I hear you now, I hear you, shy perpetual companion,
Whose deep whispers
Never wholly fail upon my twilight; but for months now
Too dimly quivered
About the crowded corridors of actions and the clamouring
Swarmed ingresses where like squinting cobblers and worse creatures
On a weary ship that moors in dock, with grimy hatches,
Cross-purpose jangles.
Those the master, with a sudden fountain anger, towering
By his mood a Cyclops,
Back has driven, back, and snivelling, cackling, down the ladder.
I, so springing,
Have lashed the buzzing bullies out, and in the freed air pause now,
Hearing you, whose face is ever one and ever million,
This dear dead one’s, this dear living one’s, no man’s and all men’s,
True map of Flanders.
Wordless language! well to me this moment making music,
Utmost union.
So, so, so we meet again; here we know our coexistence,
And your voice is
My self-utterance, while the region thus is hush and lonely,
Not a charlatan thought there left to gnaw my heart is skulking,
Nor one sunbeam sets the tingling atoms dancing by me
Like doubt’s mad apings.
But my danger lies even here, even now worn weak and nerveless
I go drooping,
Heavy-headed, and would sleep thus lulled with your love’s fulness.
Sharply awake me
With fierce words, cold as the fangs of bayonets in the frozen saps,
Simple as the fact that you must kill, or go for rations,
As clear as morning blue, as red and grotesque as the open mouths
Of winter corpses.
I hear you now: the voice, the voice of marching bowed battalions,
Of one strong soldier,
Now black-haired Daniels, now more saxon Clifford, now hale Worley –
O, speak. Our old tongue.
‘I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile, thou whiteness, Ypres,
How mighty in thy misery, how royal in thy ravishing,
With fingers brittle as ice, I champed and clattered by the convent
And shouted orders;
Which echoes scrambling on the snowy walls and eyeless bulwarks
Made haste to carry,
But they could not, for the curious air was overburdened
With ancient echoes.
Vaults below the convent, when they pitied and would shelter,
Scarce could lure me, counter-lured though eyelids pressed like roof-leads;
Nor such sights as the circling pigeons of poor St Martin held me
From my huge labours.
Blood-like swam the moon, the city’s sable wounds lurked;
Still she cried out,
Be most constant! Thence with clumsy zeal and sacred cursing
Through the shrill grass,
Through the trapping thicket-thorns of death, that sudden planter,
While in the light of the moon and snow his blueness masked all faces,
Stern I went, the weaker kind most mercilessly heartening
To the shambles
All for her, that gat-toothed witch, that beauty at the butcher’s,
To me intrusted;
Nor did I desert her, though without so much as a second’s warning
Some harsh slash-hook
Slit my skull and poured out all the fountains of my senses;
Burst the blood-gates; still I came, and went and came to man her,
Left Posthoornstraat and Goldfish Château, joined with waxen
hands the cleft trench,
Hating and loving.
She, with that, was sometime mild and from the spectre ruin
Herself seemed lifting;
Walking in some silent moments, to the glimmer of candles,
I smiled and marvelled
How the dusky houses in the rainy gloom with feigned renascence,
Stood for life, and surely from the opened doors would be duly coming
Women and lightfoot children, lover there in the lamplight grow to lover—
Death, stop that laughing!
Nor has ever been the man, not Milton with his angels,
Who found such chorus,
Such diapason and amazement in strange old oriental
Fantasy-places,
As I in gross and clod-like names of hamlets by the city;
The fame of Kemmel clanged, and Athens dulled: I listened
If one spoke of Zonnebeke with thronged imagination,
A dazing distance.
For words spoke at the Mermaid, I would not give the meanest
That I heard echoing
In some green-shuttered Nachtegaal or Kasteel, a brief evening,
While the panes were jumping;
Far less one of the sweet astounding jests and sallies
That dared contest with smoking salvoes the forlorn hope’s attention,
That wreathed the burning steel that slew with man’s eternal laurel
In that one city.
For her was much accomplished, and she will not forget me,
Whose name is Legion;
She will know who knew her best, and with his rough warm garment
Would have wrapt her;
Her midnight tears will ever well as greyly she remembers
The hillock’s signifying tree, that choked and gouged and miry
Was like a cross, but such a cross that there no bleeding Figure
Might hang without tautology.
And mine she is; they now may build, sign and assign there,
Above bright doorways
Paint in gold their titles; shrine among their tufted gardens,
As did their elders,
The statues of their mild desire Arcadian: but I
Am in the soil and sap, and in the becks and conduits
My blood is flowing, and my sigh of consummation
Is the wind in the rampart trees.’