The quick sparks on the gorse-bushes are leaping
Little jets of sunlight texture imitating flame;
Above them, exultant, the peewits are sweeping:
They have triumphed again o’er the ages, their screamings proclaim.
Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie
Low-rounded on the mournful turf they have bitten down to the quick.
Are they asleep?—are they living?—Now see, when I
Lift my arms, the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick!
The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes
Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes;
There the lazy streamlet pushes
His bent course mildly; here wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes
Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,
Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow;
Naked on the steep, soft lip
Of the turf I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro.
What if the gorse-flowers shrivelled, and I were gone?
What if the waters ceased, where were the marigolds then, and the gudgeon?
What is this thing that I look down upon?
White on the water wimples my shadow, strains like a dog on a string, to run on.
How it looks back, like a white dog to its master!
I on the bank all substance, my shadow all shadow looking
up to me, looking back!
And the water runs, and runs faster, runs faster,
And the white dog dances and quivers, I am holding his
cord quite slack.
But how splendid it is to be substance, here!
My shadow is neither here nor there; but I, I am royally here!
I am here! I am here! screams the peewit; the may-blobs burst out in a laugh as they hear!
Here! flick the rabbits. Here! pants the gorse. Here! say the
insects far and near.
Over my skin in the sunshine, the warm, clinging air
Flushed with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad.
You are here! You are here! We have found you! Everywhere
We sought you substantial, you touchstone of caresses, you naked lad!
Oh but the water loves me and folds me,
Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me, murmurs:
Oh marvellous stuff!
No longer shadow!—and it holds me
Close, and it rolls me, enfolds me, touches me, as if never it
could touch me enough.
Sun, but in substance, yellow water-blobs!
Wings and feathers on the crying, mysterious ages, peewits wheeling!
All that is right, all that is good, all that is God takes substance! a rabbit lobs
In confirmation, I hear sevenfold lark-songs pealing.
Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips,
And at night when the wind rose, the lash of the tree
Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s
Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously.
Within the house two voices arose, a slender lash
Whistling she-delirious rage, and the dreadful sound
Of a male thong booming and bruising, until it had drowned
The other voice in a silence of blood, ’neath the noise of the ash.
The five old bells
Are hurrying and stridently calling,
Insisting, protesting
They are right, yet clamorously falling
Into gabbling confusion, without resting,
Like spattering shouts of an orator endlessly dropping
From the tower on the town, but endlessly, never stopping.
The silver moon
That somebody has spun so high
To settle the question, heads or tails? has caught
In the net of the night’s balloon,
And sits with a smooth, bland smile up there in the sky
Serenely smiling at naught,
Unless the little star that keeps her company
Makes tittering jests at the bells’ obscenity;
As if he knew aught!
Sits indifferent, hugged in her rags;
She neither knows nor cares
Why the old church bellows and brags;
The noise distresses her ears, and tears
At her tattered silence, as she crouches and covers her face,
Bent, if we did but know it, on a weary and bitter grimace.
The wise old trees
Drop their leaves with a faint, sharp hiss of contempt;
A car at the end of the street goes by with a laugh.
As by degrees
The damned bells cease, and we are exempt,
And the stars can chaff
The cool high moon at their ease; while the droning church
Is peopled with shadows and wailing, and last ghosts lurch
Towards its cenotaph.
Yesterday the fields were only grey with scattered snow,
And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge;
Yet her deep footsteps mark the snow, and go
On towards the pines at the hill’s white verge.
I cannot see her, since the mist’s pale scarf
Obscures the dark wood and the dull orange sky;
But she’s waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half
Sobs struggling into her frosty sigh.
Why does she come so promptly, when she must know
She’s only the nearer to the inevitable farewell?
The hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow—
Why does she come, when she knows what I have to tell?
It is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the panes,
The thin sycamore in the playground is swinging with flattened leaves;
The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains
The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves.
It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance; I endured too long.
I have pushed my hands in the dark soil, under the flower of my soul
And the gentle leaves, and have felt where the roots are strong
Fixed in the darkness, grappling for the deep soil’s crowded control.
And there in the dark, my darling, where the roots are entangled and fight
Each one for its hold on the concrete darkness, I know that there
In the night where we first have being, before we rise on the light,
We are not lovers, my darling, we fight and we do not spare.
And in the original dark the roots cannot keep, cannot know
Any communion whatever, but they bind themselves on to the dark,
And drawing the darkness together, crush from it a twilight, a slow
Dim self that rises slowly to leaves and the flower’s gay spark.
I came to the boys with love, dear, and only they turned on me;
With gentleness came I, with my heart ’twixt my hands like a bowl,
Like a loving-cup, like a grail, but they spilt it triumphantly
And tried to break the vessel, and violate my soul.
And perhaps they were right, for the young are busy deep down at the roots,
And love would only weaken their under-earth grip, make shallow
Their hold on reality, enfeeble their rising shoots
With too much tincture of me, instead of the dark’s deep fallow.
I thought that love would do all things, but now I know I am wrong.
There are depths below depths, my darling, where love does not belong.
Where the fight that is fight for being is fought throughout the long
Young years, and the old must not win, not even if they love and are strong.
I must not win their souls, no never, I only must win
The brief material control of the hour, leave them free of me.
Learn they must to obey, for all harmony is discipline,
And only in harmony with others the single soul can be free.
