Part 1

THE SIRENS AN ODE

[Illustration: Decoration]

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO

THE SIRENS

AN ODE

BY

LAURENCE BINYON

[Illustration: Decoration]

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1925

COPYRIGHT

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

TO CICELY

NOTE

This poem was printed by hand by Richard and Elinor Lambert at the Stanton Press and issued by them in 1924 in a limited edition. It has been revised for the present edition.

PRELUDE

I remember a night of my youth, I remember a night Soundless! The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height Boundless With stars, with stars, with stars. I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty Out of the ends of the air and the unsealed darkness Poured in a rain, in a river, Into my marrow,—thro’ all the veins of delight Poured into me. O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence! I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them; I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight, Born to be free. In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all, A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh; For they came to me as lovers, Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air, I felt more than heard, like a whisper Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting Sound Of waves, of waves, of waves. And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair, That it sought me, a mind in the muteness: In the midst of the worlds I trembled, I in the night a mortal Found! What was I? What was I? Nothing But a Moment, aware Of the ruins of Time! Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where, Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust, From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair, Rose to claim This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share; To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man. And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came, For I was the word on Earth’s lips That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves, Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars, Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me, The earth-child? To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world, To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves, Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling Earth-exiled? But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves, In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars, As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind At its core, This draws my dark being up from its secret caves, And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth Shelter me more. I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered: I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry, And feel within me, for this mortality’s answer, Sea without shore.

I. THE VICTORIES

Masters of the known and found Singers of a world completed, All to a time and end ordained, Powers foredestined to their bound And truth immutably contained, A dominion mapped and meted,— Like as in Egyptian noon Gods of granite throned august Gaze on old realms round them strewn Far as the horizon dust,— All beneath that searching sky Gathered into wisdom’s eye! Prophets of the found and known, Chanters of the Laws unchanging, Comes not an hour that undoes all With a whispered homelessness, With a sudden touch estranging? Certainties you deemed your own, Housing with a friendly wall, Glide into a doubt and guess Swift as when, the low light going, Darkness on the wind comes flowing Out of nothing; and surmise, Dream, desire, are frontierless; And the unroofed mind has skies To breathe of, where a rumour sings Of other mind and vaster things Wooed to wilder destinies. Thought throbs: there a power entices (Like, on a wonder-night, all June In a draught of stolen spices) Not to stay, not to stay, But to embark for the outer dark. Only charms the untrodden way, Only the unspelt secret rune.

Conqueror with foot superb Planted on the last step won, Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim Destiny’s accepted son, Robed in a resounding name, What profounder pangs disturb Something that’s unquarried yet In the deep soul? All the gain Weighs but as an ashy grain In the world those pangs beget. Fierce fruitions but betray And deliver to the hard Hope of things unhazarded. Where that world is, who shall say? Under western evening starred Black waves tempt to far-away Visioned walls of a wide shore, Lands the only-coveted, Gleaming as they gleamed before Alexander’s dying eyes In the tent at Babylon. Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him, Dumb’d with grief that only saw The pillar of the world undone, Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw The unsated mind with cruelties,— Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies, Sentinelled afar, deride him, Mocking all that passion willed With the frustrate and the unfulfilled. O the inexorable Lure Spur to the demon hearts of men! Ravening Genghis, hot Timour, And the empire-storming Saracen, Fate’s infuriate charioteers, Fly from a whisper in their ears (Earth before them, Time behind) Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill, Storm and scatter, work your will!’ Hunters hunted in the mind, Hunting what they cannot name, Thunder over earth, to find Nothing. Though the harvest black Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong, There’s a thing they cannot tame. Still they keep their torrent-track, Maddened by a shadowy song Sung beyond the reach of sense. What song is this which wastes the worth Of human things, and distastes earth, And fevers with magnificence Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned, Toward a goal that none has found? Is it the song the Adventurer stole Body-bound upon the mast For the enchantment of his soul? Over farthest foam of waves That are sailors’ restless graves, He heard exulting as he passed Perilous voices challenging The mortal heart of him, and fear Became a glory, so to hear Secure as an immortal, sing The Sirens.

