Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  Made me a slave to clay for a fee of breath.

  Sweep on, O wild and lonely: mine the derision,

  Then the splendor and speed, the cleanness of death.

  Over the world’s rim, out of some splendid noon,

  Seeking some high desire, and not in vain,

  They fill and empty the red and dying moon

  And, crying, cross the rim of the world again.

  XXIX

  AS to an ancient music’s hidden fall

  Her seed in the huddled dark was warm and wet

  And three cold stars were riven in the wall:

  Rain and fire and death above her door were set.

  Her hands moaned on her breast in blind and supple fire,

  Made light within her cave: she saw her harried

  Body wrung to a strange and bitter lyre

  Whose music once was pure strings simply married.

  One to another in sleepy difference

  Her thin and happy sorrows once were wed,

  And what tomorrow’s chords are recompense

  For yesterday’s single song unravished?

  Three stars in her heart when she awakes

  As winter’s sleep breaks greening in soft rain,

  And in the caverned earth spring’s rumor shakes

  As in her loins, the tilled and quickened grain.

  XXX

  GRAY the day, and all the year is cold,

  Across the empty land the swallows’ cry

  Marks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled

  Save winter, in the sky.

  O sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep

  Stirs and turns and time once more is green,

  In empty path and lane grass will creep

  With none to tread it clean.

  April and May and June, and all the dearth

  Of heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;

  What good is budding, gray November earth?

  No need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.

  The hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees

  Shivers the grass in path and lane

  And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas —

  Hush, hush! He’s home again.

  XXXI

  HE WINNOWED it with bayonets

  And planted it with guns,

  And now the final cannonade

  Is healed with rains and suns

  He looks about — and leaps to stamp

  The stubborn grinning seeds

  Of olden plantings back beneath

  His field of colored weeds.

  XXXII

  look, cynthia,

  how abelard evaporates

  the brow of time, and paris

  tastes his bitter thumbs —

  the worm grows fat, eviscerate,

  but not on love, o cynthia.

  XXXIII

  DID I know love once? Was it love or grief,

  This grave body by where I had lain,

  And my heart, a single stubborn leaf

  That will not die, though root and branch be slain?

  Though warm in dark between the breasts of Death,

  That other breast forgot where I did lie,

  And from the tree are stripped the leaves of breath,

  There’s still one stubborn leaf that will not die

  But restless in the sad and bitter earth,

  Gains with each dawn a death, with dusk a birth.

  XXXIV

  THE ship of night, with twilightcolored sails,

  Dreamed down the golden river of the west,

  And Jesus’ mother mused the sighing gales

  While Jesus’ mouth shot drinking on her breast.

  Her soft doveslippered eyes strayed in the dusk

  Creaming backward from the fallen day,

  And a haughty star broke yellow musk

  Where dead kings slept the long cold years away.

  The hushed voices on the stair of heaven

  Upward mounting, wake each drowsing king;

  The dawn is milk to swell her breast, her seven

  Sorrows crown her with a choiring ring;

  A star to fleck young Jesus’ eyes is given,

  And white winds in the duskfilled sails to sing.

  XXXV

  THE courtesan is dead, for all her subtle ways,

  Her bonds are loosed in brittle and bitter leaves;

  Her last long backward look’s to see who grieves

  The imminent night of her reverted gaze.

  Another will reign supreme, now she is dead

  And winter’s lean clean rain sweeps out her room,

  For man’s delight and anguish: with old new bloom

  Crowning his desire, garlanding his head.

  Thus the world, turning to cold and death

  When swallows empty the blue and drowsy days

  And lean rain scatters the ghost of summer’s breath —

  The courtesan that’s dead, for all her subtle ways —

  Spring will come! rejoice! But still is there

  An old sorrow sharp as woodsmoke on the air.

  XXXVI

  GUSTY trees windily lean on green

  eviscerated skies, the stallion, Wind,

  against the sun’s gold collar stamps, to lean

  his weight. And once the furrowed day behind,

  the golden steed browses the field he breaks

  and full of flashing teeth where he has been

  trees, the waiting mare his neighing shakes,

  hold his heaving shape a moment seen.

