The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe tower

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe towerThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The towerAuthor: W. B. YeatsRelease date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72985]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: London: Macmillan and Co, Limited, 1928Credits: Produced by Christopher Hapka. Images generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library.*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOWER ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The towerAuthor: W. B. YeatsRelease date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72985]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: London: Macmillan and Co, Limited, 1928Credits: Produced by Christopher Hapka. Images generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library.

Title: The tower

Author: W. B. Yeats

Release date: February 18, 2024 [eBook #72985]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co, Limited, 1928

Credits: Produced by Christopher Hapka. Images generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOWER ***

The TowerBYW. B. YeatsMACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITEDST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON1928

W. B. Yeats

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITEDST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON1928

CONTENTSSailing to ByzantiumThe TowerMeditations in Time of Civil WarNineteen Hundred and NineteenThe WheelYouth and AgeThe New FacesA Prayer for My SonTwo Songs from a PlayWisdomLeda and the SwanOn a Picture of a Black CentaurAmong School ChildrenColonus’ PraiseThe Hero, The Girl, and The FoolOwen Ahern and His DancersA Man Young and OldThe Three MonumentsFrom ‘Oedipus at Colonus’The Gift of Harun Al-RashidAll Souls’ NightNotes

Sailing to ByzantiumIThat is no country for old men. The youngIn one another’s arms, birds in the trees,—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten born and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.IIAn aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.IIIO sages standing in God’s holy fireAs in the gold mosaic of a wall,Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,And be the singing masters of my soul.Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is; and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.IVOnce out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamellingTo keep a drowsy emperor awake;Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.1927The TowerIWhat shall I do with this absurdity—O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,Decrepit age that has been tied to meAs to a dog’s tail?Never had I moreExcited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible—No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s backAnd had the livelong summer day to spend.It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friendUntil imagination, ear and eye,Can be content with argument and dealIn abstract things; or be derided byA sort of battered kettle at the heel.III pace upon the battlements and stareOn the foundations of a house, or whereTree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;And send imagination forthUnder the day’s declining beam, and callImages and memoriesFrom ruin or from ancient trees,For I would ask a question of them all.Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and onceWhen every silver candlestick or sconceLit up the dark mahogany and the wine,A serving man that could divineThat most respected lady’s every wish,Ran and with the garden shearsClipped an insolent farmer’s earsAnd brought them in a little covered dish.Some few remembered still when I was youngA peasant girl commended by a song,Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,And praised the colour of her face,And had the greater joy in praising her,Remembering that, if walked she there,Farmers jostled at the fairSo great a glory did the song confer.And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,Or else by toasting her a score of times,Rose from the table and declared it rightTo test their fancy by their sight;But they mistook the brightness of the moonFor the prosaic light of day—Music had driven their wits astray—And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.Strange, but the man who made the song was blind,Yet, now I have considered it, I findThat nothing strange; the tragedy beganWith Homer that was a blind man,And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.O may the moon and sunlight seemOne inextricable beam,For if I triumph I must make men mad.And I myself created HanrahanAnd drove him drunk or sober through the dawnFrom somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.Caught by an old man’s juggleriesHe stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and froAnd had but broken knees for hireAnd horrible splendour of desire;I thought it all out twenty years ago:Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was onHe so bewitched the cards under his thumbThat all, but the one card, becameA pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,And that he changed into a hare.Hanrahan rose in frenzy thereAnd followed up those baying creatures towards—O towards I have forgotten what—enough!I must recall a man that neither loveNor music nor an enemy’s clipped earCould, he was so harried, cheer;A figure that has grown so fabulousThere’s not a neighbour left to sayWhen he finished his dog’s day:An ancient bankrupt master of this house.Before that ruin came, for centuries,Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the kneesOr shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,And certain men-at-arms there wereWhose images, in the Great Memory stored,Come with loud cry and panting breastTo break upon a sleeper’s restWhile their great wooden dice beat on the board.As I would question all, come all who can;Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;The red man the juggler sentThrough God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,Gifted with so fine an ear;The man drowned in a bog’s mire,When mocking muses chose the country wench.Did all old men and women, rich and poor,Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,Whether in public or in secret rageAs I do now against old age?But I have found an answer in those eyesThat are impatient to be gone;Go therefore; but leave HanrahanFor I need all his mighty memories.Old lecher with a love on every windBring up out of that deep considering mindAll that you have discovered in the grave,For it is certain that you haveReckoned up every unforeknown, unseeingPlunge, lured by a softening eye,Or by a touch or a sigh,Into the labyrinth of another’s being;Does the imagination dwell the mostUpon a woman won or woman lost?If on the lost, admit you turned asideFrom a great labyrinth out of pride,Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thoughtOr anything called conscience once;And that if memory recur, the sun’sUnder eclipse and the day blotted out.IIIIt is time that I wrote my will;I choose upstanding men,That climb the streams untilThe fountain leap, and at dawnDrop their cast at the sideOf dripping stone; I declareThey shall inherit my pride,The pride of people that wereBound neither to Cause nor to State,Neither to slaves that were spat on,Nor to the tyrants that spat,The people of Burke and of GrattanThat gave, though free to refuse—Pride, like that of the morn,When the headlong light is loose,Or that of the fabulous horn,Or that of the sudden showerWhen all streams are dry,Or that of the hourWhen the swan must fix his eyeUpon a fading gleam,Float out upon a longLast reach of glittering streamAnd there sing his last song.And I declare my faith;I mock Plotinus’ thoughtAnd cry in Plato’s teeth,Death and life were notTill man made up the whole,Made lock, stock and barrelOut of his bitter soul,Aye, sun and moon and star, all,And further add to thatThat, being dead, we rise,Dream and so createTranslunar Paradise.I have prepared my peaceWith learned Italian thingsAnd the proud stones of Greece,Poet’s imaginingsAnd memories of love,Memories of the words of women,All those things whereofMan makes a superhuman,Mirror-resembling dream.As at the loophole there,The daws chatter and scream,And drop twigs layer upon layer.When they have mounted up,The mother bird will restOn their hollow top,And so warm her wild nest.I leave both faith and prideTo young upstanding menClimbing the mountain side,That under bursting dawnThey may drop a fly;Being of that metal madeTill it was broken byThis sedentary trade.Now shall I make my soulCompelling it to studyIn a learned schoolTill the wreck of bodySlow decay of blood,Testy deliriumOr dull decrepitude,Or what worse evil come—The death of friends, or deathOf every brilliant eyeThat made a catch in the breath—Seem but the clouds of the skyWhen the horizon fades;Or a bird’s sleepy cryAmong the deepening shades.1926Meditations in Time of Civil WarIAncestral HousesSurely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,Amid the rustle of his planted hills,Life overflows without ambitious pains;And rains down life until the basin spills,And mounts more dizzy high the more it rainsAs though to choose whatever shape it willsAnd never stoop to a mechanical,Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sungHad he not found it certain beyond dreamsThat out of life’s own self-delight had sprungThe abounding glittering jet; though now it seemsAs if some marvellous empty sea-shell flungOut of the obscure dark of the rich streams,And not a fountain, were the symbol whichShadows the inherited glory of the rich.Some violent bitter man, some powerful manCalled architect and artist in, that they,Bitter and violent men, might rear in stoneThe sweetness that all longed for night and day,The gentleness none there had ever known;But when the master’s buried mice can play,And maybe the great-grandson of that house,For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.Oh, what if gardens where the peacock straysWith delicate feet upon old terraces,Or else all Juno from an urn displaysBefore the indifferent garden deities;Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled waysWhere slippered Contemplation finds his easeAnd Childhood a delight for every sense,But take our greatness with our violence!What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,And buildings that a haughtier age designed,The pacing to and fro on polished floorsAmid great chambers and long galleries, linedWith famous portraits of our ancestors;What if those things the greatest of mankind,Consider most to magnify, or to bless,But take our greatness with our bitterness!IIMy HouseAn ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,An acre of stony ground,Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,The sound of the rain or soundOf every wind that blows;The stilted water-henCrossing stream againScared by the splashing of a dozen cows;A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,A candle and written page.Il Penseroso’sPlatonist toiled onIn some like chamber, shadowing forthHow the daemonic rageImagined everything.Benighted travellersFrom markets and from fairsHave seen his midnight candle glimmering.Two men have founded here. A man-at-armsGathered a score of horse and spent his daysIn this tumultuous spot,Where through long wars and sudden night alarmsHis dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-waysForgetting and forgot;And I, that after meMy bodily heirs may find,To exalt a lonely mind,Befitting emblems of adversity.IIIMy TableTwo heavy tressels, and a boardWhere Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,By pen and paper lies,That it may moraliseMy days out of their aimlessness.A bit of an embroidered dressCovers its wooden sheath.Chaucer had not drawn breathWhen it was forged. In Sato’s house,Curved like new moon, moon luminousIt lay five hundred years.Yet if no change appearsNo moon; only an aching heartConceives a changeless work of art.Our learned men have urgedThat when and where ’twas forgedA marvellous accomplishment,In painting or in pottery, wentFrom father unto sonAnd through the centuries ranAnd seemed unchanging like the sword.Soul’s beauty being most adored,Men and their business tookThe soul’s unchanging look;For the most rich inheritor,Knowing that none could pass heaven’s doorThat loved inferior art,Had such an aching heartThat he, although a country’s talkFor silken clothes and stately walk,Had waking wits; it seemedJuno’s peacock screamed.IVMy DescendantsHaving inherited a vigorous mindFrom my old fathers I must nourish dreamsAnd leave a woman and a man behindAs vigorous of mind, and yet it seemsLife scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,But the torn petals strew the garden plot;And there’s but common greenness after that.And what if my descendants lose the flowerThrough natural declension of the soul,Through too much business with the passing hour,Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?May this laborious stair and this stark towerBecome a roofless ruin that the owlMay build in the cracked masonry and cryHer desolation to the desolate sky.The Primum Mobile that fashioned usHas made the very owls in circles move;And I, that count myself most prosperous,Seeing that love and friendship are enough,For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the houseAnd decked and altered it for a girl’s love,And know whatever flourish and declineThese stones remain their monument and mine.VThe Road at My DoorAn affable Irregular,A heavily built Falstaffan man,Comes cracking jokes of civil warAs though to die by gunshot wereThe finest play under the sun.A brown Lieutenant and his men,Half dressed in national uniform,Stand at my door, and I complainOf the foul weather, hail and rain,A pear tree broken by the storm.I count those feathered balls of sootThe moor-hen guides upon the stream,To silence the envy in my thought;And turn towards my chamber, caughtIn the cold snows of a dream.VIThe Stare’s Nest by My WindowThe bees build in the crevicesOf loosening masonry, and thereThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.My wall is loosening; honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.We are closed in, and the key is turnedOn our uncertainty; somewhereA man is killed, or a house burned,Yet no clear fact to be discerned:Come build in the empty house of the stare.A barricade of stone or of wood;Some fourteen days of civil war;Last night they trundled down the roadThat dead young soldier in his blood:Come build in the empty house of the stare.We had fed the heart on fantasies,The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,More substance in our enmitiesThan in our love; oh, honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.VIII See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming EmptinessI climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moonThat seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of windAnd those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wideFor the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astrayBecause of all that senseless tumult, all but criedFor vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a poolWhere even longing drowns under its own excess;Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are fullOf their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,Give place to an indifferent multitude, give placeTo brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.I turn away and shut the door, and on the stairWonder how many times I could have proved my worthIn something that all others understand or share;But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forthA company of friends, a conscience set at ease,It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,The half read wisdom of daemonic images,Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.1923Nineteen Hundred and NineteenIMany ingenious lovely things are goneThat seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,Protected from the circle of the moonThat pitches common things about. There stoodAmid the ornamental bronze and stoneAn ancient image made of olive wood—And gone are Phidias’ famous ivoriesAnd all the golden grasshoppers and bees.We too had many pretty toys when young;A law indifferent to blame or praise,To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrongMelt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;Public opinion ripening for so longWe thought it would outlive all future days.O what fine thought we had because we thoughtThat the worst rogues and rascals had died out.All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,And a great army but a showy thing;What matter that no cannon had been turnedInto a ploughshare; parliament and kingThought that unless a little powder burnedThe trumpeters might burst with trumpetingAnd yet it lack all glory; and perchanceThe guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.He who can read the signs nor sink unmannedInto the half-deceit of some intoxicantFrom shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spentOn master work of intellect or hand,No honour leave its mighty monument,Has but one comfort left: all triumph wouldBut break upon his ghostly solitude.But is there any comfort to be found?Man is in love and loves what vanishes,What more is there to say? That country roundNone dared admit, if such a thought were his,Incendiary or bigot could be foundTo burn that stump on the Acropolis,Or break in bits the famous ivoriesOr traffic in the grasshoppers or bees?IIWhen Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwoundA shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,It seemed that a dragon of airHad fallen among dancers, had whirled them roundOr hurried them off on its own furious path;So the platonic yearWhirls out new right and wrong,Whirls in the old instead;All men are dancers and their treadGoes to the barbarous clangour of gong.IIISome moralist or mythological poetCompares the solitary soul to a swan;I am satisfied with that,Satisfied if a troubled mirror show itBefore that brief gleam of its life be gone,An image of its state;The wings half spread for flight,The breast thrust out in prideWhether to play, or to rideThose winds that clamour of approaching night.A man in his own secret meditationIs lost amid the labyrinth that he has madeIn art or politics;Some platonist affirms that in the stationWhere we should cast off body and tradeThe ancient habit sticks,And that if our works couldBut vanish with our breathThat were a lucky death,For triumph can but mar our solitude.The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:That image can bring wildness, bring a rageTo end all things, to endWhat my laborious life imagined, evenThe half imagined, the half written page;O but we dreamed to mendWhatever mischief seemedTo afflict mankind, but nowThat winds of winter blowLearn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.IVWe, who seven years agoTalked of honour and of truth,Shriek with pleasure if we showThe weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.VCome let us mock at the greatThat had such burdens on the mindAnd toiled so hard and lateTo leave some monument behind,Nor thought of the levelling wind.Come let us mock at the wise;With all those calendars whereonThey fixed old aching eyes,They never saw how seasons run,And now but gape at the sun.Come let us mock at the goodThat fancied goodness might be gay,And sick of solitudeMight proclaim a holiday:Wind shrieked—and where are they?Mock mockers after thatThat would not lift a hand maybeTo help good, wise or greatTo bar that foul storm out, for weTraffic in mockery.VIViolence upon the roads: violence of horses;Some few have handsome riders, are garlandedOn delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,But wearied running round and round in their coursesAll break and vanish, and evil gathers head:Herodias’ daughters have returned againA sudden blast of dusty wind and afterThunder of feet, tumult of images,Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughterAll turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,According to the wind, for all are blind.But now wind drops, dust settles; thereuponThere lurches past, his great eyes without thoughtUnder the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,That insolent fiend Robert ArtissonTo whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler broughtBronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.1919The WheelThrough winter-time we call on spring,And through the spring on summer call,And when abounding hedges ringDeclare that winter’s best of all;And after that there s nothing goodBecause the spring-time has not come—Nor know that what disturbs our bloodIs but its longing for the tomb.Youth and AgeMuch did I rage when young,Being by the world oppressed,But now with flattering tongueIt speeds the parting guest.1924The New FacesIf you, that have grown old, were the first dead,Neither catalpa tree nor scented limeShould hear my living feet, nor would I treadWhere we wrought that shall break the teeth of time.Let the new faces play what tricks they willIn the old rooms; night can outbalance day,Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,The living seem more shadowy than they.A Prayer for My SonBid a strong ghost stand at the headThat my Michael may sleep sound,Nor cry, nor turn in the bedTill his morning meal come round;And may departing twilight keepAll dread afar till morning’s back,That his mother may not lackHer fill of sleep.Bid the ghost have sword in fist:Some there are, for I avowSuch devilish things exist,Who have planned his murder for they knowOf some most haughty deed or thoughtThat waits upon his future days,And would through hatred of the baysBring that to nought.Though You can fashion everythingFrom nothing every day, and teachThe morning stars to sing,You have lacked articulate speechTo tell Your simplest want, and known,Wailing upon a woman’s knee,All of that worst ignominyOf flesh and bone;And when through all the town there ranThe servants of Your enemy,A woman and a man,Unless the Holy Writings lie,Hurried through the smooth and roughAnd through the fertile and waste,Protecting, till the danger past,With human love.Two Songs from a PlayII saw a staring virgin standWhere holy Dionysus died,And tear the heart out of his side,And lay the heart upon her handAnd bear that beating heart away;And then did all the Muses singOf Magnus Annus at the spring,As though God’s death were but a play.Another Troy must rise and set,Another lineage feed the crow,Another Argo’s painted prowDrive to a flashier bauble yet.The Roman Empire stood appalled:It dropped the reins of peace and warWhen that fierce virgin and her StarOut of the fabulous darkness called.IIIn pity for man’s darkening thoughtHe walked that room and issued thenceIn Galilean turbulence;The Babylonian Starlight broughtA fabulous, formless darkness in;Odour of blood when Christ was slainMade Plato’s tolerance in vainAnd vain the Doric discipline.WisdomThe true faith discovered wasWhen painted panel, statuary,Glass-mosaic, window-glass,Straightened all that went awryWhen some peasant gospellerImagined Him upon the floorOf a working-carpenter.Miracle had its playtime whereIn damask clothed and on a seat,Chryselephantine, cedar boarded,His majestic Mother satStitching at a purple hoarded,That He might be nobly breeched,In starry towers of BabylonNoah’s freshet never reached.King Abundance got Him onInnocence; and Wisdom He.That cognomen sounded bestConsidering what wild infancyDrove horror from His Mother’s breast.Leda and the SwanA sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?And how can body, laid in that white rushBut feel the strange heart beating where it lies?A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead.Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?1928On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmond DulacYour hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing.What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eatAnd that alone; yet I, being driven half insaneBecause of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheatIn the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grainAnd after baked it slowly in an oven; but nowI bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel foundWhere seven Ephesian topers slept and never knewWhen Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound.Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keepUnwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.Among School ChildrenII walk through the long schoolroom questioning,A kind old nun in a white hood replies;The children learn to cipher and to sing,To study reading-books and history,To cut and sew, be neat in everythingIn the best modern way—the children’s eyesIn momentary wonder stare uponA sixty year old smiling public man.III dream of a Ledæan body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that sheTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy—Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.IIIAnd thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t’other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age—For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething of every paddler’s heritage—And had that colour upon cheek or hairAnd thereupon my heart is driven wild:She stands before me as a living child.IVHer present image floats in to the mind—Did quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mass of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledæan kindHad pretty plumage once—enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.VWhat youthful mother, a shape upon her lapHoney of generation had betrayed,And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escapeAs recollection or the drug decide,Would think her son, did she but see that shapeWith sixty or more winters on its head,A compensation for the pang of his birth,Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?VIPlato thought nature but a spume that playsUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;Solider Aristotle played the tawsUpon the bottom of a king of kings;World-famous golden-thighed PythagorasFingered upon a fiddle stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.VIIBoth nuns and mothers worship images,But those the candles light are not as thoseThat animate a mother’s reveries,But keep a marble or a bronze repose.And yet they too break hearts—O PresencesThat passion, piety or affection knows,And that all heavenly glory symbolise—O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;VIIILabour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?Colonus’ Praise(From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’)ChorusCome praise Colonus’ horses and come praiseThe wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,The nightingale that deafens daylight there,If daylight ever visit where,Unvisited by tempest or by sun,Immortal ladies tread the groundDizzy with harmonious sound,Semele’s lad a gay companion.And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrivesThe self-sown, self-begotten shape that givesAthenian intellect its mastery,Even the grey-leaved olive treeMiracle-bred out of the living stone;Nor accident of peace nor warShall wither that old marvel, forThe great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.Who comes into this country, and has comeWhere golden crocus and narcissus bloom,Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughterAnd beauty-drunken by the waterGlittering among grey-leaved olive trees,Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;Who finds abounding CephisusHas found the loveliest spectacle there is.Because this country has a pious mindAnd so remembers that when all mankindBut trod the road, or paddled by the shore,Poseidon gave it bit and oar,Every Colonus lad or lass discoursesOf that oar and of that bit;Summer and winter, day and night,Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.The Hero, The Girl, and The FoolThe GirlI rage at my own image in the glass,That’s so unlike myself that when you praise itIt is as though you praised another, or evenMocked me with praise of my mere opposite;And when I wake towards morn I dread myselfFor the heart cries that what deception winsCruelty must keep; therefore be warned and goIf you have seen that image and not the woman.The HeroI have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.The GirlIf you are no more strength than I am beautyI had better find a convent and turn nun;A nun at least has all men’s reverenceAnd needs no cruelty.The HeroI have heard one sayThat men have reverence for their holinessAnd not themselves.The GirlSay on and sayThat only God has loved us for ourselves,But what care I that long for a man’s love?The Fool by the RoadsideWhen my days that haveFrom cradle run to graveFrom grave to cradle run instead;When thoughts that a foolHas wound upon a spoolAre but loose thread, are but loose thread.When cradle and spool are pastAnd I mere shade at lastCoagulate of stuffTransparent like the wind,I think that I may findA faithful love, a faithful love.Owen Ahern and His DancersIA strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsoughtUpon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.IIThe Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistakeHer childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’A Man Young and OldFirst LoveThough nurtured like the sailing moonIn beauty’s murderous brood,She walked awhile and blushed awhileAnd on my pathway stoodUntil I thought her body boreA heart of flesh and blood.But since I laid a hand thereonAnd found a heart of stoneI have attempted many thingsAnd not a thing is done,For every hand is lunaticThat travels on the moon.She smiled and that transfigured meAnd left me but a lout,Maundering here, and maundering there,Emptier of thoughtThan heavenly circuit of its starsWhen the moon sails out.Human DignityLike the moon her kindness is,If kindness I may callWhat has no comprehension in’t,But is the same for allAs though my sorrow were a sceneUpon a painted wall.So like a bit of stone I lieUnder a broken tree.I could recover if I shriekedMy heart’s agonyTo passing bird, but I am dumbFrom human dignity.The MermaidA mermaid found a swimming lad,Picked him for her own,Pressed her body to his body,Laughed; and plunging downForgot in cruel happinessThat even lovers drown.The Death of the HareI have pointed out the yelling pack,The hare leap to the wood,And when I pass a complimentRejoice as lover shouldAt the drooping of an eyeAt the mantling of the blood.Then suddenly my heart is wrungBy her distracted airAnd I remember wildness lostAnd after, swept from there,Am set down standing in the woodAt the death of the hare.The Empty CupA crazy man that found a cup,When all but dead of thirst,Hardly dared to wet his mouthImagining, moon accursed,That another mouthfulAnd his beating heart would burst.October last I found it tooBut found it dry as bone,And for that reason am I crazedAnd my sleep is gone.His MemoriesWe should be hidden from their eyes,Being but holy showsAnd bodies broken like a thornWhereon the bleak north blows,To think of buried HectorAnd that none living knows.The women take so little stockIn what I do or sayThey’d sooner leave their cossetingTo hear a jackass bray;My arms are like the twisted thornAnd yet there beauty lay;The first of all the tribe lay thereAnd did such pleasure take—She who had brought great Hector downAnd put all Troy to wreck—That she cried into this earStrike me if I shriek.The Friends of His YouthLaughter not time destroyed my voiceAnd put that crack in it,And when the moon’s pot-belliedI get a laughing fit,For that old Madge comes down the laneA stone upon her breast,And a cloak wrapped about the stone,And she can get no restWith singing hush and hush-a-bye;She that has been wildAnd barren as a breaking waveThinks that the stone’s a child.And Peter that had great affairsAnd was a pushing manShrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’And perches on a stone;And then I laugh till tears run downAnd the heart thumps at my side,Remembering that her shriek was loveAnd that he shrieks from pride.Summer and SpringWe sat under an old thorn-treeAnd talked away the night,Told all that had been said or doneSince first we saw the light,And when we talked of growing upKnew that we’d halved a soulAnd fell the one in t’other’s armsThat we might make it whole;Then Peter had a murdering lookFor it seemed that he and sheHad spoken of their childish daysUnder that very tree.O what a bursting out there was,And what a blossoming,When we had all the summer timeAnd she had all the spring.The Secrets of the OldI have old women’s secrets nowThat had those of the young;Madge tells me what I dared not thinkWhen my blood was strong,And what had drowned a lover onceSounds like an old song.Though Margery is stricken dumbIf thrown in Madge’s way,We three make up a solitude;For none alive to-dayCan know the stories that we knowOr say the things we say:How such a man pleased women mostOf all that are gone,How such a pair loved many yearsAnd such a pair but one,Stories of the bed of strawOr the bed of down.His WildnessO bid me mount and sail up thereAmid the cloudy wrack,For Peg and Meg and Paris’ loveThat had so straight a back,Are gone away, and some that stay,Have changed their silk for sack.Were I but there and none to hearI’d have a peacock cryFor that is natural to a manThat lives in memory,Being all alone I’d nurse a stoneAnd sing it lullaby.The Three MonumentsThey hold their public meetings whereOur most renowned patriots stand,One among the birds of the air,A stumpier on either hand;And all the popular statesmen sayThat purity built up the stateAnd after kept it from decay;Admonish us to cling to thatAnd let all base ambition be,For intellect would make us proudAnd pride bring in impurity:The three old rascals laugh aloud.From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’IEndure what life God gives and ask no longer span;Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.IIEven from that delight memory treasures so,Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.IIIIn the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.IVNever to have lived is best, ancient writers say;Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.The Gift of Harun Al-RashidKusta ben Luka is my name, I writeTo Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,And for no ear but his.Carry this letterThrough the great gallery of the Treasure HouseWhere banners of the Caliphs hang, night-colouredBut brilliant as the night’s embroidery,And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;Pass books of learning from ByzantiumWritten in gold upon a purple stain,And pause at last, I was about to say,At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,For should you leave my letter there, a boy’sLove-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon itAnd let it fall unnoticed to the floor.Pause at the Treatise of ParmenidesAnd hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s endMust keep that perfect, as they keep her songSo great its fame.When fitting time has passedThe parchment will disclose to some learned manA mystery that else had found no chroniclerBut the wild Bedouin. Though I approveThose wanderers that welcomed in their tentsWhat great Harun Al-Rashid, occupiedWith Persian embassy or Grecian war,Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truthThat wandering in a desert, featurelessAs air under a wing, can give birds’ wit.In after time they will speak much of meAnd speak but phantasy. Recall the yearWhen our beloved Caliph put to deathHis Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason;‘If but the shirt upon my body knew itI’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’That speech was all that the town knew, but heSeemed for a while to have grown young again;Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends,That none might know that he was conscience struck—But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for meThat in the early summer of the yearThe mightiest of the princes of the worldCame to the least considered of his courtiers;Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edgeOne hand amid the goldfish in the pool;And thereupon a colloquy took placeThat I commend to all the chroniclersTo show how violent great hearts can loseTheir bitterness and find the honey-comb.‘I have brought a slender bride into the house;You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”,And she and I, being sunk in happiness,Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,When evening stirs the jasmine, and yetAre brideless.’‘I am falling into years.’‘But such as you and I do not seem oldLike men who live by habit. Every dayI ride with falcon to the river’s edgeOr carry the ringed mail upon my back,Or court a woman; neither enemy,Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;And so a hunter carries in the eyeA mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thoughtThat springs from body and in body fallsLike this pure jet, now lost amid blue skyNow bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,Be mimicry?’‘What matter if our soulsAre nearer to the surface of the bodyThan souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youthShows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,My lantern is too loyal not to showThat it was made in your great father’s reign.’‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;You think that love has seasons, and you thinkThat if the spring bear off what the spring gaveThe heart need suffer no defeat; but IWho have accepted the Byzantine faith,That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;And if her eye should not grow bright for mineOr brighten only for some younger eye,My heart could never turn from daily ruin,Nor find a remedy.’‘But what if IHave lit upon a woman, who so sharesYour thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,So strains to look beyond our life, an eyeThat never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,Being all brimmed with life.’‘Were it but trueI would have found the best that life can give,Companionship in those mysterious thingsThat make a man’s soul or a woman’s soulItself and not some other soul.’‘That loveMust needs be in this life and in what followsUnchanging and at peace, and it is rightEvery philosopher should praise that love.But I being none can praise its opposite.It makes my passion stronger but to thinkLike passion stirs the peacock and his mate,The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouthIs a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’And thereupon his bounty gave what nowCan shake more blossom from autumnal chillThan all my bursting springtime knew. A girlPerched in some window of her mother’s houseHad watched my daily passage to and fro;Had heard impossible history of my past;Imagined some impossible historyLived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touchGave but more reason for a woman’s care.Yet was it love of me, or was it loveOf the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?Or did the torchlight of that mysteryPick out my features in such light and shadeTwo contemplating passions chose one themeThrough sheer bewilderment? She had not pacedThe garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,Before she had spread a book upon her kneesAnd asked about the pictures or the text;And often those first days I saw her stareOn old dry writing in a learned tongue,On old dry faggots that could never pleaseThe extravagance of spring; or move a handAs if that writing or the figured pageWere some dear cheek.Upon a moonless nightI sat where I could watch her sleeping form,And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,And fearing that my light disturbed her sleepI rose that I might screen it with a cloth.I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expoundWhat’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;And saw her sitting upright on the bed;Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hourShe seemed the learned man and I the child;Truths without father came, truths that no bookOf all the uncounted books that I have read,Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,Those terrible implacable straight linesDrawn through the wandering vegetative dream,Even those truths that when my bones are dustMust drive the Arabian host.The voice grew still,And she lay down upon her bed and slept,But woke at the first gleam of day, rose upAnd swept the house and sang about her workIn childish ignorance of all that passed.A dozen nights of natural sleep, and thenWhen the full moon swam to its greatest heightShe rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleepWalked through the house. Unnoticed and unfeltI wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desertAnd there marked out those emblems on the sandThat day by day I study and marvel at,With her white finger. I led her home asleepAnd once again she rose and swept the houseIn childish ignorance of all that passed.Even to-day, after some seven yearsWhen maybe thrice in every moon her mouthMurmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,She keeps that ignorance, nor has she nowThat first unnatural interest in my books.It seems enough that I am there; and yetOld fellow student, whose most patient earHeard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.What if she lose her ignorance and soDream that I love her only for the voice,That every gift and every word of praiseIs but a payment for that midnight voiceThat is to age what milk is to a child!Were she to lose her love, because she had lostHer confidence in mine, or even loseIts first simplicity, love, voice and all,All my fine feathers would be plucked awayAnd I left shivering. The voice has drawnA quality of wisdom from her love’sParticular quality. The signs and shapes;All those abstractions that you fancied wereFrom the great treatise of Parmenides;All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight thingsAre but a new expression of her bodyDrunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.And now my utmost mystery is out.A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;Under it wisdom stands, and I alone—Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone—Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.1923All Souls’ NightAn Epilogue to ‘A Vision’Midnight has come and the great Christ Church Bell,And may a lesser bell, sound through the room;And it is All Souls’ Night,And two long glasses brimmed with muscatelBubble upon the table. A ghost may come;For it is a ghost’s right,His element is so fineBeing sharpened by his death,To drink from the wine-breathWhile our gross palates drink from the whole wine.I need some mind that, if the cannon soundFrom every quarter of the world, can stayWound in mind’s pondering,As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;Because I have a marvellous thing to say,A certain marvellous thingNone but the living mock,Though not for sober ear;It may be all that hearShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.H⸺’s the first I call. He loved strange thoughtAnd knew that sweet extremity of prideThat’s called platonic love,And that to such a pitch of passion wroughtNothing could bring him, when his lady died,Anodyne for his love.Words were but wasted breath;One dear hope had he:The inclemencyOf that or the next winter would be death.Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tellWhether of her or God he thought the most,But think that his mind’s eye,When upward turned, on one sole image fell;And that a slight companionable ghost,Wild with divinity,Had so lit up the wholeImmense miraculous houseThe Bible promised us,It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.On Florence Emery I call the next,Who finding the first wrinkles on a faceAdmired and beautiful,And knowing that the future would be vexedWith ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,Preferred to teach a school,Away from neighbour or friendAmong dark skins, and therePermit foul years to wearHidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.Before that end much had she ravelled outFrom a discourse in figurative speechBy some learned IndianOn the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,Until it plunge into the sun;And there, free and yet fastBeing both Chance and Choice,Forget its broken toysAnd sink into its own delight at last.And I call up MacGregor from the grave,For in my first hard springtime we were friends,Although of late estranged.I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,And told him so, but friendship never ends;And what if mind seem changed,And it seem changed with the mind,When thoughts rise up unbidOn generous things that he didAnd I grow half contented to be blind.He had much industry at setting out,Much boisterous courage, before lonelinessHad driven him crazed;For meditations upon unknown thoughtMake human intercourse grow less and less;They are neither paid nor praised.But he’d object to the host,The glass because my glass;A ghost-lover he wasAnd may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.But names are nothing. What matter who it be,So that his elements have grown so fineThe fume of muscatelCan give his sharpened palate ecstasyNo living man can drink from the whole wine.I have mummy truths to tellWhereat the living mock,Though not for sober ear,For maybe all that hearShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tightTill meditation master all its parts,Nothing can stay my glanceUntil that glance run in the world’s despiteTo where the damned have howled away their hearts,And where the blessed dance;Such thought, that in it boundI need no other thingWound in mind’s wandering,As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

