Marble Faun & Green Bough (5 page)

The lurking thief, in sharp regret
Watches the far world, waking yet,
But which in sleep will soon be still;
While he upon his misty hill
Hears a dark bird briefly cry
From its thicket on the sky,
And curses the moon because her light
Marks every outcast under night.

Still swings the murderer, bent of knees
In a slightly strained repose,
Nor feels the faint hand of the breeze:
He now with Solomon all things knows:
That, lastly, breath is to a man
But to want and fret a span.

H
E FURROWS
the brown earth, doubly sweet
To a hushed great passage of wind
Dragging its shadow. Beneath his feet
The furrow breaks, and at its end

He turns. With peace about his head
Traverses he again the earth: his own,
Still with enormous promises of bread
And the clean smell of its strength upon him blown.

Against the shimmering azure of the wood
A blackbird whistles, cool and mellow;
And there, where for a space he stood
To fill his lungs, a spurting yellow

Rabbit bursts, its flashing scut
Muscled in erratic lines
Of fright from furrow hill to rut.
He shouts: the darkly liquid pines

Mirror his falling voice, as leaf
Raises clear brown depths to meet its falling self;
Then again the blackbird, thief
Of silence in a burnished pelf.

Inscribes the answer to all life
Upon the white page of the sky:
The furious emptiness of strife
For him to read who passes by.

Beneath the marbled sky go sheep
Slow as clouds on hills of green;
Somewhere waking waters sleep
Beyond a faintleaved willow screen.

Wind and sun and air: he can
Furrow the brown earth, doubly sweet
With his own sweat, since here a man
May bread him with his hands and feet.

T
HE
sun lies long upon the hills,
The plowman slowly homeward wends;
Cattle low, uneased of milk,
The lush grass to their passing bends.

Mockingbirds in the ancient oak
In golden madness swing and shake;
Sheep like surf against a cliff
Of green hills, slowly flow and break.

Then sun sank down, and with him went
A pageantry whose swords are sheathed
At last, as warriors long ago
Let fall their storied arms and breathed

This air and found this peace as he
Who across this sunset moves to rest,
Finds but simple scents and sounds;
And this is all, and this is best.

B
e
YOND
the hill the sun swam downward
And he was lapped in azure seas;
The dream that hurt him, the blood that whipped him
Dustward, slowed and gave him ease.

Behind him day lay stark with labor
Of him who strives with earth for bread;
Before him sleep, tomorrow his circling
Sinister shadow about his head.

But now, with night, this was forgotten:
Phantoms of breath round man swim fast;
Forgotten his father, Death; Derision
His mother, forgotten by her at last.

Nymph and faun in this dusk might riot
Beyond all oceaned Time’s cold greenish bar
To shrilling pipes, to cymbals’ hissing
Beneath a single icy star

Where he, to his own compulsion
—A terrific figure on an urn—
Is caught between his two horizons,
Forgetting that he cant return.

W
HEN
evening shadows grew around
And a thin moon filled the lane,
Their slowing breath made scarce a sound
Where Richard lay with Jane.

The world was empty of all save they
And Spring itself was snared,
And well’s the fare of any day
When none has lesser fared:

Young breasts hollowed out with fire,
A singing fire that spun
The gusty tree of his desire
Till tree and gale were one;

And a small white belly yielded up
That they might try to make
Of youth and dark and spring a cup
That cannot fail nor slake.

Y
OUNG
Richard, striding toward town,
Felt life within him grown
Taut as a silver wire on which
Desire’s sharp winds were blown

To a monstrous sound that lapped him close
With a rain of earth and fire,
Flaying him exquisitely
With whips of living wire.

Under the arch where Mary dwelt
And nights were brief and sharp,
Her ancient music fell with his
As cythern falls with harp

And Richard’s fire within her fire
Swirled up into the air,
And polarised was all breath when
A girl let down her hair.

W
HEN
I was young and proud and gay
And flowers in fields were thicking,
There was Tad and Ralph and Ray
All waiting for my picking.

And who, with such a page to spell
And the hand of Spring to spread it,
Could like the tale told just as well
By another who had read it?

Ah, not I! and if I had
—When I was young and pretty—
Not learned to spell, then there was Tad
And Ralph and Ray to pity.

There was Tad and Ray and Ralph,
And field and lane were sunny;
And ah! I spelled my page myself
Long ere I married Johnny.

H
IS
mother said: I’ll make him
A lad has never been
(And rocked him closely, stroking
His soft hair’s yellow sheen)
His bright youth will be metal
No alchemist has seen.

His mother said: I’ll give him
A brave and high desire,
’Till all the dross of living
Burns clean within his fire.
He’ll be strong and merry
And he’ll be clean and brave,
And all the world will rue it
When he is dark in grave.

But dark will treat him kinder
Than man would anywhere
(With barren winds to rock him
—Though now he doesn’t care—
And hushed and haughty starlight
To stroke his golden hair)

Mankind called him felon
And hanged him stark and high
Where four winds could watch him
Troubled on the sky.

Once he was quick and golden,
Once he was clean and brave.
Earth, you dreamed and shaped him:
Will you deny him grave?

Being dead he will forgive you
And all that you have done,
But he’ll curse you if you leave him
Grinning at the sun.

B
ONNY
earth and bonny sky
And bonny was the sweep
Of sun and rain in apple trees
While I was yet asleep.

And bonny earth and bonny sky
And bonny’ll be the rain
And sun among the apple trees
When I’ve long slept again.

B
EHOLD
me, in my feathered cap and doublet,
strutting across this stage that men call living:
the mirror of all youth and hope and striving.
Even you, in me, become a grimace.”

“Ay, in that belief you too are but a mortal,
thinking that peace and quietude and silence
are but the shadows of your little gestures
upon the wall of breathing that surrounds you.”

