O wretched man, that for a little mileCrawls beneath heaven for his brother’s blood,Whose days the planets number with their style,To whom all earth is slave, all living, food!O withering man, within whose folded shellLies yet the seed, the spirit’s quickening corn,That Time and Sun will change out of the cellInto green meadows, in the world unborn!If Beauty be a dream, do but resolveAnd fire shall come, that in the stubborn clayWorks to make perfect till the rocks dissolve,The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way:Beauty herself, within whose blossoming SpringEven wretched man shall clap his hands and sing.Out of the special cell’s most special senseCame the suggestion when the light was sweet;All skill, all beauty, all magnificence,Are hints so caught, man’s glimpse of the complete.And, though the body rots, that sense survives;Being of life’s own essence, it endures(Fruit of the spirit’s tillage in men’s lives)Round all this ghost that wandering flesh immures.That is our friend, who, when the iron brainAssails, or the earth clogs, or the sun hides,Is the good God to whom none calls in vain,Man’s Achieved Good, which, being Life, abides:The man-made God, that man in happy breathMakes in despite of Time and dusty Death.I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,The unending sky, with all its million sunsWhich turn their planets everlastinglyIn nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.If I could sail that nothing, I should crossSilence and emptiness with dark stars passing;Then, in the darkness, see a point of glossBurn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,And rage into a sun with wandering planets,And drop behind; and then, as I proceed,See his last light upon his last moon’s granitesDie to a dark that would be night indeed:Night where my soul might sail a million yearsIn nothing, not even Death, not even tears.How did the nothing come, how did these fires,These million-leagues of fires, first toss their hair,Licking the moons from heaven in their ires,Flinging them forth for them to wander there?What was the Mind? Was it a mind which thought?Or chance? or law? or conscious law? or power?Or a vast balance by vast clashes wrought?Or Time at trial with Matter for an hour?Or is it all a body where the cellsAre living things supporting something strange,Whose mighty heart the singing planet swellsAs it shoulders nothing in unending change?Is this green earth of many-peopled painPart of a life, a cell within a brain?It may be so; but let the unknown be.We, on this earth, are servants of the sun:Out of the sun comes all the quick in me,His golden touch is life to everyone.His power it is that makes us spin through space;His youth is April and his manhood bread;Beauty is but a looking on his face;He clears the mind, he makes the roses red.What he may be, who knows? But we are his;We roll through nothing round him, year by year,The withering leaves upon a tree which is,Each with his greed, his little power, his fear,What we may be, who knows? But every oneIs dust on dust a servant of the sun.What is this life which uses living cellsIt knows not how nor why, for no known end,This soul of man upon whose fragile shellsOf blood and brain his very powers depend?Pour out its little blood or touch its brain,The thing is helpless, gone, no longer known;The carrion cells are never man again,No hand relights the little candle blown.It comes not from Without, but from the spermFed in the womb; it is a man-made thingThat takes from man its power to live a term,Served by live cells of which it is the King.Can it be blood and brain? It is most great.Through blood and brain alone it wrestles Fate.Can it be blood and brain, this transient forceWhich, by an impulse, seizes flesh and growsTo man, the thing less splendid than the horse,More blind than owls, less lovely than the rose?O, by a power unknown it works the cellsOf blood and brain; it has the power to seeBeyond the apparent thing the something elseWhich it inspires dust to bring to be.Both blood and brain are its imperfect tools,Easily wrecked, soon worn, slow to attain;Only by years of toil the master rulesTo lovely ends those servants, blood and brain.And Death, a touch, a germ, has still the forceTo make him ev’n as the rose, the owl, the horse.Not only blood and brain its servants are;There is a finer power that needs no slaves,Whose lovely service distance cannot bar,Nor the green sea with all her hell of waves;Nor snowy mountains, nor the desert sand,Nor heat, nor storm, it bends to no control;It is a stretching of the spirit’s handTo touch the brother’s or the sister’s soul;So that from darkness in the narrow roomI can step forth and be about her heart,Needing no star, no lantern in the gloom,No word from her, no pointing on the chart,Only red knowledge of a window flungWide to the night, and calling without tongue.Here in the self is all that man can knowOf Beauty, all the wonder, all the power,All the unearthly colour, all the glow,Here in the self which withers like a flower;Here in the self which fades as hours pass,And droops and dies and rots and is forgottenSooner, by ages, than the mirroring glassIn which it sees its glory still unrotten.Here in the flesh, within the flesh, behind,Swift in the blood and throbbing on the bone,Beauty herself, the universal mind,Eternal April wandering alone;The God, the holy Ghost, the atoning Lord,Here in the flesh, the never yet explored.Flesh, I have knocked at many a dusty door,Gone down full many a windy midnight lane,Probed in old walls and felt along the floor,Pressed in blind hope the lighted window-pane.But useless all, though sometimes when the moonWas full in heaven and the sea was full,Along my body’s alleys came a tunePlayed in the tavern by the Beautiful.Then for an instant I have felt at pointTo find and seize her, whosoe’er she be,Whether some saint whose glory doth anointThose whom she loves, or but a part of me,Or something that the things not understoodMake for their uses out of flesh and blood.But all has passed, the tune has died away,The glamour gone, the glory; is it chance?Is the unfeeling mud stabbed by a rayCast by an unseen splendour’s great advance?Or does the glory gather crumb by crumbUnseen, within, as coral islands rise,Till suddenly the apparitions comeAbove the surface, looking at the skies?Or does sweet Beauty dwell in lovely thingsScattering the holy hintings of her nameIn women, in dear friends, in flowers, in springs,In the brook’s voice, for us to catch the same?Or is it we who are Beauty, we who ask?We by whose gleams the world fulfils its task.These myriad days, these many thousand hours,A man’s long life, so choked with dusty things,How little perfect poise with perfect powers,Joy at the heart and Beauty at the springs.One hour, or two, or three, in long years scatteredSparks from a smithy that have fired a thatch,Are all that life has given and all that mattered;The rest, all heaving at a moveless latch.For these, so many years of useless toil,Despair, endeavour, and again despair,Sweat, that the base machine may have its oil,Idle delight to tempt one everywhere.A life upon the cross. To make amends,Three flaming memories that the deathbed ends.There, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brainThat flared three several times in seventy years.It cannot lift the silly hand again,Nor speak, nor sing, it neither sees nor hears;And muffled mourners put it in the groundAnd then go home, and in the earth it liesToo dark for vision and too deep for sound,The million cells that made a good man wise.Yet for a few short years an influence stirs,A sense or wraith or essence of him dead,Which makes insensate things its ministersTo those beloved, his spirit’s daily bread;Then that, too, fades; in book or deed a sparkLingers, then that, too, fades; then all is dark.So in the empty sky the stars appear,Are bright in heaven marching through the sky,Spinning their planets, each one to his year,Tossing their fiery hair until they die;Then in the tower afar the watcher seesThe sun, that burned, less noble than it was,Less noble still, until by dim degreesNo spark of him is specklike in his glass.Then blind and dark in heaven the sun proceeds,Vast, dead and hideous, knocking on his moons,Till crashing on his like creation breeds,Striking such life, a constellation swoons;From dead things striking fire a new sun springs,New fire, new life, new planets with new wings.It may be so with us, that in the dark,When we have done with time and wander space,Some meeting of the blind may strike a spark,And to Death’s empty mansion give a grace.It may be, that the loosened soul may findSome new delight of living without limbs,Bodiless joy of flesh-untrammelled mind,Peace like a sky where starlike spirit swims.It may be, that the million cells of sense,Loosed from their seventy years’ adhesion, passEach to some joy of changed experience,Weight in the earth or glory in the grass.It may be, that we cease; we cannot tell.Even if we cease, life is a miracle.What am I, Life? A thing of watery saltHeld in cohesion by unresting cellsWhich work they know not why, which never halt,Myself unwitting where their master dwells.I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin:A world which uses me as I use them,Nor do I know which end or which begin,Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.So, like a marvel in a marvel set,I answer to the vast, as wave by waveThe sea of air goes over, dry or wet,Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,Or the great sun comes north, this myriad ITingles, not knowing how, yet why.If I could get within this changing I,This ever altering thing which yet persists,Keeping the features it is reckoned by,While each component atom breaks or twists,If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms,Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work,Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms,I might attain to where the Rulers lurk.If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates,The brain’s most folded, intertwisted shell,I might attain to that which alters fates,The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell;Then, on Man’s earthly peak, I might beholdThe unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.What is this atom which contains the whole,This miracle which needs adjuncts so strange,This, which imagined God and is the soul,The steady star persisting amid change?What waste, that smallness of such power should needSuch clumsy tools so easy to destroy,Such wasteful servants difficult to feed,Such indirect dark avenues to joy.Why, if its business is not mainly earth,Should it demand such heavy chains to sense?A heavenly thing demands a swifter birth,A quicker hand to act intelligence;An earthly thing were better like the rose,At peace with clay from which its beauty grows.Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men;Something that uses and despises both,That takes its earth’s contentment in the pen,Then sees the world’s injustice and is wroth,And flinging off youth’s happy promise, fliesUp to some breach, despising earthly things,And, in contempt of hell and heaven, diesRather than bear some yoke of priests or kingsOur joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man’s,A woman’s beauty, or a child’s delight,The trembling blood when the discoverer scansThe sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite;The ringing scene, the stone at point to blushFor unborn men to look at and say “Hush.”Roses are beauty, but I never seeThose blood drops from the burning heart of JuneGlowing like thought upon the living treeWithout a pity that they die so soon,Die into petals, like those roses old,Those women, who were summer in men’s heartsBefore the smile upon the Sphinx was coldOr sand had hid the Syrian and his arts.O myriad dust of beauty that lies thickUnder our feet that not a single grainBut stirred and moved in beauty and was quickFor one brief moon and died nor lived again;But when the moon rose lay upon the grassPasture to living beauty, life that was.Over the church’s door they moved a stone,And there, unguessed, forgotten, mortared up,Lay the priest’s cell where he had lived alone.There was his ashy hearth, his drinking cup,There was his window whence he saw the Host,The God whose beauty quickened bread and wine;The skeleton of a religion lost,The ghostless bones of what had been divine.O many a time the dusty masons comeKnocking their trowels in the stony brainTo cells where perished priests had once a home,Or where devout brows pressed the window pane,Watching the thing made God, the God whose bonesBind underground our soul’s foundation stones.O little self, within whose smallness liesAll that man was, and is, and will become,Atom unseen that comprehends the skiesAnd tells the tracks by which the planets roam;That, without moving, knows the joys of wings,The tiger’s strength, the eagle’s secrecy,And in the hovel can consort with kings,Or clothe a God with his own mystery.O with what darkness do we cloak thy light,What dusty folly gather thee for food,Thou who alone art knowledge and delight,The heavenly bread, the beautiful, the good.O living self, O God, O morning star,Give us thy light, forgive us what we are.I went into the fields, but you were thereWaiting for me, so all the summer flowersWere only glimpses of your starry powers;Beautiful and inspired dust they were.I went down by the waters, and a birdSang with your voice in all the unknown tonesOf all that self of you I have not heard,So that my being felt you to the bones.I went into the house, and shut the doorTo be alone, but you were there with me;All beauty in a little room may be,Though the roof lean and muddy be the floor.Then in my bed I bound my tired eyesTo make a darkness for my weary brain;But like a presence you were there again,Being and real, beautiful and wise,So that I could not sleep, and cried aloud,“You strange grave thing, what is it you would say?”The redness of your dear lips dimmed to grey,The waters ebbed, the moon hid in a cloud.Wherever beauty has been quick in claySome effluence of it lives, a spirit dwells,Beauty that death can never take awayMixed with the