Slike strani
PDF
ePub

And thus the Jester parries all retort: His jest eternal, and our lives so short.

PASTORAL

So soft in the hemlock wood
The phoenix sang his lullaby,
Shepherds drowsed where they stood,
Slumber felled each passerby,
And lovers at their first caress
Slept in virgin loneliness.

Not for mortal eye to see
Naked life arise from embers;
Only the dark hemlock tree
Evergreen itself, remembers
How the Word came into being,
No man hearing, no man seeing.

From the taut bow of sleep
Shoots the phoenix toward the day,
Shepherds wake and call their sheep,
Wanderers go on their way.
Unaware how death went by,
Lovers under the hemlocks lie.

PROTHALAMION

(Second Section)

The hills turn hugely in their sleep
With sound of grinding rock and soil
While down their granite shoulders leap
The waterbrooks in white turmoil.
The vigil of Good Friday done,
Our second spring ascends the height;
The earth turns southward toward the sun,
And trees which guard the pascal door,
In leaf once more,

Once more are murmurous with strange delight.

For now is the world's Eastertide,
And born that they may die again
Arise from death the gods who died.
Osiris, slender as young grain,
Comes back to Isis; the shy lad
Adonis wakens by the stream;

And Jesus, innocently clad

In samite, walks beneath the trees,
Half ill-at-ease

That Judas and the Cross were but a dream.

And thou art she whom I have seen
Always, but never understood,
In broken shrines festooned with green,
In twilight chapels of the wood;
Or on the hills a shepherdess
Walked with the sun full on her face,
And though her body and her dress
Appareled her in meek disguise,
I dropped my eyes,

For still I knew the goddess by her pace.

I know thee now in morning light
Though thou art wrought of flesh and blood,
And though the mother of the night
Resumes at dawn her maidenhood;
And though love severed with his knife
The girdle of the million years
And yielded to importunate life
The toll she asks of those who still
Would journey, till

They pass her known and visible frontiers.

The children from beyond the sun
Come bounding down the hillside grass,
And in the joyous rout is one
Who smiles and will not let us pass.
He stands, the fairest of them all,
And in his loveliness I trace
Thy loveliness. His light footfall
Bends not the grass he treads upon;
But he is gone

Before my eyes have feasted on his face.

Let him go back beyond the air;
This spring is ours, it is not his;
Those eager lips would take their share
Of love's yet undiminished kiss.
Fairer than he, as young, as gay,
As much a child, forget all things,
All but this transitory day

Of love, all things but love, and give
Thy fugitive

Delights to me who fly but with thy wings

In undulant desire we merge,
On tides of light we sport and rest;
We swerve up from the deeper surge
To hover on the trembling crest
Of joy, and when the wave has passed,
Then smooth is the wing to the abyss

Of quietness, where with a last
Eve-darkening smile, we say farewell
Until the spell

Shall be renewed. Forget all things but this.
No grass-blade bends, no shadow stirs;
Love mounted high, slumber is deep;
Deep is the spring beneath the firs,
A sweet and lonely place for sleep.
And waking, we shall cool our flesh
In depths so clear they seem as air;
Twofold in beauty, thou refresh
Thy body in that water, bright
With muted light,

And brighter still for thy reflection there.

While I along the bank shall find
The flowers that opened with the day

Still dew-drenched, and with these entwined
New fronds of fern or darker bay.
Or pausing in a shaft of sun

That strikes across the mottled glade
Watch thee too long, beloved one,

Watch thee with eyes grown big with tears
Because the years

Suddenly spoke and made my heart afraid.

Giver of immortality—

That was

thy name within the shrineThe Mighty Mother, Star of the Sea,

All syllables of love were thine
To wear as lesser women wear
The garlands of their fragile spring;
Why then within my heart this fear
Of time? why then amid the shout
Of life, this doubt.

That clouds the new sun like an outspread
wing?

We must not to a foe like time
Yield up our present. Take my hand
And up the morning we shall climb
Until the wooded valley land
Lies all beneath us in the drowse
Of love's meridial aftermath;
The trellis of entwining boughs
Trembles in the great joy of green,
But does not screen

The comfortable glimpse of homeward path.

We will not to our ancient foe
Yield all this happiness; it lies
Shielded from sickle and from snow
And all the menace of the skies.

At night I shall watch over thee,
The future safe beneath thy breast,
And after autumn there shall be
Dayspring, when for each other's sake
We shall awake

And follow Love beyond the unknown west.

NIGHT PIECE

There is always the sound of falling water here;

By day, blended with birdsong and windy leaves,

By night, the only sound, steady and clear

Through the darkness and half-heard through sleepers' dreams.
Here in the mottled shadow of glades, the deer,
Unstartled, waits until the walker is near,

Then with a silent bound, without effort is gone,
While the sound of falling water goes on and on.

Those are not stars reflected in the lake,

They are shadows of stars that were there aeons ago;

When you walk by these waters at night, you must forsake

All you have known of time; you are timeless, alone,
The mystery almost revealed, like the breath you take
In the summer dawn before the world is awake,
Or the last breath, when the spirit beyond recalling
Goes forth to the sound of water for ever falling.

