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diff --git a/old/66889-0.txt b/old/66889-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 17eaa9a..0000000 --- a/old/66889-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,4328 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems by Isaac Rosenberg, by Isaac Rosenberg - -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 at -www.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: Poems by Isaac Rosenberg - -Author: Isaac Rosenberg - -Editor: Gordon Bottomley - -Contributor: Laurence Binyon - -Release Date: December 5, 2021 [eBook #66889] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team - at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images - generously made available by The Internet Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS BY ISAAC ROSENBERG *** - - - - - POEMS BY - ISAAC ROSENBERG - - - - - SONGS IN CAPTIVITY - _By R. H. Sauter_ - - BALLAD OF THE “ROYAL ANN” - _By Crosbie Garston_ - - DOWN HERE THE HAWTHORN - _By Thomas Moult_ - - -LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - -[Illustration: - - ISAAC ROSENBERG. -] - - - - - POEMS BY - ISAAC ROSENBERG - - - SELECTED AND EDITED BY - GORDON BOTTOMLEY - - WITH AN INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR BY - LAURENCE BINYON - -[Illustration: 1922] - - LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN - - - - -_Youth is still childhood: when we cast off every cloudy vesture, and -our thoughts are clear and mature; when every act is a conscious -thought, every thought an attempt to arrest feeling; our feelings strong -and overwhelming, our sensitiveness awakened by insignificant things in -life; when the skies race tumultuously with our blood, and the earth -shines and laughs; when our blood hangs suspended at the rustling of a -gown. Our vanity loves to subdue—battle, aggressive. How we despise -those older and duller—we want life, newness, excitement._ - - -(_Circa 1916._) - - - - - CONTENTS - - - PAGE - INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR 1 - †MOSES: A PLAY 51 - - POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH: - DAUGHTERS OF WAR 81 - ON RECEIVING THE FIRST NEWS OF THE WAR 84 - †SPRING, 1916 86 - THE TROOP SHIP 87 - †MARCHING 88 - BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES 89 - KILLED IN ACTION 91 - RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS 92 - THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES 93 - THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE 95 - HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE 96 - THE IMMORTALS 97 - LOUSE HUNTING 98 - GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE 100 - SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY 102 - THE JEW 103 - THE DYING SOLDIER 104 - DEAD MAN’S DUMP 105 - IN WAR 109 - §THE DEAD HEROES 112 - - FRAGMENTS OF “THE UNICORN”: - I. THE AMULET 117 - II. THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN 129 - III. THE TOWER OF SKULLS 130 - - EARLIER POEMS: - §EXPRESSION 135 - *FROM “NIGHT AND DAY” 137 - ZION 140 - *SPIRITUAL ISOLATION: A FRAGMENT 142 - FAR AWAY 144 - SPRING 145 - SONG 146 - *HEART’S FIRST WORD. I. 147 - †HEART’S FIRST WORD. II. 149 - *LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD 150 - §IF YOU ARE FIRE 151 - IN THE UNDERWORLD 152 - *O, IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN 153 - §A GIRL’S THOUGHTS 154 - A BALLAD OF WHITECHAPEL 155 - *TESS 159 - THE NUN 160 - §IN PICCADILLY 161 - §A MOOD 162 - †FIRST FRUIT 163 - A CARELESS HEART 164 - DAWN 165 - AT NIGHT 166 - CREATION 168 - OF ANY OLD MAN 170 - THE ONE LOST 171 - §WEDDED 172 - DON JUAN’S SONG 173 - ON A LADY SINGING 174 - BEAUTY 175 - A QUESTION 176 - †CHAGRIN 177 - THE BLIND GOD 179 - THE FEMALE GOD 180 - †GOD 182 - †SLEEP 184 - MY DAYS 186 - - - - - BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE - - -The poems whose titles are marked * appeared in a privately issued -pamphlet, “Night and Day. By Isaac Rosenberg. 1912” (pp. 24); those -marked § in “Youth. By Isaac Rosenberg. London, I. Narodiczky, Printer, -48 Mile End Road, E. 1915” (pp. 18); and those marked † in “Moses. A -Play. By Isaac Rosenberg. London, Printed By The Paragon Printing Works, -8 Ocean Street, Stepney Green, E. 1916” (pp. ii + 26). - -These pamphlets were the only work issued by the author, in addition to -the following single pieces which appeared in various periodicals: - - -“In the Workshop,” in _A Piece of Mosaic_ (for a Jewish Bazaar). - -“Our Dead Heroes,” in _South African Women in Council_, December, 1914. - -“Essay on Art,” Part I. (prose), prefaced by a poem, “Beauty,” in _South -African Women in Council_, December, 1914. - -“Essay on Art,” Part II., _South African Women in Council_, January, -1915. - -“Marching,” and “Break of Day in the Trenches,” in _Poetry_ (Chicago), -December, 1916. - - -The following pieces have appeared posthumously: - - -“In Piccadilly,” “If You are Fire,” “Heart’s First Word, II.,” “Wedded,” -“I Did Not Pluck at All,” in _Art and Letters_, Summer, 1919; with an -“In Memoriam” notice by Annie Rosenberg. - -“Killed in Action,” in _Colour_, October, 1919. - -“Savage Song” (“A Naked African” from “Moses”), “God,” in _Rainbow_ (New -York), October, 1920; with an “In Memoriam” notice by Horace Brodzky. - -“I Mingle with Your Bones”; with an article by Samuel Roth, in _Voices_, -Summer, 1921. - - - - - INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR - - - I - -Of the many young poets who gave their lives in the war, Isaac Rosenberg -was not the least gifted. Adverse circumstances, imperfect education, -want of opportunity, impeded and obscured his genius; but whatever -criticism be made of his poetry, its faults are plainly those of excess -rather than deficiency. His writing was often difficult and obscure, -because he instinctively thought in images and did not sufficiently -appreciate the limitations of language. Also, a continual fear of being -empty or thin led him to an over-intricate complexity. But there was no -incoherence in his mind. And the main object of these notes, beyond -recording the facts of his life, is to illustrate the growth and -workings of his mind from his own letters, which will be the best -commentary on his poems. - -I cannot precisely fix the date, but it must have been some time in -1912, when one morning there came to me a letter in an untidy hand from -an address in Whitechapel, enclosing some pages of verse on which -criticism was asked, and signed “Isaac Rosenberg.” It was impossible not -to be struck by something unusual in the quality of the poems. Thoughts -and emotions of no common nature struggled for expression, and at times -there gushed forth a pure song which haunted the memory. - -I answered at once, and the next day received another letter which told -me something about my unknown correspondent. In this letter, which, like -nearly all his letters, is undated, he wrote: - -“I must thank you very much for your encouraging reply to my poetical -efforts.... As you are kind enough to ask about myself, I am sending a -sort of autobiography I wrote about a year ago.... You will see from -that that my circumstances have not been very favourable for artistic -production; but generally I am optimistic, I suppose because I am young -and do not properly realize the difficulties. I am now attending the -Slade, being sent there by some wealthy Jews who are kindly interested -in me, and, of course, I spend most of my time drawing. I find writing -interferes with drawing a good deal, and is far more exhausting.” - -He went on to tell of his admirations, Rossetti coming first for him -among modern artists. He had seen very little of early Italian art, but -divined that theirs was the type of art which he thought the only kind -worth having—“expression through passionate colour and definite -design”—not “a moment frozen on to canvas,” but “the spontaneity of -un-selfconscious and childlike nature—infinity of suggestion—that is as -much part and voice of the artist’s soul as the song to the bird.” As to -modern poets, they were “difficult to get hold of” (their volumes being -expensive), but he had an immense admiration for Francis Thompson—“that -is the sort of poetry that appeals most to me.” He had done nothing yet -in painting which he would care to show. He aspired to do imaginative -work, but at present was practising portraiture, as it was necessary to -earn a living. - -At my invitation Rosenberg came to see me. Small in stature, dark, -bright-eyed, thoroughly Jewish in type, he seemed a boy with an unusual -mixture of self-reliance and modesty. Indeed, no one could have had a -more independent nature. Obviously sensitive, he was not touchy or -aggressive. Possessed of vivid enthusiasms, he was shy in speech. One -found in talk how strangely little of second-hand (in one of his age) -there was in his opinions, how fresh a mind he brought to what he saw -and read. There was an odd kind of charm in his manner which came from -his earnest, transparent sincerity. - -The “sort of autobiography,” which I have never seen since I returned it -to him, and has perhaps been destroyed, was the story of a youth, -mentally ambitious, introspective, dissatisfied with his surroundings, -consumed by secret desires for liberation and self-expression. - -The external facts of his life are briefly told. For these I am mainly -indebted to his sister, Mrs. Wynick, whose devotion to her brother and -his work was at all times unwearied. She gave much of a scanty -leisure-time to typing copies of his poems, and many of them would have -been lost but for her care in preserving them. - -Isaac Rosenberg was born at Bristol on the 25th of November, 1890. When -he was seven he came to London with his parents. The family settled in -the East End. The boy was sent to the Board School of St. George’s in -the East, and afterwards to the Stepney Board School. From childhood he -showed a natural gift both for drawing and for writing. While at the -Stepney school his promise appeared so remarkable that the headmaster -allowed him to spend all his time in these pursuits. Out of school he -would draw with chalks on the street pavement. Reading poetry was a -passion with him. At the age of fourteen he was reluctantly obliged to -leave school. His parents were poor; and though they took great pride in -his gifts, he was one of a family of eight, and he must now earn his -living. He was apprenticed, therefore, to the firm of Carl Hentschel, in -Fleet Street. A trade connected with art was chosen for him as a -stepping-stone to a painter’s career, and as something to fall back upon -in case his resources failed him. But he hated trade, and felt in -bondage. In his meal-times he consoled himself by writing poems; in the -evenings he went to classes at the Art School of Birkbeck College. He -worked hard and won many prizes. Mr. Frank Emanuel, the painter, who -befriended and encouraged him at this time, describes him as having been -made “bitter and despondent by his circumstances”; and his letters -reveal fits of the deepest dejection against which his will contended. - -The uncongenial work came at last to an end. The sense of liberation was -at first intoxicating. Yet work had to be found, and Isaac was -determined to pursue art and nothing else. He met at first with -disappointment, and endured many privations. But before long he found -good friends. Mr. Amschewitz, an artist, and Mr. Samuels warmly -interested themselves in his behalf. Through them he made the -acquaintance of three ladies, Mrs. Josephs, Mrs. Herbert Cohen, and Mrs. -Lowy, who undertook to provide the means for his training at the Slade -School. - -Through Mr. Emanuel’s friendship he had become a member of “The -Limners,” a club of artists and art teachers, which met at Mr. Emanuel’s -studio. Here he had the opportunity of meeting other artists and -exchanging ideas. Prizes were given, which young Rosenberg occasionally -won. In spite, therefore, of his poverty and unpropitious surroundings, -he had now won sympathetic friends, and received both encouragement and -material help from discerning compatriots. But with his sensitive -artist’s pride and jealous independence of spirit, he was not always -easy to understand; and those who, with the sole desire to help him, -advanced his circumstances sometimes felt that their efforts did not -seem to be appreciated. The case is not unfamiliar to readers of -artists’ biographies. - -Rosenberg went to the Slade School in October, 1911, and remained till -March, 1914. He won prizes at the school and praise from his teachers. -Thrown among contemporaries, all occupied with the problems of art and -the discussion of them, he became tinged with the temper and the -prevalent ideas of his own generation of students. His natural bent, I -think, was in another direction. He showed me drawings and studies from -time to time, and I saw a few of his paintings when they were exhibited -one summer at the Whitechapel Gallery. He was full of ideas, was a -capable draughtsman, and could conceive an interesting design. Yet, to -judge from what I have seen of his work, it did not seem to be for him -the inevitable means of expression. He once showed me at his studio a -large, ambitious composition—an oil-painting—which I fancy was never -completed. I cannot recall the nominal subject, but it was saturated -with symbolism and required a good deal of explanation. I liked the -mysteriousness of it, and the ideas which inspired the painting had -suggested figures and groups and visionary glimpses of landscape which -had passages of real beauty, though the whole work had grown impossibly -complex with its convolutions of symbolic meaning. It reminded me of his -poetry; and I think that represented his natural bent in art. Had he -been born half a century earlier, he would have been an ardent disciple -of Rossetti. But he could not escape from the mental atmosphere of his -own generation, in which so “literary” a conception of painting was -bound to wither in discouragement. Later, he showed me some studies of -landscape and portrait which he had made in South Africa. These were in -a more “modern” vein of realism, but they seemed to fail in the quality -of force, to which all other qualities had been, in intention, -sacrificed. They had no personal savour. Like every generous and -ambitious youth, Rosenberg wished his own generation to do glorious -things, and wished to belong to it as a comrade. Whether he would have -emerged and found himself as a painter is a doubtful conjecture. I think -it possible that he would have abandoned painting. For his true vocation -was poetry, and he thought of himself as a poet rather than as a -painter. - -He had begun to write verse at a very early age. Mr. Morley Dainow, who -was at the time librarian in the Whitechapel Public Library, was -approached one day by a Jewish girl who wanted advice and help for her -young brother. His aim in life, she said, was to be a poet. The next day -the boy was brought to the library. Isaac then seemed to be between ten -and twelve years of age. He had already determined to be a poet and a -painter. He interested and impressed Mr. Dainow, and in return for his -friendly encouragement sent him a poem called “David’s Harp.” These are -the earliest verses of Rosenberg’s that Mr. Bottomley or I have seen. -They are not printed in this book, but they are interesting because they -show how, even as a young boy, Rosenberg cherished the traditions of his -race and aspired to become a representative poet of his own nation. -Moses and Judas Maccabæus were intended to be themes of his maturer -poetry. “David’s Harp” is in fluent stanzas, and shows the passing -influence of Byron. - -The pamphlet called “Night and Day,” printed in 1912, contains probably -all that Rosenberg cared to preserve of his early verse, though no doubt -it represented but a small selection from what he had written. - -After leaving the Slade School, he found himself faced with a harder -struggle than ever. But he never admitted defeat. He sold a few pictures -and got a few poems into print, but his health was now a cause for -anxiety. His lungs were thought to be affected, and he was advised to -try a warmer climate. Having a married sister in Cape Town, he thought -of South Africa, and in June, 1914, he sailed for the Cape. Here he made -one or two friends, painted some pictures, taught a little, gave a few -lectures, and published some poems and articles. But the visit was not a -material success, and he returned disappointed and despondent. Soon -after his return, in 1915, he printed a second pamphlet of verse, -“Youth.” But he was restless and unhappy, and could not work. It was now -that he enlisted in the Army. From this date onward he had practically -no time for painting, but he continued to write till the end. “Moses” -was printed in 1916. He was first in a Bantam regiment, then in the -King’s Own Royal Lancasters, and after a period of training at Bury St. -Edmunds and at Farnborough went out, early in 1916, to France. No one -could have been less fitted for a military life. He suffered not only -from physical disability, bad health, and sensitiveness, but from the -absent-mindedness of one whose imagination was possessed by his poetic -schemes. “My mind will not relinquish its