Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/The Vision of the Russian Famine
THE VISION OF THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.
1.
Over vast areas of the night-ringed lists
And hiving tracts of life
Where death and birth,
Moving like storms upon a leafy wilderness,
Wage their perennial strife,
I see your wraiths drift heavenward like mists
That suck from earth
When the slant streamers of the sun caress
The frosted furrows and the steaming marshes,
And phantom phalanxes evolve on stealthy marches.
I see your wraiths drift heavenward like smoke
That swirls aloft
In ashen whorls
And tortuous trunks of vapour like the twisted oak,
And writhing torsos of pale flame,
As oft
When conflagration that no craft can tame
And running prairie-fires past control
Consume whole provinces and char a countryside;
Far and wide
The floating scrolls unroll
And swaying curtains lazily unfurl,
And o'er the blackened belt the drifting palls abide.
I see your wraiths tower up in dizzy rush.
So, when the tempests shroud
The heavens and the hurricane is loud
And ocean shouts
Between the silence of the depths and the sidereal hush,
The whirling pillars of the water-spouts
By harrying currents chased
Lift from the rolling waste
In traveling vortices that feed the clouds.
Now as your laggard wraiths are blown
Vista on vista of the blasted zone
Is momently revealed,
Vision on vision of the visitation.
The invisible flame of famine, fiercely fanned,
Consumes the land.
Starvation
Feeds on all flesh, a spirit-conflagration,
Leaving the human stubble charred on every hand.
Far as the eye can see outside the village bounds
The dead lie heaped in mounds
Awaiting burial like the slaughtered hordes
Upon some vaster battle-field.
The refuse wagons make their daily rounds;
The bodies rattle on the boards,—
Young forms yet apt for living's hurtless strife,
Lithe weapons still for eager souls to wield,
And children's bodies swift to play,
Still unworn vestures strangers to decay;
Stiff as curved fish beneath the unregarded sun,
Copies of God, obscene as carrion.
The steppes are littered with the unnumbered slain
As though great nature by some hideous birth,
Some foul abortion,
Had piled the earth
With countless still-born progeny,
By some untoward miscarriage suddenly
Heaped dead in life's domain,
Blasted with malformation and distortion.
Or as if in the sun
Hell had disgorged its bloodless multitude
And, dreaming the Millennium begun,
The tombs of time cast up their dead too soon,
Fleshed but unquickened,
Only to swoon,
As once Protesiläus who reviewed
The human scene in more than human mood
And breathless in our upper kingdom sickened
And the old pilgrimage of death renewed.
Or as if hell-escaping dæmons thickened
In countless legions
Like locusts darkening these devoted regions,
Leaving their desert haunts untenanted,
Hungry for habitation, to possess
With madness an uncounted populace
And hurl them down, and tear, and leave them dead.
As though whole peoples erred and wandered unaware
Past the frontiers of Providence,
Beyond the vital air
To alien elements
To suffocate beyond God's atmosphere of care;
Hordes that in far migrations overpassed
The universe's habitable zone
Or some entire population gassed
By man-devisèd poisons yet unknown,
Or foul contagion sown,
Or liquid fires from the hostile heavens cast.
Corruption taints the world, plunged in the noisome night
Of some ill-starred eclipse,
The sun-devouring dragon casts his shade,
The isles take fright,
The peoples are dismayed,
A jaundiced blight
Has fallen on the luxuriant globe.
The moth of death is in the many-stranded robe
That mortals weave against the Apocalypse,
Its travailed woof that time transmutes
To stuff of gold
Crumbles to mould.
A blight has fallen on the fecund globe,
A drop of poison on the human hive,
And on the swarming ant-hill where men drive
Their myriad pursuits
Some god as though to harass
Their labour turns his flaming burning-glass.
The withering blasts of some Olympian curse
The teeming clans disperse,
And breeds an ill in nature; a consuming rust
Mildews the wholesome grain; a cankerous spot
Is in earth's globèd fruit,
A leprosy that eats the planet's crust,
A gangrene and a rot.
2.
How can we walk the same earth, undisturbed,
Breathe the identical air, indifferent,
And gaze on the same stars with alien thought?
How, unperturbed,
Gather the fruits the impartial seasons pour
Nor share impartially the general store?