air that shakes the flower bells;So that by waters where the apples fall,Or in lone glens, or valleys full of flowers,Or in the streets where bloody tidings call,The haunting waits the mood that makes it ours.Then at a turn, a word, an act, a thought,Such difference comes; the spirit apprehendsThat place’s glory; for where beauty foughtUnder the veil the glory never ends;But the still grass, the leaves, the trembling flowerKeep, through dead time, that everlasting hour.Not for the anguish suffered is the slur,Not for the woman’s taunts, the mocks of men;No, but because you never welcomed her,Her of whose beauty I am only the pen.There was a dog, dog-minded, with dog’s eyes,Damned by a dog’s brute-nature to be true.Something within her made his spirit wise;He licked her hand, he knew her; not so you.When all adulterate beauty has gone by,When all inanimate matter has gone down,We will arise and walk, that dog and I,The only two who knew her in the town.We’ll range the pleasant mountain side by side,Seeking the blood-stained flowers where Christs have died.You will remember me in days to come,With love, or pride, or pity, or contempt,So will my friends (not many friends, yet some),When this my life will be a dream out-dreamt;And one, remembering friendship by the fire,And one, remembering love time in the dark,And one, remembering unfulfilled desire,Will sigh, perhaps, yet be beside the mark;For this my body with its wandering ghostIs nothing solely but an empty grange,Dark in a night that owls inhabit most,Yet when the King rides by there comes a changeThe windows gleam, the cresset’s fiery hairBlasts the blown branch and beauty lodges there.If Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense,There be a wisdom piercing into brains,Why should the glory wait on impotence,Biding its time till blood is in the veins?There is no beauty, but, when thought is quick,Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselvesSome flattery comes to try to cheat the sick,Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves.There is no beauty, for we tread a sceneRed to the eye with blood of living things;Thought is but joy from murder that has been,Life is but brute at war upon its kings.There is no beauty, nor could beauty careFor us, this dust, that men make everywhere.If all be governed by the moving stars,If passing planets bring events to be,Searing the face of Time with bloody scars,Drawing men’s souls even as the moon the sea,If as they pass they make a current passAcross man’s life and heap it to a tide,We are but pawns, ignobler than the grassCropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside.Is all this beauty that doth inhabit heavenTrain of a planet’s fire? Is all this lustA chymic means by warring stars contrivenTo bring the violets out of Cæsar’s dust?Better be grass, or in some hedge unknownThe spilling rose whose beauty is its own.In emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are,Perhaps some planet of our master sunStill rolls an unguessed orbit round its star,Unthought, unseen, unknown of anyone.Roving dead space according to its law,Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind,Singing in the frozen void its word of awe,One wandering thought in all that idiot mind.And, in some span of many a thousand year,Passing through heaven its influence may arouseBeauty unguessed in those who habit here,And men may rise with glory on their browsAnd feel new life like fire, and see the oldFall from them dead, the bronze’s broken mould.Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood,Shy-footed beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood.Glimpsed in the beech-wood dim and in the dropping fir,Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty’s minister.Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon,A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.Only a moment held, only an hour seen,Only an instant known in all that life has been,One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace,The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.Death lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives;I perish even as you by whom all spirit lives.Come to me, spirit, come, and fill my hour of breathWith hours of life in life that pay no toll to death.Go, spend your penny, Beauty, when you will,In the grave’s darkness let the stamp be lost.The water still will bubble from the hill,And April quick the meadows with her ghost;Over the grass the daffodils will shiver,The primroses with their pale beauty abound,The blackbird be a lover and make quiverWith his glad singing the great soul of the ground;So that if the body rot, it will not matter;Up in the earth the great game will go on,The coming of spring and the running of the water,And the young things glad of the womb’s darkness gone.And the joy we felt will be a part of the gloryIn the lover’s kiss that makes the old couple’s story.Let that which is to come be as it may,Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense,The flies are happy in the summer day,Flies will be happy many summers hence.Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphinx,Time with her men to come whose wings will tower,Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks,But with blind force, to each his little hour.And when the hour has struck, comes death or change,Which, whether good or ill we cannot tell,But the blind planet will wander through her rangeBearing men like us who will serve as well.The sun will rise, the winds that ever moveWill blow our dust that once were men in love.
O wretched man, that for a little mileCrawls beneath heaven for his brother’s blood,Whose days the planets number with their style,To whom all earth is slave, all living, food!O withering man, within whose folded shellLies yet the seed, the spirit’s quickening corn,That Time and Sun will change out of the cellInto green meadows, in the world unborn!If Beauty be a dream, do but resolveAnd fire shall come, that in the stubborn clayWorks to make perfect till the rocks dissolve,The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way:Beauty herself, within whose blossoming SpringEven wretched man shall clap his hands and sing.Out of the special cell’s most special senseCame the suggestion when the light was sweet;All skill, all beauty, all magnificence,Are hints so caught, man’s glimpse of the complete.And, though the body rots, that sense survives;Being of life’s own essence, it endures(Fruit of the spirit’s tillage in men’s lives)Round all this ghost that wandering flesh immures.That is our friend, who, when the iron brainAssails, or the earth clogs, or the sun hides,Is the good God to whom none calls in vain,Man’s Achieved Good, which, being Life, abides:The man-made God, that man in happy breathMakes in despite of Time and dusty Death.I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,The unending sky, with all its million sunsWhich turn their planets everlastinglyIn nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.If I could sail that nothing, I should crossSilence and emptiness with dark stars passing;Then, in the darkness, see a point of glossBurn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,And rage into a sun with wandering planets,And drop behind; and then, as I proceed,See his last light upon his last moon’s granitesDie to a dark that would be night indeed:Night where my soul might sail a million yearsIn nothing, not even Death, not even tears.How did the nothing come, how did these fires,These million-leagues of fires, first toss their hair,Licking the moons from heaven in their ires,Flinging them forth for them to wander there?What was the Mind? Was it a mind which thought?Or chance? or law? or conscious law? or power?Or a vast balance by vast clashes wrought?Or Time at trial with Matter for an hour?Or is it all a body where the cellsAre living things supporting something strange,Whose mighty heart the singing planet swellsAs it shoulders nothing in unending change?Is this green earth of many-peopled painPart of a life, a cell within a brain?It may be so; but let the unknown be.We, on this earth, are servants of the sun:Out of the sun comes all the quick in me,His golden touch is life to everyone.His power it is that makes us spin through space;His youth is April and his manhood bread;Beauty is but a looking on his face;He clears the mind, he makes the roses red.What he may be, who knows? But we are his;We roll through nothing round him, year by year,The withering leaves upon a tree which is,Each with his greed, his little power, his fear,What we may be, who knows? But every oneIs dust on dust a servant of the sun.What is this life which uses living cellsIt knows not how nor why, for no known end,This soul of man upon whose fragile shellsOf blood and brain his very powers depend?Pour out its little blood or touch its brain,The thing is helpless, gone, no longer known;The carrion cells are never man again,No hand relights the little candle blown.It comes not from Without, but from the spermFed in the womb; it is a man-made thingThat takes from man its power to live a term,Served by live cells of which it is the King.Can it be blood and brain? It is most great.Through blood and brain alone it wrestles Fate.Can it be blood and brain, this transient forceWhich, by an impulse, seizes flesh and growsTo man, the thing less splendid than the horse,More blind than owls, less lovely than the rose?O, by a power unknown it works the cellsOf blood and brain; it has the power to seeBeyond the apparent thing the something elseWhich it inspires dust to bring to be.Both blood and brain are its imperfect tools,Easily wrecked, soon worn, slow to attain;Only by years of toil the master rulesTo lovely ends those servants, blood and brain.And Death, a touch, a germ, has still the forceTo make him ev’n as the rose, the owl, the horse.Not only blood and brain its servants are;There is a finer power that needs no slaves,Whose lovely service distance cannot bar,Nor the green sea with all her hell of waves;Nor snowy mountains, nor the desert sand,Nor heat, nor storm, it bends to no control;It is a stretching of the spirit’s handTo touch the brother’s or the sister’s soul;So that from darkness in the narrow roomI can step forth and be about her heart,Needing no star, no lantern in the gloom,No word from her, no pointing on the chart,Only red knowledge of a window flungWide to the night, and calling without tongue.Here in the self is all that man can knowOf Beauty, all the wonder, all the power,All the unearthly colour, all the glow,Here in the self which withers like a flower;Here in the self which fades as hours pass,And droops and dies and rots and is forgottenSooner, by ages, than the mirroring glassIn which it sees its glory still unrotten.Here in the flesh, within the flesh, behind,Swift in the blood and throbbing on the bone,Beauty herself, the universal mind,Eternal April wandering alone;The God, the holy Ghost, the atoning Lord,Here in the flesh, the never yet explored.Flesh, I have knocked at many a dusty door,Gone down full many a windy midnight lane,Probed in old walls and felt along the floor,Pressed in blind hope the lighted window-pane.But useless all, though sometimes when the moonWas full in heaven and the sea was full,Along my body’s alleys came a tunePlayed in the tavern by the Beautiful.Then for an instant I have felt at pointTo find and seize her, whosoe’er she be,Whether some saint whose glory doth anointThose whom she loves, or but a part of me,Or something that the things not understoodMake for their uses out of flesh and blood.But all has passed, the tune has died away,The glamour gone, the glory; is it chance?Is the unfeeling mud stabbed by a rayCast by an unseen splendour’s great advance?Or does the glory gather crumb by crumbUnseen, within, as coral islands rise,Till suddenly the apparitions comeAbove the surface, looking at the skies?Or does sweet Beauty dwell in lovely thingsScattering the holy hintings of her nameIn women, in dear friends, in flowers, in springs,In the brook’s voice, for us to catch the same?Or is it we who are Beauty, we who ask?We by whose gleams the world fulfils its task.These myriad days, these many thousand hours,A man’s long life, so choked with dusty things,How little perfect poise with perfect powers,Joy at the heart and Beauty at the springs.One hour, or two, or three, in long years scatteredSparks from a smithy that have fired a thatch,Are all that life has given and all that mattered;The rest, all heaving at a moveless latch.For these, so many years of useless toil,Despair, endeavour, and again despair,Sweat, that the base machine may have its oil,Idle delight to tempt one everywhere.A life upon the cross. To make amends,Three flaming memories that the deathbed ends.There, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brainThat flared three several times in seventy years.It cannot lift the silly hand again,Nor speak, nor sing, it neither sees nor hears;And muffled mourners put it in the groundAnd then go home, and in the earth it liesToo dark for vision and too deep for sound,The million cells that made a good man wise.Yet for a few short years an influence stirs,A sense or wraith or essence of him dead,Which makes insensate things its ministersTo those beloved, his spirit’s daily bread;Then that, too, fades; in book or deed a sparkLingers, then that, too, fades; then all is dark.So in the empty sky the stars appear,Are bright in heaven marching through the sky,Spinning their planets, each one to his year,Tossing their fiery hair until they die;Then in the tower afar the watcher seesThe sun, that burned, less noble than it was,Less noble still, until by dim degreesNo spark of him is specklike in his glass.Then blind and dark in heaven the sun proceeds,Vast, dead and hideous, knocking on his moons,Till crashing on his like creation breeds,Striking such life, a constellation swoons;From dead things striking fire a new sun springs,New fire, new life, new planets with new wings.It may be so with us, that in the dark,When we have done with time and wander space,Some meeting of the blind may strike a spark,And to Death’s empty mansion give a grace.It may be, that