Poetry

By C. S. Lewis.

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Spirits in Bondage

A Cycle of Lyrics

Prologue

As of old Phoenician men, to the Tin Isles sailing
Straight against the sunset and the edges of the earth,
Chaunted loud above the storm and the strange sea’s wailing,
Legends of their people and the land that gave them birth⁠—
Sang aloud to Baal-Peor, sang unto the horned maiden,
Sang how they should come again with the Brethon treasure laden,
Sang of all the pride and glory of their hardy enterprise,
How they found the outer islands, where the unknown stars arise;
And the rowers down below, rowing hard as they could row,
Toiling at the stroke and feather through the wet and wary weather,
Even they forgot their burden in the measure of a song,
And the merchants and the masters and the bondsmen all together,
Dreaming of the wondrous islands, brought the gallant ship along;

So in mighty deeps alone on the chainless breezes blown
In my oracle of verses I will sing of lands unknown,
Flying from the scarlet city where a Lord that knows no pity,
Mocks the broken people praying round his iron throne,
—Sing about the Hidden Country fresh and full of quiet green.
Sailing over seas uncharted to a port that none has seen.

Part I

The Prison House

I

Satan Speaks

I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,
I am the law: ye have none other.

I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh,
I am the lust in your itching flesh.

I am the battle’s filth and strain,
I am the widow’s empty pain.

I am the sea to smother your breath,
I am the bomb, the falling death.

I am the fact and the crushing reason
To thwart your fantasy’s new-born treason.

I am the spider making her net,
I am the beast with jaws blood-wet.

I am a wolf that follows the sun
And I will catch him ere day be done.

II

French Nocturne

(Monchy-le-Preux)

Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread
And all is still; now even this gross line
Drinks in the frosty silences divine
The pale, green moon is riding overhead.

The jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim;
Out on the ridge have swallowed up the sun,
And in one angry streak his blood has run
To left and right along the horizon dim.

There comes a buzzing plane: and now, it seems
Flies straight into the moon. Lo! where he steers
Across the pallid globe and surely nears
In that white land some harbour of dear dreams!

False mocking fancy! Once I too could dream,
Who now can only see with vulgar eye
That he’s no nearer to the moon than I
And she’s a stone that catches the sun’s beam.

What call have I to dream of anything?
I am a wolf. Back to the world again,
And speech of fellow-brutes that once were men
Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot sing.

III

The Satyr

When the flowery hands of spring
Forth their woodland riches fling,
Through the meadows, through the valleys
Goes the satyr carolling.

From the mountain and the moor,
Forest green and ocean shore
All the faerie kin he rallies
Making music evermore.

See! the shaggy pelt doth grow
On his twisted shanks below,
And his dreadful feet are cloven
Though his brow be white as snow⁠—

Though his brow be clear and white
And beneath it fancies bright,
Wisdom and high thoughts are woven
And the musics of delight,

Though his temples too be fair
Yet two horns are growing there
Bursting forth to part asunder
All the riches of his hair.

Faerie maidens he may meet
Fly the horns and cloven feet,
But, his sad brown eyes with wonder
Seeing⁠—stay from their retreat.

IV

Victory

Roland is dead, Cuchulain’s crest is low,
The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust,
And Helen’s eyes and Iseult’s lips are dust
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.

The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,
No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.

For these decay: but not for that decays
The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man
That never rested yet since life began
From striving with red Nature and her ways.

Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout
Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft
Out of the deeps, of old, it rose aloft
That they who watch the ages may not doubt.

Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod,
Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed
Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head
And higher⁠—till the beast become a god.

V

Irish Nocturne

Now the grey mist comes creeping up
From the waste ocean’s weedy strand
And fills the valley, as a cup
Is filled of evil drink in a wizard’s hand;
And the trees fade out of sight,
Like dreary ghosts unhealthily
Into the damp, pale night,
Till you almost think that a clearer eye could see
Some shape come up of a demon seeking apart
His meat, as Grendel sought in Harte
The thanes that at by the wintry log⁠—
Grendel or the shadowy mass
Of Balor, or the man with the face of clay,
The grey, grey walker who used to pass
Over the rock-arch nightly to his prey.
But here at the dumb, slow stream where the willows hang,
With never a wind to blow the mists apart,
Bitter and bitter it is for thee, O my heart,
Looking upon this land, where poets sang,
Thus with the dreary shroud
Unwholesome, over it spread,
And knowing the fog and the cloud
In her people’s heart and head
Even as it lies for ever upon her coasts
Making them dim and dreamy lest her sons should ever arise
And remember all their boasts;
For I know that the colourless skies
And the blurred horizons breed
Lonely desire and many words and brooding and never a deed.

VI

Spooks

Last night I dreamed that I was come again
Unto the house where my belovèd dwells
After long years of wandering and pain.

And I stood out beneath the drenching rain
And all the street was bare, and black with night,
But in my true love’s house was warmth and light.

Yet I could not draw near nor enter in,
And long I wondered if some secret sin
Or old, unhappy anger held me fast;

Till suddenly it came into my head
That I was killed long since and lying dead⁠—
Only a homeless wraith that way had passed.

So thus I found my true love’s house again
And stood unseen amid the winter night
And the lamp burned within, a rosy light,
And the wet street was shining in the rain.

VII

Apology

If men should ask, Despoina, why I tell
Of nothing glad nor noble in my verse
To lighten hearts beneath this present curse
And build a heaven of dreams in real hell,

Go you to them and speak among them thus:
“There were no greater grief than to recall,
Down in the rotting grave where the lithe worms crawl,
Green fields above that smiled so sweet to us.”

Is it good to tell old tales of Troynovant
Or praises of dead heroes, tried and sage,
Or sing the queens of unforgotten age,
Brynhild and Maeve and virgin Bradamant?

How should I sing of them? Can it be good
To think of glory now, when all is done,
And all our labour underneath the sun
Has brought us this⁠—and not the thing we would?

All these were rosy visions of the night,
The loveliness and wisdom feigned of old.
But now we wake. The East is pale and cold,
No hope is in the dawn, and no delight.

VIII

Ode for New Year’s Day

Woe unto you, ye sons of pain that are this day in earth,
Now cry for all your torment: now curse your hour of birth
And the fathers who begat your to a portion nothing worth.
And Thou, my own belovèd, for as brave as ere thou art,
Bow down thine head, Despoina, clasp thy pale arms over it,
Lie low with fast-closed eyelids, clenched teeth, enduring heart,
For sorrow on sorrow is coming wherein all flesh has part.
The sky above is sickening, the clouds of God’s hate cover it,
Body and soul shall suffer beyond all word or thought,
Till the pain and noisy terror that these first years have wrought
Seem but the soft arising and prelude of the storm
That fiercer still and heavier with sharper lightnings fraught
Shall pour red wrath upon us over a world deform.

Thrice happy, O Despoina, were the men who were alive
In the great age and the golden age when still the cycle ran
On upward curve and easily, for then both maid and man
And beast and tree and spirit in the green earth could thrive.
But now one age is ending, and God calls home the stars
And looses the wheel of the ages and sends it spinning back
Amid the death of nations, and points a downward track,
And madness is come over us and great and little wars.
He has not left one valley, one isle of fresh and green
Where old friends could forgather amid the howling wreck.
It’s vainly we are praying. We cannot, cannot check
The Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.

It’s truth they tell, Despoina, none hears the eart’s complaining
For Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear.
Yet I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining
And lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear
The curse wherewith I cursed Him because the Good was dead.
But lo! I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts
Have made a phantom called the Good, while a few years have sped
Over a little planet. And what should the great Lord know of it
Who tosses the dust of chaos and gives the suns their parts?
Hither and thither he moves them; for an hour we see the show of it:
Only a little hour, and the life of the race is done.
And here he builds a nebula, and there he slays a sun
And works his own fierce pleasure. All things he shall fulfill,
And O, my poor Despoina, do you think he ever hears
The wail of hearts he has broken, the sounds of human ill?
He cares not for our virtues, our little hopes and fears,
And how could it all go on, love, if he knew of laughter and tears?

Ah, sweet, if a man could cheat him! If you could flee away
Into some other country beyond the rosy West,
To hide in the deep forests and be for ever at rest
From the rankling hate of God and the outworn world’s decay!

IX

Night

After the fret and failure of this day,
And weariness of thought, O Mother Night,
Come with soft kiss to soothe our care away
And all our little tumults set to right;
Most pitiful of all death’s kindred fair,
Riding above us through the curtained air
On thy dusk car, thou scatterest to the earth
Sweet dreams and drowsy charms of tender might
And lovers’ dear delight before to-morrow’s birth.
Thus art thou wont thy quiet lands to leave
And pillared courts beyond the Milky Way
Wherein thou tarriest all our solar day
While unsubstantial dreams before thee weave
A foamy dance, and fluttering fancies play
About thy palace in the silver ray
Of some far, moony globe. But when the hour,
The long-expected comes, the ivory gates
Open on noiseless hinge before thy bower
Unbidden, and the jewelled chariot waits
With magic steeds. Thou from the fronting rim
Bending to urge them, whilst thy sea-dark hair
Falls in ambrosial ripples o’er each limb,
With beautiful pale arms, untrammelled, bare
For horsemanship to those twin chargers fleet
Dost give full reign across the fires that flow
In the wide floor of heaven, from off their feet
Scattering the powdery star-dust as they go.
Come swiftly down the sky, O Lady Night,
Fall through the shadow-country, O most kind,
Shake out thy strands of gentle dreams and light
For chains, wherewith thou still art used to bind
With tenderest love of careful leeches’ art
The bruised and weary heart
In slumber blind.

X

To Sleep

I will find out a place for thee, O Sleep⁠—
A hidden wood among the hill-tops green,
Full of soft streams and little winds that creep
The murmuring boughs between.

A hollow cup above the ocean placed
Where nothing rough, nor loud, nor harsh shall be,
But woodland light and shadow interlaced
And summer sky and sea.

There in the fragrant twilight I will raise
A secret altar of the rich sea sod,
Whereat to offer sacrifice and praise
Unto my lonely god:

Due sacrifice of his own drowsy flowers,
The deadening poppies in an ocean shell
Round which through all forgotten days and hours
The great seas wove their spell.

So may he send me dreams of dear delight
And draughts of cool oblivion, quenching pain,
And sweet, half-wakeful moments in the night
To hear the falling rain.

And when he meets me at the dusk of day
To call me home for ever, this I ask⁠—
That he may lead me friendly on that way
And wear no frightful mask.

XI

In Prison

I cried out for the pain of man,
I cried out for my bitter wrath
Against the hopeless life that ran
For ever in a circling path
From death to death since all began;
Till on a summer night
I lost my way in the pale starlight
And saw our planet, far and small,
Through endless depths of nothing fall
A lonely pin-prick spark of light,
Upon the wide, enfolding night,
With leagues on leagues of stars above it,
And powdered dust of stars below⁠—
Dead things that neither hate nor love it
Not even their own loveliness can know,
Being but cosmic dust and dead.
And if some tears be shed,
Some evil God have power,
Some crown of sorrow sit
Upon a little world for a little hour⁠—
Who shall remember? Who shall care for it?

XII

De Profundis

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.

Four thousand years of toil and hope and thought
Wherein man laboured upward and still wrought
New worlds and better, Thou hast made as naught.

We built us joyful cities, strong and fair,
Knowledge we sought and gathered wisdom rare.
And all this time you laughed upon our care,

And suddenly the earth grew black with wrong,
Our hope was crushed and silenced was our song,
The heaven grew loud with weeping. Thou art strong.

Come then and curse the Lord. Over the earth
Gross darkness falls, and evil was our birth
And our few happy days of little worth.

Even if it be not all a dream in vain
—The ancient hope that still will rise again⁠—
Of a just God that cares for earthly pain,

Yet far away beyond our labouring night,
He wanders in the depths of endless light,
Singing alone his musics of delight;

Only the far, spent echo of his song
Our dungeons and deep cells can smite along,
And Thou art nearer. Thou art very strong.

O universal strength, I know it well,
It is but froth of folly to rebel,
For thou art Lord and hast the keys of Hell.

Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,
For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,
And know this frail, bruised being is above thee.

Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right,
Our mercy and long seeking of the light,
Shall we change these for thy relentless might?

Laugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth,
Heap torment still on torment for thy mirth⁠—
Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.

XIII

Satan Speaks

I am the Lord your God: even he that made
Material things, and all these signs arrayed
Above you and have set beneath the race
Of mankind, who forget their Father’s face
And even while they drink my light of day
Dream of some other gods and disobey
My warnings, and despise my holy laws,
Even tho’ their sin shall slay them. For which cause,
Dreams dreamed in vain, a never-filled desire
And in close flesh a spiritual fire,
A thirst for good their kind shall not attain,
A backward cleaving to the beast again.
A loathing for the life that I have given,
A haunted, twisted soul for ever riven
Between their will and mine⁠—such lot I give
While still in my despite the vermin live.
They hate my world! Then let that other God
Come from the outer spaces glory-shod,
And from this castle I have built on Night
Steal forth my own thought’s children into light,
If such an one there be. But far away
He walks the airy fields of endless day,
And my rebellious sons have called Him long
And vainly called. My order still is strong
And like to me nor second none I know.
Wither the mammoth went this creature too shall go.

XIV

The Witch

Trapped amid the woods with guile
They’ve led her hound in fetters vile
To death, a deadlier sorceress
Than any born for earth’s distress
Since first the winner of the fleece
Bore home the Colchian witch to Greece⁠—
Seven months with snare and gin
They’ve sought the maid o’erwise within
The forest’s labyrinthine shade.
The lonely woodman half afraid
Far off her ragged form has seen
Sauntering down the alleys green,
Or crouched in godless prayer alone
At eve before a Druid stone
But now the bitter chase is won,
The quarry’s caught, her magic’s done,
The bishop’s brought her strongest spell
To naught with candle, book, and bell;
With holy water splashed upon her,
She goes to burning and dishonour
Too deeply damned to feel her shame,
For, though beneath her hair of flame
Her thoughtful head be lowly bowed
It droops for meditation proud
Impenitent, and pondering yet
Things no memory can forget,
Starry wonders she has seen
Brooding in the wildwood green
With holiness. For who can say
In what strange crew she loved to play,
What demons or what gods of old
Deep mysteries unto her have told
At dead of night in worship bent
At ruined shrines magnificent,
Or how the quivering will she sent
Alone into the great alone
Where all is loved and all is known,
Who now lifts up her maiden eyes
And looks around with soft surprise
Upon the noisy, crowded square,
The city oafs that nod and stare,
The bishop’s court that gathers there,
The faggots and the blackened stake
Where sinners die for justice’ sake?
Now she is set upon the pile,
The mob grows still a little while,
Till lo! before the eager folk
Up curls a thin, blue line of smoke.
“Alas!” the full-fed burghers cry,
“That evil loveliness must die!”

XV

Dungeon Grates

So piteously the lonely soul of man
Shudders before this universal plan,
So grievous is the burden and the pain
So heavy weighs the long, material chain
From cause to cause, too merciless for hate,
The nightmare march of unrelenting fate,
I think that he must die thereof unless
Ever and again across the dreariness
There came a sudden glimpse of spirit faces,
A fragrant breath to tell of flowery places
And wider oceans, breaking on the shore
From which the hearts of men are always sore.
It lies beyond endeavour; neither prayer
Nor fasting, nor much wisdom winneth there,
Seeing how many prophets and wise men
Have sought for it and still returned again
With hope undone. But only the strange power
Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour
Can build a bridge of light or sound or form
To lead you out of all this strife and storm;
When of some beauty we are grown a part
Till from its very glory’s midmost heart
Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light
Into our souls. All things are seen aright
Amid the blinding pillar of its gold,
Seven times more true than what for truth we hold
In vulgar hours. The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloft from all distress
Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire
Making us faint with overstrong desire
To sport and swim for ever in its deep⁠—
Only a moment.
O! but we shall keep
Our vision still. One moment was enough,
We know we are not made of mortal stuff.
And we can bear all trials that come after,
The hate of men and the fool’s loud bestial laughter
And Nature’s rule and cruelties unclean,
For we have seen the Glory⁠—we have seen.

