Part 5

Fierce wrath of Solomon, Where sleepest thou? O see, The fabric which thou won Earth and ocean to give thee— O look at the red skies.

Or hath the sun plunged down? What is this molten gold— These thundering fires blown Through heaven, where the smoke rolled? Again the great king dies.

His dreams go out in smoke. His days he let not pass And sculptured here are broke, Are charred as the burnt grass, Gone as his mouth’s last sighs.

HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE

Wan, fragile faces of joy, Pitiful mouths that strive To light with smiles the place We dream we walk alive,

To you I stretch my hands, Hands shut in pitiless trance In a land of ruin and woe, The desolate land of France.

Dear faces startled and shaken, Out of wild dust and sounds You yearn to me, lure and sadden My heart with futile bounds.

THE IMMORTALS

I killed them, but they would not die. Yea, all the day and all the night For them I could not rest nor sleep, Nor guard from them nor hide in flight!

Then in my agony I turned And made my hands red in their gore. In vain—for faster than I slew They rose more cruel than before.

I killed and killed with slaughter mad; I killed till all my strength was gone; And still they rose to torture me, For Devils only die for fun.

I used to think the Devil hid In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse; I called him Satan, Balzebub; But now I call him dirty louse.

LOUSE HUNTING

Nudes, stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire; For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his throat With oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice, And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript To hunt the verminous brood. Soon like a demons’ pantomime This plunge was raging. See the silhouettes agape, See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the baffled arms on the wall. See Gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness. See the merry limbs in that Highland fling Because some wizard vermin willed To charm from the quiet this revel When our ears were half lulled By the dark music Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.

GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE

I love you, Titan lover, My own storm-days’ Titan. Greater than the son of Zeus, I know whom I would choose.

Titan—my splendid rebel— The old Prometheus Wanes like a ghost before your power: His pangs were joys to yours.

Pallid days, arid and wan, Tied your soul fast: Babel-cities’ smoky tops Pressed upon your growth

Weary gyves. What were you But a word in the brain’s ways, Or the sleep of Circe’s swine? One gyve holds you yet.

It held you hiddenly on the Somme Tied from my heart at home: O must it loosen now? I wish You were bound with the old, old gyves.

Love! You love me—your eyes Have looked through death at mine. You have tempted a grave too much. I let you—I repine.

SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY

I love you, great new Titan! Am I not you? Napoleon and Cæsar Out of you grew.

Out of unthinkable torture, Eyes kissed by death, Won back to the world again, Lost and won in a breath,

Cruel men are made immortal. Out of your pain born, They have stolen the sun’s power With their feet on your shoulders worn.

Let them shrink from your girth, That has outgrown the pallid days When you slept like Circe’s swine Or a word in the brain’s ways.

THE JEW

Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, With the same heaving blood, Keep tide to the moon of Moses. Then why do they sneer at me?

THE DYING SOLDIER

“Here are houses,” he moaned, “I could reach, but my brain swims.” Then they thundered and flashed, And shook the earth to its rims.

“They are gunpits,” he gasped, “Our men are at the guns. Water!... Water!... Oh, water! For one of England’s dying sons.”

“We cannot give you water, Were all England in your breath.” “Water!... Water!... Oh, water!” He moaned and swooned to death.

DEAD MAN’S DUMP

The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched; Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman; And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended—stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! Have they gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their souls’ sack, Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, These dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called “An end!” But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man’s brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer’s face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye; The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead. His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said; The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight, “Will they come? Will they ever come?” Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight.

So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face.

IN WAR

Fret the nonchalant noon With your spleen Or your gay brow, For the motion of your spirit Ever moves with these.

When day shall be too quiet, Deaf to you And your dumb smile, Untuned air shall lap the stillness In the old space for your voice—

The voice that once could mirror Remote depths Of moving being, Stirred by responsive voices near, Suddenly stilled for ever.

No ghost darkens the places Dark to One; But my eyes dream, And my heart is heavy to think How it was heavy once.

In the old days when death Stalked the world For the flower of men, And the rose of beauty faded And pined in the great gloom,

One day we dug a grave: We were vexed With the sun’s heat. We scanned the hooded dead: At noon we sat and talked.

How death had kissed their eyes Three dread noons since, How human art won The dark soul to flicker Till it was lost again:

And we whom chance kept whole— But haggard, Spent—were charged To make a place for them who knew No pain in any place.

