Collected Poems
Page 8
Through powdered yellow hair, and would have laughed
To think that use too mean for art or craft.
THE WILD SKY
Here from the corridor of an English train,
I see the landscape slide through glancing rain,
A land so personal that every leaf
Unfolds as if to witness human life,
And every aging milestone seems to know
That human hands inscribed it, long ago.
Oasthouse and garden, narrow bridge and hill—
Landscape with figures, where a change of style
Comes softened in a water-colour light
By Constable; and always, shire on shire,
The low-pitched sky sags like a tent of air
Beneath its ancient immaterial weight.
The weather in these gentle provinces
Moves like the shift of daylight in a house,
Subdued by time and custom. Sun and rain
Are intimate, complaisant to routine,
Guests in the garden. Year on country year
Has worn the edge of wildness from this air.
And I remember that unblunted light
Poured out all day from a prodigious height—
My country, where the blue is miles too high
For minds of men to graze the leaning sky.
The telegraph may rise or timber fall,
That last frontier remains, the vertical.
Men there are beanstalk climbers, all day long
Haunted by stilts they clattered on when young.
Giants no longer, now at mortal size
They stare into that upward wilderness.
The vertical reminds them what they are,
And I remember I am native there.
THE PROSPECT
You promise me when certain things are done
We’ll close these rooms above a city square,
And stealing out by half-light, will be gone
When next the telephone breaks the waiting air.
Before they send to find us, we shall be
Aboard a blunt-nosed steamer, at whose rail
We’ll watch the loading of the last brown bale
And feel the channel roughening into sea.
And after many sunlit days we’ll sight
The coast you tell me of. Along that shore
Rare shells lie tumbled, and the seas of light
Dip past the golden rocks to crash and pour
Upon the bowl-shaped beach. In that clear bay
We’ll scoop for pebbles till our feet and hands
Are gilded by the wash of blending sands;
And though the boat lift anchor, we shall stay.
You will discover in the woods beyond
The creatures you have loved on Chinese silk:
The shell-gray fox, gazelles that at your sound
Will lift their eyes as calm as golden milk.
The leaves and grasses feathered into plumes
Will shadow-edge their pale calligraphy;
And in the evening you will come to me
To tell of honey thick in silver combs.
Yet in the drift of moments unendeared
By sameness, when the cracks of morning show
Only a replica of days we’ve marred
With still the same old penances to do,
In furnished rooms above a city square,
Eating the rind of fact, I sometimes dread
The promise of that honey-breeding air,
Those unapportioned clusters overhead.
EPILOGUE FOR A
MASQUE OF PURCELL
Beast and bird must bow aside,
Grimbald limp into the wings.
All that’s lovely and absurd,
All that dances, all that sings
Folded into trunks again—
The haunted grove, the starlit air—
All turns workaday and plain,
Even the happy, happy pair.
Harpsichord and trumpet go
Trundling down the dusty hall.
That airy joy, that postured woe
Like the black magician’s spell
Fall in pieces round us now,
While the dancer goes to lie
With the king, and need not know
He will jilt her by and by.
We were young once and are old;
Have seen the dragon die before;
Knew the innocent and bold,
Saw them through the cardboard door
Kiss the guilty and afraid,
Turning human soon enough.
We have wept with the betrayed,
Never known them die for love.
Yet, since nothing’s done by halves
While illusion’s yet to do,
May we still forgive ourselves,
And dance again when trumpets blow.
VILLA ADRIANA
When the colossus of the will’s dominion
Wavers and shrinks upon a dying eye,
Enormous shadows sit like birds of prey,
Waiting to fall where blistered marbles lie.
But in its open pools the place already
Lay ruined, before the old king left it free.
Shattered in waters of each marble basin
He might have seen it as today we see.
Dying in discontent, he must have known
How, once mere consciousness had turned its back,
The frescoes of his appetite would crumble,
The fountains of his longing yawn and crack.
And all his genius would become a riddle,
His perfect colonnades at last attain
The incompleteness of a natural thing;
His impulse turn to mystery again.
Who sleeps, and dreams, and wakes, and sleeps again
May dream again; so in the end we come
Back to the cherished and consuming scene
As if for once the stones will not be dumb.
