The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems, 1916-1918

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Title: Poems, 1916-1918

Creator: Francis Brett Young

Release date: July 26, 2012 [eBook #40344]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40344

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, 1916-1918 ***

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Cover

POEMS

1916-1918

BY

FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW MELBOURNE AUCKLAND

Copyright 1919

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Novels:

THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN
THE CRESCENT MOON
THE IRON AGE
THE DARK TOWER
DEEP SEA
UNDERGROWTH (with E. Brett Young)

Poems:

FIVE DEGREES SOUTH

Belles Lettres:

ROBERT BRIDGES: A Critical Study
MARCHING ON TANGA

TO
EDYTH GOODALL

Remember thus our sweet conspiracy:
That I, having dreamed a lovely thing, with dull
Words marred it--and you gave it back to me
A thousand, thousand times more beautiful.

ERRATA

Page 26, line 17, for "Lybian" read "Libyan."
Page 46, line 9, for "lythe" read "lithe."
Page 70, line 13, for "tyrranous" read "tyrannous."

[Transcriber's note: the above errata have been applied to this etext. The word "Lybia" was also on page 32, and was corrected as above. Similarly, "tyrranous" was also on page 86, and was corrected.]

CONTENTS

PROTHALAMION
TESTAMENT
LOCHANILAUN
LETTERMORE
LAMENT
THE LEMON-TREE
PHTHONOS
EASTER
THE LEANING ELM
THE JOYOUS LOVER
DEAD POETS
PORTON WATER
AN OLD HOUSE
THE DHOWS
THE GIFT
FIVE DEGREES SOUTH
104° FAHRENHEIT
FEVER-TREES
THE RAIN-BIRD
MOTHS
BÊTE HUMAINE
DOVES
SONG (i)
BEFORE ACTION
ON A SUBALTERN KILLED IN ACTION
AFTER ACTION
SONNET
A FAREWELL TO AFRICA
SONG (ii)
THE HAWTHORN SPRAY
THE PAVEMENT
TO LYDIA LOPOKOVA (i)
TO LYDIA LOPOKOVA (ii)
TO LYDIA LOPOKOVA (iii)
GHOSTLY LOVES
FEBRUARY
SONG OF THE DARK AGES
WINTER SUNSET
SONG (iii)
ENGLAND, APRIL 1918
SLENDER THEMES
INVOCATION
THAMAR
ENVOI

PROTHALAMION

When the evening came my love said to me:

Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,

The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,

Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.

Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat

Of day had waned, and round that shaded plot

Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet:

Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.

Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam

Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise

With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,

So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies

Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk

Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;

No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk

I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.

No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon

Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:

Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,

The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.

For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now

Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,

Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough--

Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?

Was ever a moment meeter made for love?

Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;

And all your yielding sweetness beautiful--

Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!

TESTAMENT

If I had died, and never seen the dawn

For which I hardly hoped, lighting this lawn

Of silvery grasses; if there had been no light,

And last night merged into perpetual night;

I doubt if I should ever have been content

To have closed my eyes without some testament

To the great benefits that marked my faring

Through the sweet world; for all my joy was sharing

And lonely pleasures were few. Unto which end

Three legacies I'll send,

Three legacies, already half possess'd:

One to a friend, of all good friends the best,

Better than which is nothing; yet another

Unto thy twin, dissimilar spirit, Brother;

The third to you,

Most beautiful, most true,

Most perfect one, to whom they all are due.

Quick, quick ... while there is time....

O best of friends, I leave you one sublime

Summer, one fadeless summer. 'Twas begun

Ere Cotswold hawthorn tarnished in the sun,

When hedges were fledged with green, and early swallows

Swift-darting, on curved wings, pillaged the fallows;

When all our vale was dappled blossom and light,

And oh, the scent of beanfields in the night!

You shall remember that rich dust at even

Which made old Evesham like a street in heaven,

Gold-paved, and washed within a wave of golden

Air all her dreamy towers and gables olden.

You shall remember

How arms sun-blistered, hot palms crack'd with rowing,

Clove the cool water of Avon, sweetly flowing;

And how our bodies, beautifully white,

Stretch'd to a long stroke lengthened in green light,

And we, emerging, laughed in childish wise,

And pressed the kissing water from our eyes.

Ah, was our laughter childish, or were we wise?

And then, crown of the day, a tired returning

With happy sunsets over Bredon burning,

With music and with moonlight, and good ale,

And no thought for the morrow.... Heavy phlox

Our garden pathways bordered, and evening stocks,

Those humble weeds, in sunlight withered and pale,

With a night scent to match the nightingale,

Gladdened with spicèd sweetness sweet night's shadows,

Meeting the breath of hay from mowing meadows:

As humble was our joy, and as intense

Our rapture. So, before I hurry hence,

Yours be the memory.

One night again,

When we were men, and had striven, and known pain,

By a dark canal debating, unresigned,

On the blind fate that shadows humankind,

On the blind sword that severs human love...

Then did the hidden belfry from above

On troubled minds in benediction shed

The patience of the great anonymous dead

Who reared those towers, those high cathedrals builded

In solemn stone, and with clear fancy gilded

A beauty beyond ours, trusting in God.

Then dared we follow the dark way they trod,

And bowing to the universal plan

Trust in the true and fiery spirit of Man.

And you, my Brother,

You know, as knows one other,

How my spirit revisiteth a room

In a high wing, beneath pine-trees, where gloom

Dwelleth, dispelled by resinous wood embers,

Where, in half-darkness ... How the heart remembers...

We talked of beauty, and those fiery things

To which the divine desirous spirit clings,

In a wing'd rapture to that heaven flinging,

Where beauty is an easy thing, and singing

The natural speech of man. Like kissing swords

Our wits clashed there; the brittle beauty of words

Breaking, seemed to discover its secret heart

And all the rapt elusiveness of Art.

Now I have known sorrow, and now I sing

That a lovely word is not an idle thing;

For as with stars the cloth of night is spangled,

With star-like words, most lovelily entangled,

The woof of sombre thought is deckt.... Ah, bright

And cold they glitter in the spirit's night!

But neither distant nor dispassionate;

For beauty is an armour against fate....

I tell you, who have stood in the dark alone.

Seeing the face that turneth all to stone,

Medusa, blind with hate,

While I was dying, Beauty sate with me

Nor tortured any longer; gracious was she;

To her soft words I listened, and was content

To die, nor sorry that my light was spent.

So, Brother, if I come not home,

Go to that little room

That my spirit revisiteth, and there,

Somewhere in the blue air, you shall discover

If that you be a lover

Nor haughtily minded, all that once half-shaped

Then fled us, and escaped:

All that I found that day,

Far, so far away.

And you, my lovely one,

What can I leave to you, who, you having left,

Am utterly bereft?

What in my store of visionary dowers

Is not already yours?

What silences, what hours

Of peace passing all understanding; days

Made lyric by your beauty and its praise;

Years neither time can tarnish, nor death mar,

Wherein you shined as steadfast as a star

In my bleak night, heedless of the cloud-wrack

Scudding in torn fleeces black

Of my dark moods, as those who rule the far

Star-haunted pleasaunces of heaven are?

So think but lightly of that afternoon

With white clouds climbing a blue sky in June

When a boy worshipped under dreaming trees,

Who touched your hand, and sought your eyes.

... Ah, cease,

Not these, not these...