XVI

The Philosopher

Who shall be our prophet then,
Chosen from all the sons of men
To lead his fellows on the way
Of hidden knowledge, delving deep
To nameless mysteries that keep
Their secret form the solar day!
Or who shall pierce with surer eye!
This shifting veil of bittersweet
And find the real things that lie
Beyond this turmoil, which we greet
With such a wasted wealth of tears?
Who shall cross over for us the bridge of fears
And pass in to the country where the ancient Mothers dwell?
Is it an elder, bent and hoar
Who, where the waste Atlantic swell
Oh lonely beaches makes its roar,
In his solitary tower
Through the long night hour by hour
Pores on old books with watery eye
When all his youth has passed him by,
And folly is schooled and love is dead
And frozen fancy laid abed,
While in his veins the gradual blood
Slackens to a marish flood?
For he rejoiceth not in the ocean’s might,
Neither the sun giveth delight,
Nor the moon by night
Shall call his feet to wander in the haunted forest lawn.
He shall no more rise suddenly in the dawn
When mists are white and the dew lies pearly
Cold and cold on every meadow,
To take his joy of the season early,
The opening flower and the westward shadow,
And scarcely can he dream of laughter and love,
They lie so many leaden years behind.
Such eyes are dim and blind,
And the sad, aching head that nods above
His monstrous books can never know
The secret we would find.
But let our seer be young and kind
And fresh and beautiful of show,
And taken ere the lustyhead
And rapture of his youth be dead;
Ere the gnawing, peasant reason
School him over-deep in treason
To the ancient high estate
Of his fancy’s principate,
That he may live a perfect whole,
A mask of the eternal soul,
And cross at last the shadowy bar
To where the ever-living are.

XVII

The Ocean Strand

O leave the labouring roadways of the town,
The shifting faces and the changeful hue
Of markets, and broad echoing streets that drown
The heart’s own silent music. Though they too
Sing in their proper rhythm, and still delight
The friendly ear that loves warm human kind,
Yet it is good to leave them all behind,
Now when from lily dawn to purple night
Summer is queen,
Summer is queen in all the happy land.
Far, far away among the valleys green
Let us go forth and wander hand in hand
Beyond those solemn hills that we have seen
So often welcome home the falling sun
Into their cloudy peaks when day was done⁠—
Beyond them till we find the ocean strand
And hear the great waves run,
With the waste song whose melodies I’d follow
And weary not for many a summer day,
Born of the vaulted breakers arching hollow
Before they flash and scatter into spray.
On, if we should be weary of their play
Then I would lead you further into land
Where, with their ragged walls, the stately rocks
Shut in smooth courts and paved with quiet sand
To silence dedicate. The sea-god’s flocks
Have rested here, and mortal eyes have seen
By great adventure at the dead of noon
A lonely nereid drowsing half a-swoon
Buried beneath her dark and dripping locks.

XVIII

Noon

Noon! and in the garden bower
The hot air quivers o’er the grass
The little lake is smooth as glass
And still so heavily the hour
Drags, that scarce the proudest flower
Pressed upon its burning bed
Has strength to lift a languid head:
—Rose and fainting violet
By the water’s margin set
Swoon and sink as they were dead
Though their weary leaves be fed
With the foam-drops of the pool
Where it trembles dark and cool
Wrinkled by the fountain spraying
O’er it. And the honey-bee
Hums his drowsy melody
And wanders in his course a-straying
Through the sweet and tangled glade
With his golden mead o’erladen
Where beneath the pleasant shade
Of the darkling boughs a maiden
—Milky limb and fiery tress,
All at sweetest random laid⁠—
Slumbers, drunken with the excess
Of the noontide’s loveliness.

XIX

Milton Read Again

(In Surrey)

Three golden months while summer on us stole
I have read your joyful tale another time,
Breathing more freely in that larger clime
And learning wiselier to deserve the whole.

Your Spirit, Master, has been close at hand
And guided me, still pointing treasures rare,
Thick-sown where I before saw nothing fair
And finding waters in the barren land.

Barren once thought because my eyes were dim.
Like one I am grown to whom the common field
And often-wandered copse one morning yield
New pleasures suddenly; for over him

Falls the weird spirit of unexplained delight,
New mystery in every shady place,
In every whispering tree a nameless grace,
New rapture on the windy seaward height.

So may she come to me, teaching me well
To savour all these sweets that lie to hand
In wood and lane about this pleasant land
Though it be not the land where I would dwell.

XX

Sonnet

The stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall
About a dreaming garden still and sweet,
I hear the unseen bats above me bleat
Among the ghostly moths their hunting call,
And twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl.
Now for a chamber dim, a pillow meet
For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet,
Cool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall
With poppies strewn where sleep that is so dear
With magic sponge can wipe away an hour
Or twelve and make them naught. Why not a year,
Why could a man not loiter in that bower
Until a thousand painless cycles wore,
And then⁠—what if it held him evermore?

XXI

The Autumn Morning

See! the pale autumn dawn
Is faint, upon the lawn
That lies in powdered white
Of hour-frost dight

And now from tree to tree
The ghostly mist we see
Hung like a silver pall
To hallow all.

It wreathes the burdened air
So strangely everywhere
That I could almost fear
This silence drear

Where no one song-bird sings
And dream that wizard things
Mighty for hate or love
Were close above.

White as the fog and fair
Drifting through middle air
In magic dances dread
Over my head.

Yet these should know me too
Lover and bondman true,
One that has honoured well
The mystic spell

Of earth’s most solemn hours
Wherein the ancient powers
Of dryad, elf, or faun
Or leprechaun

Oft have their faces shown
To me that walked alone
Seashore or haunted fen
Or mountain glen.

Wherefore I will not fear
To walk the woodlands sere
Into this autumn day
Far, far away.

Part II

Hesitation

XXII

L’Apprenti Sorcier

Suddenly there came to me
The music of a mighty sea
That on a bare and iron shore
Thundered with a deeper roar
Than all the tides that leap and run
With us below the real sun:
Because the place was far away,
Above, beyond our homely day,
Neighbouring close the frozen clime
Where out of all the woods of time,
Amid the frightful seraphim
The fierce, cold eyes of Godhead gleam,
Revolving hate and misery
And wars and famines yet to be.
And in my dreams I stood alone
Upon a shelf of weedy stone,
And saw before my shrinking eyes
The dark, enormous breakers rise,
And hover and fall with deafening thunder
Of thwarted foam that echoed under
The ledge, through many a cavern drear,
With hollow sounds of wintry fear.
And through the waters waste and grey,
Thick-strown for many a league away,
Out of the toiling sea arose
Many a face and form of those
Thin, elemental people dear
Who live beyond our heavy sphere.
And all at once from far and near,
They all held out their arms to me,
Crying in their melody,
“Leap in! Leap in, and take thy fill
Of all the cosmic good and ill,
Be as the Living ones that know
Enormous joy, enormous woe,
Pain beyond thought and fiery bliss:
For all thy study hunted this,
On wings of magic to arise,
And wash from off thy filmed eyes
The cloud of cold mortality,
To find the real life and be
As are the children of the deep!
Be bold and dare the glorious leap,
Or to thy shame, go, slink again
Back to the narrow ways of men.”
So all these mocked me as I stood
Striving to wake because I feared the flood.

XXIII

Alexandrines

There is a house that most of all on earth I hate.
Though I have passed through many sorrows and have been
In bloody fields, sad seas, and countries desolate,
Yet most I fear that empty house where the grasses green
Grow in the silent court the gaping flags between,
And down the moss-grown paths and terrace no man treads
Where the old, old weeds rise deep on the waste garden beds.
Like eyes of one long dead the empty windows stare
And I fear to cross the garden, I fear to linger there,
For in that house I know a little, silent room
Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom
To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast⁠—
Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.

XXIV

In Praise of Solid People

Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.

Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing and each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.

Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.

Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
With work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.

O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now thro’ weariness and strife
I learn your worthiness indeed,
The world is better for such life
As stout suburban people lead.

Too often have I sat alone
When the wet night falls heavily,
And fretting winds around me moan,
And homeless longing vexes me

For lore that I shall never know,
And visions none can hope to see,
Till brooding works upon me so
A childish fear steals over me.

I look around the empty room,
The clock still ticking in its place,
And all else silent as the tomb,
Till suddenly, I think, a face

Grows from the darkness just beside.
I turn, and lo! it fades away,
And soon another phantom tide
Of shifting dreams begins to play,

And dusky galleys past me sail,
Full freighted on a faerie sea;
I hear the silken merchants hail
Across the ringing waves to me

—Then suddenly, again, the room,
Familiar books about me piled,
And I alone amid the gloom,
By one more mocking dream beguiled.

And still no nearer to the Light,
And still no further from myself,
Alone and lost in clinging night
—(The clock’s still ticking on the shelf).

Then do I envy solid folk
Who sit of evenings by the fire
After their work and doze and smoke,
And are not fretted by desire.

Part III

The Escape

XXV

Song of the Pilgrims

O Dwellers at the back of the North Wind,
What have we done to you? How have we sinned
Wandering the Earth from Orkney unto Ind?

With many deaths our fellowship is thinned,
Our flesh is withered in the parching wind,
Wandering the earth from Orkney unto Ind.

We have no rest. We cannot turn again
Back to the world and all her fruitless pain,
Having once sought the land where ye remain.

Some say ye are not. But, ah God! we know
That somewhere, somewhere past the Northern snow
Waiting for us the red-rose gardens blow:

—The red-rose and the white-rose gardens blow
In the green Northern land to which we go,
Surely the ways are long and the years are slow.

We have forsaken all things sweet and fair,
We have found nothing worth a moment’s care
Because the real flowers are blowing there.

Land of the Lotus fallen from the sun,
Land of the Lake from whence all rivers run,
Land where the hope of all our dreams is won!

Shall we not somewhere see at close of day
The green walls of that country far away,
And hear the music of her fountains play?

So long we have been wandering all this while
By many a perilous sea and drifting isle,
We scarce shall dare to look thereon and smile.

Yea, when we are drawing very near to thee,
And when at last the ivory port we see
Our hearts will faint with mere felicity:

But we shall wake again in gardens bright
Of green and gold for infinite delight,
Sleeping beneath the solemn mountains white,

While from the flowery copses still unseen
Sing out the crooning birds that ne’er have been
Touched by the hand of winter frore and lean;

And ever living queens that grow not old
And poets wise in robes of faerie gold
Whisper a wild, sweet song that first was told

Ere God sat down to make the Milky Way.
And in those gardens we shall sleep and play
For ever and for ever and a day.

An, Dwellers at the back of the North Wind,
What have we done to you? How have we sinned,
That yes should hide beyond the Northern wind?

Land of the Lotus, fallen from the Sun,
When shall your hidden, flowery vales be won
And all the travail of our way be done?

Very far we have searched; we have even seen
The Scythian waste that bears no soft nor green,
And near the Hideous Pass our feet have been.

We have heard Syrens singing all night long
Beneath the unknown stars their lonely song
In friendless seas beyond the Pillars strong.

Nor by the dragon-daughter of Hypocras
Nor the vale of the Devil’s head we have feared to pass,
Yet is our labour lost and vain, alas!

Scouring the earth from Orkney unto Ind,
Tossed on the seas and withered in the wind,
We seek and seek your land. How have we sinned?

Or is it all a folly of the wise,
Bidding us walk these ways with blinded eyes
While all around us real flowers arise?

But, by the very God, we know, we know
That somewhere still, beyond the Northern snow
Waiting for us the red-rose gardens blow.

XXVI

Song

Faeries must be in the woods
Or the satyr’s laughing broods⁠—
Tritons in the summer sea,
Else how could the dead things be
Half so lovely as they are?
How could wealth of star on star
Dusted o’er the frosty night
Fill thy spirit with delight
And lead thee from this care of thine
Up among the dreams divine,
Were it not that each and all
Of them that walk the heavenly hall
Is in truth a happy isle,
Where eternal meadows smile,
And golden globes of fruit are seen
Twinkling through the orchards green;
Were the Other People go
On the bright sward to and fro?
Atoms dead could never thus
Stir the human heart of us
Unless the beauty that we see
The veil of endless beauty be,
Filled full of spirits that have trod
Far hence along the heavenly sod
And see the bright footprints of God.

XXVII

The Ass

I woke and rose and slipt away
To the heathery hills in the morning grey.

In a field where the dew lay cold and deep
I met an ass, new-roused from sleep.

I stroked his nose and I tickled his ears,
And spoke soft words to quiet his fears.

His eyes stared into the eyes of me
And he kissed my hands of his courtesy.

“O big, brown brother out of the waste,
How do thistles for breakfast taste?

“And do you rejoice in the dawn divine
With a heart that is glad no less than mine?

“For, brother, the depth of your gentle eyes
Is strange and mystic as the skies:

“What are the thoughts that grope behind,
Down in the mist of a donkey mind?

“Can it be true, as the wise men tell,
That you are a mask of God as well,

“And, as in us, so in you no less
Speaks the eternal Loveliness,

“And words of the lips that all things know
Among the thoughts of a donkey go?

“However it be, O four-foot brother,
Fair to-day is the earth, our mother.

“God send you peace and delight thereof,
And all green meat of the waste you love,

“And guard you well from violent men
Who’d put you back in the shafts again.”

But the ass had far too wise a head
To answer one of the things I said,

So he twitched his fair ears up and down
And turned to nuzzle his shoulder brown.

XXVIII

Ballade Mystique

The big, red house is bare and lone
The stony garden waste and sere
With blight of breezes ocean blown
To pinch the wakening of the year;
My kindly friends with busy cheer
My wretchedness could plainly show.
They tell me I am lonely here⁠—
What do they know? What do they know?

They think that while the gables moan
And easements creak in winter drear
I should be piteously alone
Without the speech of comrades dear;
And friendly for my sake they fear,
It grieves them thinking of me so
While all their happy life is near⁠—
What do they know? What do they know?

That I have seen the Dagda’s throne
In sunny lands without a tear
And found a forest all my own
To ward with magic shield and spear,
Where, through the stately towers I rear
For my desire, around me go
Immortal shapes of beauty clear:
They do not know, they do not know.

L’Envoi

The friends I have without a peer
Beyond the western ocean’s glow,
Wither the faerie galleys steer,
They do not know: how should they know?

XXIX

Night

I know a little Druid wood
Where I would slumber if I could
And have the murmuring of the stream
To mingle with a midnight dream,
And have the holy hazel trees
To play above me in the breeze,
And smell the thorny eglantine;
For there the white owls all night long
In the scented gloom divine
Hear the wild, strange, tuneless song
Of faerie voices, thin and high
As the bat’s unearthly cry,
And the measure of their shoon
Dancing, dancing, under the moon,
Until, amid the pale of dawn
The wandering stars begin to swoon.⁠ ⁠…
Ah, leave the world and come away!
The windy folk are in the glade,
And men have seen their revels, laid
In secret on some flowery lawn
Underneath the beechen covers
Kings of old, I’ve heard them say,
Here have found them faerie lovers
That charmed them out of life and kissed
Their lips with cold lips unafraid,
And such a spell around them made
That they have passed beyond the mist
And fount eh Country-under-wave.⁠ ⁠…

Kings of old, whom none could save!

XXX

Oxford

It is well that there are palaces of peace
And discipline and dreaming and desire,
Lest we forget our heritage and cease
The Spirit’s work⁠—to hunger and aspire:

Lest we forget that we were born divine,
Now tangled in red battle’s animal net,
Murder the work and lust the anodyne,
Pains of the beast ’gainst bestial solace set.

But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.

We are not wholly brute. To us remains
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.

She was not builded out of common stone
But out of all men’s yearning and all prayer
That she might live, eternally our own,
The Spirit’s stronghold⁠—barred against despair.

XXXI

Hymn (For Boy’s Voices)

All the things magicians do
Could be done by me and you
Freely, if we only knew.

Human children every day
Could play at games the faeries play
If they were but shown the way.

Every man a God would be
Laughing through eternity
If as God’s his eyes could see.

