Collected Poems (29 page)

What disputations doth my spirit hold,

Contending with itself of this and that,

Laggard, alas, in action, but most bold

To storm celestial citadels with chat!

Now will it hale the villain flesh to bar,

Condemning it for all its own transgressions,

Holding itself a virgin winter-star,

Eclipsed but by poor body’s vile obsessions.

Now when much weariness hath done it spite

It calleth body as the only leech,

Beggeth of him a music, or a sight

Curative — leaves in rain or thundering beach —

And ever in its loneliness it cries,

“Show me her hands, her mouth, her pitiful eyes.”

When I allow my schoolèd eyes to lift

And see the beautiful ones of earth drift past

With parted lips and scooped wings of the swift

Along their temples — each lovelier than the last —

Seeing the wistful hunger in their eyes,

I love those damnèd ladies sweet of heart

Who draw the rippling curtains at sunrise

And watch the stranger, solaced by their art,

Sleeping and warm and childish: I would teach

Their kindness to my heart and solace too,

Like Magdala and Cressid, all and each,

To each unfaithful, but to all most true.

But there are some whose fortune is to be

Lonely: no beautiful one has need of me.

Let me confess I am no Launcelot —

But not to you confess, or you, or you,

The many I have loved, for you have got

What share of me you asked, your every due,

And we are quits. But to my secret soul

I make confession — and absolve as well —

That little parts and never the great rôle

I’ve played, and often, in love’s carnival.

Well cast, no doubt. But I have read, somewhere,

A long time since, and liked, a sadder plot

Of two that wept or kissed on a dark stair

Hearing the winds howl over Camelot.…

Thou Maker of hearts flawed and dissonant,

The pain left out of mine — this I resent.

Knowing you give yourself without desire —

No golden turmoil and no fevered shame —

I take you with a four-fold kindled fire,

My salty torment coloring the flame.

Your acquiescence I reward with all

The secret riches only love should see,

Share beauty with you, run before you call,

Make your desires my one idolatry.

O I have made myself so rare a lover

That though I get from you nor praise nor blame

The world applauds, and, seeing but the cover,

Gives to the bawdy thing a sacred name.

But not for you I play this zealous rôle:

From cold-fanged lust somehow it saves the soul.

Though we be breasted shallowly, to hold

Deciduous loves that live their sweetness out,

Impotent by dimension to enfold

One mighty love and single, never doubt

But there are breasts can chalice love’s full tide

With all its weight of wind and stars and rain,

Though lodgment for a surge so deep, so wide

Demands the hollow where some sea has lain.

We are but woodland pools whose shallow urns

One summer empties and one April fills,

Doubling a neighborhood of flowers and ferns,

Devout for any star the great dark spills.

We are for wayfarers to drink from and forget,

Parting again the branches low and wet.

All that is lovely is incredible,

No sooner seen or heard or touched than gone

And not believed in by the mind too full

Of mirrors to recall what has withdrawn.

I am so filled with ghosts of loveliness

That I could furbish out and populate

A vacant star, so that the gods would press

To gaze and memorize and duplicate.

But here, alone, with fog about my heart,

Of all the beauty I have seen so plain

I seek to summon up so small a part

Two hands could hold it, and I seek in vain.

I only know your eyes and mouth and hair

Are beauty’s own: I cannot see them, dear.

With what unyielding fortitude of heart

We tap the prison walls to find escape,

Measure the thickness, calculate and chart, —

As if mole eyes could read the meagre tape!

Long after our unteemèd brain’s forgot

The hope of star or sun or crystal air,

We fumble at the hinges of the plot

And cipher on the whence and how and where.

Our knowledge foots no sum: our seasoned pen

Writes question-marks we dry with our last breath.

Lavish in horror to the race of men,

Thou makest a boon, O God, of horrible death, —

Yet canst not wring this cry from minds mature

“Let us seek anodynes, for there’s no cure.”

Not the blue flagstones of eternal space,

Sprinkled a little way with frugal fire,

Confound my mind, for there’s no mind can pace

Our visible moiety of space entire

From earth to moon, from moon to Formilhaut

And out and out beyond the phosphorent weave

Of nebulæ and the last golden tow

Of suns pulsing at anchor, that can conceive

Ending or no beyond. A hope is here,

Ambiguous, obscure, but still a hope:

If mind’s machinery, this thinking gear

Boasts the eternal for its mould and scope,

Is he eternal that I thought could die —

This flash of dew, this frosty breath, this I?

I have no patience, no philosophy

To heal at all the wound that we call life:

One after one the anodynes for me

Have failed. Still as of old I see the strife,

Savage and sad, but have forgot its cause

Nor glimpse its outcome any more. The stare

Of truth has not revealed immutable laws

Or far beneficences or the care

Of any intellect, alert, serene.

Instead, these I am sure of as I wait:

Pain, the hot-sanded heart’s one evergreen;

Ignorance, rubbing slick the cell of fate.

On, in the dark, then; cloak the decent scars:

The cage of darkness shows, not hides the stars.

Chart back as best he might the way he’d come

And not a turn but still seemed best to choose,

Yet he had reached a wilderness, wherefrom

He must escape or all the struggle lose.