We come like dreamers searching for an answer,
Passionately in need to reconstruct
The columned roofs under the blazing sky,
The courts so open, so forever locked.
And some of us, as dreamers, excavate
Under the blanching light of sleep’s high noon,
The artifacts of thought, the site of love,
Whose Hadrian has given the slip, and gone.
THE EXPLORERS
Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea
Where water never was, sit down with me,
And let us talk of Earth, where long ago
We drank the air and saw the rivers flow
Like comets through the green estates of man,
And fruit the colour of Aldebaran
Weighted the curving boughs. The route of stars
Was our diversion, and the fate of Mars
Our grave concern; we stared throughout the night
On these uncolonized demesnes of light.
We read of stars escaping Newton’s chain
Till only autographs of fire remain;
We aimed our mortal searchlights into space
As if in hopes to find a mortal face.
O little Earth, our village, where the day
Seemed all too brief, and starlight would not stay,
We were provincials on the grand express
That whirled us into dark and loneliness.
We thought to bring you wonder with a tale
Huger than those that turned our fathers pale.
Here in this lunar night we watch alone
Longer than ever men have watched for dawn.
Beyond this meteor-bitten plain we see
More starry systems than you dream to be,
And while their clockwork blazes overhead,
We speak the names we learned as we were bred,
We tell of places seen each day from birth—
Obscure and local, patois of the Earth!
O race of farmers, plowing year by year
The same few fields, I sometimes seem to hear
The far-off echo of a cattle-bell
Against the cratered cliff of Arzachel,
And weep to think no sound can ever come
Across that outer desert, from my home.
LANDSCAPE OF THE STAR
The silence of the year. This hour the streets
Lie empty, and the clash of bells is scattered
Out to the edge of stars. I heard them tell
Morning’s first change and clang the people home
From crèche and scented aisle. Come home, come home,
I heard the bells of Christmas call and die.
This Christmas morning, in the stony streets
Of an unaccustomed city, where the gas
Quivers against the darkly-shuttered walls,
I walk, my breath a veil upon the cold,
No longer sick for home nor hunted down
By faces loved, by gate or sill or tree
That once I used to wreathe in red and silver
Under the splintered incense of the fir.
I think of those inscrutables who toiled,
Heavy and brooding in their camel-train,
Across the blue-wrapped stretches. Home behind,
Kingdoms departed from, the solemn journey
Their only residence: the starlit hour,
The landscape of the star, their time and place.
O to be one of them, and feel the sway
Of rocking camel through the Judaean sand,—
Ride, wrapped in swathes of damask and of silk,
Hear the faint ring of jewel in silver mesh
Starring the silence of the plain; and hold
With rigid fingers curved as in oblation
The golden jar of myrrh against the knees.
To ride thus, bearing gifts to a strange land,
To a strange King; nor think of fear and envy,
Being so bemused by starlight of one star,
The long unbroken journey, that all questions
Sink like the lesser lights behind the hills;
Think neither of the end in sight, nor all
That lies behind, but dreamlessly to ride,
Traveller at one with travelled countryside.
How else, since for those Magi and their train
The palaces behind have ceased to be
Home, and the home they travel toward is still
But rumor stoking fear in Herod’s brain?
What else for them but this, since never more
Can courts and states receive them as they were,
Nor have the trampled earth, the roof of straw
Received the kings as they are yet to be?
The bells are silent, silenced in my mind
As on the dark. I walk, a foreigner,
Upon this night that calls all travellers home,
The prodigal forgiven, and the breach
Mended for this one feast. Yet all are strange
To their own ends, and their beginnings now
Cannot contain them. Once-familiar speech
Babbles in wayward dialect of a dream.
Our gifts shall bring us home: not to beginnings
Nor always to the destination named
Upon our setting-forth. Our gifts compel,
Master our ways and lead us in the end
Where we are most ourselves; whether at last
To Solomon’s gaze or Sheba’s silken knees
Or winter pastures underneath a star,
Where angels spring like starlight in the trees.