Nor yet those nights when icy Brathay thundered

Under his bridges, and ghostly mountains wondered

At the white blossoming of a Christmas rose

More stainless than their snows;

Nor even of those placid days together

Mellow as early autumn's amber weather

When beech is ankleted with fire, and old

Elms wear their livery of yellow gold,

When orchards all are laden with increase,

And the quiet earth hath fruited, and knows peace

Oh, think not overmuch on those sweet years

Lest their last fruit be tears,--

Your tears, beloved, that were my utmost pain,--

But rather, dream again

How that a lover, half poet and half child,

An eager spirit of fragile fancies wild

Compact, adored the beauty and truth in you:

To your own truth be true;

And when, not mournfully, you turn this page

Consider still your starry heritage,

Continue in your loveliness, a star

To gladden me from afar

Even where there is no light

In my last night.

LOCHANILAUN

This is the image of my last content:

My soul shall be a little lonely lake,

So hidden that no shadow of man may break

The folding of its mountain battlement;

Only the beautiful and innocent

Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake

Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake

Of churn'd cloud in a howling wind's descent.

For there shall be no terror in the night

When stars that I have loved are born in me,

And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair;

But this shall be the end of my delight:

That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see

Your image in the mirrored beauty there.

LETTERMORE

These winter days on Lettermore

The brown west wind it sweeps the bay,

And icy rain beats on the bare

Unhomely fields that perish there:

The stony fields of Lettermore

That drink the white Atlantic spray.

And men who starve on Lettermore,

Cursing the haggard, hungry surf,

Will souse the autumn's bruisèd grains

To light dark fires within their brains

And fight with stones on Lettermore

Or sprawl beside the smoky turf.

When spring blows over Lettermore

To bloom the ragged furze with gold,

The lovely south wind's living breath

Is laden with the smell of death:

For fever breeds on Lettermore

To waste the eyes of young and old.

A black van comes to Lettermore;

The horses stumble on the stones,

The drivers curse,--for it is hard

To cross the hills from Oughterard

And cart the sick from Lettermore:

A stinking load of rags and bones.

But you will go to Lettermore

When white sea-trout are on the run,

When purple glows between the rocks

About Lord Dudley's fishing-box

Adown the road to Lettermore,

And wide seas tarnish in the sun.

And so you'll think of Lettermore

As a lost island of the blest:

With peasant lovers in a blue

Dim dusk, with heather drench'd in dew,

And the sweet peace of Lettermore

Remote and dreaming in the West.

LAMENT

Once, I think, a finer fire

Touched my lips, and then I sang

Half the songs of my desire:

With their splendour the world rang.

And their sweetness made me free

Of those starry ways whereby

Planets make their minstrelsy

In echoing, unending sky.

So, before that spell was broken,

Song of the wind, surge of the sea,--

Beautiful passionate things unspoken

Rose like a breaking wave in me:

Rose like a wave with curled crest

That green sunlight splinters through...

But the wave broke within my breast:

And now I am a man like you.

THE LEMON-TREE

Last night, last night, a vision of you

Sweetly troubled my waking dream:

Beneath the clear Algerian blue

You stood with lifted eyes: the beam

Of a winter sun beat on the crown

Of a lemon-tree, whose delicate fruit

Like pale lamps hung airily down;

And in your gazing eyes a mute

And lovely wonder.... Have I sung

Of slender things and naught beside?

You were so beautifully young

I must have kissed you or have died.

PHTHONOS

If, in high jealousy, God made me blind

And laughed to see me stumble in the night,

Driving his many-splintered arrows of light

Into that lost dominion of my mind;

Then, knowing me still unvext and unresigned,

Stole from my ears all homely sounds that might

Temper the darkness, saying, in heaven's despite,

I had not wholly left the world behind;

So, sunless, soundless, if, to make an end,

He smote the nerves that move, the nerves that feel:

Even then, O jealous one, I would not complain

If I were spared the wealth I cannot spend,

If I were left the treasure none can steal:

The lovely words that wander through my brain.

EASTER

Adown our lane at Eastertide

Hosts of dancing bluebells lay

In pools of light: and 'Oh,' you cried,

'Look, look at them: I think that they

Are bluer than the laughing sea,'

And 'Look!' you cried, 'a piece of the sky

Has fallen down for you and me

To gaze upon and love.' ... And I,

Seeing in your eyes the dancing blue

And in your heart the innocent birth

Of a pure delight, I knew, I knew

That heaven had fallen upon earth.

THE LEANING ELM

Before my window, in days of winter hoar

Huddled a mournful wood:

Smooth pillars of beech, domed chestnut, sycamore,

In stony sleep they stood:

But you, unhappy elm, the angry west

Had chosen from the rest,

Flung broken on your brothers' branches bare,

And left you leaning there

So dead that when the breath of winter cast

Wild snow upon the blast,

The other living branches, downward bowed,

Shook free their crystal shroud

And shed upon your blackened trunk beneath,

Their livery of death....

On windless nights between the beechen bars

I watched cold stars

Throb whitely in the sky, and dreamily

Wondered if any life lay locked in thee:

If still the hidden sap secretly moved,

As water in the icy winterbourne

Floweth unheard;

And half I pitied you your trance forlorn:

You could not hear, I thought, the voice of any bird,

The shadowy cries of bats in dim twilight

Or cool voices of owls crying by night....

Hunting by night under the hornèd moon:

Yet half I envied you your wintry swoon,

Till, on this morning mild, the sun, new-risen

Steals from his misty prison;

The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken

In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken:

And lo, your ravaged bole, beyond belief

Slenderly fledged anew with tender leaf

As pale as those twin vanes that break at last

In a tiny fan above the black beech-mast

Where no blade springeth green

But pallid bells of the shy helleborine.

What is this ecstasy that overwhelms

The dreaming earth? See, the embrownèd elms

Crowding purple distances warm the depths of the wood;

A new-born wind tosses their tassels brown,

His white clouds dapple the down;

Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand;

Soon, with banners flying, Spring will walk the land....

There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,

No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss

Of mortal love that maketh man divine

This light cannot outshine:

Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch

The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match

This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull

Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;

But we, alas, are not more beautiful:

We cannot flower in beauty as in joy.

We sing, our musèd words are sped, and then

Poets are only men

Who age, and toil, and sicken.... This maim'd tree

May stand in leaf when I have ceased to be.

THE JOYOUS LOVER

O, now that I am free as the air

And fleet as clouds above,

I will wander everywhere

Over the ways I love.

Lightly, lightly will I pass

Nor scatter as I go

A shadow on the blowing grass

Or a footprint in the snow.

All the wild things of the wood

That once were timid and shy

They shall not flee their solitude

For fear, when I pass by;

And beauty, beauty, the wide world over,

Shall blush when I draw near:

She knows her lover, the joyous lover,

And greets him without fear.

But if I come to the dark room

From which our love hath fled

And bend above you in the gloom

Or kneel beside your bed,

Smile soft in your sleep, my beautiful one,

For if you should say 'Nay'

To the dream which visiteth you alone,

My joy would wither away.

DEAD POETS

ODE WRITTEN AT WILTON HOUSE

Last night, amazed, I trod on holy ground

Breathing an air that ancient poets knew,

Where, in a valley compassed with sweet sound,

Beneath a garden's alley'd shades of yew,

With eager feet passèd that singer sweet

Who Stella loved, whom bloody Zutphen slew

In the starred zenith of his knightly fame.

There too a dark-stoled figure I did meet:

Herbert, whose faith burned true

And steadfast as the altar candle's flame.

Under the Wilton cedars, pondering

Upon the pains of Beauty and the wrong

That sealeth lovely lips, fated to sing,

Before they reach the cadence of their song,

I mused upon dead poets: mighty ones

Who sang and suffered: briefly heard were they

As Libyan nightingales weary of wing

Fleeing the temper of Saharan suns

To gladden our moon'd May,

And with the broken blossom vanishing.