All the wizardries of God⁠—
Slaying matter with a nod,
Charming spirits with his rod,

With the singing of his voice
Making lonely lands rejoice,
Leaving us no will nor choice,

Drawing headlong me and you
As the piping Orpheus drew
Man and beast the mountains through,

By the sweetness of his horn
Calling us from lands forlorn
Nearer to the widening morn⁠—

All that loveliness of power
Could be man’s peculiar dower,
Even mine, this very hour;

We should reach the Hidden Land
And grow immortal out of hand,
If we could but understand!

We could revel day and night
In all power and all delight
If we learn to think aright.

XXXII

“Our Daily Bread”

We need no barbarous words nor solemn spell
To raise the unknown. It lies before our feet;
There have been men who sank down into Hell
In some suburban street,

And some there are that in their daily walks
Have met archangels fresh from sight of God,
Or watched how in their beans and cabbage-stalks
Long files of faerie trod.

Often me too the Living voices call
In many a vulgar and habitual place,
I catch a sight of lands beyond the wall,
I see a strange god’s face.

And some day this will work upon me so
I shall arise and leave both friends and home
And over many lands a pilgrim go
Through alien woods and foam,

Seeking the last steep edges of the earth
Whence I may leap into that gulf of light
Wherein, before my narrowing Self had birth,
Part of me lived aright.

XXXIII

How He Saw Angus the God

I heard the swallow sing in the eaves and rose
All in a strange delight while others slept,
And down the creaking stair, alone, tip-toes,
So carefully I crept.

The house was dark with silly blinds yet drawn,
But outside the clean air was filled with light,
And underneath my feet the cold, wet lawn
With dew was twinkling bright.

The cobwebs hung from every branch and spray
Gleaming with pearly strands of laden thread,
And long and still the morning shadows lay
Across the meadows spread.

At that pure hour when yet no sound of man,
Stirs in the whiteness of the wakening earth,
Alone through innocent solitudes I ran
Singing aloud for mirth.

Till I had found the open mountain heath
Yellow with gorse, and rested there and stood
To gaze upon the misty sea beneath,
Or on the neighbouring wood,

—That little wood of hazel and tall pine
And youngling fir, where oft we have loved to see
The level beams of early morning shine
Freshly from tree to tree.

Through the denser wood there’s many a pool
Of deep and night-born shadow lingers yet
Where the new-wakened flowers are damp and cool
And the long grass is wet.

In the sweet heather long I rested there
Looking upon the dappled, early sky,
When suddenly, from out the shining air
A god came flashing by.

Swift, naked, eager, pitilessly fair,
With a live crown of birds about his head,
Singing and fluttering, and his fiery hair,
Far out behind him spread,

Streamed like a rippling torch upon the breeze
Of his own glorious swiftness: in the grass
He bruised no feathery stalk, and through the trees
I saw his whiteness pass.

But when I followed him beyond the wood,
Lo! He was changed into a solemn bull
That there upon the open pasture stood
And browsed his lazy full.

XXXIV

The Roads

I stand on the windy uplands among the hills of Down
With all the world spread out beneath, meadow and sea and town,
And ploughlands on the far-off hills that glow with friendly brown.

And ever across the rolling land to the far horizon line,
Where the blue hills border the misty west, I see the white roads twine,
The rare roads and the fair roads that call this heart of mine.

I see them dip in the valleys and vanish and rise and bend
From shadowy dell to windswept fell, and still to the West they wend,
And over the cold blue ridge at last to the great world’s uttermost end.

And the call of the roads is upon me, a desire in my spirit has grown
To wander forth in the highways, ’twixt earth and sky alone,
And seek for the lands no foot has trod and the seas no sail had known:

—For the lands to the west of the evening and east of the morning’s birth,
Where the gods unseen in their valleys green are glad at the ends of the earth
And fear no morrow to bring them sorrow, nor night to quench their mirth.

XXXV

Hesperus

Through the starry hollow
Of the summer night
I would follow, follow
Hesperus the bright,
To seek beyond the western wave
His garden of delight.

Hesperus the fairest
Of all gods that are,
Peace and dreams thou bearest
In thy shadowy car,
And often in my evening walks
I’ve blessed thee from afar.

Stars without number,
Dust the moon of night,
Thou the early slumber
And the still delight
Of the gentle twilit hours
Rulest in thy right.

When the pale skies shiver,
Seeing night is done,
Past the ocean-river,
Lightly thou dost run,
To look for pleasant, sleepy lands,
That never fear the sun.

Where, beyond the waters
Of the outer sea,
Thy triple crown of daughters
That guards the golden tree
Sing out across the lonely tide
A welcome home to thee.

And while the old, old dragon
For joy lifts up his head,
They bring thee forth a flagon
Of nectar foaming red,
And underneath the drowsy trees
Of poppies strew thy bed.

Ah! that I could follow
In thy footsteps bright,
Through the starry hollow
Of the summer night,
Sloping down the western ways
To find my heart’s delight!

XXXVI

The Star Bath

A place uplifted towards the midnight sky
Far, far away among the mountains old,
A treeless waste of rocks and freezing cold,
Where the dead, cheerless moon rode neighbouring by⁠—
And in the midst a silent tarn there lay,
A narrow pool, cold as the tide that flows
Where monstrous bergs beyond Varanger stray,
Rising from sunless depths that no man knows;
Thither as clustering fireflies have I seen
At fixèd seasons all the stars come down
To wash in that cold wave their brightness clean
And win the special fire wherewith they crown
The wintry heavens in frost. Even as a flock
Of falling birds, down to the pool they came.
I saw them and I heard the icy shock
Of stars engulfed with hissing of faint flame
—Ages ago before the birth of men
Or earliest beast. Yet I was still the same
That now remember, knowing not where or when.

XXXVII

Tu Ne Quæsieris

For all the lore of Lodge and Myers
I cannot heal my torn desires,
Nor hope for all that man can speer
To make the riddling earth grow clear.
Though it were sure and proven well
That I shall prosper, as they tell,
In fields beneath a different sun
By shores where other oceans run,
When this live body that was I
Lies hidden from the cheerful sky,
Yet what were endless lives to me
If still my narrow self I be
And hope and fail and struggle still,
And break my will against God’s will,
To play for stakes of pleasure and pain
And hope and fail and hope again,
Deluded, thwarted, striving elf
That through the window of my self
As through a dark glass scarce can see
A warped and masked reality?
But when this searching thought of mine
Is mingled in the large Divine,
And laughter that was in my mouth
Runs through the breezes of the South,
When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress,
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

XXXVIII

Lullaby

Lullaby! Lullaby!
There’s a tower strong and high
Built of oak and brick and stone,
Stands before a wood alone.
The doors are of the oak so brown
As any ale in Oxford town,
The walls are builded warm and thick
Of the old red Roman brick,
The good grey stone is over all
In arch and floor of the tower tall.
And maidens three are living there
All in the upper chamber fair,
Hung with silver, hung with pall,
And stories painted on the wall.
And softly goes the whirring loom
In my ladies’ upper room,
For they shall spin both night and day
Until the stars do pass away.
But every night at evèning.
The window open wide they fling,
And one of them says a word they know
And out as three white swans they go,
And the murmuring of the woods is drowned
In the soft wings’ whirring sound,
As they go flying round, around,
Singing in swans’ voices high
A lonely, lovely lullaby.

XXXIX

World’s Desire

Love, there is a castle built in a country desolate,
On a rock above a forest where the trees are grim and great,
Blasted with the lightning sharp⁠—giant boulders strewn between,
And the mountains rise above, and the cold ravine
Echoes to the crushing roar and thunder of a mighty river
Raging down a cataract. Very tower and forest quiver
And the grey wolves are afraid and the call of birds is drowned,
And the thought and speech of man in the boiling water’s sound.
But upon the further side of the barren, sharp ravine
With the sunlight on its turrets is the castle seen,
Calm and very wonderful, white above the green
Of the wet and waving forest, slanted all away,
Because the driving Northern wind will not rest by night or day.
Yet the towers are sure above, very mighty is the stead,
The gates are made of ivory, the roofs of copper red.

Round and round the warders grave walk upon the walls for ever
And the wakeful dragons couch in the ports of ivory,
Nothing is can trouble it, hate of the gods nor man’s endeavour,
And it shall be a resting-place, dear heart, for you and me.

Through the wet and waving forest with an age-old sorrow laden
Singing of the world’s regret wanders wild the faerie maiden,
Through the thistle and the brier, through the tangles of the thorn,
Till her eyes be dim with weeping and her homeless feet are torn.
Often to the castle gate up she looks with vain endeavour,
For her soulless loveliness to the castle winneth never.

But within the sacred court, hidden high upon the mountain,
Wandering in the castle gardens lovely folk enough there be,
Breathing in another air, drinking of a purer fountain,
And among that folk, beloved, there’s a place for you and me.

XL

Death in Battle

Open the gates for me,
Open the gates of the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,
In the sweet dim Isle of Apples over the wide sea’s breast
Open the gates for me!

Sorely pressed have I been
And driven and hurt beyond bearing this summer day,
But the heat and the pain together suddenly fall away,
All’s cool and green.

But a moment agone,
Among men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,
But the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,
And now⁠—alone!

Ah, to be ever alone,
In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,
In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,
This would atone!

I shall not see
The brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown
Into the faces of devils⁠—yea, even as my own⁠—
When I find thee,

O Country of Dreams!
Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,
Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,
Full of dim woods and streams.

Dymer

“Nine nights I hung upon the Tree,
wounded with the spear, as an offering to
Odin, myself sacrificed to myself.”

Havamal

Dymer

Canto I

1

You stranger, long before your glance can light
Upon these words, time will have washed away
The moment when I first took pen to write,
With all my road before me⁠—yet to-day,
Here, if at all, we meet: the unfashioned clay
Ready to both our hands; both hushed to see
That which is nowhere yet come forth and be.

2

This moment, if you join me, we begin
A partnership where both must toil to hold
The clue that I caught first. We lose or win
Together; if you read, you are enrolled.
And first, a marvel⁠—Who could have foretold
That in the city which men called in scorn
The Perfect City, Dymer could be born?

3

There you’d have thought the gods were smothered down
Forever, and the keys were turned on fate.
No hour was left unchartered in that town,
And love was in a schedule and the State
Chose for eugenic reasons who should mate
With whom, and when. Each idle song and dance
Was fixed by law and nothing left to chance.

4

For some of the last Platonists had founded
That city of old. And mastery they made
An island of what ought to be, surrounded
By this gross world of easier light and shade.
All answering to the master’s dream they laid
The strong foundations, torturing into stone
Each bubble that the Academy had blown.

5

This people were so pure, so law-abiding,
So logical, they made the heavens afraid:
They sent the very swallows into hiding
By their appalling chastity dismayed:
More soberly the lambs in spring time played
Because of them: and ghosts dissolved in shame
Before their common-sense⁠—till Dymer came.

6

At Dymer’s birth no comets scared the nation,
The public crêche engulfed him with the rest,
And twenty separate Boards of Education
Closed round him. He was passed through every test,
Was vaccinated, numbered, washed and dressed,
Proctored, inspected, whipt, examined weekly,
And for some nineteen years he bore it meekly.

7

For nineteen years they worked upon his soul,
Refining, chipping, moulding and adorning.
Then came the moment that undid the whole⁠—
The ripple of rude life without a warning.
It came in lecture-time one April morning
—Alas for laws and locks, reproach and praise,
Who ever learned to censor the spring days?

8

A little breeze came stirring to his cheek.
He looked up to the window. A brown bird
Perched on the sill, bent down to whet his beak
With darting head⁠—Poor Dymer watched and stirred
Uneasily. The lecturer’s voice he heard
Still droning from the dais. The narrow room
Was drowsy, over-solemn, filled with gloom.

9

He yawned, and a voluptuous laziness
Tingled down all his spine and loosed his knees,
Slow-drawn, like an invisible caress.
He laughed⁠—The lecturer stopped like one that sees
A Ghost, then frowned and murmured, “Silence, please.”
That moment saw the soul of Dymer hang
In the balance⁠—Louder then his laughter rang.

10

The whole room watched with unbelieving awe,
He rose and staggered rising. From his lips
Broke yet again the idiot-like guffaw.
He felt the spirit in his finger tips,
Then swinging his right arm⁠—a wide ellipse
Yet lazily⁠—he struck the lecturer’s head.
The old man tittered, lurched and dropt drown dead.

11

Out of the silent room, out of the dark,
Into the sum-stream Dymer passed, and there
The sudden breezes, the high hanging lark
The milk-white clouds sailing in polished air,
Suddenly flashed about him like a blare
Of trumpets. And no cry was raised behind him.
His class sat dazed. They dared not go to find him.

12

Yet wonderfully some rumour spread abroad⁠—
An inarticulate sense of life renewing
In each young heart⁠—He whistled down the road:
Men said: “There’s Dymer”⁠—“Why, what’s Dymer doing?”
“I don’t know”⁠—“Look, there’s Dymer,”⁠—far pursuing
With troubled eyes⁠—A long mysterious “Oh”
Sighed from a hundred throats to see him go.

13

Down the white street and past the gate and forth
Beyond the wall he came to grassy places.
There was a shifting wind to West and North
With clouds in heeling squadron running races.
The shadows following on the sunlight’s traces
Crossed the whole field and each wild flower within it
With change of wavering glories every minute.

14

There was a river, flushed with rains, between
The flat fields and a forest’s willowy edge.
A sauntering pace he shuffled on the green,
He kicked his boots against the crackly sedge
And tore his hands in many a furzy hedge.
He saw his feet and ankles gilded round
With buttercups that carpeted the ground.

15

He looked back then. The line of a low hill
Had hid the city’s towers and domes from sight;
He stopt: he felt a break of sunlight spill
Around him sudden waves of searching light.
Upon the earth was green, and gold, and white,
Smothering his feet. He felt his city dress
An insult to that April cheerfulness.

16

He said: “I’ve worn this dust heap long enough,
Here goes!” And forthwith in the open field
He stripped away that prison of sad stuff:
Socks, jacket, shirt and breeches off he peeled
And rose up mother-naked with no shield
Against the sun: then stood awhile to play
With bare toes dabbling in cold river clay.

17

Forward again, and sometimes leaping high
With arms outspread as though he would embrace
In one act all the circle of the sky:
Sometimes he rested in a leafier place,
And crushed the wet, cool flowers against his face:
And once he cried aloud, “Oh world, oh day,
Let, let me,”⁠—and then found no prayer to say.

18

Up furrows still unpierced with earliest crop
He marched. Through woods he strolled from flower to flower,
And over hills. As ointment drop by drop
Preciously meted out, so hour by hour
The day slipped through his hands: and now the power
Failed in his feet from walking. He was done,
Hungry and cold. That moment sank the sun.

19

He lingered⁠—Looking up, he saw ahead
The black and bristling frontage of a wood
And over it the large sky swimming red,
Freckled with homeward crows. Surprised he stood
To feel that wideness quenching his hot mood,
Then shouted, “Trembling darkness, trembling green,
What do you mean, wild wood, what do you mean?”

20

He shouted. But the solitude received
His noise into her noiselessness, his fire
Into her calm. Perhaps he half believed
Some answer yet would come to his desire.
The hushed air quivered softly like a wire
Upon his voice. It echoed, it was gone:
The quiet and the quiet dark went on.

21

He rushed into the wood. He struck and stumbled
On hidden roots. He grouped and scratched his face.
The little birds woke chattering where he fumbled.
The stray cat stood, paw lifted, in mid-chase.
There is a windless calm in such a place.
A sense of being indoors⁠—so crowded stand
The living trees, watching on every hand:

22

A sense of trespass⁠—such as in the hall
Of the wrong house, one time, to me befell.
Groping between the hatstand and the wall⁠—
A clear voice from above me like a bell,
The sweet voice of a woman asking “Well?”
No more than this. And as I fled I wondered
Into whose alien story I had blundered.

23

A like thing fell to Dymer. Bending low,
Feeling his way he went. The curtained air
Sighed into sound above his head, as though
Stringed instruments and horns were riding there.
It passed and at its passing stirred his hair.
He stood intent to hear. He heard again
And checked his breath half-drawn, as if with pain.

24

That music could have crumbled proud belief
With doubt, or in the bosom of the sage
Madden the heart that had outmastered grief,
And flood with tears the eyes of frozen age
And turn the young man’s feet to pilgrimage⁠—
So sharp it was, so sure a path it found,
Soulward with stabbing wounds of bitter sounds.

