Instruments faulty; filter, magneto, each strut unsound.
Yet after four days, though we swore she never could leave the ground,
We saw her in headstrong haste diminish towards the east –
That makeshift, mad sky-farer.
Aimed they now for Baghdad, unwritten in air’s annals
A voyage. But theirs the fate all flights of logic to refute,
Who obeyed no average law, who buoyed the viewless channels
Of sky with a courage steadfast, luminous. Safe they crossed
Sinai’s desert, and daring
The Nejd, the unneighbourly waste of Arabia, yet higher soaring
(Final a fall there for birds of passage, limed and lost
In shifty the sand’s embrace) all day they strove to climb
Through stormy rain: but they felt her shorten her stride and falter,
And they fell at evening time.
Slept that night beside their machine, and the next morning
Raider Arabs appeared reckoning this stranded bird
A gift: like cobras they struck, and their gliding shadows athwart
The sand were all their warning.
But the aeronauts, knowing iron the coinage here, had brought
Mills bombs and revolvers, and M’Intosh held them off
While Parer fought for life –
A spark, the mechanic’s right answer, and finally wrought
A miracle, for the dumb engine spoke and they rose
Convulsively out of the clutch of the desert, the clench of their foes.
Orchestrate this theme, artificer-poet. Imagine
The roll, crackling percussion, quickening tempo of engine
For a start: the sound as they soar, an octave-upward slur
Scale of sky ascending:
Hours-held note of level flight, a beat unhurried,
Sustaining undertone of movement never-ending:
Wind shrill on the ailerons, flutes and fifes in a flurry
Devilish when they dive, plucking of tense stays.
These hardly heard it, who were the voice, the heavenly air
That sings above always.
We have seen the extremes, the burning, the freezing, the outward face
Of their exploit; heroic peaks, tumbling-to-zero depressions:
Little our graph can show, the line they traced through space,
Of the heart’s passionate patience.
How soft drifts of sleep piled on their senses deep
And they dug themselves out often: how the plane was a weight that hung
And swung on their aching nerve; how din drilled through the skull
And sight sickened – so slow earth filtered past below.
Yet nerve failed never, heart clung
To height, and the brain kept its course and the hand its skill.
Baghdad renewed a propeller damaged in desert. Arid
Baluchistan spared them that brought down and spoilt with thirst
Armies of Alexander. To Karachi they were carried
On cloud-back: fragile as tinder their plane, but the winds were tender
Now to their need, and nursed
Them along till teeming India made room for them to alight.
Wilting her wings, the sweltering suns had moulted her bright
Plumage, rotten with rain
The fabric: but they packed her with iron washers and tacked her
Together, good for an hour, and took the air again.
Feats for a hundred flights, they were prodigal of: a fairest
Now to tell – how they foiled death when the engine failed
Above the Irrawaddy, over close-woven forest.
What shoals for a pilot there, what a snarled passage and dark
Shelves down to doom and grip
Of green! But look, balanced superbly, quick off the mark
Swooping like centre three-quarter whose impetus storms a gap –
Defenders routed, rooted their feet, and their arms are mown
Aside, that high or low aim at his overthrow –
M’Intosh touched her down.
And they picked her up out of it somehow and put her at the air, a
Sorry hack for such steeplechasing, to leap the sky.
‘We’ll fly this bloody crate till it falls to bits at our feet,’
Said the mechanic Parer.
And at Moulmein soon they crashed; and the plane by their spirit’s high
Tension long pinned, girded and guarded from dissolution,
Fell to bits at their feet. Wrecked was the undercarriage,
Radiator cracked, in pieces, compasses crocked;
Fallen all to confusion.
Their winged hope was a heap of scrap, but unsplintered their courage.
Six weeks they worked in sun-glare and jungle damps, assembling
Fragments to make airworthy what was worth not its weight in air,
As a surgeon, grafter of skin, as a setter of bones tumbling
Apart, they had power to repair
This good for naught but the grave; they livened her engine and gave
Fuselage faith to rise rejuvenated from ruin.
Went with them stowaways, not knowing what hazard they flew in –
Bear-cubs, a baby alligator, lizards and snakes galore;
Mascots maybe, for the plane though twice she was floored again
Always came up for more.
Till they came to the pitiless mountains of Timor. Yet these, untamed,
Not timorous, against the gradient and Niagara of air they climbed
Scarce-skimming the summits; and over the shark-toothed Timor sea
Lost their bearings, but shirked not the odds, the deaths that lurked
A million to one on their trail:
They reached out to the horizon and plucked their destiny.
On for eight hours they flew blindfold against the unknown,
And the oil began to fail
And their flying spirit waned – one pint of petrol remained
When the land stood up to meet them and they came into their own.
