The Happy Marriage and Other Poems/The Happy Marriage
THE HAPPY MARRIAGE
and Other Poems
THE HAPPY MARRIAGE
***
PART ONE
(1)
First I will tell you something of these two.
He followed love as watchful as a child,
And yet unchildlike never quite beguiled
To think the thing he found the thing he knew:
She, sure of all things seen by moon or sun,
And sure that these were all her eyes could see,
Waited impatient for the victory
That should secure what was already won.
He followed love, she waited her true lover:
She waited what she need but wait to find;
He followed what pursuit could not discover
Nor time disclose nor death surprise and bind.
Over the hills, he sang, and far away—
She never knew that land nor where it lay.
(2)
Well, he was drunk. That much was clear,
Or not quite clear but certain.
Queer
The way a rising moon will burn
Green copper!
Thing you'll never learn
From books: but out of life and beer
Or beer and life you may discern
Great truths—as that a tower gleams
In moon-fire like a torch and seems
A toppling brand of burnt emprise.
No teacher else is half so wise
At demonstrating chords and themes
The singing sort of men devise.
Take Helen,—all you hear of her
In lectures is a learned slur
Of couplets solemnly undressed
To indicate the female chest,
Till Helen's lost and nothing's sure
But that she had, praise God, a breast.
And then you're drunk and out you walk
Through High Street where the shadows mock
The third dimension of thick day,
And walls chirp back the words you say;
And magically above your talk,
As lift faint mountains far away,
There lifts a sudden loveliness,
A flare of beauty, an excess
Of radiance, more sense than thought,
Like soundless music somehow caught
Back of the brain, or some impress
Of figures in a dream forgot—
And there stands Helen—there's the face
Young Marlowe saw past time and space
And would have seen again and died;
There, there the subtle breast, the side
White as white water, there the grace
Of queens and there the pride, the pride.
Helen, he said,—but was it she?
Somewhere he'd seen serenity
Drawn smooth as this across a flame
As bright to hide, and brows that tame
Eyes as unapt to secrecy,—
Nay, he had known these eyes, this same
Young breast, this throat.—There was a name—
(3)
He had used love or lust or what's between
Long, long before. When he was still a boy
Old hairy love that hugs his knees for joy
And quavers tunes, ecstatic and obscene,
Grey goatish love that whistles to the fauns,
Had whistled fever through his aching flesh
And led him giddy down his nerves' dark mesh
To lie with empresses and leprechauns.
So he had used and after in a mood
Of sluggish melancholy and vague grief,
Ruffled with such warm rifts as in a wood
A sunny wind blows over leaf by leaf,
Had longed for death that lies beneath the ground
And feels no lust and listens to no sound.
(4)
And he had used love's dream of love before,
Love that hopes nothing but the hope it is,
Love that has no utterance in a kiss,
Nor eloquence in flesh, but would adore
Its perfect adoration, its desire,
As musingly in wonder as the moon
Stares back into a brook whose running rune
Burns with the imaged argent of moon-fire.
Sometimes in music when the phrase would close
And yet yearn on in silence, unfulfilled,
Once in the imperfection of a rose,
Once in an ape's face marvellously stilled,
He had imagined the perfected thing,
The hope made real, the unfolded wing.
(5)
But she was both,—she was both loved and love,
She was desire and the thing desired,
She was Troy flame and she was Troy town fired,
She was hope realized and the hope thereof:
Her slender body was the instant bloom
Of lovely secrecies; the shadowed swell
Of her small breast was beauty sensible;
Her stormy hair wore wonder like a plume.
Away, his sense of her was like the sense
Of moonlight under the smooth vague of sleep;
Near, at her touch, her beauty's imminence
Was like a wave that falters at the leap
And lifts in foam a moment till it fall,
Filling with thunderous hush the interval.
(6)
Passing her in the day he had but dared
To meet her eyes and in the moment's touch
Seemed to his flinching brain to dare too much
So proud she was and single and unshared.
She was another flesh than his he thought,
Another element, less earth than flame,
A different life, unnamed but for the name,
Her eyes should teach him if he could be taught.
But now at midnight the remembering dark
Imaged her body naked by his side,
Her head half turned and on her mouth the mark
Of lust fed full and still unsatisfied,
And her clear eyes that had compelled his mind
Were humble now and hideously kind.
(7)
Under an elm tree where the river reaches
They watched the evening deepen in the sky,
They watched the westward clouds go towering by
Through lakes of blue toward those shining beaches,
Those far enchanted strands where blowing tides
Break into light along the shallow air;
They watched how like a ship's tall lantern there
Over that silent surf the faint star rides.