25

It died out on the middle of a note,
As though it failed at the urge of its own meaning.
It left him with life quivering at the throat,
Limbs shaken and wet cheeks and body leaning,
With strain towards the sound and senses gleaning
The last, least, ebbing ripple of the air,
Searching the emptied darkness, muttering “Where?”

26

Then followed such a time as is forgotten
With morning light, but in the passing seems
Unending. Where he grasped the branch was rotten,
Where he trod forth in haste the forest streams
Laid wait for him. Like men in fever dreams
Climbing an endless rope, he laboured much
And gained no ground. He reached and could not touch.

27

And often out of darkness like a swell
That grows up from no wind upon blue sea,
He heard the music, unendurable
In stealing sweetness wind from tree to tree.
Battered and bruised in body and soul was he
When first he saw a little lightness growing
Ahead: and from that light the sound was flowing.

28

The trees were fewer now: and gladly nearing
That light, he saw the stars. For sky was there,
And smoother grass, white flowered⁠—a forest clearing
Set in seven miles of forest, secreter
Than valleys in the tops of clouds, more fair
Than greenery under snow or desert water
Or the white peace descending after slaughter.

29

As some who have been wounded beyond healing
Wake, or half wake, once only and so bless,
Far off the lamplight travelling on the ceiling.
A disk of pale light filled with peacefulness
And wonder if this is the C.C.S.,
Or home, or heaven, or dreams⁠—then sighing win
Wise, ignorant death before the pains begin:

30

So Dymer in the wood-lawn blessed the light,
A still light, rosy, clear, and filled with sounds.
Here was some pile of building which the night
Made larger. Spiry shadows rose all round,
But through the open door appeared profound
Recesses of pure light⁠—fire with no flame⁠—
And out of that deep light the music came.

31

Tip-toes he slunk towards it where the grass
Was twinkling in a lane of light before
The archway. There was neither fence to pass
Nor word of challenge given, nor bolted door,
But where it’s open, open evermore,
No knocker and no porter and no guard,
For very strangeness entering in grows hard.

32

Breath not! Speak not! Walk gently. Someone’s here,
Why have they left heir house with the door so wide?
There must be someone.⁠ ⁠… Dymer hung in fear
Upon the threshold, longing and big-eyed.
At last he squared he shoulders, smote his side
And called, “I’m here. Now let the feast begin.
I’m coming now. I’m Dymer,” and went in.

Canto II

1

More light. Another step, and still more light
Opening ahead. It swilled with soft excess,
His eyes yet quivering from the dregs of night,
And it was nowhere more and nowhere less:
In it no shadows were. He could not guess
Its fountain. Wondering round around he turned:
Still on each side the level glory burned.

2

Far into the dome to where his gaze was lost
The deepening roof shone clear as stones that lie
In-shore beneath pure seas. The aisles, that crossed
Like forests of white stone their arms on high,
Past pillar after pillar dragged his eye
In unobscured perspective till the sight
Was weary. And there also was the light.

3

Look with my eyes. Conceive yourself above
And hanging in the dome: and thence through space
Look down. See Dymer, dwarfed and naked, move,
A white blot on the floor, at such a pace
As boats that hardly seem to have changed place
Once in an hour when from the cliffs we spy
The same ship always smoking towards the sky.

4

The shouting mood had withered from his heart;
The oppression of huge places wrapped him round.
A great misgiving sent its fluttering dart
Deep into him⁠—some fear of being found,
Some hope to find he knew not what. The sound
Of music, never ceasing, took the role
Of silence and like silence numbed his soul.

5

Till, as he turned a corner, his deep awe
Broke with a sudden start. For straight ahead,
Far off, a wild eyed, naked man he saw
That came to meet him: and beyond was spread
Yet further depth of light. With quickening tread
He leaped towards the shape. Then stooped and smiled
Before a mirror, wondering like a child.

6

Beside the glass, unguarded, for the claiming,
Like a great patch of flowers upon the wall
Hung every kind of clothes: silk, feathers flaming,
Leopard skin, furry mantles like the fall
Of deep mid-winter snows. Upon them all
Hung the faint smell of cedar, and the dyes
Were bright as blood and clear as morning skies.

7

He turned from the white spectre in the glass
And looked at these. Remember, he had worn
Thro’ winter slush, thro’ summer flowers and grass
One kind of solemn stuff since he was born,
With badge of year and rank. He laughed in score
And cried, “Here is no law, nor eye to see,
Nor leave of entry given. Why should there be?

8

“Have done with that⁠—you threw it all behind.
Henceforth I ask no licence where I need.
It’s on, on, on, though I go mad and blind,
Though knees ache and lungs labour and feet bleed,
Or else⁠—it’s home again: to sleep and feed,
And work, and hate them always and obey
And loathe the punctual rise of each new day.”

9

He made mad work among them as he dressed,
With motley choice and litter on the floor,
And each thing as he found it seemed the best.
He wondered that he had not known before
How fair a man he was. “I’ll creep no more
In secret,” Dymer said. “But I’ll go back
And drive them all to freedom on this track.”

10

He turned towards the glass. The space looked smaller
Behind him now. Himself in royal guise
Filled the whole frame⁠—a nobler shape and taller,
Till suddenly he started with surprise,
Catching, by chance, his own familiar eyes,
Fevered, yet still the same, without their share
Of bravery, undeceived and watching there.

11

Yet, as he turned, he cried, “The rest remain.⁠ ⁠…
If they rebelled⁠ ⁠… if they should find me here,
We’d pluck the whole taut fabric from the strain,
Hew down the city, let live earth appear!
—Old men and barren women whom through fear
We have suffered to be masters in our home,
Hide! hide! for we are angry and we come.”

12

Thus feeding on vain fancy, covering round
His hunger, his great loneliness arraying
In facile dreams until the qualm was drowned,
The boy went on. Through endless arches straying
With casual tread he sauntered, manly playing
At manhood lest more loss of faith betide him,
Till lo! he saw a table set beside him.

13

When Dymer saw this sight, he leaped for mirth,
He clapped his hands, his eye lit like a lover’s.
He had a hunger in him that was worth
Ten cities. Here was silver, glass and covers.
Cold peacock, prawns in aspic, eggs of plovers,
Raised pies that stood like castles, gleaming fishes
And bright fruit with broad leaves around the dishes.

14

If ever you have passed a café door
And lingered in the dusk of a June day,
Fresh from the road, sweat-sodden and foot-sore,
And heard the plates clink and the music play,
With laughter, with white tables far away,
With many lights⁠—conceive how Dymer ran
To table, looked once round him, and began.

15

That table seemed unending. Here and there
Were broken meats, bread crumbled, flowers defaced,
—A napkin, with white petals, on a chair,
—A glass already tasted, still to taste.
It seemed that a great host had fed in haste
And gone: yet left a thousand places more
Untouched, wherein no guest had sat before.

16

There in the lonely splendour Dymer ate,
As thieves eat, ever watching, half in fear.
He blamed his evil fortune. “I come late.
Whose board was this? What company sat here?
What women with wise mouths, what comrades dear
Who would have made me welcome as the one
Free-born of all my race and cried, ‘Well done!’ ”

17

Remember, yet again, he had grown up
On rations and on scientific food,
At common boards, with water in his cup,
One mess alike for every day and mood:
But here, at his right hand, a flagon stood.
He raised it, paused before he drank, and laughed.
“I’ll drown their Perfect City in this draught.”

18

He fingered the cold neck. He saw within,
Like a strange sky, some liquor that foamed blue
And murmured. Standing now with pointed chin
And head thrown back, he tasted. Rapture flew
Through every vein. That moment louder grew
The music and swelled forth a trumpet note.
He ceased and put one hand up to his throat.

19

Then heedlessly he let the flagon sink
In his right hand. His staring eyes were caught
In distance, as of one who tries to think
A thought that is still waiting to be thought.
There was a riot in his heart that brought
The loud blood to the temples. A great voice
Sprang to his lips unsummoned, with no choice.

20

“Ah! but the eyes are open, the dream is broken!
To sack the Perfect City?⁠ ⁠… a fool’s deed
For Dymer! Folly of follies I have spoken!
I am the wanderer, new born, newly freed⁠ ⁠…
A thousand times they have warned me of men’s greed
For joy, for the good that all desire, but never
Till now I knew the wild heat of the endeavour.

21

“Some day I will come back to break the City,
—Not now. Perhaps when age is white and bleak
—Not now. I am in haste. O God, the pity
Of all my life till this, groping and weak,
The shadow of itself! But now to seek
That true most ancient glory whose white glance
Was lost through the whole world by evil chance!

22

“I was a dull, cowed thing from the beginning.
Dymer the drudge, the blackleg who obeyed.
Desire shall teach me now. If this be sinning,
Good luck to it! O splendour long delayed,
Beautiful world of mine, O world arrayed
For bridal, flower and forest, wave and field,
I come to be your lover. Loveliest, yield!

23

“World, I will prove you. Lest it should be said
There was man who loved the earth: his heart
Was nothing but that love. With doing tread
He worshipt the loved grass: and every start
Of every bird from cover, the least part
Of every flower he held in awe. Yet earth
Gave him no joy between his death and birth.

24

“I know my good is hidden at your breast.
There is a sound of great good in my ear,
Like wings. And, oh! this moment is the best;
I shall not fail⁠—I taste it⁠—it comes near.
As men from a dark dungeon see the clear
Stars shining and the filled streams far away,
I hear your promise booming and obey.

25

“This forest lies a thousand miles, perhaps,
Beyond where I am come. And farther still
The rivers wander seaward with smooth lapse,
And there is cliff and cottage, tower and hill.
Somewhere, before the world’s end, I shall fill
My spirit at earth’s pap. For earth must hold
One rich thing sealed as Dymer’s from of old.

26

“One rich thing⁠—or, it may be, more than this⁠ ⁠…
Might I not reach the borders of a land
That ought to have been mine? And there, the bliss
Of free speech, there the eyes that understand,
The men free grown, not modelled by the hand
Of masters⁠—men that know, or men that seek,
—They will not gape and murmur when I speak.”

27

Then, as he ceased, amid the farther wall
He saw a curtained and low lintelled door;
—Dark curtains, sweepy fold, night-purple pall,
He thought he had not noticed it before.
Sudden desire for darkness overbore
His will, and drew him towards it. All was blind
Within. He passed. The curtains closed behind.

28

He entered a void. Night-scented flowers
Breathed there, but this was darker than the night
That is most black with beating thunder-showers,
—A disembodied world where depth and height
And distance were unmade. No seam of light
Showed through. It was a world not made for seeing,
One pure, one undivided sense of being.

29

Through darkness smooth as amber, warily, slowly
He moved. The floor was soft beneath his feet.
A cool smell that was holy and unholy,
Sharp like the very spring and roughly sweet,
Blew towards him: and he felt his fingers meet
Broad leaves and wiry stems that at his will
Unclosed before and closed behind him still.

30

With body intent he felt the foliage quiver
On breast and thighs. With groping arms he made
Wide passes in the air. A sacred shiver
Of joy from the heart’s centre oddly strayed
To every nerve. Deep sighing, much afraid,
Much wondering, he went on: then, stooping, found
A knee-depth of warm pillows on the ground.

31

And there it was sweet rapture to lie still,
Eyes open on the dark. A flowing health
Bathed him from head to foot and great goodwill
Rose springing in his heart and poured its wealth
Outwards. Then came a hand as if by stealth
Out of the dark and touched his hand: and after
The beating silence budded into laughter:

32

—A low grave laugh and rounded like a pearl,
Mysterious, filled with home. He opened wide
His arms. The breathing body of a girl
Slid into them. From the world’s end, with the stride
Of seven-leagued boots came passion to his side.
Then, meeting mouths, soft-falling hair, a cry,
Heart-shaken flank, sudden cool-folded thigh:

33

The same nights swelled the mushroom in earth’s lap
And silvered the wet fields: it drew the bud
From hiding and led on the rhythmic sap
And sent the young wolves thirsting after blood,
And, wheeling the big seas, made ebb and flood
Along the shores of earth: and held these two
In dead sleep till the time of morning dew.

Canto III

1

He woke, and all at once before his eyes
The pale spires of the chestnut-trees in bloom
Rose waving and, beyond, dove-coloured skies;
But where he lay was dark and, out of gloom,
He saw them, through the doorway of a room
Full of strange scents and softness, padded deep
With growing leaves, heavy with last night’s sleep.

2

He rubbed his eyes. He felt that chamber wreathing
New sleepiness around him. At his side
He was aware of warmth and quiet breathing.
Twice he sank back, loose-limbed and drowsy-eyed;
But the wind came even there. A sparrow cried
And the wood shone without. Then Dymer rose,
—“Just for one glance,” he said, and went, tip-toes,

3

Out into crisp grey air and drenching grass.
The whitened cobweb sparkling in its place
Clung to his feet. He saw the wagtail pass
Beside him and the thrush: and from his face
Felt the thin-scented winds divinely chase
The flush of sleep. Far off he saw, between
The trees, long morning shadows of dark green.

4

He stretched his lazy arms to their full height,
Yawning, and sighed and laughed, and sighed anew;
Then wandered farther, watching with delight
How his broad naked footprints stained the dew,
—Pressing his foot to feel the cold come through
Between the spreading toes⁠—then wheeled round
Each moment to some new, shrill forest sound.

5

The wood with its cold flowers had nothing there
More beautiful than he, new waked from sleep,
New born from joy. His soul lay very bare
That moment to life’s touch, and pondering deep
Now first he knew that no desire could keep
These hours for always, and that men do die
—But oh, the present glory of lungs and eye!

6

He thought: “At home they are waking now. The stair
Is filled with feet. The bells clang⁠—far from me.
Where am I now? I could not point to where
The City lies from here,”⁠ ⁠… then, suddenly,
“If I were here alone, these woods could be
A frightful place! But now I have met my friend
Who loves me, we can talk to the road’s end.”

7

Thus, quickening with the sweetness of the tale
Of his new love, he turned. He saw, between
The young leaves, where the palace walls showed pale
With chilly stone: but far above the green,
Springing like cliffs in air, the towers were seen,
Making more quiet yet the quiet dawn.
Thither he came. He reached the open lawn.

8

No bird was moving here. Against the wall
Out of the unscythed grass the nettle grew.
The doors stood open wide, but no footfall
Rang in the colonnades. Whispering through
Arches and hollow halls the lights wind blew⁠ ⁠…
His awe returned. He whistled⁠—then, no more,
It’s better to plunge in by the first door.

9

But then the vastness threw him into doubt.
Was this the door that he had found last night?
Or that, beneath the tower? Had he come out
This side at all? As the first snow falls light
With following rain before the year grows white,
So the first, dim foreboding touched his mind,
Gently as yet, and easily thrust behind.

10

And with it came the thought, “I do not know
Her name⁠—no, nor her face.” But still his mood
Ran blithely as he felt the morning blow
About him, and the earth-smell in the wood
Seemed waking for long hours that must be good
Here, in the unfettered lands, that knew no cause
For grudging⁠—out of reach of the old laws.

11

He hastened to one entry. Up the stair,
Beneath the pillared porch, without delay,
He ran⁠—then halted suddenly: for there
Across the quiet threshold something lay,
A bundle, a dark mass that barred the way.
He looked again, and lo, the formless pile
Under his eyes was moving all the while.

12

And it had hands, pale hands of wrinkled flesh,
Puckered and gnarled with vast antiquity,
That moved. He eyed the sprawling thing afresh,
And bit by bit (so faces come to be
In the red coal) yet surely, he could see
That the swathed hugeness was uncleanly human,
A living thing, the likeness of a woman.

13

In the centre a draped hummock marked the head;
Thence flowed the broader lines with curve and fold
Spreading as oak roots do. You would have said
A man could hid among them and grow old
In finding a way out. Breast manifold
As of the Ephesian Artemis might be
Under that robe. The face he did not see.

14

And all his being answered, “Not that way!”
Never a word he spoke. Stealthily creeping
Back from the door he drew. Quick! No delay!
Quick, quick, but very quiet!⁠—backward peeping
Till fairly out of sight. Then shouting, leaping,
Shaking himself, he ran⁠—as puppies do
From bathing⁠—till that door was out of view.

