Grouped about lamps and lanterns, and they pass
The wine-flask, the brown loaf and honeyed figs
And marbled mortadella and pale cheese.
Then someone tunes a fiddle and scratches jigs
Or softly from the darkness of the trees
Jingles a mandoline, so sad, so faint,
It sounds as though dead fingers touched the strings:
And laughter comes in gusts and through the quaint
Dark-huddled groups the yellow lamplight flings
Brightness across the corner of a shawl
Or fires a hand or gilds a laughing face
Or, touching hidden boughs, reveals a fall
Of emerald leaves with shadows frail as lace.
Then lamps go out and laughter dies and each
Creeps to his bed, and moonlight fills the square
And silence, broken by the lone owl’s screech,
While all lie dreaming of to-morrow’s fair
Till the delicious coolness of early dawning
Sharpens the air and all is fresh and gleaming,
And a chill fragrance steals beneath the awning
Of dewy boughs and stirs them from their dreaming.
II
Before the Battle
Here on the blind verge of infinity
We live and move like moles. Our crumbling trench
Gapes like a long wound in the sodden clay.
The land is dead. No voice, no living thing,
No happy green of leaves tells that the spring
Wakes in the world behind us. Empty gloom
Fills the cold interspace of earth and sky.
The sky is waterlogged and the drenched earth
Rots, and the whining sorrow of slow shells
Flies overhead. But memory like the rose
Wakes and puts forth her bright and odorous blooms
And builds green hanging gardens in the heart.
Once, in another life in other places,
Where a slow river coiled through broad green spaces
And sunlight filled the long grass of the meadows
And moving water flashed from shine to shadows
Of old green-feathered willows, bent in ranks
Along sun-speckled banks,—
Lovely remembered things now gone forever;
I saw young men run naked by the river,
Thirty young soldiers. Where the field-path goes,
Their boots and shirts and khaki lay in rows.
With feet among the long warm grass stood one
Like ivory in the sun,
And in the water, white upon the shade
That hung beneath the shore,
His long reflexion like a slow flag swayed
And at the trembling of the water frayed
Into a hundred shreds, then joined once more.
One, where the river, when the willows end,
Breaks from its calm to swirl about a bend,
Strong swimmer he, wrestled against the race
Of the full stream. I saw his laughing face
Framed by his upcurved arm. Another, slim,
Hands above head, stood braced upon the brim,
Then dived, a brother of the curved new moon,
And came up streaming soon
Ten feet beyond, brown shoulders shining wet
And comic face and hair washed sleek as jet.
Out on the further bank another fellow
Climbed stealthily into a leaning willow
And perched leaf-shrouded, crooning like a dove;
Till from the pool below a voice was heard:
“’Ere, Bert! Where’s Bert?” and Bert sang out above:
“Up ’ere, old son, changed to a bloody bird!”
And dived through leaves and shattered through the cool
Clear watery mirror, and all across the pool
Slow winking circles opened wide, till he
Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.
Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.
Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere
Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows
Beat the shores, and the hanging boughs of willows
Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,
A bugle sounded, and their happy din
Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline
By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,
Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright
With bodies swarming up out of the stream.
From the water and the boughs they came in sight:
Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.
Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.
They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.
One, stepping to the water, carefully
Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:
One sat with updrawn knee,
Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.
Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud
Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.
The ranks fell in: no sound, no movement stirred.
The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:
The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,
Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream
And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:
Only the trodden meadow-grass reported
Where all that gay humanity had sported.
So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how
Many of those smart boys no longer now
Cast running shadows on the grass or make
White tents with laughter shake,
But lie in narrow chambers underground,
Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound
Of laughter. Round my post on every hand
Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land
Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost
In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,
Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed
By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.
The rainy evening fades. A rainy night
Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay
Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,
All broken sounds and movements of the day,
To emptiness and listlessness, a grey
Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise
Of hearts intent with fearful expectation
And secret preparation,
Silence that is not peace but bated breath,
A listening for death,
The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.
