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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75422 ***





  THE SIRENS
  AN ODE




[Illustration: Decoration]

  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
  DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
  TORONTO




  THE SIRENS

  AN ODE

  BY

  LAURENCE BINYON

  [Illustration: Decoration]

  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
  1925




  COPYRIGHT


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




  TO
  CICELY




NOTE


This poem was printed by hand by Richard and Elinor Lambert at the
Stanton Press and issued by them in 1924 in a limited edition. It has
been revised for the present edition.




PRELUDE


    I remember a night of my youth, I remember a night
    Soundless!
    The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened
    Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height
    Boundless
    With stars, with stars, with stars.
    I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled
    Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty
    Out of the ends of the air and the unsealed darkness
    Poured in a rain, in a river,
    Into my marrow,—thro’ all the veins of delight
    Poured into me.
    O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!
    I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;
    I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,
    Born to be free.
    In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,
    A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;
    For they came to me as lovers,
    Those stars from on high.

    Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,
    I felt more than heard, like a whisper
    Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting
    Sound
    Of waves, of waves, of waves.
    And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,
    That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:
    In the midst of the worlds I trembled,
    I in the night a mortal
    Found!
    What was I? What was I? Nothing
    But a Moment, aware
    Of the ruins of Time!
    Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,
    Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,
    From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir
    In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,
    Rose to claim
    This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;
    To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.
    And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,
    For I was the word on Earth’s lips
    That she needed to name.

    But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,
    Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,
    Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,
    The earth-child?
    To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,
    To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,
    Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling
    Earth-exiled?
    But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,
    In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,
    As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind
    At its core,
    This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,
    And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth
    Shelter me more.
    I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:
    I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,
    And feel within me, for this mortality’s answer,
    Sea without shore.




I. THE VICTORIES


    Masters of the known and found
    Singers of a world completed,
    All to a time and end ordained,
    Powers foredestined to their bound
    And truth immutably contained,
    A dominion mapped and meted,—
    Like as in Egyptian noon
    Gods of granite throned august
    Gaze on old realms round them strewn
    Far as the horizon dust,—
    All beneath that searching sky
    Gathered into wisdom’s eye!
    Prophets of the found and known,
    Chanters of the Laws unchanging,
    Comes not an hour that undoes all
    With a whispered homelessness,
    With a sudden touch estranging?
    Certainties you deemed your own,
    Housing with a friendly wall,
    Glide into a doubt and guess
    Swift as when, the low light going,
    Darkness on the wind comes flowing
    Out of nothing; and surmise,
    Dream, desire, are frontierless;
    And the unroofed mind has skies
    To breathe of, where a rumour sings
    Of other mind and vaster things
    Wooed to wilder destinies.
    Thought throbs: there a power entices
    (Like, on a wonder-night, all June
    In a draught of stolen spices)
    Not to stay, not to stay,
    But to embark for the outer dark.
    Only charms the untrodden way,
    Only the unspelt secret rune.

    Conqueror with foot superb
    Planted on the last step won,
    Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim
    Destiny’s accepted son,
    Robed in a resounding name,
    What profounder pangs disturb
    Something that’s unquarried yet
    In the deep soul? All the gain
    Weighs but as an ashy grain
    In the world those pangs beget.
    Fierce fruitions but betray
    And deliver to the hard
    Hope of things unhazarded.
    Where that world is, who shall say?
    Under western evening starred
    Black waves tempt to far-away
    Visioned walls of a wide shore,
    Lands the only-coveted,
    Gleaming as they gleamed before
    Alexander’s dying eyes
    In the tent at Babylon.
    Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,
    Dumb’d with grief that only saw
    The pillar of the world undone,
    Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw
    The unsated mind with cruelties,—
    Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies,
    Sentinelled afar, deride him,
    Mocking all that passion willed
    With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.
    O the inexorable Lure
    Spur to the demon hearts of men!
    Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,
    And the empire-storming Saracen,
    Fate’s infuriate charioteers,
    Fly from a whisper in their ears
    (Earth before them, Time behind)
    Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill,
    Storm and scatter, work your will!’
    Hunters hunted in the mind,
    Hunting what they cannot name,
    Thunder over earth, to find
    Nothing. Though the harvest black
    Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,
    There’s a thing they cannot tame.
    Still they keep their torrent-track,
    Maddened by a shadowy song
    Sung beyond the reach of sense.
    What song is this which wastes the worth
    Of human things, and distastes earth,
    And fevers with magnificence
    Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned,
    Toward a goal that none has found?
    Is it the song the Adventurer stole
    Body-bound upon the mast
    For the enchantment of his soul?
    Over farthest foam of waves
    That are sailors’ restless graves,
    He heard exulting as he passed
    Perilous voices challenging
    The mortal heart of him, and fear
    Became a glory, so to hear
    Secure as an immortal, sing
    The Sirens.