Will Strangers from another planet sent
Succour the Kin that we ignore?
Will other worlds supply the need that we neglect?
Shall we expect
Some heavenly Samaritan to do aught
If we of the terrestrial clan
And holy Nation, Man,
Avert our eyes
With sophistries
And flee the scene nor call it into mind?
Lo, these co-heritors with us of life!
Than which all else is surmise, these who share
This one indubitable fact, to be aware!
To drink the light, to feel, to breathe the air,
This one indubitable fact outlined
Upon the enveloping dark.
With us back untold periods they trace
The issuing of the common race,
And one with us to-day they too embark
With each new moment as upon the crest
Of time's great tidal wave
Down the amazing venture of the next
Invisible moment, even as we, perplexed,
With us still humanly brave
To affront the unimagined, self-possessed.
The fellowship of mystery is ours,
The confraternity of nakedness,
Huddling together in the cosmic cold
No bond we hold
Like that of earth's duress
And common awe before the blank that lowers,
The mute Before and the unanswering After,
The fiendish laughter
Of all the mindless powers
And wild insensate storms that with their lulls and swellings
Rave round our human dwellings.
Illiterate or scholar, Celt or Slav,
No tie we have
As when we stand before the enigmatic grave.
Their ill is ours;
Life in all creatures suffers violence,
Existence is attainted in the scourge,
Night gains upon the light-redeemèd hours.
Our lives so merge
With all who share the dower of sentience
Their pain reverberates through the universal sense
And wakes far-prompted spasms
Of unaccountable pain,
Even as their distant triumphs move obscure enthusiasms,
The swift contagion of their spiritual plague
Breeds in us nostalgias vague
That give intelligence
Of far calamities, and wars, and myriads slain.
Our life is one with theirs,
We may not fling them down the blood-stained stairs
And grades of being brutally
And break away and all unhindered mount.
They cling about our hems tenaciously;
Their cries unnerve our ardour.
We needs must take account
That to earth's farthest cape man is his brother's warder.
Man has one soul and where aught human's ill
Its far contagion blasts each member still;
Yet he will die
Who his own self with all will not identify,
Scorning to know life else than at its worst,
With the disdained, disdained, with the accursed, accursed;
Dreading the most in his full misery
The accusing eyes of those who suffered more than he:
Therefore that One
Who most was man, shrank from the shame
Of any lot less shameful than another's,
Fearing the ignominy of a name
Less ignominious than some human brother's,
That none
Might claim before Him to know well
The trancèd tortures of some deeper hell,
Or cast reproachful glances from a fiercer cross,
Asking in vain for faith in some more hopeless loss,
And hope for some more desperate enterprise,
And love for some more utter sacrifice.
Therefore rejecting the cerulean bliss
He sought the corrupt abyss;
Revolted by the wrongs
Of those whose loathed immunities He shared,
Dreading the direr fate of isolation
And gradual alienation
From man and his millennial exultation,
Driven by a divine bitterness,
Impatiently He bared
His body to the thongs
As if a lover of his kind could not agree
In such a world as this
To any form of death save by the abhorrèd tree,
And by deliberate will
United Love to man's extremest ill.
3.
O Thou Whom men call Father, Who dost taste
An infinite pain in infinite ways, and share
Each pang we bear,
Pierced through with sorrow at the abysmal waste
Wherewith the creature
Gropes his way on in age-long strife with nature,
How shall these know of Thee
Whose years were circled with malignancy?
How shall they know Thee father save Thou prove
To the uttermost Thy love?
They heard no tale of Thee.
Earth's frozen landscapes, unrelenting storms
Let no sign through of that great hearth that warms Eternity.
Cast from the void upon the atrocious years
A lifeless world they trod,
As some dark out-worn earth forgotten even by God,
Ruled by the powers of darkness and a brood
Of Terrors and gaunt Fears.
Born to make hope their spiritual food
They found no trace of good,
Born to breathe God they found no God to breathe;
And they are gone
With no report of mercy to pass on,
No record of compassion to bequeath,
Nor token of Thy grace to testify.
Eternal Vindicator, grant, O grant
Thy love remain not unto these a lie!
