Complete Poems
Page 8
You sink a shaft below
Despair and see the roots of death close-curled
About the kernel of your world.
Where is the invaluable star
Whose beams enlacèd are
The scaffolding of truth, whose stages drawn
Aside unshutter an ideal dawn?
It is well hid. You would not find
It there, though far you mined
Up through the golden seams that cram the night
And walked those galleries of light.
Above, below, the Flux tight-packed
Stages its sexual act –
An ignominious scuffling in the dark
Where brute encounters brute baresark.
Keep to the pithead, then, nor pry
Beyond what meets the eye,
Since household stuff, stone walls, mountains and trees
Placard the day with certainties.
For individual truth must lie11
Within diversity;
Under the skin all creatures are one race,
Proved integers but by their face.
So he, who learns to comprehend
The form of things, will find
They in his eye that purest star have sown
And changed his mind to singular stone.
26
Chiefly to mind appears
That hour on Silverhowe
When evening’s lid hung low
And the sky was about our ears.
Buoyed between fear and love12
We watched in eastward form
The armadas of the storm
And sail superbly above;
So near, they’d split and founder
On the least jag of sense,
One false spark fire the immense
Broadside the confounding thunder.
They pass, give not a salvo,
And in their rainy wash
We hear the horizons crash
With monitors of woe.
Only at highest power
Can love and fear become
Their equilibrium,
And in that eminent hour
A virtue is made plain
Of passionate cleavage
Like the hills’ cutting edge
When the sun sets to rain.
This is the single mind,
This the star-solved equation
Of life with life’s negation.
A deathless cell designed
To demonstrate death’s act,
Which, the more surely it moves
To earth’s influence, but proves
Itself the more intact.
27
With me, my lover makes
The clock assert its chime:
But when she goes, she takes
The mainspring out of time.
Yet this time-wrecking charm
Were better than love dead
And its hollow alarum
Hammered out on lead.
Why should I fear that Time
Will superannuate
These workmen of my rhyme –
Love, despair and hate?
Fleeing the herd, I came
To a graveyard on a hill,
And felt its mould proclaim
The bone gregarious still.
Boredoms and agonies
Work out the rhythm of bone: –
No peace till creature his
Creator has outgrown.
Passion dies from the heart
But to infect the marrow;
Holds dream and act apart
Till the man discard his narrow
Sapience and folly
Here, where the graves slumber
In a green melancholy
Of overblown summer.
Part IV
‘The hatches are let down13
And the night meets the day
The spirit comes to its own
The beast to its play.’14
W. H. AUDEN.
28
In the beginning was the Word.
Under different skies now, I recall
The childhood of the Word.
Before the Fall,
Was dancing on the green with sun and moon:
And the Word was with God.
Years pass, relaxed in a faun’s afternoon.
And the Word was God.
For him rise up the litanies of leaves
From the tormented wood, and semi-breves
Of birds accompany the simple dawn.
Obsequious to his mood the valleys yawn,
Nymphs scamper or succumb, waterfalls part
The hill-face with vivacious smiles. The heart,
Propped up against its paradise, records
Each wave of godhead in a sea of words.
He grows a wall of sunflower and moonflower blent
To protest his solitude and to prevent
Wolf or worm from trespassing on his rule.
Observe how paradise can make a fool:
They can’t get in; but he – for a god no doubt
Is bound by his own laws – cannot get out.
And the Word was made flesh,
Under different skies now,
Wrenching a stony song from a scant acre,
The Word still justifies its Maker.
Green fields were my slippers,
Sky was my hat,
But curiosity
Killed the cat.
For this did I burst
My daisy band –
To be clapped in irons
By a strange hand?
Nevertheless, you are well out of Eden:
For there’s no wonder where all things are new;
No dream where all is sleep; no vision where
Seer and seen are one; nor prophecy
Where only echo waits upon the tongue.
Now he has come to a country of stone walls,
Breathes a precarious air.
Frontiers of adamant declare
A cold autonomy. There echo starves;
And the mountain ash bleeds stoically there
Above the muscular stream.
What cairn will show the way he went?
A harrow rusting on defeated bones?