I. 2

    Whither is she gone, wing’d by the evening airs,
    Yon sail that draws the last of light afar,
    On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares
    Than her own errand and her guiding star?
    She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads
    Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth.
    She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms,
    The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust,
    And generations of men asleep in the old earth.
    Between two solitudes she glides and fades,
    And round us falls the darkness she invades.

    Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters!
    What have your wastes to do
    With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail
    Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens;
    Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds,
    And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass
    In soil his fathers knew?
    What shall he hope for from your careless desolation,
    Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath?
    What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers
    But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage?...
    Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.

    I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon,
    Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air,
    Cry down the secret waters of the world,
    Under the far sea-streams, to summon there
    The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships.
    In their ribb’d ruin and age-long sleep they heard,
    Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed,
    Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound;
    Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread
    In corners of all oceans, where the light
    Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize:
    And shapes at last were stirred
    On glimmerless abysses’ oozy floors
    Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;—
    Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth
    Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores,
    Or questing up the white gloom of the North,
    Or shattered in the glory of old wars,
    The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!

    I saw them clouding up over the verge,
    Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave,
    Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon
    And strange to the idle glitter of the wave.
    Magically re-builded, rigged and manned,
    They stole in their slow beauty toward the land.
    Mariners, O mariners!
    I heard a voice cry; Home, come home!
    Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here
    Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace
    Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb.
    Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India?
    Are not children’s kisses dearer than ivory and pearls?
    And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water
    And the cold, wandering foam?
    Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer,
    Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet
    The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin.
    But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music;
    And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn;
    We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go.
    We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes,
    But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win;
    Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow,
    And a world to wander in.


I. 3

    O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!
    O alone soaring over care and stain!
    Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?
    Or who your spaciousness of light attain?
    Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,
    When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,
    Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard
    Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,
    Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—
    Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,
    Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,
    Silent in glory as of chanting quires.
    Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences
    In apparition from some world august,
    Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy
    That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.
    Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,
    And mid the void as on some dazzling shore
    Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,
    Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.

    Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion
    Surpassing all the measures of his kind,
    He, a free rider of the undulating silences,
    Has in himself begotten a new mind;
    Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling
    Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,
    Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him
    Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,
    Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,
    A soundless vapour that he pulses through,
    Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again
    And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—
    Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery
    Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire
    Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,
    A daring, a defiance, a desire!

    Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,
    Invading far and far the virgin sky,
    Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man
    (O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!
    Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle’s ways
    Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting
    Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries
    Of his condition, being so brief a thing,
    Being a creature perishable and passionate,
    To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo
    Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,
    A lover, else to his own faith untrue,
    Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice
    Upon the untried way that he must tread,
    So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,
    Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.
    Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance
    From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,
    Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible,
    He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone,
    Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning
    A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare?
    Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate
    World, and exulting to be native there?


I. 4

    Hymn the Finders! Hymn the bold
    Trusters of Earth, those patient ones,
    That listen to the subtle words
    Of Silence in the streams and stones;
    Ponderers of the secret-souled
    Bodies quick with ignorant being;
    Followers of the clues that thread
    Differences and accords;
    Wooers of what powers agreeing
    May the hands of man bestead;
    Seers who have turned aside
    From the greeds that ask and ache
    Blinded to all else beside,—
    Letting the clear spirit take
    Truth from vision open-eyed.
    Breaks the bud for him that sees
    In a world of promises.

    Hymn the breaker of the dark,
    Hymn the finder of the flame,
    Troubler of the essential spark
    Lurking in the withered pith
    Or from stony prison freed,
    Friend and fury, holy need
    And fierce destroyer, hard to tame,
    Risen, a God to wrestle with!
    Hymn the bender of the wheel,
    Mother of the shapes of speed!
    Hymn the launcher of the keel
    Carrying thought’s arrow-aim
    Beyond the sundown,—sowing seed
    Of man on coasts untrod before,
    To widen memory’s haunted shore
    And add the nearness of a name.