poetical yearnings,” he wrote, -“and concentration on alien things and dull has strained my memory.” But -he endured the inhuman horror of modern war with a great heart; he would -not have liked to be called a hero, but his fortitude was truly heroic. -On the first of April, 1918, he was killed in action. - - - II - -The poems collected in this volume speak for themselves. The -obscurities, the straining and tormenting of language in the effort to -find right expression, the immaturities of style and taste, are apparent -on the surface. The imaginative conceptions and the frequent gleam of -imaginative phrasing should be equally apparent. But what does not -appear on the surface is the fine intention, the ardent toil, and the -continual self-criticism which underlay his work. Rosenberg’s aim was, -in his own words, a kind of poetry “where an interesting complexity of -thought is kept in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that -it is understandable and still ungraspable.” The sentence occurs in one -of his letters, and from this point on I wish to let Rosenberg speak for -himself. His letters give a picture both of his mind and character, far -more vivid than anything one could write about him. He very rarely dated -a letter, but the address and internal evidence give a clue to the date. -The first extract is from a letter written, while he was still an -apprentice, to Miss Winifreda Seaton, a friend to whom Mr. Amschewitz -introduced him. Miss Seaton lent him books, encouraged him to write, -discussed art and literature with him, and criticized his poems. - - -“It is horrible to think that all these hours, when my days are full of -vigour and my hands and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound, -chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without hope and almost -desire of deliverance, and the days of youth go by.... I have tried to -make some sort of self-adjustment to circumstances by saying, ‘It is all -_experience_’; but, good God! it is _all_ experience, and nothing -else.... I really would like to take up painting seriously; I think I -might do something at that; but poetry—I despair of ever writing -excellent poetry. I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that -great poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled and fevered, there is -no consistency of purpose, no oneness of aim; the very fibres are torn -apart, and application deadened by the fiendish persistence of the coil -of circumstance.” - - -At last the apprenticeship is over and Rosenberg writes[1] exulting: - - -“Congratulate me! I’ve cleared out of the —— shop, I hope for good and -all. I’m free—free to do anything, hang myself or anything except -work.... I’m very optimistic, now that I don’t know what to do, and -everything seems topsy-turvy.” - - -Footnote 1: - - This and the following extracts are from letters to the same - correspondent. - -A little later comes the reaction: - - -“I am out of work. I doubt if I feel the better for it, much as the work -was distasteful, though I expect it’s the hankering thought of the -consequences, pecuniary, etc., that bothers me.... All one’s thoughts -seem to revolve round to one point—death. It is horrible, especially at -night, ‘in the silence of the midnight’; it seems to clutch at your -thought—you can’t breathe. Oh, I think, work, work, any work, only to -stop one thinking.” - - -But such moods are resisted. At another time he is writing: - - -“One conceives one’s lot (I suppose it’s the same with all people, no -matter what their condition) to be terribly tragic. You are the victim -of a horrible conspiracy; everything is unfair. The gods have either -forgotten you or made you a sort of scapegoat to bear all the -punishment. I believe, however hard one’s lot is, one ought to try and -accommodate oneself to the conditions; and except in a case of purely -physical pain, I think it can be done. Why not make the very utmost of -our lives?... I’m a practical economist in this respect. I endeavour to -waste nothing.... Waste words! Not to talk is to waste words.... - -“To most people life is a musical instrument on which they are unable to -play: but in the musician’s hands it becomes a living thing.... The -artist can see beauty everywhere, anywhere....” - - -In what is perhaps an earlier letter he excuses his neglect of serious -reading by his lack of leisure and the worries that make him crave for -amusing books as an antidote: - - -“You mustn’t forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the -little education I have had. Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever -put poetry in my way. I don’t think I knew what real poetry was till I -read Keats a couple of years ago. True, I galloped through Byron when I -was about fourteen, but I fancy I read him more for the story than for -the poetry. I used to try to imitate him. Anyway, if I didn’t quite take -to Donne at first, you understand why. Poetical appreciation is only -newly bursting on me. I always enjoyed Shelley and Keats. The ‘Hyperion’ -ravished me.... - -“Whenever I read anything in a great man’s life that pulls him down to -me, my heart always pleads for him, and my mind pictures extenuating -circumstances. - - * * * * * - -“Have you ever picked up a book that looks like a Bible on the outside, -but is full of poetry or comic within? My Hood is like that, and, I am -afraid, so am I. Whenever I feel inclined to laugh, my visage assumes -the longitude and gravity of a church spire. - - * * * * * - -“I can’t say I have ever experienced the power of one spirit over -another, except in books, of course, at least in any intense way that -you mean. Unless you mean the interest one awakes in us, and we long to -know more, and none other. I suppose we are all influenced by everybody -we come in contact with, in a subconscious way, if not direct, and -everything that happens to us is experience; but only the few know it. -Most people can only see and hear the noisy sunsets, mountains and -waterfalls; but the delicate greys and hues, the star in the puddle, the -quiet sailing cloud, is nothing to them. Of course, I only mean this -metaphorically, as distinguishing between obvious experiences and the -almost imperceptible. I still have no work to do. I think, if nothing -turns up here, I will go to Africa. I could not endure to live upon my -people; and up till now I have been giving them from what I had managed -to save up when I was at work. It is nearly run out now, and if I am to -do nothing, I would rather do it somewhere else. Besides, I feel so -cramped up here, I can do no drawing, reading, or anything.... - -“Create our own experience! We can, but we don’t. Very often it’s only -the trouble of a word, and who knows what we miss through not having -spoken? It’s the man with impudence who has more experience than -anybody. He not only varies his own, but makes other people’s his own. - - * * * * * - -“Do I like music, and what music I like best? I know nothing whatever -about music. Once I heard Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’ at the band; -and—well, I was in heaven. It was a blur of sounds—sweet, fading and -blending. It seemed to draw the sky down, the whole spirit out of me; it -was articulate feeling. The inexpressible in poetry, in painting, was -there expressed. But I have not heard much, and the sensation that gave -me I never had again. I should like very much to be one of the -initiated. - - * * * * * - -“Some more confidences. I’ve discovered I’m a very bad talker: I find it -difficult to make myself intelligible at times; I can’t remember the -exact word I want, and I think I leave the impression of being a -rambling idiot.” - - -In 1910 he went to see the wonderful collection of Japanese paintings -lent by Japan to the Exhibition at Shepherd’s Bush. - - -“The thoroughness is astounding. No slipshod, tricky slickness, trusting -to chance effects, but a subtle suggestiveness, and accident that is the -consequence of intention.” - - -Here are a few sentences from some “Notes on Art”: - - -“Life stales and dulls; the mind demands noble excitement, -half-apprehended surmises, the eternal desire, the beautiful. It is a -vain belief that Art and Life go hand-in-hand; Art is, as it were, -another planet. - -“Mere representation is unreal, is fragmentary. The bone taken from Adam -remains a bone. To create is to apply pulsating rhythmic principles to -the part; a unity, another nature, is created.” - - - _To Miss Seaton._ - -“Thanks so much for the Donne. I had just been reading Ben Jonson again, -and from his poem to Donne he must have thought him a giant. I have read -some of the Donne; I have certainly never come across anything so -choke-full of profound meaningful ideas. It would have been very -difficult for him to express something commonplace, if he had to.” - - - _To Miss Seaton._ - - -“I forgot to ask you to return my poetry, as I mean to work on some [of -the poems]. I agree the emotions are not worth expressing, but I thought -the things had some force, and an idea or so I rather liked. Of course, -I know poetry is a far finer thing than that, but I don’t think the -failure was due to the subject—I had nothing to say about it, that’s -all. Crashaw, I think, is sometimes very sexual in his religious poems, -but it is always new and beautiful. I believe we are apt to fix a -standard (of subject) in poetry. We acknowledge the poetry in subjects -not generally taken as material, but I think we all (at least I do) -prefer the poetical subject—“Kubla Khan,” “The Mistress of Vision,” -“Dream-Tryst”; Poe, Verlaine. Here feeling is separated from intellect; -our senses are not interfered with by what we know of facts: we know -infinity through melody.” - - -After leaving the Slade School, at a loss for work and anxious about his -health, Rosenberg thought for a time of going to Russia. But it was -difficult for a Jew to get a passport, and he reverted to the African -journey which he had contemplated already some years before. - - - _To Miss Seaton._ - - -“So I’ve decided on Africa, the climate being very good, and I believe -plenty to do.... I won’t be quite lost in Africa.... I dislike London -for the selfishness it instils into one, which is a reason of the -peculiar feeling of isolation I believe most people have in London. I -hardly know anybody whom I would regret leaving (except, of course, the -natural ties of sentiment with one’s own people); but whether it is that -my nature distrusts people, or is intolerant, or whether my pride or my -backwardness cools people, I have always been alone. Forgive this little -excursion into the forbidden lands of egotism.” - - -The next letter was written to Mr. Edward Marsh, in the midst of packing -for the voyage to the Cape. Mr. Marsh was interested in Rosenberg both -as an artist and as a poet; he printed one of his poems in “Georgian -Poetry, 1916–1917,” and befriended him in many ways. The letter throws -light on Rosenberg’s use of language in poetry. As the piece referred -to—“Midsummer Frost”—is not in the present selection, it may be given -here: - - A July ghost, aghast at the strange winter, - Wonders, at burning noon, all summer-seeming, - How, like a sad thought buried in light [woven] words, - Winter, an alien presence, is ambushed here. - See from the fire-fountained noon there creep - Lazy yellow ardours towards pale evening, - Dragging the sun across the shell of thought; - A web threaded with fading fire; - Futile and fragile lure, a July ghost - Standing with feet of fire on banks of ice, - My frozen heart, the summer cannot reach— - Hidden as a root from air, or star from day, - A frozen pool whereon mirth dances, - Where the shining boys would fish. - - - _To Edward Marsh_ (1914). - - -“I believe that all poets who are personal see things genuinely—have -their place. One needn’t be a Shakespeare and yet be quite as -interesting. I have moods when Rossetti satisfies me more than -Shakespeare, and I am sure I have enjoyed some things of Francis -Thompson more than the best of Shakespeare. Yet I never meant to go as -high as these. I know I’ve come across things by people of far inferior -vision that were as important in their results to me. I am not going to -refute your criticisms; in literature I have no judgment, at least for -style. If in reading a thought has expressed itself to me in beautiful -words, my ignorance of grammar, etc., makes me accept that, I should -think you are right mostly, and I may yet work away your chief -objections. You are quite right in the way you read my poems, but I -thought I could use the ‘July Ghost’ to mean the summer, and also an -ambassador of the summer, without interfering with the sense. The ‘shell -of thought’ is man; you realize a shell has an opening, the ‘ardours’; -the sense of heat forms a web; this signifies a sense of summer; the web -again becomes another metaphor, a July Ghost. But, of course, I mean it -for summer right through. I think your suggestion of taking out ‘woven’ -is very good.” - - -The next letter is from Cape Town. - - - _To Edward Marsh_ (1914). - -“I should like you to do me a favour if it’s not putting you to too much -bother. I am in an infernal city by the sea. This city has men in it—and -these men have souls in them—or at least have the passages to souls. -Though they are millions of years behind time, they have yet reached the -stage of evolution that knows ears and eyes. But these passages are -dreadfully clogged up: gold dust, diamond dust, stocks and shares, and -Heaven knows what other flinty muck. Well, I’ve made up my mind to clear -through all this rubbish, but I want your help. Now, I’m going to give a -series of lectures on modern art (I’m sending you the first, which I -gave in great style. I was asked whether the Futurists exhibited at the -Royal Academy). But I want to make the lectures interesting and -intelligible by reproductions or slides. Now, I wonder whether you have -reproductions which you could lend me till I returned or was finished -with them. I want to talk about John, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Innes, the -early Picasso (not the cubistic one), Spencer, Gertler, Lamb, Puvis de -Chavannes, Degas. A book of reproductions of the P.-Impressionists would -do, and I could get them transferred on slides. I hope this would not -put you to any great trouble, but if you could manage to do it you don’t -know how you would help me. Stanley gave me a little job to paint two -babies, which helped me to pay my way for a bit. I expect to get pupils -and kick up a row with my lectures. But nobody seems to have money here, -and not an ounce of interest in Art. The climate’s fine, but the Sun is -a very changeable creature and I can’t come to any sort of understanding -with this golden beast. He pretends to keep quiet for half an hour, and -just as I think, ‘Now I’ve got it,’ the damned thing has frisked about. -There’s a lot of splendid stuff to paint. We are walled in by the sharp -upright mountain and the bay. Across the bay the piled-up mountains of -Africa look lovely and dangerous. It makes one think of savagery and -earthquakes—the elemental lawlessness.” - - -The next extract is from a letter written in 1915, just after hearing -the news of Rupert Brooke’s death. - - - _To Miss Seaton._ - -“Do you know Emerson’s poems? I think they are wonderful. ‘Each and All’ -I think is deep and beautiful. There is always a kind of beaminess, like -a dancing of light in light, in his poems. I do think, though, that he -depends too much on inspiration; and though they always have a solid -texture of thought, they sometimes seem thin in colour or sensuousness.” - - - _To Miss Seaton._ - -“I saw Olive Schreiner last night. She’s an extraordinary woman—full of -life. I had a little picture for her from a dear friend of hers in -Africa I stayed with while I was there. She was so pleased with my -pictures of Kaffirs. Who is your best living English poet? I’ve found -somebody miles and miles above everybody—a young man, Lascelles -Abercrombie—a mighty poet and brother to Browning.” - - -Other references in letters show how deep at this time Mr. Abercrombie’s -influence was. Rosenberg calls his “Hymn of Love” the finest poem of our -time. - -He has now joined the Army, and writes from Bury St. Edmunds. - - - _To Edward Marsh_ (1915). - -“I have just joined the Bantams, and am down here amongst a horrible -rabble. Falstaff’s scarecrows were nothing to these. Three out of every -four have been scavengers, the fourth is a ticket-of-leave. But that is -nothing; though while I’m waiting for my kit I’m roughing it a bit, -having come down without even a towel. I dry myself with my -pocket-handkerchief. I don’t know whether I will be shifted as soon as I -get my rig-out.” - - -The next was written in hospital at Bury. - - - _To Edward Marsh._ - -“First, not to alarm you by this heading, I must tell you that while -running before the Colonel I started rather excitedly and tripped -myself, coming down pretty heavily in the wet grit, and am in hospital -with both my hands cut. I’ve been here since last Saturday, and expect -to be out by about the beginning of the week. It is a dull kind of life -in the hospital, and I’m very anxious to get out and be doing some rough -kind of work. Mr. Shiff sent me some water-colours, and I amuse myself -with drawing the other invalids. Of course, I must give them what I do, -but I can see heaps of material for pictures here. The landscape, too, -seems decent, though I haven’t seen anything but from the barracks, as -this accident happened pretty near at the start. I hope you were not -annoyed at that fib of mine, but I never dreamt they would trouble to -find out at home. I have managed to persuade my mother that I am for -home service only, though, of course, I have signed on for general -service. I left without saying anything because I was afraid it would -kill my mother or I would be too weak and not go. She seems to have got -over it, though, and as soon as I can get leave I’ll see her, and I hope -it will be well. It is very hard to write here, so you must not expect -interesting letters; there is always behind or through my object some -pressing sense of foreign matter, immediate and not personal, which -hinders and disjoints what would otherwise have coherence and perhaps -weight. I have left all my poems, including a short drama, with a -friend, and I will write to him for them, when I shall send them either -direct to Abercrombie or to you first. I believe in myself more as a -poet than a painter; I think I get more depth into my writing. I have -only taken Donne with me, and don’t feel for poetry much in this -wretched place. There is not a book or paper here; we are not allowed to -stir from the gate, have little to eat, and are not allowed to buy any -if we have money, and are utterly wretched. (I mean the hospital.) If -you could send me some novel or chocolates, you would make me very -happy.