“Ho, old spectre, solemnly ribbed with wisdom!
D’ye think that I must feel your dark compulsions
and flee with kings and queens in whistling darkness?
I am star, and sun, and moon, and laughter.”

“What star is there that falls, with none to watch it?
What sun is there more permanent than darkness?
What moon is there that cracks not? ay, what laughter,
what purse is there that empties not with spending?”

“Ho.… One grows weary, posturing and grinning,
aping a dream to a house of peopled shadows!
Ah, ’twas you who stripped me bare and set me
gibbering at mine own face in a mirror.”

“Yes, it is I who, in the world’s clear evening
with a silver star like a rose in a bowl of lacquer,
when you have played your play and at last are quiet,
will wait for you with sleep, and you can drown.”

o atthis
for a moment an aeon i pause plunging
above the narrow precipice of thy breast

what before thy white precipice the eagle
sharp in the sunlight and cleaving
his long blue ecstasy and what
wind on hilltops blond with the wings of the morning
what wind o atthis sweeping the april to lesbos
whitening the seas

O
NCE
upon an adolescent hill
There lay a lad who watched amid the piled
And silver shapes of aircarved cumulae
A lone uncleaving eagle, and the still
Serenely blue dissolving of desire.

Easeful valleys of the earth had been: he looked not back,
Not down, he had not seen
Lush lanes of vernal peace, and green
Unebbing windless tides of trees; no wheeling gold
Upon the lamplit wall where is no speed
Save that which peaceful tongue ’twixt bed and supper wrought.

Here still the blue, the headlands; here still he
Who did not waken and was not awaked.
The eagle sped its lonely course and tall;
Was gone. Yet still upon his lonely hill the lad
Winged on past changing headlands where was laked
The constant blue

And saw the fleeing canyons of the sky
Tilt to banshee wire and slanted aileron,
And his own lonely shape on scudding walls
Where harp the ceaseless thunders of the sun.

G
REEN
is the water, green
The grave voluptuous music of the sun;
The pale and boneless fingers of a queen
Upon his body stoop and run.

Within these slow cathedralled corridors
Where ribs of sunlight drown
He joins in green caressing wars
With seamaids red and brown

And chooses one to bed upon
And lapped and lulled is he
By dimdissolving music of the sun
Requiemed down through the sea.

H
ERE
he stands, while eternal evening falls
And it is like a dream between gray walls
Slowly falling, slowly falling
Between two walls of gray and topless stone,
Between two walls with silence on them grown.
The twilight is severed with waters always falling
And heavy with budded flowers that never die,
And a voice that is forever calling
Sweetly and soberly.

Spring wakes the walls of a cold street,
Sows silver remembered seed in frozen places:
Upon meadows like still and simply smiling faces,
and wrinkled streams, and grass that knew her feet.

Here he stands, without the gate of stone
Between two walls with silence on them grown,
And littered leaves of silence on the floor;
Here, in a solemn silver of ruined springs
Among the smooth green buds, before the door
He stands and sings.

W
HAT
sorrow, knights and gentles? scroll and
Harp will prop the shaken sky
With the bronzehard fame of Roland
Who was not bronze, and so did die.

And ladies fair, why tears? why sighs?
There’s still many a champion that’ll
Feel the sharp goads of your eyes
As Roland did, in love and battle.

And be of cheer, ye valiant foemen.
Woman bore you: though amain
Life’s gale may blow, there’s born of woman
One who’ll give you sleep again.

Weep not for Roland: envy him
Whose fame is fast in song and story,
While he, with myriad cherubim
Is lapped in ease, asleep in glory.

I
SEE
your face through the twilight of my mind,
A dusk of forgotten things, remembered things;
It is a corridor dark and cool with music
And too dim for sight,
That leads me to a door which brings
You, clothed in quiet sound for my delight.

S
OMEWHERE
a moon will bloom and find me not,
Then wane the windless gardens of the blue;
Somewhere a lost green hurt (but better this
Than in rich desolation long forgot)
Somewhere a sweet remembered mouth to kiss—
Still, you fool; lie still: that’s not for you.

H
OW
canst thou be chaste, when lonely nights
And nights I lay beside in intimate loveliness
Thy grave beauty, girdle-slacked; and grief
So long my own was gone, and there was peace
Like azure wings my body along to lie
Wherein thy name like muted silver bells
Breathed over me, and found
Less joy, but less of grief than waking thou didst stir?
Then I did need but turn to thee, and then
My hand dreamed on thy little breast. Then flowed
Beneath my hand thy body’s curve, and turned
To me within the famished lonely dark
Thy sleeping kiss.

W
AS
this the dream?
                          Thus: It seemed I lay
Upon a beach where sand and water kiss
With endless kissing in a dying fall. The moon
Walked in the water, trod with silver shoon
The quavering sands: naught else but this.

And then and soon, O soon
                                            What wind
Shaped thee in Cnydos? shaped
Thy graven music? whence such guise
Doth starlight take nor beauty never taken
Yet hand so hungry for?
                                      O I have seen
The ultimate hawk unprop the ultimate skies,
And with the curving image of his fall
Locked beak to beak. And waked

And waked. And then the moon
And quavering sands where kissing crept and slaked
And that was all.
                        (Or had I slept
And in the huddle of its fading, wept
That long waking ere I should sleep again?)

S
TILL
, and look down, look down:
Thy curious withdrawn hand
Unprobes, now spirit and sense unblend, undrown,
Knit by a word and sundered by a tense
Like this: Is: Was: and Not. Nor caught between
Spent beaches and the annealed insatiate sea
Dost myriad lie, cold and intact Selene,
On secret strand or old disastrous lee
Behind the fading mistral of the sense.