    Far-descended old desire!
    That stirred in swarming forest-ages,
    Prowled by fear whose stealthy eye
    Watched from glooms, where hunger-rages
    Ravened; see at last the Hand
    Emerging human, stretched to try
    Shapes of things with wondering pleasure,
    When its strength forgets to kill;
    Tempted on to understand,
    Serving ways of secret will,—
    Fit and fashion, poise and measure.
    Hymn the hand that builds the wall
    And spans the river, and arches over
    Man the worshipper and lover
    Song-like stone; the hand so strong
    To strike, yet in whose touch is all
    Life’s mystery that wooes from things
    Their strength, as music from the strings,—
    Touch of the mind that seeks behind
    The world for the befriending Mind.

    Hymn the openers of the gates,
    Hymn the changers of the fates!
    Hymn the seekers! them that saw,
    Past the seeming starry roof
    Of human earth, in mazy plan
    Bright eternities of law;
    Them that neared those orbs to man,
    Unafraid, and put to proof
    Divination’s ancient scheme;
    Stept into the timeless stream,
    Star-like spirits among the stars!
    Hymn the seekers! Chosen souls,
    Grapnel’d in the very marrow
    By a thought that night and day
    Draws them whither their unknown
    Mighty lover far away
    Beckons them to the frore Poles
    Or new meridians; like to him
    Who climbed in Panama the tree,
    And splendour of untravelled sea
    Smote him like a glorious arrow:
    Never shall he rest again
    Till he sail that virgin main!
    Or like him who quietly
    Sitting in his Polar tent
    Found so great a way to die;
    Hope-forsaken, famine-spent,
    Wrote his words of faith and cheer
    Till the pen dropt from the hand
    That wrote them.
                     Hymn the lost, who never
    Found, but kept high heart to steer
    Onward toward the mark they meant,
    Sailing out of sight of land.
    Wail not them, nor lost endeavour,
    For they heard what tranced the ear,
    Filled the exulting soul, the song
    Pale and prudent mortals fear,
    Song of those who, out of Time,
    Sing the heights the immortals climb,
    The Sirens.




II. PENUMBRA


    Hearken to the hammers, endlessly hammering,
    The din of wheels, the drone of wheels, the furnaces
    Panting, where Man as in a demon-palace toils
    To forge the giant creatures of his brain.
    He has banished the spring and the innocence of leaves
    From the blackened waste he has made; the infected sky
    Glooms with a sun aghast, and the murk of the night
    Is peopled with tall flames like spirits insane.

    He strips himself to the heat, not of the jovial sun,
    But of the scorch of furnaces; with naked breast
    Sweating beneath the iron and blear glass, amid
    The hammers’ hammering and the wheels’ roar.
    Not with grapes of October trodden underfoot
    Spurting juices of ripeness in runnels, his vats
    Brim, but with gushes flickered-over and blinding,
    Unshapen spilth and blaze of molten ore.

    With a finger he lifts the weight of mountain-sides
    Poised; the metal mass he shears red-hot in a trice;
    He has given to the animate iron thews of force,
    A Titan’s pulse, and breath of fiery draught.
    Monsters mightier far than himself he creates
    To swim storming seas, and to mount in miles of air,
    To deride Space and the old opposition of Time:
    Their speed is like strong drink that he has quaffed.

    He has the tamed lightning to do his bidding, draws
    Energies out of the veins of earth; he is armed
    From all elements, woven as in a magic web;
    He has stolen seeds of Death, wherewith to fight.
    He holds fabled terrors of the ancient gods in his hand—
    In a handful of dust, earthquake and pestilence;
    He exults to destroy, to obliterate, to be
    Lord of the powers of the engulfing night.

    Deafened with the hammers, inebriate with the sound
    Of the powers he has raised out of their jealous lair,
    He has fever within him, he becomes dizzy,
    And craves, and knows not whither he is bound.
    Shall he attain god-like felicity of ease,
    Supreme articulate voice of nature’s striving,
    Or builds he a vast prison for himself, a slave
    With iron of his own strong forging crowned?

    Insatiable of ransacked worlds, and exulting
    Furiously in feet-supplanting speed, the proud-eyed
    Victor, he who has come so far, so far, looks forth
    To achieve the eluded glory of his goal.
    What solitude is this that suddenly he enters?
    Voices of earth no more with anchoring kindness call.
    The fevered hammers throb; but deep within he knows
    The desert he has made in his own soul.

