Collected Poems 1931-74 (2 page)

Now that I have given all that I could bring

Slit the wide, silken tassel of the purse,

Scattered its myriad bounties to the Spring.

To the rich Autumn leaves:

                                           The crumbled dust

Of ancient adorations, murmurings,

And the dull story of some faded lust,

Will you remember it and, mother-wise

Thank me in these chill after-days

When I am empty-handed … with your eyes?

1980/
1931

I built a house, far in a wilderness,

Against the arid ramparts of a sky,

Proof against occult art or wizardry:

Against my distant wanderings, comradeless.

I planted the straight, cool pine-trees all around,

And brimmed the garden with wild peony;

Here I kept silence, lived only to see

The magic in the trees, the friendly ground

Turn and put forth its tendrils of new life

Into the glowing grass: and here I dwelt,

No eloquent shadows that could break or melt

My great content;

                            Only a living strife

Calling me back from this core of desolation,

To seek an ultimate twilight in a life.

1980/
1931

Child, in the first few hours I lived with you,

Time beat the generous pulses of desire,

And churned the embers of a faded light to livid fever heat;

The fleeting moments laughed in mockery;

Fled with the light abruptness of a dream …

Time was asleep … Night and the stars remained

The bitter emptiness of nothing gained,

The queer half-witted stagnancy of Love

Passed like a covert whisper in the night.

And yet, they say, beneath some other skies,

Grey in the dusk there'll be another one

Another with perhaps diviner eyes.

1980/
1931

I was a vagabond; sunset and moon

Found me a place in their hearts.

   Gladly I saw

The still, white summits of the friendly hills,

And snatched a wraith of sadness from the core

Of the deep sea, the unresisting earth:

Sang to the moon, and wove a melody

Deep in the strident archways of the sky;

Or felt the benediction of rebirth

That stirred strange anguish in this vagrant heart …

So there was silence in the wind that followed after,

Dim with a memory I'd left behind

Chilled into terror by the phantom of your laughter.

1980/
1931

We had a heritage that we have lost,

Ours was the whiteness and the godliness

Wings of the twilight; child-like we caress

The tawdry fragments of old dreams, embossed

With all the garishness of wandering minds,

Crazed and distraught; palsied with senile age.

The wisdom of a fool that seeks and finds

An emptiness, a gaunt penultimate stage

Before perfection! Reason fades and dies

Beneath the burden of such blasphemies;

Life is a loneliness, and heritage

A whispered mockery; yet first to go,

Killed by the fitful ravings of a sage

Was youth; youth has been dead a painted age ago …

Sometimes the gross pendulum of time

Is swung back an aeon;

                                      And I,

Bewilderingly wonder at my great foolishness

To leave you forever alone that night by a star swept sea,

With the laughter of the dark surf in your eyes …

Godless, and yet so very much a God.

1980/
1931

Oh! to blunder onto the glory of some white, majestic headland,

And to feel the clean wisdom of the curving sea,

And the dear mute calling of the wind

On the masked heels of the twilight….

Greying away to sundown, winding into the west;

And oh! heart of my heart to find

Dreams so oft forgotten, few fulfilled.

1980/
1931

The road is a sinister pathway paved with smoke,

A faint, white tremor; in the encircling trees

Grow the little whispers, oak to friendly oak,

Sentinels of the road.

                                  Darker than these

Full in the shadow of the leaning elm

A restive horse pads on the level grass,

And counts the seconds; dark, immobile sits

The masked rider, gleaming oblique slits

For eyes, watching the timid minutes pass

On stealthy feet, hurrying the approach

Of time;

             Far out upon the curving road

Glitters, an unsuspecting prey, the Midnight Coach.…

1980/
1931

How can we find the substance of the lie;

Trace the huge source of deadlock, and complain

Of wealth denied, when we who paid the cost

Thwart our forbidden ends of destiny,

And mock our own wild laughter?

   We have lost

In the lithe whips of the soft, blinding rain,

More than a century of mingled hates …

More than these years of recompense forget:

Turbulence at a sleeping city's gates:

The pathos of a victim still, beset

By a reluctant Hector, finding light

In the huge heart-break of its shaken tears,

A width … a tenderness … some ultimate height

To stem the vanguard of to-day with years.

1980/
1931

Down the wide shadow-streets of the city,

   By the white marble steps

Where the quiet, soft-robed people

Crowd to the glamour of the music,

Deep between the pallid shadows of the houses,

And the white fantasy of the Moonlight

   Among the columns;

Through the glazed signature of the mists

   Across the great Dome,

Sped the lithe God, the tall Grecian youth,

   Dark of limb, and fleet,

With the ebony glitter of light in his hair,

   And his full, lustrous eyes

Dim with unbidden searching.