the loosened soul may findSome new delight of living without limbs,Bodiless joy of flesh-untrammelled mind,Peace like a sky where starlike spirit swims.It may be, that the million cells of sense,Loosed from their seventy years’ adhesion, passEach to some joy of changed experience,Weight in the earth or glory in the grass.It may be, that we cease; we cannot tell.Even if we cease, life is a miracle.What am I, Life? A thing of watery saltHeld in cohesion by unresting cellsWhich work they know not why, which never halt,Myself unwitting where their master dwells.I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin:A world which uses me as I use them,Nor do I know which end or which begin,Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.So, like a marvel in a marvel set,I answer to the vast, as wave by waveThe sea of air goes over, dry or wet,Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,Or the great sun comes north, this myriad ITingles, not knowing how, yet why.If I could get within this changing I,This ever altering thing which yet persists,Keeping the features it is reckoned by,While each component atom breaks or twists,If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms,Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work,Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms,I might attain to where the Rulers lurk.If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates,The brain’s most folded, intertwisted shell,I might attain to that which alters fates,The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell;Then, on Man’s earthly peak, I might beholdThe unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.What is this atom which contains the whole,This miracle which needs adjuncts so strange,This, which imagined God and is the soul,The steady star persisting amid change?What waste, that smallness of such power should needSuch clumsy tools so easy to destroy,Such wasteful servants difficult to feed,Such indirect dark avenues to joy.Why, if its business is not mainly earth,Should it demand such heavy chains to sense?A heavenly thing demands a swifter birth,A quicker hand to act intelligence;An earthly thing were better like the rose,At peace with clay from which its beauty grows.Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men;Something that uses and despises both,That takes its earth’s contentment in the pen,Then sees the world’s injustice and is wroth,And flinging off youth’s happy promise, fliesUp to some breach, despising earthly things,And, in contempt of hell and heaven, diesRather than bear some yoke of priests or kingsOur joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man’s,A woman’s beauty, or a child’s delight,The trembling blood when the discoverer scansThe sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite;The ringing scene, the stone at point to blushFor unborn men to look at and say “Hush.”Roses are beauty, but I never seeThose blood drops from the burning heart of JuneGlowing like thought upon the living treeWithout a pity that they die so soon,Die into petals, like those roses old,Those women, who were summer in men’s heartsBefore the smile upon the Sphinx was coldOr sand had hid the Syrian and his arts.O myriad dust of beauty that lies thickUnder our feet that not a single grainBut stirred and moved in beauty and was quickFor one brief moon and died nor lived again;But when the moon rose lay upon the grassPasture to living beauty, life that was.Over the church’s door they moved a stone,And there, unguessed, forgotten, mortared up,Lay the priest’s cell where he had lived alone.There was his ashy hearth, his drinking cup,There was his window whence he saw the Host,The God whose beauty quickened bread and wine;The skeleton of a religion lost,The ghostless bones of what had been divine.O many a time the dusty masons comeKnocking their trowels in the stony brainTo cells where perished priests had once a home,Or where devout brows pressed the window pane,Watching the thing made God, the God whose bonesBind underground our soul’s foundation stones.O little self, within whose smallness liesAll that man was, and is, and will become,Atom unseen that comprehends the skiesAnd tells the tracks by which the planets roam;That, without moving, knows the joys of wings,The tiger’s strength, the eagle’s secrecy,And in the hovel can consort with kings,Or clothe a God with his own mystery.O with what darkness do we cloak thy light,What dusty folly gather thee for food,Thou who alone art knowledge and delight,The heavenly bread, the beautiful, the good.O living self, O God, O morning star,Give us thy light, forgive us what we are.I went into the fields, but you were thereWaiting for me, so all the summer flowersWere only glimpses of your starry powers;Beautiful and inspired dust they were.I went down by the waters, and a birdSang with your voice in all the unknown tonesOf all that self of you I have not heard,So that my being felt you to the bones.I went into the house, and shut the doorTo be alone, but you were there with me;All beauty in a little room may be,Though the roof lean and muddy be the floor.Then in my bed I bound my tired eyesTo make a darkness for my weary brain;But like a presence you were there again,Being and real, beautiful and wise,So that I could not sleep, and cried aloud,“You strange grave thing, what is it you would say?”The redness of your dear lips dimmed to grey,The waters ebbed, the moon hid in a cloud.Wherever beauty has been quick in claySome effluence of it lives, a spirit dwells,Beauty that death can never take awayMixed with the air that shakes the flower bells;So that by waters where the apples fall,Or in lone glens, or valleys full of flowers,Or in the streets where bloody tidings call,The haunting waits the mood that makes it ours.Then at a turn, a word, an act, a thought,Such difference comes; the spirit apprehendsThat place’s glory; for where beauty foughtUnder the veil the glory never ends;But the still grass, the leaves, the trembling flowerKeep, through dead time, that everlasting hour.Not for the anguish suffered is the slur,Not for the woman’s taunts, the mocks of men;No, but because you never welcomed her,Her of whose beauty I am only the pen.There was a dog, dog-minded, with dog’s eyes,Damned by a dog’s brute-nature to be true.Something within her made his spirit wise;He licked her hand, he knew her; not so you.When all adulterate beauty has gone by,When all inanimate matter has gone down,We will arise and walk, that dog and I,The only two who knew her in the town.We’ll range the pleasant mountain side by side,Seeking the blood-stained flowers where Christs have died.You will remember me in days to come,With love, or pride, or pity, or contempt,So will my friends (not many friends, yet some),When this my life will be a dream out-dreamt;And one, remembering friendship by the fire,And one, remembering love time in the dark,And one, remembering unfulfilled desire,Will sigh, perhaps, yet be beside the mark;For this my body with its wandering ghostIs nothing solely but an empty grange,Dark in a night that owls inhabit most,Yet when the King rides by there comes a changeThe windows gleam, the cresset’s fiery hairBlasts the blown branch and beauty lodges there.If Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense,There be a wisdom piercing into brains,Why should the glory wait on impotence,Biding its time till blood is in the veins?There is no beauty, but, when thought is quick,Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselvesSome flattery comes to try to cheat the sick,Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves.There is no beauty, for we tread a sceneRed to the eye with blood of living things;Thought is but joy from murder that has been,Life is but brute at war upon its kings.There is no beauty, nor could beauty careFor us, this dust, that men make everywhere.If all be governed by the moving stars,If passing planets bring events to be,Searing the face of Time with bloody scars,Drawing men’s souls even as the moon the sea,If as they pass they make a current passAcross man’s life and heap it to a tide,We are but pawns, ignobler than the grassCropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside.Is all this beauty that doth inhabit heavenTrain of a planet’s fire? Is all this lustA chymic means by warring stars contrivenTo bring the violets out of Cæsar’s dust?Better be grass, or in some hedge unknownThe spilling rose whose beauty is its own.In emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are,Perhaps some planet of our master sunStill rolls an unguessed orbit round its star,Unthought, unseen, unknown of anyone.Roving dead space according to its law,Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind,Singing in the frozen void its word of awe,One wandering thought in all that idiot mind.And, in some span of many a thousand year,Passing through heaven its influence may arouseBeauty unguessed in those who habit here,And men may rise with glory on their browsAnd feel new life like fire, and see the oldFall from them dead, the bronze’s broken mould.Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood,Shy-footed beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood.Glimpsed in the beech-wood dim and in the dropping fir,Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty’s minister.Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon,A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.Only a moment held, only an hour seen,Only an instant known in all that life has been,One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace,The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.Death lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives;I perish even as you by whom all spirit lives.Come to me, spirit, come, and fill my hour of breathWith hours of life in life that pay no toll to death.Go, spend your penny, Beauty, when you will,In the grave’s darkness let the stamp be lost.The water still will bubble from the hill,And April quick the meadows with her ghost;Over the grass the daffodils will shiver,The primroses with their pale beauty abound,The blackbird be a lover and make quiverWith his glad singing the great soul of the ground;So that if the body rot, it will not matter;Up in the earth the great game will go on,The coming of spring and the running of the water,And the young things glad of the womb’s darkness gone.And the joy we felt will be a part of the gloryIn the lover’s kiss that makes the old couple’s story.Let that which is to come be as it may,Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense,The flies are happy in the summer day,Flies will be happy many summers hence.Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphinx,Time with her men to come whose wings will tower,Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks,But with blind force, to each his little hour.And when the hour has struck, comes death or change,Which, whether good or ill we cannot tell,But the blind planet will wander through her rangeBearing men like us who will serve as well.The sun will rise, the winds that ever moveWill blow our dust that once were men in love.
O wretched man, that for a little mileCrawls beneath heaven for his brother’s blood,Whose days the planets number with their style,To whom all earth is slave, all living, food!O withering man, within whose folded shellLies yet the seed, the spirit’s quickening corn,That Time and Sun will change out of the cellInto green meadows, in the world unborn!If Beauty be a dream, do but resolveAnd fire shall come, that in the stubborn clayWorks to make perfect till the rocks dissolve,The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way:Beauty herself, within whose blossoming SpringEven wretched man shall clap his hands and sing.
Out of the special cell’s most special senseCame the suggestion when the light was sweet;All skill, all beauty, all magnificence,Are hints so caught, man’s glimpse of the complete.And, though the body rots, that sense survives;Being of life’s own essence, it endures(Fruit of the spirit’s tillage in men’s lives)Round all this ghost that wandering flesh immures.That is our friend, who, when the iron brainAssails, or the earth clogs, or the sun hides,Is the good God to whom none calls in vain,Man’s Achieved Good, which, being Life, abides:The man-made God, that man in happy breathMakes in despite of Time and dusty Death.
I could not sleep for thinking of the sky,The unending sky, with all its million sunsWhich turn their planets everlastinglyIn nothing, where the fire-haired comet runs.If I could sail that nothing, I should crossSilence and emptiness with dark stars passing;Then, in the darkness, see a point of glossBurn to a glow, and glare, and keep amassing,And rage into a sun with wandering planets,And drop behind; and then, as I proceed,See his last light upon his last moon’s granitesDie to a dark that would be night indeed:Night where my soul might sail a million yearsIn nothing, not even Death, not even tears.
How did the nothing come, how did these fires,These million-leagues of fires, first toss their hair,Licking the moons from heaven in their ires,Flinging them forth for them to wander there?What was the Mind? Was it a mind which thought?Or chance? or law? or conscious law? or power?Or a vast balance by vast clashes wrought?Or Time at trial with Matter for an hour?Or is it all a body where the cellsAre living things supporting something strange,Whose mighty heart the singing planet swellsAs it shoulders nothing in unending change?Is this green earth of many-peopled painPart of a life, a cell within a brain?
It may be so; but let the unknown be.We, on this earth, are servants of the sun:Out of the sun comes all the quick in me,His golden touch is life to everyone.His power it is that makes us spin through space;His youth is April and his manhood bread;Beauty is but a looking on his face;He clears the mind, he makes the roses red.What he may be, who knows? But we are his;We roll through nothing round him, year by year,The withering leaves upon a tree which is,Each with his greed, his little power, his fear,What we may be, who knows? But every oneIs dust on dust a servant of the sun.