Let them live, the boys, and learn not to trespass; I had to learn
Not to trespass on them with love, they must learn not to trespass in the young
Cruel self; the fight is not for existence, the fight is to burn
At last into blossom of being, each one his own flower outflung.
They are here to learn but one lesson, that they shall not thwart each other
Nor be thwarted, in life’s slow struggle to unfold the flower of the self.
They draw their sap from the Godhead, not from me, but they must not smother
The sun from their neighbour either, nor be smothered in turn by pelf.
I will teach them the beginning of the lesson at the roots, and then no more.
I throw from out of the darkness myself like a flower into sight
Of the day, but it’s nothing to do with the boys, so let them ignore
What’s beyond them, and fight with me in discipline’s little fight.
But whoever would pluck apart my flowering will burn their hands,
For flowers are tender folk, and roots can only hide.
But sometimes the opening petals are fire, and the scarlet brands
Of the blossom are roses to look at, but flames when they’re tried.
But now I am trodden to earth, and my fires are low;
Now I am broken down like a plant in winter, and all
Myself but a knowledge of roots, of roots in the dark, that throw
A net on the undersoil, that lies passive, and quickened with gall.
Yet wait awhile, for henceforth I will love when a blossom calls
To my blossom in perfume and seed-dust, and only then; I will give
My love where it is wanted. Yet wait awhile! My fall
Is complete for the moment, yet wait, and you’ll see that my flower will live.
A faint, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising up in the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class’s lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and sable.
I can smell the bog-end, gorgeous in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, where the marigold glare overcast you
With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your chin as you dipped
Your face in the marigold bunch, to touch and contrast you,
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks,
And the kingcups’ glisten, that shall long outlast you.
You amid the bog-end’s yellow incantation,
You sitting in the cowslips of the meadow above,
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame flowery may-blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love;
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,
You with your face all rich, like the sheen on a dove!
You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The buttercup bog-end where the flowers rose up
And glazed you over with a sheen of gold?
You ask me, do the healing days close up
The gulf that came between us, and drew us in?
Do they wipe away the gloom the gulf throws up?
You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, once more, only once
Taken like a sacrifice, in the night invisible;
Only the darkness, and the scent of you!—
And yes, thank God, it still is possible
The healing days shall close the dark gulf up
Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew!
Like vapour, dew, or poison! Now, thank God
The last year’s fire is gone, and your face is ash;
And the gulf that came between you, woman, and me, man,
That day, is half grown over, it need not abash
Either of us any more; henceforth we can
Forget each other and the bruise of our bodies’ clash.
Yours is the sullen sorrow,
The disgrace is also mine;
Your love was intense and thorough,
Mine was the love of a growing flower
For the sunshine.
You had the power to explore me,
Blossom me stalk by stalk;
You woke my spirit, you bore me
To consciousness, you gave me the dour
Awareness—then I suffered a balk.
Body to body I could not
Love you, although I would.
We kissed, we kissed though we should not.
You yielded, we threw the last cast,
And it was no good.
You only endured, and it broke
My craftsman’s nerve.
No flesh responded to my stroke;
So I failed to give you the last
Fine torture you did deserve.
You are shapely, you are adorned
But opaque and null in the flesh;
Who, had I but pierced with the thorned
Full anguish, perhaps had been cast
In a lovely illumined mesh
Like a painted window; the best
Fire passed through your flesh,
Undrossed it, and left it blest
In clean new awareness. But now
Who shall take you afresh?
Now who will burn you free
From your body’s deadness and dross?
Since the fire has failed in me,
What man will stoop in your flesh to plough
The shrieking cross?
A mute, nearly beautiful thing
Is your face, that fills me with shame
As I see it hardening;
I should have been cruel enough to bring
You through the flame.
The hoar-frost crumbles in the sun,
The crisping steam of a train
Melts in the air, while two black birds
Sweep past the window again.
Along the vacant road a red
Telegram-bicycle approaches; I wait
In a thaw of anxiety, for the boy
To leap down at our gate.
He has passed us by; but is it
Relief that starts in my breast?
Or a deeper bruise of knowing that still
She has no rest.
The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;
As slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.
Farther down the valley the clustered tombstones recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after
The street-lamps in the twilight have suddenly started to bleed.
The leaves fly over the window, and utter a word as they pass
To the face that gazes outwards, watching for night to waft a
Meaning or a message over the window glass.
Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?
Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,
I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I watched them float up the dark chimney.
A yellow leaf, from the darkness
Hops like a frog before me;
Why should I start and stand still?
I was watching the woman that bore me
Stretched in the brindled darkness
Of the sick-room, rigid with will
To die: and the quick leaf tore me
Back to this rainy swill
Of leaves and lamps and the city street
mingled before me.
The sick grapes on the chair by the bed lie prone; at the window
The tassel of the blind swings constantly, tapping the pane
As the air moves in.
The room is the hollow rind of a fruit, a gourd
Scooped out and bare, where a spider,
Folded in its legs as in a bed,
Lies on the dust, watching where there is nothing to see but dusky walls.
And if the day outside were mine! What is the day
But a grey cave, with great grey spider-cloths hanging
Low from the roof, and the wet dust falling softly from them
Over the wet dark rocks, the houses, and over The spiders with white faces, that scuttle on the floor of the cave!
Ah, but I am ill, and it is still raining, coldly raining!