And thus the Jester parries all retort: His jest eternal, and our lives so short.
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—
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.
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.
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!"
"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."
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
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."
"Only at his own epitaph,
Half tears and laughter half."
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