Transitional Poem/Part 3
PART III
"But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still centrally disport in mute calm."
Herman Melville.
18
On my right are trees and a lank stream slidingImpervious as Anaconda to the sunsOf autumn; and the boughs are vipers writhingTo slough the summer from their brittle bones.Here is the Trojan meadow, here Scamander;And I, the counterfeit Achilles, feelA river-god surge up to tear me asunder,A serpent melancholy bruise my heel.
On my left is the city famed for talkAnd tolerance. Its old men run aboutChasing reality, chasing the AukWith butterfly-nets. Its young men swell the routGaping at Helen in the restaurant,Mocking at Helen from monastic towers.Boy Achilles, who has known Helen too longTo scold or worship, stands outside and glowers.
Between the stream and city a rubbish heapProclaims the pleasant norm with smouldering stenches.See! the pathetic pyre where Trojans keepWell out of sight the prey of time's revenges;Old butterfly-nets, couches where lovers lay— All furniture out of fashion. So the fireGuts the proud champions of the real: so TroyCremates her dead selves and ascends to higher.
Grecians awake, salute the happy norm!Now may Achilles find employment still;And once again the blood-lust will grow warm,Gloating on champions he could never kill.And if Scamander rears up and pursues,This ring of rubbish fire will baffle allHis rage. Hero, you're safe, in the purlieusOf God's infernal acre king and thrall.
19
When April comes aliveOut of the small bird's throat,Achilles in the sunshineKept on his overcoat.Trojan and Greek at battle,Helen wantoning—None but heroic metalCould ignore the spring.
When honeysuckle and summerSuffocate the lane,That sulky boil was brokenAnd I at last a man. I'd have stripped off my skin toThe impacts of hate and love—Rebel alone because ICould not be slave enough.
Bodies now, not shadows,Intercept the sun:It takes no rod to tell meThat discipline's begun.Seeking the fabled fusionFrom love's last chemical,I found the experimentMakes monads of us all;
For love still keeps apart,And all its vanitiesBut emphasise higher heaven,As February treesWhen rooks begin their noisyCoronation of the woodAre turreted with follyYet grow toward some good.
I thought, since love can harnessPole with contrary pole,It must be earthed in darknessDeeper than mine or mole. Now that I have lovedA while and not gone blind,I think love's terminalsAre fixed in fire and wind.
20
How often, watching the windy boughsJuggle with the moon, or leaningMy body against a windThat sets all earth careening;Or when I have seen flames browsingOn the prairie of night and tossingTheir muzzles up at Orion;Or the sun's hot arsenal spentOn a cloud salientTill the air explodes with light;How often have I perceived a delightWhich parallels the racing mind,But never rides it off the course.
Another fire, another windNow take the air, and IAm matched with a stricter ecstasy.For he whom love and fear enlistTo comb his universeFor what Protagoras missed, Needs be reborn hermaphroditeAnd put himself out to nurseWith a syren and a sybil.So the spider gradually,Drawing fine systems from his belly,Includes creation with a threadAnd squats on the navel of his world.Yet even that arch-fakir must feedAusterity on warm blood.
The tracks of love and fearLead back till I disappearInto that ample terminusFrom which all trains draw outSnorting towards an Ultima Thule.Nothing is altered aboutThe place, except its gloom is newlyLacquered by an unaccustomed eye,Yet cannot blunt mine eyes nowTo the clear finalityOf all beginnings.Of all beginnings.OutsideIn the diamond air of dayThe engines simmer with delay,Desiring a steely disciplineNo less, though now quite satisfiedThey travel a loop-line.
21
My lover is so happy, you well might sayOne of the Hellene summers had lost its wayAnd taken shelter underneath her breast.None but its proper fear can now arrestOur meteoric love: but still we grieveThat curves of mind and body should outliveAll expectation, and the heart becomeA blunt habitual arc, a pendulumWagged by the ghost of its first impetus.Love keeps the bogey slave to admonish usOf vanity, yet through this fear we scrawlOur sky with love's vain comets ere it fall.
And then, up on High Stoy standing alone,We saw the excellence of the serious downThat shakes the seasons from its back, and bearsNo obligation but to wind and stars.What paroxysm of green can crack those hugeRibs grown from Chaos, stamped by the Deluge?
Later, within the wood sweetly recliningOn bluebell and primrose, we loved; whose shiningMade a poor fiction of the royal skies,But were to love alone repositoriesOf what by-product wonder it could spare From lips and eyes. Yet nothing had such powerAs prattle of small flowers within the brakeTo mount the panic heart and rein it backFrom the world's edge. For they, whose virtue liesIn a brief act of beauty, summarizeEarth's annual passion and leave the naked earthStill dearer by their death than by their birth.So we, who are love's hemispheres hidingBeneath the coloured ordeal of our spring,Shall be disclosed, and I shall see your faceAn autumn evening certain of its peace.
22
It is an easier thingTo give up great possessionsThan to forego one farthingOf the rare unpossessed.
But I've been satelliteLong enough to this moon,The pharisee of nightShining by tradition.
There's no star in the skyBut gazing makes it doubleAnd the infatuate eyeCan breed dilemmas on it.
Wiser it were to sheathMy burning heart in clayThan by this double breathTo magnify the tomb.
