Thyme, tufa, sage, anemone,
And we heard that music singing:
The sea, the heavens, and all rivers
Standing still to listen, the bare mountain
Bulging in delight
Rose hugely to heaven, dark grey lump uplifting
Height on height—
Up crags and winding levels,
Up paths and pathless rocks, to the bald crown
Stamped down by the winged hoof:
Clear water gushes from that blow;
Voices of those who are to die sing, shuddering.
—White sunlight and the dripping oars!
Capes naked to the north wind, and besieged
By honey-coloured poesy—
What was it I refused, refusing love?
‘It was the vision of the light
From which I am shut out.’ And what decided it—
What had I then desired, or hoped or feared,
To give or to receive?—Strange agony,
To stare on my disgrace through the soft spring!
But I reply ‘I cannot know,
Because I cannot love, I only know
Sad sapphire, much as cloud
Drizzles on glass-grey waters.
‘And are you sad, and are you satisfied?’
‘I am sad, but I am not satisfied.’
Gold eagles hover in the grey,
Goats climb up crumbling gypsum …
—And I was sad to lose that virgin sadness!
Alas, why had I fled from the reality? …
Look, you have disappeared, and now
Asphodel breaks grey stubble.
How do we know what will happen, who will tell us? …
And even now that faded radiance
You knew unfaded, shines; I am not yet much withered.
Therefore a thousand doubts, a thousand questions,
Most of them with no answer; as, I wonder
‘Why did he not then force my love?’ add suddenly
‘You should have loved me more, why did you not?
You might have saved me.’
—Questions of hope, despair, changes of mind….
Acceptance of the changeless mind!
And now I sit and hide my face;
And know that where the soft and rough tide hurries,
The tide will rise and wash the rocks tomorrow;
That cloud of an angelic dignity
Will form and melt tomorrow—and tomorrow,
While far out in the milky straits
The black shape of a boat sits,
And drags itself….
Then came a time of great guilt, that I inhabited
Under the night’s dark face
Declivities
And diamonds, high sorrow
Solemn tears
Trembling but never falling
Night
We watch you, brute white stars,
Panelled in brilliant silence, pendulous jewels
That rotate or pause
Quivering, hovering over us,
As if aware of the abyss,
And glistening like a forest of pale eyes:
The utter quiet of these skies
Dumb, gliding wildly aloof,
Wafted, glimmering with milky fires
Like thorn-trees hung with pollen, finches’ nests
Of winged and torn desires,
—Furious and holy vacancy
Or tender dreaming fury, the pale jealousies
Of pity-breathing milk-stars,
And the crackle of dew-soft fire-drops
On great plains …
I walk alone, we walk on the dead world
Tied to our living heel, the whole wide sky
A kind of wild white living glimmer
Mirroring our lost nakedness.
The pallor and the sigh
Prepare a pure deep tomb where we
Might sole-survive to love, but see,
The gaping veil that fans our skin!
The pure desires take flight,
Leaving us naked, less
The vanished loveliness: the dusky tissue
Folds us in tragic opposites,
Bedaubs us in deliberate glitter,
A numberless dull dazzle, wretched glory…
Dim shams that grimly glimmer
And we abhor, abjure;
Dead thistledowns of bitterness,
Or withered plumes of nothingness
Suspended, the vast gestures
Of some frustrated exploit:
A distant dog barks, and the sombre shimmer
Shifts, bristles.
And do we hope to regain
And gather softly, all shut up alive,
The shadowy body, the bare breast,
And dusk like nakedness and dew like darkness
Hung with the jewels of ourselves?
—Where the dark serpent glows,
Rising and slowly sinking
Through the starry murk, the noon of night;
Lonely to one alone it comes
Like that wild trembling permanent sky
That has divided us, and brings
The prison of these things, the terrible trembling,
And all that loveliness we canvassed! there,
The softness of those mirrored loins
Rises within my beating throat,
And then the taste dreams of some crust
Of what was lost, the starry meal
Of some delicious crumbled bread
Powdering all infinity; and then,
Love is the web, the bed
Soft-burning with religious breath,
For which the constellated waste, sage clarities,
Are brimmed with ghastliness of light
And echo silent cries of ours;
For only furtive love,
Known in the great fear, captive
Of the dire luxurious clarities,
Can find within our exile (damned,
Vituperated, loathed)
The sigh of peace, the delicate flight!…
The birds are silent in their nests. Black midnight,
And the crass blaze of our destinies but shudders
And utters nothing, only
Tracing slowly once again
The massive sorrow, the starred lineaments
Of silence and the infinite night.
