.
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ’most could touch it with my hand!
And, reaching up my hand to try,

I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and—lo !—Infinity

Came down and settled over me;

And, pressing of the Undefined

The definition on my mind,

Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold ;

Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,

And brought unmuffled to my ears

The gossiping of friendly spheres,

The creaking of the tented sky,

The ticking of Eternity.

I saw and heard, and knew at last

The How and Why of all things, past,

And present, and forevermore.

The universe, cleft to the core,

Lay open to my probing sense

That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck

350My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out—Ah, fearful pawn!

For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.

All sin was of my sinning, all

Atoning mine, and mine the gall

Of all regret. Mine was the weight

Of every brooded wrong, the hate

That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.

And all the while for every grief,

Each suffering, I craved relief

With individual desire—

Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;

Perished with each—then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;

He moved his eyes and looked at me;

I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,

And knew his hunger as my own.

I saw at sea a great fog-bank

Between two ships that struck and sank;

A thousand screams the heavens smote;

And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death

That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry

From the compassion that was I.

351i

a

 

 

    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
    

All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.

Ah, awful weight! Infinity

Pressed down upon the finite me!

My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I

And suffered death, but could not die.

Deep in the earth I rested now;

Cool is its hand upon the brow

And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.

And all at once, and over all,

The pitying rain began to fall;

I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatchéd roof,

And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.

For rain it hath a friendly sound

To one who’s six feet underground ;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come

And speak to me in my new home.

352I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,

To drink into my eyes the shine

Of every slanting silver line,

To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,

And then the broad face of the sun

Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top,
How can I bear it; buried here,

While overhead the sky grows clear

And blue again after the storm?

O, multi-coloured, multiform,

Beloved beauty over me,

That I shall never, never see

Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!

O God, I cried, give me new birth,

And put me back upon the earth!

Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd

And let the heavy rain, down-poured

In one big torrent, set me free,

Washing my grave away from me!

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
  
 

I ceased; and, through the breathless hush

353einai
ee eaten

 

That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string

Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave

Fell from the sky and struck my grave.

I know not how such things can be

I only know there came to me

A fragrance such as never clings

To aught save happy living things;

A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,

A sense of glad awakening.

The grass, a tip-toe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;

I felt the rain’s cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealéd sight,

And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see—

A drenched and dripping apple-tree.
A last long line of silver rain,

A sky grown clear and blue again.
3d54And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle

Of orchard-breath, and with the smell—
I know not how such things can be !—
I breathed my soul back into me.

Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man

Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound:

Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high ;

I laughed and laughed into the sky,

Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;

O God, I cried, no dark disguise

Can e’er hereafter hide from me

Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,

But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on Thy heart!

355The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky—
No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.MAXWELL BODENHEIM— eae -
=

TIENT apa

7DEATH

I shall walk down the road.

I shall turn and feel upon my feet

The kisses of Death, like scented rain.

For Death is a black slave with little silver
birds

Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.

He will tell me, his voice like jewels

Dropped into a satin bag,

How he has tip-toed after me down the road.

His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing
for me,

Then he will graze me with his hands

And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds

Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-
toes off.INTERLUDE

Sun-light recedes on the mountains, in long
gold shafts,

Like the falling pillars of a temple.

Then singing silence almost too nimble for
ears:

The mountain-tenors fling their broad voices

Into the blue hall of the sky,

And through a rigid column of these voices

Night dumbly walks.

Night, crushing sound between his fingers

Until it forms a lightly frozen couch

On which he dreams,HILL-SIDE TREE

Like a drowsy, rain-browned saint,

You squat, and sometimes your voice

In which the wind takes no part,

Is like mists of music wedding each other.

A drunken odour-laced pedlar is the morning
wind.

He brings you golden-scarfed cities

Whose voices are swirls of bells burdened with
summer ;

And maidens whose hearts are galloping princes.

And you raise your branches to the sky,

With a whisper that holds the smile you cannot

shape.FORGETFULNESS

Happier than green-kirtled apple-trees
Waving their soft-rimmed fans of light
And taking the morning mist, in quick breaths,
You sit in the woven meditation and surprise

Of a morning uncovering its wind-wreathed
head.

And yet within the light stillness of your soul

Dream-heavy guards sleep uneasily

Over the body of your last slain sorrow,SOLDIERS

The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted

To a hieroglyphic of silence.

The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question

That digs into it like sudden claws.

Beside it is a face like a mirror

In which a stiffened child dangles. . .

Dead soldiers in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentenceMINNA

I

Moonlight bends over black silence,

Making it bloom to wild-flowers of sound

That only green things can hear.

A wind sprawls over an orchard,

Frightening its silent litany to sound.

A thread of starlight has fallen to this tree

And curls among its leaves, tangling them to
silence. . .

Standing amidst these things, Beloved,

We feel the words our hearts cannot form.

II

Two walls, dizzy with rain-touch

And suffused with gauzily amorous sunlight,
Creep over a hill and meet.

And so our foreheads touch.

364Silence between our hands grows into clasped
music

Sprinkling our finger-tips with attenuated
chords of touch.

Our hearts weave low songs to this accompani-

ment :

So low that even silence cannot hear.

III

Afternoon sunlight limps tenuously away,

Leaving a snarled retrospect of golden foot-
marks,

The sea is pregnant with gracious discords

That falteringly shroud the sleep-rhythmed
breasts of winds.

The sky is a genially vacant stare.

Remaining touches of starlight

Tremble the leaves when air is still.

And so my love for you strolls through this
day,

Picking up forgotten hints of its heart.

IV

The gown you wear is curiously like sound—
Tangles of dahlia-murmurs taking shape

In shrinking mellow sprays.

The everlasting journey of your heart

365Gliding over a sleepy litany

That winds through scattered star-flowers of
regrets:

The everlasting journey of your heart

Is like a fragile traveller of sound—

A murmur seeking the love that gave it birth.

V

Whenever a love dies within you,

Griefs, phosphorescent with unborn tears,

Cut the glowing hush of a meadow within you:

Griefs striking their pearl-voiced cymbals

And shaping the silences once held by your
love.

Your new love blows a trumpet of sunlight

Into the meadow, and your griefs

Leap into the echo, and return to you.

VI
We blew a luminous confusion of thoughts
Upon the silence of our souls,
Staining it to little, weeping tints.
Our hands pressed serpentine pain into each
other
And stroked it away to twilights of relief.
Our lips shook before the tread of coming
words,

But closed again, finding no need for them.
366VII

Upon an arched sarcophagus of pain

Are figures painted in arrested embraces

With outlines so light that we
to see:

must bend close

Old loves almost merging to one tone

Of pale regret that holds

An inner glow of dead weeping.

Our lips cling and our breath winds to a hand
With touch like summer rain

Blending the arrested figures upon the arched
sarcophagus of pain.PLEASE RETURN TO
ALDERMAN LIBRARY

 

DUEXX GOL S46 S44