Swift as deer, half-thoughts in the summer mind
Flash with their hints of happiness and are gone;
In the dark waters of ourselves we find

No stars but shadows of stars which memory lost.
Dark are the waters under the bridge we crossed,
And the sound of their falling knows neither end nor start.
Frail are your stars, deep are your waters, mind;
And the sound of falling water troubles my heart.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

I

You walk up a deep roadbed to a hilltop,
The trees are splintered and the sun is gray,
Shells rip the cheese-cloth air, and curling gas
That smells of death, out of the lungs of death
Breathes, it is like the sap of slaughtered poplars
Rancid with spring, it is like the breath of old men
Who have been dead a long time but still breathe.
Shell by shell you note the approaching range,
Methodical, no doubt after a graph
Devised by the professors in Berlin,
And thus defeated by its own precision.
A scattered fire might, by a random chance,
Drape you like garlands on a broken tree,
But this! it is to laugh. You need not wince
Or fling yourself face down in mud until-
Well, until then! By God, they broke the rules;
That nearly got you. You must telegraph
Berlin and file complaints with the professors.
Euclid was wrong. The parallels have met.

But you're all right, stop jabbering the Lord's Prayer,
Since it was answered, and go on with Mozart,
G-minor Symphony, the second movement.
And now with Mozart playing in your skull
Tread daintily among the rats and shell-holes,
Pick your way up the hill between the fragments
Of men and horses, let the blue gas curl.
Listen, that pizzicato on the 'cellos.
Lovelier always with the increasing beauty
Of spring, which to an adolescent rapture
Yields not one half its glories, saving all

For those whose spring finds winter in their hearts.
Plucked strings are louder, if you listen for them,
Than shells exploding, and dead suns are brighter
Than Very lights or fear. Death is no rampart
From which, methodical, the fusillades
Of hidden foes come nearer and yet nearer
Until you gauge their range and duck. It is
Not as you think it, not dead breath of poplars;
It is a chance that after sundry warnings
Plotted methodically by distant science,
The shell will miss you, and you will arrive
Up on the hillcrest after lonely walking,

The sun grown splendid for the sunset glory

Hanging above a land ruined but quiet,

And friends whose voices waken you from nightmare,
Singing amid your tangled strands of Mozart:

"The Armistice! We have signed the truce with Death!"

II

"What! you were in the war! I'd never guess it
Reading your books. What a strange man you are.
Think of dear Brooke and Seeger and Joyce Kilmer,—
Of course, they all met heroes' deaths, but still
How can experiences so profound

Have failed to leave one comma on your verses?"
"Bird droppings, madam, are not punctuation,
However fair the bird, you do but join
The illimitable clamor of bad causes
Which deafen poetry. I must confess
Though born an Anglo-Catholic, I am
Lazy but not a skeptic, and although
Romantically I take the side of kings
I am no Royalist, and neither am I
Enamored of Moscow, for within her streets
I find not even so faint a trace of verse

As metric crowsfeet in the bloodstained snow.
These causes! You will find ten thousand of them
If you read Gibbon. The damned things are dead.
Search Shakspere and prepare for me a list
Of his outpourings on the Spanish menace
With rhetoric reserved for the Armada."
"But first, Shakspere was not aboard that flagship
Of Effingham's; and second, you're not Shakspere."
"True! True, and thirdly, there is a landscape
Where green Connecticut shrouds Massachusetts
In haze on haze on hills falling away,
Like lovely lies obscuring ugly fact.
I fear to use geography as figure-

I am Connecticut. I face the ocean,
Yet of its turmoils hear but far-off surf;
I face the mountains yet climb never to them;
I face the mills of booming Massachusetts
Yet do not sweat nor jingle coin in pocket;
I face New York and let her lights be distant,
As seasonable shifts on pine and oak
Show the sun changing after winter solstice.
I listen always in my mind to music
That sings away my worries and the world."

III

However much you love your wife, your child,
Time will divide you, and however much
You love yourself, time will divide you also
Into the many parts you have forgotten.
It is triumphant that the mortal man

Remembering so many deaths, can still
Sing in the twilight and take heart at dawn
And lift his cup and say: You, my beloved.
Surely beyond that moment's apprehension,
Beyond his conscious thought, beyond the depths
Of his unconscious where the false Messiahs
Bungle amid the delicate corals, and blow
Foul-smelling bubbles to the surface world.
And signal with dream-cables: Watch my breath!
Surely beyond thought and all pseudo-science
Of the mind's last profundities, where Faith
Alone is Sea King, surely the soul dwells,
Timeless, immortal, alert to songs of earth
And knowing that when he says: You, my beloved,
Echoes start out and ring the golden spheres
To meet in perfect circles beyond space

And there to find again the voice they sprang
This is good physics, you who disbelieve
Acknowledge that your voice has also started.
Motion throughout the Universe, and never

from.

Though you should chase it through Paolo's whirlwind
Shall you catch up with it. You'd eat your words
But cannot, while throughout resounding space
The syllables of love clap laughing hands.
Whatever starts in time cannot be stopped.
Wherefore lift up your hearts all you that love
Gravely as well as passionately; wherefore
Take heed, you wastrels of the sacred word.
For time bequeaths her patience to eternity
Wherein so many ages beyond counting

Have poured what seemed immense and what was lost
In immensity and found in new dimensions.
However much you love your wife, your child,
Time will divide you, and beyond division
Eternity echoes: "You, you my beloved."

THE ASSASSINATION

"Do you not find something very strange About him?" asked the First Fate.

"Very strange indeed," answered the Second Fate, "He is immune to change."

"Yes, he is always young," complained the First Fate.

"He never heeds us," said the Second,

"I, for example, have often called and beckoned."

"We must kill him while he sleeps."

"He does not sleep."

"Then we must make him weep." "He does not weep."

"Or laugh?"

"Only at his own epitaph,

Half tears and laughter half."

« PrejšnjaNaprej »