O give us one more day of sun and leaves,
The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,
And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves
The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,
Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)
We climb the trench and cross the wire and start,
We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart
Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.
Immortality
When on the sluggish tide of time
The immortal moment comes
Whose bugle-summons cleaves with gleaming edge
Flesh and all stuff of the material world,
The soldier-soul, with that swift discipline
Wherewith keen life answers the heart’s desire,
Leaps on the deed as tiger leaps on fawn,
As powder answers fire.
Soul is the perfect athlete running free
Among the clear winds of reality;
For whom dim speculation and the thought
That measured, weighed, and sought
In worlds
unreal the cloudy paradises
And comfortable prizes
For loveless rules obeyed, are less than nought.
The eternal moment being his vital air,
He cannot ask nor care
Whether his burning deed shall sow the seeds
Of other life and deeds,
Or if his being, ardent, pure, intact,
Die on the summit of the immortal act.
Bugles
Mournful and clear and golden on the dusk
The sudden fire of bugles. Fervid flights
Of burning wings flash up from the dark hill
Where like a growth of giant lilies glow
The lighted tents. That piercing music rouses
The slumbrous memory. Forests of the past
Answer those fervid notes with fainter notes
Sepulchral, far, whose clear reveille shakes
The dark unfretted waters of the mind
Till all the surface quivers with keen pain
And depth to depth the searching trouble stirs
Till all that watery world
Thrills with new life that urges to the top
Layers of dim memory hidden long from light,
And years long dead, victories, endurances,
And terrible happenings live again. Again
In rainswept darkness down the broken roads
The drenched and sweating troops swarm towards the line,
Stumbling with burdened backs and burdened hearts
Into their new ordeal: on and on
Through tunnels of the blind and timeless night,
By wallowing lorries thrust into the ditch
And pulsing tractors hauling monstrous guns,
Or in cold rain interminably impeded
By some unknown obstruction miles ahead:
Through fields that stink of carnage, yawn with holes
Full of pale stagnant water; thicket-snares
Of sharp-fanged wire, through roar of murderous shells
And gas and blood and flame, till the shocked mind
Flares up in terror and the memory dies
In tumult and blown smoke. Then slowly rise
The pale forgotten faces of the dead,
Cast off the rust of Time, the mould of Earth,
And speak again and laugh and sing gay songs
And eat and drink in warm light of the sun
In the good fellowship of adventurous souls
Who have purged their hearts of fear. Too happy vision,
Vainly denying death and the iron fact
For those poor slaves of clay
And us sad children of mortality.
For the buglers take the bugles from their lips
And Time and Death return with the failing light
To numb the leaves and blind the lake’s clear eyes
And shroud the water with a film of frost.
And the heart takes up its sure mechanic beat
And the dulled eyesight shrinks
To outward things and the narrow pen of Space.
Layer under layer, sluggish as falling snow,
The settling sediment of memory sinks
Till the mind is tranquil as a block of ice.
Epitaph
These are the unthrifty souls
Who watered dusty streets with wine;
Gathered pearls from Indian shoals
And cast them royally to swine;
Their most precious love who strowed
To be trampled by the crowd;
Freely broached their hearts’ red blood
To dye the garments of the proud;
Who have sung away their years
To soothe the perjurer and the thief;
Poured for the heartless, healing tears;
Fed the tyrant with their grief;
Paid the price they never owed;
Prayed to gods who claim no prayer;
Climbed the high encumbered road
Never asking why or where.