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (from Bury St. Edmunds)._ - -“I received a letter to-day (sent over a week ago) from Abercrombie, and -I feel very flushed about it. He says no one who tries to write poetry -would help envying some of my writing. Since I wrote you I have had more -mishaps. My feet now are the trouble. Do you know what privates’ -military boots are? You are given a whole armourer’s shop to wear; but, -by God! in a few hours my heels were all blistered, and I’ve been -marching and drilling in most horrible pain. I drew three weeks’ pay and -had some money sent me from home, and bought a pair of boots three or -four sizes too large for me, my feet had swelled so. Besides this -trouble I have a little impudent schoolboy pup for an officer, and he -has me marked; he has taken a dislike to me: I don’t know why.” - - - _To Miss Seaton (from Bury St. Edmunds)._ - -“Thanks for your letter and your books which they sent me from home. It -is impossible to read as we are, and I don’t expect to get proper -leisure for reading till this rotten affair is over. My feet are pretty -nigh better, and my hands, and I am put down for a Lance-Corporal. The -advantage is, though you have a more responsible position, you are less -likely to be interfered with by the men, and you become an authority. I -expect to be home for four days shortly. I don’t know whether I told you -Lascelles Abercrombie sent me a fine letter about my work, which made me -very bucked. There is nobody living whose praise could have pleased me -so much. I have some pictures at the N.E.A.C., one of which is likely to -be sold.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (from Bury St. Edmunds)._ - -“I suppose my troubles are really laughable, but they do irritate at the -moment. Doing coal fatigues and cookhouse work with a torn hand, and -marching ten miles with a clean hole about an inch round in your heel, -and bullies swearing at you, is not very natural. I think when my hands -and feet get better I’ll enjoy it. Nobody thinks of helping you—I mean -those who could. Not till I had been made a thorough cripple an officer -said it was absurd to think of wearing those boots, and told me to soak -them thoroughly in oil to soften them. Thank you for your note; we get -little enough, you know, and I allow half of that to my mother (I rather -fancy she is going to be swindled in this rat-trap affair), so it will -do to get to London with. You must now be the busiest man in England, -and I am sure would hardly have time to read my things; besides, you -won’t like the formlessness of the play. If you like you can send them -to Abercrombie, and read them when you have more time. I don’t think I -told you what he said: ‘A good many of your poems strike me as -experimental and not quite certain of themselves. But, on the other -hand, I always find a vivid and original impulse; and what I like most -in your songs is your ability to make the concealed poetic power in -words come flashing out. Some of your phrases are remarkable; no one who -tries to write poetry would help envying some of them.’ I have asked him -to sit for me—a poet to paint a poet. All this must seem to you like a -blur on the window, or hearing sounds without listening while you are -thinking.” - - - _To Miss Seaton (from Blackdown Camp, Farnborough)._ - -“Thanks very much for the bread and biscuits, which I enjoyed very much. -I am in another regiment now, as the old one was smashed up on account -of most of the men being unfit. We that were left have been transferred -here. The food is much better, but conditions are most unsettling. Every -other person is a thief, and in the end you become one yourself, when -you see all your most essential belongings go, which you must replace -somehow. I also got into trouble here the first day. It’s not worth -while detailing what happened and exposing how ridiculous, idiotic, and -meaningless the Army is, and its dreadful bullyisms, and what puny minds -control it. I am trying to get our Passover off, which falls Easter. If -I do I’ll let you know. The bother is that we will be on our ball-firing -then, and also this before-mentioned affair may mess it up. This -ball-firing implies we will be ready for the front. I have been working -on ‘Moses’—in my mind, I mean—and it was through my absent-mindedness -while full of that that I forgot certain orders, and am now undergoing a -rotten and unjust punishment. I’m working a curious plot into it, and of -course, as I can’t work here, I jot little scraps down and will piece it -together the first chance I get.” - - -The remaining letters are all from France. - - - _To Miss Seaton_ (1916). - -“We made straight for the trenches, but we’ve had vile weather, and I’ve -been wet through for four days and nights. I lost all my socks and -things before I left England, and hadn’t the chance to make it up again, -so I’ve been in trouble, particularly with bad heels; you can’t have the -slightest conception of what such an apparently trivial thing means. -We’ve had shells bursting two yards off, bullets whizzing all over the -show, but all you are aware of is the agony of your heels.... I had a -letter from R. C. Trevelyan, the poet.... He writes: ‘It is a long time -since I have read anything that has impressed me so much as your “Moses” -and some of your short poems....’ He confesses parts are difficult, and -he is not sure whether it’s my fault or his.” - - -The next letter is the first of a series to Mr. Bottomley, whom he was -only to know by correspondence. He was now for a time working with the -Salvage Corps. - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, June 12, 1916)._ - -“If you really mean what you say in your letter, there is no need to -tell you how proud I am. I had to read your letter many times before I -could convince myself you were not ‘pulling my leg.’ People are always -telling me my work is promising—incomprehensible, but promising, and all -that sort of thing, and my meekness subsides before the patronizing -knowingness. The first thing I saw of yours was last year in the -Georgian Book, ‘The End of the World.’ I must have worried all London -about it—certainly everybody I know. I had never seen anything like it. -After that I got hold of ‘Chambers of Imagery.’ Mr. Marsh told me of -your plays, but I joined the Army and have never been able to get at -them. It is a great thing to me to be able to tell you now in this way -what marvellous pleasure your work has given me, and what pride that my -work pleases you. I had ideas for a play called ‘Adam and Lilith’ before -I came to France, but I must wait now.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, July 23, 1916)._ - -“Your letter came to-day with Mr. Trevelyan’s, like two friends to take -me for a picnic. Or rather like friends come to release the convict from -his chains with his innocence in their hands, as one sees in the -twopenny picture palace. You might say, friends come to take you to -church, or the priest to the prisoner. Simple _poetry_,—that is where an -interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right value to the -dominating idea so that it is understandable and still ungraspable. I -know it is beyond my reach just now, except, perhaps, in bits. I am -always afraid of being empty. When I get more leisure in more settled -times I will work on a larger scale and give myself room; then I may be -less frustrated in my efforts to be clear, and satisfy myself too. I -think what you say about getting beauty by phrasing of passages rather -than the placing of individual words very fine and very true.” - - - _To Miss Seaton (written in Hospital, 1916)._ - -“I was very glad to have your letter and know there is no longer a -mix-up about letters and suchlike. Always the best thing to do is to -answer at once, that is the likeliest way of catching one, for we shift -about so quickly; how long I will stay here I cannot say: it may be a -while or just a bit. I have some Shakespeare: the Comedies and also -‘Macbeth.’ Now I see your argument and cannot deny my treatment of your -criticisms, but have you ever asked yourself why I always am rude to -your criticisms? Now, I intended to show you ——’s letters and why I -value his criticisms. I think anybody can pick holes and find unsound -parts in any work of art; anyone can say Christ’s creed is a slave’s -creed, the Mosaic is a vindictive, savage creed, and so on. It is the -unique and superior, the illuminating qualities one wants to -find—discover the direction of the impulse. Whatever anybody thinks of a -poet he will always know himself: he knows that the most marvellously -expressed idea is still nothing; and it is stupid to think that praise -can do him harm. I know sometimes one cannot exactly define one’s -feelings nor explain reasons for liking and disliking; but there is then -the right of a suspicion that the thing has not been properly understood -or one is prejudiced. It is much my fault if I am not understood, I -know; but I also feel a kind of injustice if my idea is not grasped and -is ignored, and only petty cavilling at form, which I had known all -along was so, is continually knocked into me. I feel quite sure that -form is only a question of time. I am afraid I am more rude than ever, -but I have exaggerated here the difference between your criticisms and -——’s. Ideas of poetry can be very different too. Tennyson thought Burns’ -love-songs important, but the ‘Cottar’s S. N.’ poor. Wordsworth thought -the opposite.” - - - _To Miss Seaton (November 15, 1916; written in Hospital)._ - -“London may not be the place for poetry to keep healthy in, but -Shakespeare did most of his work there, and Donne, Keats, Milton, -Blake—I think nearly all our big poets. But, after all, that is a matter -of personal likings or otherwise. Most of the French country I have seen -has been devastated by war, torn up—even the woods look ghastly with -their shell-shattered trees; our only recollections of warm and -comfortable feelings are the rare times amongst human villages, which -happened about twice in a year; but who can tell what one will like or -do after the war? If the twentieth century is so awful, tell me what -period you believe most enviable. Even Pater points out the Renaissance -was not an outburst—it was no simultaneous marked impulse of minds -living in a certain period of time—but scattered and isolated.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (Postmark, January 30, 1917)._ - -“I think with you that poetry should be definite thought and clear -expressions, however subtle; I don’t think there should be any vagueness -at all, but a sense of something hidden and felt to be there. Now, when -my things fail to be clear, I am sure it is because of the luckless -choice of a word or the failure to introduce a word that would flash my -idea plain, as it is to my own mind. I believe my Amazon poem to be my -best poem. If there is any difficulty, it must be in words here and -there, the changing or elimination of which may make the poem clear. It -has taken me about a year to write; for I have changed and rechanged it -and thought hard over that poem, and striven to get that sense of -inexorableness the human (or unhuman) side of this war has. It even -penetrates behind human life; for the ‘Amazon’ who speaks in the second -half of the poem is imagined to be without her lover yet, while all her -sisters have theirs, the released spirits of the slain earth-men; her -lover yet remains to be released.” - - - _To Miss Seaton (1916)._ - -“Many thanks for book and chocolate. Both are being devoured with equal -pleasure. I can’t get quite the delight in Whitman as from one poem of -his I know—‘Captain, my Captain.’ I admire the vigour and independence -of his mind, but his diction is so diffused. Emerson and not Whitman is -America’s poet. You will persist in refusing to see my side of our -little debate on criticism. Everybody has agreed with you about the -faults, and the reason is obvious; the faults are so glaring that nobody -can fail to see them. But how many have seen the beauties? And it is -here more than the other that the true critic shows himself. And I -absolutely disagree that it is blindness or carelessness; it is the -brain succumbing to the herculean attempt to enrich the world of ideas.” - - - _To Laurence Binyon (1916)._ - -“It is far, very far, to the British Museum from here (situated as I am, -Siberia is no further and certainly no colder), but not too far for that -tiny mite of myself, my letter, to reach there. Winter has found its way -into the trenches at last, but I will assure you, and leave to your -imagination, the transport of delight with which we welcomed its coming. -Winter is not the least of the horrors of war. I am determined that this -war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting; -that is, if I am lucky enough to come through all right. I will not -leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with -the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will -all refine itself into poetry later on. I have thoughts of a play round -our Jewish hero, Judas Maccabeus. I have much real material here, and -also there is some parallel in the savagery of the invaders then to this -war. I am not decided whether truth of period is a good quality or a -negative one. Flaubert’s ‘Salambo’ proves, perhaps, that it is good. It -decides the tone of the work, though it makes it hard to give the human -side and make it more living. However, it is impossible now to work and -difficult even to think of poetry, one is so cramped intellectually.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (February, 1917)._ - -“Your letters always give me a strange and large pleasure; and I shall -never think I have written poetry in vain, since it has brought your -friendliness in my way. Now, feeling as I am, cast away and used up, you -don’t know what a letter like yours is to me. Ever since November, when -we first started on our long marches, I have felt weak; but it seems to -be some inscrutable mysterious quality of weakness that defies all -doctors. I have been examined most thoroughly several times by our -doctor, and there seems to be nothing at all wrong with my lungs. I -believe I have strained my abdomen in some way, and I shall know of it -later on. We have had desperate weather, but the poor fellows in the -trenches where there are no dug-outs are the chaps to pity. I am sending -a very slight sketch of a louse-hunt. It may be a bit vague, as I could -not work it out here, but if you can keep it till I get back I can work -on it then. I do believe I could make a fine thing of Judas. Judas as a -character is more magnanimous than Moses, and I believe I could make it -very intense and write a lot from material out here. Thanks very much -for your joining in with me to rout the pest out, but I have tried all -kinds of stuff; if you can think of any preparation you believe -effective I’d be most grateful for it.” - - -The “louse-hunt” refers to a night scene in which Rosenberg took part, -and which forcibly struck his imagination as a subject for a Goya -picture or for a poem like the “Jolly Beggars”: a barn full of naked -soldiers—Scottish and others—singing, swearing, and laughing, in mad -antics as they pursued the chase. - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, April 8, 1917)._ - -“All through this winter I have felt most crotchety, all kinds of small -things interfering with my fitness. My hands would get chilblains or bad -boots would make my feet sore; and this aggravating a general -run-down-ness, I have not felt too happy. I have gone less warmly clad -during the winter than through the summer, because of the increased -liveliness on my clothes. I’ve been stung to what we call ‘dumping’ a -great part of my clothing, as I thought it wisest to go cold than lousy. -It may have been this that caused all the crotchetiness. However, we’ve -been in no danger—that is, from shell-fire—for a good long while, though -so very close to most terrible fighting. But as far as houses or sign of -ordinary human living is concerned, we might as well be in the Sahara -Desert. I think I could give some blood-curdling touches if I wished to -tell all I see, of dead buried men blown out of their graves, and more, -but I will spare you all this.