The sky brims with the ghost of a great rage.
—I am alone, and on my height
The wind cracks and shudders,
Dust and sweetness whirl in the new light;
And washed in brilliant madness,
The whole coast glitters and expands,
Pale-brown to dull-red, off-white,
Capes and beaches laugh and clap their hands,
And the emancipated, wild and noble sorrows
Flash through the solitudes!
Like the sea-swallows
Swoop out and cut and glide, chafe joy and scud and skim,
Twittering drunkenly in flight
Their delicious scurrying music—dart upright,
Climb, totter, drop incontinently,
Grazing the low ground by the sea
And single brownish flower
Fast-rooted in the rocky soil,
The small sweet-scented broom
Whose tough stems bear a bloom
That is golden and subdued,
And significantly sad.
—And my dream and my despair,
My delight in what I hate,
My mourning, my desire,
Have wasted that estate:
And now a low brown person, shrinking slowly to a bag of skin,
I wonder at myself, and even more that, were I to begin,
I think that I should do what I have done.
And gulls, swallows, turn down wind,
The sea toils, grinds and crushes
Marble to milk at cliff-base.
And the air,
The air is stirring, everywhere
A sweetness dignifies the air:
The broom, that tanned and dusty angel,
Bound down, is taken by the hair
And rifled, and blown lingeringly, or plunged
By the wind’s tooth and talon, torn
But living and enduring, the sweet doom
Like an imaginary face
Springs out of the rough shrub and floats in ambush,
To honey our disgrace.
—Each grain of dust or grain of gold
A universe of incense!…
And the birds and the birds’ cries
And yet the Sibyl parches, caught and clutched within a fist of dust!
—Burning and ribbed abysses, broken cradles, empty shores
And the uneasy airy glitter, the slow glow
And then the massive flash
That answers irresistibly,
And sobs and rubs and woos,
Mirrors and writhes and rocks itself and sighs
And strives to glut itself with light:
Dust on the parched bluff, on the rock-cliff,
And ruined splendour on the sea:
And looking down on the yellow town,
All glowing like a sun or star,
And farther than if I were dead
—So far away it seems, so far—
Sunlight and moonlight mix like joy with pain,
So that I cannot tell you which;
I only know the burnished tarnished surface, stretched
Over the wide sea, rich
Stretched like a rustling mirror haunts the air,
Flutters the glowing gulf
—Supple and subtle, full of stirrings—
And the impatient flood of calm,
To suffer but the mirrored softness burns,
And longs to melt its shores!…
And sitting upon my rock alone, unrecognisable to myself,
Moving motionless to death, I see
That one must suffer what one sees,
Living what it is not and it is.
And as I live my centuries,
Rejoicing in my choice that was
Either of happiness or this,
I sing ‘And I may live like this,’
I am not blind, I sing and see,
As balsam trees weep gum, as leathery pods
Breed tufts of silk, as bees thieve honey and thrive:
My mournful calcined life
Half-eaten by desires,
Brimming with light and sorrow,
Yet I do not repent me;
I remain in my pain that is
A golden distance endlessly,
And with my head bent, and my eyes
That follow down and stare
As with a dreaming stare, I gaze
Until the noon that climbs the air
Troubles, makes more than ever now excessive
—Rubbed and ruffled, thumbed—
Outrageously more beautiful,
The burning young tumescent sea,
And the smoke-black stone-pine, wings wide on the hushed air,
Hangs over its own shadow, tilted:
Smouldering incense of the pine,
Under the noonday, over the dark pool, cool.
—And the sky opens
Like a fan its vault of violet light, unfolding
A wide and wingless path to the impossible.