Complete Poems and Plays (21 page)

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —

To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name

Behind the hands that wove

The intolerable shirt of flame

Which human power cannot remove.

We only live, only suspire

Consumed by either fire or fire.

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others‚

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always —

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one. 

Let these memorials of built stone — music’s

enduring instrument, of many centuries of

patient cultivation of the earth, of English

verse

be joined with the memory of this defence of

the islands

and the memory of those appointed to the grey

ships — battleship, merchantman, trawler —

contributing their share to the ages’ pavement

of British bone on the sea floor

and of those who, in man’s newest form of gamble

with death, fight the power of darkness in air

and fire

and of those who have followed their forebears

to Flanders and France, those undefeated in de-

feat, unalterable in triumph, changing nothing

of their ancestors’ ways but the weapons

and those again for whom the paths of glory are

the lanes and the streets of Britain:

to say, to the past and the future generations

of our kin and of our speech, that we took up

our positions, in obedience to instructions.

Not the expression of collective emotion

Imperfectly reflected in the daily papers.

Where is the point at which the merely individual

Explosion breaks

In the path of an action merely typical

To create the universal, originate a symbol

Out of the impact? This is a meeting

On which we attend

Of forces beyond control by experiment —

Of Nature and the Spirit. Mostly the individual

Experience is too large, or too small. Our emotions

Are only ‘incidents’

In the effort to keep day and night together.

It seems just possible that a poem might happen

To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry —

That is a life.

War is not a life: it is a situation,

One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,

A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,

Enveloped or scattered.

The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,

Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception

Of private experience at its greatest intensity

Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,

May be affirmed in verse.

A man’s destination is his own village,

His own fire, and his wife’s cooking;

To sit in front of his own door at sunset

And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson

Playing in the dust together.

Scarred but secure, he has many memories

Which return at the hour of conversation,

(The warm or the cool hour, according to the climate)

Of foreign men, who fought in foreign places,

Foreign to each other.

A man’s destination is not his destiny

Every country is home to one man

And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely

At one with his destiny, that soil is his.

Let his village remember.

This was not your land, or ours: but a village in the Midlands,

And one in the Five Rivers, may have the same graveyard.

Let those who go home tell the same story of you:

Of action with a common purpose, action

None the less fruitful if neither you nor we

Know, until the judgment after death,

What is the fruit of action.

The children who explored the brook and found

A desert island with a sandy cove

(A hiding place, but very dangerous ground,

For here the water buffalo may rove,

The kinkajou, the mangabey, abound

In the dark jungle of a mango grove‚

And shadowy lemurs glide from tree to tree —

The guardians of some long-lost treasure-trove)

Recount their exploits at the nursery tea

And when the lamps are lit and curtains drawn

Demand some poetry, please. Whose shall it be,

At not quite time for bed? …

Or when the lawn

Is pressed by unseen feet, and ghosts return

Gently at twilight, gently go at dawn,

The sad intangible who grieve and yearn;

When the familiar scene is suddenly strange

Or the well known is what we have yet to learn,

And two worlds meet, and intersect, and change;

When cats are maddened in the moonlight dance,

Dogs cower, flitter bats, and owls range

At witches’ sabbath of the maiden aunts;

When the nocturnal traveller can arouse

No sleeper by his call; or when by chance

An empty face peers from an empty house;

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?

By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practised with natural ease;

By the delicate, invisible web you wove —

The inexplicable mystery of sound.