So to my eyes a sorrowful vision came

Of one whose name was writ in water: bright

His cheeks and eyes burned with a hectic flame;

And one, alas! I saw whose passionate might

Was spent upon a fevered fen in Greece;

One shade there was who, starving, choked with bread;

One, a drown'd corpse, through stormy water slips;

One in the numbing poppy-juice found peace;

And one, a youth, lay dead

With powdered arsenic upon his lips.

O bitter were the sorrow that could dull

The sombre music of slow evening

Here, where the old world is so beautiful

That even lesser lips are moved to sing

How the wide heron sails into the light

Black as the cedarn shadows on the lawns

Or stricken woodlands patient in decay,

And river water murmurs through the night

Until autumnal dawns

Burn in the glass of Nadder's watery way.

Nay, these were they by whom the world was lost,

To whom the world most richly gave: forlorn

Beauty they worshipp'd, counting not the cost

If of their torment beauty might be born;

And life, the splendid flower of their delight,

Loving too eagerly, they broke, and spill'd

The perfume that the folded petals close

Before its prime; yet their frail fingers white

From that bruised bloom distill'd

Uttermost attar of the living rose.

Wherefore, O shining ones, I will not mourn

You, who have ravish'd beauty's secret ways

Beneath death's impotent shadow, suffering scorn,

Hatred, and desolation in her praise....

Thus as I spoke their phantom faces smiled,

As brooding night with heavy downward wing

Fell upon Wilton's elegiac stone,

On the dark woodlands and the waters wild

And every living thing--

Leaving me there amazèd and alone.

PORTON WATER

Through Porton village, under the bridge,

A clear bourne floweth, with grasses trailing,

Wherein are shadows of white clouds sailing,

And elms that shelter under the ridge.

Through Porton village we passed one day,

Marching the plain for mile on mile,

And crossed the bridge in single file,

Happily singing, and marched away

Over the bridge where the shallow races,

Under a clear and frosty sky:

And the winterbourne, as we marched by,

Mirrored a thousand laughing faces.

O, do we trouble you, Porton river,

We who laughing passed, and after

Found a resting-place for laughter?

Over here, where the poplars shiver

By stagnant waters, we lie rotten.

On windless nights, in the lonely places,

There, where the winter water races,

O, Porton river, are we forgotten?

Through Porton village, under the bridge,

The clear bourne floweth with grasses trailing,

Wherein are shadows of light cloud sailing,

And elms that shelter under the ridge.

The pale moon she comes and looks;

Over the lonely spire she climbs;

For there she is lovelier many times

Than in the little broken brooks.

AN OLD HOUSE

No one lives in the old house; long ago

The voices of men and women left it lonely.

They shuttered the sightless windows in a row,

Imprisoning empty darkness--darkness only.

Beyond the garden-closes, with sudden thunder

The lumbering troop-train passing clanks and jangles;

And I, a stranger, peer with careless wonder

Into the thickets of the garden tangles.

Yet, as I pass, a transient vision dawns

Ghostly upon my pondering spirit's gloom,

Of grey lavender bushes and weedy lawns

And a solitary cherry-tree in bloom....

No one lives in the old house: year by year

The plaster crumbles on the lonely walls:

The apple falls in the lush grass; the pear,

Pulpy with ripeness, on the pathway falls.

Yet this the garden was, where, on spring nights

Under the cherry-blossom, lovers plighted

Have wondered at the moony billows white,

Dreaming uncountable springs by love delighted;

Whose ears have heard the blackbird's jolly whistle,

The shadowy cries of bats in twilight flitting

Zigzag beneath the eaves; or, on the thistle,

The twitter of autumn birds swinging and sitting;

Whose eyes, on winter evenings, slow returning

Saw on the frosted paths pale lamplight fall

Streaming, or, on the hearth, red embers burning,

And shadows of children playing in the hall.

Where have they gone, lovers of another day?

(No one lives in the old house; long ago

They shuttered the sightless windows....) Where are they,

Whose eyes delighted in this moony snow?

I cannot tell ... and little enough they care,

Though April spray the cherry-boughs with light,

And autumn pile her harvest unaware

Under the walls that echoed their delight.

I cannot tell ... yet I am as those lovers;

For me, who pass on my predestinate way,

The prodigal blossom billows and recovers

In ghostly gardens a hundred miles away.

Yet, in my heart, a melancholy rapture

Tells me that eyes, which now an iron haste

Hurries to iron days, may here recapture

A vision of ancient loveliness gone to waste.

THE DHOWS

South of Guardafui with a dark tide flowing

We hailed two ships with tattered canvas bent to the monsoon,

Hung betwixt the outer sea and pale surf showing

Where dead cities of Libya lay bleaching in the moon.

'Oh whither be ye sailing with torn sails broken?'

'We sail, we sail for Sheba, at Suliman's behest,

With carven silver phalli for the ebony maids of Ophir

From brown-skinned baharias of Arabia the Blest.'

'Oh whither be ye sailing, with your dark flag flying?'

'We sail, with creaking cedar, towards the Northern Star.

The helmsman singeth wearily, and in our hold are lying

A hundred slaves in shackles from the marts of Zanzibar.'

'Oh whither be ye sailing...?'

'Alas, we sail no longer:

Our hulls are wrack, our sails are dust, as any man might know.

And why should you torment us? ... Your iron keels are stronger

Than ghostly ships that sailed from Tyre a thousand years ago.'

THE GIFT

Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain

Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,

England came to me--me who had always ta'en

But never given before--England, the giver,

In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver

On still evenings of summer, after rain,

By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver

When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.

Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,

And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake

Shivering all night through till cold daybreak:

In that I count these sufferings my gain

And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain

Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.

FIVE DEGREES SOUTH

I love all waves and lovely water in motion,

That wavering iris in comb of the blown spray:

Iris of tumbled nautilus in the wake's commotion,

Their spread sails dipped in a marmoreal way

Unquarried, wherein are greeny bubbles blowing

Plumes of faint spray, cool in the deep

And lucent seas, that pause not in their flowing

To lap the southern starlight while they sleep.

These I have seen, these I have loved and known:

I have seen Jupiter, that great star, swinging

Like a ship's lantern, silent and alone

Within his sea of sky, and heard the singing

Of the south trade, that siren of the air,

Who shivers the taut shrouds, and singeth there.

104° FAHRENHEIT

To-night I lay with fever in my veins

Consumed, tormented creature of fire and ice,

And, weaving the enhavock'd brain's device,

Dreamed that for evermore I must walk these plains

Where sunlight slayeth life, and where no rains

Abated the fierce air, nor slaked its fire:

So that death seemed the end of all desire,

To ease the distracted body of its pains.

And so I died, and from my eyes the glare

Faded, nor had I further need of breath;

But when I reached my hand to find you there

Beside me, I found nothing.... Lonely was death.

And with a cry I wakened, but to hear

Thin wings of fever singing in my ear.

FEVER-TREES

The beautiful Acacia

She sighs in desert lands:

Over the burning waterways

Of Africa she sways and sways,

Even where no air glideth

In cooling green she stands.

The beautiful Acacia

She hath a yellow dress:

A slender trunk of lemon sheen

Gleameth through the tender green

(Where the thorn hideth)

Shielding her loveliness.

The beautiful Acacia

Dwelleth in deadly lands:

Over the brooding waterways

Where death breedeth, she sways and sways,

And no man long abideth

In valleys where she stands.

THE RAIN-BIRD

High on the tufted baobab-tree

To-night a rain-bird sang to me

A simple song, of three notes only,

That made the wilderness more lonely;

For in my brain it echoed nearly,

Old village church bells chiming clearly:

The sweet cracked bells, just out of tune,

Over the mowing grass in June--

Over the mowing grass, and meadows

Where the low sun casts long shadows.