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (Postmark, May, 1917)._ - -“Regular rhythms I do not like much, but, of course, it depends on where -the stress and accent are laid. I think there is nothing finer than the -vigorous opening to ‘Lycidas’ for music; yet it is regular.... It is -only when we get a bit of a rest and the others might be gambling or -squabbling I do a line or two and continue this way. The weather is -gorgeous now, and we are bivouacked in the fields.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (1917)._ - -“I hope you have not yet got my poem, ‘The Amulet,’ I’ve asked my sister -to send you. If you get it, please don’t read it, because it’s the -merest sketch and the best is yet to come. If I am able to carry on with -it, I’ll send you it in a more presentable fashion. I believe I have a -good idea at bottom. It’s a kind of ‘Rape of the Sabine Women’ idea: -some strange race of wanderers have settled in some wild place and are -perishing out for lack of women. The prince of these explores some -country near where the women are most fair. But the natives will not -hear of foreign marriages; and he plots another Rape of the Sabines, but -is trapped in the act.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (1917)._ - -“I am now fearfully rushed, but find energy enough to scribble this in -the minute I plunder from my work. I believe I can see the obscurities -in the ‘Daughters,’ but hardly hope to clear them up in France. The -first part, the picture of the Daughters dancing and calling to the -spirits of the slain before their last ones have ceased among the boughs -of the tree of life, I must still work on. In that part obscure the -description of the voice of the Daughter I have not made clear, I see; I -have tried to suggest the wonderful sound of her voice, spiritual and -voluptuous at the same time. The end is an attempt to imagine the -severance of all human relationship and the fading away of human love. -Later on I will try and work on it, because I think it a pity if the -ideas are to be lost for want of work. My ‘Unicorn’ play is stopped -because of my increased toil, and I forget how much or little I told you -of it. I want to do it in one Act, although I think I have a subject -here that could make a gigantic play. I have not the time to write out -the sketch of it as far as it’s gone, though I’d like to know your -criticism of it very much. The most difficult part I shrink from; I -think even Shakespeare might:—the first time Tel, the chief of the -decaying race, sees a woman (who is Lilith, Saul’s wife), and he is -called upon to talk. Saul and Lilith are ordinary folk into whose -ordinary lives the Unicorn bursts. It is to be a play of terror—terror -of hidden things and the fear of the supernatural. But I see no hope of -doing the play while out here. I have a way, when I write, to try and -put myself in the situation, and I make gestures and grimaces.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, July 20, 1917)._ - -“My sister wrote me of your note, and it made me very glad to feel you -thought in that way about my poem, because I liked it myself above -anything I have yet done. I know my letters are not what they should be; -but I must take any chance I get of writing for fear another chance does -not come, so I write hastily and leave out most I should write about. I -wished to say last time a lot about your poem, but I could think of -nothing that would properly express my great pleasure in it; and I can -think of nothing now. If anything, I think it is too brief—although it -is so rare and compressed and full of hinted matter. I wish I could get -back and read your plays; and if my luck still continues, I shall. -Leaves have commenced with us, but it may be a good while before I get -mine. We are more busy now than when I last wrote, but I generally -manage to knock something up if my brain means to, and I am sketching -out a little play. My great fear is that I may lose what I’ve written, -which can happen here so easily. I send home any bit I write, for -safety, but that can easily get lost in transmission. However, I live in -an immense trust that things will turn out well.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (1917)._ - -“The other poems I have not yet read, but I will follow on with letters -and shall send the bits of—or rather the bit of—a play I’ve written. -Just now it is interfered with by a punishment I am undergoing for the -offence of being endowed with a poor memory, which continually causes me -trouble and often punishment. I forgot to wear my gas-helmet one day; in -fact, I’ve often forgotten it, but I was noticed one day, and seven -days’ pack drill is the consequence, which I do between the hours of -going up the line and sleep. My memory, always weak, has become worse -since I’ve been out here.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, August 3, 1917)._ - -“I don’t think I’ll get my play complete for it in time, though it will -hardly take much space, it’s so slight. If I could get home on leave I’d -work at it and get it done, no doubt, but leaves are so chancy. It’s -called ‘The Unicorn.’ Now, it’s about a decaying race who have never -seen a woman; animals take the place of women, but they yearn for -continuity. The chief’s Unicorn breaks away and he goes in chase. The -Unicorn is found by boys outside a city and brought in, and breaks away -again. Saul, who has seen the Unicorn on his way to the city for the -week’s victuals, gives chase in his cart. A storm comes on, the mules -break down, and by the lightning he sees the Unicorn race by; a naked -black like an apparition rises up and easily lifts the wheels from the -rut, and together they ride to Saul’s hut. There Lilith is in great -consternation, having seen the Unicorn and knowing the legend of this -race of men. The emotions of the black (the Chief) are the really -difficult part of my story. Afterwards a host of blacks on horses, like -centaurs and buffaloes, come rushing up, the Unicorn in front. On every -horse is clasped a woman. Lilith faints, Saul stabs himself, the Chief -places Lilith on the Unicorn, and they all race away.” - - -In the late summer of this year (1917) Rosenberg came to England on -leave. - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (dated September 21, 1917)._ - -“The greatest thing of my leave after seeing my mother was your letter -which has just arrived.... I wish I could have seen you, but now I must -go on and hope that things will turn out well, and some happy day will -give me the chance of meeting you.... I am afraid I can do no writing or -reading; I feel so restless here and unanchored. We have lived in such -an elemental way so long, things here don’t look quite right to me -somehow; or it may be the consciousness of my so limited time here for -freedom—so little time to do so many things bewilders me. ‘The Unicorn,’ -as will be obvious, is just a basis; its final form will be very -different, I hope.” - - -On returning to France he was taken ill and sent down the line. The time -in hospital was a relief, especially as his restlessness in England had -prevented writing or reading. - - - _To Miss Seaton (dated February 14, 1918)._ - -“We had a rough time in the trenches with the mud, but now we’re out for -a bit of a rest, and I will try and write longer letters. You must know -by now what a rest behind the line means. I can call the evenings—that -is, from tea to lights out—my own; but there is no chance whatever for -seclusion or any hope of writing poetry now. Sometimes I give way and am -appalled at the devastation this life seems to have made in my nature. -It seems to have blunted me. I seem to be powerless to compel my will to -any direction, and all I do is without energy and interest.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Postmark, February 26, 1918)._ - -“I wanted to send some bits I wrote for the ‘Unicorn’ while I was in -hospital, and if I find them I’ll enclose them. I tried to work on your -suggestion and divided it into four acts, but since I left the hospital -all the poetry has gone quite out of me. I seem even to forget words, -and I believe if I met anybody with ideas I’d be dumb. No drug could be -more stupefying than our work (to me anyway), and this goes on like that -old torture of water trickling, drop by drop unendingly, on one’s -helplessness.” - - - _To Gordon Bottomley (Dated, March 7, 1918)._ - -“I believe our interlude is nearly over, and we may go up the line any -moment now, so I answer your letter straightaway. If only this war were -over our eyes would not be on death so much: it seems to underlie even -our underthoughts. Yet when I have been so near to it as anybody could -be, the idea has never crossed my mind, certainly not so much as when -some lying doctor told me I had consumption. I like to think of myself -as a poet; so what you say, though I know it to be extravagant, gives me -immense pleasure.” - - - _To Miss Seaton (March 8, 1918)._ - -“I do not feel that I have much to say, but I do know that unless I -write now it will be a long time before you hear from me again, without -something exceptional happens. It is not very cold now, but I dread the -wet weather, which is keeping off while we are out, and, I fear, saving -itself up for us. We will become like mummies—look warm and lifelike, -but a touch and we crumble to pieces. Did I send you a little poem, ‘The -Burning of the Temple’? I thought it was poor, or rather, difficult in -expression, but G. Bottomley thinks it fine. Was it clear to you? If I -am lucky, and come off undamaged, I mean to put all my innermost -experiences into the ‘Unicorn.’ I want it to symbolize the war and all -the devastating forces let loose by an ambitious and unscrupulous will. -Last summer I wrote pieces for it and had the whole of it planned out, -but since then I’ve had no chance of working on it and it may have gone -quite out of my mind.” - - - _To Edward Marsh (dated March 28, 1918)._ - -“I think I wrote you I was about to go up the line again after our -little rest. We are now in the trenches again, and though I feel very -sleepy, I just have a chance to answer your letter, so I will while I -may. It’s really my being lucky enough to bag an inch of candle that -incites me to this pitch of punctual epistolary. I must measure my -letter by the light....” - - -The date of the postmark on this letter is April 2, when the writer was -already dead. - - LAURENCE BINYON. - - - - - MOSES - A PLAY (1916) - - - PERSONS - - MOSES _An Egyptian Prince_ - ABINOAH _An Overseer_ - TWO HEBREWS - KOELUE _Abinoah’s Daughter_ - MESSENGER - - - MOSES - - - SCENE I.: _Outside a college in Thebes. Egyptian students pass by._ - MOSES _alone in meditation_. - - [_Enter_ MESSENGER.] - - MESSENGER - -[_Handing papyrus._] Pharaoh’s desires. - - MOSES - -[_Reads._] To our beloved son, greeting. Add to our thoughts of you, if -possible to add, but a little, and you are more than old heroes—not to -bemean your genius, who might cry “Was that all!” We pile barriers -everywhere: we give you idiots for tools, tree stumps for swords, skin -sacks for souls. The sixteenth pyramid remains to be built: we give you -the last draft of slaves. Move! Forget not the edict. PHARAOH. - - MOSES - -[_To_ MESSENGER.] What is the edict? - - MESSENGER - - The royal paunch of Pharaoh dangled worriedly, - Not knowing where the wrong: viands once giant-like - Came to him thin and thinner—what rats gnawed? - Horror, the swarm of slaves! The satraps swore - Their wives’ bones hurt them when they lay abed, - That before were soft and plump: the people howled - They’d boil the slaves three days to get their fat, - Ending the famine. A haggard council held - Decrees the two hind molars, those two staunchest - Busy labourers in the belly’s service, to be drawn - From out each slave’s greased mouth, which soon - From incapacity will lose the habit - Of eating. - - MOSES - - Well, should their bones stick out to find the air, - I’ll make a use of them for pleasantness— - Droll demonstrations of anatomy. - - MESSENGER - - And when you’ve ended find ’twas one on sharks. - - [MOSES _signs to_ MESSENGER _to go. - Exit_ MESSENGER.] - - MOSES - - Fine! Fine! - See, in my brain - What madmen have rushed through - And like a tornado - Torn up the tight roots - Of some dead universe: - The old clay is broken - For a power to soak in and knit - It all into tougher tissues - To hold life; - Pricking my nerves till the brain might crack - It boils to my finger-tips, - Till my hands ache to grip - The hammer—the lone hammer - That breaks lives into a road - Through which my genius drives. - Pharaoh well peruked and oiled, - And your admirable pyramids, - And your interminable procession - Of crowded kings, - You are my little fishing rods - Wherewith I catch the fish - To suit my hungry belly. - I am rough now, and new, and will have no tailor. - Startlingly, - As a mountain-side - Wakes aware of its other side - When from a cave a leopard comes, - On its heels the same red sand, - Springing with acquainted air, - Sprang an intelligence - Coloured as a whim of mine, - Showed to my dull outer eyes - The living eyes underneath. - Did I not shrivel up and take the place of air, - Secret as those eyes were, - And those strong eyes call up a giant frame? - And I am that now. - - Pharaoh is sleek and deep; - And where his love for me is set—under - The deeps, on their floor, or in the shallow ways, - Though I have been as a diver—never yet - Could I find.... I have a way, a touchstone! - A small misdemeanour, touch of rebelliousness; - To prick the vein of father, monitor, foe, - Will tell which of these his kingship is. - If I shut my eyes to the edict, - And leave the pincers to rust - And the slaves’ teeth as God made them, - Then hide from the summoning tribunal, - Pharaoh will speak; and I’ll seize that word to act. - Should the word be a foe’s I can use it well - As a poison to soak into Egypt’s bowels; - A wraith from old Nile will cry - “For his mercy they break his back” - And I shall have a great following for this, - The rude, touched heart of the mauled, sweaty horde, - Their rough tongues fawn at my hands, their red-streaked eyes - Glitter with sacrifice. Well! Pharaoh bids me act.... - Hah! I’m all a-bristle.... Lord, his eyes would go wide - If he knew the road my rampant dreams would race! - I am too much awake now—restless, so restless. - Behind white mists invisibly - My thoughts stood like a mountain; - But Power, watching as a man, - Saw no mountain there— - Only the mixing mist and sky - And the flat earth. - What shoulder pushed through those mists - Of gay fantastic pastimes - And startled hills of sleep? - - [_He looks in a mirror._] - - Oh, apparition of me, - Ruddy flesh soon hueless, - Fade and show to my eyes - The lasting bare body; - Soul-sack fall away - And show what you hold! - Sing! Let me hear you sing. - - A VOICE - - [_Sings._] - - Upon my lips, like a cloud - To burst on the peaks of light, - Sit cowled impossible things - To tie my hands at their prime and height. - Power, break through their shroud; - Pierce them so thoroughly, - Thoroughly enter me, - Know me for one dead; - Break the shadowy thread, - The cowering spirit’s bond - Writ by illusions blond! - - Ah! Let the morning pale - Throb with a wilder pulse: - No delicate flame shall quail - With terror at your convulse. - Thin branches whip the white skies - To lips and spaces of song - That chant a mood to my eyes.... - Ah! Sleep can be overlong. - - MOSES - - Voices thunder, voices of deeds not done: - Lo, on the air are scrawled in abysmal light - Old myths never known and yet already forgone, - And songs more lost, more secret than desert light: - Martyrdoms of uncreated things, - Virgin silences waiting a breaking voice— - As in a womb they cry, in a cage beat vain wings - Under life, over life: is their unbeing my choice? - - Dull wine of torpor—the unsoldered spirit lies limp. - Ah! If she would run into a mould, - Some new idea unwalled - To human by-ways, an apocalyptic camp - Of utterest and ulterior dreaming, - Understood only in its gleaming, - To flash stark naked the whole girth of the world. - - I am sick of priests and forms, - This rigid dry-boned refinement: - As ladies’ perfumes are - Obnoxious to stern natures, - This miasma of a rotting god - Is to me. - Who has made of the forest a park? - Who has changed the wolf to a dog? - And put the horse in harness? - And man’s mind in a groove? - - I heard the one spirit cry in them, - “Break this metamorphosis, - Disenchant my lying body; - Only putrefaction is free, - And I, Freedom, am not. - Moses! Touch