    O where is now the dew-dropt radiance of morning,
    That sistered with him leafing tree and rippling stream,
    When simple of heart in the sun with a free body
    He accepted all the boundaries of his mind?
    Full of fears he was then, shadowed with helpless need
    To propitiate Powers that threatened each footstep.
    Has he escaped from those old terrors, to be prey
    Of fears more terrible because less blind?


II. 2

    Ah, did men feign you once, triumphant Sirens,
    Omnipotent in your lure
    On a far spice-island over legendary surges
    Singing, and divine you with the famished eyes of mariners,
    Listen in a trance to your voices, but listen
    In a dream secure?

    Lost amid strange and hungry waters
    They fabled the storm-worn sailor stung
    By a vision of arms outstretched at the end of the world,—
    Eternal woman, wonderful, with a bosom
    Heaved as with love, and with warm, white eyelids
    Over eyes cruel and young.
    From those voluptuous throats, magical throats,
    As out of a coral-lipped, an ivory-coloured
    Dazzling flower, tormenting sweetness floats,
    Sweetness of voices, odour of strange, strange longing
    Felt on the flesh like trail of perfumed hair,
    In sound that stole like soft arms round the soul
    Drawn thither and inescapably aware
    Of nothing but the extreme ache to press
    Lips on those lips, that thirst to suck the breath,
    The heart’s blood, into theirs, till eyes grow dull,
    Till lips be lips no longer, and only a skull
    Roll from your feast of death,
    O sated Sirens!

    But what if it be that fond perfidious Voices
    With different music lure
    Even us who have cast far from us the fables of old?
    If the pride of our quest undo us, and they enchant us
    Simple as those lost mariners, but no longer
    In dream secure?

    If not with sorcery of song in a scarlet mouth
    And with eyes of desire
    You ensnare the easy senses and perishing flesh,
    But with spiritual lure you hunger to entice us
    Beyond the borders of knowledge, O evilly enamoured,
    O terrible choir?
    If shadowy at the end of time you wait,
    Wooing subtly the while Man’s spirit, tempted
    On ever more extravagant quest, and bait
    His blood with charm of secrecy and peril,
    Ay, and waylay the longings of his mind,
    Yielding by dear degrees what he exults to seize,
    Until he glows to seem the unconfined
    Master of earth, the world’s sole will, but only
    That you may taste his glory, spent and shared,
    Before you press upon his lips the last
    Kiss of annihilation, and he be cast
    Into the void prepared,
    Malignant Sirens!


II. 3

    ‘Whither, Whither?’ I heard a crying
    That asked of Night, and there was none replying.
    ‘Whither, into what land of change and wrack,
    Into what time out-racing thought and will,
    With feet borne onward and mind beaten back
    Over an earth that our lost loves has buried,
    Against a dark wind blowing chill,
    Whither are we driven, whither hurried?

    ‘Lovely vales of our youth, where haunted
    Peace of the ripening years, and hope that vaunted
    Its strength so rooted in earth’s purposes
    That children’s children should possess peace there!
    O sunny vales, and corn, and guardian trees,
    Shut off by the blind rain’s down-dropping curtain,—
    Vanished, as if they never were,
    And doubt alone were certain!

    ‘Heaven we feigned in a time perfecting
    Our missed design, and beauty of our neglecting.
    There should we live completed in an age
    Wise from our loss and rich with all our spoil,
    A race redeeming its lost heritage,
    Not by vain fears checked, nor by vain hopes cheated.
    —If that heaven fade, and futureless we toil,
    And battle already defeated?

    ‘Words of beauty, words of assuaging
    Majesty saw we on high above time’s raging
    Inscribed as over some vast porch serene;
    PARDON: the heart flowed out on tides of peace.
    JUSTICE: the soiled soul hasted to be clean.
    One word we named not, dreamed not, feared not even,
    THE END.—If All utterly cease;
    Earth, Time, Desire, Hell, Heaven?’

    Titan spirit of god-like stature;
    Star-measurer, holder of deep clues of nature;
    Maker, but half-aware of what he makes,
    Of what the extravagant flame in him devours,
    And what unshapen Vastness he awakes,—
    Toiled in the terrible webs his mind invented,
    And caught in flame that twists and towers,
    Man strives with himself tormented.

