I
The lark begins to go up
Like a warning
As if the globe were uneasy –
Barrel-chested for heights,
Like an Indian of the high Andes,
A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,
But leaden
With muscle
For the struggle
Against
Earth’s centre.
And leaden
For ballast
In the rocketing storms of the breath.
Leaden
Like a bullet
To supplant
Life from its centre.
II
Crueller than owl or eagle
A towered bird, shot through the crested head
With the command, Not die
But climb
Climb
Sing
Obedient as to death a dead thing.
III
I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings
Rip in and out through your voicebox
O lark
And sing inwards as well as outwards
Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle
O lark
O song, incomprehensibly both ways –
Joy! Help! Joy! Help!
O lark
IV
You stop to rest, far up, you teeter
Over the drop
But not stopping singing
Resting only for a second
Dropping just a little
Then up and up and up
Like a mouse with drowning fur
Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall
Lamenting, mounting a little –
But the sun will not take notice
And the earth’s centre smiles.
V
My idleness curdles
Seeing the lark labour near its cloud
Scrambling
In a nightmare difficulty
Up through the nothing
Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,
As if it were too late, too late
Dithering in ether
Its song whirls faster and faster
And the sun whirls
The lark is evaporating
Till my eye’s gossamer snaps
and my hearing floats back widely to earth
After which the sky lies blank open
Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.
Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.
VI
All the dreary Sunday morning
Heaven is a madhouse
With the voices and frenzies of the larks,
Squealing and gibbering and cursing
Heads flung back, as I see them,
Wings almost torn off backwards – far up
Like sacrifices set floating
The cruel earth’s offerings
The mad earth’s missionaries.
VII
Like those flailing flames
The lift from the fling of a bonfire
Claws dangling full of what they feed on
The larks carry their tongues to the last atom
Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –
So it’s a relief, a cool breeze
When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out
And the sun’s sucked them empty
And the earth gives them the O.K.
And they relax, drifting with changed notes
Dip and float, not quite sure if they may
Then they are sure and they stoop
And maybe the whole agony was for this
The plummeting dead drop
With long cutting screams buckling like razors
But just before they plunge into the earth
They flare and glide off low over grass, then up
To land on a wall-top, crest up,
Weightless,
Paid-up,
Alert,
Conscience perfect.
VIII
Manacled with blood,
Cuchulain listened bowed,
Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)
Hearing the far crow
Guiding the near lark nearer
With its blind song
‘That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself
Take thy head
Thine ear
And thy life’s career from thee.’