The urgency to act was thick upon him,

But still he paused to place the past mistake:

Inevitable blameless by-gones stun him,

His loyalties to shaping justice break.

At last he saw and took, like one quite tired,

The path ahead, obscure and full of stress:

To see was easy, but to take required

The solemn fortitude of hopelessness.

His clothes are shiny now that once were napped:

The liveliest beast grows somewhat seedy, trapped.

All day the vultures sit and tear my heart

Among the scorched unearthly tremulous peaks:

All night it heals and grows with mystic art

Pasture again for purple hammering beaks.

How long will days return with latticed light

And brassy plumes upon my side like fleece?

However long, longer still the night,

The healing longer, and the long dark peace.

I’ll push the iron heavens back,

I’ll lift them from my shoulders’ rack,

And walk awhile and be at ease

And fellow with the sober trees.

They wear the morning’s sequined wet

As calmly as the turbulent jet

When lavender and silver eels

Leap from the drunken tempest’s creels.

Each battles only for the space

Demanded by his destined grace

And when that width of sky is got

Envies no other tree his lot.

No sound he makes not musical,

No thing he has not beautiful;

When comes what comes to each, alone,

He stands and dies, and makes no moan …

For me by useless riddles stung,

Unwise in silence and in tongue,

Beating at walls I think are doors,

Neglecting mine for heaven’s chores,

Wisdom and patience might be found

In trees content to stand their ground.

Breastful of shadow,

How proudly they go,

Secret in sorrow,

Silent in woe,

Never a light

Along lids to denote

All of the tears

Caught back in the throat.

Regal the place is —

Heaven or hell —

Fit to receive them,

Wounded so well.

Bring them no song from Faerie,

Lend them no dreamy lies —

These have a dread in their bosoms,

These have a hurt in their eyes.

No scarlet skeins nor patterns,

No scents nor sounds nor dyes —

Tears make warm the bosom,

Kisses heal the eyes.

They tell me that essential you

    Is just essential me —

Electrons shifting, you’d be man

    And I a twinkling tree.

That could have happened easily

    Odd twenty years ago,

But you, to match me, must have worn

    Your moonlight and your snow.

Her shadows are rimmed with silver,

And there is wild beautiful sunlight in her anger;

Her injustice is some virtue in excess,

And the dapple of dew is on her passion.

Because of her I am like the morning for laughter

And like the morning-glory vine for innocence;

Rain-washed leaves might fillet my forehead

And a dream could hover there.

Always I seem to be lying

On the green soft meadow of the world

Beneath the blue bell of heaven where the birds hurry,

Repeating lauds and magnificats and glorias:

The blue bell of heaven is pealing,

The blue bells of the morning-glory ring out hosannas,

It is Easter morning

And my heart is a steeple with chimes.

    All in the blue, blue morning

               Our Lady led our Lord

    Whose eyes were blue like flowers

               Along a lilied sward.

He touched the lily throats and laughed

               Like any blond wee child;

                         Like any mother, she

               Touched his and smiled.…

                         I have a morning-glory,

               I have a golden gourd —

                         I need our Lady

               And a blond wee lord.

    “How many trees in your forest?”

                         “One:

               The rest are saplings

               That preen in the sun.”

    “What happens in your forest

               When storms run?”

                         “Odd,

               The saplings add hardly

               A leaf to the sod,

    But the tree bows like Jacob

               Wrestling with God.”

A star, a cloud, a bird, a bell

Know that the world does very well,

But snakes and flitter-mice and men

Perceive it as a noisome pen.

Sky and steeple and top o’ tree

Are places where I long to dwell

    And do, infrequently,

But house of earth and field and fen,

Fair for night-stops now and then,

    Are usual home to me.

No wonder but by fit and spell

I think the world does very well.

There will be other kisses on your eyes

    But none like mine,

And every kiss will be a shadow kiss

    Because of mine.

Your larkspur eyes with tears another brings

    Will surely shine,

But they refused my purple shrouds of sorrow,

    A gift divine.

Mortal you are, who might have been, a moment,

                         Mine.

Beaten, wounded, like to die,

Last of the lost battalion, I

Pour salt into my quaking wound,

Like my horn, red-gleaming, mooned,

And breathe a blast my brethren hear

Beyond these tumbled hills of fear.

In that far naked purple land

They lift to lip a musing hand:

“Defeat” they say, “defeat again,

The ancient doom, the ancient pain,”

— But louder than the victor’s jibe —

“The ancient courage of the tribe.”

Tuck the earth, fold the sod,

Drop the hollow-sounding clod.

Quiet’s come; time for sleeping,

Tired out of mirth and weeping,

Calmed at last of mirth and weeping.

Tuck the earth, fold the sod;

Quiet’s here, maybe God.

Only asters gone to seed,

Goldenrod and fennel-weed,

Make her meagre diadem,

Brede her snowy cuffs and hem.

Stitch the blossoms gone to feather

On her breast where frost’s the weather,

Here a sprig and there a spray —

Loveliness has gone its way.

There are those who had as lief

Be buried with remembered grief

As live a long long time with it

Stuck in the live heart it has split.

Asters here. — Her only care

Was breathing anything but air;

Her only wish — let’s lay them slanted,

So — a simple one, and granted.