It was an evening late in the year
When the frost stings again,
Hard-bitten was the face of the hills
And harsh breathed the plain.
Along a stony watershed
Surly and peaked with cold
I saw a company straggling over,
Over an endless wold.
The plain breathed up in smoke: its breath
Like a dying curse did freeze:
The fingers of the fog reached up
And took them by the knees.
Cruel, cruel look the stars
Fixed in a bitter frown:
Here at our feet to left and right
The silly streams run down.
We have left the ice-fields far behind,
Jungle, desert and fen;
We have passed the place of the temperate race
And the land of the one-eyed men.
The road reels back a million miles,
It is high time we came
Dropping down to the rich valleys
Where each can stake his claim.
Iron, iron rang the road,
All iron to the tread:
Heaven’s face was barred with steel
Star-bolted overhead.
The well, the ill, on foot or on wheel,
The shattered, the shamed, the proud –
And limousines like painted queans
Went curving through the crowd.
What are these shapes that drive them on?
Is it the ravenous host
Of the dead? Or are they shadows of children
Not born, nipped by the frost?
The viaduct’s broken down behind:
They cannot turn again.
Telegraph poles stride on before them
Pacing out their pain.
Where are you going, you wan hikers,
And why this ganglion gear?
What are those packs that on your backs
Through frost and fog you bear?
Through frost and fog, by col and crag
Leads on this thoroughfare
To kingdom-come: it is our gods
That on our backs we bear.
True they had travelled a million miles
If they had travelled one:
They walked or rode, each with his load,
A leaden automaton:
But never the sun came out to meet them
At the last lap of land,
Nor in the frore and highest heaven
Did the flint-eyed stars unbend.
Now they have come to night’s massif;
Those sheer, unfissured walls
Cry halt, and still the following shadows
Rustle upon their heels.
They have come to the crisis of the road,
They have come without maps or guides:
To left and right along the night
The cryptic way divides.
I looked and I saw a stark signpost
There at the road’s crest,
And its arms were the arms of a man pointing,
Pointing to east and west.
His face was pure as the winnowed light
When the wild geese fly high,
And gentle as on October evenings
The heron-feathered sky.
The mists grovelled below his feet
And the crowd looked up to pray:
From his beacon eyes a tremendous backwash
Of darkness surged away.
Speak up, speak up, you skyward man,
Speak up and tell us true;
To east or west – which is the best,
The through-way of the two?
The heaven-wind parts your hair, the sun
Is wintering in your eyes;
Johnny Head-In-Air, tell us
Which way our good luck lies.
Wirily stirred the stiffening grasses
With a chitter of migrant birds:
Wearily all that horde fell silent
Waiting for his words.
Each way the blindly spearing headlights
Were blunted on the gloom:
Only his eyes like keen X-rays
Saw into the night’s womb.
I look to right, to right, comrades,
I look to right and I see
A smooth decline past rowan and pine
That leads to a low country.
Roses cling to a second summer
There, and the birds are late
To bed; the dying sun has left it
A legacy of light:
Winds browse over the unreaped corn,
Rivers flow on gems,
Shades dream in the dust of glory, and steeples
Hum with remembered chimes.
But go you now or go you then,
Those ferlies you’ll not behold
Till the guardians of that valley have crossed
Your hand with fairy gold.
Who takes that gold is a ghost for ever
And none shall hear his cries,
He never shall feel or heat or hail,
He never shall see sun rise.
I look to left, to left, comrades,
I look to left, and there –
Put off those gods, put off those goods
That on your backs you bear –
For he must travel light who takes
An eagle’s route, and cope
With canyons deeper than despair
And heights o’ertopping hope:
Only the lifting horizon leads him
And that is no man’s friend:
Only his duty breath to whisper
All things come to an end.
But all shall be changed, all shall be friends
Upon that mountainside;
They shall awake with the sun and take
Hilltops in their stride.
Out of their crimson-hearted east
A living day shall dawn,
Out of their agonies a rare
And equal race be born.
His arms were stretched to the warring poles,
The current coursed his frame:
Over the hill-crest, niched in night,
They saw a man of flame.
Come down, come down, you suffering man,
Come down, and high or low
Choose your fancy and go with us
The way that we should go.
That cannot be till two agree
Who long have lain apart:
Traveller, know, I am here to show
Your own divided heart.