Ship of a dream, he thought,—O dreamed of shore
Beyond all oceans and all earthly seas!
Now would they never call him any more,
Now would they never hurt him with unease.
She was that ship, that sea, that syren land;
And she was here, her hand shut in his hand.
(8)
Here, O wanderer, here is the hill and the harbor,
Farer and follower, here the Hesperides.
Here wings the Halcyon down through the glamorous arbor,
Here is the end of the seas.
Have you heard music at morning of far sea singing?
Have you heard singing over the water at dark?
This was the music you heard here forever reringing,
Only the thrush, O hark!
Have you seen citadels glance in the sunset, and towers?
Have you seen castles of glint and of gossamer spun?
These, only these, were the heights, these hills grown with flowers,
These were the gates of the sun.
There is no music but this, no loveliness other,—
Only the reaching of arms and the rose of a breast,
Only a girl's throat—beyond this earth ends and seas smother,
And the old moon fades in the west.
There is no land beyond and no shore and no ocean,
Nothing but night and the moon and the cold thin air,
Where change never comes but the stars' unchangeable motion,
Nor end but endlessness there.
(9)
Beatrice, Beatrice, poor Beatrice,
She said, and laughed and tossed aside the book.
Once Dante saw her and his green bones shook
And that you say was love. Why love is—this—
She leaned above him in the sunlight there.
Poor Beatrice! The shadowy Florentine
Dissolved in shadow, and high heaven's queen
Drowned in the heavy darkness of dark hair.
Poor Beatrice—Poor Dante—did they miss
So much of love exalting love so much?
Or is it love to tremble on a kiss?
Or does true love love only past the touch?
But this was true whatever truth's device,
And this could live in Hell or Paradise.
(10)
Would you jig, O lusty loin?
O brain, would you dance so soon?
But love who pays the fiddler's coin
Must call the tune.
Not when you would, O soul,
Not, О flesh, when you will,
But when love nods, and the wild drums roll
And the fiddles shrill.
PART TWO
(1)
It was all quiet on that little hill,
And through the dusk a hazy quiet fell,
Quiet as lulled as after a slow bell
The silver quaver falters and is still.
There was no stir among the trees at all
Nor any lift of air along the ground;
Only soft rain that settled with no sound,
And rain drops on still leaves too stilled to fall.
He thought the stillness was her bridal house
And here within hushed walls of secretness
She lay and waited till his love should rouse
Echoes of longing, and with love's excess
Ring down this silence on a rising chime,
Ring down the heavens and the roof of time.
(2)
Turning he raised the latch and passed the door
And stood upon the threshold of her room,
As though he stood upon the farthest shore
Of wonder and awaited there the bloom
Of moonrise on the sea. O, surely here,
Here in this heart of silence he should find
That something sought which now as he came near
Was like moonrise and music in his mind.
Here, surely here, his very flesh should know
Beauty that has no knowledge in the flesh,
And beauty known within that mortal mesh
Should be immortal and true beauty show.
So should his body be his subtle brain
And thought be sense and sense be thought again.
(3)
Things he had loved because he knew them lost,
Things he had loved and never yet had found—
The unintelligible beauty tossed
Back from a foolish dream—the smothered sound
Of laughter from a window swiftly barred
In some monk's chronicle—the ruined grace
Of carven marbles that old rains had marred—
Things he had lost and loved were in that place.
And she was like the voice of those lost things
Haunting the body that his arms held near,
And singing there of other loves as sings
The bird at evening of another year.
But now she slept and was herself and seemed
More than his love and less than he had dreamed.
(4)
She was herself, not his, not anything
That might be his or he might ever own,
Or ever think, or with much thinking bring
To words that may be spoken out and known;
And that dear image he had coined of her
To spend his love, and gilded with her head,
Was but the counterfeit love's pensioner
Should hoard for all his wealth when she was dead,
And all he knew of her was something less
Than what his hand could learn against her side,
Or what his mouth remembered from the press
Of her mute mouth. She had become the bride
Of something in his sense that understood
The touch of things, the moments of the blood.
(5)
They say they are one flesh:
They are two nations.
They cannot mix nor mesh:—
Their conjugations
Are cries from star to star.
They would commingle,
They couple far and far—
Still they are single.
With arms and hungry hands
They cling together,
They strain at bars and bands,
They tug at tether,
Still there are walls between,
Still space divides them,
Still are themselves unseen,
Still distance hides them.
PART THREE
(1)
I see you with my mind.
You are a swarm
Of dust,
A storm
Of timeless atoms blowing where they must,
From kind to crumbling kind.
