To where the sunset hung its wan gold cloths;
And you stood alone, watching them go,
And that mother-love like a demon drew you
from me
Towards England.
Along the road, after nightfall,
Along the glamorous birch-tree avenue
Across the river levels
We went in silence, and you staring to England.
So then there shone within the jungle darkness
Of the long, lush under-grass, a glow-worm's
sudden
Green lantern of pure light, a little, intense, fusing
triumph,
White and haloed with fire-mist, down in the
tangled darkness.
Then you put your hand in mine again, kissed me,
and we struggled to be together.
And the little electric flashes went with us, in the
grass,
Tiny lighthouses, little souls of lanterns, courage
burst into an explosion of green light
Everywhere down in the grass, where darkness was
ravelled in darkness.
Still, the kiss was a touch of bitterness on my mouth
Like salt, burning in.
And my hand withered in your hand.
For you were straining with a wild heart, back,
back again,
Back to those children you had left behind, to all
the aeons of the past.
And I was here in the under-dusk of the Isar.
At home, we leaned in the bedroom window
Of the old Bavarian Gasthaus,
And the frogs in the pool beyond thrilled with
exuberance,
Like a boiling pot the pond crackled with happiness,
Like a rattle a child spins round for joy, the night
rattled
With the extravagance of the frogs,
And you leaned your cheek on mine,
And I suffered it, wanting to sympathise.
At last, as you stood, your white gown falling from
your breasts,
You looked into my eyes, and said: "But this is
joy!"
I acquiesced again.
But the shadow of lying was in your eyes,
The mother in you, fierce as a murderess, glaring
to England,
Yearning towards England, towards your young
children,
Insisting upon your motherhood, devastating.
Still, the joy was there also, you spoke truly,
The joy was not to be driven off so easily;
Stronger than fear or destructive mother-love, it
stood flickering;
The frogs helped also, whirring away.
Yet how I have learned to know that look in your
eyes
Of horrid sorrow!
How I know that glitter of salt, dry, sterile,
sharp, corrosive salt!
Not tears, but white sharp brine
Making hideous your eyes.
I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my
chest, my belly,
Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through
my defenceless nakedness.
I have been thrust into white, sharp crystals,
Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated.
Ah, Lot's Wife, Lot's Wife!
The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column
of salt, like a waterspout
That has enveloped me!
Snow of salt, white, burning, eating salt
In which I have writhed.
Lot's Wife!--Not Wife, but Mother.
I have learned to curse your motherhood,
You pillar of salt accursed.
I have cursed motherhood because of you,
Accursed, base motherhood!
I long for the time to come, when the curse against
you will have gone out of my heart.
But it has not gone yet.
Nevertheless, once, the frogs, the globe-flowers of
Bavaria, the glow-worms
Gave me sweet lymph against the salt-burns,
There is a kindness in the very rain.
Therefore, even in the hour of my deepest, pas-
sionate malediction
I try to remember it is also well between us.
That you are with me in the end.
That you never look quite back; nine-tenths, ah,
more
You look round over your shoulder;
But never quite back.
Nevertheless the curse against you is still in my
heart
Like a deep, deep burn.
The curse against all mothers.
All mothers who fortify themselves in motherhood,
devastating the vision.
They are accursed, and the curse is not taken off
It burns within me like a deep, old burn,
And oh, I wish it was better.
BEUERBERG
_ON THE BALCONY_
IN front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost
ribbon of rainbow;
And between us and it, the thunder;
And down below in the green wheat, the labourers
Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.
You are near to me, and your naked feet in their
sandals,
And through the scent of the balcony's naked
timber
I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the
Lightning falls from heaven.
Adown the pale-green glacier river floats
A dark boat through the gloom--and whither?
The thunder roars. But still we have each other!
The naked lightnings in the heavens dither
And disappear--what have we but each other?
The boat has gone.
ICKING
_FROHNLEICHNAM_
You have come your way, I have come my way;
You have stepped across your people, carelessly,
hurting them all;
I have stepped across my people, and hurt them
in spite of my care.
But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding
We have come our ways and met at last
Here in this upper room.
Here the balcony
Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons
slowly
Go by with their loads of green and silver birch-
trees
For the feast of Corpus Christi.
Here from the balcony
We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-
green river
Goes between the pine-woods,
Over and beyond to where the many mountains
Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the
morning.
I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through
me, like the first
Breeze of the morning through a narrow white
birch.
