钢琴
幽暗中，一个女人对我唱着柔和的歌声，
把我引入回忆，直到眼前重现昔日情景——
一个孩子坐在钢琴底下，在钢弦轰鸣中央
依偎着母亲的纤足，听她微笑着歌唱。
我身不由己，被这歌声的狡诈艺术
诱回往昔，直到我的心哭泣着要求归属
昔日家中假日的傍晚，门窗把冬天阻挡，
舒适的厅内颂歌荡漾、钢琴丁当为我们导航。
此刻哪怕歌手突然爆发出喧声强烈，
黑色大钢琴也热情奔泻。童稚的日月
已经把我迷住，我的男子气概已没入
回忆的洪波，我像孩子似的为过去哀哭。
吴迪 译
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蛇
气候炎热，我穿着睡衣，
一条蛇爬向我的水槽，
前去喝水。
在巨大的黑色角豆树的气味奇特的浓荫里，
我提着大水罐走下台阶，
必须等待，必须站住等待，因为他呆在我眼前
的水槽边。
他从暗处土墙的裂缝中爬下，
拖曳着黄褐色的松弛的软肚子，来到石头水
槽的边缘，
把喉咙搭在石槽底部休息。
那儿，水从龙头一点一点地清楚地滴下，
他用笔直的嘴啜饮着，
喝下的水通过笔直的牙床，舒畅地流入松弛
的长长躯体，
静静地流入。
别人超前到了我的水槽，
我呀，像后来的人．等待着。
他从水槽抬起头来，就像一头牲口，
呆滞地盯着我，就像一头喝水的牲口，
从嘴里轻轻地弹出双叉舌头，沉思了一会儿
又俯身去喝了一点，
在这个西西里的七月的日子，当艾特纳火山
仍旧冒烟之时，
他像土地一样发褐，像土地一样金黄，
就像一条从大地的躯体中冒出来的燃烧的大肠。
我所受的教育发出声音，对我说：
必须处死他．
因为在西西里，黑色的蛇是清白的，金色的
蛇是有毒的。
我身上的声音说，假若你是个男子汉．
你就该抓起棍棒，把他打断．把他打死。
但我必须承认，我非常喜欢他，
我格外高兴地看到他安静地来到这儿作客，
在我的水槽里喝水，然后平静地、温和地离开，
用不着道谢，回到大地躯体内其它燃烧的大肠中间。
是否出于懦弱，我不敢把他杀死？
是否出于堕落．我盼望与他交谈？
是否一种羞辱，我竟感到光荣？
我感到如此光荣。
然而，又传出了声音：
“假若你不害怕，你就得把他处死！”
的确，我感到害怕，感到非常害怕，
即使如此，我更感到光荣，
因为他能从秘密大地的黑暗的门中走出，
前来寻求我的好客之情。
他喝足了，
神情恍惚地昂起头来，就像一名醉汉，
并且在空中摇动着他那像有叉的黑夜一样的舌头，
似乎在舔着嘴唇，
接着像视而不见的神，环顾空中，
慢悠悠地转动脑袋，
慢悠悠地，慢悠悠地．仿佛耽于梦幻之中，
开始拖曳长长的、绕成曲线的躯体，
又爬上了破裂的墙面。
当他把脑袋伸进那可怕的洞穴，
当他慢慢地停住．放松肩膀，再继续进洞，
当他撤进那可怕的黑洞，不慌不忙地进入黑暗，
慢慢地把身子拖进去，
一种恐怖．一种对他这种行为的反抗，
占据了我的心身，可他对我不予理睬。
我环视四周，我放下水罐，
我捡起笨重的木头，
啪地一声砸向水槽。
我想我没有砸中他，
但是，他留在后面仓促地摆动着的部位
突然闪电般地蠕动了一下，
进入了黑洞．进入了墙面上的裂缝，
我带着迷恋凝视着黑洞，在这个酷热的宁静的中午。
我立刻感到懊悔。
我想到我的行动是多么粗暴，多么卑鄙！
我憎恨我自己，憎恨可恶的人类教育的声音。
我回想起了信天翁的故事。
我希望他能够回来，我的蛇呀。
因为我又觉得他像一个皇帝，
像一个流放中的皇帝，废黜到了地狱，
他一定会马上重新戴上皇冠。
于是，我失去了一次与人生的君主
交往的机会。
我必将受到惩罚，
因为自己的卑劣。
吴迪 译
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灵船
1
时值秋天，掉落的水果；
通向湮灭的漫长的征途。
苹果像大颗的露珠一样掉落，
撞破自己，为自己打开一个出口。
该走了，向自我道一声告别，
从掉落的自我中
寻找一个出口。
2
你是否造好了自己的灵船？
哦，造一只灵船吧，因为你需要它。
严霜很快就要降临，苹果密集地、
几乎轰隆轰隆地向变硬的大地掉落。
死亡就像骨灰的气味一样散发在空气里！
啊！你难道没有闻到吗？
在撞破的躯体内，惊恐的灵魂 ．
发现自己蜷缩一团，无法抵挡
从洞孔吹入而进的寒气。
3
一个人能否用出鞘的剑
来解除生活的苦难？
用匕道，用长剑．用子弹，
人们能为自己的生命捅开一个出口；
但是，请告诉我，这是否就是解除苦难？
当然不是！一个凶手，一个自杀凶手
怎能解除人生的苦难？
4
哦，让我们谈谈我们所知道的宁静，
我们能够知道的、深切、可爱的宁静
它来自安谧时分的强烈的心灵！
我们怎能为自己解除苦难？
5
那么为自己制造一只灵船吧，
因为你必须走完最漫长的旅程，抵达湮灭。
死亡吧，这漫长而又痛苦的死亡，
摆脱旧的自我，创造新的自我。
我们的躯体早就掉落，撞得百孔千疮，
我们的灵魂正从残忍的撞破之处的洞孔，
向外渗漏。
黑暗、无边无际的死亡之洋
正在涌进我们破裂的缺口，
洪水早已把我们覆盖。
6
哦，造起你的灵船，造起你的避难方舟，
装上食物，装上蛋糕和甜洒，
为了通往湮灭的黑暗的航行。
当黑暗的洪水泛起，躯体一点一点地死去，
胆怯的灵魂也被洗劫了立足之处。
我们正在死亡，正在死亡，我们大家正在死亡，
在我们身上升起的死亡洪水不可阻挡，
它很快就会淹没世界，淹没外部世界。
我们正在死亡，正在死亡，我们的躯体正在
一点一点地死亡，
我们的力量离开了我们，
我们的灵魂在洪水之上的黑雨中赤身裸体地哆嗦。
在我们的生命之树的最后的枝桠上寒颤。
7
我们正在死亡，我们正在死亡，我们现在能做的一切
就是心甘情愿地死亡，制作灵船，
带上灵魂去进行最长的一次航行。
小小的船上，准备了木桨和食物，
还有小小的莱盘．以及为辞别的灵魂
所各好的各种用品。
这就开航，随着躯体的死亡
和生命的离别，开航，
易碎的灵魂呆在易碎的勇猛的小舟上，
贮有食物、小小炒锅
和替换衣服的忠诚的方舟，
在一片荒凉的黑色洪水上，
在毁灭之海上，
在死亡之洋上，我们仍旧
糊涂地航行，因为不能掌舵．也没有港口。
没有港口，没地方可去，
只有加深的黑暗在黑暗中继续加深，
在无声的、不是汩汩作响的、
与黑暗连成一体的黑暗的洪水中，
上上下下、前前后后、十足地黑暗，
因此，再也没有了方向。
小舟在那儿；然而灵魂已经走了。
她看不见了，附近没有任何物体能看见她。
她已经走了！走了！然而，
她呆在那儿的一个地方。
不知晓的地方！
8
一切都走了，躯体也走了，
完全地走下去了，彻底地走了。
上方的黑暗像下方一样沉重，
在两者之间，小船
已经走了，
灵魂已经走了。
9
这是终结，这是湮灭。
9
然而，在黑暗之上，
有一条细线从永恒中分离出来，
一条水平线
带着苍白冒到了黑暗之上。
这是幻象？或是苍白
冒得高了一点？
啊，等吧，等吧，因为黎明来了，
残酷的黎明从湮灭中，
返回到了人生。
等吧，等吧，小船在漂泊．
在死灰色的
洪水般黎明的下方。
等吧，等吧！虽然如此，但黄色的、奇特的、
冷却的、苍白的灵魂突然萌发，
玫瑰突然萌发。
玫瑰突然萌发，一切事物重新开始。
10
洪水平息了，躯体，就像衰旧的海贝，
奇怪地、可爱地浮现出来。
小船急速回家，
在粉红色的洪水上，摇晃，渐浙消失，
易碎的灵魂跳了出来．又回到她自己的家里
用宁静填塞心房。
被湮灭之宁静复活了的心房
摇荡起来。
哦．造起你的灵船。哦，造起来！
因为你将需要它。
因为通往湮灭的航程等着你。
吴迪 译
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赤脚跑着的婴儿
那婴儿的白脚跑过草地，
小小的白脚就象花朵在风中摇，
停停跑跑象风落风起，
吹过水面，水草很稀很少。
他那双白脚在草中嬉戏，
知更鸟歌声般迷人，飘忽不定，
象两只蝴蝶在玻璃杯上稍息，
发出双翅排击的轻轻声音。
这婴儿会向我奔来，我希望，
就象掠过池水的风影，
雪白的双脚站在我膝上，
我伸出双手去抚摸他们——
象早晨丁香花般凉爽干净，
象新开的牡丹花柔滑坚挺。
袁可嘉 译
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布尔乔亚，真他妈的——
布尔乔亚，真他妈的，
特别是那些男人们——
拿得出去，完全拿得出去——
我把他当礼物送你一个好吗？
他不英俊吗？他不健康吗？他不是好样的吗？
外表上他不象个干净利落的英国佬吗？
这不是上帝自己的形象？一天奔三十英里，
去打鹧鸪，去打小小的皮球？
你不想象他那样，很有钱，象那么回事儿？
噢，且慢！
让他碰上新感情，遇到另一个人的需求，
让他回家碰上一点道德上的小麻烦，让生活向他的
头脑提出新要求，
你看他就松软了，象一块潮湿了的甜饼。
你看他弄的一团糟，变成个傻瓜或恶棍。
你看他怎么个表演，当他的智力遇到新测验，
遇到一个新生活的需求。
布尔乔亚，真他妈的，
特别是那些男人们——
干干净净，象个蘑菇
站在那里，那么光洁，挺直而悦目——
象一个酵母菌，在过去生命的遗骸上生存，
从比他伟大的生命的枯叶中吮吸养料。
即使如此，他还是陈腐的，他活得太久了。
摸摸他，你就会发觉他内部已蛀空了，
就象一个老蘑菇，里面给虫蛀烂了，蛀空了，
在光滑的皮肤下，在笔直的外表下。
充满了炽热的。长满虫子的空洞感觉，
相当卑污——
布尔乔亚，真他妈的！
在潮湿的英国，这些形象成千上万个站着。
真可惜，不能把他们全部踢翻，
象令人作呕的毒菌，让它们
在英国的泥土中迅速腐烂。
1929
袁可嘉 译
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产生意象的爱情
始终
在我的核心
燃烧着一片小小的愤怒的火焰吞噬着我，
因为
越过界线的抚摸，因为爱情炽热的、深入的手指。
始终
在那些深深爱我的人的眼中，
我最终见到她们所热爱的他的意象，
却被当作是我，
误当作是我。
始终
是一只象我的聪明的猴子
嘲笑着我。
于是超过了一切，我现在要
使我自己的赤身裸体
避开产生意象的爱情的嘲笑和抚摸
裘小龙 译
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绿
天空一色苹果绿，
天空是阳光下举着的绿色美酒，
月亮是其中一片金色的花瓣
她睁开她的眼睛，绿莹莹地
眼波闪耀，象未绽的花蕾一般纯，
第一次，此刻第一次为人瞥见
裘小龙 译
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迟来的爱情
我不知道爱情已居于我的身上：
他像海鸥一样来临，以扬起的双翼掠过悠悠呼吸的大海，
几乎没有惊动摇曳的落日余晖，
但不知不觉已融进玫瑰的色彩。
它轻柔地降临，我丝毫没有觉察，
红光消隐，它深入黑暗；我睡着，仍然不知爱情来到这里，
直到一个梦在夜间颤抖地经过我的肉体，
于是我醒来，不知道是谁以如此的恐惧和喜悦将我触击。
随着第一道曙光，我起身照镜，
我愉快地开始，因为在夜间
我脸上所纺起的时光之线
已织成美丽的面纱，如同新娘的花边。
透过面纱，我有笑声一般的魅力，
像姑娘在大海苍白的夜间有着定当作响的欢畅；
我心中的温暖，如同海洋，沿着迟来的爱情之路，
曙光洒下无数片片闪耀的罂粟花瓣。
所有这些闪闪发光的海鸟烦躁地飞旋，
在我的下方，抱怨夜间亲吻的温暖
从未流过它们的血液，促使它们在清晨
恣情地追逐撒入水中的红色罂粟花瓣。
吴笛 译
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要求
你，海伦，把一颗颗星星看成
在黑树上燃烧的槲寄生果，
你一定把我当作亲吻之碗，
将嘴插入其中，吮吸着我。
海伦，你让我的亲吻白白地蒸发，
蒸进黑夜的鼻孔；把我吸光吧，我向你恳求；
哦，你呀，你这个夜间的狂饮作乐者，
面对我着亲吻之碗，你怎能缩脚缩手？
吴笛 译
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在阳台上
在幽暗的山前，有一条淡淡的、损毁的彩虹；
在我们与彩虹之间，是滚滚的雷鸣；
下方，青幽幽的麦田里站着农民，
像黑黝黝的树桩，静静地站在青幽幽的麦田。
你在我身边，赤足穿着凉鞋，
透过阳台上赤裸裸木材的芬芳，
我辨别出你的发香；即刻，
迅速的闪电划破长空。
沿着淡绿的冰河，一艘黑色的船
漂过昏暗－－又去何方？
雷声轰鸣。然而你有我，我有你！
赤裸裸的闪电在天空中战栗
并且消失－－除了我有你，你有我，还有什么？
黑船已经漂走。
吴笛 译
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枇杷与山梨
我爱你，腐坏者，
美味的腐败。
我喜爱把你从皮里吮吸出来，
这般的褐色，如此的柔嫩、温和，
如意大利人所说：病态的细腻。
多么稀奇、强大，值得追怀的滋味
在你堕入腐烂的阶段中流溢出来，
如溪水一般流溢。
芬芳扑鼻，像西那库斯的葡萄酒，
或普通的马沙拉。
尽管马沙拉一词在禁酒的西方
将很快带有矫揉造作的意味。
这是什么？
这是什么？在转变为葡萄干的葡萄里面？
在枇杷、山梨里面？
褐色病态的纵饮者，
秋天的排泄！
这是什么，它使我们想起白色的神明。
上帝一丝不挂，像去皮的桃仁，
奇特，不太吉祥的果肉芳香，
仿佛渗了汗水，
并且浸泡了神秘。
顶端枯死的山梨和枇杷。
我说，恶魔般的体验非常美好，
似俄耳甫斯的音乐，像下界的
优美的狄俄尼索斯。
离别时分的一记亲吻，一阵痉挛，破裂时分的一股兴奋，
然后独自行走在潮湿的道路，直至下一个拐弯。
那儿，一名新的伴侣，一次新的离别，一次新的一分为二，
一种新的对离群索居的渴望，
对寂然孤独的新的心醉神迷，处在那衰弱的寒叶之间。
沿着奇异的地狱之路行走，越发孤寂，
心中的力量逐一地离去，
然而灵魂在继续，赤着足，更生动地具体表现出来，
像火焰般被吹得越来越白
在更深更深的黑暗之中，
分离而更加优美，更加精炼。
所以，在枇杷与山梨的奇特的蒸馏中
炼出了地狱的精髓。
剧烈的离别的气味。
一路平安！
俄耳甫斯，蜿蜒的、被树叶阻塞的、寂静的地狱之路。
每颗灵魂与自己的孤寂告别，
最奇特的伴侣，
最好的伴侣。
枇杷、山梨，
更多的秋天的甜蜜流动
从你空洞的皮囊中
吮吸出来
啜饮下去，也许，像呷一口马沙拉，
好让蔓延的、自天而降的葡萄向你增添滋味，
俄耳甫斯的辞别，辞别，辞别，
狄俄尼索斯的自我总和，
完美的陶醉中的自我，
最终孤寂的心醉神迷。
吴笛 译
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
命运
一旦树叶凋落，
甚至连上帝也不能使它返回树身。
一旦人类生活与活生生的宇宙的联系被击破，
人最后变得以自我为中心，
不管什么人，不管是上帝还是基督，
都无法挽回这种联系。
只有死亡通过分解的漫长过程，
能够溶化分裂的生活。
经过树根旁边的黑暗的冥河，
再次溶进生命之树的流动的汁液。
吴笛 译
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
落叶
有一种肌体的连结，像树叶属于树枝，
还有一种机械的连结，像落叶般抛在大地。
天国之风扇动树叶像扇动火焰和调谐曲调，
但天国之风是上帝对付落叶的磨坊，
在大地下界的石磨上，把它们碾成碎片，化为沃土。
吴笛 译
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
巴伐利亚龙胆花
给我一支龙胆花，给我一支火炬！
让我用这支花那蓝色，分岔的火炬给自己引路
沿着那越来越黑暗的楼梯下去，蓝色越来越暗
甚至到冥后去的地方去，就在此刻，从降霜的九月
到那看不见的王国去，那里黑暗醒着，
冥后只是一个声音，
或是看不见的黑暗，被包围在冥王怀抱里更深的黑暗中，
被浓厚阴影的激情穿透，
在黑暗火炬那璀璨的光华中，
黑暗照耀在丢失的新娘和她的新郎身上。
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
没什么值得留的
没什么值得留的，一切都已失去
唯有心中的一丁点儿宁静
像紫罗兰眸子般的花心
郑建青 译
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
悲思
一片黄叶来自黑暗
如蛙跳跃眼前。
我缘何肃立？
我注视生我的女人
直挺挺地躺在病房的
斑驳的黑暗里，僵硬
欲死：急迫的叶拽我回到
雨中的瑟瑟叶声，街灯和市街，
一一在我面前搅混
郑建青 译 To Cynthia Asquith
CONTENTS
GUARDS
Where the trees rise like cliffs
THE LITTLE TOWN AT EVENING
The chime of the bells
LAST HOURS
The cool of an oak's unchequered shade
TOWN
London
AFTER THE OPERA
Down the stone stairs
GOING BACK
The night turns slowly round
ON THE MARCH
We are out on the open road
BOMBARDMENT
The town has opened to the sun
WINTER-LULL
Because of the silent snow
THE ATTACK
When we came out of the wood
OBSEQUIAL ODE
Surely you've trodden straight
SHADES
Shall I tell you, then, how it is?--
BREAD UPON THE WATERS
So you are lost to me
RUINATION
The sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist
RONDEAU
The hours have tumbled their leaden sands
TOMMIES IN THE TRAIN
The sun shines
WAR-BABY
The child like mustard-seed
NOSTALGIA
The waning moon looks upward
COLOPHON
GUARDS!