IThat is no country for old men. The youngIn one another’s arms, birds in the trees,—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten born and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.IIAn aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.IIIO sages standing in God’s holy fireAs in the gold mosaic of a wall,Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,And be the singing masters of my soul.Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is; and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.IVOnce out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamellingTo keep a drowsy emperor awake;Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.1927

That is no country for old men. The youngIn one another’s arms, birds in the trees,—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,Fish flesh or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten born and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.

IIAn aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.

IIIO sages standing in God’s holy fireAs in the gold mosaic of a wall,Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,And be the singing masters of my soul.Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is; and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.

O sages standing in God’s holy fireAs in the gold mosaic of a wall,Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,And be the singing masters of my soul.Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is; and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.

IVOnce out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamellingTo keep a drowsy emperor awake;Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.

Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamellingTo keep a drowsy emperor awake;Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.

1927

IWhat shall I do with this absurdity—O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,Decrepit age that has been tied to meAs to a dog’s tail?Never had I moreExcited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible—No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s backAnd had the livelong summer day to spend.It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friendUntil imagination, ear and eye,Can be content with argument and dealIn abstract things; or be derided byA sort of battered kettle at the heel.III pace upon the battlements and stareOn the foundations of a house, or whereTree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;And send imagination forthUnder the day’s declining beam, and callImages and memoriesFrom ruin or from ancient trees,For I would ask a question of them all.Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and onceWhen every silver candlestick or sconceLit up the dark mahogany and the wine,A serving man that could divineThat most respected lady’s every wish,Ran and with the garden shearsClipped an insolent farmer’s earsAnd brought them in a little covered dish.Some few remembered still when I was youngA peasant girl commended by a song,Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,And praised the colour of her face,And had the greater joy in praising her,Remembering that, if walked she there,Farmers jostled at the fairSo great a glory did the song confer.And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,Or else by toasting her a score of times,Rose from the table and declared it rightTo test their fancy by their sight;But they mistook the brightness of the moonFor the prosaic light of day—Music had driven their wits astray—And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.Strange, but the man who made the song was blind,Yet, now I have considered it, I findThat nothing strange; the tragedy beganWith Homer that was a blind man,And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.O may the moon and sunlight seemOne inextricable beam,For if I triumph I must make men mad.And I myself created HanrahanAnd drove him drunk or sober through the dawnFrom somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.Caught by an old man’s juggleriesHe stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and froAnd had but broken knees for hireAnd horrible splendour of desire;I thought it all out twenty years ago:Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was onHe so bewitched the cards under his thumbThat all, but the one card, becameA pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,And that he changed into a hare.Hanrahan rose in frenzy thereAnd followed up those baying creatures towards—O towards I have forgotten what—enough!I must recall a man that neither loveNor music nor an enemy’s clipped earCould, he was so harried, cheer;A figure that has grown so fabulousThere’s not a neighbour left to sayWhen he finished his dog’s day:An ancient bankrupt master of this house.Before that ruin came, for centuries,Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the kneesOr shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,And certain men-at-arms there wereWhose images, in the Great Memory stored,Come with loud cry and panting breastTo break upon a sleeper’s restWhile their great wooden dice beat on the board.As I would question all, come all who can;Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;The red man the juggler sentThrough God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,Gifted with so fine an ear;The man drowned in a bog’s mire,When mocking muses chose the country wench.Did all old men and women, rich and poor,Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,Whether in public or in secret rageAs I do now against old age?But I have found an answer in those eyesThat are impatient to be gone;Go therefore; but leave HanrahanFor I need all his mighty memories.Old lecher with a love on every windBring up out of that deep considering mindAll that you have discovered in the grave,For it is certain that you haveReckoned up every unforeknown, unseeingPlunge, lured by a softening eye,Or by a touch or a sigh,Into the labyrinth of another’s being;Does the imagination dwell the mostUpon a woman won or woman lost?If on the lost, admit you turned asideFrom a great labyrinth out of pride,Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thoughtOr anything called conscience once;And that if memory recur, the sun’sUnder eclipse and the day blotted out.IIIIt is time that I wrote my will;I choose upstanding men,That climb the streams untilThe fountain leap, and at dawnDrop their cast at the sideOf dripping stone; I declareThey shall inherit my pride,The pride of people that wereBound neither to Cause nor to State,Neither to slaves that were spat on,Nor to the tyrants that spat,The people of Burke and of GrattanThat gave, though free to refuse—Pride, like that of the morn,When the headlong light is loose,Or that of the fabulous horn,Or that of the sudden showerWhen all streams are dry,Or that of the hourWhen the swan must fix his eyeUpon a fading gleam,Float out upon a longLast reach of glittering streamAnd there sing his last song.And I declare my faith;I mock Plotinus’ thoughtAnd cry in Plato’s teeth,Death and life were notTill man made up the whole,Made lock, stock and barrelOut of his bitter soul,Aye, sun and moon and star, all,And further add to thatThat, being dead, we rise,Dream and so createTranslunar Paradise.I have prepared my peaceWith learned Italian thingsAnd the proud stones of Greece,Poet’s imaginingsAnd memories of love,Memories of the words of women,All those things whereofMan makes a superhuman,Mirror-resembling dream.As at the loophole there,The daws chatter and scream,And drop twigs layer upon layer.When they have mounted up,The mother bird will restOn their hollow top,And so warm her wild nest.I leave both faith and prideTo young upstanding menClimbing the mountain side,That under bursting dawnThey may drop a fly;Being of that metal madeTill it was broken byThis sedentary trade.Now shall I make my soulCompelling it to studyIn a learned schoolTill the wreck of bodySlow decay of blood,Testy deliriumOr dull decrepitude,Or what worse evil come—The death of friends, or deathOf every brilliant eyeThat made a catch in the breath—Seem but the clouds of the skyWhen the horizon fades;Or a bird’s sleepy cryAmong the deepening shades.1926

What shall I do with this absurdity—O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,Decrepit age that has been tied to meAs to a dog’s tail?Never had I moreExcited, passionate, fantasticalImagination, nor an ear and eyeThat more expected the impossible—No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s backAnd had the livelong summer day to spend.It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friendUntil imagination, ear and eye,Can be content with argument and dealIn abstract things; or be derided byA sort of battered kettle at the heel.

III pace upon the battlements and stareOn the foundations of a house, or whereTree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;And send imagination forthUnder the day’s declining beam, and callImages and memoriesFrom ruin or from ancient trees,For I would ask a question of them all.Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and onceWhen every silver candlestick or sconceLit up the dark mahogany and the wine,A serving man that could divineThat most respected lady’s every wish,Ran and with the garden shearsClipped an insolent farmer’s earsAnd brought them in a little covered dish.Some few remembered still when I was youngA peasant girl commended by a song,Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,And praised the colour of her face,And had the greater joy in praising her,Remembering that, if walked she there,Farmers jostled at the fairSo great a glory did the song confer.And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,Or else by toasting her a score of times,Rose from the table and declared it rightTo test their fancy by their sight;But they mistook the brightness of the moonFor the prosaic light of day—Music had driven their wits astray—And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.Strange, but the man who made the song was blind,Yet, now I have considered it, I findThat nothing strange; the tragedy beganWith Homer that was a blind man,And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.O may the moon and sunlight seemOne inextricable beam,For if I triumph I must make men mad.And I myself created HanrahanAnd drove him drunk or sober through the dawnFrom somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.Caught by an old man’s juggleriesHe stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and froAnd had but broken knees for hireAnd horrible splendour of desire;I thought it all out twenty years ago:Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was onHe so bewitched the cards under his thumbThat all, but the one card, becameA pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,And that he changed into a hare.Hanrahan rose in frenzy thereAnd followed up those baying creatures towards—O towards I have forgotten what—enough!I must recall a man that neither loveNor music nor an enemy’s clipped earCould, he was so harried, cheer;A figure that has grown so fabulousThere’s not a neighbour left to sayWhen he finished his dog’s day:An ancient bankrupt master of this house.Before that ruin came, for centuries,Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the kneesOr shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,And certain men-at-arms there wereWhose images, in the Great Memory stored,Come with loud cry and panting breastTo break upon a sleeper’s restWhile their great wooden dice beat on the board.As I would question all, come all who can;Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;The red man the juggler sentThrough God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,Gifted with so fine an ear;The man drowned in a bog’s mire,When mocking muses chose the country wench.Did all old men and women, rich and poor,Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,Whether in public or in secret rageAs I do now against old age?But I have found an answer in those eyesThat are impatient to be gone;Go therefore; but leave HanrahanFor I need all his mighty memories.Old lecher with a love on every windBring up out of that deep considering mindAll that you have discovered in the grave,For it is certain that you haveReckoned up every unforeknown, unseeingPlunge, lured by a softening eye,Or by a touch or a sigh,Into the labyrinth of another’s being;Does the imagination dwell the mostUpon a woman won or woman lost?If on the lost, admit you turned asideFrom a great labyrinth out of pride,Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thoughtOr anything called conscience once;And that if memory recur, the sun’sUnder eclipse and the day blotted out.