us, thou!” - - There shall not be a void or calm, - But a fury fill the veins of time— - Whose limbs had begun to rot, - Who had flattered my stupid torpor - With an easy and mimic energy, - And drained my veins with a paltry marvel - More monstrous than battle; - For the soul ached and went out dead in pleasure. - - Is not this song still sung in the streets of me? - - A naked African - Walked in the sun - Singing—singing - Of his wild love. - - I slew the tiger - With your young strength - (My tawny panther) - Rolled round my life. - - Three sheep, your breasts - And my head between, - Grazing together - On a smooth slope. - - Ah! Koelue! - Had you embalmed your beauty, so - It could not backward go - Or change in any way, - What were the use if on my eyes - The embalming spices were not laid - To keep us fixed, - Two amorous sculptures passioned endlessly? - What were the use if my sight grew - And its far branches were cloud-hung, - You small at the roots like grass; - While the new lips my spirit would kiss - Were not red lips of flesh, - But the huge kiss of power? - Where yesterday soft hair through my fingers fell - A shaggy mane would entwine; - And no slim form work fire to my thighs, - But human Life’s inarticulate mass - Throb the pulse of a thing - Whose mountain flanks awry - Beg my mastery—mine! - Ah! I will ride the dizzy beast of the world - My road—my way. - - - SCENE II.: _Evening before Thebes. The Pyramids are being built. - Swarms of Hebrews labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two Hebrews - are furtively talking._ KOELUE _passes by singing_. - - KOELUE - - The vague viols of evening - Call all the flower clans - To some abysmal swinging - And tumult of deep trance; - He may hear, flower of my singing, - And come hither winging. - - OLD HEBREW - - [_Gazing after her in a muffled frenzy._] - - Hateful harlot! Boils cover your small cruel face. - O, fine champion Moses: O, so good to us: - O, grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer, - Her father, born to us since you kissed her. - Our champion, O so good to us! - - - YOUNG HEBREW - - For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums - Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed: - For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy - Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums - Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now; - And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril. - Be still, old man; wait a little. - - OLD HEBREW - - Wait! - All day some slow dark quadruped beats - To pulp our springiness: - All day some hoofed animal treads our veins, - Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out: - All agonies created from the first day - Have wandered hungry searching the world for us, - Or they would perish like disused Behemoth. - Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies - As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah? - - YOUNG HEBREW - - Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil - Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood, - - Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me, - He came by and bore me into the shade: - O, what a furnace roaring in his blood - Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own - Raging through me like a strong cordial. - He spoke! Since yesterday - Am I not larger grown? - I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul, - Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence - They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight, - And to their shop only heroes come; - But all were cripples to this speed - Constrained to the stables of flesh. - I say there is a famine in ripe harvest - When hungry giants come as guests: - Come knead the hills and ocean into food, - There is none for him. - The streaming vigours of his blood erupting - From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust - Out of a madman’s piteous craving for - A monstrous balked perfection. - - OLD HEBREW - - He is a prince, an animal - Not of our kind; who perhaps has heard - - Vague rumours of our world, to his mind - An unpleasant miasma. - - YOUNG HEBREW - - Is not Miriam his sister, Jochabed his mother? - In the womb he looked round and saw - From furthermost stretches our wrong: - From the palaces and schools - Our pain has pierced dead generations - Back to his blood’s thin source. - As we lie chained by Egyptian men - He lay in nets of their women, - And now rejoices he has broken their meshes. - O! His desires are fleets of treasure - He has squandered in treacherous seas, - Sailing mistrust to find frank ports; - He fears our fear and tampers mildly - For our assent to let him save us. - When he walks amid our toil - With some master-mason - His tense brows, critical - Of the loose enginery, - Hint famed devices flat, his rod - Scratching new schemes on the sand: - But read hard the scrawled lines there— - Limned turrets and darkness, chinks of light, - - Half beasts snorting into the light, - A phantasmagoria, wild escapade - To our hearts’ clue; just a daring plan - To the honest mason. What swathed meanings peer - From his work-a-day council, washed to and from - Your understanding till you doubt - That a word was said— - But a terror wakes and forces your eyes - Into his covertly, to search his searching; - Startled to life, starved hopes slink out - Cowering, incredulous. - - OLD HEBREW - - [_To himself._] His youth is flattered at Moses’ kind speech to him. - - [_To the_ YOUNG HEBREW.] - - I am broken and grey, have seen much in my time, - And all this gay grotesque of childish man - Long passed; half blind, half deaf, I only grumble - I am not blind or deaf enough for peace. - I have seen splendid young fools cheat themselves - Into a prophet’s frenzy; I have seen - So many crazed shadows puffed away, - And conscious cheats with such an ache for fame - - They’d make a bonfire of themselves to be - Mouthed in the squares, broad in the public eye: - And whose backs break, whose lives are mauled, after - It all falls flat? His tender airs chill me— - As thoughts of sleep to a man tiptoed night-long - Roped round his neck, for sleep means death to him. - Oh, he is kind to us! - Your safe teeth chatter when they hear a step: - He left them yours because his cunning way - Would brag the wrong against his humane act - By Pharaoh; so gain more favour than he lost. - - YOUNG HEBREW - - Help him not then, and push your safety away: - I for my part will be his backward eye, - His hands when they are shut. Ah! Abinoah! - Like a bad smell from the soul of Moses dipt - In the mire of lust he hangs round him; - And if his slit-like eyes could tear right out - The pleasure Moses on his daughter had, - She’d be as virgin as ere she came nestling - Into that fierce unmanageable blood, - Flying from her loathed father. O, that slave - Has hammered from the anvil of her beauty - - A steel to break his manacles: hard for us - Moses has made him overseer. O, his slits - Pry—pry.... For what?... To sell to Imra.... - - [ABINOAH _is seen approaching_.] - - Sh! The thin-lipped abomination! - Zig-zagging haschish tours in a fine style: - It were delightful labour making bricks, - Knowing they would kiss friendly with his head. - - ABINOAH - - - [_Who has been taking haschish; and who has one obsession, hatred of - Jews._] - - Dirt-draggled mongrels, circumcised slaves, - You puddle with your lousy gibberish - The holy air, Pharaoh’s own tributary: - Filthy manure for Pharaoh’s flourishing, - I’ll circumcise and make holy your tongues, - And stop one outlet to your profanation. - - [_To the_ OLD HEBREW.] - - I’ve never seen one beg so for a blow; - Too soft am I to resist such entreaty. - [_Beats him._] - Your howling holds the earnest energies - You cheat from Pharaoh when you make his bricks. - - - AN AGED MINSTREL - - [_Sings from a distance._] - - Taut is the air and tied the trees, - The leaves lie as on a hand; - God’s unthinkable imagination - Invents new tortures for nature. - - And when the air is soft and the leaves - Feel free and push and tremble, - Will they not remember and say - How wonderful to have lived? - - [_The_ OLD HEBREW _is agitated and murmurs_.] - - Messiah, Messiah.... That voice.... - O, he has beaten my sight out.... I see - Like a rain about a devouring fire.... - - [_The Minstrel sings._] - - Ye who best God awhile, O hear: your wealth - Is but His cunning to see to make death more hard, - Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; - And he has made the market for your beauty - Too poor to buy although you die to sell. - - - OLD HEBREW - - I am crazed with whips.... I hear a Messiah. - - YOUNG HEBREW - - The venerable man will question this. - - ABINOAH - - [_Overhearing._] I’ll beat you more, and he’ll question - The scratchiness of your whining; or, may be, - Thence may be born deep argument - With reasons from philosophy, - That this blow, taking longer, yet was but one, - Or perhaps two; or that you felt this one— - Arguing from the difference in your whine— - Exactly, or not, like the other. - - MINSTREL - - You labour hard to give pain. - - ABINOAH - - [_Still beating._] My pain is ... not ... to labour so. - - MINSTREL - - What is this greybeard worth to you now, - All his dried-up blood crumbled to dust? - - - [_Motions_ ABINOAH _to desist, but not in time to prevent the old man - fainting into the hands of the_ YOUNG HEBREW.] - - ABINOAH - - Harper, are you envious of the old fool? - Go! Hug the rat who stole your last crumbs, - And gnawed the hole in your life which made time wonder - Who it was saved labour for him the next score of years. - We allowed them life for their labour—they haggled. - Food they must have, and (god of laughter!) even ease; - But mud and lice and Jews are very busy - Breeding plagues in ease. - - [_The Minstrel pulls his beard and robe off._] - - ABINOAH - - Moses! - - MOSES - - You drunken rascal! - - ABINOAH - - A drunken rascal! Isis, hear the Prince! - Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal. - - - MOSES - - You may think it your duty to get drunk; - But get yourself bronze claws before - You would be impudent. - - ABINOAH - - When a man’s drunk he’ll kiss a horse or king, - He’s so affectionate. Under your words - There is strong wine to make me drunk; you think, - The lines of all your face say, “Her father, Koelue’s father.” - - MOSES - - This is too droll and extraordinary. - I dreamt I was a prince—a queer droll dream - Where a certain slave of mine, a thing, a toad, - Shifting his belly, showed a diamond - Where he had lain; and a blind dumb messenger - Bore syllabled messages soaked right through with glee: - I paid the toad, the blind man; afterwards - They spread a stench and snarling. O, droll dream! - - I think you merely mean to flatter me, - You subtle knave, that, more than prince, I’m _man_ - And worth to listen to your bawdy breath. - - ABINOAH - - Yet my breath was worth your mixing with. - - MOSES - - A boy at college flattered so by a girl - Will give her what she asks for. - - ABINOAH - - Osiris! Burning Osiris! - Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair.... - - [_He looks inanely at_ MOSES, _saying to himself_.] - - Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards: - Isis, to let a Jew have her for nothing! - - [_He sings under his breath._] - - Night by night in a little house - A man and woman meet; - They look like each other, - They are sister and brother; - And night by night at that same hour - A king calls for his son in vain. - - - MOSES - - [_To himself._] So, sister Miriam, it is known then. Slave, you die. - [_Aloud._] O, you ambiguous stench, - You’ll be more interesting as a mummy - I have no doubt. - - ABINOAH - - I’m drunk, yes—drenched with the thought - Of a certain thing. [_Aside._] I’ll sleep sounder to-night - Than all the nights I’ve followed him about - Worrying each slight clue, each monosyllable - To give the word to Imra: the prince is near, - And Moses’ eyes shall blink before next hour - To a hundred javelins. I’ll tease him till they come. - [_Aloud._] On Koelue’s tears I swam to you, in a mist - Of her sighs I hung round you; - As in some hallucination I’ve been walking - A white waste world, we two only in it. - - MOSES - - Doubtless the instinct balked to bully the girl, - Making large gapings in your haschish dreams, - - Led you to me in whom she was thoroughly lost. - Pah, you sicken me! - - [_He is silent awhile, then turns away._] - - ABINOAH - - Prince Imra is Pharaoh’s choice now, and Koelue’s. - - [MOSES _turns back menacingly_.] - - MOSES - - Silence, you beast! - - [_He changes his tone to a winning softness._] - - I hate these family quarrels: it is so - Like fratricide. I am a rebel, well? - Soft! You are not, and we are knit so close - It would be shame for a son to be so honoured - And the father still unknown: come, Koelue’s (so _my_) father, - I’ll tell my plans—you’ll beg to be rebel then. - Look round on the night— - Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done; - She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of the sun, - Yet only dawn divides; could a miracle - - Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with light, - No night or light would be, but a new thing: - So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom, - Egypt was in the way; I’ll strike it out - With my ways curious and unusual. - I have a trouble in my mind for largeness, - Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours lack: - Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew; - Here are the springs, primeval elements, - The roots’ hid secrecy, old source of race, - Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct. - I’d shape one impulse through the contraries - Of vain ambitious men, selfish and callous, - And frail life-drifters, reticent, delicate— - Litheness thread bulk, a nation’s harmony: - These are not lame nor bent awry, but placeless - With the rust and stagnant. All that’s low I’ll charm, - Barbaric love sweeten to tenderness, - Cunning run into wisdom, craft turn to skill; - Their meanness, threaded right and sensibly, - Change to a prudence envied and not sneered; - Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing - - Ineffable and useable, as near - Solidity as human life can be: - So grandly fashion these rude elements - Into some newer nature, a consciousness - Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul, - Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny - Until they take it thus—or die. - - [_While speaking, he places his hand on the unsuspecting Egyptian’s head - and gently, caressingly, pulls his hair back until his chin is above - his forehead, and holds him so till he is suffocated. In the darkness - ahead is seen the glimmer of javelins and spears: it is Prince Imra’s - cohorts come to arrest_ MOSES.] - - - THE END. - - - - - POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH - - And like the artist who creates - From dying things what never dies.... - _Fragment._ - - - DAUGHTERS OF WAR - - Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs, - Their naked dances with man’s spirit naked - By the root side of the tree of life - (The under side of things - And shut from earth’s profoundest eyes). - - I saw in prophetic gleams - These mighty daughters in their dances - Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse - To mix in their glittering dances: - I heard the mighty daughters’ giant sighs - In sleepless passion for the sons of valour - And envy of the days of flesh, - Barring their love with mortal boughs across— - The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life. - The old bark burnt with iron wars - They blow to a live flame - To char the young green days - And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure, - No softer lure than the savage ways of death. - - We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun - To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth— - These maidens came—these strong everliving Amazons, - And in an easy might their wrists - Of night’s sway and noon’s sway the sceptres brake, - Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes. - - Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights; - Driving the darkness into the flame of day - With the Amazonian wind of them - Over our corroding faces - That must be broken—broken for evermore, - So the soul can leap out - Into their huge embraces. - Though there are human faces - Best sculptures of Deity, - And sinews lusted after - By the Archangels tall, - Even these must leap to the love-heat of these maidens - From the flame of terrene days, - Leaving grey ashes to the wind—to the wind. - - One (whose great lifted face, - Where wisdom’s strength and beauty’s strength - And the thewed strength of large beasts - Moved and merged, gloomed and lit) - Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men’s earth fell away; - Whose new hearing drank the sound - Where pictures, lutes, and mountains mixed - With the loosed spirit of a thought, - Essenced to language thus— - - “My sisters force their males - From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee - And hankering of hearts. - Frail hands gleam up through the human quagmire, and lips of ash - Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings - Far-sunken and strange. - My sisters have their males - Clean of the dust of old days - That clings about those white hands - And yearns in those voices sad: - But these shall not see them, - Or think of them in any days or years; - They are my sisters’ lovers in other days and years.” - - - ON RECEIVING THE FIRST NEWS OF THE WAR - - Snow is a strange white word; - No ice or frost - Has asked of bud or bird - For Winter’s cost. - - Yet ice and frost and snow - From earth to sky - This Summer land doth know; - No man knows why. - - In all men’s hearts it is: - Some spirit old - Hath turned with malign kiss - Our lives to mould. - - Red fangs have torn His face, - God’s blood is shed: - He mourns from His lone place - His children dead. - - O ancient crimson curse! - Corrode, consume; - Give back this universe - Its pristine bloom. - - -_Cape Town, 1914._ - - - SPRING, 1916 - - Slow, rigid, is this masquerade - That passes as through a difficult air: - Heavily—heavily passes. - What has she fed on? Who her table laid - Through the three seasons? What forbidden fare - Ruined her as a mortal lass is? - - I played with her two years ago, - Who might be now her own sister in stone; - So altered from her May mien, - When round the pink a necklace of warm snow - Laughed to her throat where my mouth’s touch had gone. - How is this, ruined Queen? - - Who lured her vivid beauty so - To be that strained chill thing that moves - So ghastly midst her young brood - Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow? - Where are the strong men who made these their loves? - Spring! God pity your mood! - - - THE TROOP SHIP - - Grotesque and queerly huddled - Contortionists to twist - The sleepy soul to a sleep, - We lie all sorts of ways - And cannot sleep. - The wet wind is so cold, - And the lurching men so careless, - That, should you drop to a doze, - Winds’ fumble or men’s feet - Are on your face. - - - MARCHING - - (AS SEEN FROM THE LEFT FILE). - - My eyes catch ruddy necks - Sturdily pressed back— - All a red-brick moving glint. - Like flaming pendulums, hands - Swing across the khaki— - Mustard-coloured khaki— - To the automatic feet. - - We husband the ancient glory - In these bared necks and hands. - Not broke is the forge of Mars; - But a subtler brain beats iron - To shoe the hoofs of death - (Who paws dynamic air now). - Blind fingers loose an iron cloud - To rain immortal darkness - On strong eyes. - - - BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES - - The darkness crumbles away— - It is the same old druid Time as ever. - Only a live thing leaps my hand— - A queer sardonic rat— - As I pull the parapet’s poppy - To stick behind my ear. - Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew - Your cosmopolitan sympathies - (And God knows what antipathies). - Now you have touched this English hand - You will do the same to a German— - Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure - To cross the sleeping green between. - It seems you inwardly grin as you pass - Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes - Less chanced than you for life, - Bonds to the whims of murder, - Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, - The torn fields of France. - What do you see in our eyes - At the shrieking iron and flame - Hurled through still heavens? - What quaver—what heart aghast? - Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins - Drop, and are ever dropping; - But mine in my ear is safe, - Just a little white with the dust. - - - KILLED IN ACTION - - Your “Youth”[2] has fallen from its shelf, - And you have fallen, you yourself. - They knocked a soldier on the head, - I mourn the poet who fell dead. - And yet I think it was by chance, - By oversight you died in France. - You were so poor an outward man, - So small against your spirit’s span, - That Nature, being tired awhile, - Saw but your outward human pile; - And Nature, who would never let - A sun with light still in it set, - Before you even reached your sky, - In inadvertence let you die. - -Footnote 2: - - “Youth,” a volume of poems by I. Rosenberg. - - - RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS - - Sombre the night is: - And, though we have our lives, we know - What sinister threat lurks there. - - Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know - This poison-blasted track opens on our camp— - On a little safe sleep. - - But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy. - Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks: - Music showering on our upturned listening faces. - - Death could drop from the dark - As easily as song— - But song only dropped, - Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand - By dangerous tides; - Like a girl’s dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there, - Or her kisses where a serpent hides. - - - THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES - - They left their Babylon bare - Of all its tall men, - Of all its proud horses; - They made for Lebanon. - - And shadowy sowers went - Before their spears to sow - The fruit whose taste is ash, - For Judah’s soul to know. - - They who bowed to the Bull god, - Whose wings roofed Babylon, - In endless hosts darkened - The bright-heavened Lebanon. - - They washed their grime in pools - Where laughing girls forgot - The wiles they used for Solomon. - Sweet laughter, remembered not! - - Sweet laughter charred in the flame - That clutched the cloud and earth, - While Solomon’s towers crashed between - To a gird of Babylon’s mirth. - - - THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE - - Fierce wrath of Solomon, - Where sleepest thou? O see, - The fabric which thou won - Earth and ocean to give thee— - O look at the red skies. - - Or hath the sun plunged down? - What is this molten gold— - These thundering fires blown - Through heaven, where the smoke rolled? - Again the great king dies. - - His dreams go out in smoke. - His days he let not pass - And sculptured here are broke, - Are charred as the burnt grass, - Gone as his mouth’s last sighs. - - - HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE - - Wan, fragile faces of joy, - Pitiful mouths that strive - To light with smiles the place - We dream we walk alive, - - To you I stretch my hands, - Hands shut in pitiless trance - In a land of ruin and woe, - The desolate land of France. - - Dear faces startled and shaken, - Out of wild dust and sounds - You yearn to me, lure and sadden - My heart with futile bounds. - - - THE IMMORTALS - - I killed them, but they would not die. - Yea, all the day and all the night - For them I could not rest nor sleep, - Nor guard from them nor hide in flight! - - Then in my agony I turned - And made my hands red in their gore. - In vain—for faster than I slew - They rose more cruel than before. - - I killed and killed with slaughter mad; - I killed till all my strength was gone; - And still they rose to torture me, - For Devils only die for fun. - - I used to think the Devil hid - In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse; - I called him Satan, Balzebub; - But now I call him dirty louse. - - - LOUSE HUNTING - - Nudes, stark and glistening, - Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces - And raging limbs - Whirl over the floor one fire; - For a shirt verminously busy - Yon soldier tore from his throat - With oaths - Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice, - And soon the shirt was aflare - Over the candle he’d lit while we lay. - - Then we all sprang up and stript - To hunt the verminous brood. - Soon like a demons’ pantomime - This plunge was raging. - See the silhouettes agape, - See the gibbering shadows - Mixed with the baffled arms on the wall. - See Gargantuan hooked fingers - Pluck in supreme flesh - To smutch supreme littleness. - See the merry limbs in that Highland fling - Because some wizard vermin willed - To charm from the quiet this revel - When our ears were half lulled - By the dark music - Blown from Sleep’s trumpet. - - - GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE - - I love you, Titan lover, - My own storm-days’ Titan. - Greater than the son of Zeus, - I know whom I would choose. - - Titan—my splendid rebel— - The old Prometheus - Wanes like a ghost before your power: - His pangs were joys to yours. - - Pallid days, arid and wan, - Tied your soul fast: - Babel-cities’ smoky tops - Pressed upon your growth - - Weary gyves. What were you - But a word in the brain’s ways, - Or the sleep of Circe’s swine? - One gyve holds you yet. - - It held you hiddenly on the Somme - Tied from my heart at home: - O must it loosen now? I wish - You were bound with the old, old gyves. - - Love! You love me—your eyes - Have looked through death at mine. - You have tempted a grave too much. - I let you—I repine. - - - SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY - - I love you, great new Titan! - Am I not you? - Napoleon and Cæsar - Out of you grew. - - Out of unthinkable torture, - Eyes kissed by death, - Won back to the world again, - Lost and won in a breath, - - Cruel men are made immortal. - Out of your pain born, - They have stolen the sun’s power - With their feet on your shoulders worn. - - Let them shrink from your girth, - That has outgrown the pallid days - When you slept like Circe’s swine - Or a word in the brain’s ways. - - - THE JEW - - Moses, from whose loins I sprung, - Lit by a lamp in his blood - Ten immutable rules, a moon - For mutable lampless men. - - The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, - With the same heaving blood, - Keep tide to the moon of Moses. - Then why do they sneer at me? - - - THE DYING SOLDIER - - “Here are houses,” he moaned, - “I could reach, but my brain swims.” - Then they thundered and flashed, - And shook the earth to its rims. - - “They are gunpits,” he gasped, - “Our men are at the guns. - Water!... Water!... Oh, water! - For one of England’s dying sons.” - - “We cannot give you water, - Were all England in your breath.” - “Water!... Water!... Oh, water!” - He moaned and swooned to death. - - - DEAD MAN’S DUMP - - The plunging limbers over the shattered track - Racketed with their rusty freight, - Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, - And the rusty stakes like sceptres old - To stay the flood of brutish men - Upon our brothers dear. - - The wheels lurched over sprawled dead - But pained them not, though their bones crunched; - Their shut mouths made no moan. - They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, - Man born of man, and born of woman; - And shells go crying over them - From night till night and now. - - Earth has waited for them, - All the time of their growth - Fretting for their decay: - Now she has them at last! - In the strength of their strength - Suspended—stopped and held. - - What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? - Earth! Have they gone into you? - Somewhere they must have gone, - And flung on your hard back - Is their souls’ sack, - Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. - Who hurled them out? Who hurled? - - None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass, - Or stood aside for the half used life to pass - Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, - When the swift iron burning bee - Drained the wild honey of their youth. - - What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, - Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, - Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, - Immortal seeming ever? - Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, - A fear may choke in our veins - And the startled blood may stop. - - The air is loud with death, - The dark air spurts with fire, - The explosions ceaseless are. - Timelessly now, some minutes past, - These dead strode time with vigorous life, - Till the shrapnel called “An end!” - But not to all. In bleeding pangs - Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, - Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. - - A man’s brains splattered on - A stretcher-bearer’s face; - His shook shoulders slipped their load, - But when they bent to look again - The drowning soul was sunk too deep - For human tenderness. - - They left this dead with the older dead, - Stretched at the cross roads. - - Burnt black by strange decay - Their sinister faces lie, - The lid over each eye; - The grass and coloured clay - More motion have than they, - Joined to the great sunk silences. - - Here is one not long dead. - His dark hearing caught our far wheels, - And the choked soul stretched weak hands - To reach the living word the far wheels said; - The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, - Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels - Swift for the end to break - Or the wheels to break, - Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight, - “Will they come? Will they ever come?” - Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, - The quivering-bellied mules, - And the rushing wheels all mixed - With his tortured upturned sight. - - So we crashed round the bend, - We heard his weak scream, - We heard his very last sound, - And our wheels grazed his dead face. - - - IN WAR - - Fret the nonchalant noon - With your spleen - Or your gay brow, - For the motion of your spirit - Ever moves with these. - - When day shall be too quiet, - Deaf to you - And your dumb smile, - Untuned air shall lap the stillness - In the old space for your voice— - - The voice that once could mirror - Remote depths - Of moving being, - Stirred by responsive voices near, - Suddenly stilled for ever. - - No ghost darkens the places - Dark to One; - But my eyes dream, - And my heart is heavy to think - How it was heavy once. - - In the old days when death - Stalked the world - For the flower of men, - And the rose of beauty faded - And pined in the great gloom, - - One day we dug a grave: - We were vexed - With the sun’s heat. - We scanned the hooded dead: - At noon we sat and talked. - - How death had kissed their eyes - Three dread noons since, - How human art won - The dark soul to flicker - Till it was lost again: - - And we whom chance kept whole— - But haggard, - Spent—were charged - To make a place for them who knew - No pain in any place. - - The good priest came to pray; - Our ears half heard, - And half we thought - Of alien things, irrelevant; - And the heat and thirst were great. - - The good priest read: “I heard....” - Dimly my brain - Held words and lost.... - Sudden my blood ran cold.... - God! God! It could not be. - - He read my brother’s name; - I sank— - I clutched the priest. - They did not tell me it was he - Was killed three days ago. - - What are the great sceptred dooms - To us, caught - In the wild wave? - We break ourselves on them, - My brother, our hearts and years. - - - THE DEAD HEROES - - Flame out, you glorious skies, - Welcome our brave; - Kiss their exultant eyes; - Give what they gave. - - Flash, mailed seraphim, - Your burning spears; - New days to outflame their dim - Heroic years. - - Thrills their baptismal tread - The bright proud air; - The embattled plumes outspread - Burn upwards there. - - Flame out, flame out, O Song! - Star ring to star; - Strong as our hurt is strong - Our children are. - - Their blood is England’s heart; - By their dead hands - It is their noble part - That England stands. - - England—Time gave them thee; - They gave back this - To win Eternity - And claim God’s kiss. - - - - - FRAGMENTS OF “THE UNICORN” - - - I - THE AMULET - - LILITH. SAUL. AMAK. NUBIAN. - - LILITH _sits under pomegranate trees watching her child_ AMAK _playing - with Saul his father’s helm and spear. A light smoke is ascending - from the chimney of their hut, and through the doorway a naked - Nubian man is seen stirring the embers._ SAUL _sleeps_. - - LILITH - - Amak, you’ll break your father’s sleep: - Come here and tell me what those spices are - This strange man bakes our cakes with. - It makes the brain wild. Be still, Amak: - I’ll give you the strange man your father brought, - And he will run with you upon his back to-day. - - Come from your father or you’ll get no cake; - He’s been a long journey. - Bring me the pictured book he brought for you. - What! Already cut to pieces? - Put away that horn from your father’s ear, - And stay that horrid noise: come, Amak. - - [_Amak runs to his mother with a jade amulet, shouting._] - - AMAK - - Look, mother, what I’ve found. - - [_He runs back again, making great shouts._] - - LILITH - - It dances with my blood: when my eyes caught it first - I was like lost, and yearned and yearned and yearned, - And strained like iron to stay my head from falling - Upon that beggar’s breast where the jade stone hung. - Perhaps the spirit of Saul’s young love lies here - Strayed far and brought back by this stranger near. - Saul said his discourse was more deep than Heaven. - - For the storm trapped him ere he left the town - Loaded with our week’s victuals: the slime clung - And licked and clawed and chewed the clogged dragging wheels - Till they sunk right to the axle: Saul, sodden and vexed, - Like fury smote the mules’ mouths, pulling but sweat - From his drowned hair and theirs, while the thunder knocked - And all the air yawned water, falling water, - And the light cart was water, like a wrecked raft, - And all seemed