    Born for ever to move, the Dancer
    Of dark Creation’s dream, its destined answer,—
    Joy were those limbs created to express!
    Now like one darkly stumbling, while his brain
    Puzzles each motion with too anxious stress,
    Under the glory of stars that move unhalting
    He burns with the old need onward still to strain,
    Mis-timed, way-lost, defaulting.


II. 4

    Hearken to the eternal lovers rejoicing!
    A sunrise in their hearts, a music in their veins,
    Their bodies make sweet singing to one another;
    They bathe in beams from one another’s eyes.
    They rejoice to belong to the Eternal Delight
    Upon whose universe of buoyance they are launched,
    That questions not of its way nor of its haven
    But is both way and haven where it hies.

    They marvel to be born in a new element,
    To meet like streams as they go chiming to the sea,
    To move like flames that touch and tremble; and marvelling
    They look back on the voided shell they quit.
    Dawn within dawn, light within light, unfolds for them
    The secret of the world that flowing overflows
    The sun and the moon and the farthest of the stars,
    And it abounds in them, and they in it.

    Beautiful are their fears as the shy-footed fawns
    Safe only in wildness from the old hunter, Time,
    To be assured in shadow of the heart’s solitude,
    Where joy finds joy that never Time records.
    They have made virgin words of that soiled alphabet
    Wherewith have been written histories of sorrow,
    Labour and long defeat, and proud and vain conquest;
    And all their lore is those sufficing words.

    Magnificent they match the music of a name
    Against abhorred Silence and terrors of the abyss,
    The trust of a smile against all-ignoring Night,
    And one low voice against Oblivion’s greed.
    Difference drew them to the enamoured wrestle,
    Chosen, inevitable dear antagonists;
    They cry one to the other; ‘Alone I was not I,’
    ‘O lovely danger!’ and ‘O my angel need!’

    ‘Because thy sweetness is so troubling and so sharp,
    Full of blood-thrilling strangeness, unexplored peril,
    Never to be possessed, always to be desired,
    Thou unknown world, I will dare all for thee.’
    ‘Though in a moment thou hast made me to forget
    All that I was and had, triumphing I hold thee;
    To thy darkness of strength I give and commit me;
    Here is thy world, O sail upon my sea!’

    As the East that quickens and flushes to the height
    Answering the ardour of the West, and as a rose
    Quivers on the western cloud before the dayspring,
    Divided as the East and West they are:
    But upon ways invisible to mortal sense
    Moves their bright union, where was created new
    Love’s wondrous world; from the darkness it emerges;
    It is their Evening and their Morning Star.

    Out of the hollows of unpenetrated Night
    From afar calls to them, though they have known it not,
    A voice that is theirs, yet is not theirs, a new voice
    Never yet heard, yet older than all things;
    Laughter of a child’s voice, sweeter than any sound
    On the earth or in the air, voice of eternal joy,
    Victorious over the bowed wisdom of mortals,
    A well beyond the world, that springs and sings.




III. THE UNDISCOVERED WORLD


    O in a living stream to bathe
    That runs its course from spring to sea!
    And O to cast this aching mesh
    Of iron bands that starkly swathe
    Limbs that labour, neck to knee!
    To feel the wind upon the flesh,
    Wind that was before man was,
    Blowing out of blue divine;
    Feel the feet on morning grass
    Lightly firm, and body bare
    Over-showered with beams so fine
    As cleanse the very heart of care!
    Sages, had you found but this
    For the mind, so it could use
    What the body knows of bliss
    When all thought it loves to lose
    Merely poising in the sun,
    Sure of powers a-spring within it
    Rippling out to leap and run,—
    Like for memory’s waiting ear
    Silence, ere the music win it:—
    When unreasoned joy alone
    Brims the body, itself its own
    Infinity unquestioning;
    Careless, Life is O so near,
    Death a legendary thing,
    Breath and blood like bells that ring;—
    Sages, had you art to find
    Such a glory for the mind,
    Not with eyes that are too wise
    But the lover’s wonder-vision
    Seeing far and seeing near
    As within one radiant sphere
    All things living, joined and whole,
    Bloomed with light of Paradise;
    Sages then—but who has taught
    Such an end for labouring thought,
    Such a nakedness of soul;—
    What but probing, doubting, and division?
    Hark, on iron iron’s endless clamour!
    The hours, the hours, drive swifter than we strain—
    Earth changes not, but who has changed us,
    As if a Fury with a shadowy hammer
    Nailed the nails into the fiery brain?
    Who has estranged us?

