Part 4
Ah! Let the morning pale Throb with a wilder pulse: No delicate flame shall quail With terror at your convulse. Thin branches whip the white skies To lips and spaces of song That chant a mood to my eyes.... Ah! Sleep can be overlong.
MOSES
Voices thunder, voices of deeds not done: Lo, on the air are scrawled in abysmal light Old myths never known and yet already forgone, And songs more lost, more secret than desert light: Martyrdoms of uncreated things, Virgin silences waiting a breaking voice— As in a womb they cry, in a cage beat vain wings Under life, over life: is their unbeing my choice?
Dull wine of torpor—the unsoldered spirit lies limp. Ah! If she would run into a mould, Some new idea unwalled To human by-ways, an apocalyptic camp Of utterest and ulterior dreaming, Understood only in its gleaming, To flash stark naked the whole girth of the world.
I am sick of priests and forms, This rigid dry-boned refinement: As ladies’ perfumes are Obnoxious to stern natures, This miasma of a rotting god Is to me. Who has made of the forest a park? Who has changed the wolf to a dog? And put the horse in harness? And man’s mind in a groove?
I heard the one spirit cry in them, “Break this metamorphosis, Disenchant my lying body; Only putrefaction is free, And I, Freedom, am not. Moses! Touch us, thou!”
There shall not be a void or calm, But a fury fill the veins of time— Whose limbs had begun to rot, Who had flattered my stupid torpor With an easy and mimic energy, And drained my veins with a paltry marvel More monstrous than battle; For the soul ached and went out dead in pleasure.
Is not this song still sung in the streets of me?
A naked African Walked in the sun Singing—singing Of his wild love.
I slew the tiger With your young strength (My tawny panther) Rolled round my life.
Three sheep, your breasts And my head between, Grazing together On a smooth slope.
Ah! Koelue! Had you embalmed your beauty, so It could not backward go Or change in any way, What were the use if on my eyes The embalming spices were not laid To keep us fixed, Two amorous sculptures passioned endlessly? What were the use if my sight grew And its far branches were cloud-hung, You small at the roots like grass; While the new lips my spirit would kiss Were not red lips of flesh, But the huge kiss of power? Where yesterday soft hair through my fingers fell A shaggy mane would entwine; And no slim form work fire to my thighs, But human Life’s inarticulate mass Throb the pulse of a thing Whose mountain flanks awry Beg my mastery—mine! Ah! I will ride the dizzy beast of the world My road—my way.
## SCENE II.: _Evening before Thebes. The Pyramids are being built.
Swarms of Hebrews labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two Hebrews are furtively talking._ KOELUE _passes by singing_.
KOELUE
The vague viols of evening Call all the flower clans To some abysmal swinging And tumult of deep trance; He may hear, flower of my singing, And come hither winging.
OLD HEBREW
[_Gazing after her in a muffled frenzy._]
Hateful harlot! Boils cover your small cruel face. O, fine champion Moses: O, so good to us: O, grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer, Her father, born to us since you kissed her. Our champion, O so good to us!
YOUNG HEBREW
For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed: For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now; And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril. Be still, old man; wait a little.
OLD HEBREW
Wait! All day some slow dark quadruped beats To pulp our springiness: All day some hoofed animal treads our veins, Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out: All agonies created from the first day Have wandered hungry searching the world for us, Or they would perish like disused Behemoth. Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?
YOUNG HEBREW
Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,
Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me, He came by and bore me into the shade: O, what a furnace roaring in his blood Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own Raging through me like a strong cordial. He spoke! Since yesterday Am I not larger grown? I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul, Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight, And to their shop only heroes come; But all were cripples to this speed Constrained to the stables of flesh. I say there is a famine in ripe harvest When hungry giants come as guests: Come knead the hills and ocean into food, There is none for him. The streaming vigours of his blood erupting From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust Out of a madman’s piteous craving for A monstrous balked perfection.
OLD HEBREW
He is a prince, an animal Not of our kind; who perhaps has heard
Vague rumours of our world, to his mind An unpleasant miasma.
