Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg

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Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg Page 8

by Isaac Rosenberg


  How can there be Spring?

  5 I see the pink blossoms

  That slept for a year,

  But who could have woke them

  While you were not near?

  Birds sing to the blossoms,

  10 Blind, dreaming your pink;

  These blush to the songsters,

  Your music they think.

  So well had you taught them

  To look and to sing,

  15 Your bloom and your music,

  The ways of the Spring.

  ON A LADY SINGING

  She bade us listen to the singing lark

  In tones far sweeter than its own.

  For fear that she should cease and leave us dark

  We built the bird a feigned throne,

  Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways

  From sceptred hands of starred humility.

  Praising herself the more in giving praise

  To music less than she.

  1913

  AS A SWORD IN THE SUN

  As a sword in the sun —

  A glory calling a glory —

  Our eyes seeing it run

  Capture its gleam for our story.

  Singer, marvellous gleam

  Dancing in splendid light,

  Here you have brought us our dream —

  Ah! but its stay is its flight.

  AT SEA-POINT

  Let the earth crumble away,

  The heavens fade like a breath,

  The sea go up in a cloud,

  And its hills be given to death.

  5 For the roots of the earth are old,

  And the pillars of heaven are tired.

  The hands that the sea enfold

  Have seen a new desired.

  All things upon my sense

  10 Are wasted spaces dull,

  Since one shape passed like a song

  Let God all things annul.

  A lie with its heart hidden

  Is that cruel wall of air

  15 That held her there unbidden,

  Who comes not at my prayer.

  Gone who yet never came.

  There is the breathing sea,

  And the shining skies are the same,

  20 But they lie — they lie to me.

  For she stood with the sea below,

  Between the sky and the sea,

  She flew ere my soul was aware,

  But left this thirst in me.

  1914

  O HEART, HOME OF HIGH PURPOSES

  O heart, home of high purposes,

  O hand with craft and skill,

  Say, why this meagre dalliance

  To do such greatness ill?

  5 Marshal the flame-winged legions, yours, —

  The thunder and the beauty;

  Sweeten these sunsoiled days of ours,

  We need your wizard duty.

  Our parched lips yearn for music yet.

  10 Find us some gate in air

  To leave our world-stained lives behind,

  And live a life more fair.

  The vagrant clouds are alive with light

  When the sun shines and sings,

  15 When the wind blows they race in flight

  So happy in their wings.

  Help us, the helpless, breathe thy breath,

  Show us new flowers, new ways to live,

  Thy glory thaw our lips of death,

  20 To you your feel of power we’ll give.

  1914

  OF ANY OLD MAN

  Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness

  With alien uproar and rude jolly cries,

  Which satyr-like to a mild maiden’s pride

  Ripens not wisdom, but a large recoil.

  Give them their withered peace, their trial grave,

  Their past youth’s three-scored shadowy effigy.

  Mock them not with your ripened turbulence,

  Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath,

  While edging your boisterous thunders shivers one word,

  Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth.

  The feigned ramparts of bleak ignorance.

  ‘Experience’ — crown of naked majesties,

  That tells us nought we know not — but confirms.

  O think! you reverend, shadowy, austere,

  Your Christ’s youth was not ended when he died.

  1914

  INVISIBLE ANCIENT ENEMY OF MINE

  Invisible ancient enemy of mine

  My house’s foe

  To rich my pride with wrongful suffering

  Your vengeful gain

  5 Coward and striker in the pit lined dark

  Lie to my friends

  Feed the world’s jealousy and pamper woe.

  When I had bowed

  I felt your smile, when my large spirit groaned

  10 And hid its fire

  Because another spirit leaned on it,

  I knew you near.

  O that the tortured spirit could amass

  All the world’s pains,

  15 How I would cheat you, leaving none for life,

  You would recount

  All you have piled on me, self-tortured count

  Through all eternity.

  1914

  AT NIGHT

  Crazed shadow from no golden body

  That I can see, embraces me warm;

  All is purple and closed

  Round by night’s arm.

  5 A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices,

  Wild lost voices of shadows white.

  See the long houses lean

  To the weird flight.

  Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time

  10 (Because the sun spreads wide like a tree

  With no good fruit for them)

  Thrill secrecy.

  Pale horses ride before the morning

  The secret roots of the sun to tread,

  15 With hoofs shod with venom

  And ageless dread,

  To breathe on burning emerald grasses,

  And opalescent dews of the day,

  And poison at the core

  20 What smiles may stray.

  1914

  SUBJECTIVITY

  At my eyes’ anchoring levels

  The pigmy skies foam over

  The flat earth my senses see;

  A vapour my lips might stir —

  5 The heat of my breath might wither.

  Strong eyes unfed, not baffled.

