Part 4

Out of the barracks to the castle yard Those Roman soldiers came, buckling their gear; The word was passed that they were prison guard; The sergeant proved their dressing with his spear. Then, as the prisoner came, a wretch who bled Holding a cross, those nearest cursed his soul: He might have died some other time, they said, Not at high noon: the sergeant called the roll. Then, sloping spears, the files passed from the court Into the alleys, thrusting back the crowd, They cursed the bleeding man for stepping short; The drums beat time: the sergeant hummed aloud; The rabble closed behind: the soldiers cursed The prisoner's soul, the flies, their packs, their thirst.

Not for the anguish suffered is the slur, Not for the women's mocks, the taunts of men, No, but because you never welcomed her, Her of whose beauty I am only the pen. There was a dog, dog-minded, with dog's eyes, Damned by a dog's brute-nature to be true, Something within her made his spirit wise, He licked her hand, he knew her, not so you. When all adulterate beauty has gone by, When all inanimate matter has gone down, We will arise and walk, that dog and I, The only two who knew her in the town, We'll range the pleasant mountains side by side, Seeking the blood-stained flowers where Christs have died.

Beauty was with me once, but now, grown old, I cannot hear nor see her: thus a king In the high turret kept him from the cold Over the fire, with his magic ring Which, as he wrought, made pictures come and go Of men and times, past, present, and to be, Now like a smoke, now flame-like, now a glow, Now dead, now bright, but always fantasy. While, on the stair without, a faithful slave Stabbed to the death, crawled bleeding, whispering "Sir, They come to kill you, fly: I come to save; O you great gods, have pity, let him hear." Then, with his last strength tapped and muttered, "Sire," While the king smiled and drowsed above the fire.

So beauty comes, so with a failing hand She knocks and cries, and fails to make me hear, She who tells futures in the falling sand And still, by signs, makes hidden meanings clear; She, who behind this many peopled smoke, Moves in the light and struggles to direct, Through the deaf ear and by the baffled stroke, The wicked man, the honored architect. Yet at a dawn before the birds begin, In dreams, as the horse stamps and the hound stirs, Sleep slips the bolt and beauty enters in Crying aloud those hurried words of hers, And I awake and, in the birded dawn, Know her for Queen and own myself a pawn.

If Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense, There be a wisdom piercing into brains, Why should the glory wait on impotence, Biding its time till blood is in the veins? There is no beauty, but, when thought is quick, Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselves, Some flattery comes to try to cheat the sick, Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves. And, for the rest, we play upon a scene Beautiful with the blood of living things; We move and speak and wonder and have been, Upon the dust as dust, not queens and kings; We know no beauty, nor does beauty care For us, this dust, that men make everywhere.

Each greedy self, by consecrating lust, Desire pricking into sacrifice, Adds, in his way, some glory to the dust, Brings, to the light, some haze of Paradise, Hungers and thirsts for beauty; like the hound Snaps it, to eat alone; in secret keeps His miser's patch of consecrated ground Where beauty's corns are dug down to the deeps. So when disturbing death digs up our lives, Some little gleam among the broken soil May witness for us as the shovel rives The dirty heap of all our tiny toil; Some gleam of you may make the digger hold, Touched for an instant with the thought of gold.

Time being an instant in eternity, Beauty above man's million years must see The heaped corrupted mass that had to die, The husk of man that set the glitter free; Now from those million bodies in the dark, Forgotten, rotten, part of fields or roads, The million gleam united makes a spark Which Beauty sees among her star abodes. And, from the bodies, comes a sigh, "Alas, We hated, fought and killed, as separate men; Now all is merged and we are in the grass, Our efforts merged, would we had known it then. All our lives' battle, all our spirits' dream, Nought in themselves, a clash which made a gleam."

You will remember me in days to come With love, or pride, or pity, or contempt; So will my friends (not many friends, yet some) When this my life will be a dream out-dreamt; And one, remembering friendship by the fire, And one, remembering love time in the dark, And one, remembering unfulfilled desire, Will sigh, perhaps, yet be beside the mark; For this my body with its wandering ghost Is nothing solely but an empty grange, Dark in a night that owls inhabit most, Yet when the king rides by there comes a change; The windows gleam, the cresset's fiery hair Blasts the blown branch and beauty lodges there.

They took the bloody body from the cross, They laid it in its niche and rolled the stone. One said, "Our blessed Master," one "His loss Ends us companions, we are left alone." And one, "I thought that Pilate would acquit Right to the last;" and one, "The sergeant took The trenching mall and drove the nails with it." One who was weeping went apart and shook. Then one, "He promised that in three short days He would return, oh God; but He is dead." And one, "What was it that He meant to raise? The Temple? No? What was it that He said? He said that He would build? That He would rise?" "No," answered one, "but come from Paradise."