Or will he leave a luckier testament –
Rock deeply rent,
Fountains of spring playing upon the air?
29
Those Himalayas of the mind
Are not so easily possessed:
There’s more than precipice and storm
Between you and your Everest.
You who declare the peak of peaks
Alone will satisfy your want,
Can you distil a grain of snow?
Can you digest an adamant?
Better by far the household cock
Scratching the common yard for corn,
Whose rainy voice all night at will
Can signify a private dawn.
Another bird, sagacious too,
Circles in plain bewilderment
Where shoulder to shoulder long waves march
Towards a magnetic continent.
‘What are these rocks impede our pomp?’
Gesticulating to the sun
The waves part ranks, sidle and fume,
Then close behind them and march on.
The waves advance, the Absolute Cliffs
Unaccountably repel:
They linger grovelling; where assault
Has failed, attrition may tell.
The bird sees nothing to the point;
Shrugs an indifferent wing; proceeds
From rock to rock in the mid-ocean
Peering for barnacles and weeds.
30
In the chaotic age
This was enough for me –
Her beauty walked the page
And it was poetry.
Now that the crust has cooled,
The floods are kept in pen,
Mountain
s have got their mould
And air its regimen.
Nothing of heat remains
But where the sacred hill
Conserves within her veins
The fiery principle.
Fire can no longer shake
Stars from their sockets down;
It burns now but to make
Vain motions above the town.15
This glum canal, has lain16
Opaque night after night,
One hour will entertain
A jubilee of light,
And show that beauty is
A motion of the mind
By its own dark caprice
Directed or confined.
31
Where is the fool would want those days again
Whose light was globed in pain
And danced upon a point of wire?
When the charged batteries of desire
Had licence but to pass
Into a narrow room of frosted glass?
The globe was broken and the light made free
Of a king’s territory.
Artemis then, the huntress pale,
Flung her black dogs upon the trail:
So with one glance around
The hunted lightning ran and went to ground.
Safer perhaps within that cell to stay
Which qualified its ray
And gave it place and period,
Than be at liberty where God
Has put no firmament
Of glass to prove dark and light different.
But Artemis leaps down. At her thin back
Wheel the shades in a pack.
At once that old habit of fire
Jumps out, not stopping to inquire
Whether it follows or flies,
Content to use the night for exercise.
And I, when at the sporting queen’s halloo
The light obedient flew
Blazing its trail across the wild –
Resigned now but not reconciled,
That ancient Sphinx I saw17
Put moon and shades like mice beneath its paw.
32
The red nor-easter is out:
Trees in the covert strain
Like dogs upon a leash
And snuff the hurricane.
Another wind and tree now
Are constant to their west:
The breath that scours the midday
Unseen, is manifest
In this embittered thorn –
Forcing the stubborn frame
To grow one way and point
His constancy and aim.
This wind that fills the hollow
Sky, of a vacuum
Was purely bred. The thorn once
In modest seed lay mum
That squats above the Atlantic
Promontoried on pride.
For my tenacious tree
Requires not, to decide
That he has roots somewhere,
A tropic foliage;
Since that the leaf recurs
Is a sufficient gauge.
Again, what of this glass
Whereby the formulæ
Of sense should all be solved?
It cannot enlarge a flea
Nor accurately define
The features of a star.
Gazing through it I saw
Nothing particular
Distant or close. A summer
Accident it was
Explained its property.
It is a burning-glass
Which interrupts the sun
To make him more intense,
And touch to a single flame
The various heap of sense.
33
Seventeen months ago
We came to the mine on the moor. A crow
Sees more than meets the eye –
What marrow in fleshless bones may lie.
And now I passed by a forbidding coast
Where ironworks rust
On each headland: goats crop the salted grass:
Steam oozes out of the mud. Earth has
No promise for proprietors. I from far
Came, and passing saw something oracular.
Put down the tripod here.
I stretched a line from pole to pole
To hang my paper lanterns on. Poor soul,
By such a metaphysical conceit
Thinking to make ends meet!
This line, spun from the blind heart –
What could it do but prove the poles apart?