A Review in Hyde Park 1913.
The Crowd Watches.
WHERE the trees rise like cliffs, proud and
blue-tinted in the distance,
Between the cliffs of the trees, on the grey-
green park
Rests a still line of soldiers, red motionless range of
guards
Smouldering with darkened busbies beneath the bay-
onets' slant rain.
Colossal in nearness a blue police sits still on his horse
Guarding the path; his hand relaxed at his thigh,
And skyward his face is immobile, eyelids aslant
In tedium, and mouth relaxed as if smiling--ineffable
tedium!
So! So! Gaily a general canters across the space,
With white plumes blinking under the evening grey
sky.
And suddenly, as if the ground moved
The red range heaves in slow, magnetic reply.
EVOLUTIONS OF SOLDIERS
The red range heaves and compulsory sways, ah see!
in the flush of a march
Softly-impulsive advancing as water towards a weir
from the arch
Of shadow emerging as blood emerges from inward
shades of our night
Encroaching towards a crisis, a meeting, a spasm and
throb of delight.
The wave of soldiers, the coming wave, the throbbing
red breast of approach
Upon us; dark eyes as here beneath the busbies glit-
tering, dark threats that broach
Our beached vessel; darkened rencontre inhuman, and
closed warm lips, and dark
Mouth-hair of soldiers passing above us, over the wreck
of our bark.
And so, it is ebb-time, they turn, the eyes beneath the
busbies are gone.
But the blood has suspended its timbre, the heart from
out of oblivion
Knows but the retreat of the burning shoulders, the
red-swift waves of the sweet
Fire horizontal declining and ebbing, the twilit ebb of
retreat.
THE LITTLE TOWN AT EVENING
THE chime of the bells, and the church clock
striking eight
Solemnly and distinctly cries down the babel
of children still playing in the hay.
The church draws nearer upon us, gentle and great
In shadow, covering us up with her grey.
Like drowsy children the houses fall asleep
Under the fleece of shadow, as in between
Tall and dark the church moves, anxious to keep
Their sleeping, cover them soft unseen.
Hardly a murmur comes from the sleeping brood,
I wish the church had covered me up with the rest
In the home-place. Why is it she should exclude
Me so distinctly from sleeping with those I love best?
LAST HOURS
THE cool of an oak's unchequered shade
Falls on me as I lie in deep grass
Which rushes upward, blade beyond blade,
While higher the darting grass-flowers pass
Piercing the blue with their crocketed spires
And waving flags, and the ragged fires
Of the sorrel's cresset--a green, brave town
Vegetable, new in renown.
Over the tree's edge, as over a mountain
Surges the white of the moon,
A cloud comes up like the surge of a fountain,
Pressing round and low at first, but soon
Heaving and piling a round white dome.
How lovely it is to be at home
Like an insect in the grass
Letting life pass.
There's a scent of clover crept through my hair
From the full resource of some purple dome
Where that lumbering bee, who can hardly bear
His burden above me, never has clomb.
But not even the scent of insouciant flowers
Makes pause the hours.
Down the valley roars a townward train.
I hear it through the grass
Dragging the links of my shortening chain
Southwards, alas!
TOWN
LONDON
Used to wear her lights splendidly,
Flinging her shawl-fringe over the River,
Tassels in abandon.
And up in the sky
A two-eyed clock, like an owl
Solemnly used to approve, chime, chiming,
Approval, goggle-eyed fowl.
There are no gleams on the River,
No goggling clock;
No sound from St. Stephen's;
No lamp-fringed frock.
Instead,
Darkness, and skin-wrapped
Fleet, hurrying limbs,
Soft-footed dead.
London
Original, wolf-wrapped
In pelts of wolves, all her luminous
Garments gone.
London, with hair
Like a forest darkness, like a marsh
Of rushes, ere the Romans
Broke in her lair.
It is well
That London, lair of sudden
Male and female darknesses
Has broken her spell.
AFTER THE OPERA
DOWN the stone stairs
Girls with their large eyes wide with tragedy
Lift looks of shocked and momentous emotion
up at me.
And I smile.
Ladies
Stepping like birds with their bright and pointed feet
Peer anxiously forth, as if for a boat to carry them out
of the wreckage,
And among the wreck of the theatre crowd
I stand and smile.
They take tragedy so becomingly.
Which pleases me.
But when I meet the weary eyes
The reddened aching eyes of the bar-man with thin
arms,
I am glad to go back to where I came from.
GOING BACK
THE NIGHT turns slowly round,
Swift trains go by in a rush of light;
Slow trains steal past.
This train beats anxiously, outward bound.
But I am not here.
I am away, beyond the scope of this turning;
There, where the pivot is, the axis
Of all this gear.
I, who sit in tears,
I, whose heart is torn with parting;
Who cannot bear to think back to the departure
platform;
My spirit hears
Voices of men
Sound of artillery, aeroplanes, presences,
And more than all, the dead-sure silence,
The pivot again.
There, at the axis
Pain, or love, or grief
Sleep on speed; in dead certainty;
Pure relief.
There, at the pivot
Time sleeps again.
No has-been, no here-after; only the perfected
Silence of men.
ON THE MARCH
WE are out on the open road.
Through the low west window a cold light
flows
On the floor where never my numb feet trode
Before; onward the strange road goes.
Soon the spaces of the western sky
With shutters of sombre cloud will close.
But we'll still be together, this road and I,
Together, wherever the long road goes.
The wind chases by us, and over the corn
Pale shadows flee from us as if from their foes.
Like a snake we thresh on the long, forlorn
Land, as onward the long road goes.
From the sky, the low, tired moon fades out;
Through the poplars the night-wind blows;
Pale, sleepy phantoms are tossed about
As the wind asks whither the wan road goes.
Away in the distance wakes a lamp.
Inscrutable small lights glitter in rows.
But they come no nearer, and still we tramp
Onward, wherever the strange road goes.
Beat after beat falls sombre and dull.
The wind is unchanging, not one of us knows
What will be in the final lull
When we find the place where this dead road goes.
For something must come, since we pass and pass
Along in the coiled, convulsive throes
Of this marching, along with the invisible grass
That goes wherever this old road goes.
Perhaps we shall come to oblivion.
Perhaps we shall march till our tired toes
Tread over the edge of the pit, and we're gone
Down the endless slope where the last road goes.
If so, let us forge ahead, straight on
If we're going to sleep the sleep with those
That fall forever, knowing none
Of this land whereon the wrong road goes.
BOMBARDMENT
THE TOWN has opened to the sun.
Like a flat red lily with a million petals
She unfolds, she comes undone.
A sharp sky brushes upon
The myriad glittering chimney-tips
As she gently exhales to the sun.
Hurrying creatures run
Down the labyrinth of the sinister flower.
What is it they shun?
A dark bird falls from the sun.
It curves in a rush to the heart of the vast
Flower: the day has begun.
WINTER-LULL
Because of the silent snow, we are all hushed
Into awe.
No sound of guns, nor overhead no rushed
Vibration to draw
Our attention out of the void wherein we are crushed.
A crow floats past on level wings
Noiselessly.
Uninterrupted silence swings
Invisibly, inaudibly
To and fro in our misgivings.
We do not look at each other, we hide
Our daunted eyes.
White earth, and ruins, ourselves, and nothing beside.
It all belies
Our existence; we wait, and are still denied.
We are folded together, men and the snowy ground
Into nullity.
There is silence, only the silence, never a sound
Nor a verity
To assist us; disastrously silence-bound!
THE ATTACK
WHEN we came out of the wood
Was a great light!
The night uprisen stood
In white.
I wondered, I looked around
It was so fair. The bright
Stubble upon the ground
Shone white
Like any field of snow;
Yet warm the chase
Of faint night-breaths did go
Across my face!
White-bodied and warm the night was,
Sweet-scented to hold in my throat.
White and alight the night was.
A pale stroke smote
The pulse through the whole bland being
Which was This and me;
A pulse that still went fleeing,
Yet did not flee.
After the terrible rage, the death,
This wonder stood glistening?
All shapes of wonder, with suspended breath,
Arrested listening
In ecstatic reverie.
The whole, white Night!--
With wonder, every black tree
Blossomed outright.
I saw the transfiguration
And the present Host.
Transubstantiation
Of the Luminous Ghost.
OBSEQUIAL ODE
SURELY you've trodden straight
To the very door!
Surely you took your fate
Faultlessly. Now it's too late
To say more.
It is evident you were right,
That man has a course to go
A voyage to sail beyond the charted seas.
You have passed from out of sight
And my questions blow
Back from the straight horizon that ends all one sees.
Now like a vessel in port
You unlade your riches unto death,
And glad are the eager dead to receive you there.
Let the dead sort
Your cargo out, breath from breath
Let them disencumber your bounty, let them all share.
I imagine dead hands are brighter,
Their fingers in sunset shine
With jewels of passion once broken through you as a
prism
Breaks light into jewels; and dead breasts whiter
For your wrath; and yes, I opine
They anoint their brows with your blood, as a perfect
chrism.
On your body, the beaten anvil,
Was hammered out
That moon-like sword the ascendant dead unsheathe
Against us; sword that no man will
Put to rout;
Sword that severs the question from us who breathe.
Surely you've trodden straight
To the very door.
You have surely achieved your fate;
And the perfect dead are elate
To have won once more.
Now to the dead you are giving
Your last allegiance.
But what of us who are living
And fearful yet of believing
In your pitiless legions.
SHADES
SHALL I tell you, then, how it is?--
There came a cloven gleam
Like a tongue of darkened flame
To flicker in me.
And so I seem
To have you still the same
In one world with me.
In the flicker of a flower,
In a worm that is blind, yet strives,
In a mouse that pauses to listen
Glimmers our
Shadow; yet it deprives
Them none of their glisten.
In every shaken morsel
I see our shadow tremble
As if it rippled from out of us hand in hand.
As if it were part and parcel,
One shadow, and we need not dissemble
Our darkness: do you understand?
For I have told you plainly how it is.
BREAD UPON THE WATERS.
SO you are lost to me!
Ah you, you ear of corn straight lying,
What food is this for the darkly flying
Fowls of the Afterwards!
White bread afloat on the waters,
Cast out by the hand that scatters
Food untowards,
Will you come back when the tide turns?
After many days? My heart yearns
To know.
Will you return after many days
To say your say as a traveller says,
More marvel than woe?
Drift then, for the sightless birds
And the fish in shadow-waved herds
To approach you.
Drift then, bread cast out;
Drift, lest I fall in doubt,
And reproach you.
For you are lost to me!
RUINATION
THE sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist
That huddles in grey heaps coiling and holding
back.
Like cliffs abutting in shadow a drear grey sea
Some street-ends thrust forward their stack.
On the misty waste-lands, away from the flushing grey
Of the morning the elms are loftily dimmed, and tall
As if moving in air towards us, tall angels
Of darkness advancing steadily over us all.
RONDEAU OF A CONSCIENTIOUS
OBJECTOR.
THE hours have tumbled their leaden, mono-
tonous sands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the
West.
I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;
To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours I
detest.
I force my cart through the sodden filth that is pressed
Into ooze, and the sombre dirt spouts up at my hands
As I make my way in twilight now to rest.
The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous
sands.
A twisted thorn-tree still in the evening stands
Defending the memory of leaves and the happy round
nest.
But mud has flooded the homes of these weary lands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
All day has the clank of iron on iron distressed
The nerve-bare place. Now a little silence expands
And a gasp of relief. But the soul is still compressed:
I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands.