"Come to us fiery with the saints of God To judge the world and take His power and reign." Then one. "This was the very road we trod That April day, would it could come again; The day they flung the flowers." "Let be," said one, "He was a lovely soul, but what He meant Passes our wit, for none among us, none, Had brains enough to fathom His intent. His mother did not, nor could one of us, But while He spoke I felt I understood." And one, "He knew that it would finish thus. Let His thought be, I know that He was good. There is the orchard see, the very same Where we were sleeping when the soldiers came."

So from the cruel cross they buried God; So, in their desolation, as they went They dug him deeper with each step they trod, Their lightless minds distorting what He meant. Lamenting Him, their leader, who had died, They heaped the stones, they rolled the heavy door; They said, "Our glory has been crucified, Unless He rise our glory will be o'er." While in the grave the spirit left the corpse Broken by torture, slowly, line by line, And saw the dawn come on the eastern thorpes, And shook his wings and sang in the divine, Crying "I told the truth, even unto death, Though I was earth and now am only breath."

If all be governed by the moving stars, If passing planets bring events to be, Searing the face of Time with bloody scars, Drawing men's souls even as the moon the sea; If as they pass they make a current pass Across man's life and heap it to a tide, We are but pawns, ignobler than the grass Cropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside. Is all this beauty that does inhabit heaven Trail of a planet's fire? Is all this lust A chymic means by warring stars contriven To bring the violets out of Cæsar's dust? Better be grass, or in some hedge unknown The spilling rose whose beauty is its own.

In emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are Perhaps some planet of our master sun Still rolls an unguessed orbit round its star Unthought, unseen, unknown of any one. Roving dead space according to its law Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind Singing in the frozen void its word of awe One wandering thought in all that idiot mind. And, in some span of many a thousand year, Passing through heaven, its influence may arouse Beauty unguessed in those who habit here, And men may rise with glory on their brows, And feel new life like fire, and see the old Fall from them dead, the bronze's broken mould.

Perhaps in chasms of the wasted past, That planet wandered within hail of ours, And plucked men's souls to loveliness and cast The old, that was, away, like husks of flowers; And made them stand erect and bade them build Nobler than hovels plaited in the mire, Gave them an altar and a god to gild, Bridled the brooks for them and fettered fire; And, in another coming, forged the steel Which, on life's scarlet wax, forever set Longing for beauty bitten as a seal That blood not clogs nor centuries forget, That built Atlantis, and, in time will raise That grander thing whose image haunts our days.

For, like an outcast from the city, I Wander the desert strewn with traveller's bones, Having no comrade but the starry sky Where the tuned planets ride their floating thrones. I pass old ruins where the kings caroused In cups long shards from vines long since decayed, I tread the broken brick where queens were housed In beauty's time ere beauty was betrayed; And in the ceaseless pitting of the sand On monolith and pyle, I see the dawn, Making those skeletons of beauty grand By fire that comes as darkness is withdrawn; And in that fire the art of men to come Shines with such glow I bless my martyrdom.

Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood, Shy-footed beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood, Glimpsed in the beech wood dim, and in the dropping fir, Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty's minister. Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon, A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon. Only a moment held, only an hour seen, Only an instant known in all that life has been, One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face. Death lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives, I perish even as you by whom all spirit lives, Come to me, spirit, come, and fill my hour of breath With hours of life in life that pay no toll to death.

What are we given, what do we take away? Five little senses, startling with delight, That dull to death and perish into clay And pass from human memory as from sight. So the new penny glittering from the mint, Bears the king's head awhile, but Time effaces The head, the date, the seated queen, the print Even as a brook the stone in pebbly places. We bear the stamp, are current, and are prized, Hoarded or spent, the while the mintage passes, Then, like light money, challenged or despised, We join the heap of dross which Time amasses, Erased, uncurrent discs no more to range The clanging counters in the great exchange.

They called that broken hedge The Haunted Gate. Strange fires (they said) burnt there at moonless times. Evil was there, men never went there late, The darkness there was quick with threatened crimes. And then one digging in that bloodied clay Found, but a foot below, a rotted chest. Coins of the Romans, tray on rusted tray, Hurriedly heaped there by a digger prest. So that one knew how, centuries before, Some Roman flying from the sack by night, Digging in terror there to hide his store, Sweating his pick, by windy lantern light, Had stamped his anguish on that place's soul, So that it knew and could rehearse the whole.

There was an evil in the nodding wood Above the quarry long since overgrown, Something which stamped it as a place of blood Where tortured spirit cried from murdered bone. Then, after years, I saw a rusty knife Stuck in a woman's skull, just as 'twas found, Blackt with a centuried crust of clotted life, In the red clay of that unholy ground. So that I knew the unhappy thing had spoken, That tongueless thing for whom the quarry spoke, The evil seals of murder had been broken By the red earth, the grass, the rooted oak, The inarticulate dead had forced the spade, The hand, the mind, till murder was displayed.