The good priest came to pray; Our ears half heard, And half we thought Of alien things, irrelevant; And the heat and thirst were great.

The good priest read: “I heard....” Dimly my brain Held words and lost.... Sudden my blood ran cold.... God! God! It could not be.

He read my brother’s name; I sank— I clutched the priest. They did not tell me it was he Was killed three days ago.

What are the great sceptred dooms To us, caught In the wild wave? We break ourselves on them, My brother, our hearts and years.

THE DEAD HEROES

Flame out, you glorious skies, Welcome our brave; Kiss their exultant eyes; Give what they gave.

Flash, mailed seraphim, Your burning spears; New days to outflame their dim Heroic years.

Thrills their baptismal tread The bright proud air; The embattled plumes outspread Burn upwards there.

Flame out, flame out, O Song! Star ring to star; Strong as our hurt is strong Our children are.

Their blood is England’s heart; By their dead hands It is their noble part That England stands.

England—Time gave them thee; They gave back this To win Eternity And claim God’s kiss.

FRAGMENTS OF “THE UNICORN”

I THE AMULET

LILITH. SAUL. AMAK. NUBIAN.

LILITH _sits under pomegranate trees watching her child_ AMAK _playing with Saul his father’s helm and spear. A light smoke is ascending from the chimney of their hut, and through the doorway a naked Nubian man is seen stirring the embers._ SAUL _sleeps_.

LILITH

Amak, you’ll break your father’s sleep: Come here and tell me what those spices are This strange man bakes our cakes with. It makes the brain wild. Be still, Amak: I’ll give you the strange man your father brought, And he will run with you upon his back to-day.

Come from your father or you’ll get no cake; He’s been a long journey. Bring me the pictured book he brought for you. What! Already cut to pieces? Put away that horn from your father’s ear, And stay that horrid noise: come, Amak.

[_Amak runs to his mother with a jade amulet, shouting._]

AMAK

Look, mother, what I’ve found.

[_He runs back again, making great shouts._]

LILITH

It dances with my blood: when my eyes caught it first I was like lost, and yearned and yearned and yearned, And strained like iron to stay my head from falling Upon that beggar’s breast where the jade stone hung. Perhaps the spirit of Saul’s young love lies here Strayed far and brought back by this stranger near. Saul said his discourse was more deep than Heaven.

For the storm trapped him ere he left the town Loaded with our week’s victuals: the slime clung And licked and clawed and chewed the clogged dragging wheels Till they sunk right to the axle: Saul, sodden and vexed, Like fury smote the mules’ mouths, pulling but sweat From his drowned hair and theirs, while the thunder knocked And all the air yawned water, falling water, And the light cart was water, like a wrecked raft, And all seemed like a forest under the ocean. Sudden the lightning flashed upon a figure Moving as a man moves in the slipping mud, Singing, but not as a man sings, through the storm, Which could not drown his sounds. Saul bawled “Hi! Hi!” And the man loomed, naked, vast, and gripped the wheels; Saul fiercely dug from under; he tugged the wheels; The mules foamed straining, straining. Suddenly they went. Saul and the man leaped in: Saul, miserably sodden,

Marvelled at the large cheer in a naked glistening man; Yet soon fell in with that contented mood, That when our hut’s light broke on his new mind He could not credit it—too soon it seemed: The stranger man’s talk was witchery. I pray his baking be as magical; The cakes should be nigh burnt.

[_She calls the_ NUBIAN. _He answers from within._]

NUBIAN

They are laid by to cool, housewife.

LILITH

Bring me the sherbet from the ledge and the fast-dried figs.

[_The_ NUBIAN _brings sherbet, figs, and a bowl of ice, and lays them down_.]

[_She looks curiously at him. He is an immense man with squat, mule-skinned features: his jet-black curled beard, crisp hair, glistening nude limbs, appear to her like some heathen idol of ancient stories._]

[_She thinks to herself._]

Out of the lightning In a dizzying cloven wink This apparition stood up, Of stricken trunk or beast’s spirit, Stirred by Saul’s blasphemies; So Saul’s heart feared, aghast. But lo, he touched the mischance and life ran straight! Was it the storm-spirit, storm’s pilot, With all the heaving débris of Noah’s sunken days Dragged on his loins; Law’s spirit wandering to us Through Nature’s anarchy, Wandering towards us when the Titans yet were young? Perhaps Moses and Buddha he met.

[_She speaks aloud._]

The shadow of these pomegranate boughs Is sweet and restful; sit and ease your feet. Eat of these figs; You have journeyed long.

