Collected Poems
Page 18
Of weasels trapped in winter when they’ve lost their tan;
We went too far when we let the fox assist us
To warm the hide that houses the soul of Man.
The reek of the leopard and the stink of the inky cat
Striped handsomely with white, are in the concert hall;
We sleekly writhe from under them, and are above all that;
But, the concert over, back into our pelts we crawl.
“It is bad to let the dog taste leather.”
Through the Green Forest
Through the green forest softly without a sound,
Wrapped in a still moo d
As in a cloak and hood
I went, and cast no shadow in the shadow of the wood.
There grew beeches taller than a ship’s mast
That rocks from wave to wave
On the great seas of the world.
I looked into their tops;
Their tops were in another world;
Tossed in a sunny air as far from me
As the foam on waves that follow each other fast,
All day, unseen by man, over the sunny sea.
Naked birches, whiter than a god’s thigh,
I saw, and stared, between the stems of the black pines;
Boulders whiter than a dream remembered by day
Stood in the brook’s way,
Damp with mosses greener than an emerald’s eye.
And ferns where the water sloped from stone to stone in the clear dark
Without ripple or speech
Curved motionless, rooted in rotted bark
And leaves laid together and the rifled husks of the beech.
As sharp as in my childhood, still
Ecstasy shocks me fixed. The will
Cannot entice it, never could,
So never tries. But from the wood
The wind will hurl the clashing sleet;
Or a small fawn with lovely feet,
Uncertain in its gait, will walk
Among the ferns, not breaking back
One frond, not bruising one fern black,
Into the clearing, and appraise
With mild, attracted, wondering gaze,
And lifted head unhurt and new,
This world that he was born into.
Such marvels as, one time, I feared
Might go, and leave me unprepared
For hardship. But they never did.
They blaze before me still, as wild
And clear, as when I was a child.
They never went away at all.
I need not, though I do, recall
Such moments in my childhood, when
Wonder sprang out at me again,
And took me by the heels, and whirled
Me round and round above the world.
For wonder leaps upon me Still,
And makes me dizzy, makes me ill,
But never frightened—for I know—
Not where—but in whose hands I go:
The lovely fingers of Delight
Have hold of me and hold me tight.
By goodness and by evil so surrounded, how can the heart
Maintain a quiet beat?
It races like an idling engine, shaking the whole machine;
And the skin of the inner wrist is blue and green
And yellow, where it has been pounded.
Or else, reluctant to repeat
Bright battles ending always in defeat,
From sadness and discouragement it all but fails;
And the warm blood welling slowly from the weary heart
Before it reaches wrist or temple cools,
Collects in little pools
Along its way, and wishes to remain there, while the face pales,
And diastole and systole meet.
At least, my dear,
You did not have to live to see me die.
Considering now how many things I did that must have caused you pain,
Sweating at certain memories, blushing dark blood, unable
To gather home my scattered thoughts that graze the forbidden hills, cropping the mind-bane,
I cut from the hedge for crook the one disservice
I never did you,—you never saw me die.
I find in my disorderly files among unfinished
Poems, and photographs of picnics on the rocks, letters from you in your bold hand.
I find in the pocket of a coat I could not bring myself to give away
A knotted handkerchief, containing columbine-seeds.
A few more moments such as these and I shall have paid all.
Not that you ever—
O, love inflexible, O militant forgiveness, I know
You kept no books against me! In my own hand
Are written down the sum and the crude items of my inadequacy.
It is only that there are moments when for the sake of a
little quiet in the brawling mind I must search out,
Recorded in my favour,
One princely gift.
The most I ever did for you was to outlive you.
But that is much.
From Mine the Harvest
Small Hands, Relinquish All
Small hands, relinquish all:
Nothing the fist can hold,—
Not power, not love, not gold—
But suffers from the cold,
And is about to fall.
The mind, at length bereft
Of thinking, and its pain,
Will soon disperse again,
And nothing will remain:
No, not a thought be left.
Exhort the closing eye,
Urge the resisting ear,
To say, “The thrush is here”;
To say, “His song is clear”;
To live, before it die.
Small hands, relinquish all:
Nothing the fist can hold,
Not power, not love, not gold,
But suffers from the cold,
And is about to fall.
The mind, at length bereft
Of thinking and its pain,
Will soon disperse again,
And nothing will remain:
No, not a thing be left.
Only the ardent eye,
Only the listening ear
Can say, “The thrush was here!”
