Collected Poems (17 page)

You say this poppy blooms so red

Because its roots were daily fed

On last year’s cold and festering dead?

Such is the blessèd way of earth;

Oblivious, intent on mirth,

To turn rank death to gorgeous birth!

Even this brutal agony,

So hideous, so foul, will be

Romance to others, presently.

And would it not be proud romance

Falling in some obscure advance

To rise, a poppy field of France?

I have reached a green, green island

    In a sea without a shore.

Behind the grey waves crumble,

    And I will not look before.

Here there are music and leisure

    And the touch of a tender hand;

Here is my golden river

    And the warm, wide river land.

I am safe to-day, if never;

    They have given me love and rest;

Sailing the sea of sorrow

    I have touched at the isle of the blest.

Her spirit’s loveliness was such

Her body’s loveliness I could not see;

I only know her eyes were heavenly blue

That now are grey with tears for me.

Let not a foreign earth weigh down my head,

Nor mingle with the dust that was my heart!

Lay me among my own when I am dead,

In my own land, eternally a part

Of all I know and love. I could not sleep

With strangers here, and there is aching need

Of sleep after much weariness, and deep

Were mine at home. It is a place, indeed,

For long, untroubled sleep. All summer there

The pale somnambulists of heaven pass

Immense and silver through the turquoise air,

Trailing their purple garments on the grass.

Though friendless, childless, honorless I come,

They will know I am theirs; they will make room.

We are the sons of disaster,

Deserted by gods that are named,

Thrust in a world with no master,

Our altars prepared but unclaimed;

Wreathed with the blood-purple aster,

Victims, foredoomed, but untamed.

Behold, without faith we were fashioned,

Bereft the assuaging of lies;

Thirsty for dreams we have passioned,

Yet more for truth that denies;

Aware that no powers compassioned,

We have turned to our hearts and grown wise.

Leisure we loved and laughter;

Our portion is labor and pain;

For home we are given a rafter

Of wind and a lintel of rain,

And all that our hearts followed after

Is taken and naught doth remain.

Yet never a new generation

But shall live by the battle we fight,

And prosper of our immolation

And reap of our anguish, delight.

Accepting the great abnegation

We are fathers, not children, of light.

Bruised with the scourges of sorrow,

Broke with the terrible rod,

Bidden for respite to borrow

A poppy-red swathe of the sod,

Yet this is our hope — that to-morrow

Will yield of our strivings, God.

Voice of Earth:

               These are my children’s voices! Born

               Not of the sun, who, for a heritage,

               Giveth a light wherewith to see, a fire

               To burn away the dross gat from my loins;

               Nor of the moon whose sons are mad with beauty;

               Nor of the stars, for they, thro’ change and drift,

               Behold the steadfast heavens and the pole.

               But these are mine, unfathered and unclaimed,

               Sustained by shining from no sun nor moon

               Nor fixed nor vagrant star.

               Yea, they are mine —

               Dust that is black with my ferocious blood

               And brackish with my tears.

               Their days are short at best, and they return

               With shuddering to my bosom’s dark, yet now

               They rob each other of the little years their due,

               And choke the houses of the whimpering dead!

               And why? O why?

               Another’s folly wrought this holocaust,

               Calling it falsely by a sacred name,

               Turning the shambles to an altar stone,

               And butchery to sacrifice!

I have sung me a stave, a stave or two,

    I have drunk me a stoop of wine,

I have roystered across a world that was dew

    And a sea that was sunlight and brine.

And now I’ll go down where the need is not

    Of a singing heart, but a sword;

I’ll fight where the dead men welter and rot

    With the hard-pressed hosts of the Lord.

And should I come back again, ‘twill be

    With accolade and spurs,

And many a tale of chivalry,

    And the deeds of warriors.

And should I not, O break for me

    No buds nor funeral boughs —

I go with the noblest company

    That ever death did house.

How blossomy must be the halls of Death

Against the coming of the newly dead!

How sweet with woven garlands gatherèd

From pastures where the pacing stars take breath!

And with what tender haste, each with his wreath

Of welcome, must the elder dead return

To greet about the doors with dear concern

These much-loved, proud-eyed farers from beneath.

For these that come, come not forspent with years,

Nor bent with long despair, nor weak with tears,

They mount superbly thro’ the gold-flecked air,

The light of immolation in their eyes,

The green of youth eternal in their hair,

And Honor’s music on them like sunrise.

The dreamy rain comes down,

And cotton’s in the grass.

The farmers all complain —

But I watch armies pass.…

The ones that did not come

From Ivoiry again

Are marching down the road

And whistling in the rain.

The forty-two I saw

In Olsene, prone and pale,

With packs and helmets on

Pass by me, young and hale.

I hear their laughter plain —

Some blasphemous, quaint jest

That livens up their step

More than an hour’s rest.

They talk of Montfaucon,

Of Thielt and Chryshautem;

My cotton rows, it seems,

Are turnip fields to them.

It’s hard to stay indoors

With soldiers marching by.

And if you’ve hiked and fought

It’s hard until you die.

.   .   .   .   .

Dim Flanders rain comes down,

The cotton’s in the grass;

But I watch wistfully

Gay phantom armies pass.

Paul of Tarsus, I have enquired of Jesus

And meditated much and read your words

Directed to the wise Corinthians

Of whom am I. There is much beauty in

His life and therefore comfort, and there is beauty

In that unreasoning rush of eloquence

Of yours, so much it almost caught me up

And made me Christian. Such is the power of faith

Ablaze in one we know to be no fool!

I watched you as you preached that day in Athens:

You are no fool, nor saint, but one I judge

Of intellect that somehow has caught fire

And so misleads when it is shiningest.

I had hoped to find in you or in your Christ

Some answer to the questions that unanswered

Slay our wills.… There’s so much lost!

Parnassus there across the turquoise gulf

Still holds its rose and snow to the blown sun,

But no young Phoebus guides the golden car,

Nor will the years’ returning loveliness

For all its perfumed broidure bring again

The Twelve to the bright mountain place they loved.

The gods of Greece are dead, forever dead:

The Romans substitute idolatry;

And there’s such peace and idleness in the world

As gives the thinking powers full scope to soar,

And soar they do, but in red-beakèd bands

That darken all the sun and nurture find

On the Promethean bare heart of man.

How strange to see the labor of the world

Straining for plenteous food and drink and warmth,

For ease and freedom and the right to choose,

But winning these win only doubt and anguish!

Is this accessory to our coming here?

Is there no answer waiting to be found?

I judge the struggle for perfection if

Engaged in long enough, say thro’ the years

Of gorgeous youth, the ashen middle years,

Will end in calm, a kind of stale content —

No gush and quiver in the leafless tree!

But that’s the body’s dying, not the fight’s

Reward, old age not victory!

Yet who, save those few souls and stern

That passionate unto perfection walk

The alien earth scornful and sure,

Would pledge themselves to life-long virtue

Except exchanged for happiness, here

Or hereafter? Who, I ask and hear no answer.

‘Twas for the few that Socrates had thought:

Your Jesus had profounder bitterness

And, wroth against a universal woe,

Conceived a universal anodyne —

Heaven, his father’s Kingdom, Paradise.

Hence his success with slave and sick and poor —

The solace for their skimped experience

They find in dreams of restitution and

A promised land, whose king will dower and

Reward their loyalty with bliss eternal.

This promise of his kingdom and the immense

Illusion that he had, shared still by you,

Of coming once again and shortly to

Select mankind for punishment or saving

Are above all the concepts that ensure

His following, which when the fact disproves

Will fall away and be forgotten till

His name will vanish and the careless years

Hide with their passing sandals’ dust his dream.

Yet in this Jesus I detect always

Something more true and sound and saving than

The postulates of his philosophy.

Compared with Socrates his intellect

Lacked wonder, self-delight, sufficiency.

The Athenian in his noblest eloquence

Assumed himself a son of God, yet him

I understood, somehow: it seemed at least

Poetically true. But when your Jew

Speaks of his father, all that I never learned

Is near, I cannot think, but I can feel,

And ‘spite of me, I have the sense of wisdom

Simpler and fruitfuller and wiser than

All wisdom we had hardly learned before,

That turns irrelevant and pitiful

Much we had frayed and tattered our poor souls

In guessing. Yet when I turn to you for counsel —

And who of his untutored band but you

Is qualified in wide and leisured learning

To parley equal-minded with a Greek? —

I find a blur of words, a wall of thought,

That more completely hide the god I sense

Than the fantastic patter of his humble

Ignorant worshipers … Paul, Paul, I’d give

My Greek inheritance, my wealth and youth,

To speak one evening with that Christ you love

And never saw and cannot understand!

But he is dead and you alone are left,

Irascible and vehement and sure,

For me to turn to with the bleak bad question —

Do we then die? Or shall we be raised up? …

There is the hope always of other life,

After this choking room a width of air,

A star perhaps after this sallow earth,

After this place of prayer, a place of deeds.

No man but in his heart’s locked privacy

Dares hope this muffled transiency we hate

For its most bitter and ignoble failure

Ends not with what our ignorance calls death.

A Christ with promise of eternity

And proof could Christianize a hundred hundred worlds!

There are such glimpses of the never-seen,

Such breathings from the outer infinite,

The possible hath such nobility

As makes us suppliants for further chance —

Not repetition, but more scope, O Powers!

Yet better purposeless mortality

Than this mad answer you proclaim to us.

We shall rise up, you say: so far well said.

This essence that disquieteth itself

With less than truth, that will not tolerate

The fare whereon ’tis fed, but sickens so

For immortalities that it doth shape

Of its own yearning — piteously methinks —

Gods and a dwelling place of distant stars,

This surely hath a strength beyond mere days!

But then you add, with equal certainty,

“There’s too a resurrection of the flesh.”

This is your creed and final comfort, Jew,

That these our gyves and chains are never slipped,

That this captivity we thought a term

Carks to eternity, do what we will!

The impediments to every high resolve,

The traitors to our nascent deity,

The perfumed, warm, corporeal parts of us

That drug to sleep or death the impetuous will,

These are partakers of such after-life

As our fierce souls may grievously attain!

Tarsus, I’ll not accept eternal life

Hampered and foiled by this vile thing of flesh!

There is no fire can burn it pure, no rain

Can wash it clean, no death can scourge it slave!

The spirit that is holier than light

Its touch will stain, its vesture will pollute!