I. 2

Whither is she gone, wing’d by the evening airs, Yon sail that draws the last of light afar, On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares Than her own errand and her guiding star? She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth. She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms, The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust, And generations of men asleep in the old earth. Between two solitudes she glides and fades, And round us falls the darkness she invades.

Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters! What have your wastes to do With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens; Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds, And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass In soil his fathers knew? What shall he hope for from your careless desolation, Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath? What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage?... Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.

I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon, Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air, Cry down the secret waters of the world, Under the far sea-streams, to summon there The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships. In their ribb’d ruin and age-long sleep they heard, Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed, Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound; Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread In corners of all oceans, where the light Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize: And shapes at last were stirred On glimmerless abysses’ oozy floors Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;— Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores, Or questing up the white gloom of the North, Or shattered in the glory of old wars, The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!

I saw them clouding up over the verge, Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave, Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon And strange to the idle glitter of the wave. Magically re-builded, rigged and manned, They stole in their slow beauty toward the land. Mariners, O mariners! I heard a voice cry; Home, come home! Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb. Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India? Are not children’s kisses dearer than ivory and pearls? And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water And the cold, wandering foam? Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer, Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin. But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music; And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn; We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go. We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes, But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win; Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow, And a world to wander in.

I. 3

O divine summits and O unascended solitudes! O alone soaring over care and stain! Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles? Or who your spaciousness of light attain? Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible, When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone, Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne, Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,— Thither some splendour in the mind aspires, Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood, Silent in glory as of chanting quires. Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences In apparition from some world august, Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust. Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot, And mid the void as on some dazzling shore Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate, Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.

Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion Surpassing all the measures of his kind, He, a free rider of the undulating silences, Has in himself begotten a new mind; Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows, Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows, Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial, A soundless vapour that he pulses through, Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again And steers his path up toward the topless blue;— Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it, A daring, a defiance, a desire!

Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light, Invading far and far the virgin sky, Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man (O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high! Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle’s ways Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries Of his condition, being so brief a thing, Being a creature perishable and passionate, To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices, A lover, else to his own faith untrue, Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice Upon the untried way that he must tread, So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost, Breath only sweet when all is hazarded. Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance From chains of time and paths of dust and stone, Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible, He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone, Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare? Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate World, and exulting to be native there?

I. 4

Hymn the Finders! Hymn the bold Trusters of Earth, those patient ones, That listen to the subtle words Of Silence in the streams and stones; Ponderers of the secret-souled Bodies quick with ignorant being; Followers of the clues that thread Differences and accords; Wooers of what powers agreeing May the hands of man bestead; Seers who have turned aside From the greeds that ask and ache Blinded to all else beside,— Letting the clear spirit take Truth from vision open-eyed. Breaks the bud for him that sees In a world of promises.

Hymn the breaker of the dark, Hymn the finder of the flame, Troubler of the essential spark Lurking in the withered pith Or from stony prison freed, Friend and fury, holy need And fierce destroyer, hard to tame, Risen, a God to wrestle with! Hymn the bender of the wheel, Mother of the shapes of speed! Hymn the launcher of the keel Carrying thought’s arrow-aim Beyond the sundown,—sowing seed Of man on coasts untrod before, To widen memory’s haunted shore And add the nearness of a name.

Far-descended old desire! That stirred in swarming forest-ages, Prowled by fear whose stealthy eye Watched from glooms, where hunger-rages Ravened; see at last the Hand Emerging human, stretched to try Shapes of things with wondering pleasure, When its strength forgets to kill; Tempted on to understand, Serving ways of secret will,— Fit and fashion, poise and measure. Hymn the hand that builds the wall And spans the river, and arches over Man the worshipper and lover Song-like stone; the hand so strong To strike, yet in whose touch is all Life’s mystery that wooes from things Their strength, as music from the strings,— Touch of the mind that seeks behind The world for the befriending Mind.