So at their coming move the nether realm
That from beyond the grave
The vast disorder
And far commotion in the unseen order
Shall overwhelm
Even death's dim sea-walls of adamant
(Whose ramparts looming since the primæval Act
Immure our days from Life's assaulting ocean tracts
And blot the stars from those wide-ranging cataracts)
And raise a wave
Shall roll back on the hearts of those that live
And rouse reverberations on the oceans of the day
And wake responding passions in the living far away.
Give, O give
To these whose futile cry
Found no reply,
Starving beneath a mocking sky,
To speak in trumpet tones by those who live,
Deep answering deep, and soul to distant soul,
As gong wakes gong, and when long echoes roll
From ocean, far abandoned belfries toll.
There is no ebb in nature without answering flow.
When summer's tide of green
Retreats to depths unseen
And earth is bare beneath the usurping snow,
None doubt that from its unplumbed levels deep
The tides of spring will creep
To submerge the world again in emerald seas.
So shall life's flood retire from its estuaries.
The satellites that from the unseen preside
Over the flux and reflux of the spirit's tide
May now withdraw
Its floods to depths beyond our curious awe,
Then by majestic and unfailing law
To cast them on earth's coasts in varied play
Of colour and of movement and display.
Ay, and the life that ebbed from these uncounted slain
Shall from its hidden cisterns flow again.
The light that faded from their eyes,
The strength that left their limbs,
Gathers somewhere again to pour
Upon earth's conscious shore.
The oil whose flame now dims
Comes flooding back from reservoirs beyond our awed surmise.
There shall be resurrection for the crucified!
And these who died
Clutching with bony fingers the cadaverous earth
Shall wake the eternal bounty past the gates of death
And rise again upborne on some insurgent breath,
Some outburst of celestial mirth
Commensurate to this dearth.
Their passion groping at the doors of life
And feeling up the ways of day
Shall find its utterance once again in clay;
And we who still conduct earth's play and strife
Under the sun
Shall be upborne on tempests from their oblivion
And through us they shall speak
In tones stentorian now where they before were weak:
Saying, Let no soul stand aloof;
But cords of love bind human heart to heart
Across all barriers, lest the warp and woof
Of mortal life in time
Disjoin, and the woven fabric fall apart,
Marring the pattern of the timeless art,
The hieroglyph sublime.
Yet all its strands
Even those that run out to the great unknown
Are gathered in His hands
To Whom all depths and distances are known;
And in the latter day
The tissue of the centuries that we
In part survey
But lose there where it falls
Beyond the world's horizons and the walls
And parapets of sense,
That panorama'd tapestry in all magnificence
One day all souls shall see
Perfected, from their stand in immortality.
4.
Inscrutable Love, how Thy millennial plan
Escapes the momentary glimpse of man
That in the span
Of Thy o'erarching care such havoc finds a place!
'Tis past believing
That Thy beneficent ends
So great a holocaust can yet embrace.
Surely Thy thought transcends
All our aghast conceiving
If it have guerdons that can make amends
For such terrestrial cataclysm;
Indifferent to the wrack of worlds, and schism
In the set frame of things,
The extinction of the suns, and systems' vanishings.
What unimagined solace waits the sons of men
Flung from the wheel of time to fall on sleep
In green oblivious coverts past our ken
Far from the roar of suns and heaven's azure steep.
What realms of colour, what demesnes of rainbow-light,
What vista'd slopes purpureal and shimmering to their gaze,
What gauze-like prospects rare, what irised cloud-lands bright,
Shall make atonement for the outrageous days.
What sudden sloughing of the universe,
Blissful annihilation of the stars,
In what restoring depths will death immerse
These sons of God that bear creation's scars.
Buoyant with what new grace of wingèd feet,
Moving with what new ecstasy of sense,
Will they explore in heady courses fleet,
Untrammeled, these aerial continents.
How shall they cry aloud in poignant joy,
And how aspire unweighted by despair,
And intercede in love without alloy,
And plead with God in crystalline, sweet prayer.
O dear and pitiable multitude
So travailing on the very brink of Life,
Expect the chrysalis-change whereof the prophetic mood
Speaks with appalling sweetness here amid the ephemeral strife.
Oxford, February 1922.