NUBIAN

All my life, housewife.

LILITH

You have seen men and women, Soaked yourself in powers and old glories, In broken days and tears and glees, And touched cold hands— Hands shut in pitiless trances where the feast high. I think there is more sorrow in the world Than man can bear.

NUBIAN

None can exceed their limit, lady: You either bear or break.

LILITH

Can one choose to break? To bear, Wearily to bear, is misery. Beauty is this corroding malady.

NUBIAN

Beauty is a great paradox— Music’s secret soul creeping about the senses To wrestle with man’s coarser nature. It is hard when beauty loses.

LILITH

I think beauty is a bad bargain made of life. Men’s iron sinews hew them room in the world And use deceits to gain them trophies: O, when our beauty fails us did we not use Deceits, where were our room in the world— Only our room in the world? Are not the songs and devices of men Moulds they have made after my scarlet mouth, Of cunning words and contours of bronze And viols and gathered air? They without song have sung me Boldly and shamelessly. I am no wanton, no harlot; I have been pleased and smiled my pleasure, I am a wife with a woman’s natural ways. Yet through the shadow of the pomegranates Filters a poison day by day, And to a malady turns The blond, the ample music of my heart: Inward to eat my heart My thoughts are worms that suck my softness all away. I watch the dumb eyeless hours Drop their tears, then shapeless moaning drop.

Unfathomable is my mouth’s dream Do not men say? So secret are my far eyes, Weaving for iron men profound subtleties.

Sorceress they name me; And my eyes harden, and they say, “How may those eyes know love If God made her without a heart?

“Her tears, her moaning, Her sad profound gaze, The dishevelled lustres of her hair Moon-storm like” they say, “These are her subtleties” men say. My husband sleeps, The ghosts of my virgin days do not trouble him: His sleep can be over-long, For there is that in my embers Pride and blushes of fire, the outraged blood, His sleep makes me remember.

Sleep, hairy hunter; sleep! You are not hungry more, Having fed on my deliciousness; Your sleep is not adultery to me,

For you were wed to a girl And I am a woman. My lonely days are not whips to my honour.

[_She dries her tears with her hair, then fingers the amulet at her throat._]

Yours, friend.

NUBIAN

[_Eagerly._] My amulet! My amulet!

[_He speaks gravely._] Small comfort is counsel to broken lives; But tolerance is medicinal. In all our textures are loosed Pulses straining against strictness Because an easy issue lies therefrom. (Could they but slink past the hands holding whips To hunt them from the human pale Where is the accident to cover? Spite fears bias.) I am justified at my heart’s plea; He is justified also.

For the eyes of vanity are sleepless—are suspicious. Are mad with imaginings Of secret stabs in words, in looks, in gestures.

Man is a chimera’s eremite, That lures him from the good kindness of days Which only ask his willingness.

There is a crazed shadow from no golden body That poisons at the core What smiles may stray: It mixes with all God-ancestralled essences, And twists the brain and heart. This shadow sits in the texture of Saul’s being, Mauling your love and beauty with its lies: I hold a power like light to shrivel it— There, in your throat’s hollow—that green jade.

[_He snatches at it as she lets it fall. He grows white and troubled, and walks to where_ AMAK _is playing, and sees minutely strewn pieces of paper_.]

[_He mutters._] Lost—lost. The child has torn the scroll in it, And half is away. It cannot be spelt now.

LILITH

God, restore me his love. Ah! Well!

[_She rises._]

I will go now; prepare our evening meal; And waken my husband, my love once.

NUBIAN

[_Musing._] The lightning of the heavens Lifts an apocalypse: The dumb night’s lips are scared and wide, The world is reeling with sound: Was I deaf before, mute, tied? What shakes here from lustre-seeded pomegranates Not in the great world, More vast and terrible? What is this ecstasy in form, This lightning That found the lightning in my blood, Searing my spirit’s lips aghast and naked? I am flung in the abyss of days, And the void is filled with rushing sound From pent eternities: I am strewn as the cypher is strewn. A woman—a soft woman! Our girls have hair Like heights of night ringing with never-seen larks, Or blindness dim with dreams: Here is a yellow tiger gay that blinds your night. Mane—Mane—Mane!

Your honey spilt round that small dazzling face Shakes me to golden tremors; I have no life at all, Only thin golden tremors. Light tender beast! Your fragile gleaming wrists Have shaken the scaled glacier from under me, And bored into my craft That is now with the old dreamy Adam With other things of dust.