LETTER FROM THE LAND
OF SINNERS
I write you this out of another province
That you may never see:
Country of rivers, its topography
Mutable in detail, yet always one,
Blasted in certain places, here by glaciers,
There by the work of man.
The fishers by the water have no boast
Save of their freedom; here
A man may cast a dozen kinds of lure
And think his days rewarded if he sight
Now and again the prize, unnetted, flicking
Its prism-gleams of light.
The old lord lived secluded in his park
Until the hall was burned
Years ago, by his tenants; both have learned
Better since then, and now our children run
To greet him. Quail and hunter have forgotten
The echo of the gun.
I said there are blasted places: we have kept
Their nakedness intact—
No marble to commemorate an act
Superhuman or merely rash; we know
Why they are there and why the seed that falls there
Is certain not to grow.
We keep these places as we keep the time
Scarred on our recollection
When some we loved broke from us in defection,
Or we ourselves harried to death too soon
What we could least forgo. Our memories
Recur like the old moon.
But we have made another kind of peace,
And walk where boughs are green,
Forgiven by the selves that we have been,
And learning to forgive. Our apples taste
Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,
And need not be replaced.
CONCORD RIVER
The turtles on the ledges of July
Heard our approach and splashed. Now in the mud
Lie like the memory of fecund summer
Their buried eggs. The river, colder now,
Has other, autumn tales to carry on
Between the banks where lovers used to lie.
Lovers, or boys escaped from yard and farm
To drown in sensual purities of sun—
No matter which; for single fisherman
Casting into the shade, or those absorbed
In human ardor, summer was the same,
Impervious to weariness or alarm.
The fisherman, by craft and love removed
From meanness, has an almanac at home
Saying the season will be brief this year
And ice strike early; yet upon its shelf
The book is no despoiler of this day
In which he moves and ponders, most himself.
That boy, watching for turtles by the shore,
Steeped in his satisfactory loneliness,
If asked could tell us that the sun would set,
Or autumn drive him back to games and school—
Tell us at second-hand, believing then
Only midsummer and the noonstruck pool.
And we, who floated through the sunlit green,
Indolent, voluntary as the dance
Of dragon-flies above the skimming leaves—
For us the landscape and the hour became
A single element, where our drifting silence
Fell twofold, like our shadows on the water.
This is the Concord River, where the ice
Will hold till April: this is the willowed stream
Much threaded by the native cogitators
Who wrote their journals calmly by its shore,
Observing weather and the swing of seasons
Along with personal cosmologies.
Henry Thoreau most nearly learned to live
Within a world his soul could recognize—
Unshaken by accounts of any country
He could not touch with both his hands. He saw
The river moving past the provincial town
And knew each curve of shoreline for his own.
He travelled much, he said—his wayward speech
Sounding always a little insolent,
Yet surer than the rest; they, like ourselves,
Ran off to dabble in a world beyond,
&nbs
p; While he exalted the geography
He lived each day: a river and a pond.
For him there was no turning of the ear
To rumored urgencies that sought to rouse
The fisher from his pool, the serious child
From his unconscious wandering: the sound
Of desperate enterprises rang to him
Fictive as ghosts upon old Indian ground.
Lover and child and fisherman, alike
Have in their time been native to this shore
As he would have it peopled: all entranced
By such concerns in their perfected hour
That in their lives the river and the tree
Are absolutes, no longer scenery.
APOLOGY
You, invincibly yourself,
Have nothing left to say.
The stones upon the mountainside
Are not more free,
Bearing all question, all reproach
Without reply.
The dead, who keep their peace intact,
Although they know
Much we might be gainers by,
Are proud like you—
Or, if they spoke, might sound as you
Sounded just now.
For every angry, simple man
The word is but
A shadow, and his motive grows
More still and great
While the world hums around him, wild
That he should explicate.
And Socrates, whose crystal tongue
Perturbs us now,
Left all unsatisfied; the word
Can never show
Reason enough for what a man
Knows he must do.
You told us little, and are done.
So might the dead
Begin to speak of dying, then
Leave half unsaid.
Silence like thunder bears its own
Excuse for dread.
LIVING IN SIN
She had thought the studio would keep itself;