I pace upon the battlements and stareOn the foundations of a house, or whereTree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;And send imagination forthUnder the day’s declining beam, and callImages and memoriesFrom ruin or from ancient trees,For I would ask a question of them all.

Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and onceWhen every silver candlestick or sconceLit up the dark mahogany and the wine,A serving man that could divineThat most respected lady’s every wish,Ran and with the garden shearsClipped an insolent farmer’s earsAnd brought them in a little covered dish.

Some few remembered still when I was youngA peasant girl commended by a song,Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,And praised the colour of her face,And had the greater joy in praising her,Remembering that, if walked she there,Farmers jostled at the fairSo great a glory did the song confer.

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,Or else by toasting her a score of times,Rose from the table and declared it rightTo test their fancy by their sight;But they mistook the brightness of the moonFor the prosaic light of day—Music had driven their wits astray—And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind,Yet, now I have considered it, I findThat nothing strange; the tragedy beganWith Homer that was a blind man,And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.O may the moon and sunlight seemOne inextricable beam,For if I triumph I must make men mad.

And I myself created HanrahanAnd drove him drunk or sober through the dawnFrom somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.Caught by an old man’s juggleriesHe stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and froAnd had but broken knees for hireAnd horrible splendour of desire;I thought it all out twenty years ago:

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;And when that ancient ruffian’s turn was onHe so bewitched the cards under his thumbThat all, but the one card, becameA pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,And that he changed into a hare.Hanrahan rose in frenzy thereAnd followed up those baying creatures towards—

O towards I have forgotten what—enough!I must recall a man that neither loveNor music nor an enemy’s clipped earCould, he was so harried, cheer;A figure that has grown so fabulousThere’s not a neighbour left to sayWhen he finished his dog’s day:An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

Before that ruin came, for centuries,Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the kneesOr shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs,And certain men-at-arms there wereWhose images, in the Great Memory stored,Come with loud cry and panting breastTo break upon a sleeper’s restWhile their great wooden dice beat on the board.

As I would question all, come all who can;Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant;The red man the juggler sentThrough God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,Gifted with so fine an ear;The man drowned in a bog’s mire,When mocking muses chose the country wench.

Did all old men and women, rich and poor,Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,Whether in public or in secret rageAs I do now against old age?But I have found an answer in those eyesThat are impatient to be gone;Go therefore; but leave HanrahanFor I need all his mighty memories.

Old lecher with a love on every windBring up out of that deep considering mindAll that you have discovered in the grave,For it is certain that you haveReckoned up every unforeknown, unseeingPlunge, lured by a softening eye,Or by a touch or a sigh,Into the labyrinth of another’s being;

Does the imagination dwell the mostUpon a woman won or woman lost?If on the lost, admit you turned asideFrom a great labyrinth out of pride,Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thoughtOr anything called conscience once;And that if memory recur, the sun’sUnder eclipse and the day blotted out.

IIIIt is time that I wrote my will;I choose upstanding men,That climb the streams untilThe fountain leap, and at dawnDrop their cast at the sideOf dripping stone; I declareThey shall inherit my pride,The pride of people that wereBound neither to Cause nor to State,Neither to slaves that were spat on,Nor to the tyrants that spat,The people of Burke and of GrattanThat gave, though free to refuse—Pride, like that of the morn,When the headlong light is loose,Or that of the fabulous horn,Or that of the sudden showerWhen all streams are dry,Or that of the hourWhen the swan must fix his eyeUpon a fading gleam,Float out upon a longLast reach of glittering streamAnd there sing his last song.And I declare my faith;I mock Plotinus’ thoughtAnd cry in Plato’s teeth,Death and life were notTill man made up the whole,Made lock, stock and barrelOut of his bitter soul,Aye, sun and moon and star, all,And further add to thatThat, being dead, we rise,Dream and so createTranslunar Paradise.I have prepared my peaceWith learned Italian thingsAnd the proud stones of Greece,Poet’s imaginingsAnd memories of love,Memories of the words of women,All those things whereofMan makes a superhuman,Mirror-resembling dream.As at the loophole there,The daws chatter and scream,And drop twigs layer upon layer.When they have mounted up,The mother bird will restOn their hollow top,And so warm her wild nest.I leave both faith and prideTo young upstanding menClimbing the mountain side,That under bursting dawnThey may drop a fly;Being of that metal madeTill it was broken byThis sedentary trade.Now shall I make my soulCompelling it to studyIn a learned schoolTill the wreck of bodySlow decay of blood,Testy deliriumOr dull decrepitude,Or what worse evil come—The death of friends, or deathOf every brilliant eyeThat made a catch in the breath—Seem but the clouds of the skyWhen the horizon fades;Or a bird’s sleepy cryAmong the deepening shades.

It is time that I wrote my will;I choose upstanding men,That climb the streams untilThe fountain leap, and at dawnDrop their cast at the sideOf dripping stone; I declareThey shall inherit my pride,The pride of people that wereBound neither to Cause nor to State,Neither to slaves that were spat on,Nor to the tyrants that spat,The people of Burke and of GrattanThat gave, though free to refuse—Pride, like that of the morn,When the headlong light is loose,Or that of the fabulous horn,Or that of the sudden showerWhen all streams are dry,Or that of the hourWhen the swan must fix his eyeUpon a fading gleam,Float out upon a longLast reach of glittering streamAnd there sing his last song.And I declare my faith;I mock Plotinus’ thoughtAnd cry in Plato’s teeth,Death and life were notTill man made up the whole,Made lock, stock and barrelOut of his bitter soul,Aye, sun and moon and star, all,And further add to thatThat, being dead, we rise,Dream and so createTranslunar Paradise.I have prepared my peaceWith learned Italian thingsAnd the proud stones of Greece,Poet’s imaginingsAnd memories of love,Memories of the words of women,All those things whereofMan makes a superhuman,Mirror-resembling dream.

As at the loophole there,The daws chatter and scream,And drop twigs layer upon layer.When they have mounted up,The mother bird will restOn their hollow top,And so warm her wild nest.

I leave both faith and prideTo young upstanding menClimbing the mountain side,That under bursting dawnThey may drop a fly;Being of that metal madeTill it was broken byThis sedentary trade.

Now shall I make my soulCompelling it to studyIn a learned schoolTill the wreck of bodySlow decay of blood,Testy deliriumOr dull decrepitude,Or what worse evil come—The death of friends, or deathOf every brilliant eyeThat made a catch in the breath—Seem but the clouds of the skyWhen the horizon fades;Or a bird’s sleepy cryAmong the deepening shades.

1926

IAncestral HousesSurely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,Amid the rustle of his planted hills,Life overflows without ambitious pains;And rains down life until the basin spills,And mounts more dizzy high the more it rainsAs though to choose whatever shape it willsAnd never stoop to a mechanical,Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sungHad he not found it certain beyond dreamsThat out of life’s own self-delight had sprungThe abounding glittering jet; though now it seemsAs if some marvellous empty sea-shell flungOut of the obscure dark of the rich streams,And not a fountain, were the symbol whichShadows the inherited glory of the rich.Some violent bitter man, some powerful manCalled architect and artist in, that they,Bitter and violent men, might rear in stoneThe sweetness that all longed for night and day,The gentleness none there had ever known;But when the master’s buried mice can play,And maybe the great-grandson of that house,For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.Oh, what if gardens where the peacock straysWith delicate feet upon old terraces,Or else all Juno from an urn displaysBefore the indifferent garden deities;Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled waysWhere slippered Contemplation finds his easeAnd Childhood a delight for every sense,But take our greatness with our violence!What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,And buildings that a haughtier age designed,The pacing to and fro on polished floorsAmid great chambers and long galleries, linedWith famous portraits of our ancestors;What if those things the greatest of mankind,Consider most to magnify, or to bless,But take our greatness with our bitterness!IIMy HouseAn ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,An acre of stony ground,Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,The sound of the rain or soundOf every wind that blows;The stilted water-henCrossing stream againScared by the splashing of a dozen cows;A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,A candle and written page.Il Penseroso’sPlatonist toiled onIn some like chamber, shadowing forthHow the daemonic rageImagined everything.Benighted travellersFrom markets and from fairsHave seen his midnight candle glimmering.Two men have founded here. A man-at-armsGathered a score of horse and spent his daysIn this tumultuous spot,Where through long wars and sudden night alarmsHis dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-waysForgetting and forgot;And I, that after meMy bodily heirs may find,To exalt a lonely mind,Befitting emblems of adversity.IIIMy TableTwo heavy tressels, and a boardWhere Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,By pen and paper lies,That it may moraliseMy days out of their aimlessness.A bit of an embroidered dressCovers its wooden sheath.Chaucer had not drawn breathWhen it was forged. In Sato’s house,Curved like new moon, moon luminousIt lay five hundred years.Yet if no change appearsNo moon; only an aching heartConceives a changeless work of art.Our learned men have urgedThat when and where ’twas forgedA marvellous accomplishment,In painting or in pottery, wentFrom father unto sonAnd through the centuries ranAnd seemed unchanging like the sword.Soul’s beauty being most adored,Men and their business tookThe soul’s unchanging look;For the most rich inheritor,Knowing that none could pass heaven’s doorThat loved inferior art,Had such an aching heartThat he, although a country’s talkFor silken clothes and stately walk,Had waking wits; it seemedJuno’s peacock screamed.IVMy DescendantsHaving inherited a vigorous mindFrom my old fathers I must nourish dreamsAnd leave a woman and a man behindAs vigorous of mind, and yet it seemsLife scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,But the torn petals strew the garden plot;And there’s but common greenness after that.And what if my descendants lose the flowerThrough natural declension of the soul,Through too much business with the passing hour,Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?May this laborious stair and this stark towerBecome a roofless ruin that the owlMay build in the cracked masonry and cryHer desolation to the desolate sky.The Primum Mobile that fashioned usHas made the very owls in circles move;And I, that count myself most prosperous,Seeing that love and friendship are enough,For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the houseAnd decked and altered it for a girl’s love,And know whatever flourish and declineThese stones remain their monument and mine.VThe Road at My DoorAn affable Irregular,A heavily built Falstaffan man,Comes cracking jokes of civil warAs though to die by gunshot wereThe finest play under the sun.A brown Lieutenant and his men,Half dressed in national uniform,Stand at my door, and I complainOf the foul weather, hail and rain,A pear tree broken by the storm.I count those feathered balls of sootThe moor-hen guides upon the stream,To silence the envy in my thought;And turn towards my chamber, caughtIn the cold snows of a dream.VIThe Stare’s Nest by My WindowThe bees build in the crevicesOf loosening masonry, and thereThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.My wall is loosening; honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.We are closed in, and the key is turnedOn our uncertainty; somewhereA man is killed, or a house burned,Yet no clear fact to be discerned:Come build in the empty house of the stare.A barricade of stone or of wood;Some fourteen days of civil war;Last night they trundled down the roadThat dead young soldier in his blood:Come build in the empty house of the stare.We had fed the heart on fantasies,The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,More substance in our enmitiesThan in our love; oh, honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.VIII See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming EmptinessI climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moonThat seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of windAnd those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wideFor the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astrayBecause of all that senseless tumult, all but criedFor vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a poolWhere even longing drowns under its own excess;Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are fullOf their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,Give place to an indifferent multitude, give placeTo brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.I turn away and shut the door, and on the stairWonder how many times I could have proved my worthIn something that all others understand or share;But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forthA company of friends, a conscience set at ease,It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,The half read wisdom of daemonic images,Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.1923

Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns,Amid the rustle of his planted hills,Life overflows without ambitious pains;And rains down life until the basin spills,And mounts more dizzy high the more it rainsAs though to choose whatever shape it willsAnd never stoop to a mechanical,Or servile shape, at others’ beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sungHad he not found it certain beyond dreamsThat out of life’s own self-delight had sprungThe abounding glittering jet; though now it seemsAs if some marvellous empty sea-shell flungOut of the obscure dark of the rich streams,And not a fountain, were the symbol whichShadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful manCalled architect and artist in, that they,Bitter and violent men, might rear in stoneThe sweetness that all longed for night and day,The gentleness none there had ever known;But when the master’s buried mice can play,And maybe the great-grandson of that house,For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse.

Oh, what if gardens where the peacock straysWith delicate feet upon old terraces,Or else all Juno from an urn displaysBefore the indifferent garden deities;Oh, what if levelled lawns and gravelled waysWhere slippered Contemplation finds his easeAnd Childhood a delight for every sense,But take our greatness with our violence!

What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,And buildings that a haughtier age designed,The pacing to and fro on polished floorsAmid great chambers and long galleries, linedWith famous portraits of our ancestors;What if those things the greatest of mankind,Consider most to magnify, or to bless,But take our greatness with our bitterness!