    What dark enemy within
    Makes of Earth an enemy?
    Is it not he who sought of old
    Secrets of her wealth to win,
    Hot with greed and overbold,
    Aching to possess her? he,
    Searching labyrinthine veins,
    Thirsted for yet rarer gains,
    And through patient nights perused
    Each divided element,
    Curious of that pregnant dust
    Which with intent hand he bruised;
    Crucibled in fire the grains
    That should subtly be cajoled
    In the end to yield his lust
    Feasts of gold—a continent
    Molten into dazzling gold!
    (Were not heard the Sirens then
    Deriding the poor dreams of men?)
    Nay, but he would scrutinize
    Even Night’s deep-ordered scheme,
    And spell his own proud destinies
    In scripture of the starry stream.
    Coveting what power those skies
    Might enthrone, he sought a charm
    That should warp them and should woo.
    To his use, and by such aid
    To disimperil of one harm
    This brief body, would undo
    A universe. And he arrayed
    In a constellated robe
    His heaven-projected effigy,
    Because his spirit was afraid
    Of its nakedness, nor dared
    Terrors of the truth to probe;
    Rather chose itself to ensky
    In a dream. But no night bared
    To him her grandeur, swerved no spheres
    To the wrench of human fears.
    Earth and Night to crave of lust
    Yield but fruitlessness and dust;
    Dust to lust, to greed a weed!
    Mockers rise from those forgotten years:
    ‘This is he, the self-dupe, still the same
    Vaunter of a world of his defiling!
    Claiming heavens, with only will to maim.
    Who is this to own an earth’s empire,
    In whose blood is mud, and this aviling
    Squalor of desire?’

    Lo, with feet on fiery ashes
    Earth’s foiled master casts his eyes
    Round his world-abode. Time’s heir,
    Freed by blood of martyrs, wise
    With myriad lives of thought and care,
    Into Doubt’s dim future gropes,
    Black with omen, lit with flashes!
    Lo, beneath his heaven of hopes
    Falling palaces of dream,
    Proudly pillared; regions wreckt,
    Peopled with stray flames that seem
    Hot greeds from his burning brain
    And the very earth infect.
    Lo, like bodies for his fear
    Shadowy shapes of force insane
    Menacing in murk appear,
    Primed with energy to kill,—
    Engines of his intellect,
    Incarnations of his will!
    Those old siren-songs of air
    Change into a song abhorred,
    Chanting softly, Revel, Lord!
    Triumph, Master! This you sought!
    This your own proud hands have wrought!
    Now the lover’s loathing taste
    Comes on him for what he burned
    So imperiously to clutch.
    Where is now the bliss embraced,
    Where the conquest? At a touch
    All’s to desolation turned.
    Is it he, or Earth, betrays?
    She that seemed to sting him on
    To possession, once possessed,
    Dispossesses him. Her breast
    Stony grows, and hard her gaze.
    —Yet, oh, could she again be wooed
    In her own, her chosen ways,
    Shall she not transform her mood,
    Glorify with truth his quest,
    Give, as lovers give, entire
    Body to body, mind to mind,
    Ay, and more than these can find,—
    Spirit to spirit? Beauty of Desire,
    Beauty beyond possession still is breathing,
    Beauty in us defaced!
    O secret spring eternal, muddied here,
    Soiled and sunken, troubled into seething!
    Torrent of Desire, by greed and fear
    Spilled into waste!


III. 2

    Be still! Wash out this dull roar from the ear
    That fevers Time; be emptied the hot brain
    Of clamorous, intricately-teasing toil.
    Let spiritual Silence brim again
    The mind’s well to a mirror virgin-clear;
    All these invented cares smoothe and uncoil.

    Contemplate Silence; the wild Silence, ere
    Music or word was; waste, unshapen sound;
    Crying of wind; moaning of sea; stammer of storm;
    Gropings as for a being nowhere found;
    Mateless desires, frustrated throbs of air,
    Without home, without form.

    They sought a lodge in haunted flesh, they sought
    The inward tingling sense’s touched accord;
    To be delivered, to be born perfect
    On shapes of lips, a breathed, a living word,
    A flower that seeds its riches, thought from thought,
    Incarnate sound, mysterious and elect.