Southward still to Melbourne, the bourn of their flight, they pressed
Till at last near Culcairn, like a last fretted leaf
Falling from brave autumn into earth’s breast,
D.H. nine, their friend that had seen them to the end,
Gave up her airy life.
The Southern Cross was splendid above the spot where she fell,
The end of her rainbow curve over our weeping day:
And the flyers, glad to be home, unharmed by that dizzy fall,
Dazed as the dead awoken from death, stepped out of the broken
Body and went away.
What happened then, the roar
and rave of waving crowds
That feted them, was only
an afterglow of glory
Reflected on the clouds
where they had climbed alone,
Day’s golden epilogue:
and them, whose meteor path
Lightened our eyes, whose great
spirit lifted the fog
That sours a doubtful earth,
the stars commemorate.
In February, a world of hard light,
A frosty welcome, the aconites came up
Lifting their loving cups to drink the sun:
Spring they meant, mounting and more of hope.
And I thought of my friend, like these withered too soon,
Who went away in a night
Before the spring was ready, who left our town
For good. Like aconites he pledged the spring
Out of my grief-bound heart, and he made me sing
The spirit of life that nothing can keep down.
But yesterday, in May, a storm arose
Clouding the spring’s festivities, and spoilt
Much would have been admired and given us shade.
We saw this year’s young hopes
beat down and soiled,
Blossoms not now for fruit, boughs might have made
Syringa’s2 wreath of snows.
A fortune gone time held for us in trust.
And I knew no bold flourish of flowers can write
Off the dead loss, when friends dissolve in night
Changing our dear-invested love to dust.
Strange ways the dead break through. Not the Last Post
Brings them, nor clanging midnight: for then is the inner
Heart reinforced against assault and sap.
On break-up day or at the cricket-club dinner
Between a word and a word they find the gap,
And we know what we have lost.
Sorrow is natural thirst: we are not weaned
At once. Though long withdrawn the sickening blade,
Deeply we remember loss of blood
And the new skin glosses over an active wound.
Remember that winter morning – no maroon
Warned of a raid; death granted no farewell speech,
Acted without prologue, was a bell and a line
Speaking from far of one no more within reach.
Blood ran out of me. I was alone.
How suddenly, how soon,
In a moment, while I was looking the other way,
You hid yourself where I could never find you –
Too dark the shadows earth sheeted around you.
So we went home: that was the close of play.
Still I hoped for news. Often I stood
On promontories that straining towards the west
Fret their hearts away. Thence on a clear
Day one should glimpse the islands of the blest,
And he, if any, had a passport there.
But no, it was no good.
Those isles, it proved, were broken promises,
A trick of light, a way wishes delude:
Or, if he lived out there, no cable was laid
To carry his love whispering over seas.
So I returned. Perhaps he was nearer home
And I had missed him. Here he was last seen
Walking familiar as sunlight a solid road;
Round the next turn, his door. But look, there has been
Landslide: those streets end abruptly, they lead
The eye into a tomb.
Scrabble for souvenirs. Fit bone to bone;
Anatomy of buried joys you guess,
But the wind jeers through it. Assemble the shattered glass;
A mirror you have, but the face there is your own.
Was so much else we could have better spared –
Churches, museums, multiple stores: but the bomb
Fell on the power-house: total that eclipse.
He was our dynamo, our warmth, our beam
Transmitter of mirth – it is a town’s collapse
Not easily repaired.
Or as a reservoir that, sharing out
Rain hoarded from heaven, springs from the valley,
Refreshment was for all: now breached and wholly
Drained, is a barren bed, a cup of drought.
Then to the hills, as one who dies for rain,
I went. All day the light makes lovely passes
There, whose hands are healing, whose smile was yours,
And eloquent winds hearten the dry grasses.
They have come to terms with death: for them the year’s
Harvest, the instant pain,
Are as clouds passing indifferent over
Their heads, but certain givers in the end.
Downright these hills, hiding nothing they stand
Firm to the foot and comfort the eye for ever.
They say, ‘Death is above your weight, too strong
For argument or armies, the real dictator:
He never was one to answer the question, Why?
He sends for you tomorrow, for us later:
Nor are you the Orpheus who could buy
Resurrection with a song.
Not for long will your chalk-faced bravado
Stand the erosion of eternity:
Learn from us a moment’s sanity –
To be warm in the sun, to accept the following shadow.’
In my heart’s mourning underworld I sang
As miners entombed singing despair to sleep –
Their earth is stopped, their eyes are reconciled
To night. Yet here, under the sad hill-slope
Where I thought one spring of my life for ever was sealed,
The friend I had lost sprang
To life again and showed me a mystery:
For I knew, at last wholly accepting death,
Though earth had taken his body and air his breath,
He was not in heaven or earth: he was in me.