Man Seeks to Cage Delight
Man seeks to cage delight
In vain, not seeing
That her strong-pinioned flight
Is all her being,
And sets about to frame
Dead fantasies—
Eternity, Infinity—to tame
The ecstasy that flies;
And vexed by bonds of Space,
By veils of Time,
He dreams a special grace,
A power sublime,
In these abstractions, vain
Unbodied signs,
Frail shadows of the ecstasy and pain
With which Orion shines,
With which the rose unwinds
Each scented fold,
With which man grows and finds
The note of gold
Hid in the heart of laughter,
Heart of sighs,
In measured golden music flying after
The golden voice that flies,
In love from marble wrought,
In love that chimes
Over clear-ringing thought
And well-tuned rhymes,
In love become a fact
Keen, swift, and fell,
When the whole self leaps forward to the act
Clean as the whistling shell.
For when the body and mind,
Fused in one fire,
Leap, like tiger on hind,
On the one desire,
Then the careful thoughts and schemes
Of barren years
Go down into the pit of ruined dreams
And crumbling hopes and fears.
For to be single, sure,
In one swift flash,
Pure flame or diamond pure;
To slough the ash
Of things burnt out; to gain
The fountain’s powers
Gathered in little compass to attain
Its crown of glittering showers;
This is the eternal, this
The infinite,
The gods’ immortal kiss
Set warm and bright
On heroes’ brows. In these brief moments’ span
Shall man outlive the thousand centuries
Of the blind life of man.
Therefore when I am sunk
To earth again
And thirsty earth has drunk
My joy and pain,
I shall not know or need
Pity or praise
Or thanks or love from you, the human seed
Sprung out of later days:
For on the burning crest
Of great extremes
Where the soul meets breast to breast
Its highest dreams,
Safe from stern Fate’s decrees
Irrevocably
I have possessed and savoured to the lees
My own eternity.
To Hate
Come, holy Spirit, pentecostal flame.
Out of the deep we cry to thee. The shame
Of feeble virtues, mild complacencies
Consumes our bodies like a foul disease.
Eat us as acid eats, burn us with fire,
Till every timid hope and pale desire,
All fond ideals, misty hopes that fly
Beyond the frontiers of reality,
Crumble to ash and leave us clean as light,
Essential strength, pure shapes of granite bright
Set up for no man’s worship, no man’s pleasure,
But fashioned by the slow, aeonian leisure
Of storms and blowing sands. Of thee is born
All power, all bravery, and the sharp-eyed scorn
That sees beneath bright gawds to the bare bone
Of naked Truth’s relentless skeleton.
Save, lest we perish unrepentent, sped
To our last count without thy lance and shield,
Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,
With all our small perfections on our head.
III
To Messaline
When you in death shall lie
And coldly across the low, deep-windowed room,
Where table, chair, and bed emerge from gloom,
Light from a pallid sky
Shall fall on the quiet hair and large white brow
And gleam along the sharp edge of the nose
Austere, ascetic now;
And night’s dim water, as it backward flows,
Shall leave small pools of gloom
In the waxen hollow of each sunken eye,
Round the drawn mouth where the cheeks have fallen in,
And where the throat drops from the jutting chin;
And under the cold sheet
The trunk shall stiffen and the stretched limbs pine,
Lapsing in one continuous hollow line
From the peaked face down to the long gaunt feet;
Then, Messaline, O most unhappy one,
That longing for the unattainable
That shakes your body like a vibrant bell,
Consumes it on the sacrificial pyre
Of unassuaged desire,
Shall lose its hold. And you, poor wandered nun,
Thwarted idealist, at last shall know
Repose; pure, cold repose. For you shall go
Through death, corruption, to nonentity
Of small, clean dust; and parching winds shall blow
That senselesss dust far out upon the sea,
And all of you be drowned most utterly
In each small mote descending through profound
Blind gulfs of cold green water, far from sound
And touch and every sense that wove the mesh
That held your struggling spirit in the flesh.
Puppets
We are the bloodless echoes of the past,
Blown between vast and vast:
Miserable automata, we check
Each impulse at the beck
Of dead, forbidding hands. Dancing, we tread
The footsteps of the dead,
And by their laws make love; and when we sing,
Dead fingers pluck the string
And twist our music to a stale old song;