What is this life which uses living cellsIt knows not how nor why, for no known end,This soul of man upon whose fragile shellsOf blood and brain his very powers depend?Pour out its little blood or touch its brain,The thing is helpless, gone, no longer known;The carrion cells are never man again,No hand relights the little candle blown.It comes not from Without, but from the spermFed in the womb; it is a man-made thingThat takes from man its power to live a term,Served by live cells of which it is the King.Can it be blood and brain? It is most great.Through blood and brain alone it wrestles Fate.
Can it be blood and brain, this transient forceWhich, by an impulse, seizes flesh and growsTo man, the thing less splendid than the horse,More blind than owls, less lovely than the rose?O, by a power unknown it works the cellsOf blood and brain; it has the power to seeBeyond the apparent thing the something elseWhich it inspires dust to bring to be.Both blood and brain are its imperfect tools,Easily wrecked, soon worn, slow to attain;Only by years of toil the master rulesTo lovely ends those servants, blood and brain.And Death, a touch, a germ, has still the forceTo make him ev’n as the rose, the owl, the horse.
Not only blood and brain its servants are;There is a finer power that needs no slaves,Whose lovely service distance cannot bar,Nor the green sea with all her hell of waves;Nor snowy mountains, nor the desert sand,Nor heat, nor storm, it bends to no control;It is a stretching of the spirit’s handTo touch the brother’s or the sister’s soul;So that from darkness in the narrow roomI can step forth and be about her heart,Needing no star, no lantern in the gloom,No word from her, no pointing on the chart,Only red knowledge of a window flungWide to the night, and calling without tongue.
Here in the self is all that man can knowOf Beauty, all the wonder, all the power,All the unearthly colour, all the glow,Here in the self which withers like a flower;Here in the self which fades as hours pass,And droops and dies and rots and is forgottenSooner, by ages, than the mirroring glassIn which it sees its glory still unrotten.Here in the flesh, within the flesh, behind,Swift in the blood and throbbing on the bone,Beauty herself, the universal mind,Eternal April wandering alone;The God, the holy Ghost, the atoning Lord,Here in the flesh, the never yet explored.
Flesh, I have knocked at many a dusty door,Gone down full many a windy midnight lane,Probed in old walls and felt along the floor,Pressed in blind hope the lighted window-pane.But useless all, though sometimes when the moonWas full in heaven and the sea was full,Along my body’s alleys came a tunePlayed in the tavern by the Beautiful.Then for an instant I have felt at pointTo find and seize her, whosoe’er she be,Whether some saint whose glory doth anointThose whom she loves, or but a part of me,Or something that the things not understoodMake for their uses out of flesh and blood.
But all has passed, the tune has died away,The glamour gone, the glory; is it chance?Is the unfeeling mud stabbed by a rayCast by an unseen splendour’s great advance?Or does the glory gather crumb by crumbUnseen, within, as coral islands rise,Till suddenly the apparitions comeAbove the surface, looking at the skies?Or does sweet Beauty dwell in lovely thingsScattering the holy hintings of her nameIn women, in dear friends, in flowers, in springs,In the brook’s voice, for us to catch the same?Or is it we who are Beauty, we who ask?We by whose gleams the world fulfils its task.
These myriad days, these many thousand hours,A man’s long life, so choked with dusty things,How little perfect poise with perfect powers,Joy at the heart and Beauty at the springs.One hour, or two, or three, in long years scatteredSparks from a smithy that have fired a thatch,Are all that life has given and all that mattered;The rest, all heaving at a moveless latch.For these, so many years of useless toil,Despair, endeavour, and again despair,Sweat, that the base machine may have its oil,Idle delight to tempt one everywhere.A life upon the cross. To make amends,Three flaming memories that the deathbed ends.
There, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brainThat flared three several times in seventy years.It cannot lift the silly hand again,Nor speak, nor sing, it neither sees nor hears;And muffled mourners put it in the groundAnd then go home, and in the earth it liesToo dark for vision and too deep for sound,The million cells that made a good man wise.Yet for a few short years an influence stirs,A sense or wraith or essence of him dead,Which makes insensate things its ministersTo those beloved, his spirit’s daily bread;Then that, too, fades; in book or deed a sparkLingers, then that, too, fades; then all is dark.
So in the empty sky the stars appear,Are bright in heaven marching through the sky,Spinning their planets, each one to his year,Tossing their fiery hair until they die;Then in the tower afar the watcher seesThe sun, that burned, less noble than it was,Less noble still, until by dim degreesNo spark of him is specklike in his glass.Then blind and dark in heaven the sun proceeds,Vast, dead and hideous, knocking on his moons,Till crashing on his like creation breeds,Striking such life, a constellation swoons;From dead things striking fire a new sun springs,New fire, new life, new planets with new wings.
It may be so with us, that in the dark,When we have done with time and wander space,Some meeting of the blind may strike a spark,And to Death’s empty mansion give a grace.It may be, that the loosened soul may findSome new delight of living without limbs,Bodiless joy of flesh-untrammelled mind,Peace like a sky where starlike spirit swims.It may be, that the million cells of sense,Loosed from their seventy years’ adhesion, passEach to some joy of changed experience,Weight in the earth or glory in the grass.It may be, that we cease; we cannot tell.Even if we cease, life is a miracle.
What am I, Life? A thing of watery saltHeld in cohesion by unresting cellsWhich work they know not why, which never halt,Myself unwitting where their master dwells.I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin:A world which uses me as I use them,Nor do I know which end or which begin,Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.So, like a marvel in a marvel set,I answer to the vast, as wave by waveThe sea of air goes over, dry or wet,Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,Or the great sun comes north, this myriad ITingles, not knowing how, yet why.
If I could get within this changing I,This ever altering thing which yet persists,Keeping the features it is reckoned by,While each component atom breaks or twists,If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms,Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work,Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms,I might attain to where the Rulers lurk.If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates,The brain’s most folded, intertwisted shell,I might attain to that which alters fates,The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell;Then, on Man’s earthly peak, I might beholdThe unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.
What is this atom which contains the whole,This miracle which needs adjuncts so strange,This, which imagined God and is the soul,The steady star persisting amid change?What waste, that smallness of such power should needSuch clumsy tools so easy to destroy,Such wasteful servants difficult to feed,Such indirect dark avenues to joy.Why, if its business is not mainly earth,Should it demand such heavy chains to sense?A heavenly thing demands a swifter birth,A quicker hand to act intelligence;An earthly thing were better like the rose,At peace with clay from which its beauty grows.
Ah, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men;Something that uses and despises both,That takes its earth’s contentment in the pen,Then sees the world’s injustice and is wroth,And flinging off youth’s happy promise, fliesUp to some breach, despising earthly things,And, in contempt of hell and heaven, diesRather than bear some yoke of priests or kingsOur joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man’s,A woman’s beauty, or a child’s delight,The trembling blood when the discoverer scansThe sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite;The ringing scene, the stone at point to blushFor unborn men to look at and say “Hush.”
Roses are beauty, but I never seeThose blood drops from the burning heart of JuneGlowing like thought upon the living treeWithout a pity that they die so soon,Die into petals, like those roses old,Those women, who were summer in men’s heartsBefore the smile upon the Sphinx was coldOr sand had hid the Syrian and his arts.O myriad dust of beauty that lies thickUnder our feet that not a single grainBut stirred and moved in beauty and was quickFor one brief moon and died nor lived again;But when the moon rose lay upon the grassPasture to living beauty, life that was.
Over the church’s door they moved a stone,And there, unguessed, forgotten, mortared up,Lay the priest’s cell where he had lived alone.There was his ashy hearth, his drinking cup,There was his window whence he saw the Host,The God whose beauty quickened bread and wine;The skeleton of a religion lost,The ghostless bones of what had been divine.O many a time the dusty masons comeKnocking their trowels in the stony brainTo cells where perished priests had once a home,Or where devout brows pressed the window pane,Watching the thing made God, the God whose bonesBind underground our soul’s foundation stones.
O little self, within whose smallness liesAll that man was, and is, and will become,Atom unseen that comprehends the skiesAnd tells the tracks by which the planets roam;That, without moving, knows the joys of wings,The tiger’s strength, the eagle’s secrecy,And in the hovel can consort with kings,Or clothe a God with his own mystery.O with what darkness do we cloak thy light,What dusty folly gather thee for food,Thou who alone art knowledge and delight,The heavenly bread, the beautiful, the good.O living self, O God, O morning star,Give us thy light, forgive us what we are.
I went into the fields, but you were thereWaiting for me, so all the summer flowersWere only glimpses of your starry powers;Beautiful and inspired dust they were.
I went down by the waters, and a birdSang with your voice in all the unknown tonesOf all that self of you I have not heard,So that my being felt you to the bones.
I went into the house, and shut the doorTo be alone, but you were there with me;All beauty in a little room may be,Though the roof lean and muddy be the floor.
Then in my bed I bound my tired eyesTo make a darkness for my weary brain;But like a presence you were there again,Being and real, beautiful and wise,
So that I could not sleep, and cried aloud,“You strange grave thing, what is it you would say?”The redness of your dear lips dimmed to grey,The waters ebbed, the moon hid in a cloud.
Wherever beauty has been quick in claySome effluence of it lives, a spirit dwells,Beauty that death can never take awayMixed with the air that shakes the flower bells;So that by waters where the apples fall,Or in lone glens, or valleys full of flowers,Or in the streets where bloody tidings call,The haunting waits the mood that makes it ours.Then at a turn, a word, an act, a thought,Such difference comes; the spirit apprehendsThat place’s glory; for where beauty foughtUnder the veil the glory never ends;But the still grass, the leaves, the trembling flowerKeep, through dead time, that everlasting hour.
Not for the anguish suffered is the slur,Not for the woman’s taunts, the mocks of men;No, but because you never welcomed her,Her of whose beauty I am only the pen.
There was a dog, dog-minded, with dog’s eyes,Damned by a dog’s brute-nature to be true.Something within her made his spirit wise;He licked her hand, he knew her; not so you.
When all adulterate beauty has gone by,When all inanimate matter has gone down,We will arise and walk, that dog and I,The only two who knew her in the town.
We’ll range the pleasant mountain side by side,Seeking the blood-stained flowers where Christs have died.
You will remember me in days to come,With love, or pride, or pity, or contempt,So will my friends (not many friends, yet some),When this my life will be a dream out-dreamt;And one, remembering friendship by the fire,And one, remembering love time in the dark,And one, remembering unfulfilled desire,Will sigh, perhaps, yet be beside the mark;For this my body with its wandering ghostIs nothing solely but an empty grange,Dark in a night that owls inhabit most,Yet when the King rides by there comes a changeThe windows gleam, the cresset’s fiery hairBlasts the blown branch and beauty lodges there.
If Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense,There be a wisdom piercing into brains,Why should the glory wait on impotence,Biding its time till blood is in the veins?
There is no beauty, but, when thought is quick,Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselvesSome flattery comes to try to cheat the sick,Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves.
There is no beauty, for we tread a sceneRed to the eye with blood of living things;Thought is but joy from murder that has been,Life is but brute at war upon its kings.
There is no beauty, nor could beauty careFor us, this dust, that men make everywhere.
If all be governed by the moving stars,If passing planets bring events to be,Searing the face of Time with bloody scars,Drawing men’s souls even as the moon the sea,If as they pass they make a current passAcross man’s life and heap it to a tide,We are but pawns, ignobler than the grassCropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside.Is all this beauty that doth inhabit heavenTrain of a planet’s fire? Is all this lustA chymic means by warring stars contrivenTo bring the violets out of Cæsar’s dust?Better be grass, or in some hedge unknownThe spilling rose whose beauty is its own.
In emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are,Perhaps some planet of our master sunStill rolls an unguessed orbit round its star,Unthought, unseen, unknown of anyone.Roving dead space according to its law,Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind,Singing in the frozen void its word of awe,One wandering thought in all that idiot mind.And, in some span of many a thousand year,Passing through heaven its influence may arouseBeauty unguessed in those who habit here,And men may rise with glory on their browsAnd feel new life like fire, and see the oldFall from them dead, the bronze’s broken mould.
Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood,Shy-footed beauty dear, half-seen, half-understood.Glimpsed in the beech-wood dim and in the dropping fir,Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty’s minister.Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon,A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.
Only a moment held, only an hour seen,Only an instant known in all that life has been,One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace,The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.
Death lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives;I perish even as you by whom all spirit lives.Come to me, spirit, come, and fill my hour of breathWith hours of life in life that pay no toll to death.
Go, spend your penny, Beauty, when you will,In the grave’s darkness let the stamp be lost.The water still will bubble from the hill,And April quick the meadows with her ghost;Over the grass the daffodils will shiver,The primroses with their pale beauty abound,The blackbird be a lover and make quiverWith his glad singing the great soul of the ground;So that if the body rot, it will not matter;Up in the earth the great game will go on,The coming of spring and the running of the water,And the young things glad of the womb’s darkness gone.And the joy we felt will be a part of the gloryIn the lover’s kiss that makes the old couple’s story.
Let that which is to come be as it may,Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense,The flies are happy in the summer day,Flies will be happy many summers hence.Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphinx,Time with her men to come whose wings will tower,Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks,But with blind force, to each his little hour.And when the hour has struck, comes death or change,Which, whether good or ill we cannot tell,But the blind planet will wander through her rangeBearing men like us who will serve as well.The sun will rise, the winds that ever moveWill blow our dust that once were men in love.
Even so was wisdom proven blind,So courage failed, so strength was chained;Even so the gods, whose seeing mindIs not as ours, ordained.
Even so was wisdom proven blind,So courage failed, so strength was chained;Even so the gods, whose seeing mindIs not as ours, ordained.
Even so was wisdom proven blind,So courage failed, so strength was chained;Even so the gods, whose seeing mindIs not as ours, ordained.
On old Cold Crendon’s windy topsGrows wintrily Blown Hilcote Copse,Wind-bitten beech with badger barrows,Where brocks eat wasp-grubs with their marrows,And foxes lie on short-grassed turf,Nose between paws, to hear the surfOf wind in the beeches drowsily.There was our fox bred lustilyThree years before, and there he berthed,Under the beech-roots snugly earthed,With a roof of flint and a floor of chalkAnd ten bitten hens’ heads each on its stalk,Some rabbits’ paws, some fur from scuts,A badger’s corpse and a smell of guts.And there on the night before my taleHe trotted out for a point in the vale.* * * *He saw, from the cover edge, the valleyGo trooping down with its droops of sallyTo the brimming river’s lipping bend,And a light in the inn at Water’s End.He heard the owl go hunting byAnd the shriek of the mouse the owl made die,And the purr of the owl as he tore the redStrings from between his claws and fed;The smack of joy of the horny lipsMarbled green with the blobby strips.He saw the farms where the dogs were barking,Cold Crendon Court and Copsecote Larking;The fault with the spring as bright as gleed,Green-slash-laced with water-weed.A glare in the sky still marked the town,Though all folk slept and the blinds were down,The street lamps watched the empty square,The night-cat sang his evil there.* * * *The fox’s nose tipped up and round,Since smell is a part of sight and sound.Delicate smells were drifting by,The sharp nose flaired them heedfully;Partridges in the clover stubble,Crouched in a ring for the stoat to nubble.Rabbit bucks beginning to box;A scratching place for the pheasant cocks,A hare in the dead grass near the drain,And another smell like the spring again.* * * *A faint rank taint like April coming,It touched his heart till his blood went drumming,For somewhere out by Ghost Heath StubsWas a roving vixen wanting cubs.Over the valley, floating faintOn a warmth of windflaw, came the taint;He cocked his ears, he upped his brush,And he went upwind like an April thrush.* * * *By the Roman Road to Braiches Ridge,Where the fallen willow makes a bridge,Over the brook by White Hart’s ThornTo the acres thin with pricking corn,Over the sparse green hair of the wheat,By the Clench Brook Mill at Clench Brook Leat,Through Cowfoot Pastures to Nonely Stevens,And away to Poltrewood St. Jevons.Past Tott Hill Down all snaked with meuses,Past Clench St. Michael and Naunton Crucis,Past Howle’s Oak Farm where the raving brainOf a dog who heard him foamed his chain;Then off, as the farmer’s window opened,Past Stonepits Farm to Upton Hope End,Over short sweet grass and worn flint arrowsAnd the three dumb hows of Tencombe Barrows.And away and away with a rolling scramble,Through the sally and up the bramble,With a nose for the smells the night wind carried,And his red fell clean for being married;For clicketting time and Ghost Heath WoodHad put the violet in his blood.* * * *At Tencombe Rings near the Manor LinneyHis foot made the great black stallion whinny,And the stallion’s whinny aroused the stableAnd the bloodhound bitches stretched their cable,And the clink of the bloodhounds’ chain arousedThe sweet-breathed kye as they chewed and drowsed,And the stir of the cattle changed the dreamOf the cat in the loft to tense green gleam.The red-wattled black cock hot from SpainCrowed from his perch for dawn again,His breast-pufft hens, one-legged on perch,Gurgled, beak-down, like men in church,They crooned in the dark, lifting one red eyeIn the raftered roost as the fox went by.* * * *By Tencombe Regis and Slaughters Court,Through the great grass square of Roman Fort,By Nun’s Wood Yews and the Hungry Hill,And the Corpse Way Stones all standing still.By Seven Springs Mead to Deerlip Brook,And a lolloping leap to Water Hook.Then with eyes like sparks and his blood awoken,Over the grass to Water’s Oaken,And over the hedge and into rideIn Ghost Heath Wood for his roving bride.* * * *Before the dawn he had loved and fedAnd found a kennel, and gone to bedOn a shelf of grass in a thick of gorseThat would bleed a hound and blind a horse.There he slept in the mild west weatherWith his nose and brush well tuckt together,He slept like a child, who sleeps yet hearsWith the self who needs neither eyes nor ears.* * * *He slept while the pheasant cock untuckedHis head from his wing, flew down and kukked,While the drove of the starlings whirred and wheeledOut of the ash-trees into field,While with great black flags that flogged and paddledThe rooks went out to the plough and straddled,Straddled wide on the moist red cheeseOf the furrows driven at Uppat’s Leas.* * * *Down in the village men awoke,The chimneys breathed with a faint blue smoke.The fox slept on, though tweaks and twitches,Due to his dreams, ran down his flitches.* * * *The cows were milked and the yards were sluict,And cocks and hens let out of roost,Windows were opened, mats were beaten,All men’s breakfasts were cooked and eaten;But out in the gorse on the grassy shelfThe sleeping fox looked after himself.* * * *Deep in his dream he heard the lifeOf the woodland seek for food or wife,The hop of a stoat, a buck that thumped,The squeal of a rat as a weasel jumped,The blackbird’s chackering scattering crying,The rustling bents from the rabbits flying,Cows in a byre, and distant men,And Condicote church-clock striking ten.* * * *At eleven o’clock a boy went past,With a rough-haired terrier following fast.The boy’s sweet whistle and dog’s quick yapWoke the fox from out of his nap.* * * *He rose and stretched till the claws in his padsStuck hornily out like long black gads.He listened a while, and his nose went roundTo catch the smell of the distant sound.* * * *The windward smells came free from taint—They were rabbit, strongly, with lime-kiln, faint,A wild-duck, likely, at Sars Holt Pond,And sheep on the Sars Holt Down beyond.* * * *The leeward smells were much less certain,For the Ghost Heath Hill was like a curtain,Yet vague, from the leeward, now and then,Came muffled sounds like the sound of men.* * * *He moved to his right to a clearer space,And all his soul came into his face,Into his eyes and into his nose,As over the hill a murmur rose.His ears were cocked and his keen nose flaired,He sneered with his lips till his teeth were bared,He trotted right and lifted a padTrying to test what foes he had.* * * *On Ghost Heath turf was a steady drummingWhich sounded like horses quickly coming,It died as the hunt went down the dip,Then Malapert yelped at Myngs’s whip.A bright iron horseshoe clinkt on stone,Then a man’s voice spoke, not one alone,Then a burst of laughter, swiftly still,Muffled away by Ghost Heath Hill.Then, indistinctly, the clop, clip, clep,On Brady Ride, of a horse’s step.Then silence, then, in a burst, much clearer,Voices and horses coming nearer,And another noise, of a pit-pat beatOn the Ghost Hill grass, of foxhound feet.* * * *He sat on his haunches listening hard,While his mind went over the compass card.Men were coming and rest was done,But he still had time to get fit to run;He could outlast horse and outrace hound,But men were devils from Lobs’s Pound.Scent was burning, the going good,The world one lust for a fox’s blood,The main earths stopped and the drains put to,And fifteen miles to the land he knew.But of all the ills, the ill least pleasantWas to run in the light when men were presentMen in the fields to shout and signFor a lift of hounds to a fox’s line.Men at the earth, at the long point’s end,Men at each check and none his friend,Guessing each shift that a fox contrives;But still, needs must when the devil drives.* * * *He readied himself, then a soft horn blew,Then a clear voice carolled, “Ed-hoick! Eleu!”Then the wood-end rang with the clear voice cryingAnd the crackle of scrub where hounds were trying.Then the horn blew nearer, a hound’s voice quivered,Then another, then more, till his body shivered,He left his kennel and trotted thenceWith his ears flexed back and his nerves all tense.He trotted down with his nose intentFor a fox’s line to cross his scent,It was only fair (he being a stranger)That the native fox should have the danger.Danger was coming, so swift, so swift,That the pace of his trot began to liftThe blue-winged Judas, a jay beganSwearing, hounds whimpered, air stank of man.* * * *He hurried his trotting, he now felt frighted,It was his poor body made hounds excited.He felt as he ringed the great wood through,That he ought to make for the land he knew.* * * *Then the hounds’ excitement quivered and quickened,Then a horn blew death till his marrow sickened,Then the wood behind was a crash of cryFor the blood in his veins; it made him fly.* * * *They were on his line; it was death to stay.He must make for home by the shortest way,But with all this yelling and all this wrathAnd all these devils, how find a path?* * * *He ran like a stag to the wood’s north corner,Where the hedge was thick and the ditch a yawner,But the scarlet glimpse of Myngs on Turk,Watching the woodside, made him shirk.