Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (623 page)

But she
Should have been dead nine thousand years and more,
Says our Chinese professor. For such acting
Was proper to the days and time of TSüang:
It’s hopelessly demoded, dead and gone!
To-day we have — Chinese chiropodists
Who smile like toads at Paris mannequins
In the sacred name of Progress. Well, well, well!
I’m not regretting it — No vain regrets!
What’s that —

Out of the loom of the Philosopher’s wood
Two figures brushing on the frozen grass.
The Uhlan and the cook. So I cried out:
“So late at night and not yet in the barracks!
Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?”... “Oh ghosts! oh ghosts,”
I got my answer: “Friend,
In our old home the air’s so thick with ghosts
You couldn’t breathe if they were an objection!”
And so I said: “Well, well!” to make them pass....

Just a glimmer of light there was across the grass
And on my barrow mound. Upon his head
The gleam of a helmet, and some sort of pelt
About his shoulders and the loom of a spear.
You never know these German regiments,
The oddest uniforms they have; and as for her
Her hair was all across her shoulders and her face,
Woodland embraces bring the hairpins out...
“My friend,” I said, “you’d better hurry home
Or else you’ll lose your situation!” They
Bickered in laughter and the man just said:
“You’re sitting on it!”
So I moved a little,
Apologetically, just as it
It was his table in a restaurant.
So he said calmly, looking down at me:
“They call these mounds the Hunnen Gräber — Graves
Of Huns — a modern, trifling folk!
We’ve slept in them well on nine thousand years
My wife and I. The dynasty TSuang
Then reigned in China — well, you know their ways
Of courting. But your specialty just now
I understand’s not human life but death.
I died with a wolf at my throat, this woman here
With a sword in her stomach. Yes she fell on it
To keep me company in that tumulus.
Millions and millions of dead there lie round here
In the manœuvre grounds of the Seventeenth.
Oh, yes, I’m up to date, why not, why not?
When they’ve the Sappers here in garrison
The silly chaps come digging in these mounds
For practice; but they’ve not got down to us.
The Seventeenth just scutter up and down
At scaling practice and that’s rather fun.
There was a sergeant took a chap by the ear
Last year and threw him bodily down the mound;
Then the recruit up with his bayonet
And stuck him through the neck — no end of things
We find for gossip in nine thousand years!
A Mongol people? Yes of course we were
I knew her very well that Queen who loved,
With the rice white face—” Ta-why’s” her proper name
And that adultery bred heaps of trouble!
You’ve heard of Troy? “Tra-hai’s” the real name
As Ta-why’s Helen. Well, you know all that?
That trouble sent us here, being burnt out
By the King called Ko-ha! And we wandered on
In just ten years of burning towns. This slave
My wife came from Irkutsk way to the east
Where the tundra is — You know the nightingales
Come there in spring, and so they buried us
Finger to finger as the ritual is.
Not know the ritual? Well, a mighty chief
Is buried in a chamber like a room
Walled round with slabs of stone. But mighty lovers
Lie on their backs at both arms’ length, so far
That just each little finger touches. Well
That’s how they buried us. A hundred years
It took to get accustomed to the change.
We lay just looking up — just as you might
Upwards through quiet water at the stars,
The roots of the grass, and other buryings,
Lying remembering and touching fingers.
Just still and quiet. Then I heard a whisper
Lasting a hundred years or so; “Your lips,”
It said, “Your lips! your lips! your lips!” And then
It might have been five more score years. I felt
Her fingers crawling, crawling, up my wrist.
And always the voice, call, calling; “Give your lips!”

It must have taken me a thousand years
 
— The Dead are patient — just to know that she
Was calling for my lips. What an embrace!
My God what an embrace was ours through the Earth!
My friend, if you should chance to meet Old Death
That unprogressive tyrant, tell him this,
He execrates my name — but tell him this —
He calls me Radical! Red Socialist,
That sort of thing. But you just tell him this,
The revolutionary leader of his realms
Got his ambition from his dead girl’s lips.
Tell him in future he should spare hot lovers,
Though that’s too late! We’re working through the earth,
By the score, by the million. Half his empire’s lost.
How can he fight us? He has but one dart
For every lover of the sons of Ahva!
You call her Eve. This is a vulgar age..
And so beside the woodland in the sheen
And shimmer of the dewlight, crescent moon
And dew wet leaves I heard the cry “Your lips!
Your lips! Your lips.” It shook me where I sat,
It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed,
The call of the dead. A multitudinous
And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed,
Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips
Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms
The coldness of the dew — and all a gleam
Translucent, moonstruck as of moving glasses,
Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders
Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods...

There came great rustlings from the copper leaves
And pushing outwards, shouldering, a boar
With seven wives — a monstrous tusky brute.
I rose and rubbed my eyes and all eight fled
Tore down the mountain through the thick of the leaves
Like a mighty wave of the sea that poured itself
Farther and farther down the listening night.
All round me was the clearing, and white mist
Shrouded the frosty tussocks of old grass.
And in the moonlight a wan fingerpost
(I could not read the lower row of words.)
Proclaimed: “
Forbidden!”
That’s High Germany.
Take up your glasses. “Prosit!” to the past,
To all the Dead!

RHYMIN
G

THE bells go chiming
O’er Germany
I sit here rhyming...

If fun were funny,
And love lived long,
And always honey
Were sweet on the tongue,
Would life be better
Or freedom free?

If each love-letter
Spelt loyalty,
If we didn’t go timing
The dance with a fetter?