And cuckoos call in the twilight

From elm to elm, in level flight.

Now through the evening meadows move

Slow couples of young folk in love,

Who pause at every crooked stile

And kiss in the hawthorn's shade the while:

Like pale moths the summer frocks

Hover between the beds of phlox,

And old men, feeling it is late,

Cease their gossip at the gate,

Till deeper still the twilight grows,

And night blossometh, like a rose

Full of love and sweet perfume,

Whose heart most tender stars illume.

Here the red sun sank like lead,

And the sky blackened overhead;

Only the locust chirped at me

From the shadowy baobab-tree.

MOTHS

When I lay wakeful yesternight

My fever's flame was a clear light,

A taper, flaring in the wind,

Whither, fluttering out of the dim

Night, many dreams glimmered by.

Like moths, out of the darkness, blind,

Hurling at that taper's flame,

From drinking honey of the night's flowers

Into my circled light they came:

So near I could see their soft colours,

Grey of the dove, most soothely grey;

But my heat singed their wings, and away

Darting into the dark again,

They escaped me....

Others floated down

Like those vaned seeds that fall

In autumn from the sycamore's crown

When no leaf trembleth nor branch is stirred,

More silent in flight than any bird,

Or bat's wings flitting in darkness, soft

As lizards moving on a white wall

They came quietly from aloft

Down through my circle of light, and so

Into unlighted gloom below.

But one dream, strong-winged, daring

Flew beating at the heart of the flame

Till I feared it would have put out my light,

My thin taper, fitfully flaring,

And that I should be left alone in the night

With no more dreams for my delight.

Can it be that from the dead

Even their dreams, their dreams are fled?

BÊTE HUMAINE

Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,

I saw the world awake; and as the ray

Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,

Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,

With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes

Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.

I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay

Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes...

Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain

And horror, at my own careless cruelty,

That where all things are cruel I had slain

A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:

Like beasts that prey with bloody claw...

Nay, they

Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?

DOVES

On the edge of the wild-wood

Grey doves fluttering:

Grey doves of Astarte

To the woods at daybreak

Lazily uttering

Their murmured enchantment,

Old as man's childhood;

While she, pale divinity

Of hidden evil,

Silvers the regions chaste

Of cold sky, and broodeth

Over forests primeval

And all that thorny waste's

Wooded infinity.

'Lovely goddess of groves,'

Cried I, 'what enchanted

Sinister recesses

Of these lone shades

May still be haunted

By thy demon caresses,

Thy unholy loves?'

But clear day quelleth

Her dominion lonely,

And the soft ring-dove,

Murmuring, telleth

That dark sin only

From man's lust springeth,

In man's heart dwelleth.

SONG

I made a song in my love's likeness

From colours of my quietude,

From trees whose blossoms shine no less

Than butterflies in the wild-wood.

I laid claim on all beauty

Under the sun to praise her wonder,

Till the noise of war swept over me,

Stopp'd my singing mouth with thunder.

The angel of death hath swift wings,

I heard him strip the huddled trees

Overhead, as a hornet sings,

And whip the grass about my knees.

Down we crouched in the parchèd dust,

Down beneath that deadly rain:

Dead still I lay, as lie one must

Who hath a bullet in his brain.

Dead they left me: but my soul, waking,

Quietly laughed at their distress

Who guessed not that I still was making

That new song in my love's likeness.

BEFORE ACTION

Now the wind of the dawn sighs,

Now red embers have burned white,

Under the darkness faints and dies

The slow-beating heart of night.

Into the darkness my eyes peer

Seeing only faces steel'd,

And level eyes that know not fear;

Yet each heart is a battlefield

Where phantom armies foin and feint

And bloody victories are won

From the time when stars are faint

To the rising of the sun.

With banners broken, and the roll

Of drums, at dawn the phantoms fly:

A man must commune with his soul

When he marches out to die.

O day of wrath and of desire!

For each may know upon this day

Whether he be a thing of fire

Or fettered to the traitor clay.

Such is the hazard that is thrown:

We know not how the dice may fall:

All the secrets shall be known

Or else we shall not know at all.

ON A SUBALTERN KILLED IN ACTION

Into that dry and most desolate place

With heavy gait they dragged the stretcher in

And laid him on the bloody ground: the din

Of Maxim fire ceased not. I raised his head,

And looked into his face,

And saw that he was dead.

Saw beneath matted curls the broken skin

That let the bullet in;

And saw the limp, lithe limbs, the smiling mouth...

(Ah, may we smile at death

As bravely....) the curv'd lips that no more drouth

Should blacken, and no sweetly stirring breath

Mildly displace.

So I covered the calm face

And stripped the shirt from his firm breast, and there,

A zinc identity disc, a bracelet of elephant hair

I found.... Ah, God, how deep it stings

This unendurable pity of small things!

But more than this I saw,

That dead stranger welcoming, more than the raw

And brutal havoc of war.

England I saw, the mother from whose side

He came hither and died, she at whose hems he had play'd,

In whose quiet womb his body and soul were made.

That pale, estrangèd flesh that we bowed over

Had breathed the scent in summer of white clover;

Dreamed her cool fading nights, her twilights long,

And days as careless as a blackbird's song

Heard in the hush of eve, when midges' wings

Make a thin music, and the night-jar spins.

(For it is summer, I thought, in England now....)

And once those forward gazing eyes had seen

Her lovely living green: that blackened brow

Cool airs, from those blue hills moving, had fann'd--

Breath of that holy land

Whither my soul aspireth without despair:

In the broken brain had many a lovely word

Awakened magical echoes of things heard,

Telling of love and laughter and low voices,

And tales in which the English heart rejoices

In vanishing visions of childhood and its glories:

Old-fashioned nursery rhymes and fairy stories:

Words that only an English tongue could tell.

And the firing died away; and the night fell

On our battle. Only in the sullen sky

A prairie fire, with huge fantastic flame

Leapt, lighting dark clouds charged with thunder.

And my heart was sick with shame

That there, in death, he should lie,

Crying: 'Oh, why am I alive, I wonder?'

In a dream I saw war riding the land:

Stark rode she, with bowed eyes, against the glare

Of sack'd cities smouldering in the dark,

A tired horse, lean, with outreaching head,

And hid her face of dread....

Yet, in my passion would I look on her,

Crying, O hark,

Thou pale one, whom now men say bearest the scythe

Of God, that iron scythe forged by his thunder

For reaping of nations overripened, fashioned

Upon the clanging anvil whose sparks, flying

In a starry night, dying, fall hereunder....

But she, she heeded not my cry impassioned

Nor turned her face of dread,

Urging the tired horse, with outreaching head,

O thou, cried I, who choosest for thy going

These bloomy meadows of youth, these flowery ways

Whereby no influence strays

Ruder than a cold wind blowing,

Or beating needles of rain,

Why must thou ride again

Ruthless among the pastures yet unripened,

Crushing their beauty in thine iron track

Downtrodden, ravish'd in thy following flame,

Parched and black?

But she, she stayed not in her weary haste

Nor turned her face; but fled:

And where she passed the lands lay waste....

And now I cannot tell whither she rideth:

But tired, tired rides she.

Yet know I well why her dread face she hideth:

She is pale and faint to death. Yea, her day faileth,

Nor all her blood, nor all her frenzy burning,

Nor all her hate availeth:

For she passeth out of sight

Into that night

From which none, none returneth

To waste the meadows of youth,

Nor vex thine eyelids, Routhe,

O sorrowful sister, soother of our sorrow.

And a hope within me springs

That fair will be the morrow,

And that charred plain,

Those flowery meadows, shall rejoice at last

In a sweet, clean

Freshness, as when the green

Grass springeth, where the prairie fire hath passed.