You glow at last like the mountain tops when they
catch
Day and make magic in heaven.
At last I can throw away world without end, and
meet you
Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white;
At last you can throw immortality off, and I see you
Glistening with all the moment and all your
beauty.
Shameless and callous I love you;
Out of indifference I love you;
Out of mockery we dance together,
Out of the sunshine into the shadow,
Passing across the shadow into the sunlight,
Out of sunlight to shadow.
As we dance
Your eyes take all of me in a
s a communication;
As we dance
I see you, ah, in full!
Only to dance together in triumph of being together
Two white ones, sharp, vindicated,
Shining and touching,
Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.
_IN THE DARK_
A BLOTCH of pallor stirs beneath the high
Square picture-dusk, the window of dark sky.
A sound subdued in the darkness: tears!
As if a bird in difficulty up the valley steers.
"Why have you gone to the window? Why don't
you sleep?
How you have wakened me! But why, why do
you weep?"
_"I am afraid of you, I am afraid, afraid!
There is something in you destroys me--!"_
"You have dreamed and are not awake, come here
to me."
_"No, I have wakened. It is you, you are cruel to
me!"_
"My dear!"--_"Yes, yes, you are cruel to me. You
cast
A shadow over my breasts that will kill me at last."_
"Come!"--_"No, I'm a thing of life. I give
You armfuls of sunshine, and you won't let me live."_
"Nay, I'm too sleepy!"--_"Ah, you are horrible;
You stand before me like ghosts, like a darkness
upright."_
"I!"--_"How can you treat me so, and love me?
My feet have no hold, you take the sky from above me."_
"My dear, the night is soft and eternal, no doubt
You love it!"--_"It is dark, it kills me, I am put out."_
"My dear, when you cross the street in the sun-
shine, surely
Your own small night goes with you. Why treat
it so poorly?"
_"No, no, I dance in the sun, I'm a thing of life--"_
"Even then it is dark behind you. Turn round,
my wife."
_"No, how cruel you are, you people the sunshine
With shadows!"_--"With yours I people the
sunshine, yours and mine--"
"In the darkness we all are gone, we are gone
with the trees
And the restless river;--we are lost and gone
with all these."
_"But I am myself, I have nothing to do with these."_
"Come back to bed, let us sleep on our mys-
teries.
"Come to me here, and lay your body by mine,
And I will be all the shadow, you the shine.
"Come, you are cold, the night has frightened you.
Hark at the river! It pants as it hurries through
"The pine-woods. How I love them so, in their
mystery of not-to-be."
_"--But let me be myself, not a river or a tree."_
"Kiss me! How cold you are!--Your little breasts
Are bubbles of ice. Kiss me!--You know how
it rests
"One to be quenched, to be given up, to be gone
in the dark;
To be blown out, to let night dowse the spark.
"But never mind, my love. Nothing matters,
save sleep;
keep."
MUTILATION
A THICK mist-sheet lies over the broken wheat.
I walk up to my neck in mist, holding my mouth up.
Across there, a discoloured moon burns itself out.
I hold the night in horror;
I dare not turn round.
To-night I have left her alone.
They would have it I have left her for ever.
Oh my God, how it aches
Where she is cut off from me!
Perhaps she will go back to England.
Perhaps she will go back,
Perhaps we are parted for ever.
If I go on walking through the whole breadth of
Germany
I come to the North Sea, or the Baltic.
Over there is Russia--Austria, Switzerland, France,
in a circle!
I here in the undermist on the Bavarian road.
It aches in me.
What is England or France, far off,
But a name she might take?
I don't mind this continent stretching, the sea far
away;
It aches in me for her
Like the agony of limbs cut off and aching;
Not even longing,
It is only agony.
A cripple!
Oh God, to be mutilated!
To be a cripple!
And if I never see her again?
I think, if they told me so
I could convulse the heavens with my horror.
I think I could alter the frame of things in my
agony.
I think I could break the System with my heart.
I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break.
She too suffers.
But who could compel her, if she chose me against
them all?
She has not chosen me finally, she suspends her
choice.
Night folk, Tuatha De Danaan, dark Gods, govern
her sleep,
Magnificent ghosts of the darkness, carry off her
decision in sleep,
Leave her no choice, make her lapse me-ward,
make her,
Oh Gods of the living Darkness, powers of Night.