15

Another gate⁠—and empty. In he went
And found a courtyard open to the sky,
Amidst it dripped a fountain. Heavy scent
Of flowers was here; the foxglove standing high
Sheltered the whining wasp. With hasty eye
He travelled round the walls. One doorway led
Within: one showed a further court ahead.

16

He ran up to the first⁠—a hungry lover,
And not yet taught to endure, not blunted yet,
But weary of long waiting to discover
That loved one’s face. Before his foot was set
On the first stair, he felt the sudden sweat
Cold on his sides. That sprawling mass in view,
That shape⁠—the horror of heaviness⁠—here too.

17

He fell back from the porch. Not yet⁠—not yet⁠—
There must be other ways where he would meet
No watcher in the door. He would not let
The fear rise, nor hope falter, nor defeat
Be entered in his thoughts. A sultry heat
Seemed to have filled the day. His breath came short,
And he passed on into that inner court.

18

And (like a dream) the sight he feared to find
Was waiting here. Then cloister, path and square
He hastened through: down paths that ended blind,
Traced and retraced his steps. The thing sat there
In every door, still watching, everywhere,
Behind, ahead, all around⁠—So! Steady now,
Lest panic comes. He stopped. He wiped his brow.

19

But, as he strove to rally, came the thought
That he had dreamed of such a place before
—Knew how it all would end. He must be caught
Early or late. No good! But all the more
He raged with passionate will that overbore
That knowledge: and cried out, and beat his head,
Raving, upon the senseless walls, and said:

20

“Where? Where? Dear, look once out. Give but one sign.
It’s I, I, Dymer. Are you chained and hidden?
What have they done to her? Loose her! She is mine.
Through stone and iron, haunted and hag-ridden,
I’ll come to you⁠—no stranger, nor unbidden,
It’s I. Don’t fear them. Shout above them all.
Can you not hear? I’ll follow at your call.”

21

From every arch the echo of his cry
Returned. Then all was silent, and he knew
There was no other way. He must pass by
That horror: tread her down, force his way through,
Or die upon the threshold. And this too
Had all been in a dream. He felt his heart
Beating as if his throat would burst apart.

22

There was no other way. He stood a space
And pondered it. Then, gathering up his will,
He went to the next door. The pillared place
Beneath the porch was dark. The air was still,
Moss on the steps. He felt her presence fill
The threshold with dull life. Here too was she.
This time he raised his eyes and dared to see.

23

Pah! Only an old woman!⁠ ⁠… but the size,
The old, old matriarchal dreadfulness,
Immovable, intolerable⁠ ⁠… the eyes
Hidden, the hidden head, the winding dress,
Corpselike⁠ ⁠… The weight of the brute that seemed to press
Upon his heart and breathing. Then he heard
His own voice, strange and humble, take the word.

24

“Good Mother, let me pass. I have a friend
To look for in this house. I slept the night
And feasted here⁠—it was my journey’s end,
—I found it by the music and the light,
And no one kept the doors, and I did right
To enter⁠—did I not? Now, Mother, pray,
Let me pass in⁠ ⁠… good Mother, give me way.”

25

The woman answered nothing: but he saw
The hands, like crabs, still wandering on her knee.
“Mother, if I have broken any law,
I’ll ask a pardon once: then let it be,
—Once is enough⁠—and leave the passage free.
I am in haste. And though it were a sin
By all the laws you have, I must go in.”

26

Courage was rising in him now. He said,
“Out of my path, old woman. For this cause
I am new born, new freed, and here new wed,
That I might be the breaker of bad laws.
The frost of old forbiddings breaks and thaws
Wherever my feet fall. I bring to birth
Under its crust the green, ungrudging earth.”

27

He had started, bowing low: but now he stood
Stretched to his height. His own voice in his breast
Made misery pompous, firing all his blood.
“Enough,” he cried. “Give place. You shall not wrest
My love from me. I journey on quest
You cannot understand, whose strength shall bear me
Through fire and earth. A body will not scare me.

28

“I am the sword of spring; I am the truth.
Old night, put out your stars, the dawn is here,
The sleeper’s wakening, and the wings of youth.
With crumbling veneration and cowed fear
I make no truce. My loved one, live and dear,
Waits for me. Let me in! I fled the City,
Shall I fear you or⁠ ⁠… Mother, ah, for pity.”

29

For his high mood fell shattered. Like a man
Unnerved, in bayonet-fighting, in the thick,
—Full of red rum and cheers when he began,
Now, in a dream, muttering: “I’ve not the trick.
It’s no good. I’m no good. They’re all too quick.
There! Look there! Look at that!”⁠—so Dymer stood,
Suddenly drained of hope. It was no good.

30

He pleaded then. Shame beneath Shame. “Forgive.
It may be there are powers I cannot break.
If you are of them, speak. Speak. Let me live.
I ask so small a thing. I beg. I make
My body a living prayer whose force would shake
The mountains. I’ll recant⁠—confess my sin⁠—
But this once let me pass. I must go in.”

31

“Yield but one inch, once only from your law;
Set any price⁠—I will give all, obey
All else but this, hold your least word in awe,
Give you no cause for anger from this day.
Answer! The least things living when they pray
As I pray now bear witness. They speak true
Against God. Answer! Mother, let me through.”

32

Then when he heard no answer, mad with fear
And with desire, too strained with both to know
What he desired or feared, yet staggering near,
He forced himself towards her and bent low
For grappling. Then came darkness. Then a blow
Fell on his heart, he thought. There came a blank
Of all things. As the dead sink, down he sank.

33

The first big drops are rattling on the trees,
The sky is copper dark, low thunder pealing.
See Dymer with drooped head and knocking knees
Comes from the porch. Then slowly, drunkly reeling,
Blind, beaten, broken, past desire of healing,
Past knowledge of his misery, he goes on
Under the first dark trees and now is gone.

Canto IV

1

First came the peal that split the heavens apart
Straight overhead. Then silence. Then the rain;
Twelve miles of downward water like one dart,
And in one leap were launched along the plain,
To break the budding flower and flood the grain,
And keep with dripping sound an undersong
Amid the wheeling thunder all might long.

2

He put his hands before his face. He stooped,
Blind with his hair. The loud drops’ grim tattoo
Beat him to earth. Like summer grass he drooped,
Amazed, while sheeted lightning large and blue
Blinked wide and pricked and quivering eyeball through.
Then, scrambling to his feet, with downward head
He fought into the tempest as chance led.

3

The wood was mad. Soughing of branch and straining
Was there: drumming of water. Light was none,
Nor knowledge of himself. The trees’ complaining
And his own throbbing heart seemed mixed in one,
One sense of bitter loss and beauty undone;
All else was blur and chaos and rain-stream
And noise and the confusion of a dream.

4

Aha!⁠ ⁠… Earth hates a miserable man:
Against him even the clouds and winds conspire.
Heaven’s voice smote Dymer’s ear-drum as he ran,
Its red throat plagued the dark with corded fire
—Barbed flame, coiled flame that ran like living wire
Charged with disastrous current, left and right
About his path, hell-blue or staring white.

5

Stab! Stab! Blast all at once. What’s he to fear?
Look there⁠—that cedar shrivelling in swift blight
Even where he stood! And there⁠—ah, that came near!
Oh, if some shaft would break his soul outright,
What ease so to unload and scatter quite
On the darkness this wild beating in his skull
Too burning to endure, too tense and full.

6

All lost: and driven away: even her name
Unknown. O fool, to have wasted for a kiss
Time when they could have talked! An angry shame
Was in him. He had worshipt earth, and this
—The venomed clouds fire spitting from the abyss,
This was the truth indeed, the world’s intent
Unmasked and naked now, the thing it meant.

7

The storm lay on the forest a great time
—Wheeled in its thundery circuit, turned, returned.
Still through the dead-leaved darkness, through the slime
Of standing pools and slots of clay storm-churned
Went Dymer. Still the knotty lightning burned
Along black air. He heard the unbroken sound
Of water rising in the hollower ground.

8

He cursed it in his madness, flung it back,
Sorrow as wild as young men’s sorrows are,
Till, after midnight, when the tempest’s track
Drew off, between two clouds appeared one star.
Then his mood changed. And this was heavier far,
When bit by bit, rarer and still more rare,
The weakening thunder ceased from the cleansed air;

9

When the leaves began to drip with dying rain
And trees showed black against the glimmering sky,
When the night-birds flapped out and called again
Above him: when the silence cool and shy
Came stealing to its own, and streams ran by
Now audible amid the rustling wood
—Oh, then came the worst hour for flesh and blood.

10

It was no nightmare now with fiery stream
Too horrible to last, able to blend
Itself and all things in one hurrying dream;
It was the waking world that will not end
Because hearts break, that is not foe nor friend,
Where sane and settled knowledge first appears
Of work-day desolation, with no tears.

11

He halted then, foot-sore, weary to death,
And heard his heart beating in solitude,
When suddenly the sound of sharpest breath
Indrawn with pain and the raw smell of blood
Surprised his sense. Near by to where he stood
Came a long whimpering moan⁠—a broken word,
A rustle of leaves where some live body stirred.

12

He groped towards the sound. “What, brother, brother,
Who groaned?”⁠—“I’m hit. I’m finished. Let me be.”
—“Put out your hand, then. Reach me. No, the other.”
—“Don’t touch. Fool! Damn you! Leave me.”⁠—“I can’t see.
Where are you?” Then more groans. “They’ve done for me.
I’ve no hands, Don’t come near me. No, but stay,
Don’t leave me⁠ ⁠… O my God! Is it near day?”

13

—“Soon now, a little longer. Can you sleep?
I’ll watch for you.”⁠—“Sleep, is it? That’s ahead,
But none till then. Listen: I’ve bled too deep
To last out till the morning. I’ll be dead
Within the hour⁠—sleep then. I’ve heard it said
They don’t mind at the last, but this is Hell.
If I’d the strength⁠—I have such things to tell.”

14

All trembling in the dark and sweated over
Like a man reared in peace, unused to pain,
Sat Dymer near him in the lightless cover,
Afraid to touch and shamefaced to refrain.
Then bit by bit and often checked again
With agony the voice told on. (The place
Was dark, that neither saw the other’s face.)

15

“There is a City which men call in scorn
The Perfect City⁠—eastward of this wood⁠—
You’ve heard about the place. There I was born.
I’m one of them, their work. Their sober mood,
The ordered life, the laws, are in my blood
—A life⁠ ⁠… well, less than happy, something more
Than the red greed and lusts that went before.

16

“All in one day, one man an at one blow
Brought ruin on us all. There was a boy
—Blue eyes, large limbs, were all he had to show,
You need no greater prophets to destroy.
He seemed a man asleep. Sorrow and joy
Had passed him by⁠—the dreamiest, safest man,
The most obscure, until this curse began.

17

“Then⁠—how or why it was, I cannot say⁠—
This Dymer, this fool baby pink-and-white,
Went mad beneath his quiet face. One day,
With nothing said, he rose and laughed outright
Before his master: then, in all our sight,
Even where we sat to watch, he struck him dead
And screamed with laughter once again and fled.

18

“Lord! how it all comes back. How still the place is,
And he there lying dead⁠ ⁠… only the sound
Of a bluebottle buzzing⁠ ⁠… sharpened faces
Strained, gaping from the benches all around⁠ ⁠…
The dead man hunched and quiet with no wound,
And minute after minute terror creeping
With dreadful hopes to set the wild heart leaping.

19

“Then one by one at random (no word spoken)
We slipt out to the sunlight and away.
We felt the empty sense of something broken
And comfortless adventure all that day.
Men loitered at their work and could not say
What trembled at their lips or what new light
Was in girls’ eyes. Yet we endured till night.

20

“Then⁠ ⁠… I was lying awake in bed,
Shot through with tremulous thought, lame hopes, and sweet
Desire of reckless days⁠—with burning head.
And then there came a clamour from the street,
Came nearer, nearer, nearer⁠—stamping feet
And screaming song and curses and a shout
Of ‘Who’s for Dymer, Dymer?⁠—Up and out!’

21

“We looked out from our window. Thronging there
A thousand of our people, girls and men,
Raved and reviled and shouted by the glare
Of torches and bonfire blaze. And then
Came tumult from the street beyond: again
‘Dymer!’ they cried. And farther off there came
The sound of gun-fire and the gleam of flame.

22

“I rushed down with the rest. Oh, we were mad!
After this, it’s all nightmare. The black sky
Between the housetops framed was all we had
To tell us that the old world could not die
And that we were no gods. The flood ran high
When first I came, but after was the worse,
Oh, to recall⁠ ⁠… ! On Dymer rest the curse!

23

“Our leader was a hunchback with red hair
—Bran was his name. He had that kind of force
About him that will hold your eyes fast there
As in ten miles of green one patch of gorse
Will hold them⁠—do you know? His lips were coarse,
But his eyes like a prophet’s⁠—seemed to fill
The whole face. And his tongue was never still.

24

“He cried: ‘As Dymer broke, we’ll break the chain.
The world is free. They taught you to be chaste
And labour and bear orders and refrain.
Refrain? From what? All’s good enough. We’ll taste
Whatever is. Life murmurs from the waste
Beneath the mind⁠ ⁠… who made the reasoning part
The jailer of the wild gods in the heart?’

25

“We were a ragtail crew⁠—wild-haired, half-dressed,
All shouting, ‘Up, for Dymer! Up away!’
Yet each one always watching all the rest
And looking to his back. And some were gay
Like drunk man, some were cringing, pinched and grey
With terror dry on the lip. (The older ones
Had had the sense enough to bring their guns.)

26

“The wave where I was swallowed swelled and broke,
After long surge, into the open square.
And here there was more light: new clamour woke.
Here first I heard the bullets sting the air
And went hot round the heart. Our lords were there
In barricade with all their loyal men.
For every one man loyal Bran led ten.

27

“Then charge and cheer and bubbling sobs of death,
We hovered on their front. Like swarming bees
Their spraying bullets came⁠—no time for breath.
I saw men’s stomachs fall out on their knees;
And shouting faces, while they shouted, freeze
Into black, bony masks. Before we knew
We’re into them⁠ ⁠… ‘Swine!’⁠—‘Die, then’⁠—‘That’s for you.’

28

“The next that I remember was a lull
And sated pause. I saw an old, old man
Lying before my feet with shattered skull,
And both my arms dripped red. And then came Bran
And at his heels a hundred murderers ran,
With prisoners now, clamouring to take and try them
And burn them, wedge their nails up, crucify them.

29

“God!⁠ ⁠… Once the lying spirit of a cause
With maddening words dethrones the mind of men,
They’re past the reach of prayer. The eternal laws
Hate them. Their eyes will not come clean again,
But doom and strong delusion drive them then,
Without ruth, without rest⁠ ⁠… the iron laughter
Of the immortal mouths goes hooting after.

30

“And we had firebrands too. Tower after tower
Fell sheathed in thundering flame. The street was like
A furnace mouth. We had them in our power!
Then was the time to mock them and to strike,
To flay men and spit women on the pike,
Bidding them dance. Wherever the most shame
Was done the doer called on Dymer’s name.

31

“Faces of men in torture⁠ ⁠… from my mind
They will not go away. The East lay still
In darkness when we left the town behind
Flaming to light the fields. We’d had our will:
We sang, ‘Oh, we will make the frost distil
From Time’s grey forehead into living dew
And break whatever has been and build new.’

32

“Day found us on the border of this wood,
Blear-eyed and pale. Then the most part began
To murmur and to lag, crying for food
And shelter. But we dared not answer Bran.
Wherever in the ranks the murmur ran
He’d find it⁠—‘You, there, whispering. Up, you sneak,
Reactionary, eh? Come out and speak.’

33

“Then there’d be shrieks, a pistol shot, a cry,
And someone down. I was the third he caught.
The others pushed me out beneath his eye,
Saying, ‘He’s here; here, Capture.’ Who’d have thought⁠—
My old friends? But I know now. I’ve been taught⁠ ⁠…
They cut away my two hands and my feet
And laughed and left me for the birds to eat.