AFTER ACTION

All through that day of battle the broken sound

Of shattering Maxim fire made mad the wood;

So that the low trees shuddered where they stood,

And echoes bellowed in the bush around:

But when, at last the light of day was drowned,

That madness ceased.... Ah, God, but it was good!

There, in the reek of iodine and blood,

I flung me down upon the thorny ground.

So quiet was it, I might well have been lying

In a room I love, where the ivy cluster shakes

Its dew upon the lattice panes at even:

Where rusty ivory scatters from the dying

Jessamine blossom, and the musk-rose breaks

Her dusky bloom beneath a summer heaven.

SONNET

Not only for remembered loveliness,

England, my mother, my own, we hold thee rare

Who toil, and fight, and sicken beneath the glare

Of brazen skies that smile on our duress,

Making us crave thy cloudy state no less

Than the sweet clarity of thy rain-wash'd air,

Meadows in moonlight cool, and every fair

Slow-fading flower of thy summer dress:

Not for thy flowers, but for the unfading crown

Of sacrifice our happy brothers wove thee:

The joyous ones who laid thy beauty down

Nor stayed to see it shamed. For these we love thee,

For this (O love, O dread!) we hold thee more

Divinely fair to-day than heretofore.

A FAREWELL TO AFRICA

,, vspace:: 2

Now once again, upon the pole-star's bearing,

We plough these furrowed fields where no blade springeth;

Again the busy trade in the halyards singeth

Sun-whitened spindrift from the blown wave shearing;

The uncomplaining sea suffers our faring;

In a brazen glitter our little wake is lost,

And the starry south rolls over until no ghost

Remaineth of us and all our pitiful daring;

For the sea beareth no trace of man's endeavour,

His might enarmoured, his prosperous argosies,

Soundless, within her unsounded caves, forever

She broodeth, knowing neither war nor peace,

And our grey cruisers holds in mind no more

Than the cedarn fleets that Sheba's treasure bore.

SONG

What is the worth of war

In a world that turneth, turneth

About a tired star

Whose flaming centre burneth

No longer than the space

Of the spent atom's race:

Where conquered lands, soon, soon

Lie waste as the pale moon?

What is the worth of art

In a world that fast forgetteth

Those who have wrung its heart

With beauty that love begetteth,

Whose faint flames vanish quite

In that star-powdered night

Where even the mighty ones

Shine only as far suns?

And what is beauty worth,

Sweet beauty, that persuadeth

Of her immortal birth,

Then, as a flower, fadeth:

Or love, whose tender years

End with the mourner's tears,

Die, when the mourner's breath

Is quiet, at last, in death?

Beauty and love are one,

Even when fierce war clashes:

Even when our fiery sun

Hath burnt itself to ashes,

And the dead planets race

Unlighted through blind space,

Beauty will still shine there:

Wherefore, I worship her.

THE HAWTHORN SPRAY

I saw a thrush light on a hawthorn spray,

One moment only, spilling creamy blossom,

While the bough bent beneath her speckled bosom,

Bent, and recovered, and she fluttered away.

The branch was still; but, in my heart, a pain

Than the thorn'd spray more cruel, stabbed me, only

Remembering days in a far land and lonely

When I had never hoped for summer again.

THE PAVEMENT

In bitter London's heart of stone,

Under the lamplight's shielded glare.

I saw a soldier's body thrown

Unto the drabs that traffic there

Pacing the pavements with slow feet:

Those old pavements whose blown dust

Throttles the hot air of the street,

And the darkness smells of lust.

The chaste moon, with equal glance,

Looked down on the mad world, astare

At those who conquered in sad France

And those who perished in Leicester Square.

And in her light his lips were pale:

Lips that love had moulded well:

Out of the jaws of Passchendaele

They had sent him to this nether hell.

I had no stone of scorn to fling,

For I know not how the wrong began--

But I had seen a hateful thing

Masked in the dignity of man:

And hate and sorrow and hopeless anger

Swept my heart, as the winds that sweep

Angrily through the leafless hanger

When winter rises from the deep....

* * * * *

I would that war were what men dream:

A crackling fire, a cleansing flame,

That it might leap the space between

And lap up London and its shame.

To LYDIA LOPOKOVA

HER GARLAND

O thou who comest to our wintry shade

Gay and light-footed as the virgin Spring,

Before whose shining feet the cherries fling

Their moony tribute, when the sloe is sprayed

With light, and all things musical are made:

O thou who art Spring's daughter, who can bring

Blossom, or song of bird, or anything

To match the youth in which you stand arrayed?

Not that rich garland Meleager twined

In his sun-guarded glade above the blue

That flashes from the burning Tyrian seas:

No, you are cooler, sweeter than the wind

That wakes our woodlands; so I bring to you

These wind-blown blossoms of anemones.

HER VARIETY

Soft as a pale moth flitting in moonshine

I saw thee flutter to the shadowy call

That beckons from the strings of Carneval,

O frail and fragrant image of Columbine:

So, when the spectre of the rose was thine,

A flower wert thou, and last I saw thee fall

In Cleopatra's stormy bacchanal

Flown with the red insurgence of the vine.

O moth, O flower, O mænad, which art thou?

Shadowy, beautiful, or leaping wild

As stormlight over savage Tartar skies?

Such were my ancient questionings; but now

I know that you are nothing but a child

With a red flower's mouth and hazel eyes.

HER SWIFTNESS

You are too swift for poetry, too fleet

For any musèd numbers to ensnare:

Swifter than music dying on the air

Or bloom upon rose-petals, fades the sweet

Vanishing magic of your flying feet,

Your poisèd finger, and your shining hair:

Words cannot tell how wonderful you were,

Or how one gesture made a joy complete.

And since you know my pen may never capture

The transient swift loveliness of you,

Come, let us salve our sense of the world's loss

Remembering, with a melancholy rapture,

How many dancing-girls ... and poets too...

Dream in the dust of Hecatompylos.

GHOSTLY LOVES

'Oh why,' my darling prayeth me, 'must you sing

For ever of ghostly loves, phantasmal passion?

Seeing that you never loved me after that fashion

And the love I gave was not a phantom thing,

But delight of eager lips and strong arms folding

The beauty of yielding arms and of smooth shoulder,

All fluent grace of which you were the moulder:

And I.... Oh, I was happy for your holding.'

'Ah, do you not know, my dearest, have you not seen

The shadow that broodeth over things that perish:

How age may mock sweet moments that have been

And death defile the beauty that we cherish?

Wherefore, sweet spirit, I thank thee for thy giving:

'Tis my spirit that embraceth thee dead or living.'

FEBRUARY

The robin on my lawn,

He was the first to tell

How, in the frozen dawn,

This miracle befell,

Waking the meadows white

With hoar, the iron road

Agleam with splintered light,

And ice where water flowed:

Till, when the low sun drank

Those milky mists that cloak

Hanger and hollied bank,

The winter world awoke

To hear the feeble bleat

Of lambs on downland farms:

A blackbird whistled sweet;

Old beeches moved their arms

Into a mellow haze

Aerial, newly-born:

And I, alone, agaze,

Stood waiting for the thorn

To break in blossom white

Or burst in a green flame...

So, in a single night,

Fair February came,

Bidding my lips to sing

Or whisper their surprise,

With all the joy of spring

And morning in her eyes.

SONG OF THE DARK AGES

We digged our trenches on the down

Beside old barrows, and the wet

White chalk we shovelled from below;

It lay like drifts of thawing snow

On parados and parapet:

Until a pick neither struck flint

Nor split the yielding chalky soil,

But only calcined human bone:

Poor relic of that Age of Stone

Whose ossuary was our spoil.