Can say, “His song was clear!”
Can live, before it die.
Ragged Island
There, there where those black spruces crowd
To the edge of the precipitous cliff,
Above your boat, under the eastern wall of the island;
And no wave breaks; as if
All had been done, and long ago, that needed
Doing; and the cold tide, unimpeded
By shoal or shelving ledge, moves up and down,
Instead of in and out;
And there is no driftwood there, because there is no beach;
Clean cliff going down as deep as clear water can reach;
No driftwood, such as abounds on the roaring shingle,
To be hefted home, for fires in the kitchen stove;
Barrels, banged ashore about the boiling outer harbour;
Lobster-buoys, on the eel-grass of the sheltered cove:
There, thought unbraids itself, and the mind becomes
single.
There you row with tranquil oars, and the ocean
Shows no scar from the cutting of your placid keel;
Care becomes senseless there; pride and promotion
Remote; you only look; you scarcely feel.
Even adventure, with its vital uses,
Is aimless ardour now; and thrift is waste.
Oh, to be there, under the silent spruces,
Where the wide, quiet evening darkens without haste
Over a sea with death acquainted, yet forever chaste.
To whom the house of Montagu
Was neighbour, and
that orchard near
Wherein all pleasant fruit-trees grew
Whose tops were silvered by the clear
Light of the blessèd, sworn-by moon,
(Or all-but-sworn-by—save that She,
Knowing the moon’s inconstancy,
Dreaded that Love might change as soon. . .
Which changed never; or did change
Into something rich and strange);
To whom in infancy the sight
Of Sancho Panza and his Knight,
In noble, sad and awkward state
Approaching through the picket-gate,
Was warmer with the flesh of life
Than visits from the vicar’s wife;
For whom from earliest days the lips
Of Her who launched the thousand ships
Curved in entrancing speech, and Troy
Was hurt by no historic boy,
But one more close and less a fool
Than boys who yanked your curls at school
(Far less a fool than he who lay
With willing Venus on a bed
Of anise, parsley, dill and rue,
A bank whereon the wild thyme grew,
And longed but to be gone from thence,—
Whom vainly Venus did implore
To do her that sweet violence
All boys and girls with any sense
Would die to do; but where she lay
Left her, and rose and rushed away
To stalk the tusky, small-eyed boar
He might have stalked another day),
And naked long Leander swam
The Thames, the Avon and the Cam,
And wet and chattering, white and cold
Appeared upon the pure threshold
Of Hero, whom the sight did move
To fear, to pity, and to love;
For such a child the peopled time,
When any man in any wood
Was shaggy like a goat, and stood
On hooves, and used his lusty strength
To blow through straws of different length
Bound all together; or could ride
A horse he never need bestride—
For such a child, that distant time
Was close as apple-trees to climb,
And apples crashed among the trees
Half Baldwin, half Hesperides.
This
Is mine, and I can hold it;
Lying here
In the hour before dawn, knowing that the cruel June
Frost has made the green lawn
White and brittle, smelling that the night was very cold,
Wondering if the lush, well-loved, well-tended,
Hoed and rowed and watched with pride
And with anxiety
So long,—oh, cruel, cruel,
Unseasonable June—
Whether all that green will be black long before noon—
This
I know: that what I hear
Is a thrush; and very near,
Almost on the sill of my open window, close to my ear.
I was startled, but I made no motion, I knew
What I had to do—stop breathing, not be
Here at all, and I have accomplished this. He has not yet known
Anything about me; he is singing very loud
And with leisure: he is all alone.
Oh, beautiful, oh, beautiful,
Oh, the most beautiful that I ever have heard,
Anywhere, including the nightingale.
It is not so much the tune
Although the tune is lovely, going suddenly higher
Than you expect, and neat, and something like the nightingale
dropping
And throbbing very low.
It is not so much the notes, it is the quality of the voice,
Something to do perhaps with over-tone
And under-tone, and implication
Felt, but not quite heard—
Oh, this is much to ask
Of two delicate ear-drums and of some other perception
Which I do not understand, a little oversensitive
Perhaps to certain sounds.
All my senses
Have broken their dikes and flooded into one, the sense of
hearing.
I have no choice,
I think, if I wish to continue to live: I am beginning to shiver
Already: I may be shattered
Like a vessel too thin
For certain vibrations.
Go away now, I think; go down to the damp hemlocks near
the brook in the hollow,
Where I cannot quite follow
Your deepest notes, through the dissipating air.