  Yon bright and moving vapour

  In a moment fades.

  The beamy air, the roofless silence,

  10 The smoke-throated, man-thundered street,

  Die to an essence, a love spirit.

  Whose feet compounded are

  As my own breath back brought.

  All things, that, brooding, are still,

  15 Speak to me, untwist and twine

  The shifting links of consciousness,

  Speak to the all-eyed soul,

  And tread its intricate infinities.

  Immured in two hands’ breadth

  20 Behind the mask of man.

  1914

  WISTFULLY IN PALLID SPLENDOUR

  Wistfully in pallid splendour

  Drifts the lonely infinite,

  A wan perfume vague and tender,

  Dim with feet of fragile light.

  5 Drifts so lightly through the spirit,

  Breathes the torch of dreams astir

  Till what promised lands he near it

  Wavering are betrayed to her.

  Ghostly foam of unheard waters,

  10 And the gleam of hidden skies,

  Footsteps of Eve’s whiter daughters

  Tremble to our dreaming eyes.

  O! sad wraith of joy lips parted,

  Hearing not a word they say —

  15 Even my dreams make broken hearted

  And their beauty falls away.

  1914

  HAVE WE SAILED AND HAVE
WE WANDERED

  Have we sailed and have we wandered,

  Still beyond, the hills are blue.

  Have we spent and have we squandered,

  What’s before us still is new.

  See the foam of unheard waters

  And the gleam of hidden skies,

  Footsteps of Eve’s whiter daughters

  Flash between our dreaming eyes.

  Soundless waning to the spirit,

  Still — O still the hills are blue,

  Ever and yet never near it,

  There where our far childhood grew.

  1914

  FAR AWAY

  By what pale light or moon-pale shore

  Drifts my soul in lonely flight?

  Regions God had floated o’er

  Ere He touched the world with light?

  Not in Heaven and not in earth

  Is this water, is this moon;

  For there is no starry birth,

  And no dawning and no noon.

  Far away — O far away,

  Mist-born — dewy vapours rise

  From the dim gates of the day

  Far below in earthly skies.

  GIRL’S SONG

  The pigmy skies cover

  No mood in my eyes,

  The flat earth foams over

  My pallour’s moonrise.

  5 Thin branches like whips

  Whiten the skies

  To gibbous lips

  Calling for my mad lover.

  What is his knowledge

  10 Knowing not this?

  I’ll send him a message,

  My life in a kiss.

  Why is he mad?

  I hold fire for him, bliss

  15 He has not had

  And dare not aspire.

  I KNOW YOU GOLDEN

  I know you golden

  As summer and pale

  As the clinging sweetness

  Of marvels frail.

  A touch of fire,

  A loitering thrill,

  My dancing spirit

  Has passed the will.

  And love and living

  And Time and space —

  My naked spirit

  Hath seen its face.

  SACRED, VOLUPTUOUS HOLLOWS DEEP

  Sacred, voluptuous hollows deep

  Where the unlifted shadows sleep

  Beneath inviolate mouth and chin.

  What virginal woven mystery

  5 Guarding some pleadful spiritual sin

  So hard to traffic with or flee,

  Lies in your chaste impurity?

  Warm, fleshly chambers of delights,

  Whose lamps are we, our days and nights,

  10 Where our thoughts nestle, our lithe limbs

  Frenzied exult till vision swims

  In fierce delicious agonies;

  And the crushed life bruised through and through,

  Ebbs out, trophy no spirit slew,

  15 While molten sweetest pains enmesh

  The life sucked by dissolving flesh.

  O rosy radiance incarnate,

  O glowing glory of heaven-dreamt flesh,

  O seraph-barred transplendent gate

  20 Of paradisal meadows fresh.

  O read — read what my pale mouth tells.

  God! could that mouth be but the air

  To kiss your chasteness everywhere

  Bound with lust’s shrivelling manacles!

  25 As weary water dreams of land

  While waves roll back and leave wet sand,

  Their white tongues fawning on its breast,

  But turns it to the thing that prest,

  Though my thoughts crown you sweet, and cover,

  30 Your shape in me is my mad lover.

  1914

  THE EXILE

  A northern spray in an all human speech

  To this same torrid heart may somewhat reach,

  Although its root, its mother tree

  Is in the North.

  5 But O! to its cold heart, and fervid eyes,

  It sojourns in another’s paradise,

  A loveliness its alien eyes might see

  Could its own roots go forth.

  O! dried up waters of deep hungering love!

  10 Far, far, the springs that fed you from above,

  And brimmed the wells of happiness

  With new delight.

  Blinding ourselves to rob another’s sun

  Only its scorching glory have we won,

  15 And left our own homes in bleak wintriness

  Moaning our sunward flight.