If gold were true gold
For alchemists
 
— I sit here rhyming —
And all were new gold
In morning mists?
Would laughter measure
The step of life
If each took pleasure
In each’s wife?
If much were undone
In what we see
And we built up London
In High Germany;
Without much pity
For crushed out grain
We’d fling the city
Across this plain —
A phantom city

Like old Cokayne —
Where old dead passions,
Come true again
And old time fashions
Be new again,
Where jests once witty
Would start again,
And long lost pity
Take heart again.

So I sit rhyming
Of fun to be,
And the bells all go chiming
O’er High Germany.
Blown, amid leaves, above

AUTUMN EVENIN
G

THE cold light dies, the candles glow,
The wind whirls down the bare allée
Outside my gleaming window-panes
The phantom populations go,
Blown, amid leaves, above, below.

Yet these are solid German folk
Outside, beneath the thinning planes
And the reflections that awoke
At candle time upon my panes
Are misty, unsubstantial gleams.

Only outside, obscurity,
The waning light, the cold blue beams
And rafts of shadow trick the eye;
So that the frozen passers-by
Look ghosts — and only real seems
My candle lighted, lonely place,
The gleaming windows and your face
Looking in likeness from the wall
Where the fantastic shadows fall....

Now the ghosts pass, the cold wind cries,
The leaves sift downwards, the world dies,
But in the shadows, lo! your eyes.

IN THE TRAI
N

OUT of the window I see a dozen great stars, burning bright,
Flying in silence, engrossed in the uttermost
depths of the night,
Star beyond star, growing clear, flying on as I pass
through the night.
It’s many days since last I saw the stars
Look through the night sky’s bars,
Like mists and veils of shimmer and shining gauze —
So little time we have and so much cause
To stay beneath the roof; so much to do!
The life we lead!... Well, you
Get to your bed at ten, and you, away
I like my glass of wine to end the day.

Now as the train ambles on, slowly and I watch alone
Stars and black woods and the stream, dim in the
light of the stars
Winding away to the past beneath Castor and Pollux and Mars;
It seems as long since last I held your hand
As since I saw the stars.
And ah! if we meet in this land,
And ah! if we meet oversea
In the dark where the traffic of London races
Or in these castled, woodland places —
And then — wherever it be
Shall not our thoughts go away into deeps
Where the mind sleeps and the brain too sleeps,
As when we take thought and we gaze
Past all the bee swarms of stars
Spread o’er the night and its bars,
Past mists and veils and shimmer and shine and haze
Into the deep and silent places,
The still, unfathomable spaces
Where the brain sleeps and the mind too sleeps
And all the deeps stretch out beyond the deeps
And thought dies down before infinity?...
So, in an utter satisfaction
Beyond all thought and beyond all action
In a blindness more blind than the starless places
I shall stretch my face to where your face is.
And over head, over land and sea
Shall the white stars wheel in their reverie.

THE EXIL
E

MY father had many oxen
Yet all are gone;
My father had many servants;
I sit alone.
He followed the Southern women,
He drank of the Southern wines,
He fought in the Southern quarrels —
My star declines.

I will go to the Southern houses, I will sit’mid the maids at hire;
I will bear their meat to the tables and carry wood to their fire;
Where the cheep of the rat and mouse is all night
long will I lie,
Awake in the byres and the stables. When the white
moon looks from the sky,
And over the Southern waters, and the wind blows
warm from the South,
With the bitter tears in my eyelids and the heavy
sighs in my mouth,
I shall hear through the gaping gables how the
Southern night bird sings
Of hirelings once Queen’s daughters and slaves the seed of Kings.

MOODS ON THE MOSELL
E

“SWEET! Sweet! Sweet!” sings the bird upon the bough.
But though he may call for sweetness
We have other things to witness,
Not all cherry-pie and neatness,
Now.

“Mourn! Mourn! Mourn!” cry the owls among the vines.
But it’s neither death nor fleetness
That have any utter fitness,
Not a final joy or sorrow,
As we press out wines.

“Change! Slow change!” ticks the church clock
through the snow.
And somehow ‘twixt winter’s dying
And spring apple-blossoms flying
And the summer hops a-tying...
It’s now haughty and now humble
Change! Slow change! And rough-and-tumble.
Down to-day and up to-morrow
That our songs sing now.

CANZONE A LA SONAT
A

(To E. P.)

WHAT do you find to boast of in our age,
To boast of now, my friendly sonneteer,
And not to blush for, later? By what line
Do you entrain from Mainz to Regions saner?
Count our achievements and uplift my heart;
Blazon our fineness, Optimist, I toil
Whilst you crow cocklike. But I cannot see

What’s left behind us for a heritage
For our young children? What but nameless fear?
What creeds have we to teach, legends to twine
Saner than spun our dams? Or what’s there saner
That we’ve devised to comfort those who part,
One for some years to walk the stone-clad soil,
One to his fathom-deep bed? What coin have we

For ransom when He grimly lays his siege
Whose dart is sharpened for our final hurt?
I think we do not think; we deem more fair
Earth with unthought on death; we deem him gainer
Whose brow unshadowed shows no wrinkled trail
Of the remembrance of the countless slain;
Who sets the world to fitful melody —

To fitful minstrelsy that’s summer’s liege
When all the summer’s sun-kissed fountains spurt
Kisses of bubbling sound about our hair.
I think we think that singing soul the gainer
Who disremembers that spent youth must fail,
That after autumn comes, few leaves remain
And all the well-heads freeze, and melody

O’er frozen waters grows too hoarse with age
To keep us from extremity of fear.
When agèd poets pen another line
And agèd maidens coif their locks in saner
And staider snoods; when winter of the heart
Comes on and beds beneath the frozen soil
Gape open — where’s your grinning melody?