I see you with my hands.
You are the earth.
The frame,
The girth,
Of all that is and is always the same,
And through all ruin stands.
I see you with my eyes.
You are my love,
You change,
You move,
You are alive and like all living strange
That being different dies.
(2)
She was not strange, but patterned from that plan
Perfected in the worm and still rehearsed
In fishes and all furred and feathered cursed
By fur and feather to be unlike Man,—
A hollow cylinder hooped in with bone
Projecting sidewise to isosceles,
A simple tube , but modified to ease
The seed that must not die till it be sown.
And this new marvel, this long lovely line,
This melody, this mute Alcaic curve
From thigh to throat was still the Egg's design
To propagate leviathan and serve
The toad's eternity,—and only fine
Because he chose, and chose to misdivine.
(3)
Man is immortal, for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever—why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth.
She is the tree; we are the feverish
Vain leaves that gild her summer with our own,
And fall and rot when summer's overblown,
And wish eternity and have—our wish.
And man, immortal, marries his own dreams
Of immortality in flesh and blood,
And mortal woman, wiser than she seems,
Marries her man for evil or for good,—
Wherein perception sees what reason blurs:
She was not his, but he was only hers.
(4)
O hide your eyes,
O turn your head away;
Are you so wise, so wise,
To watch unchanged this chemistry of clay?
It is not we,
It is another two;
Hide that you may not see
What flushed unlovely things their bodies do.
O think no grace
That I am glad of this:
I do not know your face,
It is not you but my own flesh I kiss.
Blind, blind your brow
And your too candid eyes:
You cannot love me now,
You cannot love what even love denies.
(5)
This was not love but love's true negative
That spends itself in passion to be spent,
And lives no longer than the wish may live
To waste itself and then is impotent.
And fails not only but confounds in fault
What love most lives upon, the very need,
The lack, the famine, the too thirsty salt,
Till wanting want love has no will to feed.
Yet, in the glut and surfeit of desire
Desire itself was perfected and found,
And fever burned by its consuming fire
Was bare as martyrs' bones beneath the ground.
This was not love, the ever unpossessed,
But this was love of her made manifest.
(6)
Love is the way that lovers never know
Who know the shortest way to find their love,
And never turn aside and never go
By vales beneath nor by the hills above,
But running straight to the familiar door
Break sudden in and call their dear by name
And have their wish and so wish nothing more
And neither know nor trouble how they came.
Love is the path that comes to this same ease
Over the summit of the westward hill,
And feels the rolling of the earth and sees
The sun go down and hears the summer still,
And dips and follows where the orchards fall
And comes here late or never comes at all.
(7)
But love of her went wandering no mood
Of azure evening where the worm's slow spark
Kindled and dimmed and like enchantment stood
The spring's young moon upon the silver dark,
Nor followed any path that seeking her
Sought beauty first and would not find her breast
Save through old forests thick and loftier
Than guard the golden apples in the west.
She was the sky and country of his love,
The towns and towers and the outward farms,
And journeys in that land might only move
From her recalled to her recalling arms,
Where all horizons were attained and dear
Before he thought them far or wished them near.
(8)
Whom do you love, she said, when you look out
So far beyond my eyes as our eyes meet?
Is she so like and yet unlike you doubt
If I'm the counterfeit or she's the cheat?
Or is she some one that I never was?
Or what I was and shall not be again?
Back of your eyes I think her image has
Not only longing and much more than pain.
She never had another's face but this,
He laughed and touched her cheek. She moved as you,
And spoke upon your tongue and used your kiss,
And knew the mysteries your wisdom knew,
And had your silence, and was called your name—
But was not I myself—was not the same!
(9)
As like, he said, as what we see of it
Is like and wider than the unseen sea—
Wider because the sea's not infinite
But banked and shored from possibility,
While what we see, because we cannot know
From maps or charts how far it should extend,
Is greater than the ocean and may flow
Over horizons till horizons end.
You have no bounds to me but my defect
Of eyes to see if there is more beyond,
And if I watch as they do who expect
Some sign, some drift of green, some lily frond
Borne out of unknown Indies in the west,
I watch your sea for shores you've not confessed.
(10)
But there are times, she said, when you forget,
Lying within the circle of my sky
To watch horizons, and our eyes have met
After a kiss when it was only I
You saw or wished to see, and you have caught
Sometimes and held me when your eyes were blind
For seeing farther than the thing they sought
Which was not farther than the flesh could find.
Were you not happy then?
Ah, happier
Forgetting you and using what you seemed
Than thinking stubbornly what else you were,
And happier forgetting I had dreamed
Than dreaming I should find what I shall not—
Till I remembered that I had forgot.