IIMy HouseAn ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,An acre of stony ground,Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,The sound of the rain or soundOf every wind that blows;The stilted water-henCrossing stream againScared by the splashing of a dozen cows;A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,A candle and written page.Il Penseroso’sPlatonist toiled onIn some like chamber, shadowing forthHow the daemonic rageImagined everything.Benighted travellersFrom markets and from fairsHave seen his midnight candle glimmering.Two men have founded here. A man-at-armsGathered a score of horse and spent his daysIn this tumultuous spot,Where through long wars and sudden night alarmsHis dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-waysForgetting and forgot;And I, that after meMy bodily heirs may find,To exalt a lonely mind,Befitting emblems of adversity.

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,An acre of stony ground,Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,The sound of the rain or soundOf every wind that blows;The stilted water-henCrossing stream againScared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,A candle and written page.Il Penseroso’sPlatonist toiled onIn some like chamber, shadowing forthHow the daemonic rageImagined everything.Benighted travellersFrom markets and from fairsHave seen his midnight candle glimmering.

Two men have founded here. A man-at-armsGathered a score of horse and spent his daysIn this tumultuous spot,Where through long wars and sudden night alarmsHis dwindling score and he seemed cast-a-waysForgetting and forgot;And I, that after meMy bodily heirs may find,To exalt a lonely mind,Befitting emblems of adversity.

IIIMy TableTwo heavy tressels, and a boardWhere Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,By pen and paper lies,That it may moraliseMy days out of their aimlessness.A bit of an embroidered dressCovers its wooden sheath.Chaucer had not drawn breathWhen it was forged. In Sato’s house,Curved like new moon, moon luminousIt lay five hundred years.Yet if no change appearsNo moon; only an aching heartConceives a changeless work of art.Our learned men have urgedThat when and where ’twas forgedA marvellous accomplishment,In painting or in pottery, wentFrom father unto sonAnd through the centuries ranAnd seemed unchanging like the sword.Soul’s beauty being most adored,Men and their business tookThe soul’s unchanging look;For the most rich inheritor,Knowing that none could pass heaven’s doorThat loved inferior art,Had such an aching heartThat he, although a country’s talkFor silken clothes and stately walk,Had waking wits; it seemedJuno’s peacock screamed.

Two heavy tressels, and a boardWhere Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,By pen and paper lies,That it may moraliseMy days out of their aimlessness.A bit of an embroidered dressCovers its wooden sheath.Chaucer had not drawn breathWhen it was forged. In Sato’s house,Curved like new moon, moon luminousIt lay five hundred years.Yet if no change appearsNo moon; only an aching heartConceives a changeless work of art.Our learned men have urgedThat when and where ’twas forgedA marvellous accomplishment,In painting or in pottery, wentFrom father unto sonAnd through the centuries ranAnd seemed unchanging like the sword.Soul’s beauty being most adored,Men and their business tookThe soul’s unchanging look;For the most rich inheritor,Knowing that none could pass heaven’s doorThat loved inferior art,Had such an aching heartThat he, although a country’s talkFor silken clothes and stately walk,Had waking wits; it seemedJuno’s peacock screamed.

IVMy DescendantsHaving inherited a vigorous mindFrom my old fathers I must nourish dreamsAnd leave a woman and a man behindAs vigorous of mind, and yet it seemsLife scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,But the torn petals strew the garden plot;And there’s but common greenness after that.And what if my descendants lose the flowerThrough natural declension of the soul,Through too much business with the passing hour,Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?May this laborious stair and this stark towerBecome a roofless ruin that the owlMay build in the cracked masonry and cryHer desolation to the desolate sky.The Primum Mobile that fashioned usHas made the very owls in circles move;And I, that count myself most prosperous,Seeing that love and friendship are enough,For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the houseAnd decked and altered it for a girl’s love,And know whatever flourish and declineThese stones remain their monument and mine.

Having inherited a vigorous mindFrom my old fathers I must nourish dreamsAnd leave a woman and a man behindAs vigorous of mind, and yet it seemsLife scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,But the torn petals strew the garden plot;And there’s but common greenness after that.

And what if my descendants lose the flowerThrough natural declension of the soul,Through too much business with the passing hour,Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?May this laborious stair and this stark towerBecome a roofless ruin that the owlMay build in the cracked masonry and cryHer desolation to the desolate sky.

The Primum Mobile that fashioned usHas made the very owls in circles move;And I, that count myself most prosperous,Seeing that love and friendship are enough,For an old neighbour’s friendship chose the houseAnd decked and altered it for a girl’s love,And know whatever flourish and declineThese stones remain their monument and mine.

VThe Road at My DoorAn affable Irregular,A heavily built Falstaffan man,Comes cracking jokes of civil warAs though to die by gunshot wereThe finest play under the sun.A brown Lieutenant and his men,Half dressed in national uniform,Stand at my door, and I complainOf the foul weather, hail and rain,A pear tree broken by the storm.I count those feathered balls of sootThe moor-hen guides upon the stream,To silence the envy in my thought;And turn towards my chamber, caughtIn the cold snows of a dream.

An affable Irregular,A heavily built Falstaffan man,Comes cracking jokes of civil warAs though to die by gunshot wereThe finest play under the sun.

A brown Lieutenant and his men,Half dressed in national uniform,Stand at my door, and I complainOf the foul weather, hail and rain,A pear tree broken by the storm.

I count those feathered balls of sootThe moor-hen guides upon the stream,To silence the envy in my thought;And turn towards my chamber, caughtIn the cold snows of a dream.

VIThe Stare’s Nest by My WindowThe bees build in the crevicesOf loosening masonry, and thereThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.My wall is loosening; honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.We are closed in, and the key is turnedOn our uncertainty; somewhereA man is killed, or a house burned,Yet no clear fact to be discerned:Come build in the empty house of the stare.A barricade of stone or of wood;Some fourteen days of civil war;Last night they trundled down the roadThat dead young soldier in his blood:Come build in the empty house of the stare.We had fed the heart on fantasies,The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,More substance in our enmitiesThan in our love; oh, honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.

The bees build in the crevicesOf loosening masonry, and thereThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.My wall is loosening; honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turnedOn our uncertainty; somewhereA man is killed, or a house burned,Yet no clear fact to be discerned:Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;Some fourteen days of civil war;Last night they trundled down the roadThat dead young soldier in his blood:Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,More substance in our enmitiesThan in our love; oh, honey-beesCome build in the empty house of the stare.

VIII See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming EmptinessI climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moonThat seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of windAnd those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wideFor the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astrayBecause of all that senseless tumult, all but criedFor vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a poolWhere even longing drowns under its own excess;Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are fullOf their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,Give place to an indifferent multitude, give placeTo brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.I turn away and shut the door, and on the stairWonder how many times I could have proved my worthIn something that all others understand or share;But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forthA company of friends, a conscience set at ease,It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,The half read wisdom of daemonic images,Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

I climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moonThat seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of windAnd those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wideFor the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astrayBecause of all that senseless tumult, all but criedFor vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a poolWhere even longing drowns under its own excess;Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are fullOf their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,Give place to an indifferent multitude, give placeTo brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stairWonder how many times I could have proved my worthIn something that all others understand or share;But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forthA company of friends, a conscience set at ease,It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,The half read wisdom of daemonic images,Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

1923

IMany ingenious lovely things are goneThat seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,Protected from the circle of the moonThat pitches common things about. There stoodAmid the ornamental bronze and stoneAn ancient image made of olive wood—And gone are Phidias’ famous ivoriesAnd all the golden grasshoppers and bees.We too had many pretty toys when young;A law indifferent to blame or praise,To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrongMelt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;Public opinion ripening for so longWe thought it would outlive all future days.O what fine thought we had because we thoughtThat the worst rogues and rascals had died out.All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,And a great army but a showy thing;What matter that no cannon had been turnedInto a ploughshare; parliament and kingThought that unless a little powder burnedThe trumpeters might burst with trumpetingAnd yet it lack all glory; and perchanceThe guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.He who can read the signs nor sink unmannedInto the half-deceit of some intoxicantFrom shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spentOn master work of intellect or hand,No honour leave its mighty monument,Has but one comfort left: all triumph wouldBut break upon his ghostly solitude.But is there any comfort to be found?Man is in love and loves what vanishes,What more is there to say? That country roundNone dared admit, if such a thought were his,Incendiary or bigot could be foundTo burn that stump on the Acropolis,Or break in bits the famous ivoriesOr traffic in the grasshoppers or bees?IIWhen Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwoundA shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,It seemed that a dragon of airHad fallen among dancers, had whirled them roundOr hurried them off on its own furious path;So the platonic yearWhirls out new right and wrong,Whirls in the old instead;All men are dancers and their treadGoes to the barbarous clangour of gong.IIISome moralist or mythological poetCompares the solitary soul to a swan;I am satisfied with that,Satisfied if a troubled mirror show itBefore that brief gleam of its life be gone,An image of its state;The wings half spread for flight,The breast thrust out in prideWhether to play, or to rideThose winds that clamour of approaching night.A man in his own secret meditationIs lost amid the labyrinth that he has madeIn art or politics;Some platonist affirms that in the stationWhere we should cast off body and tradeThe ancient habit sticks,And that if our works couldBut vanish with our breathThat were a lucky death,For triumph can but mar our solitude.The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:That image can bring wildness, bring a rageTo end all things, to endWhat my laborious life imagined, evenThe half imagined, the half written page;O but we dreamed to mendWhatever mischief seemedTo afflict mankind, but nowThat winds of winter blowLearn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.IVWe, who seven years agoTalked of honour and of truth,Shriek with pleasure if we showThe weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.VCome let us mock at the greatThat had such burdens on the mindAnd toiled so hard and lateTo leave some monument behind,Nor thought of the levelling wind.Come let us mock at the wise;With all those calendars whereonThey fixed old aching eyes,They never saw how seasons run,And now but gape at the sun.Come let us mock at the goodThat fancied goodness might be gay,And sick of solitudeMight proclaim a holiday:Wind shrieked—and where are they?Mock mockers after thatThat would not lift a hand maybeTo help good, wise or greatTo bar that foul storm out, for weTraffic in mockery.VIViolence upon the roads: violence of horses;Some few have handsome riders, are garlandedOn delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,But wearied running round and round in their coursesAll break and vanish, and evil gathers head:Herodias’ daughters have returned againA sudden blast of dusty wind and afterThunder of feet, tumult of images,Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughterAll turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,According to the wind, for all are blind.But now wind drops, dust settles; thereuponThere lurches past, his great eyes without thoughtUnder the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,That insolent fiend Robert ArtissonTo whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler broughtBronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.1919

Many ingenious lovely things are goneThat seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,Protected from the circle of the moonThat pitches common things about. There stoodAmid the ornamental bronze and stoneAn ancient image made of olive wood—And gone are Phidias’ famous ivoriesAnd all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

We too had many pretty toys when young;A law indifferent to blame or praise,To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrongMelt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;Public opinion ripening for so longWe thought it would outlive all future days.O what fine thought we had because we thoughtThat the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,And a great army but a showy thing;What matter that no cannon had been turnedInto a ploughshare; parliament and kingThought that unless a little powder burnedThe trumpeters might burst with trumpetingAnd yet it lack all glory; and perchanceThe guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

He who can read the signs nor sink unmannedInto the half-deceit of some intoxicantFrom shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spentOn master work of intellect or hand,No honour leave its mighty monument,Has but one comfort left: all triumph wouldBut break upon his ghostly solitude.

But is there any comfort to be found?Man is in love and loves what vanishes,What more is there to say? That country roundNone dared admit, if such a thought were his,Incendiary or bigot could be foundTo burn that stump on the Acropolis,Or break in bits the famous ivoriesOr traffic in the grasshoppers or bees?

IIWhen Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwoundA shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,It seemed that a dragon of airHad fallen among dancers, had whirled them roundOr hurried them off on its own furious path;So the platonic yearWhirls out new right and wrong,Whirls in the old instead;All men are dancers and their treadGoes to the barbarous clangour of gong.

When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwoundA shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,It seemed that a dragon of airHad fallen among dancers, had whirled them roundOr hurried them off on its own furious path;So the platonic yearWhirls out new right and wrong,Whirls in the old instead;All men are dancers and their treadGoes to the barbarous clangour of gong.

IIISome moralist or mythological poetCompares the solitary soul to a swan;I am satisfied with that,Satisfied if a troubled mirror show itBefore that brief gleam of its life be gone,An image of its state;The wings half spread for flight,The breast thrust out in prideWhether to play, or to rideThose winds that clamour of approaching night.A man in his own secret meditationIs lost amid the labyrinth that he has madeIn art or politics;Some platonist affirms that in the stationWhere we should cast off body and tradeThe ancient habit sticks,And that if our works couldBut vanish with our breathThat were a lucky death,For triumph can but mar our solitude.The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:That image can bring wildness, bring a rageTo end all things, to endWhat my laborious life imagined, evenThe half imagined, the half written page;O but we dreamed to mendWhatever mischief seemedTo afflict mankind, but nowThat winds of winter blowLearn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

Some moralist or mythological poetCompares the solitary soul to a swan;I am satisfied with that,Satisfied if a troubled mirror show itBefore that brief gleam of its life be gone,An image of its state;The wings half spread for flight,The breast thrust out in prideWhether to play, or to rideThose winds that clamour of approaching night.

A man in his own secret meditationIs lost amid the labyrinth that he has madeIn art or politics;Some platonist affirms that in the stationWhere we should cast off body and tradeThe ancient habit sticks,And that if our works couldBut vanish with our breathThat were a lucky death,For triumph can but mar our solitude.

