Part 2
If you, that have grown old, were the first dead, Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of time. Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms; night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.
A PRAYER FOR MY SON
Bid a strong ghost stand at the head That my Michael may sleep sound, Nor cry, nor turn in the bed Till his morning meal come round; And may departing twilight keep All dread afar till morning’s back, That his mother may not lack Her fill of sleep.
Bid the ghost have sword in fist: Some there are, for I avow Such devilish things exist, Who have planned his murder for they know Of some most haughty deed or thought That waits upon his future days, And would through hatred of the bays Bring that to nought.
Though You can fashion everything From nothing every day, and teach The morning stars to sing, You have lacked articulate speech To tell Your simplest want, and known, Wailing upon a woman’s knee, All of that worst ignominy Of flesh and bone;
And when through all the town there ran The servants of Your enemy, A woman and a man, Unless the Holy Writings lie, Hurried through the smooth and rough And through the fertile and waste, Protecting, till the danger past, With human love.
TWO SONGS FROM A PLAY
I
I saw a staring virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died, And tear the heart out of his side, And lay the heart upon her hand And bear that beating heart away; And then did all the Muses sing Of Magnus Annus at the spring, As though God’s death were but a play.
Another Troy must rise and set, Another lineage feed the crow, Another Argo’s painted prow Drive to a flashier bauble yet. The Roman Empire stood appalled: It dropped the reins of peace and war When that fierce virgin and her Star Out of the fabulous darkness called.
II
In pity for man’s darkening thought He walked that room and issued thence In Galilean turbulence; The Babylonian Starlight brought A fabulous, formless darkness in; Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made Plato’s tolerance in vain And vain the Doric discipline.
WISDOM
The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Straightened all that went awry When some peasant gospeller Imagined Him upon the floor Of a working-carpenter. Miracle had its playtime where In damask clothed and on a seat, Chryselephantine, cedar boarded, His majestic Mother sat Stitching at a purple hoarded, That He might be nobly breeched, In starry towers of Babylon Noah’s freshet never reached. King Abundance got Him on Innocence; and Wisdom He. That cognomen sounded best Considering what wild infancy Drove horror from His Mother’s breast.
LEDA AND THE SWAN
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
1928
ON A PICTURE OF A BLACK CENTAUR BY EDMOND DULAC
Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud. I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing. What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now I bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound. Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep; I have loved you better than my soul for all my words, And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.
AMONG SCHOOL CHILDREN
I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning, A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way--the children’s eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty year old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledæan body, bent Above a sinking fire, a tale that she Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event That changed some childish day to tragedy-- Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent Into a sphere from youthful sympathy, Or else, to alter Plato’s parable, Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage I look upon one child or t’other there And wonder if she stood so at that age-- For even daughters of the swan can share Something of every paddler’s heritage-- And had that colour upon cheek or hair And thereupon my heart is driven wild: She stands before me as a living child.
IV
Her present image floats in to the mind-- Did quattrocento finger fashion it Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind And took a mass of shadows for its meat? And I though never of Ledæan kind Had pretty plumage once--enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother’s reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts--O Presences That passion, piety or affection knows, And that all heavenly glory symbolise-- O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;
VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
COLONUS’ PRAISE
(From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’)
CHORUS
Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praise The wine dark of the wood’s intricacies, The nightingale that deafens daylight there, If daylight ever visit where, Unvisited by tempest or by sun, Immortal ladies tread the ground Dizzy with harmonious sound, Semele’s lad a gay companion.
And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrives The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives Athenian intellect its mastery, Even the grey-leaved olive tree Miracle-bred out of the living stone; Nor accident of peace nor war Shall wither that old marvel, for The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.
Who comes into this country, and has come Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom, Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter And beauty-drunken by the water Glittering among grey-leaved olive trees, Has plucked a flower and sung her loss; Who finds abounding Cephisus Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.
Because this country has a pious mind And so remembers that when all mankind But trod the road, or paddled by the shore, Poseidon gave it bit and oar, Every Colonus lad or lass discourses Of that oar and of that bit; Summer and winter, day and night, Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.
THE HERO, THE GIRL, AND THE FOOL
The Girl
I rage at my own image in the glass, That’s so unlike myself that when you praise it It is as though you praised another, or even Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite; And when I wake towards morn I dread myself For the heart cries that what deception wins Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go If you have seen that image and not the woman.
The Hero
I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.
The Girl
If you are no more strength than I am beauty I had better find a convent and turn nun; A nun at least has all men’s reverence And needs no cruelty.
The Hero
I have heard one say That men have reverence for their holiness And not themselves.
The Girl
Say on and say That only God has loved us for ourselves, But what care I that long for a man’s love?
The Fool by the Roadside
When my days that have From cradle run to grave From grave to cradle run instead; When thoughts that a fool Has wound upon a spool Are but loose thread, are but loose thread.
When cradle and spool are past And I mere shade at last Coagulate of stuff Transparent like the wind, I think that I may find A faithful love, a faithful love.
OWEN AHERN AND HIS DANCERS
I
A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair, The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid. It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there; It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.
I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind, I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had, But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind; I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.
II
The Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said. ‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child; How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred? Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’
‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied. ‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray; I did not find in any cage the woman at my side. O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’
‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares, Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years. O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’
A MAN YOUNG AND OLD
First Love
Though nurtured like the sailing moon In beauty’s murderous brood, She walked awhile and blushed awhile And on my pathway stood Until I thought her body bore A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon And found a heart of stone I have attempted many things And not a thing is done, For every hand is lunatic That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me And left me but a lout, Maundering here, and maundering there, Emptier of thought Than heavenly circuit of its stars When the moon sails out.
Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is, If kindness I may call What has no comprehension in’t, But is the same for all As though my sorrow were a scene Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie Under a broken tree. I could recover if I shrieked My heart’s agony To passing bird, but I am dumb From human dignity.
The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.
The Death of the Hare
I have pointed out the yelling pack, The hare leap to the wood, And when I pass a compliment Rejoice as lover should At the drooping of an eye At the mantling of the blood.
Then suddenly my heart is wrung By her distracted air And I remember wildness lost And after, swept from there, Am set down standing in the wood At the death of the hare.
The Empty Cup
A crazy man that found a cup, When all but dead of thirst, Hardly dared to wet his mouth Imagining, moon accursed, That another mouthful And his beating heart would burst. October last I found it too But found it dry as bone, And for that reason am I crazed And my sleep is gone.
His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes, Being but holy shows And bodies broken like a thorn Whereon the bleak north blows, To think of buried Hector And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock In what I do or say They’d sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray; My arms are like the twisted thorn And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there And did such pleasure take-- She who had brought great Hector down And put all Troy to wreck-- That she cried into this ear Strike me if I shriek.
The Friends of His Youth
Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon’s pot-bellied I get a laughing fit, For that old Madge comes down the lane A stone upon her breast, And a cloak wrapped about the stone, And she can get no rest With singing hush and hush-a-bye; She that has been wild And barren as a breaking wave Thinks that the stone’s a child. And Peter that had great affairs And was a pushing man Shrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’ And perches on a stone; And then I laugh till tears run down And the heart thumps at my side, Remembering that her shriek was love And that he shrieks from pride.
Summer and Spring
We sat under an old thorn-tree And talked away the night, Told all that had been said or done Since first we saw the light, And when we talked of growing up Knew that we’d halved a soul And fell the one in t’other’s arms That we might make it whole; Then Peter had a murdering look For it seemed that he and she Had spoken of their childish days Under that very tree. O what a bursting out there was, And what a blossoming, When we had all the summer time And she had all the spring.
The Secrets of the Old
I have old women’s secrets now That had those of the young; Madge tells me what I dared not think When my blood was strong, And what had drowned a lover once Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb If thrown in Madge’s way, We three make up a solitude; For none alive to-day Can know the stories that we know Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most Of all that are gone, How such a pair loved many years And such a pair but one, Stories of the bed of straw Or the bed of down.
His Wildness
O bid me mount and sail up there Amid the cloudy wrack, For Peg and Meg and Paris’ love That had so straight a back, Are gone away, and some that stay, Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear I’d have a peacock cry For that is natural to a man That lives in memory, Being all alone I’d nurse a stone And sing it lullaby.
THE THREE MONUMENTS
They hold their public meetings where Our most renowned patriots stand, One among the birds of the air, A stumpier on either hand; And all the popular statesmen say That purity built up the state And after kept it from decay; Admonish us to cling to that And let all base ambition be, For intellect would make us proud And pride bring in impurity: The three old rascals laugh aloud.
FROM ‘OEDIPUS AT COLONUS’
I
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
II
Even from that delight memory treasures so, Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow, As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
III
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng, The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song; I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
IV
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
THE GIFT OF HARUN AL-RASHID
Kusta ben Luka is my name, I write To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once, Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer, And for no ear but his. Carry this letter Through the great gallery of the Treasure House Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured But brilliant as the night’s embroidery, And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery; Pass books of learning from Byzantium Written in gold upon a purple stain, And pause at last, I was about to say, At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no, For should you leave my letter there, a boy’s Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it And let it fall unnoticed to the floor. Pause at the Treatise of Parmenides And hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s end Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song So great its fame. When fitting time has passed The parchment will disclose to some learned man A mystery that else had found no chronicler But the wild Bedouin. Though I approve Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied With Persian embassy or Grecian war, Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truth That wandering in a desert, featureless As air under a wing, can give birds’ wit. In after time they will speak much of me And speak but phantasy. Recall the year When our beloved Caliph put to death His Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason; ‘If but the shirt upon my body knew it I’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’ That speech was all that the town knew, but he Seemed for a while to have grown young again; Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends, That none might know that he was conscience struck-- But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for me That in the early summer of the year The mightiest of the princes of the world Came to the least considered of his courtiers; Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edge One hand amid the goldfish in the pool; And thereupon a colloquy took place That I commend to all the chroniclers To show how violent great hearts can lose Their bitterness and find the honey-comb. ‘I have brought a slender bride into the house; You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”, And she and I, being sunk in happiness, Cannot endure to think you tread these paths, When evening stirs the jasmine, and yet Are brideless.’ ‘I am falling into years.’ ‘But such as you and I do not seem old Like men who live by habit. Every day I ride with falcon to the river’s edge Or carry the ringed mail upon my back, Or court a woman; neither enemy, Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice; And so a hunter carries in the eye A mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thought That springs from body and in body falls Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky Now bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale, Be mimicry?’ ‘What matter if our souls Are nearer to the surface of the body Than souls that start no game and turn no rhyme! The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youth Shows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright, My lantern is too loyal not to show That it was made in your great father’s reign.’
‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’