1980/
1931

Can you remember, oh so long ago,

How we wandered one twilight over the edge of the clouds

Over the pathway to the stars, and found

The cave …

The cave of the silver echoes,

And when I stood, breathless, and called your name,

It flung it back to me in little ripples

Of ecstatic, liquid sound.

Can you forget how you said mockingly,

Hand on my arm: ‘If you have need of me

In some dim afterwards, when the gaunt years

Have brought no fuller harvest, greater recompense:

Or if in your poor loneliness you need my comfort,

Come one twilight under these vacant leagues,

These drowsy blue immensities of sky,

    And call my name,

And I will hear,' ‘And answer me,' laughed I.

1980/
1931

Sealed with the image of man grows the fungus,

Puffed to ripe unholy promise;

A vagueness unfulfilled lies in the venom.

Illimitable design

Weighed in a madman's hand

Who swings destruction in the huge scales.

The broad vision of a Xerxes turns and cries,

Seeing his Nubian mercenaries,

    The masked furies of a night,

Wreathe and twine into the tenebrous defiles,

A living snake of blindness …

And to hear that old, age-weary crying,

They are such dust before the wind.

1980/
1931

The quiet murmur shakes the shadowed wood,

And stirs the larches;

Startles the timid moorhen's fluffy brood

Where the fern arches,

Pregnant with sudden, wide-eyed loneliness.

It touches the rounded nipples of the hills

With amorous fingers:

The tender crying of the wood it stills

With a touch that lingers

Silent and magic on the placid air.

It threads its dainty way to your lone bed,

And largesse throws …

White, wrinkled leaves on your bowed head,

White as the snows

That coldly smile on youth and life and love.

1980/
1931

Last night I bowed before a destiny,

Deep in the night; bound with my huge grief,

Stooping beneath the desolation of my tears,

I climbed the forgotten pathway to the stars,

And knelt, half-man, half-child before our cave;

And the light fingers of the little winds

Touched my tired eyes and lips,

And the quaint fragrance of the clover ….

Stirred all the mournfulness of the old memories

And darkness was kind to me ….

When suddenly I cried in my great sorrow to the sky,

And heard your answer, growing quietly

Over the brimming silence of the deeps ….

So I gained comfort from one long-since dead.

1980/
1931

So we have come to evening … graciously,

Through the bewildered churning of our dreams,

And found a day well spent; the candle-light

Gathers the living gloom, and wistfully

Cradles its arms about you as you sit …

Yet you who seek a flame, ponder and write

Bound by the hapless chatter of a quill.

While beauty grows and stirs about your chair,

Oh frail poet, under the candle-light …

1980/
1931

I who have lived in death, hemmed by the spears,

Born by grave victory, or by sore defeat,

Finding no vain or mercenary tears

In battle, lithe of body, fleet

To stem a wild, vainglorious afterflow,

I live that you may laugh, die that you may live;

Strew some rich largesse where the best may throw

Some broken toy, incalculably give

The widened harness of our peaceful years

Into your eager hands. I find no joy

In old wives' adoration, women's tears,

Or the reluctant praises of a boy,

… Being the faint shadow of a vanguard's wave,

I die

That you may live, and fear the life.

1980/
1931

Pity these lame and halting parodies

Of greater, better poems; from the dawn

And from the sunset I have fashioned them

From the white wonders of the seven seas;

And from the memories of hours forlorn

When I lived goodbyes, and crushed the stem

Of conscious sadness, pillaging the sap

Of tired youth.

Strange yearning that I've had

To climb the trough of some forgotten jest

Or cry, and lay a tired head on your lap;

Sing to the moon, or yet be silent lest

In deep woods I wake some sleeping dryad….

Partly because I'm writing this to you

Perhaps because I'm only human too,

I make excuse for each strange, hopeless song:

For all this unintelligible throng

Of words inadequate. I only plead

That I have lived them all these lonely few

And made them personal … quaint offering

Each one some little magic that belongs to you.

1980/
1931

There is a great heart-break in an evening sea;

Remoteness in the sudden naked shafts

Of light that die, tremulous, quivering

Into cool ripples of blue and silver …

So it is with these songs:

                                        the ink has dried,

And found its own perpetual circuit here,

Cast its own net

Of little, formless mimicry around itself.

And you must turn away, smile …

                                                     and forget.

1980/
1931

Seal up the treasury and bar the gate.

We have enough of wonders in our store

To sit awhile at evening and relate

Wonderingly, what we did not have before.

Here in the counting-house, while daylight speeds

Nearer to us and nearer, let us tell,

Soft-voiced, with reverence, as a monk tells beads,

All the possessions that we love so well;

And fear not. In the hour before the dawn,

When cressets tremble in the icy wind

That shumbles in the parched and sleepy corn,

These will be safe for other's hands to find.

These treasures that are hoarded in our trust

Others will touch with hands, but find them dust.

1980/
1932