  Upon the hills, clashing the stars together,

  stripping the tree of heaven of its blaze,

  stabled, richly grained with golden weather —

  within the trees that he has reft and raped

  his fierce embrace by riven boughs in shaped,

  while on the shaggy hills he stamps and neighs.

  XXXVII

  The race’s splendor lifts her lip, exposes

  Amid her scarlet smile her little teeth;

  The years are sand the wind plays with; beneath,

  The prisoned music of her deathless roses.

  Within frostbitten rock she’s fixed and glassed;

  Now man may look upon her without fear.

  But her contemptuous eyes back through him stare

  And shear his fatuous sheep when he has passed.

  Lilith she is dead and safely tombed

  And man may plant and prune with naught to bruit

  His heired and ancient lot to which he’s doomed,

  For quiet drowse the flocks when wolf is mute —

  Ay, Lilith she is dead, and she is wombed,

  And breaks his vine, and slowly eats the fruit.

  XXXVIII

  LIPS that of thy weary all seem weariest,

  And wearier for the curled and pallid sly

  Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy

  Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;

  Lay no hand to heart, do not protest

  That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,

  For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled

  With secret joy of thine own flank and breast.

  Weary thy mouth with smiling: canst thou bride

  Thyself with thee, or thine own kissing slake?

  Thy belly’s waking doth itself deride

  With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake;

  And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide

  For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.

  XXXIX

  LIKE to the tree that, young, reluctant yet

  While sap’s but troubled rumor of green spring;

  Like to the leaf that in warm bud does cling

  In maidened sleep unreft though passionate;

  Or like the cloud that, quicked and shaped for rain

  But flees it in a silver hot despair;

  The bird that dreams of flight and does not dare,<
br />
  The sower who fears to sow and reaps no grain.

  Beauty or gold or scarlet, then long sleep:

  All this does buy brave trafficking with breath,

  That though gray cuckold Time be horned by Death,

  Then Death in turn is cuckold, unawake.

  But sown cold years the stolen bread you reap

  By all the Eves unsistered since the Snake.

  XL

  LADY, unawares still bride of sleep,

  To thine own self sweet prisoner and fell

  Thrall to the vassalled garrison that keep

  Thy soft unguarded breast’s white citadel;

  Alas, oft-cozened maid, who’d not be twain

  Yet self-confounded, while importunates

  The foe repulsed, and single, dost remain

  The frequent darling of the gods and fates.

  Thou chaste? Why, I’ve lain lonely nights that fled

  No swifter than thou came and brided me

  Who held thee as the fabric of thy bed

  Where, turning on thy pillow’s cheek, thy kiss

  Took in thy citadel an enemy

  Against whose mouth thy mouth sleeps on — like this.

  XLI

  HER unripe shallow breast is green among

  The windy bloom of drunken apple trees,

  And seven fauns importunate as bees

  To sip the thin young honey of her tongue.

  The old satyr, leafed and hidden, dreams her kiss

  His beard amid, leaving his mouth in sight;

  Dreams her body in a moony night

  Shortening and shuddering into his;

  Then sees a faun, bolder than the rest,

  Slide his hand upon her sudden breast,

  And feels the life in him go cold, and pass

  Until the fire that kiss had brought to be

  Gutters and faints away; ’tis night, and he

  Laughing wrings the bitter wanton grass.

  XLII

  BENEATH the apple tree Eve’s tortured shape

  Glittered in the Snake’s, her riven breast

  Sloped his coils and took the sun’s escape

  To augur black her sin from east to west.

  In winter’s night man may keep him warm

  Regretting olden sins he did omit;

  With fetiches the whip of blood to charm,

  Forgetting that with breath he’s heir to it.

  But old gods fall away, the ancient Snake

  Is throned and crowned instead, and has for minion

  That golden apple which will never slake

  But ever feeds man’s crumb of fire, when plover

  And swallow and shrill northing birds whip over

  Nazarene and Roman and Virginian.

  XLIII

  lets see I’ll say — between two brief balloons

  of skirts I saw grave chalices of knees

  and momently the cloyed and cloudy bees

  where hive her honeyed thighs those little moons

  these slender moons’ unsunder I would break

  so soft I’d break that hushed virginity

  of sleep that in her narrow house would she

  find me drowsing when she came awake —

  no — madam I love your daughter — I will say

  from out some leafed dilemma of desire

  the wind hales yawning spring still half undressed

  the hand that once did short to sighs her breast

  now slaps her white behind to rosy fire

  — sir your health your money how are they —

  XLIV

  IF THERE be grief, then let it be but rain,

  And this but silver grief for grieving’s sake,

  If these green woods be dreaming here to wake

  Within my heart, if I should rouse again.