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:That image can bring wildness, bring a rageTo end all things, to endWhat my laborious life imagined, evenThe half imagined, the half written page;O but we dreamed to mendWhatever mischief seemedTo afflict mankind, but nowThat winds of winter blowLearn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

IVWe, who seven years agoTalked of honour and of truth,Shriek with pleasure if we showThe weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

We, who seven years agoTalked of honour and of truth,Shriek with pleasure if we showThe weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

VCome let us mock at the greatThat had such burdens on the mindAnd toiled so hard and lateTo leave some monument behind,Nor thought of the levelling wind.Come let us mock at the wise;With all those calendars whereonThey fixed old aching eyes,They never saw how seasons run,And now but gape at the sun.Come let us mock at the goodThat fancied goodness might be gay,And sick of solitudeMight proclaim a holiday:Wind shrieked—and where are they?Mock mockers after thatThat would not lift a hand maybeTo help good, wise or greatTo bar that foul storm out, for weTraffic in mockery.

Come let us mock at the greatThat had such burdens on the mindAnd toiled so hard and lateTo leave some monument behind,Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;With all those calendars whereonThey fixed old aching eyes,They never saw how seasons run,And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the goodThat fancied goodness might be gay,And sick of solitudeMight proclaim a holiday:Wind shrieked—and where are they?

Mock mockers after thatThat would not lift a hand maybeTo help good, wise or greatTo bar that foul storm out, for weTraffic in mockery.

VIViolence upon the roads: violence of horses;Some few have handsome riders, are garlandedOn delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,But wearied running round and round in their coursesAll break and vanish, and evil gathers head:Herodias’ daughters have returned againA sudden blast of dusty wind and afterThunder of feet, tumult of images,Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughterAll turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,According to the wind, for all are blind.But now wind drops, dust settles; thereuponThere lurches past, his great eyes without thoughtUnder the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,That insolent fiend Robert ArtissonTo whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler broughtBronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;Some few have handsome riders, are garlandedOn delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,But wearied running round and round in their coursesAll break and vanish, and evil gathers head:Herodias’ daughters have returned againA sudden blast of dusty wind and afterThunder of feet, tumult of images,Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughterAll turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,According to the wind, for all are blind.But now wind drops, dust settles; thereuponThere lurches past, his great eyes without thoughtUnder the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,That insolent fiend Robert ArtissonTo whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler broughtBronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

1919

Through winter-time we call on spring,And through the spring on summer call,And when abounding hedges ringDeclare that winter’s best of all;And after that there s nothing goodBecause the spring-time has not come—Nor know that what disturbs our bloodIs but its longing for the tomb.

Much did I rage when young,Being by the world oppressed,But now with flattering tongueIt speeds the parting guest.1924

Much did I rage when young,Being by the world oppressed,But now with flattering tongueIt speeds the parting guest.

1924

If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,Neither catalpa tree nor scented limeShould hear my living feet, nor would I treadWhere we wrought that shall break the teeth of time.Let the new faces play what tricks they willIn the old rooms; night can outbalance day,Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,The living seem more shadowy than they.

Bid a strong ghost stand at the headThat my Michael may sleep sound,Nor cry, nor turn in the bedTill his morning meal come round;And may departing twilight keepAll dread afar till morning’s back,That his mother may not lackHer fill of sleep.Bid the ghost have sword in fist:Some there are, for I avowSuch devilish things exist,Who have planned his murder for they knowOf some most haughty deed or thoughtThat waits upon his future days,And would through hatred of the baysBring that to nought.Though You can fashion everythingFrom nothing every day, and teachThe morning stars to sing,You have lacked articulate speechTo tell Your simplest want, and known,Wailing upon a woman’s knee,All of that worst ignominyOf flesh and bone;And when through all the town there ranThe servants of Your enemy,A woman and a man,Unless the Holy Writings lie,Hurried through the smooth and roughAnd through the fertile and waste,Protecting, till the danger past,With human love.

Bid the ghost have sword in fist:Some there are, for I avowSuch devilish things exist,Who have planned his murder for they knowOf some most haughty deed or thoughtThat waits upon his future days,And would through hatred of the baysBring that to nought.

Though You can fashion everythingFrom nothing every day, and teachThe morning stars to sing,You have lacked articulate speechTo tell Your simplest want, and known,Wailing upon a woman’s knee,All of that worst ignominyOf flesh and bone;

And when through all the town there ranThe servants of Your enemy,A woman and a man,Unless the Holy Writings lie,Hurried through the smooth and roughAnd through the fertile and waste,Protecting, till the danger past,With human love.

II saw a staring virgin standWhere holy Dionysus died,And tear the heart out of his side,And lay the heart upon her handAnd bear that beating heart away;And then did all the Muses singOf Magnus Annus at the spring,As though God’s death were but a play.Another Troy must rise and set,Another lineage feed the crow,Another Argo’s painted prowDrive to a flashier bauble yet.The Roman Empire stood appalled:It dropped the reins of peace and warWhen that fierce virgin and her StarOut of the fabulous darkness called.IIIn pity for man’s darkening thoughtHe walked that room and issued thenceIn Galilean turbulence;The Babylonian Starlight broughtA fabulous, formless darkness in;Odour of blood when Christ was slainMade Plato’s tolerance in vainAnd vain the Doric discipline.

I saw a staring virgin standWhere holy Dionysus died,And tear the heart out of his side,And lay the heart upon her handAnd bear that beating heart away;And then did all the Muses singOf Magnus Annus at the spring,As though God’s death were but a play.

Another Troy must rise and set,Another lineage feed the crow,Another Argo’s painted prowDrive to a flashier bauble yet.The Roman Empire stood appalled:It dropped the reins of peace and warWhen that fierce virgin and her StarOut of the fabulous darkness called.

IIIn pity for man’s darkening thoughtHe walked that room and issued thenceIn Galilean turbulence;The Babylonian Starlight broughtA fabulous, formless darkness in;Odour of blood when Christ was slainMade Plato’s tolerance in vainAnd vain the Doric discipline.

In pity for man’s darkening thoughtHe walked that room and issued thenceIn Galilean turbulence;The Babylonian Starlight broughtA fabulous, formless darkness in;Odour of blood when Christ was slainMade Plato’s tolerance in vainAnd vain the Doric discipline.

The true faith discovered wasWhen painted panel, statuary,Glass-mosaic, window-glass,Straightened all that went awryWhen some peasant gospellerImagined Him upon the floorOf a working-carpenter.Miracle had its playtime whereIn damask clothed and on a seat,Chryselephantine, cedar boarded,His majestic Mother satStitching at a purple hoarded,That He might be nobly breeched,In starry towers of BabylonNoah’s freshet never reached.King Abundance got Him onInnocence; and Wisdom He.That cognomen sounded bestConsidering what wild infancyDrove horror from His Mother’s breast.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?And how can body, laid in that white rushBut feel the strange heart beating where it lies?A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead.Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?1928

A sudden blow: the great wings beating stillAbove the staggering girl, her thighs caressedBy the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?And how can body, laid in that white rushBut feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and towerAnd Agamemnon dead.Being so caught up,So mastered by the brute blood of the air,Did she put on his knowledge with his powerBefore the indifferent beak could let her drop?

1928

Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing.What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eatAnd that alone; yet I, being driven half insaneBecause of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheatIn the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grainAnd after baked it slowly in an oven; but nowI bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel foundWhere seven Ephesian topers slept and never knewWhen Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound.Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keepUnwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.

II walk through the long schoolroom questioning,A kind old nun in a white hood replies;The children learn to cipher and to sing,To study reading-books and history,To cut and sew, be neat in everythingIn the best modern way—the children’s eyesIn momentary wonder stare uponA sixty year old smiling public man.III dream of a Ledæan body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that sheTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy—Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.IIIAnd thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t’other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age—For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething of every paddler’s heritage—And had that colour upon cheek or hairAnd thereupon my heart is driven wild:She stands before me as a living child.IVHer present image floats in to the mind—Did quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mass of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledæan kindHad pretty plumage once—enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.VWhat youthful mother, a shape upon her lapHoney of generation had betrayed,And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escapeAs recollection or the drug decide,Would think her son, did she but see that shapeWith sixty or more winters on its head,A compensation for the pang of his birth,Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?VIPlato thought nature but a spume that playsUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;Solider Aristotle played the tawsUpon the bottom of a king of kings;World-famous golden-thighed PythagorasFingered upon a fiddle stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.VIIBoth nuns and mothers worship images,But those the candles light are not as thoseThat animate a mother’s reveries,But keep a marble or a bronze repose.And yet they too break hearts—O PresencesThat passion, piety or affection knows,And that all heavenly glory symbolise—O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;VIIILabour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,A kind old nun in a white hood replies;The children learn to cipher and to sing,To study reading-books and history,To cut and sew, be neat in everythingIn the best modern way—the children’s eyesIn momentary wonder stare uponA sixty year old smiling public man.

III dream of a Ledæan body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that sheTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy—Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

I dream of a Ledæan body, bentAbove a sinking fire, a tale that sheTold of a harsh reproof, or trivial eventThat changed some childish day to tragedy—Told, and it seemed that our two natures blentInto a sphere from youthful sympathy,Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

IIIAnd thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t’other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age—For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething of every paddler’s heritage—And had that colour upon cheek or hairAnd thereupon my heart is driven wild:She stands before me as a living child.

And thinking of that fit of grief or rageI look upon one child or t’other thereAnd wonder if she stood so at that age—For even daughters of the swan can shareSomething of every paddler’s heritage—And had that colour upon cheek or hairAnd thereupon my heart is driven wild:She stands before me as a living child.

IVHer present image floats in to the mind—Did quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mass of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledæan kindHad pretty plumage once—enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

Her present image floats in to the mind—Did quattrocento finger fashion itHollow of cheek as though it drank the windAnd took a mass of shadows for its meat?And I though never of Ledæan kindHad pretty plumage once—enough of that,Better to smile on all that smile, and showThere is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

VWhat youthful mother, a shape upon her lapHoney of generation had betrayed,And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escapeAs recollection or the drug decide,Would think her son, did she but see that shapeWith sixty or more winters on its head,A compensation for the pang of his birth,Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lapHoney of generation had betrayed,And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escapeAs recollection or the drug decide,Would think her son, did she but see that shapeWith sixty or more winters on its head,A compensation for the pang of his birth,Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VIPlato thought nature but a spume that playsUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;Solider Aristotle played the tawsUpon the bottom of a king of kings;World-famous golden-thighed PythagorasFingered upon a fiddle stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

Plato thought nature but a spume that playsUpon a ghostly paradigm of things;Solider Aristotle played the tawsUpon the bottom of a king of kings;World-famous golden-thighed PythagorasFingered upon a fiddle stick or stringsWhat a star sang and careless Muses heard:Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VIIBoth nuns and mothers worship images,But those the candles light are not as thoseThat animate a mother’s reveries,But keep a marble or a bronze repose.And yet they too break hearts—O PresencesThat passion, piety or affection knows,And that all heavenly glory symbolise—O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

Both nuns and mothers worship images,But those the candles light are not as thoseThat animate a mother’s reveries,But keep a marble or a bronze repose.And yet they too break hearts—O PresencesThat passion, piety or affection knows,And that all heavenly glory symbolise—O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIIILabour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul,Nor beauty born out of its own despair,Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?

ChorusCome praise Colonus’ horses and come praiseThe wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,The nightingale that deafens daylight there,If daylight ever visit where,Unvisited by tempest or by sun,Immortal ladies tread the groundDizzy with harmonious sound,Semele’s lad a gay companion.And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrivesThe self-sown, self-begotten shape that givesAthenian intellect its mastery,Even the grey-leaved olive treeMiracle-bred out of the living stone;Nor accident of peace nor warShall wither that old marvel, forThe great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.Who comes into this country, and has comeWhere golden crocus and narcissus bloom,Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughterAnd beauty-drunken by the waterGlittering among grey-leaved olive trees,Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;Who finds abounding CephisusHas found the loveliest spectacle there is.Because this country has a pious mindAnd so remembers that when all mankindBut trod the road, or paddled by the shore,Poseidon gave it bit and oar,Every Colonus lad or lass discoursesOf that oar and of that bit;Summer and winter, day and night,Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.

Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praiseThe wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,The nightingale that deafens daylight there,If daylight ever visit where,Unvisited by tempest or by sun,Immortal ladies tread the groundDizzy with harmonious sound,Semele’s lad a gay companion.

And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrivesThe self-sown, self-begotten shape that givesAthenian intellect its mastery,Even the grey-leaved olive treeMiracle-bred out of the living stone;Nor accident of peace nor warShall wither that old marvel, forThe great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

Who comes into this country, and has comeWhere golden crocus and narcissus bloom,Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughterAnd beauty-drunken by the waterGlittering among grey-leaved olive trees,Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;Who finds abounding CephisusHas found the loveliest spectacle there is.

Because this country has a pious mindAnd so remembers that when all mankindBut trod the road, or paddled by the shore,Poseidon gave it bit and oar,Every Colonus lad or lass discoursesOf that oar and of that bit;Summer and winter, day and night,Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.

The GirlI rage at my own image in the glass,That’s so unlike myself that when you praise itIt is as though you praised another, or evenMocked me with praise of my mere opposite;And when I wake towards morn I dread myselfFor the heart cries that what deception winsCruelty must keep; therefore be warned and goIf you have seen that image and not the woman.The HeroI have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.The GirlIf you are no more strength than I am beautyI had better find a convent and turn nun;A nun at least has all men’s reverenceAnd needs no cruelty.The HeroI have heard one sayThat men have reverence for their holinessAnd not themselves.The GirlSay on and sayThat only God has loved us for ourselves,But what care I that long for a man’s love?The Fool by the RoadsideWhen my days that haveFrom cradle run to graveFrom grave to cradle run instead;When thoughts that a foolHas wound upon a spoolAre but loose thread, are but loose thread.When cradle and spool are pastAnd I mere shade at lastCoagulate of stuffTransparent like the wind,I think that I may findA faithful love, a faithful love.