YOUNG HEBREW
Is not Miriam his sister, Jochabed his mother? In the womb he looked round and saw From furthermost stretches our wrong: From the palaces and schools Our pain has pierced dead generations Back to his blood’s thin source. As we lie chained by Egyptian men He lay in nets of their women, And now rejoices he has broken their meshes. O! His desires are fleets of treasure He has squandered in treacherous seas, Sailing mistrust to find frank ports; He fears our fear and tampers mildly For our assent to let him save us. When he walks amid our toil With some master-mason His tense brows, critical Of the loose enginery, Hint famed devices flat, his rod Scratching new schemes on the sand: But read hard the scrawled lines there— Limned turrets and darkness, chinks of light,
Half beasts snorting into the light, A phantasmagoria, wild escapade To our hearts’ clue; just a daring plan To the honest mason. What swathed meanings peer From his work-a-day council, washed to and from Your understanding till you doubt That a word was said— But a terror wakes and forces your eyes Into his covertly, to search his searching; Startled to life, starved hopes slink out Cowering, incredulous.
OLD HEBREW
[_To himself._] His youth is flattered at Moses’ kind speech to him.
[_To the_ YOUNG HEBREW.]
I am broken and grey, have seen much in my time, And all this gay grotesque of childish man Long passed; half blind, half deaf, I only grumble I am not blind or deaf enough for peace. I have seen splendid young fools cheat themselves Into a prophet’s frenzy; I have seen So many crazed shadows puffed away, And conscious cheats with such an ache for fame
They’d make a bonfire of themselves to be Mouthed in the squares, broad in the public eye: And whose backs break, whose lives are mauled, after It all falls flat? His tender airs chill me— As thoughts of sleep to a man tiptoed night-long Roped round his neck, for sleep means death to him. Oh, he is kind to us! Your safe teeth chatter when they hear a step: He left them yours because his cunning way Would brag the wrong against his humane act By Pharaoh; so gain more favour than he lost.
YOUNG HEBREW
Help him not then, and push your safety away: I for my part will be his backward eye, His hands when they are shut. Ah! Abinoah! Like a bad smell from the soul of Moses dipt In the mire of lust he hangs round him; And if his slit-like eyes could tear right out The pleasure Moses on his daughter had, She’d be as virgin as ere she came nestling Into that fierce unmanageable blood, Flying from her loathed father. O, that slave Has hammered from the anvil of her beauty
A steel to break his manacles: hard for us Moses has made him overseer. O, his slits Pry—pry.... For what?... To sell to Imra....
[ABINOAH _is seen approaching_.]
Sh! The thin-lipped abomination! Zig-zagging haschish tours in a fine style: It were delightful labour making bricks, Knowing they would kiss friendly with his head.
ABINOAH
[_Who has been taking haschish; and who has one obsession, hatred of Jews._]
Dirt-draggled mongrels, circumcised slaves, You puddle with your lousy gibberish The holy air, Pharaoh’s own tributary: Filthy manure for Pharaoh’s flourishing, I’ll circumcise and make holy your tongues, And stop one outlet to your profanation.
[_To the_ OLD HEBREW.]
I’ve never seen one beg so for a blow; Too soft am I to resist such entreaty. [_Beats him._] Your howling holds the earnest energies You cheat from Pharaoh when you make his bricks.
AN AGED MINSTREL
[_Sings from a distance._]
Taut is the air and tied the trees, The leaves lie as on a hand; God’s unthinkable imagination Invents new tortures for nature.
And when the air is soft and the leaves Feel free and push and tremble, Will they not remember and say How wonderful to have lived?
[_The_ OLD HEBREW _is agitated and murmurs_.]
Messiah, Messiah.... That voice.... O, he has beaten my sight out.... I see Like a rain about a devouring fire....
[_The Minstrel sings._]
Ye who best God awhile, O hear: your wealth Is but His cunning to see to make death more hard, Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy although you die to sell.
OLD HEBREW
I am crazed with whips.... I hear a Messiah.
YOUNG HEBREW
The venerable man will question this.
ABINOAH
[_Overhearing._] I’ll beat you more, and he’ll question The scratchiness of your whining; or, may be, Thence may be born deep argument With reasons from philosophy, That this blow, taking longer, yet was but one, Or perhaps two; or that you felt this one— Arguing from the difference in your whine— Exactly, or not, like the other.
MINSTREL
You labour hard to give pain.
ABINOAH
[_Still beating._] My pain is ... not ... to labour so.
MINSTREL
What is this greybeard worth to you now, All his dried-up blood crumbled to dust?
[_Motions_ ABINOAH _to desist, but not in time to prevent the old man fainting into the hands of the_ YOUNG HEBREW.]
ABINOAH
Harper, are you envious of the old fool? Go! Hug the rat who stole your last crumbs, And gnawed the hole in your life which made time wonder Who it was saved labour for him the next score of years. We allowed them life for their labour—they haggled. Food they must have, and (god of laughter!) even ease; But mud and lice and Jews are very busy Breeding plagues in ease.