    Contemplate Silence! The unwithered womb
    Of all music infinite as desire;
    All words, releasing tears and bliss; all song,
    That wins at last a universe for choir,
    And there the enlarged spirit has full room,
    There its desires and its delights belong.

    All speech, all song, all music still unborn,
    Waits there for its futurity of mind
    To become human; yet it holds some tone
    Drawn from a something vaster than mankind,
    As from profounder heart-strings torn,
    And yet complete in man alone;

    As if behind him travailing, the whole
    Dark world were seeking in this eloquent flesh
    Some other self, and sighing here to be
    Born afresh, born afresh;
    To win a world yet undiscovered in the soul:
    ‘O Voice,’ it cries, ‘utter; O Hands, deliver me!’

    With such a dark quest in desirous eyes,
    From the ancient East, as through a silent gate
    In the mind’s city and labyrinth of thought,
    Those Magian Kings, of knowledge satiate,
    Of riches satiate, and forlornly wise,
    Down desert gorges brought

    Gifts for the Unknown: nay, but Earth from far
    In yearning sent them, her ambassadors.
    Rocks opened veins of gold, trees oozed their blood,
    Spices sighed, gems burned up from cavern-floors,
    The very Night had made Desire a star,
    That over against them, strange and certain, stood;

    And thither laden with Earth’s hope and want,
    Her symbol’d sighs and riches of her pain,
    Down separate passes of the mountain streaming
    Wound onward each amid his marvelling train,
    Those sages drawn from towers of midnight haunt
    By their prophetic dreaming;
    And trumpet thrilled to trumpet thro’ the night,
    And torches told of glistering strange attire,
    Where met those three kings on one errand led.
    What image shaped they of the World’s Desire,
    What presence throned in majesty and might,
    As they went musing, deep in hope and dread,

    And under vast cope of the wheeling skies
    Found but a naked child, a child new-born?
    Wisdom resigned the crown of her enthroning;
    All her impassioned question was forsworn:
    In wonder she saw all things with new eyes.
    Then, there were songs of joy; now, sound of a world groaning.


III. 3

    Mystery of Dawn, ere yet the glory streams
    Risen over earth, and pauses in that hush
    When far, as from an ecstasy, clouds flush,
    And hills lift up their pureness into dreams
    Of light that not yet colours the cold flower,
    And the earth-clasping, heaven-desiring tree
    Trembles in virginal expectancy—
    What breath of the unknown Power
    Is this that, spirit to spirit, as with a spousal kiss
    Comes seeking us, even us, through shadow and dew,—
    Seeking in this soiled flesh what undiscovered world
    Beyond tears, beyond bliss, beyond wisdom, beyond
    Time? what recaptured harmony of earth and heaven?
    What world made new?

    A world so strange, the spirit thrills to flame,
    Transfigured in a wonder of release!
    A world so near, it has no other name
    Than light and breath! Where lost we, then, this peace?
    Wanting what charm to cleanse
    Our eyes? To see; is this the last of gifts,
    That, as the scales drop, the heart so uplifts?
    O world where no possession is of men’s,
    Where the will rages not with fever to destroy
    Differing wills, or warp another life to its use,
    But each lives in the light of its own joy!
    In one wide vision all have share, and we in all,
    Infinitely companioned with the stars, the dust,
    Beasts of the field, and stones, and flowers that fall!
    This body that we use seems in that air
    Marvellous; secret from ourselves; a power
    Without which were no speech, nor deed done anywhere,
    Nor could thought range and tower,
    Nor seed be sown for the unborn time to reap;
    Whose natural motion was ordained to be
    Beautiful as a wave out of a sea
    Boundless as mind asleep;
    So passionately shaped, in every part perfect,
    Universes are wounded in its abasement,
    Crying from stone to star;
    The unimagined height, the immeasurable deep,
    Hungers, abysses, heavens, millions of ghosts from far
    Meet in this body born to laugh and weep.

    Weep; not for the endured, ancestral ill,
    Perils and plagues, that ambush all our ways,
    Time’s injury, and pain’s deep-wandered maze;
    These need not eyes to see, but only flesh to feel.
    But of the eternal vision to partake,
    And see what we have done, and what refused,
    To what accepted blindness we grow used,
    And what marred shapes of one another make,
    This is to weep such tears as no flesh-throes have cost,
    Weep for our loves, our loves, that we ourselves have slain,
    The powers of loveliness that we have left forlorn.
    Eyes we had and saw not, ears and we did not hear!
    Ah, when the heart, full-visioned, breaks in shame and pain,
    Then is the world’s hope born.

    The cry of desolation turns to praise.
    If falsehood first enchant the eager mind,
    And if desire be cruel, being blind,
    Each by its own infirmity betrays,
    And some profounder, more imperious need
    Drives through all smart, whatever world to lose,
    The pure vision to choose,
    And tho’ Truth kill, there in the end be freed.
    Open, open, gates of deliverance, open!
    See, liberated spirits, see, victorious ones,
    For testimony of us from homes of glory shine,
    Vindicators of this brief flesh, they mingle us,—
    Soiled and despoiled,—with beauty and with felicity,
    And sting us from afar with the Divine.

    Hands of men stretched out in so dark a craving!
    Baffled heart, clouded vision; filled with ache
    To know you have maimed the world you sought to make
    Your instrument and minister, enslaving
    Powers of earth and air—Hands that have wrought
    So glorious things, the thoughts of joy to house!
    Heart that has pulsed so ardent for its vow’s
    Accomplishment,—O heart so hardly taught!
    O stretched-out hands! of you Eternity has need.
    Give but your sacred passion and your shaping art,
    The hunger of Eternity is there,—
    Barren else, barren: chaos and a wilderness
    Of feud and everlasting greed devouring greed,
    The unshapen dream’s despair!

    Spirit of Man, dear spirit, sore opprest
    With self-estrangement, and mis-choosing will,
    And all satiety of gainful skill,—
    Possession that was never yet possessed,—
    You that have been so great a lover, giving
    In innocency all for sacrifice;
    Whom neither Time nor earth’s regions suffice—
    You too are sought, where still your dream is living.
    Over the secret oceans of uncharted mind
    Who knows what voyagers, what sails invisibly
    Press on, for all the lost, the foundered hopes untrue?
    Who knows, through ignorant mists and storm upon that sea
    What Lover, what unweariable Adventurer,
    Makes still his quest of you?

    O world that is within us, yet must still
    Out of the eternal mystery be wooed
    Ere it be ours and, breathing in the blood,
    Live in its beauty, as the miracle
    Of the divine colour of flowers in night
    Was not, and is not of themselves alone
    Nor of the dawn-beam, but of both made one,—
    A marriage-mystery of earth and light!
    O undiscovered world that all about us lies
    When spirit to Spirit surrenders, and like young Love sees
    Heaven with human eyes!
    World of radiant morning! Joy’s untravelled region!
    Why lies it solitary? and O why tarry we?
    Why daily wander out from Paradise?


III. 4

    World-besieging Storm, from horizon heaped and menacing
    Rear up the walls of thunder, till they tower
    Shattering over earth, and from heart to heart reverberate,
    Lancing that bright fear through the ruin-shower!
    Revel, Winds, severing the bough of leafy promises
    With rages from returning chaos sent!
    Mockers and Destroyers, come; here is Man, predestinate
    To all your arrows at his bosom bent.
    Strip him of his splendours, of his conquests and dominions,
    His secure boast to be earth’s lord enthroned,
    Humble him: he stands forth greater in his nakedness
    Than in the wealth and safety that he owned.
    He that has so loved peril in all experience,
    He that has gone with Sorrow all her way,
    Will not now refuse or shrink; prove him to the innermost,
    With worse than worst confront him: come what may,
    Lo, you awake, O Trumpets of Calamity,
    Some fragment of old Darkness in his breast;
    Lo, to him fraternal is the stony and the terrible place:
    His stricken Genius out of deeps unguessed
    Rises up, grappling his reality to reality,
    And still the secret in himself explores,
    Bound beyond fear, the discovered and discoverer,
    And in his own soul touches farthest shores.
    Though he be stript of all, Powers from far replenish him,
    Powers of the streaming worlds that through him stream.
    O throbbing heart, O lifted arms, O tenderness,
    O only capable of grief supreme!
    O earth for ever mingled with unearthliness
    Because the eternal with the brief is twined!
    Wonder of breath that is momentary and tremulous
    Suffices him who breathes eternal mind.
    Vision that dawns beyond knowledge shall deliver him
    From all that flattered, threatened, foiled, betrayed.
    Lo, having nothing, he is free of all the universe,
    And where light is, he enters unafraid.


THE END




[Illustration: Decoration]

  LONDON: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
  CHISWICK PRESS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75422 ***