The hours have ceased to fall, and a star commands
Shadows to cover our stricken manhood, and blest
Sleep to make us forget: but he understands:
To-morrow will pour them all back, the dull hours
I detest.
TOMMIES IN THE TRAIN
THE SUN SHINES,
The coltsfoot flowers along the railway banks
Shine like flat coin which Jove in thanks
Strews each side the lines.
A steeple
In purple elms, daffodils
Sparkle beneath; luminous hills
Beyond--and no people.
England, Oh Dana?
To this spring of cosmic gold
That falls on your lap of mould!
What then are we?
What are we
Clay-coloured, who roll in fatigue
As the train falls league by league
From our destiny?
A hand is over my face,
A cold hand. I peep between the fingers
To watch the world that lingers
Behind, yet keeps pace.
Always there, as I peep
Between the fingers that cover my face!
Which then is it that falls from its place
And rolls down the steep?
Is it the train
That falls like meteorite
Backward into space, to alight
Never again?
Or is it the illusory world
That falls from reality
As we look? Or are we
Like a thunderbolt hurled?
One or another
Is lost, since we fall apart
Endlessly, in one motion depart
From each other.
WAR-BABY
THE CHILD like mustard-seed
Rolls out of the husk of death
Into the woman's fertile, fathomless lap.
Look, it has taken root!
See how it flourisheth.
See how it rises with magical, rosy sap!
As for our faith, it was there
When we did not know, did not care;
It fell from our husk like a little, hasty seed.
Sing, it is all we need.
Sing, for the little weed
Will flourish its branches in heaven when we
slumber beneath.
NOSTALGIA
THE WANING MOON looks upward; this
grey night
Slopes round the heavens in one smooth curve
Of easy sailing; odd red wicks serve
To show where the ships at sea move out of sight.
The place is palpable me, for here I was born
Of this self-same darkness. Yet the shadowy house
below
Is out of bounds, and only the old ghosts know
I have come, I feel them whimper in welcome, and
mourn.
My father suddenly died in the harvesting corn
And the place is no longer ours. Watching, I hear
No sound from the strangers, the place is dark, and fear
Opens my eyes till the roots of my vision seems torn.
Can I go no nearer, never towards the door?
The ghosts and I we mourn together, and shrink
In the shadow of the cart-shed. Must we hover on
the brink
Forever, and never enter the homestead any more?
Is it irrevocable? Can I really not go
Through the open yard-way? Can I not go past the
sheds
And through to the mowie?--Only the dead in their
beds
Can know the fearful anguish that this is so.
I kiss the stones, I kiss the moss on the wall,
And wish I could pass impregnate into the place.
I wish I could take it all in a last embrace.
I wish with my breast I here could annihilate it all.
HERE ENDS BAY A BOOK OF POEMS BY
D. H. Lawrence The Cover and the Decorations
designed by Anne Estelle Rice The Typography
and Binding arranged by Cyril W. Beaumont
Printed by Hand on his Press at 75 Charing
Cross Road in the City of Westminster
Completed November the Twentieth
MDCCCCXIX
[Logo] SIMPLEX . MUNDITIIS . . . THE . BEAUMONT . PRESS
Pressman Charles Wright
Compositor C. W. Beaumont Copyright, 1916, by
D. H. Lawrence
TO
OTTOLINE MORRELL
IN TRIBUTE
TO HER NOBLE
AND INDEPENDENT SYMPATHY
AND HER GENEROUS UNDERSTANDING
THESE POEMS
ARE GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
CONTENTS
Tease
The Wild Common
Study
Discord in Childhood
Virgin Youth
Monologue of a Mother
In a Boat
Week-night Service
Irony
Dreams Old
Dreams Nascent
A Winter's Tale
Epilogue
A Baby Running Barefoot
Discipline
Scent of Irises
The Prophet
Last Words to Miriam
Mystery
Patience
Ballad of Another Ophelia
Restlessness
A Baby Asleep After Pain
Anxiety
The Punisher
The End
The Bride
The Virgin Mother
At the Window
Drunk
Sorrow
Dolor of Autumn
The Inheritance
Silence
Listening
Brooding Grief
Lotus Hurt by the Cold
Malade
Liaison
Troth with the Dead
Dissolute
Submergence
The Enkindled Spring
Reproach
The Hands of the Betrothed
Excursion
Perfidy
A Spiritual Woman
Mating
A Love Song
Brother and Sister
After Many Days
Blue
Snap-Dragon
A Passing Bell
In Trouble and Shame
Elegy
Grey Evening
Firelight and Nightfall
The Mystic Blue
AMORES
TEASE
I WILL give you all my keys,
You shall be my ch鈚elaine,
You shall enter as you please,
As you please shall go again.
When I hear you jingling through
All the chambers of my soul,
How I sit and laugh at you
In your vain housekeeping r鬺e.
Jealous of the smallest cover,
Angry at the simplest door;
Well, you anxious, inquisitive lover,
Are you pleased with what's in store?
You have fingered all my treasures,
Have you not, most curiously,
Handled all my tools and measures
And masculine machinery?
Over every single beauty
You have had your little rapture;
You have slain, as was your duty,
Every sin-mouse you could capture.
Still you are not satisfied,
Still you tremble faint reproach;
Challenge me I keep aside
Secrets that you may not broach.
Maybe yes, and maybe no,
Maybe there _are_ secret places,
Altars barbarous below,
Elsewhere halls of high disgraces.
Maybe yes, and maybe no,
You may have it as you please,
Since I choose to keep you so,
Suppliant on your curious knees.
THE WILD COMMON
THE quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping,
Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame;
Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping:
They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness
their screamings proclaim.
Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie
Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten
down to the quick.
Are they asleep?--Are they alive?--Now see,
when I
Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their
spurting kick.
The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the
rushes
Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the
blossoming bushes;
There the lazy streamlet pushes
Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps,
laughs, and gushes.
Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,
Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook
ebbing through so slow,
Naked on the steep, soft lip
Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow
quivering to and fro.
What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were
lost?
Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds
and the songs of the brook?
If my veins and my breasts with love embossed
Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers
that the hot wind took.
So my soul like a passionate woman turns,
Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned,
and her love
For myself in my own eyes' laughter burns,
Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to
my belly from the breast-lights above.
Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air,
Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once,
goes kissing me glad.
And the soul of the wind and my blood compare
Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in
liberty, drifts on and is sad.
Oh but the water loves me and folds me,
Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as
though it were living blood,
Blood of a heaving woman who holds me,
Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely
good.
STUDY
SOMEWHERE the long mellow note of the blackbird
Quickens the unclasping hands of hazel,
Somewhere the wind-flowers fling their heads back,
Stirred by an impetuous wind. Some ways'll
All be sweet with white and blue violet.
(_Hush now, hush. Where am I?--Biuret--_)
On the green wood's edge a shy girl hovers
From out of the hazel-screen on to the grass,
Where wheeling and screaming the petulant plovers
Wave frighted. Who comes? A labourer, alas!
Oh the sunset swims in her eyes' swift pool.
(_Work, work, you fool--!_)
Somewhere the lamp hanging low from the ceiling
Lights the soft hair of a girl as she reads,
And the red firelight steadily wheeling
Weaves the hard hands of my friend in sleep.
And the white dog snuffs the warmth, appealing
For the man to heed lest the girl shall weep.
(_Tears and dreams for them; for me
Bitter science--the exams. are near.
I wish I bore it more patiently.
I wish you did not wait, my dear,
For me to come: since work I must:
Though it's all the same when we are dead.--
I wish I was only a bust,
All head._)
DISCORD IN CHILDHOOD
OUTSIDE the house an ash-tree hung its terrible
whips,
And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship's
Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.
Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender
lash
Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound
Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it
drowned
The other voice in a silence of blood, 'neath the noise
of the ash.
VIRGIN YOUTH
Now and again
All my body springs alive,
And the life that is polarised in my eyes,
That quivers between my eyes and mouth,
Flies like a wild thing across my body,
Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous,
Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame,
Gathering the soft ripples below my breasts
Into urgent, passionate waves,
And my soft, slumbering belly
Quivering awake with one impulse of desire,
Gathers itself fiercely together;
And my docile, fluent arms
Knotting themselves with wild strength
To clasp what they have never clasped.
Then I tremble, and go trembling
Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body,
Till it has spent itself,
And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself,
Till the bursten flood of life ebbs back to my eyes,
Back from my beautiful, lonely body
Tired and unsatisfied.
MONOLOGUE OF A MOTHER
THIS is the last of all, this is the last!
I must hold my hands, and turn my face to the fire,
I must watch my dead days fusing together in dross,
Shape after shape, and scene after scene from my past
Fusing to one dead mass in the sinking fire
Where the ash on the dying coals grows swiftly, like
heavy moss.
Strange he is, my son, whom I have awaited like a
lover,
Strange to me like a captive in a foreign country,
haunting
The confines and gazing out on the land where the
wind is free;
White and gaunt, with wistful eyes that hover
Always on the distance, as if his soul were chaunting
The monotonous weird of departure away from me.
Like a strange white bird blown out of the frozen
seas,
Like a bird from the far north blown with a broken
wing
Into our sooty garden, he drags and beats
From place to place perpetually, seeking release
From me, from the hand of my love which creeps up,
needing
His happiness, whilst he in displeasure retreats.
I must look away from him, for my faded eyes
Like a cringing dog at his heels offend him now,
Like a toothless hound pursuing him with my will,
Till he chafes at my crouching persistence, and a
sharp spark flies
In my soul from under the sudden frown of his brow,
As he blenches and turns away, and my heart stands
still.
This is the last, it will not be any more.
All my life I have borne the burden of myself,
All the long years of sitting in my husband's house,
Never have I said to myself as he closed the door:
"Now I am caught!--You are hopelessly lost, O
Self,
You are frightened with joy, my heart, like a
frightened mouse."
Three times have I offered myself, three times rejected.
It will not be any more. No more, my son, my son!
Never to know the glad freedom of obedience, since
long ago
The angel of childhood kissed me and went. I expected
Another would take me,--and now, my son, O my son,
I must sit awhile and wait, and never know
The loss of myself, till death comes, who cannot fail.
Death, in whose service is nothing of gladness, takes
me;
For the lips and the eyes of God are behind a veil.
And the thought of the lipless voice of the Father
shakes me
With fear, and fills my eyes with the tears of desire,
And my heart rebels with anguish as night draws
nigher,
IN A BOAT
SEE the stars, love,
In the water much clearer and brighter
Than those above us, and whiter,
Like nenuphars.
Star-shadows shine, love,
How many stars in your bowl?
How many shadows in your soul,
Only mine, love, mine?
When I move the oars, love,
See how the stars are tossed,
Distorted, the brightest lost.
--So that bright one of yours, love.
The poor waters spill
The stars, waters broken, forsaken.
--The heavens are not shaken, you say, love,
Its stars stand still.
There, did you see
That spark fly up at us; even
Stars are not safe in heaven.
--What of yours, then, love, yours?
What then, love, if soon
Your light be tossed over a wave?
Will you count the darkness a grave,
And swoon, love, swoon?
WEEK-NIGHT SERVICE
THE five old bells
Are hurrying and eagerly calling,
Imploring, protesting
They know, but clamorously falling
Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,
Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket
dropping
In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.
The silver moon
That somebody has spun so high
To settle the question, yes or no, has caught
In the net of the night's balloon,
And sits with a smooth bland smile up there in
the sky
Smiling at naught,
Unless the winking star that keeps her company
Makes little jests at the bells' insanity,
As if _he_ knew aught!
The patient Night
Sits indifferent, hugged in her rags,
She neither knows nor cares
Why the old church sobs and brags;
The light distresses her eyes, and tears
Her old blue cloak, as she crouches and covers her
face,
Smiling, perhaps, if we knew it, at the bells' loud
clattering disgrace.
The wise old trees
Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt,
While a car at the end of the street goes by with a
laugh;
As by degrees
The poor bells cease, and the Night is exempt,
And the stars can chaff
The ironic moon at their ease, while the dim old
church
Is peopled with shadows and sounds and ghosts that
lurch
In its cenotaph.
IRONY
ALWAYS, sweetheart,
Carry into your room the blossoming boughs of
cherry,
Almond and apple and pear diffuse with light, that
very
Soon strews itself on the floor; and keep the radiance
of spring
Fresh quivering; keep the sunny-swift March-days
waiting
In a little throng at your door, and admit the one
who is plaiting
Her hair for womanhood, and play awhile with her,
then bid her depart.
A come and go of March-day loves
Through the flower-vine, trailing screen;
A fluttering in of doves.
Then a launch abroad of shrinking doves
Over the waste where no hope is seen
Of open hands:
Dance in and out
Small-bosomed girls of the spring of love,
With a bubble of laughter, and shrilly shout
Of mirth; then the dripping of tears on your
glove.
DREAMS OLD AND NASCENT
OLD
I HAVE opened the window to warm my hands on the
sill
Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon
Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still
In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone.
The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine,
Like savage music striking far off, and there
On the great, uplifted blue palace, lights stir and
shine
Where the glass is domed in the blue, soft air.
There lies the world, my darling, full of wonder and
wistfulness and strange
Recognition and greetings of half-acquaint things, as
I greet the cloud
Of blue palace aloft there, among misty indefinite
dreams that range
At the back of my life's horizon, where the dreamings
of past lives crowd.
Over the nearness of Norwood Hill, through the
mellow veil
Of the afternoon glows to me the old romance of
David and Dora,
With the old, sweet, soothing tears, and laughter
that shakes the sail
Of the ship of the soul over seas where dreamed
dreams lure the unoceaned explorer.
All the bygone, hush鑔 years
Streaming back where the mist distils
Into forgetfulness: soft-sailing waters where fears
No longer shake, where the silk sail fills
With an unfelt breeze that ebbs over the seas, where
the storm
Of living has passed, on and on
Through the coloured iridescence that swims in the
warm
Wake of the tumult now spent and gone,
Drifts my boat, wistfully lapsing after
The mists of vanishing tears and the echo of laughter.
DREAMS OLD AND NASCENT
NASCENT
MY world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes
Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm;
An endless tapestry the past has woven drapes
The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform.
The surface of dreams is broken,
The picture of the past is shaken and scattered.
Fluent, active figures of men pass along the railway,
and I am woken
From the dreams that the distance flattered.
Along the railway, active figures of men.
They have a secret that stirs in their limbs as they
move
Out of the distance, nearer, commanding my dreamy
world.
Here in the subtle, rounded flesh
Beats the active ecstasy.
In the sudden lifting my eyes, it is clearer,
The fascination of the quick, restless Creator moving
through the mesh
Of men, vibrating in ecstasy through the rounded
flesh.
Oh my boys, bending over your books,
In you is trembling and fusing
The creation of a new-patterned dream, dream of a
generation:
And I watch to see the Creator, the power that
patterns the dream.
The old dreams are beautiful, beloved, soft-toned,
and sure,
But the dream-stuff is molten and moving mysteriously,
Alluring my eyes; for I, am I not also dream-stuff,
Am I not quickening, diffusing myself in the pattern,
shaping and shapen?
Here in my class is the answer for the great yearning:
Eyes where I can watch the swim of old dreams
reflected on the molten metal of dreams,
Watch the stir which is rhythmic and moves them
all as a heart-beat moves the blood,
Here in the swelling flesh the great activity working,
Visible there in the change of eyes and the mobile
features.