* * * *He ringed the wood and looked at the south.What wind there was blew into his mouth.But close to the woodland’s blackthorn thicketWas Dansey, still as a stone, on picket.At Dansey’s back were a twenty moreWatching the cover and pressing fore.* * * *The fox drew in and flaired with his muzzle.Death was there if he messed the puzzle.There were men without and hounds within,A crying that stiffened the hair on skin,Teeth in cover and death without,Both deaths coming, and no way out.* * * *His nose ranged swiftly, his heart beat fast,Then a crashing cry rose up in a blast,Then horse-hooves trampled, then horses’ flitchesBurst their way through the hazel switches.Then the horn again made the hounds like mad,And a man, quite near, said, “Found, by Gad!”And a man, quite near, said, “Now he’ll break.Lark’s Leybourne Copse is the line he’ll take.”And men moved up with their talk and stinkAnd the traplike noise of the horseshoe clink.Men whose coming meant death from teethIn a worrying wrench, with him beneath.* * * *The fox sneaked down by the cover side(With his ears flexed back) as a snake would glide;He took the ditch at the cover-end,He hugged the ditch as his only friend.The blackbird cock with the golden beakGot out of his way with a jabbering shriek,And the shriek told Tom on the raking bayThat for eighteenpence he was gone away.* * * *He ran in the hedge in the triple growthOf bramble and hawthorn, glad of both,Till a couple of fields were past, and thenCame the living death of the dread of men.* * * *Then, as he listened, he heard a “Hoy!”Tom Dansey’s horn and “Awa-wa-woy!”Then all hounds crying with all their forces,Then a thundering down of seventy horses.Robin Dawe’s horn and halloos of “HeyHark Hollar, Hoik!” and “Gone away!”“Hark Hollar Hoik!” and a smack of the whip.A yelp as a tail hound caught the clip.“Hark Hollar, Hark Hollar!” then Robin madePip go crash through the cut and laid.Hounds were over and on his lineWith a head like bees upon Tipple Tine.The sound of the nearness sent a floodOf terror of death through the fox’s blood.He upped his brush and he cocked his nose,And he went upwind as a racer goes.* * * *Bold Robin Dawe was over first,Cheering his hounds on at the burst;The field were spurring to be in it.“Hold hard, sirs, give them half a minute,”Came from Sir Peter on his white.The hounds went romping with delightOver the grass and got together,The tail hounds galloped hell-for-leatherAfter the pack at Myngs’s yell.A cry like every kind of bellRang from these rompers as they raced.* * * *The riders, thrusting to be placed,Jammed down their hats and shook their horses;The hounds romped past with all their forces,They crashed into the blackthorn fence.The scent was heavy on their sense,So hot, it seemed the living thing,It made the blood within them sing;Gusts of it made their hackles rise,Hot gulps of it were agoniesOf joy, and thirst for blood and passion.“Forrard!” cried Robin, “that’s the fashion.”He raced beside his pack to cheer.The field’s noise died upon his ear,A faint horn, far behind, blew thinIn cover, lest some hound were in.Then instantly the great grass riseShut field and cover from his eyes,He and his racers were alone.“A dead fox or a broken bone.”Said Robin, peering for his prey.* * * *The rise, which shut the field away,Showed him the vale’s great map spread out,The down’s lean flank and thrusting snout,Pale pastures, red-brown plough, dark wood,Blue distance, still as solitude,Glitter of water here and there,The trees so delicately bare,The dark green gorse and bright green holly.“O glorious God,” he said, “how jolly!”And there downhill two fields aheadThe lolloping red dog-fox spedOver Poor Pastures to the brook.He grasped these things in one swift look,Then dived into the bullfinch heartThrough thorns that ripped his sleeves apartAnd skutched new blood upon his brow.“His point’s Lark’s Leybourne Covers now,”Said Robin, landing with a grunt.“Forrard, my beautifuls!”The huntFollowed downhill to race with him,White Rabbit, with his swallow’s skim,Drew within hail. “Quick burst, Sir Peter.”“A traveller. Nothing could be neater.Making for Godsdown Clumps, I take it?”“Lark’s Leybourne, sir, if he can make it.Forrard!”Bill Ridden thundered down,His big mouth grinned beneath his frown,The hounds were going away from horses.He saw the glint of watercourses,Yell Brook and Wittold’s Dyke, ahead,His horseshoes sliced the green turf red.Young Cothill’s chaser rushed and past him,Nob Manor, running next, said “Blast him!The poet chap who thinks he rides.”Hugh Colway’s mare made straking stridesAcross the grass, the Colonel next,Then Squire, volleying oaths, and vext,Fighting his hunter for refusing;Bell Ridden, like a cutter cruising,Sailing the grass; then Cob on Warder,Then Minton Price upon Marauder;Ock Gurney with his eyes intense,Burning as with a different sense,His big mouth muttering glad “By damns!”Then Pete, crouched down from head to hams,Rapt like a saint, bright focussed flame;Bennett, with devils in his wame,Chewing black cud and spitting slanting;Copse scattering jests and Stukely ranting;Sal Ridden taking line from Dansey;Long Robert forcing Necromancy;A dozen more with bad beginnings;Myngs riding hard to snatch an innings.A wild last hound with high shrill yelpsSmacked forrard with some whipthong skelps.Then last of all, at top of rise,The crowd on foot, all gasps and eyes;The run up hill had winded them.* * * *They saw the Yell Brook like a gemBlue in the grass a short mile on;They heard faint cries, but hounds were goneA good eight fields and out of sight,Except a rippled glimmer whiteGoing away with dying cheering,And scarlet flappings disappearing,And scattering horses going, going,Going like mad, White Rabbit snowingFar on ahead, a loose horse takingFence after fence with stirrups shaking,And scarlet specks and dark specks dwindling.* * * *Nearer, were twigs knocked into kindling,A much bashed fence still dropping stick,Flung clods still quivering from the kick;Cut hoof-marks pale in cheesy clay,The horse-smell blowing clean away;Birds flitting back into the cover.One last faint cry, then all was over.The hunt had been, and found, and gone.* * * *
On old Cold Crendon’s windy topsGrows wintrily Blown Hilcote Copse,Wind-bitten beech with badger barrows,Where brocks eat wasp-grubs with their marrows,And foxes lie on short-grassed turf,Nose between paws, to hear the surfOf wind in the beeches drowsily.There was our fox bred lustilyThree years before, and there he berthed,Under the beech-roots snugly earthed,With a roof of flint and a floor of chalkAnd ten bitten hens’ heads each on its stalk,Some rabbits’ paws, some fur from scuts,A badger’s corpse and a smell of guts.And there on the night before my taleHe trotted out for a point in the vale.* * * *He saw, from the cover edge, the valleyGo trooping down with its droops of sallyTo the brimming river’s lipping bend,And a light in the inn at Water’s End.He heard the owl go hunting byAnd the shriek of the mouse the owl made die,And the purr of the owl as he tore the redStrings from between his claws and fed;The smack of joy of the horny lipsMarbled green with the blobby strips.He saw the farms where the dogs were barking,Cold Crendon Court and Copsecote Larking;The fault with the spring as bright as gleed,Green-slash-laced with water-weed.A glare in the sky still marked the town,Though all folk slept and the blinds were down,The street lamps watched the empty square,The night-cat sang his evil there.* * * *The fox’s nose tipped up and round,Since smell is a part of sight and sound.Delicate smells were drifting by,The sharp nose flaired them heedfully;Partridges in the clover stubble,Crouched in a ring for the stoat to nubble.Rabbit bucks beginning to box;A scratching place for the pheasant cocks,A hare in the dead grass near the drain,And another smell like the spring again.* * * *A faint rank taint like April coming,It touched his heart till his blood went drumming,For somewhere out by Ghost Heath StubsWas a roving vixen wanting cubs.Over the valley, floating faintOn a warmth of windflaw, came the taint;He cocked his ears, he upped his brush,And he went upwind like an April thrush.* * * *By the Roman Road to Braiches Ridge,Where the fallen willow makes a bridge,Over the brook by White Hart’s ThornTo the acres thin with pricking corn,Over the sparse green hair of the wheat,By the Clench Brook Mill at Clench Brook Leat,Through Cowfoot Pastures to Nonely Stevens,And away to Poltrewood St. Jevons.Past Tott Hill Down all snaked with meuses,Past Clench St. Michael and Naunton Crucis,Past Howle’s Oak Farm where the raving brainOf a dog who heard him foamed his chain;Then off, as the farmer’s window opened,Past Stonepits Farm to Upton Hope End,Over short sweet grass and worn flint arrowsAnd the three dumb hows of Tencombe Barrows.And away and away with a rolling scramble,Through the sally and up the bramble,With a nose for the smells the night wind carried,And his red fell clean for being married;For clicketting time and Ghost Heath WoodHad put the violet in his blood.* * * *At Tencombe Rings near the Manor LinneyHis foot made the great black stallion whinny,And the stallion’s whinny aroused the stableAnd the bloodhound bitches stretched their cable,And the clink of the bloodhounds’ chain arousedThe sweet-breathed kye as they chewed and drowsed,And the stir of the cattle changed the dreamOf the cat in the loft to tense green gleam.The red-wattled black cock hot from SpainCrowed from his perch for dawn again,His breast-pufft hens, one-legged on perch,Gurgled, beak-down, like men in church,They crooned in the dark, lifting one red eyeIn the raftered roost as the fox went by.* * * *By Tencombe Regis and Slaughters Court,Through the great grass square of Roman Fort,By Nun’s Wood Yews and the Hungry Hill,And the Corpse Way Stones all standing still.By Seven Springs Mead to Deerlip Brook,And a lolloping leap to Water Hook.Then with eyes like sparks and his blood awoken,Over the grass to Water’s Oaken,And over the hedge and into rideIn Ghost Heath Wood for his roving bride.* * * *Before the dawn he had loved and fedAnd found a kennel, and gone to bedOn a shelf of grass in a thick of gorseThat would bleed a hound and blind a horse.There he slept in the mild west weatherWith his nose and brush well tuckt together,He slept like a child, who sleeps yet hearsWith the self who needs neither eyes nor ears.* * * *He slept while the pheasant cock untuckedHis head from his wing, flew down and kukked,While the drove of the starlings whirred and wheeledOut of the ash-trees into field,While with great black flags that flogged and paddledThe rooks went out to the plough and straddled,Straddled wide on the moist red cheeseOf the furrows driven at Uppat’s Leas.* * * *Down in the village men awoke,The chimneys breathed with a faint blue smoke.The fox slept on, though tweaks and twitches,Due to his dreams, ran down his flitches.* * * *The cows were milked and the yards were sluict,And cocks and hens let out of roost,Windows were opened, mats were beaten,All men’s breakfasts were cooked and eaten;But out in the gorse on the grassy shelfThe sleeping fox looked after himself.* * * *Deep in his dream he heard the lifeOf the woodland seek for food or wife,The hop of a stoat, a buck that thumped,The squeal of a rat as a weasel jumped,The blackbird’s chackering scattering crying,The rustling bents from the rabbits flying,Cows in a byre, and distant men,And Condicote church-clock striking ten.* * * *At eleven o’clock a boy went past,With a rough-haired terrier following fast.The boy’s sweet whistle and dog’s quick yapWoke the fox from out of his nap.* * * *He rose and stretched till the claws in his padsStuck hornily out like long black gads.He listened a while, and his nose went roundTo catch the smell of the distant sound.* * * *The windward smells came free from taint—They were rabbit, strongly, with lime-kiln, faint,A wild-duck, likely, at Sars Holt Pond,And sheep on the Sars Holt Down beyond.* * * *The leeward smells were much less certain,For the Ghost Heath Hill was like a curtain,Yet vague, from the leeward, now and then,Came muffled sounds like the sound of men.