I rage at my own image in the glass,That’s so unlike myself that when you praise itIt is as though you praised another, or evenMocked me with praise of my mere opposite;And when I wake towards morn I dread myselfFor the heart cries that what deception winsCruelty must keep; therefore be warned and goIf you have seen that image and not the woman.

I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.

If you are no more strength than I am beautyI had better find a convent and turn nun;A nun at least has all men’s reverenceAnd needs no cruelty.

I have heard one sayThat men have reverence for their holinessAnd not themselves.

Say on and sayThat only God has loved us for ourselves,But what care I that long for a man’s love?

When my days that haveFrom cradle run to graveFrom grave to cradle run instead;When thoughts that a foolHas wound upon a spoolAre but loose thread, are but loose thread.

When cradle and spool are pastAnd I mere shade at lastCoagulate of stuffTransparent like the wind,I think that I may findA faithful love, a faithful love.

IA strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsoughtUpon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.IIThe Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistakeHer childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’

A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsoughtUpon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.

I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Heart went mad.

IIThe Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistakeHer childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’

The Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’

‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’

‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistakeHer childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’

First LoveThough nurtured like the sailing moonIn beauty’s murderous brood,She walked awhile and blushed awhileAnd on my pathway stoodUntil I thought her body boreA heart of flesh and blood.But since I laid a hand thereonAnd found a heart of stoneI have attempted many thingsAnd not a thing is done,For every hand is lunaticThat travels on the moon.She smiled and that transfigured meAnd left me but a lout,Maundering here, and maundering there,Emptier of thoughtThan heavenly circuit of its starsWhen the moon sails out.Human DignityLike the moon her kindness is,If kindness I may callWhat has no comprehension in’t,But is the same for allAs though my sorrow were a sceneUpon a painted wall.So like a bit of stone I lieUnder a broken tree.I could recover if I shriekedMy heart’s agonyTo passing bird, but I am dumbFrom human dignity.The MermaidA mermaid found a swimming lad,Picked him for her own,Pressed her body to his body,Laughed; and plunging downForgot in cruel happinessThat even lovers drown.The Death of the HareI have pointed out the yelling pack,The hare leap to the wood,And when I pass a complimentRejoice as lover shouldAt the drooping of an eyeAt the mantling of the blood.Then suddenly my heart is wrungBy her distracted airAnd I remember wildness lostAnd after, swept from there,Am set down standing in the woodAt the death of the hare.The Empty CupA crazy man that found a cup,When all but dead of thirst,Hardly dared to wet his mouthImagining, moon accursed,That another mouthfulAnd his beating heart would burst.October last I found it tooBut found it dry as bone,And for that reason am I crazedAnd my sleep is gone.His MemoriesWe should be hidden from their eyes,Being but holy showsAnd bodies broken like a thornWhereon the bleak north blows,To think of buried HectorAnd that none living knows.The women take so little stockIn what I do or sayThey’d sooner leave their cossetingTo hear a jackass bray;My arms are like the twisted thornAnd yet there beauty lay;The first of all the tribe lay thereAnd did such pleasure take—She who had brought great Hector downAnd put all Troy to wreck—That she cried into this earStrike me if I shriek.The Friends of His YouthLaughter not time destroyed my voiceAnd put that crack in it,And when the moon’s pot-belliedI get a laughing fit,For that old Madge comes down the laneA stone upon her breast,And a cloak wrapped about the stone,And she can get no restWith singing hush and hush-a-bye;She that has been wildAnd barren as a breaking waveThinks that the stone’s a child.And Peter that had great affairsAnd was a pushing manShrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’And perches on a stone;And then I laugh till tears run downAnd the heart thumps at my side,Remembering that her shriek was loveAnd that he shrieks from pride.Summer and SpringWe sat under an old thorn-treeAnd talked away the night,Told all that had been said or doneSince first we saw the light,And when we talked of growing upKnew that we’d halved a soulAnd fell the one in t’other’s armsThat we might make it whole;Then Peter had a murdering lookFor it seemed that he and sheHad spoken of their childish daysUnder that very tree.O what a bursting out there was,And what a blossoming,When we had all the summer timeAnd she had all the spring.The Secrets of the OldI have old women’s secrets nowThat had those of the young;Madge tells me what I dared not thinkWhen my blood was strong,And what had drowned a lover onceSounds like an old song.Though Margery is stricken dumbIf thrown in Madge’s way,We three make up a solitude;For none alive to-dayCan know the stories that we knowOr say the things we say:How such a man pleased women mostOf all that are gone,How such a pair loved many yearsAnd such a pair but one,Stories of the bed of strawOr the bed of down.His WildnessO bid me mount and sail up thereAmid the cloudy wrack,For Peg and Meg and Paris’ loveThat had so straight a back,Are gone away, and some that stay,Have changed their silk for sack.Were I but there and none to hearI’d have a peacock cryFor that is natural to a manThat lives in memory,Being all alone I’d nurse a stoneAnd sing it lullaby.

Though nurtured like the sailing moonIn beauty’s murderous brood,She walked awhile and blushed awhileAnd on my pathway stoodUntil I thought her body boreA heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereonAnd found a heart of stoneI have attempted many thingsAnd not a thing is done,For every hand is lunaticThat travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured meAnd left me but a lout,Maundering here, and maundering there,Emptier of thoughtThan heavenly circuit of its starsWhen the moon sails out.

Human DignityLike the moon her kindness is,If kindness I may callWhat has no comprehension in’t,But is the same for allAs though my sorrow were a sceneUpon a painted wall.So like a bit of stone I lieUnder a broken tree.I could recover if I shriekedMy heart’s agonyTo passing bird, but I am dumbFrom human dignity.

Like the moon her kindness is,If kindness I may callWhat has no comprehension in’t,But is the same for allAs though my sorrow were a sceneUpon a painted wall.

So like a bit of stone I lieUnder a broken tree.I could recover if I shriekedMy heart’s agonyTo passing bird, but I am dumbFrom human dignity.

The MermaidA mermaid found a swimming lad,Picked him for her own,Pressed her body to his body,Laughed; and plunging downForgot in cruel happinessThat even lovers drown.

A mermaid found a swimming lad,Picked him for her own,Pressed her body to his body,Laughed; and plunging downForgot in cruel happinessThat even lovers drown.

The Death of the HareI have pointed out the yelling pack,The hare leap to the wood,And when I pass a complimentRejoice as lover shouldAt the drooping of an eyeAt the mantling of the blood.Then suddenly my heart is wrungBy her distracted airAnd I remember wildness lostAnd after, swept from there,Am set down standing in the woodAt the death of the hare.

I have pointed out the yelling pack,The hare leap to the wood,And when I pass a complimentRejoice as lover shouldAt the drooping of an eyeAt the mantling of the blood.

Then suddenly my heart is wrungBy her distracted airAnd I remember wildness lostAnd after, swept from there,Am set down standing in the woodAt the death of the hare.

The Empty CupA crazy man that found a cup,When all but dead of thirst,Hardly dared to wet his mouthImagining, moon accursed,That another mouthfulAnd his beating heart would burst.October last I found it tooBut found it dry as bone,And for that reason am I crazedAnd my sleep is gone.

A crazy man that found a cup,When all but dead of thirst,Hardly dared to wet his mouthImagining, moon accursed,That another mouthfulAnd his beating heart would burst.October last I found it tooBut found it dry as bone,And for that reason am I crazedAnd my sleep is gone.

His MemoriesWe should be hidden from their eyes,Being but holy showsAnd bodies broken like a thornWhereon the bleak north blows,To think of buried HectorAnd that none living knows.The women take so little stockIn what I do or sayThey’d sooner leave their cossetingTo hear a jackass bray;My arms are like the twisted thornAnd yet there beauty lay;The first of all the tribe lay thereAnd did such pleasure take—She who had brought great Hector downAnd put all Troy to wreck—That she cried into this earStrike me if I shriek.

We should be hidden from their eyes,Being but holy showsAnd bodies broken like a thornWhereon the bleak north blows,To think of buried HectorAnd that none living knows.

The women take so little stockIn what I do or sayThey’d sooner leave their cossetingTo hear a jackass bray;My arms are like the twisted thornAnd yet there beauty lay;

The first of all the tribe lay thereAnd did such pleasure take—She who had brought great Hector downAnd put all Troy to wreck—That she cried into this earStrike me if I shriek.

The Friends of His YouthLaughter not time destroyed my voiceAnd put that crack in it,And when the moon’s pot-belliedI get a laughing fit,For that old Madge comes down the laneA stone upon her breast,And a cloak wrapped about the stone,And she can get no restWith singing hush and hush-a-bye;She that has been wildAnd barren as a breaking waveThinks that the stone’s a child.And Peter that had great affairsAnd was a pushing manShrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’And perches on a stone;And then I laugh till tears run downAnd the heart thumps at my side,Remembering that her shriek was loveAnd that he shrieks from pride.

Laughter not time destroyed my voiceAnd put that crack in it,And when the moon’s pot-belliedI get a laughing fit,For that old Madge comes down the laneA stone upon her breast,And a cloak wrapped about the stone,And she can get no restWith singing hush and hush-a-bye;She that has been wildAnd barren as a breaking waveThinks that the stone’s a child.And Peter that had great affairsAnd was a pushing manShrieks, ‘I am King of the Peacocks,’And perches on a stone;And then I laugh till tears run downAnd the heart thumps at my side,Remembering that her shriek was loveAnd that he shrieks from pride.

Summer and SpringWe sat under an old thorn-treeAnd talked away the night,Told all that had been said or doneSince first we saw the light,And when we talked of growing upKnew that we’d halved a soulAnd fell the one in t’other’s armsThat we might make it whole;Then Peter had a murdering lookFor it seemed that he and sheHad spoken of their childish daysUnder that very tree.O what a bursting out there was,And what a blossoming,When we had all the summer timeAnd she had all the spring.

We sat under an old thorn-treeAnd talked away the night,Told all that had been said or doneSince first we saw the light,And when we talked of growing upKnew that we’d halved a soulAnd fell the one in t’other’s armsThat we might make it whole;Then Peter had a murdering lookFor it seemed that he and sheHad spoken of their childish daysUnder that very tree.O what a bursting out there was,And what a blossoming,When we had all the summer timeAnd she had all the spring.

The Secrets of the OldI have old women’s secrets nowThat had those of the young;Madge tells me what I dared not thinkWhen my blood was strong,And what had drowned a lover onceSounds like an old song.Though Margery is stricken dumbIf thrown in Madge’s way,We three make up a solitude;For none alive to-dayCan know the stories that we knowOr say the things we say:How such a man pleased women mostOf all that are gone,How such a pair loved many yearsAnd such a pair but one,Stories of the bed of strawOr the bed of down.

I have old women’s secrets nowThat had those of the young;Madge tells me what I dared not thinkWhen my blood was strong,And what had drowned a lover onceSounds like an old song.

Though Margery is stricken dumbIf thrown in Madge’s way,We three make up a solitude;For none alive to-dayCan know the stories that we knowOr say the things we say:

How such a man pleased women mostOf all that are gone,How such a pair loved many yearsAnd such a pair but one,Stories of the bed of strawOr the bed of down.

His WildnessO bid me mount and sail up thereAmid the cloudy wrack,For Peg and Meg and Paris’ loveThat had so straight a back,Are gone away, and some that stay,Have changed their silk for sack.Were I but there and none to hearI’d have a peacock cryFor that is natural to a manThat lives in memory,Being all alone I’d nurse a stoneAnd sing it lullaby.

O bid me mount and sail up thereAmid the cloudy wrack,For Peg and Meg and Paris’ loveThat had so straight a back,Are gone away, and some that stay,Have changed their silk for sack.

Were I but there and none to hearI’d have a peacock cryFor that is natural to a manThat lives in memory,Being all alone I’d nurse a stoneAnd sing it lullaby.

They hold their public meetings whereOur most renowned patriots stand,One among the birds of the air,A stumpier on either hand;And all the popular statesmen sayThat purity built up the stateAnd after kept it from decay;Admonish us to cling to thatAnd let all base ambition be,For intellect would make us proudAnd pride bring in impurity:The three old rascals laugh aloud.

IEndure what life God gives and ask no longer span;Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.IIEven from that delight memory treasures so,Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.IIIIn the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.IVNever to have lived is best, ancient writers say;Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

IIEven from that delight memory treasures so,Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.

Even from that delight memory treasures so,Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.