Oh the great mystery and fascination of the unseen
Shaper,
The power of the melting, fusing Force--heat,
light, all in one,
Everything great and mysterious in one, swelling and
shaping the dream in the flesh,
As it swells and shapes a bud into blossom.
Oh the terrible ecstasy of the consciousness that I
am life!
Oh the miracle of the whole, the widespread, labouring
concentration
Swelling mankind like one bud to bring forth the
fruit of a dream,
Oh the terror of lifting the innermost I out of the
sweep of the impulse of life,
And watching the great Thing labouring through the
whole round flesh of the world;
And striving to catch a glimpse of the shape of the
coming dream,
As it quickens within the labouring, white-hot metal,
Catch the scent and the colour of the coming dream,
Then to fall back exhausted into the unconscious,
molten life!
A WINTER'S TALE
YESTERDAY the fields were only grey with scattered
snow,
And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge;
Yet her deep footsteps mark the snow, and go
On towards the pines at the hills' white verge.
I cannot see her, since the mist's white scarf
Obscures the dark wood and the dull orange sky;
But she's waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half
Sobs struggling into her frosty sigh.
Why does she come so promptly, when she must
know
That she's only the nearer to the inevitable farewell;
The hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow--
Why does she come, when she knows what I have to
tell?
EPILOGUE
PATIENCE, little Heart.
One day a heavy, June-hot woman
Will enter and shut the door to stay.
And when your stifling heart would summon
Cool, lonely night, her roused breasts will keep the
night at bay,
Sitting in your room like two tiger-lilies
Flaming on after sunset,
Destroying the cool, lonely night with the glow of
their hot twilight;
There in the morning, still, while the fierce strange
scent comes yet
Stronger, hot and red; till you thirst for the
daffodillies
With an anguished, husky thirst that you cannot
assuage,
When the daffodillies are dead, and a woman of the
dog-days holds you in gage.
Patience, little Heart.
A BABY RUNNING BAREFOOT
WHEN the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass
The little white feet nod like white flowers in the
wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the
water;
And the sight of their white play among the grass
Is like a little robin's song, winsome,
Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one
flower
For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.
I long for the baby to wander hither to me
Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,
So that she can stand on my knee
With her little bare feet in my hands,
Cool like syringa buds,
Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.
DISCIPLINE
IT is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to
the pane,
The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging
with flattened leaves;
The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow
gloom that stains
The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline
weaves.
It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I
endured too long.
I have pushed my hands in the dark soil, under the
flower of my soul
And the gentle leaves, and have felt where the roots
are strong
Fixed in the darkness, grappling for the deep soil's
little control.
And there is the dark, my darling, where the roots
are entangled and fight
Each one for its hold on the oblivious darkness, I
know that there
In the night where we first have being, before we rise
on the light,
We are not brothers, my darling, we fight and we
do not spare.
And in the original dark the roots cannot keep,
cannot know
Any communion whatever, but they bind themselves
on to the dark,
And drawing the darkness together, crush from it a
twilight, a slow
Burning that breaks at last into leaves and a flower's
bright spark.
I came to the boys with love, my dear, but they
turned on me;
I came with gentleness, with my heart 'twixt my
hands like a bowl,
Like a loving-cup, like a grail, but they spilt it
triumphantly
And tried to break the vessel, and to violate my
soul.
But what have I to do with the boys, deep down in
my soul, my love?
I throw from out of the darkness my self like a flower
into sight,
Like a flower from out of the night-time, I lift my
face, and those
Who will may warm their hands at me, comfort this
night.
But whosoever would pluck apart my flowering shall
burn their hands,
So flowers are tender folk, and roots can only hide,
Yet my flowerings of love are a fire, and the scarlet
brands
Of my love are roses to look at, but flames to chide.
But comfort me, my love, now the fires are low,
Now I am broken to earth like a winter destroyed,
and all
Myself but a knowledge of roots, of roots in the dark
that throw
A net on the undersoil, which lies passive beneath
their thrall.
But comfort me, for henceforth my love is yours
alone,
To you alone will I offer the bowl, to you will I give
My essence only, but love me, and I will atone
To you for my general loving, atone as long as I live.
SCENT OF IRISES
A FAINT, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class's lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and
sable.
I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast
you
With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your
chin as you dipped
Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast
you,
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks,
Dissolved on the golden sorcery you should not
outlast.
You amid the bog-end's yellow incantation,
You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above,
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love;
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,
You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a
dove.
You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up
And kindled you over deep with a cast of gold?
You ask again, do the healing days close up
The open darkness which then drew us in,
The dark which then drank up our brimming cup.
You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of
night
Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible;
Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you!
--And yes, thank God, it still is possible
The healing days shall close the darkness up
Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew.
Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God,
The fire of night is gone, and your face is ash
Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day;
The night has burnt us out, at last the good
Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash
Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea.
THE PROPHET
AH, my darling, when over the purple horizon shall
loom
The shrouded mother of a new idea, men hide their
faces,
Cry out and fend her off, as she seeks her procreant
groom,
Wounding themselves against her, denying her
fecund embraces.
LAST WORDS TO MIRIAM
YOURS is the shame and sorrow
But the disgrace is mine;
Your love was dark and thorough,
Mine was the love of the sun for a flower
He creates with his shine.
I was diligent to explore you,
Blossom you stalk by stalk,
Till my fire of creation bore you
Shrivelling down in the final dour
Anguish--then I suffered a balk.
I knew your pain, and it broke
My fine, craftsman's nerve;
Your body quailed at my stroke,
And my courage failed to give you the last
Fine torture you did deserve.
You are shapely, you are adorned,
But opaque and dull in the flesh,
Who, had I but pierced with the thorned
Fire-threshing anguish, were fused and cast
In a lovely illumined mesh.
Like a painted window: the best
Suffering burnt through your flesh,
Undrossed it and left it blest
With a quivering sweet wisdom of grace: but
now
Who shall take you afresh?
Now who will burn you free
From your body's terrors and dross,
Since the fire has failed in me?
What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
The shrieking cross?
A mute, nearly beautiful thing
Is your face, that fills me with shame
As I see it hardening,
Warping the perfect image of God,
And darkening my eternal fame.
MYSTERY
Now I am all
One bowl of kisses,
Such as the tall
Slim votaresses
Of Egypt filled
For a God's excesses.
I lift to you
My bowl of kisses,
And through the temple's
Blue recesses
Cry out to you
In wild caresses.
And to my lips'
Bright crimson rim
The passion slips,
And down my slim
White body drips
The shining hymn.
And still before
The altar I
Exult the bowl
Brimful, and cry
To you to stoop
And drink, Most High.
Oh drink me up
That I may be
Within your cup
Like a mystery,
Like wine that is still
In ecstasy.
Glimmering still
In ecstasy,
Commingled wines
Of you and me
In one fulfil
The mystery.
PATIENCE
A WIND comes from the north
Blowing little flocks of birds
Like spray across the town,
And a train, roaring forth,
Rushes stampeding down
With cries and flying curds
Of steam, out of the darkening north.
Whither I turn and set
Like a needle steadfastly,
Waiting ever to get
The news that she is free;
But ever fixed, as yet,
To the lode of her agony.
BALLAD OF ANOTHER OPHELIA
OH the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,
Lamps in a wash of rain!
Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stack-yard,
Oh tears on the window pane!
Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples,
Full of disappointment and of rain,
Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow
dapples
Of autumn tell the withered tale again.
All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen,
Cluck, and the rain-wet wings,
Cluck, my marigold bird, and again
Cluck for your yellow darlings.
For the grey rat found the gold thirteen
Huddled away in the dark,
Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and
keen,
Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark.
Once I had a lover bright like running water,
Once his face was laughing like the sky;
Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter
On the buttercups, and the buttercups was I.
What, then, is there hidden in the skirts of all the
blossom?
What is peeping from your wings, oh mother
hen?
'Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste
for wisdom;
What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men!
Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom,
And her shift is lying white upon the floor,
That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a
rain-storm,
Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store.
Oh the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples,
Oh the golden sparkles laid extinct!
And oh, behind the cloud-sheaves, like yellow autumn
dapples,
Did you see the wicked sun that winked!
RESTLESSNESS
AT the open door of the room I stand and look at
the night,
Hold my hand to catch the raindrops, that slant into
sight,
Arriving grey from the darkness above suddenly into
the light of the room.
I will escape from the hollow room, the box of light,
And be out in the bewildering darkness, which is
always fecund, which might
Mate my hungry soul with a germ of its womb.
I will go out to the night, as a man goes down to the
shore
To draw his net through the surfs thin line, at the
dawn before
The sun warms the sea, little, lonely and sad, sifting
the sobbing tide.
I will sift the surf that edges the night, with my net,
the four
Strands of my eyes and my lips and my hands and my
feet, sifting the store
Of flotsam until my soul is tired or satisfied.
I will catch in my eyes' quick net
The faces of all the women as they go past,
Bend over them with my soul, to cherish the wet
Cheeks and wet hair a moment, saying: "Is it
you?"
Looking earnestly under the dark umbrellas, held
fast
Against the wind; and if, where the lamplight
blew
Its rainy swill about us, she answered me
With a laugh and a merry wildness that it was she
Who was seeking me, and had found me at last to
free
Me now from the stunting bonds of my chastity,
How glad I should be!
Moving along in the mysterious ebb of the night
Pass the men whose eyes are shut like anemones in a
dark pool;
Why don't they open with vision and speak to me,
what have they in sight?
Why do I wander aimless among them, desirous
fool?
I can always linger over the huddled books on the
stalls,
Always gladden my amorous fingers with the touch
of their leaves,
Always kneel in courtship to the shelves in the
doorways, where falls
The shadow, always offer myself to one mistress,
who always receives.
But oh, it is not enough, it is all no good.
There is something I want to feel in my running
blood,
Something I want to touch; I must hold my face to
the rain,
I must hold my face to the wind, and let it explain
Me its life as it hurries in secret.
I will trail my hands again through the drenched,
cold leaves
Till my hands are full of the chillness and touch of
leaves,
Till at length they induce me to sleep, and to forget.
A BABY ASLEEP AFTER PAIN
As a drenched, drowned bee
Hangs numb and heavy from a bending flower,
So clings to me
My baby, her brown hair brushed with wet tears
And laid against her cheek;
Her soft white legs hanging heavily over my arm
Swinging heavily to my movement as I walk.
My sleeping baby hangs upon my life,
Like a burden she hangs on me.
She has always seemed so light,
But now she is wet with tears and numb with pain
Even her floating hair sinks heavily,
Reaching downwards;
As the wings of a drenched, drowned bee
Are a heaviness, and a weariness.
ANXIETY
THE hoar-frost crumbles in the sun,
The crisping steam of a train
Melts in the air, while two black birds
Sweep past the window again.
Along the vacant road, a red
Bicycle approaches; I wait
In a thaw of anxiety, for the boy
To leap down at our gate.
He has passed us by; but is it
Relief that starts in my breast?
Or a deeper bruise of knowing that still
She has no rest.
THE PUNISHER
I HAVE fetched the tears up out of the little wells,
Scooped them up with small, iron words,
Dripping over the runnels.
The harsh, cold wind of my words drove on, and still
I watched the tears on the guilty cheek of the boys
Glitter and spill.
Cringing Pity, and Love, white-handed, came
Hovering about the Judgment which stood in my
eyes,
Whirling a flame.
. . . . . . .
The tears are dry, and the cheeks' young fruits are
fresh
With laughter, and clear the exonerated eyes, since
pain
Beat through the flesh.
The Angel of Judgment has departed again to the
Nearness.
Desolate I am as a church whose lights are put out.
And night enters in drearness.
The fire rose up in the bush and blazed apace,
The thorn-leaves crackled and twisted and sweated in
anguish;
Then God left the place.
Like a flower that the frost has hugged and let go,
my head
Is heavy, and my heart beats slowly, laboriously,
My strength is shed.
THE END
IF I could have put you in my heart,
If but I could have wrapped you in myself,
How glad I should have been!
And now the chart
Of memory unrolls again to me
The course of our journey here, before we had to
part.
And oh, that you had never, never been
Some of your selves, my love, that some
Of your several faces I had never seen!
And still they come before me, and they go,
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.
And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night,
And have not any longer any hope
To heal the suffering, or make requite
For all your life of asking and despair,
I own that some of me is dead to-night.
THE BRIDE
MY love looks like a girl to-night,
But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
Are not gold,
But threaded with filigree,
And uncanny cold.
She looks like a young maiden, since her brow
Is smooth and fair,
Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed,
She sleeps a rare
Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed.
Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her
dreams
Of perfect things.
She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,
And her dead mouth sings
By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings.
THE VIRGIN MOTHER
MY little love, my darling,
You were a doorway to me;
You let me out of the confines
Into this strange countrie,
Where people are crowded like thistles,
Yet are shapely and comely to see.
My little love, my dearest
Twice have you issued me,
Once from your womb, sweet mother,
Once from myself, to be
Free of all hearts, my darling,
Of each heart's home-life free.
And so, my love, my mother,
I shall always be true to you;
Twice I am born, my dearest,
To life, and to death, in you;
And this is the life hereafter
Wherein I am true.
I kiss you good-bye, my darling,
Our ways are different now;
You are a seed in the night-time,
I am a man, to plough
The difficult glebe of the future
For God to endow.
I kiss you good-bye, my dearest,
It is finished between us here.
Oh, if I were calm as you are,
Sweet and still on your bier!
God, if I had not to leave you
Alone, my dear!
Let the last word be uttered,
Oh grant the farewell is said!
Spare me the strength to leave you
Now you are dead.
I must go, but my soul lies helpless
Beside your bed.
AT THE WINDOW
THE pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind
as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with
hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern
shutters.
Further down the valley the clustered tombstones
recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist's grey
cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly
started to bleed.
The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as
they pass
To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with
two dark-filled eyes
That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window
glass.
DRUNK
Too far away, oh love, I know,
To save me from this haunted road,
Whose lofty roses break and blow
On a night-sky bent with a load
Of lights: each solitary rose,
Each arc-lamp golden does expose
Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows
Night blenched with a thousand snows.
Of hawthorn and of lilac trees,
White lilac; shows discoloured night
Dripping with all the golden lees
Laburnum gives back to light
And shows the red of hawthorn set
On high to the purple heaven of night,
Like flags in blenched blood newly wet,
Blood shed in the noiseless fight.
Of life for love and love for life,
Of hunger for a little food,
Of kissing, lost for want of a wife
Long ago, long ago wooed.
. . . . . .
Too far away you are, my love,
To steady my brain in this phantom show
That passes the nightly road above
And returns again below.
The enormous cliff of horse-chestnut trees
Has poised on each of its ledges
An erect small girl looking down at me;
White-night-gowned little chits I see,
And they peep at me over the edges
Of the leaves as though they would leap, should
I call
Them down to my arms;
"But, child, you're too small for me, too small
Your little charms."
White little sheaves of night-gowned maids,
Some other will thresh you out!
And I see leaning from the shades
A lilac like a lady there, who braids
Her white mantilla about
Her face, and forward leans to catch the sight
Of a man's face,
Gracefully sighing through the white
Flowery mantilla of lace.
And another lilac in purple veiled
Discreetly, all recklessly calls
In a low, shocking perfume, to know who has hailed
Her forth from the night: my strength has failed
In her voice, my weak heart falls:
Oh, and see the laburnum shimmering
Her draperies down,
As if she would slip the gold, and glimmering
White, stand naked of gown.