like a forest under the ocean. - Sudden the lightning flashed upon a figure - Moving as a man moves in the slipping mud, - Singing, but not as a man sings, through the storm, - Which could not drown his sounds. Saul bawled “Hi! Hi!” - And the man loomed, naked, vast, and gripped the wheels; - Saul fiercely dug from under; he tugged the wheels; - The mules foamed straining, straining. - Suddenly they went. - Saul and the man leaped in: Saul, miserably sodden, - - Marvelled at the large cheer in a naked glistening man; - Yet soon fell in with that contented mood, - That when our hut’s light broke on his new mind - He could not credit it—too soon it seemed: - The stranger man’s talk was witchery. - I pray his baking be as magical; - The cakes should be nigh burnt. - - [_She calls the_ NUBIAN. _He answers from within._] - - NUBIAN - - They are laid by to cool, housewife. - - LILITH - - Bring me the sherbet from the ledge and the fast-dried figs. - - [_The_ NUBIAN _brings sherbet, figs, and a bowl of ice, and lays - them down_.] - - [_She looks curiously at him. He is an immense man with squat, - mule-skinned features: his jet-black curled beard, crisp hair, - glistening nude limbs, appear to her like some heathen idol of - ancient stories._] - - - [_She thinks to herself._] - - Out of the lightning - In a dizzying cloven wink - This apparition stood up, - Of stricken trunk or beast’s spirit, - Stirred by Saul’s blasphemies; - So Saul’s heart feared, aghast. - But lo, he touched the mischance and life ran straight! - Was it the storm-spirit, storm’s pilot, - With all the heaving débris of Noah’s sunken days - Dragged on his loins; - Law’s spirit wandering to us - Through Nature’s anarchy, - Wandering towards us when the Titans yet were young? - Perhaps Moses and Buddha he met. - - [_She speaks aloud._] - - The shadow of these pomegranate boughs - Is sweet and restful; sit and ease your feet. Eat of these figs; - You have journeyed long. - - NUBIAN - - All my life, housewife. - - - LILITH - - You have seen men and women, - Soaked yourself in powers and old glories, - In broken days and tears and glees, - And touched cold hands— - Hands shut in pitiless trances where the feast high. - I think there is more sorrow in the world - Than man can bear. - - NUBIAN - - None can exceed their limit, lady: - You either bear or break. - - LILITH - - Can one choose to break? To bear, - Wearily to bear, is misery. - Beauty is this corroding malady. - - NUBIAN - - Beauty is a great paradox— - Music’s secret soul creeping about the senses - To wrestle with man’s coarser nature. - It is hard when beauty loses. - - - LILITH - - I think beauty is a bad bargain made of life. - Men’s iron sinews hew them room in the world - And use deceits to gain them trophies: - O, when our beauty fails us did we not use - Deceits, where were our room in the world— - Only our room in the world? - Are not the songs and devices of men - Moulds they have made after my scarlet mouth, - Of cunning words and contours of bronze - And viols and gathered air? - They without song have sung me - Boldly and shamelessly. - I am no wanton, no harlot; - I have been pleased and smiled my pleasure, - I am a wife with a woman’s natural ways. - Yet through the shadow of the pomegranates - Filters a poison day by day, - And to a malady turns - The blond, the ample music of my heart: - Inward to eat my heart - My thoughts are worms that suck my softness all away. - I watch the dumb eyeless hours - Drop their tears, then shapeless moaning drop. - - Unfathomable is my mouth’s dream - Do not men say? - So secret are my far eyes, - Weaving for iron men profound subtleties. - - Sorceress they name me; - And my eyes harden, and they say, - “How may those eyes know love - If God made her without a heart? - - “Her tears, her moaning, - Her sad profound gaze, - The dishevelled lustres of her hair - Moon-storm like” they say, - “These are her subtleties” men say. - My husband sleeps, - The ghosts of my virgin days do not trouble him: - His sleep can be over-long, - For there is that in my embers - Pride and blushes of fire, the outraged blood, - His sleep makes me remember. - - Sleep, hairy hunter; sleep! - You are not hungry more, - Having fed on my deliciousness; - Your sleep is not adultery to me, - - For you were wed to a girl - And I am a woman. - My lonely days are not whips to my honour. - - [_She dries her tears with her hair, then fingers the amulet at her - throat._] - - Yours, friend. - - NUBIAN - - [_Eagerly._] My amulet! My amulet! - - [_He speaks gravely._] Small comfort is counsel to broken lives; - But tolerance is medicinal. - In all our textures are loosed - Pulses straining against strictness - Because an easy issue lies therefrom. - (Could they but slink past the hands holding whips - To hunt them from the human pale - Where is the accident to cover? Spite fears bias.) - I am justified at my heart’s plea; - He is justified also. - - For the eyes of vanity are sleepless—are suspicious. - Are mad with imaginings - Of secret stabs in words, in looks, in gestures. - - Man is a chimera’s eremite, - That lures him from the good kindness of days - Which only ask his willingness. - - There is a crazed shadow from no golden body - That poisons at the core - What smiles may stray: - It mixes with all God-ancestralled essences, - And twists the brain and heart. - This shadow sits in the texture of Saul’s being, - Mauling your love and beauty with its lies: - I hold a power like light to shrivel it— - There, in your throat’s hollow—that green jade. - - [_He snatches at it as she lets it fall. He grows white and troubled, - and walks to where_ AMAK _is playing, and sees minutely strewn pieces - of paper_.] - - [_He mutters._] Lost—lost. - The child has torn the scroll in it, - And half is away. It cannot be spelt now. - - LILITH - - God, restore me his love. - Ah! Well! - - [_She rises._] - - I will go now; prepare our evening meal; - And waken my husband, my love once. - - NUBIAN - - [_Musing._] The lightning of the heavens - Lifts an apocalypse: - The dumb night’s lips are scared and wide, - The world is reeling with sound: - Was I deaf before, mute, tied? - What shakes here from lustre-seeded pomegranates - Not in the great world, - More vast and terrible? - What is this ecstasy in form, - This lightning - That found the lightning in my blood, - Searing my spirit’s lips aghast and naked? - I am flung in the abyss of days, - And the void is filled with rushing sound - From pent eternities: - I am strewn as the cypher is strewn. - A woman—a soft woman! - Our girls have hair - Like heights of night ringing with never-seen larks, - Or blindness dim with dreams: - Here is a yellow tiger gay that blinds your night. - Mane—Mane—Mane! - - Your honey spilt round that small dazzling face - Shakes me to golden tremors; - I have no life at all, - Only thin golden tremors. - Light tender beast! - Your fragile gleaming wrists - Have shaken the scaled glacier from under me, - And bored into my craft - That is now with the old dreamy Adam - With other things of dust. - - LILITH - - You lazy hound! See my poor child. - - [_He turns to see_ LILITH _drop the bowl and cakes and run to_ AMAK—_who - is crying, half stifled under_ SAUL’S _huge shield_.] - - [SAUL _opens his eyes_.] - - * * * * * - - - II - THE SONG OF TEL THE NUBIAN - - Small dazzling face! - I shut you in my soul; - How can I perish now? - - But thence a strange decay— - Your fragile gleaming wrists - Waver my days and shake my life - To golden tremors. I have no life at all, - Only thin golden tremors - That shudder over the abyss of days - Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison walls - That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid beauty— - - Towering and widening till - The sad moonless place - Throngs with a million torches - And spears of flaming wings. - - - III - THE TOWER OF SKULLS - - MOURNERS - - These layers of piled-up skulls, - These layers of gleaming horror—stark horror! - Ah me! Through my thin hands they touch my eyes. - - Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth, - And here in death’s land is a pregnant birth. - Your own crying is less mortal - Than the amazing soul in your body. - Your own crying yon parrot takes up - And from your empty skull cries it afterwards. - - Thou whose dark activities unenchanted - Days from gyrating days, suspending them - To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating days - Which have gone widening on and left us here, - Cast derelicts lost for ever. - - When aged flesh looks down on tender brood; - For he knows between his thin ribs’ walls - The giant universe, the interminable - Panorama—synods, myths and creeds, - He knows his dust is fire and seed. - - - - - EARLIER POEMS - - I have heard the Gods - In their high conference - As I lay outside the world - Quiet in sleep.... - _Fragment._ - -He was an artist and a dreamer—that is, one whose delight in the beauty -of life was an effective obstacle to the achievement of the joy of -living. - - (_Circa 1913._) - - - EXPRESSION - - Call—call—and bruise the air: - Shatter dumb space! - Yea! We will fling this passion everywhere; - Leaving no place - - For the superb and grave - Magnificent throng, - The pregnant queens of quietness that brave - And edge our song - - Of wonder at the light - (Our life-leased home), - Of greeting to our housemates. And in might - Our song shall roam - - Life’s heart, a blossoming fire - Blown bright by thought, - While gleams and fades the infinite desire, - Phantasmed naught. - - Can this be caught and caged? - Wings can be clipt - Of eagles, the sun’s gaudy measure gauged, - But no sense dipt - - In the mystery of sense: - The troubled throng - Of words break out like smothered fire through dense - And smouldering wrong. - - - FROM “NIGHT AND DAY” - - - I - IN THE WORKSHOP - - Dim watery lights gleaming on gibbering faces, - Faces speechful, barren of soul and sordid, - Huddled and chewing a jest, lewd and gabbled insidious: - Laughter, born of its dung, flashes and floods like sunlight, - Filling the room with a sense of a soul lethargic and kindly, - Touches my soul with a pathos, a hint of a wide desolation. - - - II - - I saw the face of God to-day, - I heard the music of His smile, - And yet I was not far away, - And yet in Paradise the while. - - I lay upon the sparkling grass, - And God’s own mouth was kissing me, - And there was nothing that did pass - But blazed with divinity. - - Divine—divine—upon my eyes, - Upon mine hair—divine—divine, - The fervour of the golden skies, - The ardent gaze of God on mine. - - - III - - Then spake I to the tree, - “Were ye your own desire - What is it ye would be?” - - Answered the tree to me, - “I am my own desire, - I am what I would be. - - “If you were your desire - Would you lie under me, - And see me as you see?” - - “I am my own desire - While I lie under you, - And that which I would be - Desire will sing to you.” - - - IV - - I wander—I wander—O will she wander here - Where’er my footsteps carry me I know that she is near, - A jewelled lamp within her hand and jewels in her hair; - I lost her in a vision once and seek her everywhere. - - My spirit whispers she is near, I look at you and you: - Surely she has not passed me, I sleeping as she flew. - I wander—I wander, and yet she is not here, - Although my spirit whispers to me that she is near. - - - ZION[3] - - She stood—a hill-ensceptred Queen, - The glory streaming from her; - While Heaven flashed her rays between, - And shed eternal summer. - - The gates of morning opened wide - On sunny dome and steeple; - Noon gleamed upon the mountain-side - Thronged with a happy people; - - And twilight’s drowsy, half closed eyes - Beheld that virgin splendour - Whose orbs were as her darkening skies, - And as her spirit, tender. - - Girt with that strength, first-born of right, - Held fast by deeds of honour, - Her robe she wove with rays more bright - Than Heaven could rain upon her. - -Footnote 3: - - Written at the age of sixteen. - - - Where is that light—that citadel? - That robe with woof of glory? - She lost her virtue and she fell, - And only left her story. - - - SPIRITUAL ISOLATION: A FRAGMENT - - My Maker shunneth me: - Even as a wretch stricken with leprosy, - So hold I pestilent supremacy. - Yea! He hath fled far as the uttermost star, - Beyond the unperturbed fastnesses of night - And dreams that bastioned are - By fretted towers of sleep that scare His light. - - Of wisdom writ, whereto - My burdened feet may haste withouten rue, - I may not spell—and I am sore to do. - Yea, all (seeing my Maker hath such dread), - Even mine own self-love, wists not but to fly - To Him, and sore besped - Leaves me, its captain, in such mutiny. - - Will, deemed incorporate - With me, hath flown ere love, to expiate - Its sinful stay where He did habitate. - Ah me, if they had left a sepulchre; - But no—the light hath changed not, and in it - Of its same colour stir - Spirits I see not but phantasmed feel to flit. - - Air, legioned with such, stirreth, - So that I seem to draw them with my breath, - Ghouls that devour each joy they do to death, - Strange glimmering griefs and sorrowing silences - Bearing dead flowers unseen whose charnel smell - Great awe to my sense is - Even in the rose-time when all else is well. - - * * * * * - - - FAR AWAY - - By what pale light or moon-pale shore - Drifts my soul in lonely flight? - Regions God had floated o’er - Ere He touched the world with light? - - Not in Heaven and not in earth - Is this water, is this moon; - For there is no starry birth, - And no dawning and no noon. - - Far away—O far away, - Mist-born—dewy vapours rise - From the dim gates of the day - Far below in earthly skies. - - - SPRING - - I walk and I wonder - To hear the birds sing; - Without you, my lady, - How can there be Spring? - I see the pink blossoms - That slept for a year, - But who could have waked them - While you were not near? - - Birds sing to the blossoms, - Blind, dreaming your pink; - These blush to the songsters, - Your music they think: - So well had you taught them - To look and to sing, - Your bloom and your music, - The ways of the Spring. - - - SONG - - A silver rose to show - Is your sweet face; - And like the heavens’ white brow, - Sometime God’s battle-place, - Your blood is quiet now. - - Your body is a star - Unto my thought; - But stars are not too far, - And can be caught— - Small pools their prisons are. - - - HEART’S FIRST WORD. I. - - To sweeten a swift minute so - With such rare fragrance of sweet speech, - And make the after hours go - In a blank yearning each on each; - To drain the springs till they be dry, - And then in anguish thirst for drink; - So but to glimpse her robe thirst I, - And my soul hungers and I sink. - - There is no word that we have said - Whereby the lips and heart are fire; - No look the linked glances read - That held the springs of deep desire. - And yet the sounds her glad lips gave - Are on my soul vibrating still; - Her eyes that swept me as a wave - Shine my soul’s worship to fulfil. - - Her hair, her eyes, her throat and chin— - Sweet hair, sweet eyes, sweet throat, so sweet, - So fair because the ways of sin - Have never known her perfect feet— - By what far ways and marvellous - May I such lovely heaven reach? - What dread, dark seas and perilous - Lie ’twixt love’s silence and love’s speech? - - - HEARTS FIRST WORD. II. - - And all her soft dark hair - Breathed for him like a prayer, - And her white lost face - Was prisoned to some far place. - Love was not denied— - Love’s ends would hide, - And flower and fruit and tree - Were under its sea. - Yea, its abundance knelt - Where the nerves felt - The springs of feeling flow - And made pain grow! - There seemed no root or sky, - But a pent infinity - Where apparitions dim - Sculptured each whim - In flame and wandering mist - Of kisses to be kist. - - - LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD - - Lady, you are my God— - Lady, you are my Heaven. - - _If I am your God - Labour for your Heaven._ - - Lady, you are my God, - And shall not love win Heaven? - - _If love made me God - Deeds must win my Heaven._ - - If my love made you God, - What more can I for Heaven? - - - IF YOU ARE FIRE - - If you are fire and I am fire, - Who blows the flame apart - So that desire eludes desire - Around one central heart? - - A single root and separate bough, - And what blind hands between - That make our longing’s mutual glow - As if it had not been? - - - IN THE UNDERWORLD - - I have lived in the underworld so long: - How can you, a creature of light, - Without terror understand the song - And unmoved hear what moves in night? - - I am a spirit that yours has found, - Strange, undelightful, obscure, - Created by some other God, and bound - In terrible darkness, breathing breath impure. - - Creature of light and happiness, - Deeper the darkness was when you, - With your bright terror eddying the distress, - Grazed the dark waves and shivering further flew. - - - O, IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN - - O, in a world of men and women, - Where all things seemed so strange to me, - And speech the common world called human - For me was a vain mimicry, - - I thought—O, am I one in sorrow? - Or is the world more quick to hide - Their pain with raiment