LILITH

You lazy hound! See my poor child.

[_He turns to see_ LILITH _drop the bowl and cakes and run to_ AMAK—_who is crying, half stifled under_ SAUL’S _huge shield_.]

[SAUL _opens his eyes_.]

* * * * *

II THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN

Small dazzling face! I shut you in my soul; How can I perish now?

But thence a strange decay— Your fragile gleaming wrists Waver my days and shake my life To golden tremors. I have no life at all, Only thin golden tremors That shudder over the abyss of days Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison walls That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid beauty—

Towering and widening till The sad moonless place Throngs with a million torches And spears of flaming wings.

III THE TOWER OF SKULLS

MOURNERS

These layers of piled-up skulls, These layers of gleaming horror—stark horror! Ah me! Through my thin hands they touch my eyes.

Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth, And here in death’s land is a pregnant birth. Your own crying is less mortal Than the amazing soul in your body. Your own crying yon parrot takes up And from your empty skull cries it afterwards.

Thou whose dark activities unenchanted Days from gyrating days, suspending them To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating days Which have gone widening on and left us here, Cast derelicts lost for ever.

When aged flesh looks down on tender brood; For he knows between his thin ribs’ walls The giant universe, the interminable Panorama—synods, myths and creeds, He knows his dust is fire and seed.

EARLIER POEMS

I have heard the Gods In their high conference As I lay outside the world Quiet in sleep.... _Fragment._

He was an artist and a dreamer—that is, one whose delight in the beauty of life was an effective obstacle to the achievement of the joy of living.

(_Circa 1913._)

EXPRESSION

Call—call—and bruise the air: Shatter dumb space! Yea! We will fling this passion everywhere; Leaving no place

For the superb and grave Magnificent throng, The pregnant queens of quietness that brave And edge our song

Of wonder at the light (Our life-leased home), Of greeting to our housemates. And in might Our song shall roam

Life’s heart, a blossoming fire Blown bright by thought, While gleams and fades the infinite desire, Phantasmed naught.

Can this be caught and caged? Wings can be clipt Of eagles, the sun’s gaudy measure gauged, But no sense dipt

In the mystery of sense: The troubled throng Of words break out like smothered fire through dense And smouldering wrong.

FROM “NIGHT AND DAY”

I IN THE WORKSHOP

Dim watery lights gleaming on gibbering faces, Faces speechful, barren of soul and sordid, Huddled and chewing a jest, lewd and gabbled insidious: Laughter, born of its dung, flashes and floods like sunlight, Filling the room with a sense of a soul lethargic and kindly, Touches my soul with a pathos, a hint of a wide desolation.

II

I saw the face of God to-day, I heard the music of His smile, And yet I was not far away, And yet in Paradise the while.

I lay upon the sparkling grass, And God’s own mouth was kissing me, And there was nothing that did pass But blazed with divinity.

Divine—divine—upon my eyes, Upon mine hair—divine—divine, The fervour of the golden skies, The ardent gaze of God on mine.

III

Then spake I to the tree, “Were ye your own desire What is it ye would be?”

Answered the tree to me, “I am my own desire, I am what I would be.

“If you were your desire Would you lie under me, And see me as you see?”

“I am my own desire While I lie under you, And that which I would be Desire will sing to you.”

IV

I wander—I wander—O will she wander here Where’er my footsteps carry me I know that she is near, A jewelled lamp within her hand and jewels in her hair; I lost her in a vision once and seek her everywhere.

My spirit whispers she is near, I look at you and you: Surely she has not passed me, I sleeping as she flew. I wander—I wander, and yet she is not here, Although my spirit whispers to me that she is near.

ZION[3]

She stood—a hill-ensceptred Queen, The glory streaming from her; While Heaven flashed her rays between, And shed eternal summer.

The gates of morning opened wide On sunny dome and steeple; Noon gleamed upon the mountain-side Thronged with a happy people;

And twilight’s drowsy, half closed eyes Beheld that virgin splendour Whose orbs were as her darkening skies, And as her spirit, tender.

Girt with that strength, first-born of right, Held fast by deeds of honour, Her robe she wove with rays more bright Than Heaven could rain upon her.

Footnote 3:

Written at the age of sixteen.

Where is that light—that citadel? That robe with woof of glory? She lost her virtue and she fell, And only left her story.

SPIRITUAL ISOLATION: A FRAGMENT