  But I shall sleep, for where is any death

  While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead

  I’m rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,

  This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.

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  Series Contents

  Series One

  Anton Chekhov

  Charles Dickens

  D.H. Lawrence

  Dickensiana Volume I

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Elizabeth Gaskell

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  George Eliot

  H. G. Wells

  Henry James

  Ivan Turgenev

  Jack London

  James Joyce

  Jane Austen

  Joseph Conrad

  Leo Tolstoy

  Louisa May Alcott

  Mark Twain

  Oscar Wilde

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  Sir Walter Scott

  The Brontës

  Thomas Hardy

  Virginia Woolf

  Wilkie Collins

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Series Two

  Alexander Pushkin

  Alexandre Dumas (English)

  Andrew Lang

  Anthony Trollope

  Bram Stoker

  Christopher Marlowe

  Daniel Defoe

  Edith Wharton

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  G. K. Chesterton

  Gustave Flaubert (English)

  H. Rider Haggard

  Herman Melville

  Honoré de Balzac (English)

  J. W. von Goethe (English)

  Jules Verne

  L. Frank Baum

  Lewis Carroll

  Marcel Proust (English)

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Nikolai Gogol

  O. Henry

  Rudyard Kipling

  Tobias Smollett

  Victor Hugo

  William Shakespeare

  Series Three

  Ambrose Bierce

  Ann Radcliffe

  Ben Jonson

  Charles Lever

  Émile Zola

  Ford Madox Ford

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  George Gissing

  George Orwell

  Guy de Maupassant

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Henrik Ibsen

  Henry David Thoreau

  Henry Fielding

  J. M. Barrie

  James Fenimore Cooper

  John Buchan

  John Galsworthy

  Jonathan Swift

  Kate Chopin

  Katherine Mansfield

  L. M. Montgomery

  Laurence Sterne

  Mary Shelley

  Sheridan Le Fanu

  Washington Irving

  Series Four

  Arnold Bennett

  Arthur Machen

  Beatrix Potter

  Bret Harte

  Captain Frederick Marryat

  Charles Kingsley

  Charles Reade

  G. A. Henty

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Edgar Wallace

  E. M. Forster

  E. Nesbit

  George Meredith

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jerome K. Jerome

  John Ruskin

  Maria Edgeworth

  M. E. Braddon

  Miguel de Cervantes<
br />
  M. R. James

  R. M. Ballantyne

  Robert E. Howard

  Samuel Johnson

  Stendhal

  Stephen Crane

  Zane Grey

  Series Five

  Algernon Blackwood

  Anatole France

  Beaumont and Fletcher

  Charles Darwin

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  Edward Gibbon

  E. F. Benson

  Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  George Bernard Shaw

  George MacDonald

  Hilaire Belloc

  John Bunyan

  John Webster

  Margaret Oliphant

  Maxim Gorky

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Radclyffe Hall

  Robert W. Chambers

  Samuel Butler

  Samuel Richardson

  Sir Thomas Malory

  Thomas Carlyle

  William Harrison Ainsworth

  William Dean Howells

  William Morris

  Series Six

  Anthony Hope

  Aphra Behn

  Arthur Morrison

  Baroness Emma Orczy

  Captain Mayne Reid

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  E. W. Hornung

  Ellen Wood

  Frances Burney

  Frank Norris

  Frank R. Stockton

  Hall Caine

  Horace Walpole

  One Thousand and One Nights

  R. Austin Freeman

  Rafael Sabatini

  Saki

  Samuel Pepys

  Sir Issac Newton

  Stanley J. Weyman

  Thomas De Quincey

  Thomas Middleton

  Voltaire

  William Hazlitt

  William Hope Hodgson

  Series Seven

  Adam Smith

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Confucius

  David Hume

  E. M. Delafield

  E. Phillips Oppenheim

  Edmund Burke

  Ernest Hemingway

  Frances Trollope