. . . . . .
The pageant of flowery trees above
The street pale-passionate goes,
And back again down the pavement, Love
In a lesser pageant flows.
Two and two are the folk that walk,
They pass in a half embrace
Of link鑔 bodies, and they talk
With dark face leaning to face.
Come then, my love, come as you will
Along this haunted road,
Be whom you will, my darling, I shall
Keep with you the troth I trowed.
SORROW
WHY does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?
Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,
I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.
DOLOR OF AUTUMN
THE acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.
For suddenly, flush-fallen,
All my life, in a rush
Of shedding away, has left me
Naked, exposed on the bush.
I, on the bush of the globe,
Like a newly-naked berry, shrink
Disclosed: but I also am prowling
As well in the scents that slink
Abroad: I in this naked berry
Of flesh that stands dismayed on the bush;
And I in the stealthy, brindled odours
Prowling about the lush
And acrid night of autumn;
My soul, along with the rout,
Rank and treacherous, prowling,
Disseminated out.
For the night, with a great breath intaken,
Has taken my spirit outside
Me, till I reel with disseminated consciousness,
Like a man who has died.
At the same time I stand exposed
Here on the bush of the globe,
A newly-naked berry of flesh
For the stars to probe.
THE INHERITANCE
SINCE you did depart
Out of my reach, my darling,
Into the hidden,
I see each shadow start
With recognition, and I
Am wonder-ridden.
I am dazed with the farewell,
But I scarcely feel your loss.
You left me a gift
Of tongues, so the shadows tell
Me things, and silences toss
Me their drift.
You sent me a cloven fire
Out of death, and it burns in the draught
Of the breathing hosts,
Kindles the darkening pyre
For the sorrowful, till strange brands waft
Like candid ghosts.
Form after form, in the streets
Waves like a ghost along,
Kindled to me;
The star above the house-top greets
Me every eve with a long
Song fierily.
All day long, the town
Glimmers with subtle ghosts
Going up and down
In a common, prison-like dress;
But their daunted looking flickers
To me, and I answer, Yes!
So I am not lonely nor sad
Although bereaved of you,
My little love.
I move among a kinsfolk clad
With words, but the dream shows through
As they move.
SILENCE
SINCE I lost you I am silence-haunted,
Sounds wave their little wings
A moment, then in weariness settle
On the flood that soundless swings.
Whether the people in the street
Like pattering ripples go by,
Or whether the theatre sighs and sighs
With a loud, hoarse sigh:
Or the wind shakes a ravel of light
Over the dead-black river,
Or night's last echoing
Makes the daybreak shiver:
I feel the silence waiting
To take them all up again
In its vast completeness, enfolding
The sound of men.
LISTENING
I LISTEN to the stillness of you,
My dear, among it all;
I feel your silence touch my words as I talk,
And take them in thrall.
My words fly off a forge
The length of a spark;
I see the night-sky easily sip them
Up in the dark.
The lark sings loud and glad,
Yet I am not loth
That silence should take the song and the bird
And lose them both.
A train goes roaring south,
The steam-flag flying;
I see the stealthy shadow of silence
Alongside going.
And off the forge of the world,
Whirling in the draught of life,
Go sparks of myriad people, filling
The night with strife.
Yet they never change the darkness
Or blench it with noise;
Alone on the perfect silence
The stars are buoys.
BROODING GRIEF
A YELLOW leaf from the darkness
Hops like a frog before me.
Why should I start and stand still?
I was watching the woman that bore me
Stretched in the brindled darkness
Of the sick-room, rigid with will
To die: and the quick leaf tore me
Back to this rainy swill
Of leaves and lamps and traffic mingled before me.
LOTUS HURT BY THE COLD
How many times, like lotus lilies risen
Upon the surface of a river, there
Have risen floating on my blood the rare
Soft glimmers of my hope escaped from prison.
So I am clothed all over with the light
And sensitive beautiful blossoming of passion;
Till naked for her in the finest fashion
The flowers of all my mud swim into sight.
And then I offer all myself unto
This woman who likes to love me: but she turns
A look of hate upon the flower that burns
To break and pour her out its precious dew.
And slowly all the blossom shuts in pain,
And all the lotus buds of love sink over
To die unopened: when my moon-faced lover,
Kind on the weight of suffering, smiles again.
MALADE
THE sick grapes on the chair by the bed lie prone;
at the window
The tassel of the blind swings gently, tapping the
pane,
As a little wind comes in.
The room is the hollow rind of a fruit, a gourd
Scooped out and dry, where a spider,
Folded in its legs as in a bed,
Lies on the dust, watching where is nothing to see
but twilight and walls.
And if the day outside were mine! What is the day
But a grey cave, with great grey spider-cloths
hanging
Low from the roof, and the wet dust falling softly
from them
Over the wet dark rocks, the houses, and over
The spiders with white faces, that scuttle on the
floor of the cave!
I am choking with creeping, grey confinedness.
But somewhere birds, beside a lake of light, spread
wings
Larger than the largest fans, and rise in a stream
upwards
And upwards on the sunlight that rains invisible,
So that the birds are like one wafted feather,
Small and ecstatic suspended over a vast spread
country.
LIAISON
A BIG bud of moon hangs out of the twilight,
Star-spiders spinning their thread
Hang high suspended, withouten respite
Watching us overhead.
Come then under the trees, where the leaf-cloths
Curtain us in so dark
That here we're safe from even the ermin-moth's
Flitting remark.
Here in this swarthy, secret tent,
Where black boughs flap the ground,
You shall draw the thorn from my discontent,
Surgeon me sound.
This rare, rich night! For in here
Under the yew-tree tent
The darkness is loveliest where I could sear
You like frankincense into scent.
Here not even the stars can spy us,
Not even the white moths write
With their little pale signs on the wall, to try us
And set us affright.
Kiss but then the dust from off my lips,
But draw the turgid pain
From my breast to your bosom, eclipse
My soul again.
Waste me not, I beg you, waste
Not the inner night:
Taste, oh taste and let me taste
The core of delight.
TROTH WITH THE DEAD
THE moon is broken in twain, and half a moon
Before me lies on the still, pale floor of the sky;
The other half of the broken coin of troth
Is buried away in the dark, where the still dead lie.
They buried her half in the grave when they laid her
away;
I had pushed it gently in among the thick of her hair
Where it gathered towards the plait, on that very
last day;
And like a moon in secret it is shining there.
My half shines in the sky, for a general sign
Of the troth with the dead I pledged myself to keep;
Turning its broken edge to the dark, it shines indeed
Like the sign of a lover who turns to the dark of
sleep.
Against my heart the inviolate sleep breaks still
In darkened waves whose breaking echoes o'er
The wondering world of my wakeful day, till I'm
lost
In the midst of the places I knew so well before.
DISSOLUTE
MANY years have I still to burn, detained
Like a candle flame on this body; but I enshrine
A darkness within me, a presence which sleeps
contained
In my flame of living, her soul enfolded in mine.
And through these years, while I burn on the fuel of
life,
What matter the stuff I lick up in my living flame,
Seeing I keep in the fire-core, inviolate,
A night where she dreams my dreams for me, ever
the same.
SUBMERGENCE
WHEN along the pavement,
Palpitating flames of life,
People flicker round me,
I forget my bereavement,
The gap in the great constellation,
The place where a star used to be.
Nay, though the pole-star
Is blown out like a candle,
And all the heavens are wandering in disarray,
Yet when pleiads of people are
Deployed around me, and I see
The street's long outstretched Milky Way,
When people flicker down the pavement,
I forget my bereavement.
THE ENKINDLED SPRING
THIS spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering
rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is
tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost.
REPROACH
HAD I but known yesterday,
Helen, you could discharge the ache
Out of the cloud;
Had I known yesterday you could take
The turgid electric ache away,
Drink it up with your proud
White body, as lovely white lightning
Is drunk from an agonised sky by the earth,
I might have hated you, Helen.
But since my limbs gushed full of fire,
Since from out of my blood and bone
Poured a heavy flame
To you, earth of my atmosphere, stone
Of my steel, lovely white flint of desire,
You have no name.
Earth of my swaying atmosphere,
Substance of my inconstant breath,
I cannot but cleave to you.
Since you have drunken up the drear
Painful electric storm, and death
Is washed from the blue
Of my eyes, I see you beautiful.
You are strong and passive and beautiful,
I come like winds that uncertain hover;
But you
Are the earth I hover over.
THE HANDS OF THE BETROTHED
HER tawny eyes are onyx of thoughtlessness,
Hardened they are like gems in ancient modesty;
Yea, and her mouth's prudent and crude caress
Means even less than her many words to me.
Though her kiss betrays me also this, this only
Consolation, that in her lips her blood at climax
clips
Two wild, dumb paws in anguish on the lonely
Fruit of my heart, ere down, rebuked, it slips.
I know from her hardened lips that still her heart is
Hungry for me, yet if I put my hand in her breast
She puts me away, like a saleswoman whose mart is
Endangered by the pilferer on his quest.
But her hands are still the woman, the large, strong
hands
Heavier than mine, yet like leverets caught in
steel
When I hold them; my still soul understands
Their dumb confession of what her sort must feel.
For never her hands come nigh me but they lift
Like heavy birds from the morning stubble, to
settle
Upon me like sleeping birds, like birds that shift
Uneasily in their sleep, disturbing my mettle.
How caressingly she lays her hand on my knee,
How strangely she tries to disown it, as it sinks
In my flesh and bone and forages into me,
How it stirs like a subtle stoat, whatever she
thinks!
And often I see her clench her fingers tight
And thrust her fists suppressed in the folds of her
skirt;
And sometimes, how she grasps her arms with her
bright
Big hands, as if surely her arms did hurt.
And I have seen her stand all unaware
Pressing her spread hands over her breasts, as she
Would crush their mounds on her heart, to kill in
there
The pain that is her simple ache for me.
Her strong hands take my part, the part of a man
To her; she crushes them into her bosom deep
Where I should lie, and with her own strong
span
Closes her arms, that should fold me in sleep.
Ah, and she puts her hands upon the wall,
Presses them there, and kisses her bright hands,
Then lets her black hair loose, the darkness fall
About her from her maiden-folded bands.
And sits in her own dark night of her bitter hair
Dreaming--God knows of what, for to me she's
the same
Betrothed young lady who loves me, and takes care
Of her womanly virtue and of my good name.
EXCURSION
I WONDER, can the night go by;
Can this shot arrow of travel fly
Shaft-golden with light, sheer into the sky
Of a dawned to-morrow,
Without ever sleep delivering us
From each other, or loosing the dolorous
Unfruitful sorrow!
What is it then that you can see
That at the window endlessly
You watch the red sparks whirl and flee
And the night look through?
Your presence peering lonelily there
Oppresses me so, I can hardly bear
To share the train with you.
You hurt my heart-beats' privacy;
I wish I could put you away from me;
I suffocate in this intimacy,
For all that I love you;
How I have longed for this night in the train,
Yet now every fibre of me cries in pain
To God to remove you.
But surely my soul's best dream is still
That one night pouring down shall swill
Us away in an utter sleep, until
We are one, smooth-rounded.
Yet closely bitten in to me
Is this armour of stiff reluctancy
That keeps me impounded.
So, dear love, when another night
Pours on us, lift your fingers white
And strip me naked, touch me light,
Light, light all over.
For I ache most earnestly for your touch,
Yet I cannot move, however much
I would be your lover.
Night after night with a blemish of day
Unblown and unblossomed has withered away;
Come another night, come a new night, say
Will you pluck me apart?
Will you open the amorous, aching bud
Of my body, and loose the burning flood
That would leap to you from my heart?
PERFIDY
HOLLOW rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.
The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.
The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.
Two brown ponies trotting slowly
Stopped at a dim-lit trough to drink:
The dark van drummed down the distance slowly;
While the city stars so dim and holy
Drew nearer to search through the streets.
A hastening car swept shameful past,
I saw her hid in the shadow,
I saw her step to the curb, and fast
Run to the silent door, where last
I had stood with my hand uplifted.
She clung to the door in her haste to enter,
Entered, and quickly cast
It shut behind her, leaving the street aghast.
A SPIRITUAL WOMAN
CLOSE your eyes, my love, let me make you blind;
They have taught you to see
Only a mean arithmetic on the face of things,
A cunning algebra in the faces of men,
And God like geometry
Completing his circles, and working cleverly.
I'll kiss you over the eyes till I kiss you blind;
If I can--if any one could.
Then perhaps in the dark you'll have got what you
want to find.
You've discovered so many bits, with your clever
eyes,
And I'm a kaleidoscope
That you shake and shake, and yet it won't come to
your mind.
Now stop carping at me.--But God, how I hate you!
Do you fear I shall swindle you?
Do you think if you take me as I am, that that will
abate you
Somehow?--so sad, so intrinsic, so spiritual, yet so
cautious, you
Must have me all in your will and your consciousness--
I hate you.
MATING
ROUND clouds roll in the arms of the wind,
The round earth rolls in a clasp of blue sky,
And see, where the budding hazels are thinned,
The wild anemones lie
In undulating shivers beneath the wind.
Over the blue of the waters ply
White ducks, a living flotilla of cloud;
And, look you, floating just thereby,
The blue-gleamed drake stems proud
Like Abraham, whose seed should multiply.
In the lustrous gleam of the water, there
Scramble seven toads across the silk, obscure leaves,
Seven toads that meet in the dusk to share
The darkness that interweaves
The sky and earth and water and live things everywhere.
Look now, through the woods where the beech-green
spurts
Like a storm of emerald snow, look, see
A great bay stallion dances, skirts
The bushes sumptuously,
Going outward now in the spring to his brief deserts.
Ah love, with your rich, warm face aglow,
What sudden expectation opens you
So wide as you watch the catkins blow
Their dust from the birch on the blue
Lift of the pulsing wind--ah, tell me you know!
Ah, surely! Ah, sure from the golden sun
A quickening, masculine gleam floats in to all
Us creatures, people and flowers undone,
Lying open under his thrall,
As he begets the year in us. What, then, would you
shun?
Why, I should think that from the earth there fly
Fine thrills to the neighbour stars, fine yellow beams
Thrown lustily off from our full-blown, high
Bursting globe of dreams,
To quicken the spheres that are virgin still in the sky.
Do you not hear each morsel thrill
With joy at travelling to plant itself within
The expectant one, therein to instil
New rapture, new shape to win,
From the thick of life wake up another will?
Surely, and if that I would spill
The vivid, ah, the fiery surplus of life,
From off my brimming measure, to fill
You, and flush you rife
With increase, do you call it evil, and always evil?
A LOVE SONG
REJECT me not if I should say to you
I do forget the sounding of your voice,
I do forget your eyes that searching through
The mists perceive our marriage, and rejoice.
Yet, when the apple-blossom opens wide
Under the pallid moonlight's fingering,
I see your blanched face at my breast, and hide
My eyes from diligent work, malingering.
Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.
And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest.
And I do toss through the troubled night for you,
Dreaming your yielded mouth is given to mine,
Feeling your strong breast carry me on into
The peace where sleep is stronger even than wine.
BROTHER AND SISTER
THE shorn moon trembling indistinct on her path,
Frail as a scar upon the pale blue sky,
Draws towards the downward slope; some sorrow
hath
Worn her down to the quick, so she faintly fares
Along her foot-searched way without knowing why
She creeps persistent down the sky's long stairs.