Go, spend your penny, Beauty, when you will, In the grave's darkness let the stamp be lost. The water still will bubble from the hill, And April quick the meadows with her ghost; Over the grass the daffodils will shiver, The primroses with their pale beauty abound, The blackbird be a lover and make quiver With his glad singing the great soul of the ground; So that if the body rot, it will not matter; Up in the earth the great game will go on, The coming of Spring and the running of the water, And the young things glad of the womb's darkness gone; And the joy we felt will be a part of the glory In the lover's kiss that makes the old couple's story.

Not for your human beauty nor the power To shake me by your voice or by your touch, Summer must have its rose, the rose must flower, Beauty burn deep, I do not yield to such. No, but because your beauty where it falls Lays bare the spirits in the crowded streets, Shatters the lock, destroys the castle walls, Breaks down the bars till friend with comrade meets, So that I wander brains where beauty dwelled In long dead time, and see again the rose By long dead men for living beauty held, That Death's knife spares, and Winter with his snows, And know it bloodied by that pulse of birth Which greens the grass in Aprils upon earth.

The little robin hopping in the wood Draws friendship from you, the rapt nightingale Making the night a marvellous solitude, Only of you to darkness tells the tale. Kingfishers are but jewels on your dress, Dun deer that rove and timid rabbits shy Are but the hintings of your gentleness. Upon your wings the eagle climbs the sky. Fish that are shadows in the water pass With mystery from you, the purpled moth Dust from your kirtle on his broidery has, Out of your bounty every beauty flowth. For you are all, all fire, all living form, Marvel in man and glory in the worm.

Though in life's streets the tempting shops have lured, Because all beauty, howsoever base, Is vision of you, marred, I have endured Tempted or fall'n, to look upon your face. Now through the grinning death's head in the paint, Within the tavern-song, hid in the wine, In many kinded man, emperor and saint, I see you pass, you breath of the divine. I see you pass, as centuries ago The long dead men with passionate spirit saw, O brother man, whom spirit habits so, Through your red sorrows Beauty keeps her law, Beauty herself, who takes your dying hand, To leave through Time the Memnon in the sand.

When all these million cells that are my slaves Fall from my pourried ribs and leave me lone, A living speck among a world of graves, What shall I be, that spot in the unknown? A glow-worm in a night that floats the sun? Or deathless dust feeling the passer's foot? An eye undying mourning things undone? Or seed for quickening free from prisoning fruit? Or an eternal jewel on your robe, Caught to your heart, one with the April fire That made me yours as man upon the globe, One with the Spring, a breath in all desire, One with the primrose, present in all joy? Or pash that rots, which pismires can destroy?

Let that which is to come be as it may, Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense, The flies are happy in the summer day, Flies will be happy many summers hence. Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphynx Time with her men to come whose wings will tower, Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks, But with blind force, to each his little hour. And when the hour has struck, comes death or change, Which, whether good or ill, we cannot tell, But the blind planet will wander through her range Bearing men like us who will serve as well. The sun will rise, the winds that ever move Will blow our dust that once were men in love.

THE MADMAN'S SONG

You have not seen what I have seen, The town besieged by a million men; I saw it though, the people starved, My rib-bones here came through my skin. Thousands were killed and thousands died, We ate dead blow-flies from the stalls; "Help us, O Lord, our King," we cried; He could not help, for all our calls. No, but there was a poor mean man, A skinny man and mad, like me, He saw: he told the King his plan, A plan to set our city free. The King in fury had him bound, Dragged to the walls with kick and curse, And flung from off them to the ground; Daily our agonies grew worse. And all our sallies came to wreck, We ate the dead men from the grave, Our troops were killed or put in check, "O King," we cried, "in pity, save, Save us or we shall die," we cried. He could not save us, so we died.

* * * * * *

But then he called to mind the man Whose bones the dogs had picked by this, He murmured, "We will try the plan, Death would be better than what is. I'll try the madman's plan to-night. Do I remember it aright?"

* * * * * *

We did the madman's will, we won, We left the million rotting there; Not one remained alive, not one, The madman's wisdom was most rare. We laughed, we ate again, we drank, Rebuilt the city, walls and towers, We cried "We have the King to thank." We strewed his royal path with flowers.

* * * * * *

But I who am mad am wiser now, I wander in the city ditch, For wisdom grows on the withered bough. Flowers are fair and fruit is rich, But wisdom is lovelier than them all. So when the world is hard at work, I kneel in the foss below the wall On the rubble where the lizards lurk.

* * * * * *

The goutweed hides the poor man's bones, The mint-scent warms in the hot air, An influence comes out of the stones, The dead man's spirit quickens there, Singing, "I trod the piteous way The world despised me, comrades failed, But from above an unquenched ray Burned in my brain: it never quailed; My body shook, my mind had doubt, That star within me helped me on, Man, the walled town which cast me out, Was powerless like a fever gone. And now I know that light is like the sea, I was the rock it girt, it beat on me. I was the deaf-mute, blinded by a curse, Outside me was the starry universe I had but to unlatch to let it in. Nothing but mental blindness can be sin, All seeing saves, all hearing, all delight, I am a star. I wander through the night."

Printed in the United States of America.