* * * *He moved to his right to a clearer space,And all his soul came into his face,Into his eyes and into his nose,As over the hill a murmur rose.His ears were cocked and his keen nose flaired,He sneered with his lips till his teeth were bared,He trotted right and lifted a padTrying to test what foes he had.* * * *On Ghost Heath turf was a steady drummingWhich sounded like horses quickly coming,It died as the hunt went down the dip,Then Malapert yelped at Myngs’s whip.A bright iron horseshoe clinkt on stone,Then a man’s voice spoke, not one alone,Then a burst of laughter, swiftly still,Muffled away by Ghost Heath Hill.Then, indistinctly, the clop, clip, clep,On Brady Ride, of a horse’s step.Then silence, then, in a burst, much clearer,Voices and horses coming nearer,And another noise, of a pit-pat beatOn the Ghost Hill grass, of foxhound feet.* * * *He sat on his haunches listening hard,While his mind went over the compass card.Men were coming and rest was done,But he still had time to get fit to run;He could outlast horse and outrace hound,But men were devils from Lobs’s Pound.Scent was burning, the going good,The world one lust for a fox’s blood,The main earths stopped and the drains put to,And fifteen miles to the land he knew.But of all the ills, the ill least pleasantWas to run in the light when men were presentMen in the fields to shout and signFor a lift of hounds to a fox’s line.Men at the earth, at the long point’s end,Men at each check and none his friend,Guessing each shift that a fox contrives;But still, needs must when the devil drives.* * * *He readied himself, then a soft horn blew,Then a clear voice carolled, “Ed-hoick! Eleu!”Then the wood-end rang with the clear voice cryingAnd the crackle of scrub where hounds were trying.Then the horn blew nearer, a hound’s voice quivered,Then another, then more, till his body shivered,He left his kennel and trotted thenceWith his ears flexed back and his nerves all tense.He trotted down with his nose intentFor a fox’s line to cross his scent,It was only fair (he being a stranger)That the native fox should have the danger.Danger was coming, so swift, so swift,That the pace of his trot began to liftThe blue-winged Judas, a jay beganSwearing, hounds whimpered, air stank of man.* * * *He hurried his trotting, he now felt frighted,It was his poor body made hounds excited.He felt as he ringed the great wood through,That he ought to make for the land he knew.* * * *Then the hounds’ excitement quivered and quickened,Then a horn blew death till his marrow sickened,Then the wood behind was a crash of cryFor the blood in his veins; it made him fly.* * * *They were on his line; it was death to stay.He must make for home by the shortest way,But with all this yelling and all this wrathAnd all these devils, how find a path?* * * *He ran like a stag to the wood’s north corner,Where the hedge was thick and the ditch a yawner,But the scarlet glimpse of Myngs on Turk,Watching the woodside, made him shirk.* * * *He ringed the wood and looked at the south.What wind there was blew into his mouth.But close to the woodland’s blackthorn thicketWas Dansey, still as a stone, on picket.At Dansey’s back were a twenty moreWatching the cover and pressing fore.* * * *The fox drew in and flaired with his muzzle.Death was there if he messed the puzzle.There were men without and hounds within,A crying that stiffened the hair on skin,Teeth in cover and death without,Both deaths coming, and no way out.* * * *His nose ranged swiftly, his heart beat fast,Then a crashing cry rose up in a blast,Then horse-hooves trampled, then horses’ flitchesBurst their way through the hazel switches.Then the horn again made the hounds like mad,And a man, quite near, said, “Found, by Gad!”And a man, quite near, said, “Now he’ll break.Lark’s Leybourne Copse is the line he’ll take.”And men moved up with their talk and stinkAnd the traplike noise of the horseshoe clink.Men whose coming meant death from teethIn a worrying wrench, with him beneath.* * * *The fox sneaked down by the cover side(With his ears flexed back) as a snake would glide;He took the ditch at the cover-end,He hugged the ditch as his only friend.The blackbird cock with the golden beakGot out of his way with a jabbering shriek,And the shriek told Tom on the raking bayThat for eighteenpence he was gone away.* * * *He ran in the hedge in the triple growthOf bramble and hawthorn, glad of both,Till a couple of fields were past, and thenCame the living death of the dread of men.* * * *Then, as he listened, he heard a “Hoy!”Tom Dansey’s horn and “Awa-wa-woy!”Then all hounds crying with all their forces,Then a thundering down of seventy horses.Robin Dawe’s horn and halloos of “HeyHark Hollar, Hoik!” and “Gone away!”“Hark Hollar Hoik!” and a smack of the whip.A yelp as a tail hound caught the clip.“Hark Hollar, Hark Hollar!” then Robin madePip go crash through the cut and laid.Hounds were over and on his lineWith a head like bees upon Tipple Tine.The sound of the nearness sent a floodOf terror of death through the fox’s blood.He upped his brush and he cocked his nose,And he went upwind as a racer goes.* * * *Bold Robin Dawe was over first,Cheering his hounds on at the burst;The field were spurring to be in it.“Hold hard, sirs, give them half a minute,”Came from Sir Peter on his white.The hounds went romping with delightOver the grass and got together,The tail hounds galloped hell-for-leatherAfter the pack at Myngs’s yell.A cry like every kind of bellRang from these rompers as they raced.* * * *The riders, thrusting to be placed,Jammed down their hats and shook their horses;The hounds romped past with all their forces,They crashed into the blackthorn fence.The scent was heavy on their sense,So hot, it seemed the living thing,It made the blood within them sing;Gusts of it made their hackles rise,Hot gulps of it were agoniesOf joy, and thirst for blood and passion.“Forrard!” cried Robin, “that’s the fashion.”He raced beside his pack to cheer.The field’s noise died upon his ear,A faint horn, far behind, blew thinIn cover, lest some hound were in.Then instantly the great grass riseShut field and cover from his eyes,He and his racers were alone.“A dead fox or a broken bone.”Said Robin, peering for his prey.* * * *The rise, which shut the field away,Showed him the vale’s great map spread out,The down’s lean flank and thrusting snout,Pale pastures, red-brown plough, dark wood,Blue distance, still as solitude,Glitter of water here and there,The trees so delicately bare,The dark green gorse and bright green holly.“O glorious God,” he said, “how jolly!”And there downhill two fields aheadThe lolloping red dog-fox spedOver Poor Pastures to the brook.He grasped these things in one swift look,Then dived into the bullfinch heartThrough thorns that ripped his sleeves apartAnd skutched new blood upon his brow.“His point’s Lark’s Leybourne Covers now,”Said Robin, landing with a grunt.“Forrard, my beautifuls!”The huntFollowed downhill to race with him,White Rabbit, with his swallow’s skim,Drew within hail. “Quick burst, Sir Peter.”“A traveller. Nothing could be neater.Making for Godsdown Clumps, I take it?”“Lark’s Leybourne, sir, if he can make it.Forrard!”Bill Ridden thundered down,His big mouth grinned beneath his frown,The hounds were going away from horses.He saw the glint of watercourses,Yell Brook and Wittold’s Dyke, ahead,His horseshoes sliced the green turf red.Young Cothill’s chaser rushed and past him,Nob Manor, running next, said “Blast him!The poet chap who thinks he rides.”Hugh Colway’s mare made straking stridesAcross the grass, the Colonel next,Then Squire, volleying oaths, and vext,Fighting his hunter for refusing;Bell Ridden, like a cutter cruising,Sailing the grass; then Cob on Warder,Then Minton Price upon Marauder;Ock Gurney with his eyes intense,Burning as with a different sense,His big mouth muttering glad “By damns!”Then Pete, crouched down from head to hams,Rapt like a saint, bright focussed flame;Bennett, with devils in his wame,Chewing black cud and spitting slanting;Copse scattering jests and Stukely ranting;Sal Ridden taking line from Dansey;Long Robert forcing Necromancy;A dozen more with bad beginnings;Myngs riding hard to snatch an innings.A wild last hound with high shrill yelpsSmacked forrard with some whipthong skelps.Then last of all, at top of rise,The crowd on foot, all gasps and eyes;The run up hill had winded them.* * * *They saw the Yell Brook like a gemBlue in the grass a short mile on;They heard faint cries, but hounds were goneA good eight fields and out of sight,Except a rippled glimmer whiteGoing away with dying cheering,And scarlet flappings disappearing,And scattering horses going, going,Going like mad, White Rabbit snowingFar on ahead, a loose horse takingFence after fence with stirrups shaking,And scarlet specks and dark specks dwindling.* * * *Nearer, were twigs knocked into kindling,A much bashed fence still dropping stick,Flung clods still quivering from the kick;Cut hoof-marks pale in cheesy clay,The horse-smell blowing clean away;Birds flitting back into the cover.One last faint cry, then all was over.The hunt had been, and found, and gone.* * * *
On old Cold Crendon’s windy topsGrows wintrily Blown Hilcote Copse,Wind-bitten beech with badger barrows,Where brocks eat wasp-grubs with their marrows,And foxes lie on short-grassed turf,Nose between paws, to hear the surfOf wind in the beeches drowsily.There was our fox bred lustilyThree years before, and there he berthed,Under the beech-roots snugly earthed,With a roof of flint and a floor of chalkAnd ten bitten hens’ heads each on its stalk,Some rabbits’ paws, some fur from scuts,A badger’s corpse and a smell of guts.And there on the night before my taleHe trotted out for a point in the vale.* * * *He saw, from the cover edge, the valleyGo trooping down with its droops of sallyTo the brimming river’s lipping bend,And a light in the inn at Water’s End.He heard the owl go hunting byAnd the shriek of the mouse the owl made die,And the purr of the owl as he tore the redStrings from between his claws and fed;The smack of joy of the horny lipsMarbled green with the blobby strips.He saw the farms where the dogs were barking,Cold Crendon Court and Copsecote Larking;The fault with the spring as bright as gleed,Green-slash-laced with water-weed.A glare in the sky still marked the town,Though all folk slept and the blinds were down,The street lamps watched the empty square,The night-cat sang his evil there.* * * *The fox’s nose tipped up and round,Since smell is a part of sight and sound.Delicate smells were drifting by,The sharp nose flaired them heedfully;Partridges in the clover stubble,Crouched in a ring for the stoat to nubble.Rabbit bucks beginning to box;A scratching place for the pheasant cocks,A hare in the dead grass near the drain,And another smell like the spring again.* * * *A faint rank taint like April coming,It touched his heart till his blood went drumming,For somewhere out by Ghost Heath StubsWas a roving vixen wanting cubs.Over the valley, floating faintOn a warmth of windflaw, came the taint;He cocked his ears, he upped his brush,And he went upwind like an April thrush.* * * *By the Roman Road to Braiches Ridge,Where the fallen willow makes a bridge,Over the brook by White Hart’s ThornTo the acres thin with pricking corn,Over the sparse green hair of the wheat,By the Clench Brook Mill at Clench Brook Leat,Through Cowfoot Pastures to Nonely Stevens,And away to Poltrewood St. Jevons.Past Tott Hill Down all snaked with meuses,Past Clench St. Michael and Naunton Crucis,Past Howle’s Oak Farm where the raving brainOf a dog who heard him foamed his chain;Then off, as the farmer’s window opened,Past Stonepits Farm to Upton Hope End,Over short sweet grass and worn flint arrowsAnd the three dumb hows of Tencombe Barrows.And away and away with a rolling scramble,Through the sally and up the bramble,With a nose for the smells the night wind carried,And his red fell clean for being married;For clicketting time and Ghost Heath WoodHad put the violet in his blood.