Home we marched singing in the rain,

And all the while, beneath our song,

I mused how many springs should wane

And still our trenches scar the plain:

The monument of an old wrong.

But then, I thought, the fair green sod

Will wholly cover that white stain,

And soften, as it clothes the face

Of those old barrows, every trace

Of violence to the patient plain.

And careless people, passing by,

Will speak of both in casual tone:

Saying: 'You see the toil they made:

The age of iron, pick, and spade,

Here jostles with the Age of Stone.'

Yet either from that happier race

Will merit but a passing glance;

And they will leave us both alone:

Poor savages who wrought in stone--

Poor savages who fought in France.

WINTER SUNSET

Athwart the blackening bars of pines benighted,

The sun, descending to the zones of denser

Cloud that o'erhung the long horizon, lighted

Upon the crown of earth a flaming censer

From which white clouds of incense, overflowing,

Filled the chill clarity from whence the swallows

Had lately fled with wreathèd vapours, showing

Like a fine bloom over the lonely fallows:

Where, with the pungent breath of mist was blended

A faint aroma of pine-needles sodden

By autumn rains, and fainter still, ascended

Beneath high woods the scent of leaves downtrodden.

It was a moment when the earth, that sickened

For Spring, as lover when the beloved lingers,

Lay breathless, while the distant goddess quickened

Some southern hill-side with her glowing fingers:

And so, it seemed, the drowsy lands were shaken,

Stirred in their sleep, and sighed, as though the pain

Of a strange dream had bidden them awaken

To frozen days and bitter nights again.

SONG

Why have you stolen my delight

In all the golden shows of Spring

When every cherry-tree is white

And in the limes the thrushes sing,

O fickler than the April day,

O brighter than the golden broom,

O blyther than the thrushes' lay,

O whiter than the cherry-bloom,

O sweeter than all things that blow ...

Why have you only left for me

The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,

And thrushes in the linden-tree?

ENGLAND--APRIL, 1918

Last night the North flew at the throat of Spring

With spite to tear her greening banners down,

Tossing the elm-tree's tender tassels brown,

The virgin blossom of sloe burdening

With colder snow; beneath his frosty sting

Patient, the newly-wakened woods were bowed

By drownèd fields where stormy waters flowed:

Yet, on the thorn, I heard a blackbird sing....

'Too late, too late,' he sang, 'this wintry spite;

For molten snow will feed the springing grass:

The tide of life, it floweth with the year.'

O England, England, thou that standest upright

Against the tide of death, the bad days pass:

Know, by this miracle, that summer is near.

SLENDER THEMES

When, by a happier race, these leaves are turned,

They'll wonder that such quiet themes engaged

A soldier's mind when noisy wars were waged,

And half the world in one red bonfire burned.

'When that fierce age,' they'll say, 'went up in flame

He lived ... or died, seeing those bright deeds done

Whereby our sweet and settled peace was won,

Yet offereth slender dreams, not deeds, to Fame.'

Then say: 'Out of the heart the mouth speaketh,

And mine was as the hearts of other men

Whom those dark days impassioned; yet it seeketh

To paint the sombre woes that held us then,

No more than the cloud-rending levin's light

Seeks to illumine the sad skies of night.'

INVOCATION

Whither, O, my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?

For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,

And wait on thy appearing,

Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,

Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;

Alas! her presence lingers

No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;--

Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed

By a strange unworldly rest,

Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.

Yet when their secret chambers I essayed

My spirit sank, dismayed,

Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

Once indeed--but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture--

I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes:

So, suddenly made wise,

Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....

Whither, O, divine mistress, must I then follow thee?

Is it only in love ... say, is it only in death

That the spirit blossometh,

And words that may match my vision shall come to me?

THAMAR

(To Thamar Karsavina)

Once in the sombre light of the throng'd courts of night,

In a dream-haunted land only inhabited

By the unhappy dead, came one who, anxious eyed,

Clung to my idle hand with clenched fingers weak

And gazed into my eyes as he had wrongs to speak.

Silent he stood and wan, more pallid than the leaves

Of an aspen blown under a wind that grieves.

Then I: 'O haggard one, say from what ghostly zone

Of thwarted destinies or torment hast thou come?

Tell me thy race and name!' And he, with veiled face:

'I have neither name nor race, but I have travelled far,

A timeless avatar of never-ending dooms,

Out of those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star

In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar...

Once in a lonely dawn my eager spirit fared

By ways that no men dared unto a desert land,

Where, on a sullen strand, a mouldering city, vast

As towered Babylon, stood in the dreamy sand--

Older a million years: Babel was builded on

That broken city's tears; dust of her crumbled past

Rose from the rapid wheels of Babel's charioteers

In whorled clouds above those shining thoroughfares

Where Babel's millions tread on her unheeding dead.

Forth from an eastern gate where the lips of Asia wait

Parch'd with an ancient thirst that no æons can abate,

Passed I, predestinate, to a thorn'd desert's drought,

Where the rivers of the south, flowing in a cloudy spate,

Spend at last their splendid strength in a sea of molten glass

Seething with the brazen might of a white sun dipped at length

Like a baked stone, burning hot, plunged in a hissing pot.

Out of that solemn portal over the tawny waste,

Without stay, without haste, nor the joy of any mortal

Glance of eye or clasp of hand, desolate, in a burning land,

Lonely days and nights I travelled and the changing seasons squandered

Friendless, endlessly, I wandered nor my woven fate unravelled;

Drawn to a hidden goal, sore, forlorn with waiting,

Seeking I knew not what, yet unhesitating

Struggled my hapless soul...

There, in a thousand springs,

Slow, beneath frozen snow, where the blind earth lay cringing,

Have I seen the steppe unfold uncounted blossomings,

Where salty pools shone fair in a quivering blue air

That shivered every fringing reed-bed with cool delight,

And fanned the mazy flight of slow-wing'd egrets white

Beating and wheeling bright against the sun astare;

But I could not hear their wings for they were ghostly things

Sent by the powers of night to mock my sufferings

And rain upon the bitter waterpools their drops aglitter.

Yet, when these lakes accursed tortured my aching thirst,

The green reeds fell to dust, the cool pools to a crust

Of frozen salt crystallised to taunt my broken lips,

To cheat my staring eyes, as a vision of great ships

With moving towers of sail, poops throng'd with grinning crowds

And a wind in their shrouds, bears down upon the pale

Wasted castaway afloat with the salt in his throat

And a feeble wild desire to be quenched of his fire

In the green gloom beneath.

So, again and again,

Hath a phantom city thrust to the visionary vault

Of inviolate cobalt, dome and dreaming minaret

Mosque and gleaming water-tower hazy in a fountain's jet

Or a market's rising dust; and my lips have cried aloud

To see them tremble there, though I knew within my heart

They were chiselled out of cloud or carven of thin air;

And my fingers clenched my hand, for I wondered if this land

Of my stony pilgrimage were a glimmering mirage,

And I myself no more than a phantom of the sand.

'But beyond these fading slender cities, many leagues away,

Strange brooding mountains lay heaped, crowding range on range

In a changing cloudy splendour; and beyond, in lakes of light,

As eastward still I staggered, there swam into my sight,

More vast and hoar and haggard, shoulders of ice and snow

Bounding the heavens low of burnished brass, whereunder

The hot plains of Cathay perpetually slumber:

Where tawny millions breed in cities without number,

Whither, a hill-born thunder, rolling on Tartary

With torrents and barb'd lightning, swelleth the yellow river

To a tumult of whitening foam and confusèd might

That drowns in a single night many a mud-made city;

And cities of boats, and frail cities of lath and reed,

Are whirled away without pity or set afloat in a pale,

Swirling, shallow sea ... and their names seem lost for ever

Till a stranger nomad race drive their herds to the sad place

Where old sorrows lie forgotten, and raise upon the rotten

Level waste another brood to await another flood.