WOLFRATSHAUSEN
_HUMILIATION_
I HAVE been so innerly proud, and so long alone,
Do not leave me, or I shall break.
Do not leave me.
What should I do if you were gone again
So soon?
What should I look for?
Where should I go?
What should I be, I myself,
"I"?
What would it mean, this
I?
Do not leave me.
What should I think of death?
If I died, it would not be you:
It would be simply the same
Lack of you.
The same want, life or death,
Unfulfilment,
The same insanity of space
You not there for me.
Think, I daren't die
For fear of the lack in death.
And I daren't live.
Unless there were a morphine or a drug.
I would bear the pain.
But always, strong, unremitting
It would make me not me.
The thing with my body that would go on
living
Would not be me.
Neither life nor death could help.
Think, I couldn't look towards death
Nor towards the future:
Only not look.
Only myself
Stand still and bind and blind myself.
God, that I have no choice!
That my own fulfilment is up against me
Timelessly!
The burden of self-accomplishment!
The charge of fulfilment!
And God, that she is _necessary!_
_Necessary,_ and I have no choice!
Do not leave me.
_A YOUNG WIFE_
THE pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.
I walk in fear of you.
The darkness starts up where
You stand, and the night comes through
Your eyes when you look at me.
Ah never before did I see
The shadows that live in the sun!
Now every tall glad tree
Turns round its back to the sun
And looks down on the ground, to see
The shadow it used to shun.
At the foot of each glowing
thing
A night lies looking up.
Oh, and I want to sing
And dance, but I can't lift up
My eyes from the shadows: dark
They lie spilt round the cup.
The faint fine seethe in the air!
Like the seething sound in a shell!
It is death still seething where
The wild-flower shakes its bell
And the sky lark twinkles blue--
The pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.
_GREEN_
THE dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.
ICKING
_RIVER ROSES_
BY the Isar, in the twilight
We were wandering and singing,
By the Isar, in the evening
We climbed the huntsman's ladder and sat
swinging
In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes,
While river met with river, and the ringing
Of their pale-green glacier water filled the evening.
By the Isar, in the twilight
We found the dark wild roses
Hanging red at the river; and simmering
Frogs were singing, and over the river closes
Was savour of ice and of roses; and glimmering
Fear was abroad. We whispered: "No one
knows us.
Let it be as the snake disposes
Here in this simmering marsh."
KLOSTER SCHAEFTLARN
_GLOIRE DE DIJON_
WHEN she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.
She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.
ICKING
_ROSES ON THE BREAKFAST
TABLE_
JUST a few of the roses we gathered from the Isar
Are fallen, and their mauve-red petals on the
cloth
Float like boats on a river, while other
Roses are ready to fall, reluctant and loth.
She laughs at me across the table, saying
I am beautiful. I look at the rumpled young roses
And suddenly realise, in them as in me,
How lovely the present is that this day discloses.
_I AM LIKE A ROSE_
I AM myself at last; now I achieve
My very self. I, with the wonder mellow,
Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear
And single me, perfected from my fellow.
Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving
Its limpid sap to culmination, has brought
Itself more sheer and naked out of the green
In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought.
_ROSE OF ALL THE WORLD_
I AM here myself; as though this heave of effort
At starting other life, fulfilled my own:
Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a core
Of seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown
By all the blood of the rose-bush into being--
Strange, that the urgent will in me, to set
My mouth on hers in kisses, and so softly
To bring together two strange sparks, beget
Another life from our lives, so should send
The innermost fire of my own dim soul out-
spinning
And whirling in blossom of flame and being upon
me!
That my completion of manhood should be the
beginning
Another life from mine! For so it looks.
The seed is purpose, blossom accident.
The seed is all in all, the blossom lent
To crown the triumph of this new descent.
Is that it, woman? Does it strike you so?
The Great Breath blowing a tiny seed of fire
Fans out your petals for excess of flame,
Till all your being smokes with fine desire?
Or are we kindled, you and I, to be
One rose of wonderment upon the tree
Of perfect life, and is our possible seed
But the residuum of the ecstasy?
How will you have it?--the rose is all in all,
Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall?
The sharp begetting, or the child begot?
Our consummation matters, or does it not?
To me it seems the seed is just left over
From the red rose-flowers' fiery transience;
Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the
bush
Which burnt just now with marvellous immanence.
Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a rose
Of roses unchidden and purposeless; a rose
For rosiness only, without an ulterior motive;
For me it is more than enough if the flower un-