Hymn the openers of the gates, Hymn the changers of the fates! Hymn the seekers! them that saw, Past the seeming starry roof Of human earth, in mazy plan Bright eternities of law; Them that neared those orbs to man, Unafraid, and put to proof Divination’s ancient scheme; Stept into the timeless stream, Star-like spirits among the stars! Hymn the seekers! Chosen souls, Grapnel’d in the very marrow By a thought that night and day Draws them whither their unknown Mighty lover far away Beckons them to the frore Poles Or new meridians; like to him Who climbed in Panama the tree, And splendour of untravelled sea Smote him like a glorious arrow: Never shall he rest again Till he sail that virgin main! Or like him who quietly Sitting in his Polar tent Found so great a way to die; Hope-forsaken, famine-spent, Wrote his words of faith and cheer Till the pen dropt from the hand That wrote them. Hymn the lost, who never Found, but kept high heart to steer Onward toward the mark they meant, Sailing out of sight of land. Wail not them, nor lost endeavour, For they heard what tranced the ear, Filled the exulting soul, the song Pale and prudent mortals fear, Song of those who, out of Time, Sing the heights the immortals climb, The Sirens.

II. PENUMBRA

Hearken to the hammers, endlessly hammering, The din of wheels, the drone of wheels, the furnaces Panting, where Man as in a demon-palace toils To forge the giant creatures of his brain. He has banished the spring and the innocence of leaves From the blackened waste he has made; the infected sky Glooms with a sun aghast, and the murk of the night Is peopled with tall flames like spirits insane.

He strips himself to the heat, not of the jovial sun, But of the scorch of furnaces; with naked breast Sweating beneath the iron and blear glass, amid The hammers’ hammering and the wheels’ roar. Not with grapes of October trodden underfoot Spurting juices of ripeness in runnels, his vats Brim, but with gushes flickered-over and blinding, Unshapen spilth and blaze of molten ore.

With a finger he lifts the weight of mountain-sides Poised; the metal mass he shears red-hot in a trice; He has given to the animate iron thews of force, A Titan’s pulse, and breath of fiery draught. Monsters mightier far than himself he creates To swim storming seas, and to mount in miles of air, To deride Space and the old opposition of Time: Their speed is like strong drink that he has quaffed.

He has the tamed lightning to do his bidding, draws Energies out of the veins of earth; he is armed From all elements, woven as in a magic web; He has stolen seeds of Death, wherewith to fight. He holds fabled terrors of the ancient gods in his hand— In a handful of dust, earthquake and pestilence; He exults to destroy, to obliterate, to be Lord of the powers of the engulfing night.

Deafened with the hammers, inebriate with the sound Of the powers he has raised out of their jealous lair, He has fever within him, he becomes dizzy, And craves, and knows not whither he is bound. Shall he attain god-like felicity of ease, Supreme articulate voice of nature’s striving, Or builds he a vast prison for himself, a slave With iron of his own strong forging crowned?

Insatiable of ransacked worlds, and exulting Furiously in feet-supplanting speed, the proud-eyed Victor, he who has come so far, so far, looks forth To achieve the eluded glory of his goal. What solitude is this that suddenly he enters? Voices of earth no more with anchoring kindness call. The fevered hammers throb; but deep within he knows The desert he has made in his own soul.

O where is now the dew-dropt radiance of morning, That sistered with him leafing tree and rippling stream, When simple of heart in the sun with a free body He accepted all the boundaries of his mind? Full of fears he was then, shadowed with helpless need To propitiate Powers that threatened each footstep. Has he escaped from those old terrors, to be prey Of fears more terrible because less blind?

II. 2

Ah, did men feign you once, triumphant Sirens, Omnipotent in your lure On a far spice-island over legendary surges Singing, and divine you with the famished eyes of mariners, Listen in a trance to your voices, but listen In a dream secure?