34

“Oh, God’s name! If I had my hands again
And Dymer here⁠ ⁠… it would not be my blood.
I am stronger now than he is, old with pain,
One grip would make him mine. But it’s no good,
I’m dying fast. Look stranger, where the wood
Grows lighter. It’s the morning. Stranger dear,
Don’t leave me. Talk a little while. Come near.”

35

But Dymer, sitting hunched with knee to chin,
Close to the dying man, answered no word.
His face was stone. There was no meaning in
His wakeful eyes. Sometimes the other stirred
And fretted, near his death; and Dymer heard,
Yet sat like one that neither hears nor sees.
And the cold East whitened beyond the trees.

Canto V

1

Through bearded cliffs a valley has driven thus deep
Its wedge into the mountain and no more.
The faint track of farthest-wandering sheep
Ends here, and the grey hollows at their core
Of silence feel the dulled continuous roar
Of higher streams. At every step the skies
Grow less and in their place black ridges rise.

2

Hither, long after noon, with plodding tread
And eyes on earth, grown dogged, Dymer came,
Who all the long day in the woods had fled
From the horror of those lips that screamed his name
And cursed him. Busy wonder and keen shame
Were driving him, and little thoughts like bees
Followed and pricked him on and left no ease.

3

Now, when he looked and saw this emptiness
Seven times enfolded in the idle hills,
There came a chilly pause to his distress,
A cloud of the deep world-despair that fills
A man’s heart like the incoming tide and kills
All pains except its own. In that broad sea
No hope, no change, and no regret can be.

4

He felt the eternal strength of the silly earth,
The unhastening circuit of the stars and sea,
The business of perpetual death and birth,
The meaningless precision. All must be
The same and still the same in each degree⁠—
Who cared now? And the smiled and could forgive,
Believing that for sure he would not live.

5

Then, where he saw a little water run
Beneath a bush, he slept. The chills of May
Came dropping and the stars peered one by one
Out of the deepening blue, while far away
The western brightness dulled to bars of grey.
Half-way to midnight, suddenly, from dreaming
He woke wide into present horror, screaming.

6

For he had dreamt of being in the arms
Of his beloved and in quiet places;
But all at once it filled with night alarms
And rapping guns: and men with splintered faces,
—No eyes, no nose, all red⁠—were running races
With worms along the floor. And he ran out
To find the girl and shouted: and that shout

7

Had carried him into the waking world.
There stood the concave, vast, unfriendly night,
And over him the scroll of stars unfurled.
Then wailing like a child he rose upright,
Heart-sick with desolation. The new blight
Of loss had nipt him sore, and sad self-pity
Thinking of her⁠—then thinking of the City.

8

For, in each moment’s thought, the deed of Bran,
The burning and the blood and his own shame,
Would tease him into madness till he ran
For refuge to the thought of her; whence came
Utter and endless loss⁠—no, not a name,
Not a word, nothing left⁠—himself alone
Crying amid that valley of old stone:

9

“How soon it all ran out! And I suppose
They, they up there, the old contriving powers,
They knew it all the time⁠—for someone knows
And waits and watches till we pluck the flowers,
Then leaps. So soon⁠—my store of happy hours
All gone before I knew. I have expended
My whole wealth in a day. It’s finished, ended.

10

“And nothing left. Can it be possible
That joy flows through and, when the course is run,
It leaves no change, no mark on us to tell
Its passing? And as poor as we’ve begun
We end the richest day? What we have won,
Can it all die like this?⁠ ⁠… Joy flickers on
The razor-edge of the present and is gone.

11

“What have I done to bear upon my name
The curse of Bran? I was not of his crew,
Nor any man’s. And Dymer has the blame⁠—
What have I done? Wronged whom? I never knew.
What’s Bran to me? I had my deed to do
And ran out by myself, alone and free,
—Why should earth sing with joy and not for me?

12

“Ah, but the earth never did sing for joy⁠ ⁠…
There is a glamour on the leaf and flower
And April comes and whistles to a boy
Over white fields: and, beauty has such power
Upon us, he believes her in that hour,
For who could not believe? Can it be false,
All that the blackbird says and the wind calls?

13

“What have I done? No living thing I made
Nor wished to suffer harm. I sought my good
Because the spring was gloriously arrayed
And the blue eyebright misted all the wood.
Yet to obey that springtime and my blood,
This was to be unarmed and off my guard
And gave God time to hit once and hit hard.

14

“The men built right who made that City of ours,
They knew their world. A man must crouch to face
Infinite malice, watching at all hours,
Shut Nature out⁠—give her no moment’s space
For entry. The first needs of all our race
Are walls, a den, a cover. Traitor I
Who first ran out beneath the open sky.

15

“Our fortress and fenced place I made to fail,
I slipt the sentries and let in the foe.
I have lost my brothers and my love and all.
Nothing is left but me. Now let me go.
I have seen the world stripped naked and I know.
Great God, take back your world. I will have none
Of all your glittering gauds but death alone.”

16

Meanwhile the earth swung round in hollow night.
Souls without number in all nations slept
Snug on her back, safe speeding towards the light;
Hours tolled, and in damp woods the night beast crept,
And over the long seas the watch was kept
In black ships, twinkling onward, green and red:
Always the ordered stars moved overhead.

17

And no one knew that Dymer in his scales
Had weighed all these and found them nothing worth.
Indifferently the dawn that never fails
Troubled the east of night with gradual birth,
Whispering a change of colours on cold earth,
And a bird woke, then two. The sunlight ran
Along the hills and yellow day began.

18

But stagnant gloom clung in the valley yet;
Hills crowded out a third part of the sky,
Black-looking, and the boulders dripped with wet:
No bird sang. Dymer, shivering, heaved a sigh
And yawned and said: “It’s cruel work to die
Of hunger”; and again, with cloudy breath
Blown between chattering teeth, “It’s a bad death.”

19

He crouched and clasped his hands about his knees
And hugged his own limbs for the pitiful sense
Of homeliness they had⁠—familiars these,
This body, at least, his own, his last defence
But soon his morning misery drove him thence,
Eating his heart, to wander as chance led
On, upward, to the narrowing gully’s head.

20

The cloud lay on the nearest mountaintop
As from a giant’s chimney smoking there,
But Dymer took no heed. Sometimes he’d stop,
Sometimes he hurried faster, as despair
Pricked deeper, and cried out: “Even now, somewhere,
Bran with his crew’s at work. They rack, they burn,
And there’s no help in me. I’ve served their turn.”

21

Meanwhile the furrowed fog rolled down ahead,
Long tatters of its vanguard smearing round
The bases of the crags. Like cobweb shed
Down the deep combes it dulled the tinkling sound
Of waters on the hills. The spongy ground
Faded three yards ahead: then nearer yet
Fell the cold wreaths, the white depth gleaming wet.

22

Then after a long time the path he trod
Led downward. Then all suddenly it dipped
Far steeper, and yet steeper, with smooth sod.
He was half running now. A stone that slipped
Beneath him, rattled headlong down: he tripped,
Stumbled and clutched⁠—then panic, and no hope
To stop himself, once lost upon that slope.

23

And faster, ever faster, and his eye
Caught tree-tops far below. The nightmare feeling
Had gripped him. He was screaming: and the sky
Seemed hanging upside down. Then struggling, reeling,
With effort beyond thought he hung half kneeling,
Halted one saving moment. With wild will
He clawed into the hillside and lay still,

24

Half hanging on both arms. His idle feet
Dangled and found no hold. The moor lay wet
Against him and he sweated with the heat
Of terror, all alive. His teeth were set.
“By God, I will not die,” said he; “not yet.”
Then slowly, slowly, with enormous strain,
He heaved himself an inch: then heaved again,

25

Till saved and spent he lay. He felt indeed
It was the big, round world beneath his breast,
The mother planet proven at this need.
The shame of glad surrender stood confessed,
He cared not for his boasts. This, this was best,
This giving up of all. He need not strive;
He panted, he lay still, he was alive.

26

And now his eyes were closed. Perhaps he slept,
Lapt in unearthly quiet⁠—never knew
How bit by bit the fog’s white rearguard crept
Over the crest and faded, and the blue
First brightening at the zenith trembled through,
And deepening shadows took a sharper form
Each moment, and the sandy earth grew warm.

27

Yet, dreaming of blue skies, in dream he heard
The pure voice of lark that seemed to send
Its song from heights beyond all height. That bird
Sang out heaven, “The world will never end,”
Sang from the gates of heavens, “Will never end.”
Sang till it seemed there was no other thing
But bright space and one voice set there to sing.

28

It seemed to be the murmur and the voice
Or beings beyond number, each and all
Singing I am. Each of itself made choice
And was: whence flows the justice that men call
Divine. She keeps the great worlds lest they fall
From hour to hour, and makes the hills renew
Their ancient youth and sweetens all things through.

29

It seemed to be the low voice of the world
Brooding alone beneath the strength of things,
Murmuring of days and nights and years unfurled
Forever, and the unwearied joy that brings
Out of old fields the flowers of unborn springs,
Out of old wars and cities burned with wrong,
A splendour in the dark, a tale, a song.

30

The dream ran thin towards waking, and he knew
It was but a bird’s piping with no sense.
He rolled round on his back. The sudden blue,
Quivering with light, heard, cloudless and intense,
Shone over him. The lark still sounded thence
And stirred him at the heart. Some spacious thought
Was passing by too gently to be caught.

31

With that he thrust the damp hair from his face
And sat upright. The perilous cliff dropped sheer
Before him, close at hand, and from his place
Listening in mountain silence he could hear
Birds crying far below. It was not fear
That took him, but strange glory, when his eye
Looked past he edge into surrounding sky.

32

He rose and stood. Then lo! the world beneath
—Wide pools that in the sun-splashed foothills lay,
Sheep-doted downs, soft-piled, and rolling heath,
River and shining weir and steeples grey
And the green waves of forest. Far away
Distance rose heaped on distance: nearer hand,
The white roads leading down to a new land.

Canto VI

1

The sun was high in heaven and Dymer stood
A bright speck on the endless mountain-side,
Till, blossom after blossom, that rich mood
Faded and truth rolled homeward, like a tide
Before whose edge the weak soul fled to hide
In vain, with ostrich head, through many a shape
Of coward fancy, whimpering for escape.

2

But only for a moment; then his soul
Took the full swell and heaved a dripping prow
Clear of the shattering wave-crest. He was whole.
No veils should hide the truth, no truth should cow
The dear self-pitying heart. “I’ll babble now
No longer,” Dymer said. “I’m broken in.
Pack up the dreams and let the life begin.”

3

With this he turned. “I must have food to-day,”
He muttered. Then among the cloudless hills
By winding tracks he sought the downward way
And followed the steep course of tumbling rills
—Came to the glens the wakening mountain fills
In springtime with the echoing splash and shock
Of waters leaping cold from rock to rock.

4

And still, it seemed that lark with its refrain
Sang in the sky, and wind was in his hair
And hope at heart. Then once, and once again,
He heard a gun fired off. It broke the air
As a stone breaks a pond, and everywhere
The dry crags echoed clear: and at the sound
Once a big bird rose whirring from the ground.

5

In half an hour he reached the level land
And followed the field-paths and crossed the stiles,
Then looked and saw, near by, on his left hand
An old house, folded round with billowy piles
Of dark yew hedge. The moss was on the tiles
The pigeons in the yard, and in the tower
A clock that had no hands and told no hour.

6

He hastened. In warm waves the garden scent
Came stronger at each stride. The mountain breeze
Was gone. He reached the gates; then in he went
And seemed to lose the sky⁠—such weight of trees
Hung overhead. He heard the noise of bees
And saw, far off, in the blue shade between
The windless elms, one walking on the green.

7

It was a mighty man whose beardless face
Beneath grey hair shone out so large and mild
It made a sort of moonlight in the place.
A dreamy desperation, wistful-wild,
Showed in his glance and gait: yet like a child,
An Asian emperor’s only child, was he
With his grave looks and bright solemnity.

8

And over him there hung in the witching air,
The wilful courtesy, of the days of old,
The graces wherein idleness grows fair;
And somewhat in his sauntering walk he rolled
And toyed about his waist with seals of gold,
Or stood to ponder often in mid-stride,
Tilting his heavy head upon one side.

9

When Dymer had called twice, he turned his eye:
Then, coming out of silence (as a star
All in one moment slips into the sky
Of evening, yet we feel it comes from far),
He said, “Sir, you are welcome. Few there are
That come my way”: and in huge hands he pressed
Dymer’s cold hand and bade him into rest.

10

“How did you find this place out? Have you heard
My gun? It was but now I killed a lark.”
“What, Sir,” said Dymer; “shoot the singing bird?”
“Sir,” said the man, “they sing from dawn till dark,
And interrupt my dreams too long. But hark⁠ ⁠…
Another? Did you hear no singing? No?
It was my fancy, then⁠ ⁠… pray, let it go.

11

“From here you see my garden’s only flaw.
Stand here, Sir, at the dial.” Dymer stood.
The Master pointed; then he looked and saw
How hedges and the funeral quietude
Of black trees fringed the garden like a wood,
And only, in one place, one gap that showed
The blue side of the hills, the white hill-road.

12

“I have planted fir and larch to fill the gap,”

He said, “because this too makes war upon
The art of dream. But by some great mishap
Nothing I plant will grow there. We pass on⁠ ⁠…
The sunshine of the afternoon is gone.
Let us go in. It draws near time to sup
—I hate the garden till the moon is up.”

13

They passed from the hot lawn into the gloom
And coolness of the porch: then, past a door
That opened with no noise, into a room
Where green leaves choked the window and the floor
Sank lower than the ground. A tattered store.
Of brown books met the eye: a crystal ball:
And masks with empty eyes along the wall.

14

Then Dymer sat, but knew not how nor where,
And supper was set out before these two,
—He saw not how⁠—with silver old and rare
But tarnished. And he ate and never knew
What meats they were. At every bite he grew
More drowsy and let slide his crumbling will.
The Master at his side was talking still.

15

And all his talk was tales of magic words
And of the nations in the clouds above,
Astral and aerish tribes who fish for birds
With angles. And by history he could prove
How chosen spirits from earth had won their love,
As Arthur, or Usheen: and to their isle
Went Helen for the sake of a Greek smile.

16

And ever in his talk he mustered well
His texts and strewed old authors round the way,
“Thus Wierus writes,” and “Thus the Hermetics tell,”
“This was Agrippa’s view,” and “Others say
With Cardan,” till he had stolen quite away
Dymer’s dull wits and softly drawn apart
The ivory gates of hope that change the heart.

17

Dymer was talking now. Now Dymer told
Of his own love and losing, drowsily.
The Master leaned towards him, “Was it cold,
This spirit, to the touch?”⁠—“No, Sir, not she,”
Said Dymer. And his host: “Why this must be
Aethereal, not aerial! O my soul,
Be still⁠ ⁠… but wait. Tell on, Sir, tell the whole.”

18

Then Dymer told him of the beldam too,
The old, old, matriarchal dreadfulness.
Over the Master’s face a shadow drew,
He shifted in his chair and “Yes” and “Yes,”
He murmured twice. “I never looked for less!
Always the same⁠ ⁠… that frightful woman shape
Besets the dream-way and the soul’s escape.”

19

But now when Dymer made to talk of Bran,
A huge indifference fell upon his host,
Patient and wandering-eyed. Then he began,
“Forgive me. You are young. What helps us most
Is to find out again that heavenly ghost
Who loves you. For she was a ghost, and you
In that place where you met were ghostly too.

20

“Listen! for I can launch you on the stream
Will roll you to the shores of her own land⁠ ⁠…
I could be sworn you never learned to dream,
But every night you take with careless hand
What chance may bring? I’ll teach you to command
The comings and the goings of your spirit
Through all that borderland which dreams inherit.

21

“You shall have hauntings suddenly. And often,
When you forget, when least you think of her
(For so you shall forget), a light will soften
Over the evening woods. And in the stir
Of morning dreams (oh, I will teach you, Sir)
There’ll come a sound of wings. Or you shall be
Waked in the midnight murmuring, ‘It was she.’ ”

22

“No, no,” said Dymer, “not that way. I seem
To have slept for twenty years. Now⁠—while I shake
Out of my eyes that dust of burdening dream,
Now when the long clouds tremble ripe to break
And the far hills appear, when first I wake,
Still blinking, struggling towards the world of men,
And longing⁠—would you turn me back again?