Some say they see, though I have never seen,
The dead moon heaped within the new moon's arms;
For surely the fragile, fine young thing had been
Too heavily burdened to mount the heavens so.
But my heart stands still, as a new, strong dread
alarms
Me; might a young girl be heaped with such shadow
of woe?
Since Death from the mother moon has pared us
down to the quick,
And cast us forth like shorn, thin moons, to travel
An uncharted way among the myriad thick
Strewn stars of silent people, and luminous litter
Of lives which sorrows like mischievous dark mice
chavel
To nought, diminishing each star's glitter,
Since Death has delivered us utterly, naked and
white,
Since the month of childhood is over, and we stand
alone,
Since the beloved, faded moon that set us alight
Is delivered from us and pays no heed though we
moan
In sorrow, since we stand in bewilderment, strange
And fearful to sally forth down the sky's long range.
We may not cry to her still to sustain us here,
We may not hold her shadow back from the dark.
Oh, let us here forget, let us take the sheer
Unknown that lies before us, bearing the ark
Of the covenant onwards where she cannot go.
Let us rise and leave her now, she will never know.
AFTER MANY DAYS
I WONDER if with you, as it is with me,
If under your slipping words, that easily flow
About you as a garment, easily,
Your violent heart beats to and fro!
Long have I waited, never once confessed,
Even to myself, how bitter the separation;
Now, being come again, how make the best
Reparation?
If I could cast this clothing off from me,
If I could lift my naked self to you,
Or if only you would repulse me, a wound would be
Good; it would let the ache come through.
But that you hold me still so kindly cold
Aloof my flaming heart will not allow;
Yea, but I loathe you that you should withhold
Your pleasure now.
BLUE
THE earth again like a ship steams out of the dark
sea over
The edge of the blue, and the sun stands up to see
us glide
Slowly into another day; slowly the rover
Vessel of darkness takes the rising tide.
I, on the deck, am startled by this dawn confronting
Me who am issued amazed from the darkness,
stripped
And quailing here in the sunshine, delivered from
haunting
The night unsounded whereon our days are shipped.
Feeling myself undawning, the day's light playing
upon me,
I who am substance of shadow, I all compact
Of the stuff of the night, finding myself all wrongly
Among the crowds of things in the sunshine jostled
and racked.
I with the night on my lips, I sigh with the silence
of death;
And what do I care though the very stones should
cry me unreal, though the clouds
Shine in conceit of substance upon me, who am less
than the rain.
Do I not know the darkness within them? What
are they but shrouds?
The clouds go down the sky with a wealthy ease
Casting a shadow of scorn upon me for my share in
death; but I
Hold my own in the midst of them, darkling, defy
The whole of the day to extinguish the shadow I lift
on the breeze.
Yea, though the very clouds have vantage over
me,
Enjoying their glancing flight, though my love is
dead,
I still am not homeless here, I've a tent by day
Of darkness where she sleeps on her perfect bed.
And I know the host, the minute sparkling of darkness
Which vibrates untouched and virile through the
grandeur of night,
But which, when dawn crows challenge, assaulting
the vivid motes
Of living darkness, bursts fretfully, and is bright:
Runs like a fretted arc-lamp into light,
Stirred by conflict to shining, which else
Were dark and whole with the night.
Runs to a fret of speed like a racing wheel,
Which else were aslumber along with the whole
Of the dark, swinging rhythmic instead of a-reel.
Is chafed to anger, bursts into rage like thunder;
Which else were a silent grasp that held the
heavens
Arrested, beating thick with wonder.
Leaps like a fountain of blue sparks leaping
In a jet from out of obscurity,
Which erst was darkness sleeping.
Runs into streams of bright blue drops,
Water and stones and stars, and myriads
Of twin-blue eyes, and crops
Of floury grain, and all the hosts of day,
All lovely hosts of ripples caused by fretting
The Darkness into play.
SNAP-DRAGON
SHE bade me follow to her garden, where
The mellow sunlight stood as in a cup
Between the old grey walls; I did not dare
To raise my face, I did not dare look up,
Lest her bright eyes like sparrows should fly in
My windows of discovery, and shrill "Sin."
So with a downcast mien and laughing voice
I followed, followed the swing of her white dress
That rocked in a lilt along: I watched the poise
Of her feet as they flew for a space, then paused to
press
The grass deep down with the royal burden of her:
And gladly I'd offered my breast to the tread of her.
"I like to see," she said, and she crouched her down,
She sunk into my sight like a settling bird;
And her bosom couched in the confines of her gown
Like heavy birds at rest there, softly stirred
By her measured breaths: "I like to see," said she,
"The snap-dragon put out his tongue at me."
She laughed, she reached her hand out to the flower,
Closing its crimson throat. My own throat in her
power
Strangled, my heart swelled up so full
As if it would burst its wine-skin in my throat,
Choke me in my own crimson. I watched her pull
The gorge of the gaping flower, till the blood did
float
Over my eyes, and I was blind--
Her large brown hand stretched over
The windows of my mind;
And there in the dark I did discover
Things I was out to find:
My Grail, a brown bowl twined
With swollen veins that met in the wrist,
Under whose brown the amethyst
I longed to taste. I longed to turn
My heart's red measure in her cup,
I longed to feel my hot blood burn
With the amethyst in her cup.
Then suddenly she looked up,
And I was blind in a tawny-gold day,
Till she took her eyes away.
So she came down from above
And emptied my heart of love.
So I held my heart aloft
To the cuckoo that hung like a dove,
And she settled soft
It seemed that I and the morning world
Were pressed cup-shape to take this reiver
Bird who was weary to have furled
Her wings in us,
As we were weary to receive her.
This bird, this rich,
Sumptuous central grain,
This mutable witch,
This one refrain,
This laugh in the fight,
This clot of night,
This core of delight.
She spoke, and I closed my eyes
To shut hallucinations out.
I echoed with surprise
Hearing my mere lips shout
The answer they did devise.
Again I saw a brown bird hover
Over the flowers at my feet;
I felt a brown bird hover
Over my heart, and sweet
Its shadow lay on my heart.
I thought I saw on the clover
A brown bee pulling apart
The closed flesh of the clover
And burrowing in its heart.
She moved her hand, and again
I felt the brown bird cover
My heart; and then
The bird came down on my heart,
As on a nest the rover
Cuckoo comes, and shoves over
The brim each careful part
Of love, takes possession, and settles her down,
With her wings and her feathers to drown
The nest in a heat of love.
She turned her flushed face to me for the glint
Of a moment. "See," she laughed, "if you also
Can make them yawn." I put my hand to the dint
In the flower's throat, and the flower gaped wide
with woe.
She watched, she went of a sudden intensely still,
She watched my hand, to see what I would fulfil.
I pressed the wretched, throttled flower between
My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs
Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white
and keen,
And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs
Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh,
Until her pride's flag, smitten, cleaved down to the
staff.
She hid her face, she murmured between her lips
The low word "Don't." I let the flower fall,
But held my hand afloat towards the slips
Of blossom she fingered, and my fingers all
Put forth to her: she did not move, nor I,
For my hand like a snake watched hers, that could
not fly.
Then I laughed in the dark of my heart, I did exult
Like a sudden chuckling of music. I bade her eyes
Meet mine, I opened her helpless eyes to consult
Their fear, their shame, their joy that underlies
Defeat in such a battle. In the dark of her eyes
My heart was fierce to make her laughter rise.
Till her dark deeps shook with convulsive thrills, and
the dark
Of her spirit wavered like water thrilled with light;
And my heart leaped up in longing to plunge its stark
Fervour within the pool of her twilight,
Within her spacious soul, to grope in delight.
And I do not care, though the large hands of revenge
Shall get my throat at last, shall get it soon,
If the joy that they are searching to avenge
Have risen red on my night as a harvest moon,
Which even death can only put out for me;
And death, I know, is better than not-to-be.
A PASSING BELL
MOURNFULLY to and fro, to and fro the trees are
waving;
_What did you say, my dear?_
The rain-bruised leaves are suddenly shaken, as a
child
Asleep still shakes in the clutch of a sob--
_Yes, my love, I hear._
One lonely bell, one only, the storm-tossed afternoon
is braving,
_Why not let it ring?_
The roses lean down when they hear it, the tender,
mild
Flowers of the bleeding-heart fall to the throb--
_It is such a little thing!_
A wet bird walks on the lawn, call to the boy to come
and look,
_Yes, it is over now._
Call to him out of the silence, call him to see
The starling shaking its head as it walks in the
grass--
_Ah, who knows how?_
He cannot see it, I can never show it him, how it
shook--
_Don't disturb him, darling._
--Its head as it walked: I can never call him to me,
Never, he _is_ not, whatever shall come to pass.
_No, look at the wet starling._
IN TROUBLE AND SHAME
I LOOK at the swaling sunset
And wish I could go also
Through the red doors beyond the black-purple bar.
I wish that I could go
Through the red doors where I could put off
My shame like shoes in the porch,
My pain like garments,
And leave my flesh discarded lying
Like luggage of some departed traveller
Gone one knows not where.
Then I would turn round,
And seeing my cast-off body lying like lumber,
I would laugh with joy.
ELEGY
SINCE I lost you, my darling, the sky has come near,
And I am of it, the small sharp stars are quite near,
The white moon going among them like a white bird
among snow-berries,
And the sound of her gently rustling in heaven like
a bird I hear.
And I am willing to come to you now, my dear,
As a pigeon lets itself off from a cathedral dome
To be lost in the haze of the sky, I would like to
come,
And be lost out of sight with you, and be gone like
foam.
For I am tired, my dear, and if I could lift my feet,
My tenacious feet from off the dome of the earth
To fall like a breath within the breathing wind
Where you are lost, what rest, my love, what rest!
GREY EVENING
WHEN you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?
Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields.
Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among
The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,
And little stars come rolling from their husk.
And all the earth is gone into a dust
Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, pale with must,
And all the sky has withered and gone cold.
And so I sit and scan the book of grey,
Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding
With wounds of sunset and the dying day.
FIRELIGHT AND NIGHTFALL
THE darkness steals the forms of all the queens,
But oh, the palms of his two black hands are red,
Inflamed with binding up the sheaves of dead
Hours that were once all glory and all queens.
And I remember all the sunny hours
Of queens in hyacinth and skies of gold,
And morning singing where the woods are scrolled
And diapered above the chaunting flowers.
Here lamps are white like snowdrops in the grass;
The town is like a churchyard, all so still
And grey now night is here; nor will
Another torn red sunset come to pass.
THE MYSTIC BLUE
OUT of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.
Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.
And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue
crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.
And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,
The rainbow arching over in the skies,
New sparks of wonder opening in surprise.
All these pure things come foam and spray of the sea
Of Darkness abundant, which shaken mysteriously,
Breaks into dazzle of living, as dolphins that leap
from the sea
Of midnight shake it to fire, so the secret of death
we see. Apprehension
Coming Awake
From a College Window
Flapper
Birdcage Walk
Letter from Town: The Almond Tree
Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning
Thief in the Night
Letter from Town: On a Grey Evening in March
Suburbs on a Hazy Day
Hyde Park at Night: Clerks
Gipsy
Two-Fold
Under the Oak
Sigh no More
Love Storm
Parliament Hill in the Evening
Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street Walkers
Tarantella
In Church
Piano
Embankment at Night: Charity
Phantasmagoria
Next Morning
Palimpsest of Twilight
Embankment at Night: Outcasts
Winter in the Boulevard
School on the Outskirts
Sickness
Everlasting Flowers
The North Country
Bitterness of Death
Seven Seals
Reading a Letter
Twenty Years Ago
Intime
Two Wives
Heimweh
D閎鈉le
Narcissus
Autumn Sunshine
On That Day
APPREHENSION
AND all hours long, the town
Roars like a beast in a cave
That is wounded there
And like to drown;
While days rush, wave after wave
On its lair.
An invisible woe unseals
The flood, so it passes beyond
All bounds: the great old city
Recumbent roars as it feels
The foamy paw of the pond
Reach from immensity.
But all that it can do
Now, as the tide rises,
Is to listen and hear the grim
Waves crash like thunder through
The splintered streets, hear noises
Roll hollow in the interim.
COMING AWAKE
WHEN I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the
wall,
The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across,
And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas
In the window, his body black fur, and the sound
of him cross.
There was something I ought to remember: and
yet
I did not remember. Why should I? The run-
ning lights
And the airy primulas, oblivious
Of the impending bee--they were fair enough
sights.
FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW
THE glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,
Goes trembling past me up the College wall.
Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping,
The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.
Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,
Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,
Passes the world with shadows at their feet
Going left and right.
Remote, although I hear the beggar's cough,
See the woman's twinkling fingers tend him a
coin,
I sit absolved, assured I am better off
Beyond a world I never want to join.
FLAPPER
LOVE has crept out of her seal閐 heart
As a field-bee, black and amber,
Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber
Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start.
Mischief has come in her dawning eyes,
And a glint of coloured iris brings
Such as lies along the folded wings
Of the bee before he flies.
Who, with a ruffling, careful breath,
Has opened the wings of the wild young sprite?
Has fluttered her spirit to stumbling flight
In her eyes, as a young bee stumbleth?
Love makes the burden of her voice.
The hum of his heavy, staggering wings
Sets quivering with wisdom the common
things
That she says, and her words rejoice.
BIRDCAGE WALK
WHEN the wind blows her veil
And uncovers her laughter
I cease, I turn pale.
When the wind blows her veil
From the woes I bewail
Of love and hereafter:
When the wind blows her veil
I cease, I turn pale.
LETTER FROM TOWN: THE
ALMOND TREE
YOU promised to send me some violets. Did you
forget?
White ones and blue ones from under the orchard
hedge?
Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a
pledge
Of our early love that hardly has opened yet.
Here there's an almond tree--you have never seen
Such a one in the north--it flowers on the street,
and I stand
Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers
that expand
At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean.
Under the almond tree, the happy lands
Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,
And passing feet are chatter and clapping of
those
Who play around us, country girls clapping their
hands.
You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown,
All your unbearable tenderness, you with the
laughter
Startled upon your eyes now so wide with here-
after,
You with loose hands of abandonment hanging
down.
FLAT SUBURBS, S.W., IN THE
MORNING
THE new red houses spring like plants
In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
Its square shadows.
The pink young houses show one side bright
Flatly assuming the sun,
And one side shadow, half in sight,
Half-hiding the pavement-run;
Where hastening creatures pass intent
On their level way,
Threading like ants that can never relent
And have nothing to say.
Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand
At random, desolate twigs,
To testify to a blight on the land
That has stripped their sprigs.
THIEF IN THE NIGHT
LAST night a thief came to me
And struck at me with something dark.
I cried, but no one could hear me,
I lay dumb and stark.
When I awoke this morning
I could find no trace;
Perhaps 'twas a dream of warning,
For I've lost my peace.
LETTER FROM TOWN: ON A
GREY EVENING IN MARCH
THE clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly
northward to you,
While north of them all, at the farthest ends,
stands one bright-bosomed, aglance
With fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts,
red-fire seas running through
The rocks where ravens flying to windward melt
as a well-shot lance.
You should be out by the orchard, where violets
secretly darken the earth,
Or there in the woods of the twilight, with
northern wind-flowers shaken astir.