Lost amid strange and hungry waters They fabled the storm-worn sailor stung By a vision of arms outstretched at the end of the world,— Eternal woman, wonderful, with a bosom Heaved as with love, and with warm, white eyelids Over eyes cruel and young. From those voluptuous throats, magical throats, As out of a coral-lipped, an ivory-coloured Dazzling flower, tormenting sweetness floats, Sweetness of voices, odour of strange, strange longing Felt on the flesh like trail of perfumed hair, In sound that stole like soft arms round the soul Drawn thither and inescapably aware Of nothing but the extreme ache to press Lips on those lips, that thirst to suck the breath, The heart’s blood, into theirs, till eyes grow dull, Till lips be lips no longer, and only a skull Roll from your feast of death, O sated Sirens!

But what if it be that fond perfidious Voices With different music lure Even us who have cast far from us the fables of old? If the pride of our quest undo us, and they enchant us Simple as those lost mariners, but no longer In dream secure?

If not with sorcery of song in a scarlet mouth And with eyes of desire You ensnare the easy senses and perishing flesh, But with spiritual lure you hunger to entice us Beyond the borders of knowledge, O evilly enamoured, O terrible choir? If shadowy at the end of time you wait, Wooing subtly the while Man’s spirit, tempted On ever more extravagant quest, and bait His blood with charm of secrecy and peril, Ay, and waylay the longings of his mind, Yielding by dear degrees what he exults to seize, Until he glows to seem the unconfined Master of earth, the world’s sole will, but only That you may taste his glory, spent and shared, Before you press upon his lips the last Kiss of annihilation, and he be cast Into the void prepared, Malignant Sirens!

II. 3

‘Whither, Whither?’ I heard a crying That asked of Night, and there was none replying. ‘Whither, into what land of change and wrack, Into what time out-racing thought and will, With feet borne onward and mind beaten back Over an earth that our lost loves has buried, Against a dark wind blowing chill, Whither are we driven, whither hurried?

‘Lovely vales of our youth, where haunted Peace of the ripening years, and hope that vaunted Its strength so rooted in earth’s purposes That children’s children should possess peace there! O sunny vales, and corn, and guardian trees, Shut off by the blind rain’s down-dropping curtain,— Vanished, as if they never were, And doubt alone were certain!

‘Heaven we feigned in a time perfecting Our missed design, and beauty of our neglecting. There should we live completed in an age Wise from our loss and rich with all our spoil, A race redeeming its lost heritage, Not by vain fears checked, nor by vain hopes cheated. —If that heaven fade, and futureless we toil, And battle already defeated?

‘Words of beauty, words of assuaging Majesty saw we on high above time’s raging Inscribed as over some vast porch serene; PARDON: the heart flowed out on tides of peace. JUSTICE: the soiled soul hasted to be clean. One word we named not, dreamed not, feared not even, THE END.—If All utterly cease; Earth, Time, Desire, Hell, Heaven?’

Titan spirit of god-like stature; Star-measurer, holder of deep clues of nature; Maker, but half-aware of what he makes, Of what the extravagant flame in him devours, And what unshapen Vastness he awakes,— Toiled in the terrible webs his mind invented, And caught in flame that twists and towers, Man strives with himself tormented.

Born for ever to move, the Dancer Of dark Creation’s dream, its destined answer,— Joy were those limbs created to express! Now like one darkly stumbling, while his brain Puzzles each motion with too anxious stress, Under the glory of stars that move unhalting He burns with the old need onward still to strain, Mis-timed, way-lost, defaulting.

II. 4

Hearken to the eternal lovers rejoicing! A sunrise in their hearts, a music in their veins, Their bodies make sweet singing to one another; They bathe in beams from one another’s eyes. They rejoice to belong to the Eternal Delight Upon whose universe of buoyance they are launched, That questions not of its way nor of its haven But is both way and haven where it hies.