More expert now, I twist the dials, catch
Electric hints, curt omens such
As may be heard by one tapping the air
That belts an ambiguous sphere.
Put down the tripod here.
This is the interregnum of my year;
All spring except the leaf is here,
All winter but the cold.
Bandage of snow for the first time unrolled
Lays bare the wounds given when any fate
And most men’s company could humiliate:
Sterilized now; yet still they prick
And pulse beneath the skin, moving me like
An engine driven on
By sparks of its own combustion.
There are going to be some changes made to-day.18
Then add to this that I
Have known, and shall again, the greedy thigh;
Browned by that sun, but not betrayed,
Which puts the Dog-Star in the shade:
For though my world at one Equator meet,
These Arctic zones are still complete.
Baring my skin to every bruise
Love gives, I’ll love the more; since they’re but dues
That flesh must pay to bone
Till each is overthrown.
There are going to be some changes made to-day.
34
The hawk comes down from the air.19
Sharpening his eye upon
A wheeling horizon
Turned scrutiny to prayer.
He guessed the prey that cowers
Below, and learnt to keep
The distance which can strip
Earth to its blank contours.20
Then trod the air, content
With contemplation till
The truth of valley and hill
Should be self-evident.
Or as the little lark
Who veins the sky with song,
Asking from dawn to dark
No revenues of spring:
But with the night descends
Into his chosen tree,
And the famed singer ends
In anonymity.
So from a summer’s height
I come into my peace;
The wings have earned their night,
And the song may cease.
NOTES
The central theme of this poem is the single mind. The poem is divided into four parts, which essentially represent four phases of personal experience in the pursuit of single-mindedness: it will be seen that a transition is intended from one part to the next such as implies a certain spiritual progress and a consequent shifting of aspect. As far as any definitions can be attached to these aspects, they may be termed (1) metaphysical, (2) ethical, (3) psychological; while (4) is an attempt to relate the poetic impulse with the experience as a whole. Formally, the parts fall with fair accuracy into the divisions of a theorem in geometry, i.e. general enunciation, particular enunciation, proof, corollaries. The following notes may be of assistance to the diligent; they are intended simply for the elucidation of the text, and do not necessarily imply assent to any proposition that may be advanced in them.
C. D. L.
January 1929.
1 cf. Spinoza, Letters. ‘I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused
.’
2 cf. Spinoza, De intell. emend. ‘But above all a method must be thought out of healing the understanding and purifying it at the beginning. …’
3 cf. Exodus x, 21 and 27.
4 cf. Deuteronomy ix, 2; also i, 28.
5 sqq., cf. page 91, line 10.
6 Cronos is here used as a symbol for desire.
7 sqq., contrast Donne:
‘But up into the watch-tower get,
And see all things despoiled of fallacies.’
8 ‘skiagram’ – a drawing in shadow, not strictly the Greek sense.
9 cf. Dante, Inferno:
‘Ed egli a me: Questo misero modo
Tengon l’anime triste di coloro,
Che visser senza infamia e senza lodo.’
10 cf. Isaiah xxxv, 1.
11 cf. Wyndham Lewis, Art of Being Ruled, Part 12, Chapter VII.
12 ‘Fear and love’ throughout this poem represent the general principles of attraction and repulsion.
13 ‘the Word’ in this poem stands for the individual poetic impulse, as a part of the Logos in the theologian’s sense of ‘mind expressing God in the world.’
14 cf. ‘The Ballad of the Twa Brothers’:
“O when will you come hame again?
Dear Willie, tell to me!’
‘When the sun and moon dance on yon green;
And that will never be.”
15 cf. Henry James, The Ambassadors: ‘Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact – for anyone else – explained. One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.’
16 cf. note on page 59, lines 3–8.
17 cf. page 61, line 16.
18 the refrain of a song sung by Miss Sophie Tucker.
19 cf. page 59, line 15.
20 cf. Spinoza, De intell. emend. ‘Finally, perception is that wherein a thing is perceived through its essence alone. … A thing is said to be perceived through its essence alone when from the fact that I know something, I know what it is to know anything. …’
1929
FROM FEATHERS TO IRON
TO THE MOTHER