[_The Minstrel pulls his beard and robe off._]
ABINOAH
Moses!
MOSES
You drunken rascal!
ABINOAH
A drunken rascal! Isis, hear the Prince! Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal.
MOSES
You may think it your duty to get drunk; But get yourself bronze claws before You would be impudent.
ABINOAH
When a man’s drunk he’ll kiss a horse or king, He’s so affectionate. Under your words There is strong wine to make me drunk; you think, The lines of all your face say, “Her father, Koelue’s father.”
MOSES
This is too droll and extraordinary. I dreamt I was a prince—a queer droll dream Where a certain slave of mine, a thing, a toad, Shifting his belly, showed a diamond Where he had lain; and a blind dumb messenger Bore syllabled messages soaked right through with glee: I paid the toad, the blind man; afterwards They spread a stench and snarling. O, droll dream!
I think you merely mean to flatter me, You subtle knave, that, more than prince, I’m _man_ And worth to listen to your bawdy breath.
ABINOAH
Yet my breath was worth your mixing with.
MOSES
A boy at college flattered so by a girl Will give her what she asks for.
ABINOAH
Osiris! Burning Osiris! Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair....
[_He looks inanely at_ MOSES, _saying to himself_.]
Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards: Isis, to let a Jew have her for nothing!
[_He sings under his breath._]
Night by night in a little house A man and woman meet; They look like each other, They are sister and brother; And night by night at that same hour A king calls for his son in vain.
MOSES
[_To himself._] So, sister Miriam, it is known then. Slave, you die. [_Aloud._] O, you ambiguous stench, You’ll be more interesting as a mummy I have no doubt.
ABINOAH
I’m drunk, yes—drenched with the thought Of a certain thing. [_Aside._] I’ll sleep sounder to-night Than all the nights I’ve followed him about Worrying each slight clue, each monosyllable To give the word to Imra: the prince is near, And Moses’ eyes shall blink before next hour To a hundred javelins. I’ll tease him till they come. [_Aloud._] On Koelue’s tears I swam to you, in a mist Of her sighs I hung round you; As in some hallucination I’ve been walking A white waste world, we two only in it.
MOSES
Doubtless the instinct balked to bully the girl, Making large gapings in your haschish dreams,
Led you to me in whom she was thoroughly lost. Pah, you sicken me!
[_He is silent awhile, then turns away._]
ABINOAH
Prince Imra is Pharaoh’s choice now, and Koelue’s.
[MOSES _turns back menacingly_.]
MOSES
Silence, you beast!
[_He changes his tone to a winning softness._]
I hate these family quarrels: it is so Like fratricide. I am a rebel, well? Soft! You are not, and we are knit so close It would be shame for a son to be so honoured And the father still unknown: come, Koelue’s (so _my_) father, I’ll tell my plans—you’ll beg to be rebel then. Look round on the night— Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done; She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of the sun, Yet only dawn divides; could a miracle
Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with light, No night or light would be, but a new thing: So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom, Egypt was in the way; I’ll strike it out With my ways curious and unusual. I have a trouble in my mind for largeness, Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours lack: Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew; Here are the springs, primeval elements, The roots’ hid secrecy, old source of race, Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct. I’d shape one impulse through the contraries Of vain ambitious men, selfish and callous, And frail life-drifters, reticent, delicate— Litheness thread bulk, a nation’s harmony: These are not lame nor bent awry, but placeless With the rust and stagnant. All that’s low I’ll charm, Barbaric love sweeten to tenderness, Cunning run into wisdom, craft turn to skill; Their meanness, threaded right and sensibly, Change to a prudence envied and not sneered; Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing
Ineffable and useable, as near Solidity as human life can be: So grandly fashion these rude elements Into some newer nature, a consciousness Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul, Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny Until they take it thus—or die.
[_While speaking, he places his hand on the unsuspecting Egyptian’s head and gently, caressingly, pulls his hair back until his chin is above his forehead, and holds him so till he is suffocated. In the darkness ahead is seen the glimmer of javelins and spears: it is Prince Imra’s cohorts come to arrest_ MOSES.]
THE END.
POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH
And like the artist who creates From dying things what never dies.... _Fragment._
DAUGHTERS OF WAR
Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs, Their naked dances with man’s spirit naked By the root side of the tree of life (The under side of things And shut from earth’s profoundest eyes).
I saw in prophetic gleams These mighty daughters in their dances Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse To mix in their glittering dances: I heard the mighty daughters’ giant sighs In sleepless passion for the sons of valour And envy of the days of flesh, Barring their love with mortal boughs across— The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life. The old bark burnt with iron wars They blow to a live flame To char the young green days And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure, No softer lure than the savage ways of death.