IIIIn the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,The bride is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

IVNever to have lived is best, ancient writers say;Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

Kusta ben Luka is my name, I writeTo Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,And for no ear but his.Carry this letterThrough the great gallery of the Treasure HouseWhere banners of the Caliphs hang, night-colouredBut brilliant as the night’s embroidery,And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;Pass books of learning from ByzantiumWritten in gold upon a purple stain,And pause at last, I was about to say,At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,For should you leave my letter there, a boy’sLove-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon itAnd let it fall unnoticed to the floor.Pause at the Treatise of ParmenidesAnd hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s endMust keep that perfect, as they keep her songSo great its fame.When fitting time has passedThe parchment will disclose to some learned manA mystery that else had found no chroniclerBut the wild Bedouin. Though I approveThose wanderers that welcomed in their tentsWhat great Harun Al-Rashid, occupiedWith Persian embassy or Grecian war,Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truthThat wandering in a desert, featurelessAs air under a wing, can give birds’ wit.In after time they will speak much of meAnd speak but phantasy. Recall the yearWhen our beloved Caliph put to deathHis Vizir Jaffer for an unknown reason;‘If but the shirt upon my body knew itI’d tear it off and throw it in the fire.’That speech was all that the town knew, but heSeemed for a while to have grown young again;Seemed so on purpose, muttered Jaffer’s friends,That none might know that he was conscience struck—But that’s a traitor’s thought. Enough for meThat in the early summer of the yearThe mightiest of the princes of the worldCame to the least considered of his courtiers;Sat down upon the fountain’s marble edgeOne hand amid the goldfish in the pool;And thereupon a colloquy took placeThat I commend to all the chroniclersTo show how violent great hearts can loseTheir bitterness and find the honey-comb.‘I have brought a slender bride into the house;You know the saying “Change the bride with Spring”,And she and I, being sunk in happiness,Cannot endure to think you tread these paths,When evening stirs the jasmine, and yetAre brideless.’‘I am falling into years.’‘But such as you and I do not seem oldLike men who live by habit. Every dayI ride with falcon to the river’s edgeOr carry the ringed mail upon my back,Or court a woman; neither enemy,Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;And so a hunter carries in the eyeA mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thoughtThat springs from body and in body fallsLike this pure jet, now lost amid blue skyNow bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,Be mimicry?’‘What matter if our soulsAre nearer to the surface of the bodyThan souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youthShows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,My lantern is too loyal not to showThat it was made in your great father’s reign.’‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;You think that love has seasons, and you thinkThat if the spring bear off what the spring gaveThe heart need suffer no defeat; but IWho have accepted the Byzantine faith,That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;And if her eye should not grow bright for mineOr brighten only for some younger eye,My heart could never turn from daily ruin,Nor find a remedy.’‘But what if IHave lit upon a woman, who so sharesYour thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,So strains to look beyond our life, an eyeThat never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,Being all brimmed with life.’‘Were it but trueI would have found the best that life can give,Companionship in those mysterious thingsThat make a man’s soul or a woman’s soulItself and not some other soul.’‘That loveMust needs be in this life and in what followsUnchanging and at peace, and it is rightEvery philosopher should praise that love.But I being none can praise its opposite.It makes my passion stronger but to thinkLike passion stirs the peacock and his mate,The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouthIs a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’And thereupon his bounty gave what nowCan shake more blossom from autumnal chillThan all my bursting springtime knew. A girlPerched in some window of her mother’s houseHad watched my daily passage to and fro;Had heard impossible history of my past;Imagined some impossible historyLived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touchGave but more reason for a woman’s care.Yet was it love of me, or was it loveOf the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?Or did the torchlight of that mysteryPick out my features in such light and shadeTwo contemplating passions chose one themeThrough sheer bewilderment? She had not pacedThe garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,Before she had spread a book upon her kneesAnd asked about the pictures or the text;And often those first days I saw her stareOn old dry writing in a learned tongue,On old dry faggots that could never pleaseThe extravagance of spring; or move a handAs if that writing or the figured pageWere some dear cheek.Upon a moonless nightI sat where I could watch her sleeping form,And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,And fearing that my light disturbed her sleepI rose that I might screen it with a cloth.I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expoundWhat’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;And saw her sitting upright on the bed;Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hourShe seemed the learned man and I the child;Truths without father came, truths that no bookOf all the uncounted books that I have read,Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,Those terrible implacable straight linesDrawn through the wandering vegetative dream,Even those truths that when my bones are dustMust drive the Arabian host.The voice grew still,And she lay down upon her bed and slept,But woke at the first gleam of day, rose upAnd swept the house and sang about her workIn childish ignorance of all that passed.A dozen nights of natural sleep, and thenWhen the full moon swam to its greatest heightShe rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleepWalked through the house. Unnoticed and unfeltI wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desertAnd there marked out those emblems on the sandThat day by day I study and marvel at,With her white finger. I led her home asleepAnd once again she rose and swept the houseIn childish ignorance of all that passed.Even to-day, after some seven yearsWhen maybe thrice in every moon her mouthMurmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,She keeps that ignorance, nor has she nowThat first unnatural interest in my books.It seems enough that I am there; and yetOld fellow student, whose most patient earHeard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.What if she lose her ignorance and soDream that I love her only for the voice,That every gift and every word of praiseIs but a payment for that midnight voiceThat is to age what milk is to a child!Were she to lose her love, because she had lostHer confidence in mine, or even loseIts first simplicity, love, voice and all,All my fine feathers would be plucked awayAnd I left shivering. The voice has drawnA quality of wisdom from her love’sParticular quality. The signs and shapes;All those abstractions that you fancied wereFrom the great treatise of Parmenides;All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight thingsAre but a new expression of her bodyDrunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.And now my utmost mystery is out.A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;Under it wisdom stands, and I alone—Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone—Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.1923

‘But such as you and I do not seem oldLike men who live by habit. Every dayI ride with falcon to the river’s edgeOr carry the ringed mail upon my back,Or court a woman; neither enemy,Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;And so a hunter carries in the eyeA mimicry of youth. Can poet’s thoughtThat springs from body and in body fallsLike this pure jet, now lost amid blue skyNow bathing lily leaf and fishes’ scale,Be mimicry?’‘What matter if our soulsAre nearer to the surface of the bodyThan souls that start no game and turn no rhyme!The soul’s own youth and not the body’s youthShows through our lineaments. My candle’s bright,My lantern is too loyal not to showThat it was made in your great father’s reign.’

‘And yet the jasmine season warms our blood.’

‘Great prince, forgive the freedom of my speech;You think that love has seasons, and you thinkThat if the spring bear off what the spring gaveThe heart need suffer no defeat; but IWho have accepted the Byzantine faith,That seems unnatural to Arabian minds,Think when I choose a bride I choose for ever;And if her eye should not grow bright for mineOr brighten only for some younger eye,My heart could never turn from daily ruin,Nor find a remedy.’‘But what if IHave lit upon a woman, who so sharesYour thirst for those old crabbed mysteries,So strains to look beyond our life, an eyeThat never knew that strain would scarce seem bright,And yet herself can seem youth’s very fountain,Being all brimmed with life.’‘Were it but trueI would have found the best that life can give,Companionship in those mysterious thingsThat make a man’s soul or a woman’s soulItself and not some other soul.’‘That loveMust needs be in this life and in what followsUnchanging and at peace, and it is rightEvery philosopher should praise that love.But I being none can praise its opposite.It makes my passion stronger but to thinkLike passion stirs the peacock and his mate,The wild stag and the doe; that mouth to mouthIs a man’s mockery of the changeless soul.’And thereupon his bounty gave what nowCan shake more blossom from autumnal chillThan all my bursting springtime knew. A girlPerched in some window of her mother’s houseHad watched my daily passage to and fro;Had heard impossible history of my past;Imagined some impossible historyLived at my side; thought time’s disfiguring touchGave but more reason for a woman’s care.Yet was it love of me, or was it loveOf the stark mystery that has dazed my sight,Perplexed her phantasy and planned her care?Or did the torchlight of that mysteryPick out my features in such light and shadeTwo contemplating passions chose one themeThrough sheer bewilderment? She had not pacedThe garden paths, nor counted up the rooms,Before she had spread a book upon her kneesAnd asked about the pictures or the text;And often those first days I saw her stareOn old dry writing in a learned tongue,On old dry faggots that could never pleaseThe extravagance of spring; or move a handAs if that writing or the figured pageWere some dear cheek.Upon a moonless nightI sat where I could watch her sleeping form,And wrote by candle-light; but her form moved,And fearing that my light disturbed her sleepI rose that I might screen it with a cloth.I heard her voice, ‘Turn that I may expoundWhat’s bowed your shoulder and made pale your cheek’;And saw her sitting upright on the bed;Or was it she that spoke or some great Djinn?I say that a Djinn spoke. A live-long hourShe seemed the learned man and I the child;Truths without father came, truths that no bookOf all the uncounted books that I have read,Nor thought out of her mind or mine begot,Self-born, high-born, and solitary truths,Those terrible implacable straight linesDrawn through the wandering vegetative dream,Even those truths that when my bones are dustMust drive the Arabian host.The voice grew still,And she lay down upon her bed and slept,But woke at the first gleam of day, rose upAnd swept the house and sang about her workIn childish ignorance of all that passed.A dozen nights of natural sleep, and thenWhen the full moon swam to its greatest heightShe rose, and with her eyes shut fast in sleepWalked through the house. Unnoticed and unfeltI wrapped her in a heavy hooded cloak, and she,Half running, dropped at the first ridge of the desertAnd there marked out those emblems on the sandThat day by day I study and marvel at,With her white finger. I led her home asleepAnd once again she rose and swept the houseIn childish ignorance of all that passed.Even to-day, after some seven yearsWhen maybe thrice in every moon her mouthMurmured the wisdom of the desert Djinns,She keeps that ignorance, nor has she nowThat first unnatural interest in my books.It seems enough that I am there; and yetOld fellow student, whose most patient earHeard all the anxiety of my passionate youth,It seems I must buy knowledge with my peace.What if she lose her ignorance and soDream that I love her only for the voice,That every gift and every word of praiseIs but a payment for that midnight voiceThat is to age what milk is to a child!Were she to lose her love, because she had lostHer confidence in mine, or even loseIts first simplicity, love, voice and all,All my fine feathers would be plucked awayAnd I left shivering. The voice has drawnA quality of wisdom from her love’sParticular quality. The signs and shapes;All those abstractions that you fancied wereFrom the great treatise of Parmenides;All, all those gyres and cubes and midnight thingsAre but a new expression of her bodyDrunk with the bitter sweetness of her youth.And now my utmost mystery is out.A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner;Under it wisdom stands, and I alone—Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone—Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.

1923

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church Bell,And may a lesser bell, sound through the room;And it is All Souls’ Night,And two long glasses brimmed with muscatelBubble upon the table. A ghost may come;For it is a ghost’s right,His element is so fineBeing sharpened by his death,To drink from the wine-breathWhile our gross palates drink from the whole wine.I need some mind that, if the cannon soundFrom every quarter of the world, can stayWound in mind’s pondering,As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;Because I have a marvellous thing to say,A certain marvellous thingNone but the living mock,Though not for sober ear;It may be all that hearShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.H⸺’s the first I call. He loved strange thoughtAnd knew that sweet extremity of prideThat’s called platonic love,And that to such a pitch of passion wroughtNothing could bring him, when his lady died,Anodyne for his love.Words were but wasted breath;One dear hope had he:The inclemencyOf that or the next winter would be death.Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tellWhether of her or God he thought the most,But think that his mind’s eye,When upward turned, on one sole image fell;And that a slight companionable ghost,Wild with divinity,Had so lit up the wholeImmense miraculous houseThe Bible promised us,It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.On Florence Emery I call the next,Who finding the first wrinkles on a faceAdmired and beautiful,And knowing that the future would be vexedWith ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,Preferred to teach a school,Away from neighbour or friendAmong dark skins, and therePermit foul years to wearHidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.Before that end much had she ravelled outFrom a discourse in figurative speechBy some learned IndianOn the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,Until it plunge into the sun;And there, free and yet fastBeing both Chance and Choice,Forget its broken toysAnd sink into its own delight at last.And I call up MacGregor from the grave,For in my first hard springtime we were friends,Although of late estranged.I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,And told him so, but friendship never ends;And what if mind seem changed,And it seem changed with the mind,When thoughts rise up unbidOn generous things that he didAnd I grow half contented to be blind.He had much industry at setting out,Much boisterous courage, before lonelinessHad driven him crazed;For meditations upon unknown thoughtMake human intercourse grow less and less;They are neither paid nor praised.But he’d object to the host,The glass because my glass;A ghost-lover he wasAnd may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.But names are nothing. What matter who it be,So that his elements have grown so fineThe fume of muscatelCan give his sharpened palate ecstasyNo living man can drink from the whole wine.I have mummy truths to tellWhereat the living mock,Though not for sober ear,For maybe all that hearShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tightTill meditation master all its parts,Nothing can stay my glanceUntil that glance run in the world’s despiteTo where the damned have howled away their hearts,And where the blessed dance;Such thought, that in it boundI need no other thingWound in mind’s wandering,As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

I need some mind that, if the cannon soundFrom every quarter of the world, can stayWound in mind’s pondering,As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;Because I have a marvellous thing to say,A certain marvellous thingNone but the living mock,Though not for sober ear;It may be all that hearShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

H⸺’s the first I call. He loved strange thoughtAnd knew that sweet extremity of prideThat’s called platonic love,And that to such a pitch of passion wroughtNothing could bring him, when his lady died,Anodyne for his love.Words were but wasted breath;One dear hope had he:The inclemencyOf that or the next winter would be death.

Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tellWhether of her or God he thought the most,But think that his mind’s eye,When upward turned, on one sole image fell;And that a slight companionable ghost,Wild with divinity,Had so lit up the wholeImmense miraculous houseThe Bible promised us,It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.

On Florence Emery I call the next,Who finding the first wrinkles on a faceAdmired and beautiful,And knowing that the future would be vexedWith ’minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,Preferred to teach a school,Away from neighbour or friendAmong dark skins, and therePermit foul years to wearHidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.

Before that end much had she ravelled outFrom a discourse in figurative speechBy some learned IndianOn the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,Until it plunge into the sun;And there, free and yet fastBeing both Chance and Choice,Forget its broken toysAnd sink into its own delight at last.

And I call up MacGregor from the grave,For in my first hard springtime we were friends,Although of late estranged.I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,And told him so, but friendship never ends;And what if mind seem changed,And it seem changed with the mind,When thoughts rise up unbidOn generous things that he didAnd I grow half contented to be blind.

He had much industry at setting out,Much boisterous courage, before lonelinessHad driven him crazed;For meditations upon unknown thoughtMake human intercourse grow less and less;They are neither paid nor praised.But he’d object to the host,The glass because my glass;A ghost-lover he wasAnd may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,So that his elements have grown so fineThe fume of muscatelCan give his sharpened palate ecstasyNo living man can drink from the whole wine.I have mummy truths to tellWhereat the living mock,Though not for sober ear,For maybe all that hearShould laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tightTill meditation master all its parts,Nothing can stay my glanceUntil that glance run in the world’s despiteTo where the damned have howled away their hearts,And where the blessed dance;Such thought, that in it boundI need no other thingWound in mind’s wandering,As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

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