Think of me here in the library, trying and trying
a song that is worth
Tears and swords to my heart, arrows no armour
will turn or deter.
You tell me the lambs have come, they lie like
daisies white in the grass
Of the dark-green hills; new calves in shed;
peewits turn after the plough--
It is well for you. For me the navvies work in the
road where I pass
And I want to smite in anger the barren rock of
each waterless brow.
Like the sough of a wind that is caught up high in
the mesh of the budding trees,
A sudden car goes sweeping past, and I strain my
soul to hear
The voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it
rushes past like a breeze,
To hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting
the after-echo of fear.
SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY
O STIFFLY shapen houses that change not,
What conjuror's cloth was thrown across you,
and raised
To show you thus transfigured, changed,
Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased?
Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong _aqua regia_ now are you steeped?
That you lose the brick-stuff out of you
And hover like a presentment, fading faint
And vanquished, evaporate away
To leave but only the merest possible taint!
HYDE PARK AT NIGHT, BEFORE
THE WAR
_Clerks_.
WE have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet
flowers of night
Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of
golden light.
Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come
aflower
To the night that takes us willing, liberates us to the
hour.
Now at last the ink and dudgeon passes from our
fervent eyes
And out of the chambered weariness wanders a
spirit abroad on its enterprise.
Not too near and not too far
Out of the stress of the crowd
Music screams as elephants scream
When they lift their trunks and scream aloud
For joy of the night when masters are
Asleep and adream.
So here I hide in the Shalimar
With a wanton princess slender and proud,
And we swoon with kisses, swoon till we seem
Two streaming peacocks gone in a cloud
Of golden dust, with star after star
On our stream.
GIPSY
I, THE man with the red scarf,
Will give thee what I have, this last week's earn-
ings.
Take them, and buy thee a silver ring
And wed me, to ease my yearnings.
For the rest, when thou art wedded
I'll wet my brow for thee
With sweat, I'll enter a house for thy sake,
Thou shalt shut doors on me.
TWO-FOLD
How gorgeous that shock of red lilies, and larkspur
cleaving
All with a flash of blue!--when will she be leaving
Her room, where the night still hangs like a half-
folded bat,
And passion unbearable seethes in the darkness, like
must in a vat.
UNDER THE OAK
You, if you were sensible,
When I tell you the stars flash signals, each one
dreadful,
You would not turn and answer me
"The night is wonderful."
Even you, if you knew
How this darkness soaks me through and through,
and infuses
Unholy fear in my vapour, you would pause to dis-
tinguish
What hurts, from what amuses.
For I tell you
Beneath this powerful tree, my whole soul's fluid
Oozes away from me as a sacrifice steam
At the knife of a Druid.
Again I tell you, I bleed, I am bound with withies,
My life runs out.
I tell you my blood runs out on the floor of this oak,
Gout upon gout.
Above me springs the blood-born mistletoe
In the shady smoke.
But who are you, twittering to and fro
Beneath the oak?
What thing better are you, what worse?
What have you to do with the mysteries
Of this ancient place, of my ancient curse?
What place have you in my histories?
SIGH NO MORE
THE cuckoo and the coo-dove's ceaseless calling,
Calling,
Of a meaningless monotony is palling
All my morning's pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered
wood.
May-blossom and blue bird's-eye flowers falling,
Falling
In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling
Messages of true-love down the dust of the high-
road.
I do not like to hear the gentle grieving,
Grieving
Of the she-dove in the blossom, still believing
Love will yet again return to her and make all good.
When I know that there must ever be deceiving,
Deceiving
Of the mournful constant heart, that while she's
weaving
Her woes, her lover woos and sings within another
wood.
Oh, boisterous the cuckoo shouts, forestalling,
Stalling
A progress down the intricate enthralling
By-paths where the wanton-headed flowers doff
their hood.
And like a laughter leads me onward, heaving,
Heaving
A sigh among the shadows, thus retrieving
A decent short regret for that which once was very
good.
LOVE STORM
MANY roses in the wind
Are tapping at the window-sash.
A hawk is in the sky; his wings
Slowly begin to plash.
The roses with the west wind rapping
Are torn away, and a splash
Of red goes down the billowing air.
Still hangs the hawk, with the whole sky moving
Past him--only a wing-beat proving
The will that holds him there.
The daisies in the grass are bending,
The hawk has dropped, the wind is spending
All the roses, and unending
Rustle of leaves washes out the rending
Cry of a bird.
A red rose goes on the wind.--Ascending
The hawk his wind-swept way is wending
Easily down the sky. The daisies, sending
Strange white signals, seem intending
To show the place whence the scream was heard.
But, oh, my heart, what birds are piping!
A silver wind is hastily wiping
The face of the youngest rose.
And oh, my heart, cease apprehending!
The hawk is gone, a rose is tapping
The window-sash as the west-wind blows.
Knock, knock, 'tis no more than a red rose rapping,
And fear is a plash of wings.
What, then, if a scarlet rose goes flapping
Down the bright-grey ruin of things!
PARLIAMENT HILL IN THE
EVENING
THE houses fade in a melt of mist
Blotching the thick, soiled air
With reddish places that still resist
The Night's slow care.
The hopeless, wintry twilight fades,
The city corrodes out of sight
As the body corrodes when death invades
That citadel of delight.
Now verdigris smoulderings softly spread
Through the shroud of the town, as slow
Night-lights hither and thither shed
Their ghastly glow.
PICCADILLY CIRCUS AT NIGHT
_Street-Walkers_.
WHEN into the night the yellow light is roused like
dust above the towns,
Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in
the midst of the downs,
Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain
along the street,
Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in ex-
pectancy to meet
The luminous mist which the poor things wist was
dawn arriving across the sky,
When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town
has driven so high.
All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,
All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in
the sea,
Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round,
and keep
The shores of this innermost ocean alive and
illusory.
Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning
looked in at their eyes
And the Cyprian's pavement-roses are gone, and
now it is we
Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a
Paradise
On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of
the town-dark sea.
TARANTELLA
SAD as he sits on the white sea-stone
And the suave sea chuckles, and turns to the moon,
And the moon significant smiles at the cliffs and
the boulders.
He sits like a shade by the flood alone
While I dance a tarantella on the rocks, and the
croon
Of my mockery mocks at him over the waves'
bright shoulders.
What can I do but dance alone,
Dance to the sliding sea and the moon,
For the moon on my breast and the air on my limbs
and the foam on my feet?
For surely this earnest man has none
Of the night in his soul, and none of the tune
Of the waters within him; only the world's old
wisdom to bleat.
I wish a wild sea-fellow would come down the
glittering shingle,
A soulless neckar, with winking seas in his eyes
And falling waves in his arms, and the lost soul's kiss
On his lips: I long to be soulless, I tingle
To touch the sea in the last surprise
Of fiery coldness, to be gone in a lost soul's bliss.
IN CHURCH
IN the choir the boys are singing the hymn.
The morning light on their lips
Moves in silver-moist flashes, in musical trim.
Sudden outside the high window, one crow
Hangs in the air
And lights on a withered oak-tree's top of woe.
One bird, one blot, folded and still at the top
Of the withered tree!--in the grail
Of crystal heaven falls one full black drop.
Like a soft full drop of darkness it seems to sway
In the tender wine
Of our Sabbath, suffusing our sacred day.
PIANO
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the
tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who
smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter
outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano
our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The
glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a
child for the past.
EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT,
BEFORE THE WAR
_Charity_.
BY the river
In the black wet night as the furtive rain slinks
down,
Dropping and starting from sleep
Alone on a seat
A woman crouches.
I must go back to her.
I want to give her
Some money. Her hand slips out of the breast of
her gown
Asleep. My fingers creep
Carefully over the sweet
Thumb-mound, into the palm's deep pouches.
So, the gift!
God, how she starts!
And looks at me, and looks in the palm of her hand!
And again at me!
I turn and run
Down the Embankment, run for my life.
But why?--why?
Because of my heart's
Beating like sobs, I come to myself, and stand
In the street spilled over splendidly
With wet, flat lights. What I've done
I know not, my soul is in strife.
The touch was on the quick. I want to forget.
PHANTASMAGORIA
RIGID sleeps the house in darkness, I alone
Like a thing unwarrantable cross the hall
And climb the stairs to find the group of doors
Standing angel-stern and tall.
I want my own room's shelter. But what is this
Throng of startled beings suddenly thrown
In confusion against my entry? Is it only the trees'
Large shadows from the outside street lamp blown?
Phantom to phantom leaning; strange women weep
Aloud, suddenly on my mind
Startling a fear unspeakable, as the shuddering wind
Breaks and sobs in the blind.
So like to women, tall strange women weeping!
Why continually do they cross the bed?
Why does my soul contract with unnatural fear?
I am listening! Is anything said?
Ever the long black figures swoop by the bed;
They seem to be beckoning, rushing away, and
beckoning.
Whither then, whither, what is it, say
What is the reckoning.
Tall black Bacchae of midnight, why then, why
Do you rush to assail me?
Do I intrude on your rites nocturnal?
What should it avail me?
Is there some great Iacchos of these slopes
Suburban dismal?
Have I profaned some female mystery, orgies
Black and phantasmal?
NEXT MORNING
How have I wandered here to this vaulted room
In the house of life?--the floor was ruffled with gold
Last evening, and she who was softly in bloom,
Glimmered as flowers that in perfume at twilight
unfold
For the flush of the night; whereas now the gloom
Of every dirty, must-besprinkled mould,
And damp old web of misery's heirloom
Deadens this day's grey-dropping arras-fold.
And what is this that floats on the undermist
Of the mirror towards the dusty grate, as if feeling
Unsightly its way to the warmth?--this thing with
a list
To the left? this ghost like a candle swealing?
Pale-blurred, with two round black drops, as if it
missed
Itself among everything else, here hungrily stealing
Upon me!--my own reflection!--explicit gist
Of my presence there in the mirror that leans from
the ceiling!
Then will somebody square this shade with the
being I know
I was last night, when my soul rang clear as a bell
And happy as rain in summer? Why should it be
so?
What is there gone against me, why am I in hell?
PALIMPSEST OF TWILIGHT
DARKNESS comes out of the earth
And swallows dip into the pallor of the west;
From the hay comes the clamour of children's
mirth;
Wanes the old palimpsest.
The night-stock oozes scent,
And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by:
All that the worldly day has meant
Wastes like a lie.
The children have forsaken their play;
A single star in a veil of light
Glimmers: litter of day
Is gone from sight.
EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT,
BEFORE THE WAR
_Outcasts_.
THE night rain, dripping unseen,
Comes endlessly kissing my face and my hands.
The river, slipping between
Lamps, is rayed with golden bands
Half way down its heaving sides;
Revealed where it hides.
Under the bridge
Great electric cars
Sing through, and each with a floor-light racing
along at its side.
Far off, oh, midge after midge
Drifts over the gulf that bars
The night with silence, crossing the lamp-touched
tide.
At Charing Cross, here, beneath the bridge
Sleep in a row the outcasts,
Packed in a line with their heads against the wall.
Their feet, in a broken ridge
Stretch out on the way, and a lout casts
A look as he stands on the edge of this naked stall.
Beasts that sleep will cover
Their faces in their flank; so these
Have huddled rags or limbs on the naked sleep.
Save, as the tram-cars hover
Past with the noise of a breeze
And gleam as of sunshine crossing the low black heap,
Two naked faces are seen
Bare and asleep,
Two pale clots swept and swept by the light of the
cars.
Foam-clots showing between
The long, low tidal-heap,
The mud-weed opening two pale, shadowless stars.
Over the pallor of only two faces
Passes the gallivant beam of the trams;
Shows in only two sad places
The white bare bone of our shams.
A little, bearded man, pale, peaked in sleeping,
With a face like a chickweed flower.
And a heavy woman, sleeping still keeping
Callous and dour.
Over the pallor of only two places
Tossed on the low, black, ruffled heap
Passes the light of the tram as it races
Out of the deep.
Eloquent limbs
In disarray
Sleep-suave limbs of a youth with long, smooth
thighs
Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims
Of trousers fray
On the thin bare shins of a man who uneasily lies.
The balls of five red toes
As red and dirty, bare
Young birds forsaken and left in a nest of mud--
Newspaper sheets enclose
Some limbs like parcels, and tear
When the sleeper stirs or turns on the ebb of the
flood--
One heaped mound
Of a woman's knees
As she thrusts them upward under the ruffled skirt--
And a curious dearth of sound
In the presence of these
Wastrels that sleep on the flagstones without any
hurt.
Over two shadowless, shameless faces
Stark on the heap
Travels the light as it tilts in its paces
Gone in one leap.
At the feet of the sleepers, watching,
Stand those that wait
For a place to lie down; and still as they stand,
they sleep,
Wearily catching
The flood's slow gait
Like men who are drowned, but float erect in the
deep.
Oh, the singing mansions,
Golden-lighted tall
Trams that pass, blown ruddily down the night!
The bridge on its stanchions
Stoops like a pall
To this human blight.
On the outer pavement, slowly,
Theatre people pass,
Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are
bright
Like flowers of infernal moly
Over nocturnal grass
Wetly bobbing and drifting away on our sight.
And still by the rotten
Row of shattered feet,
Outcasts keep guard.
Forgotten,
Forgetting, till fate shall _delete_
One from the ward.
The factories on the Surrey side
Are beautifully laid in black on a gold-grey sky.
The river's invisible tide
Threads and thrills like ore that is wealth to the eye.
And great gold midges
Cross the chasm
At the bridges
Above intertwined plasm.
WINTER IN THE BOULEVARD
THE frost has settled down upon the trees
And ruthlessly strangled off the fantasies
Of leaves that have gone unnoticed, swept like old
Romantic stories now no more to be told.
The trees down the boulevard stand naked in
thought,
Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught
In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront
Implacable winter's long, cross-questioning brunt.
Has some hand balanced more leaves in the depths
of the twigs?
Some dim little efforts placed in the threads of the
birch?--
It is only the sparrows, like dead black leaves on
the sprigs,
Sitting huddled against the cerulean, one flesh with
their perch.
The clear, cold sky coldly bethinks itself.
Like vivid thought the air spins bright, and all
Trees, birds, and earth, arrested in the after-thought
Awaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought.
SCHOOL ON THE OUTSKIRTS
How different, in the middle of snows, the great
school rises red!
A red rock silent and shadowless, clung round
with clusters of shouting lads,
Some few dark-cleaving the doorway, souls that
cling as the souls of the dead
In stupor persist at the gates of life, obstinate
dark monads.
This new red rock in a waste of white rises against
the day
With shelter now, and with blandishment, since
the winds have had their way
And laid the desert horrific of silence and snow on
the world of mankind,
School now is the rock in this weary land the winter
burns and makes blind.
SICKNESS
WAVING slowly before me, pushed into the dark,
Unseen my hands explore the silence, drawing the
bark
Of my body slowly behind.
Nothing to meet my fingers but the fleece of night
Invisible blinding my face and my eyes! What if
in their flight
My hands should touch the door!
What if I suddenly stumble, and push the door
Open, and a great grey dawn swirls over my feet,
before
I can draw back!
What if unwitting I set the door of eternity wide
And am swept away in the horrible dawn, am gone
down the tide
Of eternal hereafter!
Catch my hands, my darling, between your breasts.
Take them away from their venture, before fate
wrests
The meaning out of them.
