Collected Poems (28 page)

I cannot see by what integrity

High Heaven annihilated so his efforts!

Unless there be no heaven — and that I’ll grant

Sooner than that his vision’s fate was just! …

A vision’s own validity and worth

Has no transmuting power to turn it facts;

And, even turned, with all the needed aid

Of accident combined with dominant will,

Its best escapes: its second best may live

And for a dubious cycle shed its lustre.

But his was buttressed by all things save chance,

And there’s no tatter left, no single gleam.

What hope for this wrong world if such things be?

What are so hemmed by horror, pressed by darkness,

That there’s no lighted calm where we may pause

And see our evil destinies in bulk —

Bathed in an awful loveliness, perhaps,

And part of some transcending glimpsed coherence.

There is no certain thing I can lay hold on

And say, “This, this is good! This will I worship!”

Except my father. For he intended like

A god: or, since I see no signs of gods,

If some day earth shall house divinities

In guise of men, or in some guise I guess not,

They shall be minded, willed, and souled like him.

And so despite life’s infamy and failure

I thank whatever may be thanked that I

Was heaved up from the insentient void and saw

In him divinity, though marred and baffled.

It seems now nothing else in life was worth

The seeing. What the crop is of his sowing

I am not seer enough to speculate:

I only know the grain was golden and

The earth is culpable if there’s no harvest.…

Darkness; darkness; and for me no hope

Of any light, unless there be some place

For tarrying, where he will tarry for me.

Now let me kneel, old man, and clasp your knees

And bend my head the way I learned when little,

And you will bless me through your falling tears.…

Ah, you and I are all that now remain

Of his heart’s Kingdom, so we must keep worthy.…

Go now, Berard. The waiting’s empty, but

The end is sure, and we have much to dream on.

This wind upon my mouth, these stars I see
,

The breathing of the night above the trees
,

Not these nor anything my senses touch

Are real to me or worth the boon of breath.

But all the never-heard, the never-seen
,

The just-beyond my hands can never reach
,

These have a substance that is stout and sure
,

These brace the unsubstantial sliding world
,

And lend the evanescent actual

An air of life, a tint of worth and meaning
.

Shall dust, fortuitously blown into

A curve of moon or leaf or throat or petal

And seeding back to vacancy and dust
,

Content my soul with its illiterate

And lapsing loveliness? Or tired knowledge

Make credible the hard decree of living?

Oh, I have heard a golden trumpet blowing

Under the night. Another warmth than blood

Has coursed, though briefly, through my intricate veins
.

Some sky is in my breast where swings a hawk

Intemperate for immortalities

And unpersuaded by the show of death
.

I am content with that I cannot prove
.

Rejoice, my heart, that the stars do not comprehend you,

That they march on their mighty courses, serene and terrible,

Unvexed by your sorrow, untarnished by your desires.

You may spread your pain like a purple cloth before them

And their silver and golden feet will brush it lightly

As they brush the cloths of the grass which is more beautiful.

You may cry aloud to them your dolor and desolation,

And though your cry were intolerable and keen as Israfel’s,

They will not heed it, high-hearted in the roar of ebbing chaos.

Even your self-pity, shining like a gift and shameless,

You may bring them without evil, for they, they only of your comrades,

Resist the infection of sorrow, the contagion of tears.

Quietly, silently passing, at twilight, when streets are crowded,

Ah, the faces I see, the sad beautiful faces of men,

With the haze of their dream or their love or their sorrow tenderly on them,

With the charmed wistful shadows and hollows on cheek and temple,

Strangers to me, passing from dark into dark, unreturning!

Would I could lay on their twilight lids the kiss of peace,

But they pass, and I can only call after them “Brother, brother.”

                         
1.
THE BREEZE

This night of air like warm finger-tips touching

Sleepily my cheek or asleep in my shoulder’s hollow,

I remember the kisses they gave me in tenderness or passion,

Never in love, the ones they could spare me, forgetful,

And I am thankful for each, regretting nothing,

Only wishing they lay on my mouth again

To-night when the moist buds are uncrinkling in starlight

And the air is touching my cheek like finger-tips warm and sleepy.

                         
2.
THE MOCKING-BIRDS

All night they wake and sing on the cold branches,

Sometimes a mere cadenza of delight, a phrase,

Or hours long of glittering bravado.

The silver-breasted stars in their long swarming,

Endlessly migratory, lighting never

Spring after spring, float over them unheeding;

Under the eaves, in the cautious green of the myrtle

No lover-bird rouses from sleep to listen:

All but the singers sleep, and the dark is deaf.

Nights when the jonquils bloom and the April iris

They wake and sing their cold rash ecstasy

To their own hearts, girded with terrors and lonely —

And I in the spring night listening blush for a coward.

                         
3.
THE RAIN

The rain has come and gone, and the night is breathing:

There is humble joy in the little things that grow,

The slow trees meditate and burgeon,

Far off the tiny frogs are happy in chorus,

The last rain-drops tap like fairy hammers,

Slowly the air sweetens with stealthy perfume.