We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth— These maidens came—these strong everliving Amazons, And in an easy might their wrists Of night’s sway and noon’s sway the sceptres brake, Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes.
Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights; Driving the darkness into the flame of day With the Amazonian wind of them Over our corroding faces That must be broken—broken for evermore, So the soul can leap out Into their huge embraces. Though there are human faces Best sculptures of Deity, And sinews lusted after By the Archangels tall, Even these must leap to the love-heat of these maidens From the flame of terrene days, Leaving grey ashes to the wind—to the wind.
One (whose great lifted face, Where wisdom’s strength and beauty’s strength And the thewed strength of large beasts Moved and merged, gloomed and lit) Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men’s earth fell away; Whose new hearing drank the sound Where pictures, lutes, and mountains mixed With the loosed spirit of a thought, Essenced to language thus—
“My sisters force their males From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee And hankering of hearts. Frail hands gleam up through the human quagmire, and lips of ash Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings Far-sunken and strange. My sisters have their males Clean of the dust of old days That clings about those white hands And yearns in those voices sad: But these shall not see them, Or think of them in any days or years; They are my sisters’ lovers in other days and years.”
ON RECEIVING THE FIRST NEWS OF THE WAR
Snow is a strange white word; No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost.
Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know; No man knows why.
In all men’s hearts it is: Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould.
Red fangs have torn His face, God’s blood is shed: He mourns from His lone place His children dead.
O ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume; Give back this universe Its pristine bloom.
_Cape Town, 1914._
SPRING, 1916
Slow, rigid, is this masquerade That passes as through a difficult air: Heavily—heavily passes. What has she fed on? Who her table laid Through the three seasons? What forbidden fare Ruined her as a mortal lass is?
I played with her two years ago, Who might be now her own sister in stone; So altered from her May mien, When round the pink a necklace of warm snow Laughed to her throat where my mouth’s touch had gone. How is this, ruined Queen?
Who lured her vivid beauty so To be that strained chill thing that moves So ghastly midst her young brood Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow? Where are the strong men who made these their loves? Spring! God pity your mood!
THE TROOP SHIP
Grotesque and queerly huddled Contortionists to twist The sleepy soul to a sleep, We lie all sorts of ways And cannot sleep. The wet wind is so cold, And the lurching men so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Winds’ fumble or men’s feet Are on your face.
MARCHING
(AS SEEN FROM THE LEFT FILE).
My eyes catch ruddy necks Sturdily pressed back— All a red-brick moving glint. Like flaming pendulums, hands Swing across the khaki— Mustard-coloured khaki— To the automatic feet.
We husband the ancient glory In these bared necks and hands. Not broke is the forge of Mars; But a subtler brain beats iron To shoe the hoofs of death (Who paws dynamic air now). Blind fingers loose an iron cloud To rain immortal darkness On strong eyes.
BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES
The darkness crumbles away— It is the same old druid Time as ever. Only a live thing leaps my hand— A queer sardonic rat— As I pull the parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies (And God knows what antipathies). Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German— Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver—what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe, Just a little white with the dust.
KILLED IN ACTION
Your “Youth”[2] has fallen from its shelf, And you have fallen, you yourself. They knocked a soldier on the head, I mourn the poet who fell dead. And yet I think it was by chance, By oversight you died in France. You were so poor an outward man, So small against your spirit’s span, That Nature, being tired awhile, Saw but your outward human pile; And Nature, who would never let A sun with light still in it set, Before you even reached your sky, In inadvertence let you die.
Footnote 2:
“Youth,” a volume of poems by I. Rosenberg.
RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS
Sombre the night is: And, though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know This poison-blasted track opens on our camp— On a little safe sleep.
But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy. Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks: Music showering on our upturned listening faces.
Death could drop from the dark As easily as song— But song only dropped, Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand By dangerous tides; Like a girl’s dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES
They left their Babylon bare Of all its tall men, Of all its proud horses; They made for Lebanon.
And shadowy sowers went Before their spears to sow The fruit whose taste is ash, For Judah’s soul to know.
They who bowed to the Bull god, Whose wings roofed Babylon, In endless hosts darkened The bright-heavened Lebanon.
They washed their grime in pools Where laughing girls forgot The wiles they used for Solomon. Sweet laughter, remembered not!
Sweet laughter charred in the flame That clutched the cloud and earth, While Solomon’s towers crashed between To a gird of Babylon’s mirth.
THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE