Collected Poems (19 page)

I saw a handful of white stars

Blooming in a width of grass;

I saw a cherry tree, snow-white,

In woods as naked-cold as glass.

I saw a blue leaf zigzag down —

The bluebird with his russet throat!

From out the sallow cane-brake stole

Another bluebird’s aching note.

The blue, the white, I wrote them down

To soothe my heart when spring was over.

No need, or help, alas, to write

That bluebird’s “Lover, lover, lover!”

                         Ah, he was white and slender

                         And the lamplight turned him gold

                         And his groping hands were tender

                         And his kisses never bold.

How shall I sleep through the long, long nights

                         In my wide cold-sheeted bed,

Hearing the wild geese crying in their flights,

                                        And me afraid,

And him not by to turn and hold me to his heart

                         In the way he knew,

And me no longer folded to his heart,

                                        Thinking him true!

Limpid lavender like water-hyacinths

The light floods on after the sun is down

And tips ethereally the primrose moon.

There is a delicate music in the films of the air,

And I remember how I saw, long, long ago,

A primrose slip of a girl, with lowered lids

And fugitive smile such as Luini loved,

Flush ethereally with the flooding of first love.

               Could I pluck down Aldebaran

               And haze the Pleiads in your hair

I could not add more burning to your beauty

Or lend a starrier coldness to your air.

               If I were cleaving terrible waters

               With death ahead on the visible sands

I could not turn and stretch my hands more wildly,

More vainly turn and stretch to you my hands.

Here’s tansy for you, and a sprig of rue.

Such simples are not worn upon the brow,

    But next a heart they’ll keep it true—

                         Or did till now.

    A sprig of rue should keep it true

    And tansy’s good as any vow.

    But round your heart, not round your brow

    Wear them, and wear enough for two.

    It does not seem a piteous thing to pass

From out the passionate sunlight and to never see

    Light-loving winds press down the tremulous grass

                         Inconstantly.

    The closing of the eyes, the clean forgetting,

The silence broken by no whispering love-calls,

    These willingly I’d take — not once regretting

                         Unheard footfalls.

    What power lies in long, untender kisses

To steal the tears from pain, the innocence from mirth!

    What loved exchange — these desolate, hurt blisses

                         For folded earth!

Love, they say, is kind:

    Nay, wrinkles here

And here love gave to me

    And quenched my eyes.

    Love is not kind.

A god, they say, is love.

    Do gods, then, dull

The aureate dawn and bleach

    The purple haze?

    No god is love.

A boy, they say, is love.

    His hunter’s eyes,

Alert and cold, I saw,

    Insatiable,

    And they were old.

Give back, O love, give back

    What you have stole,

And I will make return

    Of all your gifts —

    And go, enriched.

Shake out, dark-tressed and multitudinous storm-winds,

Your theft of scarlet leaves for Hecate’s hair,

Your coral bits from autumn’s dead clenched hand,

Your brittle blooms that once had breath and color,

Asters and docks and hateful immortelles —

Scatter them down, but bear away the summer

And hopes that were and loves that could not be.

Strip off the garlands, hang the trees with fire

Of frost and clanking armor of blue ice.

There is much death abroad and for a tomb

Starkness were needed and unmelted tears.

Welcome, dark-tressed and multitudinous storm-winds.

Strike down into my breast, O sun, and cleanse my soul —

    Shadows are here and ailments of the dark!

    Burn out the horror, sear away the dread,

    Beat like live hope in spark on molten spark.

Lone in your uncouth solitude of chasmed air

    You scale the sky, reckless of end or change,

    Chanting like some wild Himalayan shepherd

    Wind-rocked, enraptured, on his bleak vast range.

Eternity will pass and down the blue cliffs hear

    You singing, vigorous still in fierce delight.

    Strike through my breast and pour your courage in —

    Enough to last this little way to night.

Delicious hurt is in the throb

Of every ruby in youth’s blood:

Moonlight or love can call a sob,

Or red trees in a drizzling wood.

We own a strength we never guess

When warm and weak with April’s wine,

A fortitude against the stress

Of tragic things young hearts divine.

The visions that we could not bear

Turned facts are borne almost with grace:

The future with its heartbreak air

Arrives unflushed and commonplace.

Far-travelled in the land of pain,

Fate’s clear worst warrant learned by rote,

I watch the red trees in the rain

With eyes undimmed and unhurt throat.

Fingerless cactus hands heal in the sun

And tortured olive trees grope up the hills;

A lizard feigns to sleep but flinching kills

The busy spider in her web half done.

The gaunt Sicilian pastures burn blue-white,

The sunlight rains its blue perpetual rain;

The south is still the south, but not again

Shall I find there my kingdom, Heart’s Delight.

Oh, not on hills of blue eternal lustre

Build we the kingdom of our heart’s delight,

But on love’s shale, that quakes above a night

Where ocean yawns and screaming storm-birds cluster.

The nights of autumn stars are never still,

For without gust the heavy acorns fall

And rattle on the roof — the oak’s proud gift

And happy show of his accomplishment.

For this he shouldered storms and stripping hail,

For this unwrinkled in the weak spring sun

His velvet buds and shook his tassels out

And ruffled noisily in boisterous May.

For this — a fall of acorns in the starlight.

But where they fall, what burgeoning or death

Awaits them on the sparkling, plangent ground

Are not to his bronze peace inquietudes.

On glittering shale, perhaps, or sterile sand

Their hope of swelling spring will waste away;

Perhaps the droves of night-marauding hogs,

Scuffling and loud, will eat the last smooth one;

Perhaps the little children, up at dawn,

Scouring the deep-rimed leaves for treasure-trove,

Will set them with their spools and broken glass

For patterns in their fairy palaces;

Perhaps not one will burst and branch and grow

A windy place for elf-eyed boys to climb,

A shade for clasping lovers in the night,

A spangled roof for old folk in the rain.

He will not care: his joy is to have done

The appointed deed, not guess the deed’s result.

Along his branches creeps the bright-eyed frost.

He spills his fruit and laughs against the stars.

Outside the Earthly Paradise,

    Beneath its cool high walls,

I walk the little grass-blurred path

    Where sunlight seldom falls.

I try no more the guarded gates

    That will not let me in;

I cease to wonder what the cause,

    What accident, what sin.

I walk the lonely path that’s mine,

    My heart and I employ

Our solitude in songs about

    The near-by Kingdom’s joy.

And once, while singing thus, we heard

    Applause and friendly cries,

And saw, high up, our happy kin,

    Love in their lovely eyes.

The path of lonely wayfaring

    Ends where I cannot tell:

Outside the Earthly Paradise

    I know — but that is well.

When I see your beauty the beasts in me lie down

And I know the good man that I might have been.

To watch you is more cleansing than clear sunsets

And more regretful than the deeds that I have done.

If memory could only keep me perfect

And not fade out to leave me with myself!

With all my altars ashes and my gods asleep

You with your marvellous sad infinite beauty

Make me kneel down and know what life could be —

Unhurtfulness and worship and sure trust.

But I have missed you in the passing of the ships

And as a stranger only watch you pass.

Yet seeing you tonight in your great beauty

I shall dream calmly of a clear green sky

Filled with wild white swans flying, flying over,

Against the hardly-visible, wide-swarming stars.

Along the just-returning green

That fledges field and berm and brake

The purple-veined white violets lean,

               Scarcely awake;

And pear and plum and apple trees,

Evoked to bloom before they leaf,

Lift cloudy branches filled with bees

               Strange as new grief.

A thousand springs will poise and pass

And leave no track beneath the sun:

Some gray-eyed lad, cool-cheeked as grass,

               Will watch each one,

And wonder, as I wonder here,

And find no clue I have not found,

And smile before he joins me, near

                         But underground.

If there were any room within my heart

For godly pride to linger, I should not kneel

And clasp your feet. But there’s no tenant here

Save love, and he has made me your idolater.

I am alone, belovèd, but for you.

Cast out the sea-look from your eyes and look

On me, my utter self — no luring left,

No unused wile to whet your appetite.

You know me all, and all of me is yours.

I should have kept some harlot reticence

To bate the surfeiting beast in you. Alas!

Shrink not. Men’s modesty is but in speech.

These are still gray eyes and pomegranate lips

As once you called them, whispering through my hair

In the dawn-stillness when the dawn-bird sang,

And blissfully your drowsy kisses clung.

What is the loss that loses me your favor,

Your misty voice, your eyes spilled full of color,

Your hands whose very stillness in a curve

Betrayed their greediness to reach for mine?

Ah, do you dream, lover no longer young,

That those frail ecstasies can be lived over

If only on some new young breast you slumber

And fresher lips yearn to you in the dark?

There is no second spring: your first is past

And it was passed with me and you are mine!

Or can a woman never claim as hers

The heart of any man before it breaks?

Oh, is the love of man a sunset waning,

A music slipping by, a one day’s flower,

Its very fleetingness the magic flaw

That lures the fixed idolatrous love of woman?

Say not it is the sea that summons you,

Or such affairs as chafing heroes plan:

Hearted as that fierce pleading wanderer

That once was you, nothing could draw you from me!

Belovèd, leave me not! There is such terror

In the loneliness of souls that once were large!

Though yours be never lonely, without you

Mine were a gray rock in a wintry sun.

No use, no use! The touch of you tells me that.

This body that I gave you when the gift

Was begged as sole alternative to death

Has served and staled.… The sea calls and you go.

Then go.… No, I should hate a sea-cold kiss;

Remembered ones will do.… And I’ll endure

Loneliness with more profit and more pride

Than you an aging man’s concupiscence.

The lakes of the sky are clearer than day

    And all but the great stars are drowned,

The glorying winds and the phosphorous clouds

    Fling the dark in swift coils on the ground,

And the burning bleared moon in a halo of bronze

    Is dashed through the zenith like sound.