Now will be cloudburst over a countryside
Where the tongues of prophets were dry and the air was aching:
Sky-long the flash, the thunder, the release,
Are fresh beginning, the hour of the weather breaking.
Sing, you watercourses, bringers of peace!
Valleys, open wide
Your cracked lips! You shall be green again
And ease with flowers what the sun has seared.
Waking tomorrow we’ll find the air cleared,
Sunny with fresh eloquence after rain.
For my friend that was dead is alive. He bore transplanting
Into a common soil. Strongly he grows
Upon the heart and gives the tentative wing
Take-off for flights, surety for repose.
And he returns not in an echoing
Regret, a hollow haunting,
Not as a shadow thrown across our day;
But radiant energy, charging the mind with power
That all who are wired to receive him surely can share.
It is no flying visit: he comes to stay.
His laughter was better than birds in the morning: his smile
Turned the edge of the wind: his memory
Disarms death and charms the surly grave.
Early he went to bed, too early we
Saw his light put out: yet we could not grieve
More than a little while,
For he lives in the earth around us, laughs from the sky.
Soon he forgave – still generous to a fault –
My crippling debt of sorrow, and I felt
In grief’s hard winter earth’s first melting sigh.
Think. One breath of midsummer will start
A buried life – on sunday boys content
Hearing through study windows a gramophone,
Sweet peas arrested on a morning scent –
And the man sighs for what he has outgrown.
He wastes pity. The heart
Has all recorded. Each quaver of distress,
Mirth’s every crotchet, love’s least tremolo –
Scarce-noted notes that to full movements flow –
Have made their mark on its deep tenderness.
Much more should he, who had life and to spare,
Be here impressed, his sympathy relayed
Out of the rich-toned past. And is. For through
Desert my heart he gives a fiery lead,
Unfolding contours, lengthening the view.
He is a thoroughfare
Over all sliding sands. Each stopping-place
Wears his look of welcome. May even find,
When I come to the snow-line, the bitter end,
His hand-holds cut on death’s terrific face.
Distant all that, and heaven a hearsay word –
Truth’s fan-vaulting, vision carved in flight
Perhaps, or the last delirium of self-loving.
But now a word in season, a dance in spite
Of death: love, the affirmative in all living,
Blossom, dew or bird.
For one is dead, but his love has gone before
Us,
pointing and paving a way into the future;
Has gone to form its very flesh and feature,
The air we shall breathe, the kindling for our fire.
Nothing is lost. There is a thrifty wife,
Conceives all, saves all, finds a use for all.
No waste her deserts: limited rock, lightnings
And speedwell that run riot, seas that spill
Over, grass and man – whatever springs
From her excess of life
Is active and passive, spending and receipt.
And he took after her, a favourite son
In whom she excelled, through whom were handed on
Dewy her morning and her lasting heat.
Now we have sorrow’s range, no more delaying –
Let the masked batteries of spring flash out
From ridge and copse, and flowers like shrapnel burst
Along the lanes, and all her land-mines spout
Quick and hanging green. Our best, our boast,
Our mood and month of maying,
For winter’s bleak blockade is broken through
And every street flies colours of renaissance.
Today the hawk goes up for reconnaissance,
The heart beats faster having earth’s ends in view.
Leave to the mercies of the manifold grass,
Will cover all earth’s faults, what in his clay
Were but outcrops of volcanic life.
You shall recall one open as the day,
Many-mooded as the light above
English hills where pass
Sunlight and storm to a large reconciling.
You shall recall how it was warmth to be
With him – a feast, a first of June; that he
Was generous, that he attacked the bowling.
Lay laurels here, and leave your tears to dry –
Sirs, his last wishes were that you should laugh.
For those in whom was found life’s richest seam
Yet they asked no royalty, one cenotaph
Were thanks enough – a world where none may scheme
To hoard, while many die,
Life; where all lives grow from an equal chance.
Tomorrow we resume building: but this
Day he calls holiday, he says it is
A time to dance, he calls you all to dance.
Today the land that knew him shall do him honour,
Sun be a spendthrift, fields come out with gold,
Severn and Windrush be Madrigal and Flowing,
Woodlarks flash up like rockets and unfold
In showers of song, cloud-shadows pace the flying
Wind, the champion runner.
Joy has a flying start, our hopes like flames
Lengthen their stride over a kindled earth,
And noon cheers all, upstanding in the south.
Sirs, be merry: these are his funeral games.
Complete Poems Page 16