'But I never might attain to this melancholy plain

For the mountains rose between; stark in my path they lay

Between me and Cathay, through moving mist half-seen.

And I knew that they were real, for their drooping folds of cloud

Enwrapped me in a shroud, and the air that fell at night

From their frozen summits white slid like an ice-blue steel

Into my living breast and stilled the heart within

As the chill of an old sin that robs a man of rest,

Killing all delight in the silence of the night

And brooding black above till the heart dare not move

But lieth cold and numb ... and the dawn will not come.

'Yet to me a dawn came, new-kindled in cold flame,

Flinging the imminence of those inviolate snows

On the forest lawns below in a shadow more immense

Than their eternal vastness; and a new hope beyond reason,

Flamed in my heart's dark season, dazzled my pallid eyes,

Till, when the hot sun soared above the uttermost height,

A draught of keen delight into my body was poured,

For all that frozen fastness lay flowered with the spring:

Her starry blossoms broke beneath my bruisèd feet,

And their beauty was so sweet to me I kissed them where they lay;

Yea, I bent my weary hips and kissed them with dry lips,

Tenderly, only dreading lest their petals delicate

Should be broken by my treading, for I lived, I lived again,

And my heart would have been broken by a living creature's pain,

So I kissed them for a token of my joy in their new birth,

And I kissed the gentle earth. Slowly the shadows crept

To the bases of the crags, and I slept....

'Once, in another life, had I remembered sleep,

When tired children creep on to their mother's knees,

And there a dreamless peace more quietly descendeth

Than gentle evening endeth or ring-doves fold their wings,

Before the nightjar spins or the nightingale begins;

When the brooding hedgerow trees where they nest lie awake

And breathe so soft they shake not a single shuddering leaf

Lest the silence should break.

'Other sleep have I known,

Deeper, beyond belief, when straining limbs relax

After hot human toil in yellow harvest fields

Where the panting earth yields a smell of baked soil,

And the dust of dry stubbles blows over the whitening

Shocks of lank grain and bundles of flax,

And men fling themselves down forgetting their troubles,

Unheedful of the song that the landrail weaves along

Misty woodlands, or lightning that the pale sky laves

Like phosphorescent waves washing summer seas:

And, more beautiful than these, that sleep of dazèd wonder

When love has torn asunder the veils of the sky

And raptured lovers lie faint in each other's arms

Beneath a heaven strewn with myriad starry swarms,

Where planets float like lonely gold-flowered nenuphars

In pools of the sky; yet, when they wake, they turn

From those burning galaxies seeking heaven only

In each other's eyes, and sigh, and sleep again;

For while they sleep they seem to forget the world's pain,

And when they wake, they dream....

'But other sleep was mine

As I had drunk of wine with bitter hemlock steep'd,

Or sousèd with the heapèd milky poppyheads

A drowsy Tartar treads where slow waters sweep

Over red river beds, and the air is heavy with sleep.

So, when I woke at last, the labouring earth had rolled

Eastward under the vast dominion of night,

Funereal, forlorn as that unlighted chamber

Wherein she first was born, bereft of all starlight,

Pale silver of the moon, or the low sun's amber.

'Then to my queen I prayed, grave Ashtoreth, whose shade

Hallows the dim abyss of Heliopolis,

Where many an olive maid clashed kissing Syrian cymbals,

And silver-sounding timbrels shivered through the vale.

O lovely, and O white, under the holy night

Is their gleaming wonder, and their brows are pale

As the new risen moon, dancing till they swoon

In far forests under desolate Lebanon,

While the flame of Moloch's pyre reddens the sea-born cloud

That overshadows Tyre; so, when I cried aloud,

Behold, a torch of fire leapt on the mountain-side!

'O bright, O beautiful! for never kindlier light

Fell on the darkened sight of mortal eyes and dull

Since that devoted one, whom gloomy Caucasus

In icy silence lonely bound to his cruel shoulders,

Brought to benighted men in a hollow fennel-stem

Sparks of the torrid vapour that burned behind the bars

Of evening, broke dawn's rose, or smouldered in the stars,

Or lit the glowworm's taper, or wavered over the fen,

Or tipped the javelin of the far-ravening levin,

Lash of the Lord of Heaven and bitter scourge of sin.

O beautiful, O bright! my tired sinews strained

To this torch that flared and waned as a watery planet gloweth

And waneth in the night when a calm sea floweth

Under a misty sky spread with the tattered veils

Of rapid cloud driven over the deeps of heaven

By winds that range too high to sweep the languid sails.

On through the frozen night, like a blind moth flying

With battered wing and bruisèd bloom into a light,

I dragged my ragged limbs, cared not if I were dying,

Knew not if I were dead, where cavernous crevasses,

And stony desperate passes snared, waylaid my tread:

In the roar of broken boulders split from rocky shoulders,

In the thunder of snow sliding, or under the appalling

Rending of glacier ice or hoarse cataracts falling:

And I knew not what could save me but the unholy guiding

That some demon gave me. Thrice I fell, and thrice

In torrents of blue ice-water slipp'd and was toss'd

Like a dead leaf, or a ghost

Harried by thin bufferings of wind

Downward to Tartarus at daybreak,

Downward to the regions of the lost....

But the rushing waters ceased, and the bitter wind fell:

How I cannot tell, unless that I had come

To the hollow heart of the storm where the wind is dumb;

And there my gelid blood thawed, glowed, and grew warm,

While a black-hooded form caught at my arm, and stayed

And held me as I swayed, until, at last, I saw

In a strange unworldly awe, at the gate of light I stood:

And I entered, alone....

'Behold a cavern of stone carven, and in the midst

A brazier that hissed with tongued flames, leaping

Over whitened embers of gummy frankincense,

Into a fume of dense and fragrant vapour, creeping

Over the roof to spread a milky coverlet

Softer than the woof of webby spider's net.

But never spider yet spun a more delicate wonder

Than that which hung thereunder, drooping fold on fold,

Silks that glowed with fire of tawny Oxus gold,

Richer than ever flowed from the eager fancy of man

In his vain desire for beauty that endures:

And on the floor were spread by many a heaped daiwan

Carpets of Kurdistan, cured skins, and water-ewers

Encrusted with such gems as emperors of Hind

(Swart conquerors, long dead) sought for their diadems.

No other light was there but one torch, flaring

Against a square of sky possess'd by the wind,

And never another sound but the tongued flames creeping.

'At last, my eyes staring into the clouded gloom,

Saw that the caverned room with shadowy forms was strewn

In heavy sleep or swoon fallen, who did not move

But lay as mortals lie in the sweet release of love.

And stark between them stood huge eunuchs of ebony,

Mute, motionless, as they had been carven of black wood.

But these I scarcely saw, for, through the flame was seen

Another, a queen, with heavy closèd eyes

White against the skies of that empurpled night

In her loveliness she lay, and leaned upon her hand:

And my blood leapt at the sight, so that I could not stand

But fell upon my knees, pleading, and cried aloud

For her white loveliness as Ixion for his cloud:

And my cry the silence broke, and the sleepers awoke

From their slumber, stirred, and rose every one,--save those

Mute eunuchs of ebony, those frowning caryatides.

Slowly she looked at me, and when I cried again

In yearning and in pain, she beckoned with her hand.

Then from my knees rose I, and greatly daring,

Through the hazy air, past the brazier flaring

And the hissing flame, crept, until I came

Unto the carven seat, and kissed her white feet;

And she smiled, but spake not.