(11)
Throwing a careless pebble in the lake
She saw the clear sky crumple and the hill
Waver and reel and all the sunlight spill
In swimming circles and the willows shake,
And watching said: You say love cannot die,
But there's a lovely world has had an end.
And when he laughed and said the sky would mend
She said: And that would be another sky.
And then: Oh, yes, the image will return
Being an image—yet the sky has tumbled
However bright the sky itself may burn—
That cannot fall you say? Her fingers fumbled
Against his arm and in the touch he knew
Her heart had guessed the truth that was not true.
(12)
They say to themselves, we will think of the time that was.
Withdraws
The mist momentarily, flows
The dark down and away; and they muse
On a pattern of sky and a leaf there that blows.
And a happiness, sudden, unmeaning, unmeant, without cause,
Arises, renews,
In that leaf, in that pattern of sky and there gathers and grows.
They say to themselves, Ah, then we were happy, love knows:
But shall we be happy again if we choose
A pattern of sky and a leaf there that blows,
As then, on the hurrying flaws,
When happiness was?
PART FOUR
(1)
He leans against the window-sill:
The dusk has drizzled down to rose.
Delicious damps and odors fill
The musings of his thoughtful nose.
The soft wind slides seductive touch
Along the shoulders of the oak.
My dear, I love you, dear, so much—
He cannot think of whom he spoke.
(2)
The white of her Colonial
Showed patterns of a tranquil wall
Through lattices of apple trees,
And softly her serenities
Curled hazy blue above the backs
Of comfortable chimney stacks.
New England, not Arcadia,
She gardened her phenomena,
And tamed her asphodels to grow
To roses in a scarlet row.
New England fenced from Avalon,
The curtains of her peace were drawn
Against the peering of the moon,
And crickets shuffled down the tune
Of Pan among the lilac leaves.
From far away he saw her eaves
As shelter against every doubt,
And understood what was shut out
When doors swung back to shut him in,—
But what of that! It was no sin
To bolt with iron from the blaze
Of staring moon on empty ways
And bar the shutters to the sound
Of cloven feet on hollow ground,—
And after by the friendly stove
Sit peacefully and sup of love.
(3)
No doubt he'd once had eyes to see
Through mill-stones to the mystery
That mill-stones might perhaps intend
If there were Ends beyond the end—
But now he had no plague of eyes.
There was a way of being wise
That was not wisdom: one might love
Too loftily and fall above
As well as one might fall below.
And there were things a man might know
That were not knowledge either.
Truth
For instance.
One's ecstatic youth
Proves true what has no proof in sense:
And time strikes out the evidence
But enters judgment on the rule,
So that one's wisdom, learned fool,
Knows only that the thing is true.
But he had knowledge, for he knew
His proofs and never tried their weight
As evidence to demonstrate
The truth of anything on earth
Except themselves, and what was worth
Believing of them.
She was real:
He knew because his hands could feel
The bones that threatened in her wrist.
And she proved nothing but the twist
That was her way of beauty—not
Some Beauty that he had forgot
Nor Truth that now was past belief.
A woman was no lawyer's brief
Compounded to persuade the sense
Of things beyond experience
No woman's body could fulfil,
But Holy Writ that can distil
The very peace it promises.
Once he had seen the Thing That Is
In every movement of her head—
He yawned and shuffled off to bed.
(4)
The humid air precipitates
In moisture on enamelled plates
And orient to opaline
The glass discolors. Crinkled green
Of lettuces grows limp and fades.
A rose bowl withering pervades
The room with sickliness and rusts
The whiteness crimson. Glutted lusts,
Renewing on a deeper nerve,
Denied, make conversation serve
Obscurer converse. Intimate,
Their meeting eyes interrogate
And being answered turn aside,
She secretly and satisfied,
He startled into discontent
By something in her quick assent,
Confided and discreetly masked,
That seemed to promise all he asked.
(5)
Beside her in the dark the chime
Of ratcheted revolving time
Repeating its repeated beat
Builds complicated incomplete
Sonatas in his listening brain,
Phrase upon phrase, till the refrain
Resolves into the tick and tock
Of seconds scissored by the clock.
He thinks he has composed his dream
Of love upon as slight a theme,
And all the arduous obscure
Perfections of his overture,
Unravelled part from varied part,
Were but the drumming of her heart.
But still the clacking clockwork spins
Music of marvellous violins.
(6)
Beauty is that Medusa's head
Which men go armed to seek and sever:
It is most deadly when most dead,
And dead will stare and sting forever—
Beauty is that Medusa's head.