  Here, where the craggy mountains edge the skies,

  Whose profound spaces stare to our vain eyes;

  Where our thoughts hang, and theirs, who yearn

  20 To know our speech.

  O! what winged airs soothe the sharp mountains’ brow?

  From peak to peak with messages they go,

  Withering our peering thoughts that crowd to learn

  Words from that distant beach.

  1914

  MY SOUL IS ROBBED

  My soul is robbed by your most treacherous eyes

  Treading its intricate infinities,

  Some pale light hidden in light and felt to stir

  In listening pulse, an audible wonder

  5 Delighting me with my immortal loss;

  While you stay in its place, rich robbers, that is dross.

  Wine of the Almighty who got drunk with thee.

  (The reason sin — God slumbering then — flew free.)

  Alas! if God thus, what will hap to me?

  10 Ah! even now drunken while your sweet light beams,

  You, far as Heaven, I am drunk on my dreams.

  Not yet, that glance engendered ecstasy,

  That subtle, unspaced, mutual intimacy,

  Whereby two spirits of one thought commune,

  15 Like separate instruments that play one tune.

  The music of my playing is lost in thine.

  Does the sun see when noonday torches shine?

  Mine is not yours though you have stolen mine.

  Beautiful thieves, I cannot captive ye,

  20 Being so bound even as ye rifle me.

  My limbs that moved in trembling innocence

  You harden to knowledge of experience

  Till honour rings upon the ear as crime.

  NIGHT

  With sleek lascivious velvety caresses

  The nestling hair of night strays on my cheeks.

  My heart is full of brimless fervid fancies

  Ardent to hear the imperious word she speaks.

  5 O purple-hued — O glimmering mouth that trembles!

  O monstrous dusky shoulders lost above,

  Wrapt in bleak robes of smoke from eye, star embers;

  You smouldering pyres of flaming aeons of love.

  The straining lusts of strenuous amorists,

  10 Smoking from crimson altars of their hearts,

  In burning mists are shed upon my dreaming.

  Relax — relax. I have not strength to withstand thee;

  My soul will not recoil, so full of thee.

  Thy loathsomeness and beauty fill my hunger,

  15 O! splendid, thy lithe fingers gripping me.

  Naked and glorious, like a shining temple

  I fill with adorations, fervent psalm,

  Anoint with honey of kisses, while thy bosom

  Throbs music to my unprofaning palm.

  20 See! how thy breasts, those two white grapes of passion,

  Look mixed in mine, like globed fruit mixed with leaves.

  Lo! where I press, what crimson stains come leaping,

  Bright juice of inexhaustible dreams lust weaves.

  WHAT IF I WEAR YOUR BEAUTY

  What if I wear your beauty as this present

  Wears infinite aeons yet is only now.

  The spirit opens but to receive,

  Close hid, nought yet departing —

 
5 But the world’s gaze lessens love.

  O softer pearl whose iridescent fountain

  Hath been my sky, my sun, my stream of light

  From the first dazzling dayspring, the enfolden

  Sweet thirst, a mother prattle

  10 To a new babbled birth.

  I like an insect beautiful wings have gotten,

  Shed from you. Let me hide, O like a vessel

  That you have marvel laden, burdened

  With new rich fears of pirates

  15 I droop dark penurous sails.

  1914

  DAWN

  O tender, first cold flush of rose,

  O budded dawn, wake dreamily;

  Your dim lips as your lids unclose

  Murmur your own sad threnody.

  5 O as the soft and frail lights break

  Upon your eyelids, and your eyes

  Wider and wider grow and wake,

  The old pale glory dies.

  And then, as sleep lays down to sleep

  10 And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,

  (While naked day digs goldly deep

  For light to lie uncovered),

  Your own ghost fades with dream-ghosts there,

  Our lorn eyes see mid glimmering lips,

  15 Pass through the haunted dream-moved air,

  Slowly, their laden ships.

  1914

  UNDER THESE SKIES

  Under these skies, that take the hues

  Of metals locked beneath earth,

  According as the spirit woos

  What changing mood to birth.

  Delicate silver gleaming

  In threads of tender thought;

  Gold in a proud dreaming

  Our dream ships have brought;

  But the skies of lead

  When our hearts are dead,

  And the skies relentless

  Of an iron petal scentless,

  That brooding like a shadow

  Weighs down the sunless meadow.

  THE FEMALE GOD

  We curl into your eyes.

  They drink our fires and have never drained.

  In the fierce forest of your hair

  Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.

  5 In your eyes’ subtle pit

  Far down, glimmer our souls.

  And your hair like massive forest trees

  Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.

  Like a candle lost in an electric glare

 

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