When she smiled the sleepers wavered as the grass

Of a cornfield wavers when the ears are swept

By the breath of brown reapers singing as they pass,

Or grass of woody glades when a wind that has slept

Wakens, and invades their moonlit solitude,

When the hazels shiver and the birch is blown

To a billow of silver, but oaks in the wood

Stand firm nor quiver, stand firm as stone:

So, amid the sleepers, the black eunuchs stood.

When the sleepers stirred faintly in the heat

Of that painted room a silken sound I heard,

And a thin music, sweet as the brown nightingale

Sings in the jealous shade of a lonely spinney,

Stranger far than any music mortal made

Fell softer than the dew falleth when stars are pale.

Sweet it was, and clear as light, or as the tears

That sad Narcissus wears in the spring of the year

On barren mountain ranges where rain falls cool

And every lonely pool is sprayed with broken light:

So cool, so beautiful, and so divinely strange

I doubted if it came from any marshy reed

Or hollow fluting stem pluck'd by the hands of men,

Unless it were indeed that airy fugitive

Syrinx, who cried and ran before the laughing eyes

Of goat-footed Pan, and must for ever live

A shadowy green reed by an Arcadian river--

But never music made of Ladon's reedy daughter

Or singing river-water more sweet than that which stole,

Slow as amber honey wells from the honeycomb,

Into my weary soul with solace and strange peace.

So, trembling as I lay in a dream more desolate

Than is the darkened day of the mid-winter north,

I heard the voice of one who sang in a strange tongue,

And I know not what he sang save that he sang of love,

The while they led me forth unheeding, till we came

Unto a chamber lit with one slow-burning flame

That yellow horn bedims, and laid me down, and there

They soothed my bruised limbs, and combed my tangled hair,

And salved my limbs with rarely-mingled unguents pressed

By hands of holy ones who dream beneath the suns

Of Araby the Blest, and so, when they had bathed

My burning eyes with milk of dreamy anodyne

And cool'd my throat with wine,

In robings of cool silk my broken body they swathed,

Sandals of gold they placed upon my feet, and round

My sad sun-blistered brows a silver fillet bound--

Decking me with the pride of a bridegroom that goes

To the joy of his bride and is lovely in her eyes--

And led me to her side. Then, as a conquering prince,

I, who long since had been battered and tost

Like a dead leaf or ghost buffeted by wild storms,

Came to her white arms, conquering, and was lost,

Yet dared not gaze upon the beauty that I dreamed.

So, in my trance, it seemed that a shadowy soft dance

Coiled slowly and unwound, swayed, beckoned, and recovered

As hooded cobra bound by hollow spells of sound

Unto the piper sways; so silently they hovered

I only heard the beat of their naked feet,

And then, another sound....

A dull throb thrumming, a noise of faint drumming,

Threatening, coming nearer, piercing deeper

Than a dream lost in the heart of a sleeper

Into those deeps where the dark fire gloweth,

The secret flame that every man knoweth,

Embers that smoulder, fires that none can fan,

Terrible, older than the mind of man....

Before he crawled from his swamp and spurned

The life of the beast that dark fire burned

In the hidden deeps where no dream can come:

Only the throbbing of a drum

Can wake it from its smouldering--

Sightless, soundless, senseless, dumb--

Dumb as those blind seeds that lie

Drown'd in mud, and shuddering,

I knew that I was man no more,

But a throbbing core of flesh, that knew

Nor beauty, nor truth, nor anything

But the black sky and the slimy earth:

Roots of trees, and fear, and pain,

The blank of death, the pangs of birth,

An inhuman thing possess'd

By the throbbing of a drum:

And my lips were strange and numb,

But they kissed her white breast....

Then, being drunk with pride and splendour of love, I cried:

'"O spring of all delight, O moonèd mystery,

O living marvel, white as the dead queen of night,

O flower, and O flame ... tell me at least thy name

That, from this desolate height, I may proclaim its wonder

To the lost lands hereunder before thy beauty dies

As fades the fire of dawn upon a peak of snow!"'

Then: "Look," she sighed, "into my eyes, and thou shalt know."

So, with her fingers frail, she pressed my brows, and so,

Slowly, at last, she raised my drooping eyelids pale,

And in her eyes I gazed.

'Then fear, than love more blind,

Caught at my heart and fast in chains of horror bound--

As one who in profound and midnight forest ways

Sees in the dark the burning eyes of a tiger barred

Or stealthy footed pard blaze in a solemn hate

And lust of human blood, yet cannot cry, nor turning

Flee from the huddled wood, but stands and sees his fate,

Or one who in a black night, groping for his track,

Clings to the dizzy verge of a cragged precipice,

Shrinks from the dim abyss, yet dare not venture back,

And no sound hears but the hiss of empty air

Swirling past his ears.... So, in a hideous

Abandonment of hope, I waited for her kiss.

Then the restless beat of the muttering drum

Rose to a frenzied heat; the naked dancers leapt

Insolent through the flame, laughing as they came

With parted lips; their cries deadened my ears, my eyes

Throbbed with the pattering of their rapid feet,

And the whirling dust of their dancing swept

Into my throat unslaked, dry-parchèd with love's drought,

Until my mouth was pressed upon her burning mouth

In a kiss most terrible.... Oh, was it pride, or shame

Unending, without name, or ecstasy, or pain

Or desperate desire? Alas! I cannot tell,

Save that it pierced my trembling soul and body with fire.

For, while her soft lips clove to mine in love, she drove

A flaming blade of steel into my breast, and I,

Rent with a bitter cry, slid from her side and fell

Clutching in dumb despair the dark unbraided hair

My passion had despoiled; while she, like serpent coiled,

Poised for another stroke, terribly, slowly, smiled,

Saying: "O stranger, red, red are my lips, and sweet

Unto those lips so red are the kisses of the dead:

Far hast thou wandered, far, for the kisses of Thamar."

Then a deep silence fell on the frenzy and the laughter;

The leaping dancers crept to the shadows where they had slept,

And the mute eunuchs stood forth, and hugely bent

Above my body, spent in its pool of blood,

And hove me with black arms, while the queen followed after

With stealthy steps, and eyes that burned into the night

Of my dying brain, till, with her hand, she bade

Them falter, and they stayed, while, eagerly, she propped

My listless head that dropped downward from my shoulders,

And slowly raised it up, raised it like a cup

Unto her lips again,

Then shuddered, trembled, shrunk, as though her mouth had drunk

A potion where the fell fire of poison smoulders.

And a darkness came, and I could see no more,

But in my ears the roar of lonely torrents swelled

And stilled my breath for ever, as though a wave appalling

Had broken in my brain, and deep to deep were calling:

And I felt my body falling down and down and down

Into a blank of death, where dumb waters roll

Endlessly, only knowing, that her dagger had stabbed my breast,

But her kiss had killed my soul.

And now I know no rest until again I stand

Where that lost city's towers rise from the dreamy sand,

Until I reach the gate where the lips of Asia wait,

Till I cross the desert's drought, and the rivers of the south,

And shiver through the night under those summits white

That soar above Cathay; until I see the light

Flame from those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star

In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar.'

ENVOI

Now that the hour has come, and under the lonely

Darkness I stumble at the doors of death,

It is not hope, nor faith

That here my spirit sustaineth, but love only.

In visions, in love: only there have I clutched at divinity:

But the vision fadeth; yet love fades not: and for this

I would have you know that your kiss

Was more to me than all my hopes of infinity.

Therein you made me divine ... you, who were moon and sun for me,

You, for whose beauty I would have forsaken the splendour of the stars

And my shadowy avatars

Renounced: for there is nothing in the world you have not done for me.

So that when at length all sentient skill hath forsaken me,

And the bright world beats vainly on my consciousness,

Your beauty shineth no less:

And even if I were dead I think your shadow would awaken me.

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