* * * *At Tencombe Rings near the Manor LinneyHis foot made the great black stallion whinny,And the stallion’s whinny aroused the stableAnd the bloodhound bitches stretched their cable,And the clink of the bloodhounds’ chain arousedThe sweet-breathed kye as they chewed and drowsed,And the stir of the cattle changed the dreamOf the cat in the loft to tense green gleam.The red-wattled black cock hot from SpainCrowed from his perch for dawn again,His breast-pufft hens, one-legged on perch,Gurgled, beak-down, like men in church,They crooned in the dark, lifting one red eyeIn the raftered roost as the fox went by.* * * *By Tencombe Regis and Slaughters Court,Through the great grass square of Roman Fort,By Nun’s Wood Yews and the Hungry Hill,And the Corpse Way Stones all standing still.By Seven Springs Mead to Deerlip Brook,And a lolloping leap to Water Hook.Then with eyes like sparks and his blood awoken,Over the grass to Water’s Oaken,And over the hedge and into rideIn Ghost Heath Wood for his roving bride.* * * *Before the dawn he had loved and fedAnd found a kennel, and gone to bedOn a shelf of grass in a thick of gorseThat would bleed a hound and blind a horse.There he slept in the mild west weatherWith his nose and brush well tuckt together,He slept like a child, who sleeps yet hearsWith the self who needs neither eyes nor ears.* * * *He slept while the pheasant cock untuckedHis head from his wing, flew down and kukked,While the drove of the starlings whirred and wheeledOut of the ash-trees into field,While with great black flags that flogged and paddledThe rooks went out to the plough and straddled,Straddled wide on the moist red cheeseOf the furrows driven at Uppat’s Leas.* * * *Down in the village men awoke,The chimneys breathed with a faint blue smoke.The fox slept on, though tweaks and twitches,Due to his dreams, ran down his flitches.* * * *The cows were milked and the yards were sluict,And cocks and hens let out of roost,Windows were opened, mats were beaten,All men’s breakfasts were cooked and eaten;But out in the gorse on the grassy shelfThe sleeping fox looked after himself.* * * *Deep in his dream he heard the lifeOf the woodland seek for food or wife,The hop of a stoat, a buck that thumped,The squeal of a rat as a weasel jumped,The blackbird’s chackering scattering crying,The rustling bents from the rabbits flying,Cows in a byre, and distant men,And Condicote church-clock striking ten.* * * *At eleven o’clock a boy went past,With a rough-haired terrier following fast.The boy’s sweet whistle and dog’s quick yapWoke the fox from out of his nap.* * * *He rose and stretched till the claws in his padsStuck hornily out like long black gads.He listened a while, and his nose went roundTo catch the smell of the distant sound.* * * *The windward smells came free from taint—They were rabbit, strongly, with lime-kiln, faint,A wild-duck, likely, at Sars Holt Pond,And sheep on the Sars Holt Down beyond.* * * *The leeward smells were much less certain,For the Ghost Heath Hill was like a curtain,Yet vague, from the leeward, now and then,Came muffled sounds like the sound of men.* * * *He moved to his right to a clearer space,And all his soul came into his face,Into his eyes and into his nose,As over the hill a murmur rose.His ears were cocked and his keen nose flaired,He sneered with his lips till his teeth were bared,He trotted right and lifted a padTrying to test what foes he had.* * * *On Ghost Heath turf was a steady drummingWhich sounded like horses quickly coming,It died as the hunt went down the dip,Then Malapert yelped at Myngs’s whip.A bright iron horseshoe clinkt on stone,Then a man’s voice spoke, not one alone,Then a burst of laughter, swiftly still,Muffled away by Ghost Heath Hill.Then, indistinctly, the clop, clip, clep,On Brady Ride, of a horse’s step.Then silence, then, in a burst, much clearer,Voices and horses coming nearer,And another noise, of a pit-pat beatOn the Ghost Hill grass, of foxhound feet.* * * *He sat on his haunches listening hard,While his mind went over the compass card.Men were coming and rest was done,But he still had time to get fit to run;He could outlast horse and outrace hound,But men were devils from Lobs’s Pound.Scent was burning, the going good,The world one lust for a fox’s blood,The main earths stopped and the drains put to,And fifteen miles to the land he knew.But of all the ills, the ill least pleasantWas to run in the light when men were presentMen in the fields to shout and signFor a lift of hounds to a fox’s line.Men at the earth, at the long point’s end,Men at each check and none his friend,Guessing each shift that a fox contrives;But still, needs must when the devil drives.* * * *He readied himself, then a soft horn blew,Then a clear voice carolled, “Ed-hoick! Eleu!”Then the wood-end rang with the clear voice cryingAnd the crackle of scrub where hounds were trying.Then the horn blew nearer, a hound’s voice quivered,Then another, then more, till his body shivered,He left his kennel and trotted thenceWith his ears flexed back and his nerves all tense.
He trotted down with his nose intentFor a fox’s line to cross his scent,It was only fair (he being a stranger)That the native fox should have the danger.Danger was coming, so swift, so swift,That the pace of his trot began to liftThe blue-winged Judas, a jay beganSwearing, hounds whimpered, air stank of man.* * * *He hurried his trotting, he now felt frighted,It was his poor body made hounds excited.He felt as he ringed the great wood through,That he ought to make for the land he knew.* * * *Then the hounds’ excitement quivered and quickened,Then a horn blew death till his marrow sickened,Then the wood behind was a crash of cryFor the blood in his veins; it made him fly.* * * *They were on his line; it was death to stay.He must make for home by the shortest way,But with all this yelling and all this wrathAnd all these devils, how find a path?* * * *He ran like a stag to the wood’s north corner,Where the hedge was thick and the ditch a yawner,But the scarlet glimpse of Myngs on Turk,Watching the woodside, made him shirk.* * * *He ringed the wood and looked at the south.What wind there was blew into his mouth.But close to the woodland’s blackthorn thicketWas Dansey, still as a stone, on picket.At Dansey’s back were a twenty moreWatching the cover and pressing fore.* * * *The fox drew in and flaired with his muzzle.Death was there if he messed the puzzle.There were men without and hounds within,A crying that stiffened the hair on skin,Teeth in cover and death without,Both deaths coming, and no way out.* * * *His nose ranged swiftly, his heart beat fast,Then a crashing cry rose up in a blast,Then horse-hooves trampled, then horses’ flitchesBurst their way through the hazel switches.Then the horn again made the hounds like mad,And a man, quite near, said, “Found, by Gad!”And a man, quite near, said, “Now he’ll break.Lark’s Leybourne Copse is the line he’ll take.”And men moved up with their talk and stinkAnd the traplike noise of the horseshoe clink.Men whose coming meant death from teethIn a worrying wrench, with him beneath.* * * *The fox sneaked down by the cover side(With his ears flexed back) as a snake would glide;He took the ditch at the cover-end,He hugged the ditch as his only friend.The blackbird cock with the golden beakGot out of his way with a jabbering shriek,And the shriek told Tom on the raking bayThat for eighteenpence he was gone away.* * * *He ran in the hedge in the triple growthOf bramble and hawthorn, glad of both,Till a couple of fields were past, and thenCame the living death of the dread of men.* * * *Then, as he listened, he heard a “Hoy!”Tom Dansey’s horn and “Awa-wa-woy!”Then all hounds crying with all their forces,Then a thundering down of seventy horses.Robin Dawe’s horn and halloos of “HeyHark Hollar, Hoik!” and “Gone away!”“Hark Hollar Hoik!” and a smack of the whip.A yelp as a tail hound caught the clip.“Hark Hollar, Hark Hollar!” then Robin madePip go crash through the cut and laid.Hounds were over and on his lineWith a head like bees upon Tipple Tine.The sound of the nearness sent a floodOf terror of death through the fox’s blood.He upped his brush and he cocked his nose,And he went upwind as a racer goes.* * * *Bold Robin Dawe was over first,Cheering his hounds on at the burst;The field were spurring to be in it.“Hold hard, sirs, give them half a minute,”Came from Sir Peter on his white.The hounds went romping with delightOver the grass and got together,The tail hounds galloped hell-for-leatherAfter the pack at Myngs’s yell.A cry like every kind of bellRang from these rompers as they raced.* * * *The riders, thrusting to be placed,Jammed down their hats and shook their horses;The hounds romped past with all their forces,They crashed into the blackthorn fence.The scent was heavy on their sense,So hot, it seemed the living thing,It made the blood within them sing;Gusts of it made their hackles rise,Hot gulps of it were agoniesOf joy, and thirst for blood and passion.“Forrard!” cried Robin, “that’s the fashion.”He raced beside his pack to cheer.
The field’s noise died upon his ear,A faint horn, far behind, blew thinIn cover, lest some hound were in.Then instantly the great grass riseShut field and cover from his eyes,He and his racers were alone.“A dead fox or a broken bone.”Said Robin, peering for his prey.* * * *The rise, which shut the field away,Showed him the vale’s great map spread out,The down’s lean flank and thrusting snout,Pale pastures, red-brown plough, dark wood,Blue distance, still as solitude,Glitter of water here and there,The trees so delicately bare,The dark green gorse and bright green holly.“O glorious God,” he said, “how jolly!”And there downhill two fields aheadThe lolloping red dog-fox spedOver Poor Pastures to the brook.He grasped these things in one swift look,Then dived into the bullfinch heartThrough thorns that ripped his sleeves apartAnd skutched new blood upon his brow.“His point’s Lark’s Leybourne Covers now,”Said Robin, landing with a grunt.“Forrard, my beautifuls!”
The huntFollowed downhill to race with him,White Rabbit, with his swallow’s skim,Drew within hail. “Quick burst, Sir Peter.”“A traveller. Nothing could be neater.Making for Godsdown Clumps, I take it?”“Lark’s Leybourne, sir, if he can make it.Forrard!”
Bill Ridden thundered down,His big mouth grinned beneath his frown,The hounds were going away from horses.He saw the glint of watercourses,Yell Brook and Wittold’s Dyke, ahead,His horseshoes sliced the green turf red.Young Cothill’s chaser rushed and past him,Nob Manor, running next, said “Blast him!The poet chap who thinks he rides.”Hugh Colway’s mare made straking stridesAcross the grass, the Colonel next,Then Squire, volleying oaths, and vext,Fighting his hunter for refusing;Bell Ridden, like a cutter cruising,Sailing the grass; then Cob on Warder,Then Minton Price upon Marauder;Ock Gurney with his eyes intense,Burning as with a different sense,His big mouth muttering glad “By damns!”Then Pete, crouched down from head to hams,Rapt like a saint, bright focussed flame;Bennett, with devils in his wame,Chewing black cud and spitting slanting;Copse scattering jests and Stukely ranting;Sal Ridden taking line from Dansey;Long Robert forcing Necromancy;A dozen more with bad beginnings;Myngs riding hard to snatch an innings.A wild last hound with high shrill yelpsSmacked forrard with some whipthong skelps.Then last of all, at top of rise,The crowd on foot, all gasps and eyes;The run up hill had winded them.* * * *They saw the Yell Brook like a gemBlue in the grass a short mile on;They heard faint cries, but hounds were goneA good eight fields and out of sight,Except a rippled glimmer whiteGoing away with dying cheering,And scarlet flappings disappearing,And scattering horses going, going,Going like mad, White Rabbit snowingFar on ahead, a loose horse takingFence after fence with stirrups shaking,And scarlet specks and dark specks dwindling.* * * *Nearer, were twigs knocked into kindling,A much bashed fence still dropping stick,Flung clods still quivering from the kick;Cut hoof-marks pale in cheesy clay,The horse-smell blowing clean away;Birds flitting back into the cover.One last faint cry, then all was over.The hunt had been, and found, and gone.
* * * *