EVERLASTING FLOWERS
WHO do you think stands watching
The snow-tops shining rosy
In heaven, now that the darkness
Takes all but the tallest posy?
Who then sees the two-winged
Boat down there, all alone
And asleep on the snow's last shadow,
Like a moth on a stone?
The olive-leaves, light as gad-flies,
Have all gone dark, gone black.
And now in the dark my soul to you
Turns back.
To you, my little darling,
To you, out of Italy.
For what is loveliness, my love,
Save you have it with me!
So, there's an oxen wagon
Comes darkly into sight:
A man with a lantern, swinging
A little light.
What does he see, my darling
Here by the darkened lake?
Here, in the sloping shadow
The mountains make?
He says not a word, but passes,
Staring at what he sees.
What ghost of us both do you think he saw
Under the olive trees?
All the things that are lovely--
The things you never knew--
I wanted to gather them one by one
And bring them to you.
But never now, my darling
Can I gather the mountain-tips
From the twilight like half-shut lilies
To hold to your lips.
And never the two-winged vessel
That sleeps below on the lake
Can I catch like a moth between my hands
For you to take.
But hush, I am not regretting:
It is far more perfect now.
I'll whisper the ghostly truth to the world
And tell them how
I know you here in the darkness,
How you sit in the throne of my eyes
At peace, and look out of the windows
In glad surprise.
THE NORTH COUNTRY
IN another country, black poplars shake them-
selves over a pond,
And rooks and the rising smoke-waves scatter and
wheel from the works beyond;
The air is dark with north and with sulphur, the
grass is a darker green,
And people darkly invested with purple move
palpable through the scene.
Soundlessly down across the counties, out of the
resonant gloom
That wraps the north in stupor and purple travels
the deep, slow boom
Of the man-life north-imprisoned, shut in the hum
of the purpled steel
As it spins to sleep on its motion, drugged dense in
the sleep of the wheel.
Out of the sleep, from the gloom of motion, sound-
lessly, somnambule
Moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned,
asleep in the rule
Of the strong machine that runs mesmeric, booming
the spell of its word
Upon them and moving them helpless, mechanic,
their will to its will deferred.
Yet all the while comes the droning inaudible, out
of the violet air,
The moaning of sleep-bound beings in travail that
toil and are will-less there
In the spell-bound north, convulsive now with a
dream near morning, strong
With violent achings heaving to burst the sleep
that is now not long.
BITTERNESS OF DEATH
I
AH, stern, cold man,
How can you lie so relentless hard
While I wash you with weeping water!
Do you set your face against the daughter
Of life? Can you never discard
Your curt pride's ban?
You masquerader!
How can you shame to act this part
Of unswerving indifference to me?
You want at last, ah me!
To break my heart
Evader!
You know your mouth
Was always sooner to soften
Even than your eyes.
Now shut it lies
Relentless, however often
I kiss it in drouth.
It has no breath
Nor any relaxing. Where,
Where are you, what have you done?
What is this mouth of stone?
How did you dare
Take cover in death!
II
Once you could see,
The white moon show like a breast revealed
By the slipping shawl of stars.
Could see the small stars tremble
As the heart beneath did wield
Systole, diastole.
All the lovely macrocosm
Was woman once to you,
Bride to your groom.
No tree in bloom
But it leaned you a new
White bosom.
And always and ever
Soft as a summering tree
Unfolds from the sky, for your good,
Unfolded womanhood;
Shedding you down as a tree
Sheds its flowers on a river.
I saw your brows
Set like rocks beside a sea of gloom,
And I shed my very soul down into your
thought;
Like flowers I fell, to be caught
On the comforted pool, like bloom
That leaves the boughs.
III
Oh, masquerader,
With a hard face white-enamelled,
What are you now?
Do you care no longer how
My heart is trammelled,
Evader?
Is this you, after all,
Metallic, obdurate
With bowels of steel?
Did you _never_ feel?--
Cold, insensate,
Mechanical!
Ah, no!--you multiform,
You that I loved, you wonderful,
You who darkened and shone,
You were many men in one;
But never this null
This never-warm!
Is this the sum of you?
Is it all nought?
Cold, metal-cold?
Are you all told
Here, iron-wrought?
Is _this_ what's become of you?
SEVEN SEALS
SINCE this is the last night I keep you home,
Come, I will consecrate you for the journey.
Rather I had you would not go. Nay come,
I will not again reproach you. Lie back
And let me love you a long time ere you go.
For you are sullen-hearted still, and lack
The will to love me. But even so
I will set a seal upon you from my lip,
Will set a guard of honour at each door,
Seal up each channel out of which might slip
Your love for me.
I kiss your mouth. Ah, love,
Could I but seal its ruddy, shining spring
Of passion, parch it up, destroy, remove
Its softly-stirring crimson welling-up
Of kisses! Oh, help me, God! Here at the source
I'd lie for ever drinking and drawing in
Your fountains, as heaven drinks from out their
course
The floods.
I close your ears with kisses
And seal your nostrils; and round your neck you'll
wear--
Nay, let me work--a delicate chain of kisses.
Like beads they go around, and not one misses
To touch its fellow on either side.
And there
Full mid-between the champaign of your breast
I place a great and burning seal of love
Like a dark rose, a mystery of rest
On the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart.
Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keep
You integral to me. Each door, each mystic port
Of egress from you I will seal and steep
In perfect chrism.
Now it is done. The mort
Will sound in heaven before it is undone.
But let me finish what I have begun
And shirt you now invulnerable in the mail
Of iron kisses, kisses linked like steel.
Put greaves upon your thighs and knees, and frail
Webbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feel
Ensheathed invulnerable with me, with seven
Great seals upon your outgoings, and woven
Chain of my mystic will wrapped perfectly
Upon you, wrapped in indomitable me.
READING A LETTER
SHE sits on the recreation ground
Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale
blue sky.
The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound
Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.
So sitting under the knotted canopy
Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in
a balloon
Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see
The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.
She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one
place
Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and
stirring.
But never the motion has a human face
Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.
And so again, on the recreation ground
She alights a stranger, wondering, unused to the
scene;
Suffering at sight of the children playing around,
Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the even-
ing-green.
TWENTY YEARS AGO
ROUND the house were lilacs and strawberries
And foal-foots spangling the paths,
And far away on the sand-hills, dewberries
Caught dust from the sea's long swaths.
Up the wolds the woods were walking,
And nuts fell out of their hair.
At the gate the nets hung, balking
The star-lit rush of a hare.
In the autumn fields, the stubble
Tinkled the music of gleaning.
At a mother's knees, the trouble
Lost all its meaning.
Yea, what good beginnings
To this sad end!
Have we had our innings?
God forfend!
INTIME
RETURNING, I find her just the same,
At just the same old delicate game.
Still she says: "Nay, loose no flame
To lick me up and do me harm!
Be all yourself!--for oh, the charm
Of your heart of fire in which I look!
Oh, better there than in any book
Glow and enact the dramas and dreams
I love for ever!--there it seems
You are lovelier than life itself, till desire
Comes licking through the bars of your lips
And over my face the stray fire slips,
Leaving a burn and an ugly smart
That will have the oil of illusion. Oh, heart
Of fire and beauty, loose no more
Your reptile flames of lust; ah, store
Your passion in the basket of your soul,
Be all yourself, one bonny, burning coal
That stays with steady joy of its own fire.
But do not seek to take me by desire.
Oh, do not seek to thrust on me your fire!
For in the firing all my porcelain
Of flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain,
My ivory and marble black with stain,
My veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain,
My altars sullied, I, bereft, remain
A priestess execrable, taken in vain--"
So the refrain
Sings itself over, and so the game
Re-starts itself wherein I am kept
Like a glowing brazier faintly blue of flame
So that the delicate love-adept
Can warm her hands and invite her soul,
Sprinkling incense and salt of words
And kisses pale, and sipping the toll
Of incense-smoke that rises like birds.
Yet I've forgotten in playing this game,
Things I have known that shall have no name;
Forgetting the place from which I came
I watch her ward away the flame,
Yet warm herself at the fire--then blame
Me that I flicker in the basket;
Me that I glow not with content
To have my substance so subtly spent;
Me that I interrupt her game.
I ought to be proud that she should ask it
Of me to be her fire-opal--.
It is well
Since I am here for so short a spell
Not to interrupt her?--Why should I
Break in by making any reply!
TWO WIVES
I
INTO the shadow-white chamber silts the white
Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night
Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts
A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,
Till petals heaped between the window-shafts
In a drift die there.
A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed
pane
Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely
stain
The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed
That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest
Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead
Stretched out at rest.
Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed
The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.
Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again
With wounds between them, and suffering like a
guest
That will not go. Now suddenly going, the pain
Leaves an empty breast.
II
A tall woman, with her long white gown aflow
As she strode her limbs amongst it, once more
She hastened towards the room. Did she know
As she listened in silence outside the silent door?
Entering, she saw him in outline, raised on a pyre
Awaiting the fire.
Upraised on the bed, with feet erect as a bow,
Like the prow of a boat, his head laid back like the
stern
Of a ship that stands in a shadowy sea of snow
With frozen rigging, she saw him; she drooped like
a fern
Refolding, she slipped to the floor as a ghost-white
peony slips
When the thread clips.
Soft she lay as a shed flower fallen, nor heard
The ominous entry, nor saw the other love,
The dark, the grave-eyed mistress who thus dared
At such an hour to lay her claim, above
A stricken wife, so sunk in oblivion, bowed
With misery, no more proud.
III
The stranger's hair was shorn like a lad's dark poll
And pale her ivory face: her eyes would fail
In silence when she looked: for all the whole
Darkness of failure was in them, without avail.
Dark in indomitable failure, she who had lost
Now claimed the host,
She softly passed the sorrowful flower shed
In blonde and white on the floor, nor even turned
Her head aside, but straight towards the bed
Moved with slow feet, and her eyes' flame steadily
burned.
She looked at him as he lay with banded cheek,
And she started to speak
Softly: "I knew it would come to this," she said,
"I knew that some day, soon, I should find you thus.
So I did not fight you. You went your way instead
Of coming mine--and of the two of us
I died the first, I, in the after-life
Am now your wife."
IV
"'Twas I whose fingers did draw up the young
Plant of your body: to me you looked e'er sprung
The secret of the moon within your eyes!
My mouth you met before your fine red mouth
Was set to song--and never your song denies
My love, till you went south."
"'Twas I who placed the bloom of manhood on
Your youthful smoothness: I fleeced where fleece
was none
Your fervent limbs with flickers and tendrils of new
Knowledge; I set your heart to its stronger beat;
I put my strength upon you, and I threw
My life at your feet."
"But I whom the years had reared to be your bride,
Who for years was sun for your shivering, shade for
your sweat,
Who for one strange year was as a bride to you--you
set me aside
With all the old, sweet things of our youth;--and
never yet
Have I ceased to grieve that I was not great enough
To defeat your baser stuff."
V
"But you are given back again to me
Who have kept intact for you your virginity.
Who for the rest of life walk out of care,
Indifferent here of myself, since I am gone
Where you are gone, and you and I out there
Walk now as one."
"Your widow am I, and only I. I dream
God bows his head and grants me this supreme
Pure look of your last dead face, whence now is gone
The mobility, the panther's gambolling,
And all your being is given to me, so none
Can mock my struggling."
"And now at last I kiss your perfect face,
Perfecting now our unfinished, first embrace.
Your young hushed look that then saw God ablaze
In every bush, is given you back, and we
Are met at length to finish our rest of days
In a unity."
HEIMWEH
FAR-OFF the lily-statues stand white-ranked in the
garden at home.
Would God they were shattered quickly, the cattle
would tread them out in the loam.
I wish the elder trees in flower could suddenly heave,
and burst
The walls of the house, and nettles puff out from
the hearth at which I was nursed.
It stands so still in the hush composed of trees and
inviolate peace,
The home of my fathers, the place that is mine, my
fate and my old increase.
And now that the skies are falling, the world is
spouting in fountains of dirt,
I would give my soul for the homestead to fall with
me, go with me, both in one hurt.
DEBACLE
THE trees in trouble because of autumn,
And scarlet berries falling from the bush,
And all the myriad houseless seeds
Loosing hold in the wind's insistent push
Moan softly with autumnal parturition,
Poor, obscure fruits extruded out of light
Into the world of shadow, carried down
Between the bitter knees of the after-night.
Bushed in an uncouth ardour, coiled at core
With a knot of life that only bliss can unravel,
Fall all the fruits most bitterly into earth
Bitterly into corrosion bitterly travel.
What is it internecine that is locked,
By very fierceness into a quiescence
Within the rage? We shall not know till it burst
Out of corrosion into new florescence.
Nay, but how tortured is the frightful seed
The spark intense within it, all without
Mordant corrosion gnashing and champing hard
For ruin on the naked small redoubt.
Bitter, to fold the issue, and make no sally;
To have the mystery, but not go forth;
To bear, but retaliate nothing, given to save
The spark in storms of corrosion, as seeds from
the north.
The sharper, more horrid the pressure, the harder
the heart
That saves the blue grain of eternal fire
Within its quick, committed to hold and wait
And suffer unheeding, only forbidden to expire.
NARCISSUS
WHERE the minnows trace
A glinting web quick hid in the gloom of the brook,
When I think of the place
And remember the small lad lying intent to look
Through the shadowy face
At the little fish thread-threading the watery nook--
It seems to me
The woman you are should be nixie, there is a pool
Where we ought to be.
You undine-clear and pearly, soullessly cool
And waterly
The pool for my limbs to fathom, my soul's last
school.
Narcissus
Ventured so long ago in the deeps of reflection.
Illyssus
Broke the bounds and beyond!--Dim recollection
Of fishes
Soundlessly moving in heaven's other direction!
Be
Undine towards the waters, moving back;
For me
A pool! Put off the soul you've got, oh lack
Your human self immortal; take the watery track.
AUTUMN SUNSHINE
THE sun sets out the autumn crocuses
And fills them up a pouring measure
Of death-producing wine, till treasure
Runs waste down their chalices.
All, all Persephone's pale cups of mould
Are on the board, are over-filled;
The portion to the gods is spilled;
Now, mortals all, take hold!
The time is now, the wine-cup full and full
Of lambent heaven, a pledging-cup;
Let now all mortal men take up
The drink, and a long, strong pull.
Out of the hell-queen's cup, the heaven's pale wine--
Drink then, invisible heroes, drink.
Lips to the vessels, never shrink,
Throats to the heavens incline.
And take within the wine the god's great oath
By heaven and earth and hellish stream
To break this sick and nauseous dream
We writhe and lust in, both.
Swear, in the pale wine poured from the cups of the
queen
Of hell, to wake and be free
From this nightmare we writhe in,
Break out of this foul has-been.
ON THAT DAY
ON that day
I shall put roses on roses, and cover your grave
With multitude of white roses: and since you were
brave
One bright red ray.
So people, passing under
The ash-trees of the valley-road, will raise
Their eyes and look at the grave on the hill, in
wonder,
Wondering mount, and put the flowers asunder
To see whose praise
Is blazoned here so white and so bloodily red.
Then they will say: "'Tis long since she is dead,
Who has remembered her after many days?"
And standing there
They will consider how you went your ways
Unnoticed among them, a still queen lost in the
maze
Of this earthly affair.
A queen, they'll say,
Has slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill.
Sleeps on unknown, unnoticed there, until
Dawns my insurgent day. |
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