So it will always be when the night is April:

Sorrow is never strong and tears are ended;

Only the heart is untranquil, that soon will sleep.

I whisper to my heart words of courage

And it hears and arises and fares on again —

Not like a soldier striding to battle,

But like a pilgrim old and weary.

I say to my heart very softly and tenderly:

“Truly the shrine that we sought is a sepulchre,

But holy, perhaps, as we have been told.

It is ignoble that we, you and I,

Should sit in the dust of the roadside and weep.

We have seen stars and sunsets,

We have heard birds and thunder,

Many have been the travellers,

We have had noble companions.

Perhaps again (but the end is soon)

We will see, and hear, and hold lofty converse.

But even alone, in darkness and silence,

Remember we haughtily draw

The ice-silver of pride from far sources:

We come not of weaklings and weepers.

And there is no weakness to conquer

Till strength is taken away.

We are strengthless, unweaponed, but we will go on.”

Endure, my heart, endure: that is the ultimate courage.

So much is taken, and the rest seems better gone;

And in the hurly of the dissolute and dreadful world

Little remains of fair and wise, of just and simple.

Break but the shackles and the quailing sound is heard

Of anchor chains that break. The harbors of the past,

Silted, have grown too shallow for our deepening keels,

Or we have lost the star that guided to their entrance.

Nothing is compass to our destinies, unless

The very fortitude of that cursed mariner

Who knows no port but death, yet fights the sail and sweats

And holds the rudder true, be of itself a chart

To guide at last his haggard bark, amazedly,

Beneath the samite wall of some moon-vestured town

Where towers stand, more tranquil than somnambulists.

Be brother to the mighty mariners, my heart:

So stoutly sail that there should be a silver port.

Sickened and soiled, with all the lustre gone,

I have come back to the hill-top by the sea

And find it beautiful still, and so I know

Not all of me is dead. This too I know:

For me the god is here, in loneliness,

With an empty sea below, ribboned with wind,

And a sunlight, grave and pure, in the olive trees —

Here, and not down in the smoking jungles of men.

Let me remain, O doomed brief body of mine,

Itching for love, faithless to me you hold,

Crying out to cup the dark head of a lover

In the curve of your arm. It is late, late, and the light

Has gone from your throat, the honey-scent from your hair.

Let us remain till the long night finds us here.

A moon will come, parting the olive branches,

And lay on your breast, in the curve of your quiet arm,

A wreath of light, tender as no dark head.

But I, while yet your lids with my tears are shining,

I will steal down without you, among the shadows,

And come to the sea and pause. May the god be waiting.

Not to be naming you in all my prayers

Has made me prayerless, pagan, atheist;

Not to be knowing I am of your cares

Has loosed a ghost with eyes of amethyst

Into the regal day. The only thread,

Now broke, that bounden me to life was you,

So I am free now to consort with dead

Invisible lovers in their hushed purlieu.

O I am free now to regard the rise

From ocean of the round and rosy moon,

Muse on her narrow length of dragon dyes

Like Clytemnestra’s carpet — Take the boon!

I saw as much last night, with you away:

The moon was only round, the ocean gray.

Here life pays peace and ecstasy for tithe:

The dissonant trumpets of the world are mute

And God is but an old man with a scythe

And love the faltering fancy of a flute.

To lie with kissing lashes and confuse

The silver olives and the golden sun,

To sort the greens and purples from the blues

When the lean racers of the south wind run,

Rounding abreast the bulging Apennine,

And burst upon the clapping bay — ah, these

Are all the drudgeries of this demesne

Whose boundary is music and the sea’s.

Ye starved and hurt, ye hives of busy ghosts,

Would I could lend your ills this sea, these coasts.

Where through the olive trees I see bright shawls

And bathers laughing in the beryl bay,

Lovers more bold for tilted parasols

And waters summery and cerulean, lay

The hoarse and sweating legionnaires of Rome

Breaking their march. When they had marched their last,

Algerian pirates made of this their home

And heckled Genoa from here, and passed.

In some pale after-day of Arctic fear

When all the glittering tribes of us have thinned,

One of our last, perhaps, will wander here

Beneath the sockets of the stars and wind,

And facing seawards in the thickening night

Pray the old prayer to the last god “More light!”

Portofino.

Beloved and alien, gaze with me on the sea:

It kneels before the moon whose crimson blade

Rests on its million shoulders. But for me

The image of that lunar accolade

Is not the one your eyes bring in to you:

It varies by the flinching of a wave,

A widening iris, or a lens more true —

Or, if identical, the fact how prove?

If thus the tangible we may not share,

How hope the gorgeous fabrics of the soul

To spread before each other, or how dare

Another’s undecipherable scroll

To con? Even in love we must confess

No understanding and great loneliness.