23

“Dreams? I have had my dream too long. I thought
The sun rose for my sake. I ran down blind
And dancing to the abyss. Oh, Sir, I brought
Boy-laughter for a gift to gods who find
The martyr’s soul too soft. But that’s behind.
I’m waking now. They broke me. All ends thus
Always⁠—and we’re for them, not they for us.

24

“And she⁠—she was no dream. It would be waste
To seek her there, the living in that den
Of lies.” The Master smiled. “You are in haste!
For broken dreams the cure is, Dream again
And deeper. If the waking world, and men,
And nature marred your dream⁠—so much the worse
For a crude world beneath its primal curse.”

25

—“Ah, but you do not know! Can dreams do this,
Pluck out blood-guiltiness upon the shore
Or memory⁠—and undo what’s done amiss,
And bid the thing that has been be no more?”
—“Sir, it is only dreams unlock that door,”
He answered with a shrug. “What would you have?
In dreams the thrice-proved coward can feel brave.

26

“In dreams the fool is free from scorning voices.
Grey-headed whores are virgin there again.
Out of the past dream brings long-buried choices,
All in a moment snaps the tenfold chain
That life took years in forging. There the stain
Of oldest sins⁠—how do the good words go?⁠—
Though they were scarlet, shall be white as snow.”

27

Then, drawing near, when Dymer did not speak,
“My little son,” said he, “your wrong and right
Are also dreams: fetters to bind the weak
Faster to phantom earth and blear the sight.
Wake into dreams, into the larger light
That quenches these frail stars. They will not know
Earth’s bye-laws in the land to which you go.”

28

—“I must undo my sins.”⁠—“An earthly law,
And, even in earth, the child of yesterday.
Throw down your human pity; cast your awe
Behind you; put repentance all away.
Home to the elder depths! for never they
Supped with the stars who dared not slough behind
The last shred of earth’s holies from their mind.”

29

“Sir,” answered Dymer, “I would be content
To drudge in earth, easing my heart’s disgrace,
Counting a year’s long service lightly spent
If once at the year’s end I saw her face
Somewhere, being then most weary, in some place
I looked not for that joy⁠—or heard her near
Whispering, ‘Yet courage, friend,’ for one more year.”

30

“Pish,” said the Master. “Will you have the truth?
You think that virtue saves? Her people care
For the high heart and idle hours of youth;
For these they will descend our lower air,
Not virtue. You would nerve your arm and bear
Your burden among men? Look to it, child:
By virtue’s self vision can be defiled.

31

“You will grow full of pity and the love of men,
And toil until the morning moisture dries
Out of your heart. Then once, or once again,
It may be you will find her: but your eyes
Soon will be grown too dim. The task that lies
Next to your hand will hide her. You shall be
The child of earth and gods you shall not see.”

32

Here suddenly he ceased. Tip-toes he went.
A bolt clicked⁠—then the window creaked ajar,
And out of the wet world the hedgerow scent
Came floating; and the dark without one star
Nor shape of trees nor sense of near and far,
The undimensioned night and formless skies
Were there, and were the Master’s great allies.

33

“I am very old,” he said. “But if the time
We suffer in our dreams were counted age,
I have outlived the ocean and my prime
Is with me to this day. Years cannot gauge
The dream-life. In the turning of a page,
Dozing above my book, I have lived through
More ages than the lost Lemuria knew.

34

“I am not mortal. Were I doomed to die
This hour, in this half-hour I interpose
A thousand years of dream: and, those gone by,
As many more, and in the last of those,
Ten thousand⁠—ever journeying towards a close
That I shall never reach: for time shall flow,
Wheel within wheel, interminably slow.

35

“And you will drink my cup and go your way
Into the valley of dreams. You have heard the call.
Come hither and escape. Why should you stay?
Earth is a sinking ship, a house whose wall
Is tottering while you sweep; the roof will fall
Before the work is done. You cannot mend it.
Patch as you will, at last the rot must end it.”

36

Then Dymer lifted up his heavy head
Like Atlas on broad shoulders bearing up
The insufferable globe. “I had not said,”
He mumbled, “never said I’d taste the cup.
What, is it this you give me? Must I sup?
Oh, lies, all lies⁠ ⁠… Why did you kill the lark?
Guide me the cup to lip⁠ ⁠… it is so dark.”

Canto VII

1

The host had trimmed his lamp. The downy moth
Came from the garden. Where the lamplight shed
Its circle of smooth white upon the cloth,
Down mid the rinds of fruit and broken bread,
Upon his sprawling arms lay Dymer’s head;
And often, as he dreamed, he shifted place,
Muttering and showing half his drunken face.

2

The beating stillness of the dead of night
Flooded the room. The dark and sleepy powers
Settled upon the house and filled it quite;
Far from the roads it lay, from belfry towers
And hen-roosts, in a world of folded flowers,
Buried in loneliest fields where beasts that love
The silence through the unrustled hedgerows move.

3

Now from the Master’s lips there breathed a sigh
As of a man released from some control
That wronged him. Without aim his wandering eye,
Unsteadied and unfixed, began to roll.
His lower lip dropped loose. The informing soul
Seemed fading from his face. He laughed out loud
Once only: then looked round him, hushed and cowed.

4

Then, summoning all himself, with tightened lip,
With desperate coolness and attentive air,
He touched between his thumb and finger-tip,
Each in its turn, the four legs of his chair,
Then back again in haste⁠—there!⁠—that one there
Had been forgotten⁠ ⁠… once more!⁠ ⁠… safer now;
That’s better! and he smiled and cleared his brow.

7

Yet this was but a moment’s ease. Once more
He glanced about him like a startled hare,
His big eyes bulged with horror. As before,
Quick!⁠—to the touch that saves him. But despair
Is nearer by one step; and in his chair
Huddling he waits. He knows that they’ll come strong
Again and yet again and all night long;

7

And, after this night comes another night
—Night after night until the worst of all.
And now too even the noonday and the light
Let through the horrors. Oh, could he recall
The deep sleep and the dreams that used to fall
Around him for the asking! But, somehow,
Something’s amiss⁠ ⁠… sleep comes so rarely now.

7

Then, like the dog returning to its vomit,
He staggered to the bookcase to renew
Yet once again the taint he had taken from it,
And shuddered as he went. But horrors drew
His feet, as joy draws others. There in view
Was his strange heaven and his far stranger hell,
His secret lust, his soul’s dark citadel:⁠—

8

Old Theomagia, Demonology,
Cabbala, Chemic Magic, Book of the Dead,
Damning Hermetic rolls that none may see
Save the already damned⁠—such grubs are bred
From minds that lose the Spirit and seek instead
For spirits in the dust of dead men’s error,
Buying the joys of dream with dreamland terror.

9

This lost soul looked them over one and all,
Now sickening at the heart’s root; for he knew
This night was one of those when he would fall
And scream alone (such things they made him do)
And roll upon the floor. The madness grew
Wild at his breast, but still his brain was clear
That he could watch the moment coming near.

10

But, ere it came, he heard a sound, half groan,
Half muttering, from the table. Like a child
Caught unawares that thought it was alone,
He started as in guilt. His gaze was wild,
Yet pitiably with all his will he smiled,
—So strong is shame, even then. And Dymer stirred,
Now waking, and looked up and spoke one word:

11

“Water!” he said. He was too dazed to see
What hell-wrung face looked down, what shaking hand
Poured out the draught. He drank it thirstily
And held the glass for more. “Your land⁠ ⁠… your land
Of dreams,” he said. “All lies!⁠ ⁠… I understand
More than I did. Yes, water. I’ve the thirst
Of hell itself. Your magic’s all accursed.”

12

When he had drunk again he rose and stood,
Pallid and cold with sleep. “By God,” he said,
“You did me wrong to send me to that wood.
I sought a living spirit and found instead
Bogies and wraiths.” The Master raised his head,
Calm as a sage, and answered, “Are you mad?
Come, sit you down. Tell me what dream you had.”

13

—“I dreamed about a wood⁠ ⁠… an autumn red
Of beech-trees big as mountains. Down between⁠—
The first thing that I saw⁠—a clearing spread,
Deep down, oh, very deep. Like some ravine
Or like a well it sank, that forest green
Under its weight of forest⁠—more remote
Than one ship in a landlocked sea afloat.

14

“Then through the narrowed sky some heavy bird
Would flap its way, a stillness more profound
Following its languid wings. Sometimes I heard
Far off in the long woods with quiet sound
The sudden chestnut thumping to the ground,
Or the dry leaf that drifted past upon
Its endless loiter earthward and was gone.

15

“The next⁠ ⁠… I heard twigs splintering on my right
And rustling in the thickets. Turning there
I watched. Out of the foliage came in sight
The head and blundering shoulders of a bear,
Glistening in sable black, with beady stare
Of eyes towards me, and no room to fly
—But padding soft and slow the beast came by.

16

“And⁠—mark their flattery⁠—stood and rubbed his flank
Against me. On my shaken legs I felt
His heart beat. And my hand that stroked him sank
Wrist-deep upon his shoulder in soft pelt.
Yes⁠ ⁠… and across my spirit as I smelt
The wild thing’s scent, a new, sweet wildness ran
Whispering of Eden-fields long lost by man.

17

“So far was well. But then came emerald birds
Singing about my head. I took my way
Sauntering the cloistered woods. Then came the herds,
The roebuck and the fallow deer at play,
Trooping to nose my hand. All this, you say,
Was sweet? Oh, sweet!⁠ ⁠… do you think I could not see
That beats and wood were nothing else but me?

18

“… That I was making everything I saw,
Too sweet, far too well fitted to desire
To be a living thing? Those forests draw
No sap from the kind earth: the solar fire
And soft rain feed them not: that fairy brier
Pricks not: the birds sing sweetly in that brake
Not for their own delight but for my sake!

19

“It is a world of sad, cold, heartless stuff,
Like a bought smile, no joy in it.”⁠—“But stay;
Did you not find your lady?”⁠—“Sure enough!
I still had hopes till then. The autumn day
Was westering, the long shadows crossed my way,
When over daisies folded for the night
Beneath rook-gathering elms she came in sight.”

20

—“Was she not fair?”⁠—“So beautiful, she seemed
Almost a living soul. But every part
Was what I made it⁠—all that I had dreamed⁠—
No more, no less: the mirror of my heart,
Such things as boyhood feigns beneath the smart
Of solitude and spring. I was deceived
Almost. In that first moment I believed.

21

“For a big, brooding rapture, tense as fire
And calm as a first sleep, had soaked me through
Without thought, without word, without desire⁠ ⁠…
Meanwhile above our heads the deepening blue
Burnished the gathering stars. Her sweetness drew
A veil before my eyes. The minutes passed
Heavy like loaded vines. She spoke at last.

22

“She said, for this land only did men love
The shadow-lands of earth. All our disease
Of longing, all the hopes we fabled of,
Fortunate islands or Hesperian seas
Or woods beyond the West, were but the breeze
That blew from off those shores: one far, spent breath
That reached even to the world of change and death.

23

“She told me I had journeyed home at last
Into the golden age and the good countrie
That had been always there. She bade me cast
My cares behind forever:⁠—on her knee
Worshipped me, lord and love⁠—oh, I can see
Her red lips even now! Is it not wrong
That men’s delusions should be made so strong?

24

“For listen, I was so besotted now
She made me think that I was somehow seeing
The very core of truth⁠ ⁠… I felt somehow,
Beyond all veils, the inward pulse of being.
Thought was enslaved, but oh, it felt like freeing
And draughts of larger air. It is too much!
Who can come through untainted from that touch?

25

“There I was nearly wrecked. But mark the rest:
She went too fast. Soft to my arms she came.
The robe slipped from her shoulder. The smooth breast
Was bare against my own. She shone like flame
Before me in the dusk, all love, all shame⁠—
Faugh!⁠—and it was myself. But all was well,
For, at the least, that moment snapped the spell.

26

“As when you light a candle, the great gloom
Which was the unbounded night, sinks down, compressed
To four white walls in one familiar room,
So the vague joy shrank wilted in my breast
And narrowed to one point, unmasked, confessed;
Fool’s paradise was gone: instead was there
King Lust with his black, sudden, serious stare.

27

“That moment in a cloud among the trees
Wild music and the glare of torches came.
On sweated faces, on the prancing knees
Of shaggy satyrs fell the smoky flame,
On ape and goat and crawlers without name,
On rolling breast, black eyes and tossing hair,
On old bald-headed witches, lean and bare.

28

“They beat the devilish tom-tom rub-a-dub;
Lunging, leaping, in unwieldy romp,
Singing Cotytto and Beelzebub,
With devil-dancers’ mask and phallic pomp,
Torn raw with briers and caked from many a swamp,
They came, among the wild flowers dripping blood
And churning the green mosses into mud.

29

“They sang, ‘Return! Return! We are the lust
That was before the world and still shall be
When your last law is trampled into dust,
We are the mother swamp, the primal sea
Whence the dry land appeared. Old, old are we.
It is but a return⁠ ⁠… it’s nothing new,
Easy as slipping on a well-worn shoe.’

30

“And then there came warm mouths and finger-tips
Preying upon me, whence I could not see,
Then⁠ ⁠… a huge face, low-browed, with swollen lips
Crooning, ‘I am not beautiful as she,
But I’m the older love; you shall love me
Far more than Beauty’s self. You have been ours
Always. We are the world’s most ancient powers.’

31

“First flatterer and then bogey⁠—like a dream!
Sir, are you listening? Do you also know
How close to the soft laughter comes the scream
Down yonder?” But his host cried sharply, “No.
Leave me alone. Why will you plague me? Go!
Out of my house! Begone!”⁠—“With all my heart,”
Said Dymer. “But one word before we part.”

32

He paused, and in his cheek the anger burned:
Then turning to the table, he poured out
More water. But before he drank he turned⁠—
Then leaped back to the window with a shout
For there⁠—it was no dream⁠—beyond all doubt
He saw the Master crouch with levelled gun,
Cackling in maniac voice, “Run, Dymer, run!”

33

He ducked and sprang far out. The starless night
On the wet lawn closed round him every way.
Then came the gun-crack and the splash of light
Vanished as soon as seen. Cool garden clay
Slid from his feet. He had fallen and he lay
Face downward among leaves⁠—then up and on
Through branch and leaf till sense and breath were gone.

Canto VIII

1

When next he found himself no house was there,
No garden and great trees. Beside a lane
In grass he lay. Now first he was aware
That, all one side, his body glowed with pain:
And the next moment and the next again
Was neither less nor more. Without a pause
It clung like a great beast with fastened claws;

2

That for a time he could not frame a thought
Nor know himself for self, nor pain for pain,
Till moment added on to moment taught
The new, strange art of living on that plane,
Taught how the grappled soul must still remain,
Still choose and think and understand beneath
The very grinding of the ogre’s teeth.

3

He heard the wind along the hedges sweep,
The quarter striking from a neighbouring tower.
About him was the weight of the world’s sleep;
Within, the thundering pain. That quiet hour
Heeded it not. It throbbed, it raged with power
Fit to convulse the heavens: and at his side
The soft peace drenched the meadows far and wide.

4

The air was cold, the earth was cold with dew,
The hedge behind him dark as ink. But now
The clouds broke and a paler heaven showed through
Spacious with sudden stars, breathing somehow
The sense of change to slumbering lands. A cow
Coughed in the fields behind. The puddles showed
Like pools of sky amid the darker road.

5

And he could see his own limbs faintly white
And the blood black upon them. Then by chance
He turned⁠ ⁠… and it was strange: there at his right
He saw a woman standing, and her glance
Met his: and at the meeting his deep trance
Changed not, and while he looked the knowledge grew
She was not of the old life but the new.

6

“Who is it?” he said. “The loved one, the long lost.”
He stared upon her. “Truly?”⁠—“Truly indeed.”
—“Oh, lady, you come late. I am tempest-tossed,
Broken and wrecked. I am dying. Look, I bleed.
Why have you left me thus and given no heed
To all my prayer?⁠—left me to be the game
Of all deceits?”⁠—“You should have asked my name.”