But return soon.
Not so soon, though,
Quite, perhaps,
As tomorrow.
Of what importance, O my lovely girls, my dancers, O my
lovely boys,
My lovers and my dancers, and my lovely girls, my lovers and
my dancers,
In a world so loud
Is our sweet noise?
Who is so proud
Of deftness in the ordered dance or on the ever-listening strings
Or of skill about the ankles with no rudeness the fine Tyrian
folds
Arranging with such art that none beholds, or when she sings
Her songs by Aphrodite not unheard, so proud as I?—
(Who on this day, not unequipped with garlands pleasing to
the gods, my lyre and my stylus, my stylus and my life
put by!)
Go now to Gorgo, you, and learn from her
What dancing is and how ’tis done;
But cut for me. if ever you loved me, and you did, from your
sweet-smelling curls
One each, from each one one,—
For I have a death to die which I may not defer—
And lay on the grave of what I may not live with and sleep well
Your pretty ringlets, O my pretty girls!—
How long my song must slumber, we shall see, or may not
ever see—
No one can tell,
This is, I think, the serious death of me.
I die, that the sweet tongue of bound Aeolia never from
her throat be torn, that Mitylene may be free
To sing, long after me.
Phaon, I shall not die for you again.
There are few poets. And my own child tells me there are other
men.
Such poets as henceforth of their own will die, must die for
more than you.
This I propose to do.
But die to no purpose? in full waste of body’s brawn and skill
and brain’s instructed, rich and devious plot
To live?—not.
Death must be fertile, from this moment on, fertile, at least, as
life.
For Man has all to lose: ordered and organized from this day
on, must be his nightly
Watch, the locking of his shrine against defilers:
Skillful now indeed must be the thumbers of the record, the
compilers:
Sharpened at all hours is the knife.
Few come this way; not that the darkness
Deters them, but they come
Reluctant here who fear to find,
Thickening the darkness, what they left behind
Sucking its cheeks before the fire at home,
The palsied Indecision from whose dancing head
Precipitately they fled, only to come again
Upon him here,
Clutching at the wrist of Venture with a cold
Hand, aiming to fall in with him, companion
Of the new as of the old.
The Strawberry Shrub
Strawberry Shrub, old-fashioned, quaint as quinces,
Hard to find in a world where neon and noise
; Have flattened the ends of the three more subtle senses;
And blare and magenta are all that a child enjoys.
More brown than red the bloom—it is a dense colour;
Colour of dried blood; colour of the key of F.
Tie it in your handkerchief, Dorcas, take it to school
To smell. But no, as I said, it is browner than red; it is duller
Than history, tinnier than algebra; and you are colour-deaf.
Purple, a little, the bloom, like musty chocolate;
Purpler than the purple avens of the wet fields;
But brown and red and hard and hiding its fragrance;
More like an herb it is: it is not exuberant.
You must bruise it a bit : it does not exude; it yields.
Clinker-built, the bloom, over-lapped its petals
Like clapboards; like a boat I had; like the feathers of a wing;
Not graceful, not at all Grecian, something from the provinces:
A chunky, ruddy, beautiful Boeotian thing.
Take it to school, knotted in your handkerchief, Dorcas,
Corner of your handkerchief, take it to school, and see
What your teacher says; show your pretty teacher the curious
Strawberry Shrub you took to school for me.
When It Is Over
When it is over—for it will be over,
Though we who watched it be gone, watched it and with it
died—
Will there be none the less the yellow melilot, the white, the
high sweet clover,
Close to the dusty, fragrant, hot roadside?
Oh, yes, there will!—
Escaped from fields of fodder, for there must be fodder still. . . .
Ah, yes, but nothing will escape . . .
Yet sweet, perhaps, in fields of fodder still.
When it is over—for it will be over—
Will there be none the less, will there be still
In April on the southern slope of an orchard, apple orchard hill,
Red-and-white buds already fragrant, intent upon blossoming?—
There will; I know there will.
But for whom will they blossom?—
They will blossom for what, not whom,
I think—the streaked bloom
Red-and-white, and the hardy fragrance, strong, all but visible,
almost but not quite in sight,
Long, long before its pretty petals in a May wind fall,
Will be the finished apple in the eyes of all beholding it;
I see him well: the human creature studying the only good
A tree can be—stout wood
For building or for pulp whereon to print the expedient thing,