I'd live like grass and trees,Familiar of the earth,Proving its basalt peaceTill I was unperturbed
By synod of the sunsOr a moon's insolenceAs the ant when he runsBeneath sky-scraping grass.
23
You've trafficked with no beast but unicornWho dare hold me in scornFor my dilemmas. Nor have you perceivedThe compass-point suggestAn east by pointing to the west,Or you'd not call me thus deceivedFor fixing my desireOn this magnetic north to gyreUnder the sheer authority of ice.
I have seen what impertinenceStokes up the dingy rhetoric of sense:I've seen your subaltern ambitions riseYellow and parallelAs smoke from garden cities that soon fadesIn air it cannot even defile. Poor shades,Not black enough for hell,Learn of this poplar which beyond its heightAspires not, and will bend beneath the thumbOf every wind; yet when the stars comeIt is an omen darker than the night.
The rest may go. No satisfaction liesIn such. And you alone shall hearMy pride, whose love's the accurate frontierOf all my enterprise.While your beauties' successionHolds my adventure in a flowery chainAs the spring hedgerows hold the lane,How can I care whether it ends uponMarsh or metropolis?
But look within my heart, see thereThe tough stoic ghost of a pride was too severeTo risk an armisticeWith lesser powers than death; but rather died Welcoming that iron in the soulWhich keeps the spirit whole,Since none but ghosts are satisfiedTo see a glory passing and let it pass.
For I had been a modern moth and hurledMyself on many a flaming world,To find its globe was glass.In you aloneI met the naked light, by you becameVeteran of a flameThat burns away all but the warrior bone.And I shall know, if time should falsifyThis star the company of my night,Mine is the heron's flightWhich makes a solitude of any sky.
24
Farewell again to this adolescent moon; I say it is a bottleFor papless poets to feed their fancy on. Once mine sucked there, and I dreamedThe heart a record for the gramophone— One scratch upon the surface,And the best music of that sphere is gone. So I put passion awayIn a cold storage and took its tune on trust, While proper men with church-bellsSignal a practised or a dreamt-of lust . . . No fear could sublimateThe ennui of a tomb where music slept In artificial frost,Nor could it long persuade me to accept Rigidity for peace.Moon-stricken I worked out a solitude Of sand and sun, believingNo other soil could bear the genuine rood. But nothing grew exceptThe shadow at my heels. Now I confess There's no virtue in sand:It is the rose that makes the wilderness. I thought integrityNeeded a desert air; I saw it plain, A chimney of stone at evening,A monolith on the skyline after rain. Instead, the witless sunFertilised that old succubus and bred A skeleton in a shadow.Let cactus spring where hermits go to bed With those they come to kill.Three-legged I ran with that importunate curse, Till I guessed (in the sexual trance Or playing darts with drunken schoolmasters) The integrity that's laid bareUpon the edge of common furniture. Now to the town returningI accept the blind collisions that ensure Soul's ektogenesis.
25
Where is the true, the central stoneThat clay and vapour zone,That earthquakes budge nor vinegar bites away,That rivets man against Doomsday?
You will not find it there, althoughYou sink a shaft belowDespair and see the roots of death close-curledAbout the kernel of your world.
Where is the invaluable starWhose beams enlacèd areThe scaffolding of truth, whose stages drawnAside unshutter an ideal dawn?
It is well hid. You would not findIt there, though far you minedUp through the golden seams that cram the nightAnd walked those galleries of light.
Above, below, the Flux tight-packedStages its sexual act—An ignominious scuffling in the darkWhere brute encounters brute baresark.
Keep to the pithead, then, nor pryBeyond what meets the eye,Since household stuff, stone walls, mountains and treesPlacard the day with certainties.
For individual truth must lieWithin diversity;Under the skin all creatures are one race,Proved integers but by their face.
So he, who learns to comprehendThe form of things, will findThey in his eye that purest star have sownAnd changed his mind to singular stone.
26
Chiefly to mind appearsThat hour on SilverhoweWhen evening's lid hung lowAnd the sky was about our ears.Buoyed between fear and loveWe watched in eastward form The armadas of the stormAnd sail superbly above;So near, they'd split and founderOn the least jag of sense,One false spark fire the immenseBroadside the confounding thunder.They pass, give not a salvo,And in their rainy washWe hear the horizons crashWith monitors of woe.
Only at highest powerCan love and fear becomeTheir equilibrium,And in that eminent hourA virtue is made plainOf passionate cleavageLike the hills' cutting edgeWhen the sun sets to rain.This is the single mind,This the star-solved equationOf life with life's negation:A deathless cell designedTo demonstrate death's act,Which, the more surely it movesTo earth's influence, but provesItself the more intact.
27
With me, my lover makes The clock assert its chime:But when she goes, she takes The mainspring out of time.
Yet this time-wrecking charm Were better than love deadAnd its hollow alarum Hammered out on lead.
Why should I fear that Time Will superannuateThese workmen of my rhyme— Love, despair and hate?
Fleeing the herd, I came To a graveyard on a hill,And felt its mould proclaim The bone gregarious still.
Boredoms and agonies Work out the rhythm of bone:—No peace till creature his Creator has outgrown.
Passion dies from the heart But to infect the marrow;Holds dream and act apart Till the man discard his narrow
Sapience and folly Here, where the graves slumberIn a green melancholy Of overblown summer.