that they borrow - From pleasure in the house of pride? - - O joy of mine, O longed-for stranger, - How I would greet you if you came: - In the world’s joys I’ve been a ranger, - In my world sorrow is their name. - - - A GIRL’S THOUGHTS - - Dim apprehension of a trust - Comes over me this quiet hour, - As though the silence were a flower, - And this, its perfume, dark like dust. - - My individual self would cling - Through fear, through pride, unto its fears: - It strives to shut out what it hears, - The founts of being murmuring. - - O! Need, whose hauntings terrorize; - Whether my maiden ways would hide, - Or lose and to that need subside, - Life shrinks and instinct dreads surprise. - - - A BALLAD OF WHITECHAPEL - - God’s mercy shines; - And our full hearts must make record of this, - For grief that burst from out its dark confines - Into strange sunlit bliss. - - I stood where glowed - The merry glare of golden whirring lights - Above the monstrous mass that seethed and flowed - Through one of London’s nights. - - I watched the gleams - Of jagged warm lights on shrunk faces pale: - I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams - Or Hell’s harsh lurid tale. - - The traffic rolled, - A gliding chaos populous of din, - A steaming wail at doom the Lord had scrawled - For perilous loads of sin. - - And my soul thought: - “What fearful land have my steps wandered to? - God’s love is everywhere, but here is naught - Save love His anger slew.” - - And as I stood - Lost in promiscuous bewilderment, - Which to my mazèd soul was wonder-food, - A girl in garments rent - - Peered ’neath lids shamed - And spoke to me and murmured to my blood. - My soul stopped dead, and all my horror flamed - At her forgot of God. - - Her hungered eyes, - Craving and yet so sadly spiritual, - Shone like the unsmirched corner of a jewel - Where else foul blemish lies. - - I walked with her - Because my heart thought, “Here the soul is clean, - The fragrance of the frankincense and myrrh - Is lost in odours mean.” - - She told me how - The shadow of black death had newly come - And touched her father, mother, even now - Grim-hovering in her home, - - Where fevered lay - Her wasting brother in a cold, bleak room, - Which theirs would be no longer than a day, - And then—the streets and doom. - - Lord! Lord! Dear Lord! - I knew that life was bitter, but my soul - Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword, - Grieving such body’s dole. - - Then grief gave place - To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke; - For I could catch the glimpses of God’s grace, - And a desire awoke - - To take this trust - And warm and gladden it with love’s new fires, - Burning the past to ashes and to dust - Through purified desires. - - We walked our way, - One way hewn for us from the birth of Time; - For we had wandered into Love’s strange clime - Through ways sin waits to slay. - - Love’s euphony, - In Love’s own temple that is our glad hearts, - Makes now long music wild deliciously; - Now Grief hath used his darts. - - Love infinite, - Chastened by sorrow, hallowed by pure flame— - Not all the surging world can compass it. - Love—Love—O tremulous name! - - God’s mercy shines; - And my full heart hath made record of this, - Of grief that burst from out its dark confines - Into strange sunlit bliss. - - - TESS - - The free fair life that has never been mine, the glory that might have - been, - If I were what you seem to be and what I may not be! - I know I walk upon the earth, but a dreadful wall between - My spirit and your spirit lies, your joy and my misery. - - The angels that lie watching us, the little human play, - What deem they of the laughter and the tears that flow apart? - When a word of man is a woman’s doom do they turn and wonder and say, - “Ah! Why has God made love so great that love must burst her heart?” - - - THE NUN - - So thy soul’s meekness shrinks, - Too loth to show her face— - Why should she shun the world? - It is a holy place. - - Concealèd to itself - If the flower kept its scent, - Of itself amorous, - Less rich its ornament. - - Use—utmost in each kind— - Is beauty, truth in one, - While soul rays light to soul - In one God-linkèd sun. - - - IN PICCADILLY - - Lamp-lit faces, to you - What is your starry dew? - Gold flowers of the night blue! - - Deep in wet pavement’s slime - Mud-rooted is your fierce prime, - To bloom in lust’s coloured clime. - - The sheen of eyes that lust, - Which dew-time made your trust, - Lights your passionless dust. - - - A MOOD - - You are so light and gay, - So slight, sweet maid— - Your limbs like leaves in play, - Or beams that grasses braid; - O! Joys whose jewels pray - My breast to be inlaid. - - Frail fairy of the streets; - Strong, dainty lure; - For all men’s eyes the sweets - Whose lack makes hearts so poor; - While your heart loveless beats, - Light, laughing, and impure. - - O! Fragrant waft of flesh, - Float through me so— - My limbs are in your mesh, - My blood forgets to flow; - Ah! Lilied meadows fresh, - It knows where it would go. - - - FIRST FRUIT - - I did not pluck at all, - And I am sorry now: - The garden is not barred - But the boughs are heavy with snow, - The flake-blossoms thickly fall - And the hid roots sigh, “How long will our flowers be marred?” - - Strange as a bird were dumb, - Strange as a hueless leaf. - As one deaf hungers to hear, - Or gazes without belief, - The fruit yearned “Fingers, come!” - O, shut hands, be empty another year. - - - A CARELESS HEART - - A little breath can make a prayer, - A little wind can take it - And turn it back again to air: - Then say, why should you make it? - - An ardent thought can make a word, - A little ear can hear it, - A careless heart forget it heard: - Then why keep ever near it? - - - DAWN - - O tender first cold flush of rose, - O budded dawn, wake dreamily; - Your dim lips as your lids unclose - Murmur your own sad threnody. - O as the soft and frail lights break - Upon your eyelids, and your eyes - Wider and wider grow and wake, - The old pale glory dies. - - And then, as sleep lies down to sleep - And all her dreams lie somewhere dead, - The iron shepherd leads his sheep - To pastures parched whose green is shed. - Still, O frail dawn, still in your hair - And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips, - The ghosts of all the dreams are there, - To fade like passing ships. - - - AT NIGHT - - Crazed shadows, from no golden body - That I can see, embrace me warm; - All is purple and closed - Round by night’s arm. - - A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices, - Wild lost voices of shadows white: - See the long houses lean - To the weird flight. - - Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time - (Because the sun spreads wide like a tree - With no good fruit for them) - Thrill secrecy. - - Pale horses ride before the morning, - The secret roots of the sun to tread, - With hoofs shod with venom - And ageless dread; - - To breathe on burning emerald grasses - And opalescent dews of the day, - And poison at the core - What smiles may stray. - - - CREATION - - As the pregnant womb of night - Thrills with imprisoned light, - Misty, nebulous-born, - Growing deeper into her morn, - So man, with no sudden stride, - Bloomed into pride. - - In the womb of the All-spirit - The universe lay; the will - Blind, an atom, lay still. - The pulse of matter - Obeyed in awe - And strove to flatter - The rhythmic law. - But the will grew; nature feared, - And cast off the child she reared, - Now her rival, instinct-led, - With her own powers impregnated. - - Brain and heart, blood-fervid flowers, - Creation is each act of yours. - Your roots are God, the pauseless cause, - But your boughs sway to self-windy laws. - Perception is no dreamy birth - And magnifies transfigured earth. - With each new light, our eyes receive - A larger power to perceive. - - If we could unveil our eyes, - Become as wise as the All-wise, - No love would be, no mystery: - Love and joy dwell in infinity. - Love begets love; reaching highest - We find a higher still, unseen - From where we stood to reach the first; - Moses must die to live in Christ, - The seed be buried to live to green. - Perfection must begin from worst. - Christ perceives a larger reachless love, - More full, and grows to reach thereof. - The green plant yearns for its yellow fruit. - Perfection always is a root, - And joy a motion that doth feed - Itself on light of its own speed, - And round its radiant circle runs, - Creating and devouring suns. - - - OF ANY OLD MAN - - Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness - With alien uproar and rude jolly cries, - Which (satyr-like to a mild maiden’s pride) - Ripen not wisdom but a large recoil; - Give them their withered peace, their trial grave, - Their past youth’s three-scored shadowy effigy. - Mock them not with your ripened turbulence, - Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath, - When, edging your boisterous thunders, shivers one word - (Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth, - The feigned rampart of bleak ignorance) - “Experience”—crown of naked majesties, - That tells us naught we know not, but confirms. - O think, you reverend shadowy austere, - Your Christ’s youth was not ended when he died. - - - THE ONE LOST - - I mingle with your bones; - You steal in subtle noose - This lighted dust Jehovah loans - And now I lose. - - What will the Lender say - When I shall not be found, - Safe-sheltered at the Judgment Day, - Being in you bound? - - He’ll hunt through wards of Heaven, - Call to uncoffined earth - “Where is this soul, unjudged, not given - Dole for good’s dearth?” - - And I, lying so safe - Within you, hearing all, - To have cheated God shall laugh, - Freed by your thrall. - - - WEDDED - - They leave their love-lorn haunts, - Their sigh-warm floating Eden; - And they are mute at once, - Mortals by God unheeden, - By their past kisses chidden. - - But they have kist and known - Clear things we dim by guesses— - Spirit to spirit grown: - Heaven, born in hand-caresses. - Love, fall from sheltering tresses. - - And they are dumb and strange: - Bared trees bowed from each other. - Their last green interchange - What lost dreams shall discover? - Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover. - - - DON JUAN’S SONG - - The moon is in an ecstasy, - It wanes not nor can grow; - The heavens are in a mist of love, - And deepest knowledge know: - What things in nature seem to move - Bear love as I bear love? - And bear my pleasures so? - - I bear my love as streams that bear - The sky still flow or shake: - Though deep within, too far on high. - Light blossoms kiss and wake - The waters sooner than the sky; - And if they kiss and die - God made them frail to break. - - - ON A LADY SINGING - - She bade us listen to the singing lark - In tones far sweeter than its own: - For fear that she should cease and leave us dark - We built the bird a feignèd throne, - Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways - From sceptred hands of starred humility— - Praising herself the more in giving praise - To music less than she. - - - BEAUTY - - As a sword in the sun— - A glory calling a glory— - Our eyes, seeing it run, - Capture its gleam for our story. - - Singer, marvellous gleam - Dancing in splendid light, - Here you have brought us our dream— - Ah, but its stay is its flight! - - - A QUESTION - - What if you shut your eyes and look, - Yea, look with all the spirit’s eyes, - While mystic unrevealèd skies - Unfold like pages of a book - - Wherein new scenes of wonder rare - Are imaged, till the sense deceives - Itself, and what it sees believes— - Even what the soul has pictured there? - - - CHAGRIN - - Caught still as Absalom, - Surely the air hangs - From the swayless cloud-boughs - Like hair of Absalom - Caught and hanging still. - - From the imagined weight - Of spaces in a sky - Of mute chagrin my thoughts - Hang like branch-clung hair - To trunks of silence swung, - With the choked soul weighing down - Into thick emptiness. - Christ, end this hanging death, - For endlessness hangs therefrom! - - Invisibly branches break - From invisible trees: - The cloud-woods where we rush - (Our eyes holding so much), - Which we must ride dim ages round - Ere the hands (we dream) can touch, - We ride, we ride—before the morning - The secret roots of the sun to tread— - And suddenly - We are lifted of all we know, - And hang from implacable boughs. - - - THE BLIND GOD - - Streaked with immortal blasphemies, - Betwixt His twin eternities - The Shaper of mortal destinies - Sits in that limbo of dreamless sleep, - Some nothing that hath shadows deep. - - The world is only a small pool - In the meadows of Eternity, - And men like fishes lying cool; - And the wise man and the fool - In its depths like fishes lie. - When an angel drops a rod - And he draws you to the sky - Will you bear to meet your God - You have streaked with blasphemy? - - - THE FEMALE GOD - - We curl into your eyes— - They drink our fires and have never drained; - In the fierce forest of your hair - Our desires beat blindly for their treasure. - - In your eyes’ subtle pit, - Far down, glimmer our souls; - And your hair like massive forest trees - Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb. - - Like a candle lost in an electric glare - Our spirits tread your eyes’ infinities; - In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks - Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses? - - Queen! Goddess! Animal! - In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls? - When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow - Do not our jealous pulses wake between? - - You have dethroned the ancient God, - You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days; - Yea, every moment is delivered to you, - Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God! - - Our souls have passed into your eyes, - Our days into your hair; - And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world, - Your world. - - - GOD - - In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, - Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! - His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls: - The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat - To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, - On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, - He lay—a bullying hulk—to crush them more; - But when one fearless turned and clawed like bronze, - Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, - And he would weigh the heavier on those after. - - Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth - Is but his cunning to make death more hard, - Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; - And he has made the market for your beauty - Too poor to buy although you die to sell. - Only that he has never heard of sleep, - And when the cats come out the rats are sly, - Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn. - - But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, - And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. - Things are not strange; and strange things are forgetful. - Ah! If the day were arid, somehow lost - Out of us; but it is as hair of us, - And only in the hush no wind stirs it, - And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, - And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. - The fingers shut on voices that pass through - Where blind farewells are taken easily. - - Ah, this miasma of a rotting God! - - - SLEEP - - Godhead’s lip hangs - When our pulses have no golden tremors, - And his whips are flicked by mice - And all star-amorous things. - - Drops, drops of shivering quiet - Filter under my lids. - Now only am I powerful. - What though the cunning gods outwit us here - In daytime and in playtime, - Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them - In our sleep. - - O, subtle gods lying hidden! - O, gods with your oblique eyes! - Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists - Bright with the afternoon, - Do you not shake when a mortal slides - Into your own unvexed peace? - - When a moving stillness breaks over your knees - (An emanation of piled æons’ pressures), - From our bodies flat and straight, - And your limbs are locked, - Futilely gods, - And shut your sinister essences? - - - MY DAYS - - My days are but the tombs of buried hours; - Which tombs are hidden in the pilèd years; - But from the mounds there spring up many flowers, - Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears. - Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould, - Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high; - But from the dust there fall some grains of gold, - And the dead corpse leaves what will never die— - It may be but a thought, the nursling seed - Of many thoughts, of many a high desire; - Some little act that stirs a noble deed, - Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire: - They only live who have not lived in vain, - For in their works their life returns again. - - - PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY - BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED, - GUILDFORD AND ESHER - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES - - - 1. 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