7

—“What are you, then?” But to his sudden cry
She did not answer. When he had thought awhile
He said: “How can I tell it is no lie?
It may be one more phantom to beguile
The brain-sick dreamer with its harlot smile.”
“I have not smiled,” she said. The neighbouring bell
Tolled out another quarter. Silence fell.

8

And after a long pause he spoke again:
“Leave me,” he said. “Why do you watch with me?
You do not love me. Human tears and pain
And hoping for the things that cannot be,
And blundering in the night where none can see,
And courage with cold back against the wall,
You do not understand.”⁠—“I know them all.

9

“The gods themselves know pain, the eternal forms.
In realms beyond the reach of cloud, and skies
Nearest the ends of air, where come no storms
Nor sound of earth, I have looked into their eyes
Peaceful and filled with pain beyond surmise,
Filled with an ancient woe man cannot reach
One moment though in fire; yet calm their speech.”

10

“Then these,” said Dymer, “were the world I wooed⁠ ⁠…
These were the holiness of lowers and grass
And desolate dews⁠ ⁠… these, the eternal mood
Blowing the eternal theme through men that pass.
I called myself their lover⁠—I that was
Less fit for that long service than the least
Dull, work-day drudge of men or faithful beast.

11

“Why do they lure to them such spirits as mine,
The weak, the passionate, and the fool of dreams?
When better men go safe and never pine
With whisperings at the heart, soul-sickening gleams
Of infinite desire, and joy that seems
The promise of full power? For it was they,
The gods themselves, that led me on this way.

12

“Give me the truth! I ask not now for pity.
When gods call, can the following them be sin?
Was it false light that lured me from the City?
Where was the path⁠—without it or within?
Must it be one blind throw to lose or win?
Has heaven no voice to help? Must things of dust
Guess their own way in the dark?” She said, “They must.”

13

Another silence: then he cried in wrath,
“You came in human shape, in sweet disguise
Wooing me, lurking for me in my path,
Hid your eternal cold with woman’s eyes,
Snared me with shows of love⁠—and all was lies.”
She answered, “For our kind must come to all
If bidden, but in the shape for which they call.”

14

“What!” answered Dymer. “Do you change and sway
To serve us, as the obedient planets spin
About the sun? Are you but potter’s clay
For us to mould⁠—unholy to our sin
And holy to holiness within?”
She said, “Waves fall on many an unclean shore,
Yet the salt seas are holy as before.

15

“Our nature is no purer for the saint
That worships, nor from him that uses ill
Our beauty can we suffer any taint.
As from the first we were, so are we still:
With incorruptibles the moral will
Corrupts itself, and clouded eyes will make
Darkness within from beams they cannot take.”

16

“Well⁠ ⁠… it is well,” said Dymer. “If I have used
The embreathing spirit amiss⁠ ⁠… what would have been
The strength of all my days I have refused
And plucked the stalk, too hasty, in the green,
Trusted the good for best, and having seen
Half-beauty, or beauty’s fringe, the lowest stair,
The common incantation, worshipped there.”

17

But presently he cried in his great pain,
“If I had loved a beast it would repay,
But I have loved the Spirit and loved in vain.
Now let me die⁠ ⁠… ah, but before the way
Is ended quite, in the last hour of day,
Is there no word of comfort, no one kiss
Of human love? Does it all end in this?”

18

She answered, “Never ask of life and death.
Uttering these names you dream of wormy clay
Or of surviving ghosts. This withering breath
Of words is the beginning of decay
In truth, when truth grows cold and pines away
Among the ancestral images. Your eyes
First see her dead: and more, the more she dies.

19

“You are still dreaming, dreams you shall forget
When you have cast your fetters, far from here.
Go forth; the journey is not ended yet.
You have seen Dymer dead and on the bier
More often than you dream and dropped no tear,
You have slain him every hour. Think not al all
Or death lest into death by thought you fall.”

20

He turned to question her, then looked again,
And lo! the shape was gone. The darkness lay
Heavy as yet and a cold, shifting rain
Fell with the breeze that springs before the day.
It was an hour death loves. Across the way
The clock struck once again. He saw near by
The black shape of the tower against the sky.

21

Meanwhile above the torture and the riot
Of leaping pulse and nerve that shot with pain,
Somewhere aloof and poised in spectral quiet
His soul was thinking on. The dizzied brain
Scarce seemed her organ: link by link the chain
That bound him to the flesh was loosening fast
And the new life breathed in unmoved and vast.

22

“It was like this,” he thought⁠—“like this, or worse,
For him that I found bleeding in the wood⁠ ⁠…
Blessings upon him⁠ ⁠… there I learned the curse
That rests on Dymer’s name, and truth was good.
He has forgotten now the fire and blood,
He has forgotten that there was a man
Called Dymer. He knows not himself nor Bran.

23

“How long have I been moved at heart in vain
About this Dymer, thinking this was I⁠ ⁠…
Why did I follow close his joy and pain
More than another man’s? For he will die,
The little cloud will vanish and the sky
Reign as before. The stars remain and earth
And Man, as in the years before my birth.

24

“There was a Dymer once who worked and played
About the City; I sloughed him off and ran.
There was a Dymer in the forest glade
Ranting alone, skulking the fates of man.
I cast him also, and a third began
And he too died. But I am none of those.
Is there another still to die⁠ ⁠… Who knows?”

25

Then in his pain, half wondering what he did,
He made to struggle towards that belfried place.
And groaning down the sodden bank he slid,
And groaning in the lane he left his trace
Of bloodied mire: then halted with his face
Upwards, towards the gateway, breathing hard
—An old lych-gate before a burial-yard.

26

He looked within. Between the huddling crosses,
Over the slanted tombs and sunken slate
Spread the deep quiet grass and humble mosses,
A green and growing darkness, drenched of late,
Smelling of earth and damp. He reached the gate
With failing hand. “I will rest here,” he said,
“And the long grass will cool my burning head.”

Canto IX

1

Even as he heard the wicket clash behind
Came a great wind beneath that seemed to tear
The solid graves apart; and deaf and blind
Whirled him upright, like smoke, through towering air
Whose levels were as steps of a sky stair.
The parching cold roughened his throat with thirst
And pricked him at the heart. This was the first.

2

And as he soared into the next degree,
Suddenly all round him he could hear
Sad strings that fretted inconsolably
And ominous horns that blew both far and near.
There broke his human heart, and his last tear
Froze scalding on his chin. But while he heard
He shot like a sped dart into the third.

3

And its first stroke of silence could destroy
The spring of tears forever and compress
From off his lips the curved bow of the boy
Forever. The sidereal loneliness
Received him, where no journeying leaves the less
Still to be journeyed through: but everywhere,
Fast though you fly, the centre still is there.

4

And here the well-worn fabric of our life
Fell from him. Hope and purpose were cut short,
—Even the blind trust that reaches in mid-strife
Towards some heart of things. Here blew the mort
For the world spirit herself. The last support
Was fallen away⁠—Himself, one spark of soul,
Swam in unbroken void. He was the whole,

5

And wailing: “Why hast Thou forsaken me?
Was there no world at all, but only I
Dreaming of gods and men?” Then suddenly
He felt the wind no more: he seemed to fly
Faster than light but free, and scaled the sky
In his own strength⁠—as if a falling stone
Should wake to find the world’s will was its own.

6

And on the instant, straight before his eyes
He looked and saw a sentry shape that stood
Leaning upon its spear, with hurrying skies
Behind it and a moonset red as blood.
Upon its head were helmet and mailed hood,
And shield upon its arm and sword at thigh,
All black and pointed sharp against the sky.

7

Then came the clink of metal, the dry sound
Of steel on rock and challenge: “Who comes here?”
And as he heard it, Dymer at one bound
Stood in the stranger’s shadow, with the spear
Between them. And his human face came near
That larger face. “What watch is this you keep,”
Said Dymer, “on edge of such a deep?”

8

And answer came, “I watch both night and day
This frontier⁠ ⁠… there are beasts of the upper air
As beasts of the deep sea⁠ ⁠… one walks this way
Night after night, far scouring from his lair,
Chewing the cud of lusts which are despair
And fill not, while his mouth gapes dry for bliss
That never was.”⁠—“What kind of beast is this?”

9

“A kind of things escaped that have no home,
Hunters of men. They love the spring uncurled,
The will worn down, the wearied hour. They come
At night-time when the mask is off the world
And the soul’s gate ill-locked and the flag furled
—Then, softly, a pale swarm, and in disguise,
Flit past the drowsy watchman, small as flies.”

10

—“I’ll see this aerish beast whereof you speak.
I’ll share the watch with you.”⁠—“Nay, little One,
Begone. You are of earth. The flesh is weak⁠ ⁠…”
—“What is the flesh to me? My course is run,

All but some deed still waiting to be done,
Some moment I may rise on, as the boat
Lifts with the lifting tide and steals afloat.

11

“You are a spirit, and it is well with you,
But I am come out of great folly and shame,
The sack of cities, wrongs I must undo⁠ ⁠…
But tell me of the beast, and whence it came;
Who were its sire and dam? What is its name?”
—“It is my kin. All monsters are the brood
Of heaven and earth, and mixed with holy blood.”

12

—“How can this be?”⁠—“My son, sit here awhile.
There is a lady in that primal place
Where I was born, who with her ancient smile
Made glad the sons of heaven. She loved to chase
The springtime round the world. To all your race
She was a sudden quivering in the wood
Or a new thought springing in solitude.

13

“Till, in prodigious hour, one swollen with youth,
Blind from new-broken prison, knowing not
Himself nor her, nor how to mate with truth,
Lay with her in a strange and secret spot,
Mortal with her immortal, and begot
This walker-in-the-night.”⁠—“But did you know
This mortal’s name?”⁠—“Why⁠ ⁠… it was long ago.

14

“And yet, I think, I near the name in mind;
It was some famished boy whom tampering men
Had crippled in their chains and made him blind
Till their weak hour discovered them: and then
He broke that prison. Softly!⁠—it comes again,
I have it. It was Dymer, little One,
Dymer’s the name. This spectre is his son.”

15

Then, after silence, came an answering shout
From Dymer, glad and full: “Break off! Dismiss!
Your watch is ended and your lamp is out.
Unarm, unarm. Return into your bliss.
You are relieved, Sir. I must deal with this
As in my right. For either I must slay
This beast or else be slain before the day.”

16

“So mortal and so brave?” that other said,
Smiling, and turned and looked in Dymer’s eyes,
Scanning him over twice from heel to head
—Like an old sergeant’s glance, grown battle-wise
To know the points of men. At last, “Arise,”
He said, “and wear my arms. I can withhold
Nothing; for such an hour has been foretold.”

17

Thereat, with lips as cold as the sea-surge,
He kissed the youth, and bending on one knee
Put all his armour off and let emerge
Angelic shoulders marbled gloriously
And feet like frozen speed and, plain to see,
On his wide breast dark wounds and ancient scars,
The battle honours of celestial wars.

18

Then like a squire or brother born he dressed
The young man in those plates, that dripped with cold
Upon the inside, trickling over breast
And shoulder: but without, the figured gold
Gave to the tinkling ice its jagged hold,
And the icy spear froze fast to Dymer’s hand.
But where the other had stood he took his stand.

19

And searched the cloudy landscape. He could see
Dim shapes like hills appearing, but the moon
He sunk behind their backs. “When will it be?”
Said Dymer: and the other, “Soon now, soon.
For either he comes past us at night’s noon
Or else between the night and the full day,
And down there, on your left, will be his way.”

20

—“Swear that you will not come between us two
Nor help me by a hair’s weight if I bow.”
—“If you are he, if prophecies speak true,
Not heaven and all the gods can help you now.
This much I have been told, but know not how
The fight will end. Who knows? I cannot tell.”
“Sir, be content,” said Dymer. “I know well.”

21

Thus Dymer stood to arms, with eyes that ranged
Through aching darkness: stared upon it, so
That all things, as he looked upon them, changed
And were not as at first. But grave and slow
The larger shade went sauntering to and fro,
Humming at first the snatches of some tune
That soldiers sing, but falling silent soon.

22

Then came steps of dawn. And though they heard
No milking cry in the fields, and no cock crew,
And out of empty air no twittering bird
Sounded from neighbouring hedges, yet they knew.
Eastward the hollow blackness paled to blue,
Then blue to white: and in the West the rare,
Surviving stars blinked feebler in cold air.

23

For beneath Dymer’s feet the sad half-light
Discovering the new landscape oddly came,
And forms grown half familiar in the night
Looked strange again: no distance seemed the same.
And now he could see clear and call by name
Valleys and hills and woods. The phantoms all
Took shape, and made a world, at morning’s call.

24

It was a ruinous land. The ragged stumps
Of broken trees rose out of endless clay
Naked of flower and grass: the slobbered humps
Dividing the dead pools. Against the grey
A shattered village gaped. But now the day
Was very near them and the night was past,
And Dymer understood and spoke at last.

25

“Now I have wooed and won you, bridal earth,
Beautiful world that lives, desire of men.
All that the spirit intended at my birth
This day shall be born into deed⁠ ⁠… and then
The hard day’s labour comes no more again
Forever. The pain dies. The longings cease.
The ship glides under the green arch of peace.

26

“Now drink me as the sun drinks up the mist.
This is the hour to cease in, at full flood,
That asks no gift form following years⁠—but, hist!
Look yonder! At the corner of that wood⁠—
Look! Look there where he comes! It shocks the blood,
The first sight, eh? Now, sentinel, stand clear
And save yourself. For God’s sake come not near.”

27

His full-grown spirit had moved without command
Or spur of the will. Before he knew, he found
That he was leaping forward spear in hand
To where that ashen brute wheeled slowly round
Nosing, and set its ears towards the sounds,
The pale and heavy brute, rough-ridged behind,
And full of eyes, clinking in scaly rind.

28

And now ten paces parted them: and here
He halted. He thrust forward his left foot,
Poising his straightened arms, and launched the spear,
And gloriously it sang. But now the brute
Lurched forward: and he saw the weapon shoot
Beyond it and fall quivering on the field.
Dymer drew out his sword and raised the shield.

29

What now my friends? You get no more from me
Of Dymer. He goes from us. What he felt
Or saw from henceforth no man knows but he
Who has himself gone through the jungle belt
Of dying, into peace. That angel knelt
Far off and watched them close but could not see
Their battle. All was ended suddenly.

30

A leap⁠—a cry⁠—flurry of steel and claw,
Then silence. As before, the morning light
And the same brute crouched yonder; and he saw
Under its feet, broken and bent and white,
The ruined limbs of Dymer, killed outright
All in a moment, all his story done.
… But that same moment came the rising sun;

31

And thirty miles to westward, the grey cloud
Flushed into answering pink. Long shadows streamed
From every hill, and the low-hanging shroud
Of mist along the valleys broke and steamed
Gold-flecked to heaven. Far off the armour gleamed
Like glass upon the dead man’s back. But now
The sentinel ran forward, hand to brow.

32

And staring. For between him and the sun
He saw that country clothed with dancing flowers
Where flower had never grown; and one by one
The splintered woods, as if from April showers,
Were softening into green. In the leafy towers
Rose the cool, sudden chattering on the tongues
Of happy birds with morning in their lungs.

33

The wave of flowers came breaking round his feet,
Crocus and bluebell, primrose, daffodil
Shivering with moisture: and the air grew sweet
Within his nostrils, changing heart and will,
Making him laugh. He looked, and Dymer still
Lay dead among the flowers and pinned beneath
The brute: but as he looked he held his breath;

34

For when he had gazed hard with steady eyes
Upon the brute, behold, no brute was there,
But someone towering large against the skies,
A wing’d and sworded shaped, whose foam-like hair
Lay white about its shoulders, and the air
That came from it was burning hot. The whole
Pure body brimmed with life, as a full bowl.

35

And from the distant corner of day’s birth
He heard clear trumpets blowing and bells ring,
A noise of great good coming into earth
And such a music as the dumb would sing
If Balder had led back the blameless spring
With victory, with the voice of charging spears,
And in white lands long-lost Saturnian years.

Colophon

Poetry
was published between 1919 and 1926 by
C. S. Lewis.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Matt Chan,
and is based on a transcription produced in 1999 by
An Anonymous Volunteer, Matt Chan, and David Widger
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from
various sources.

The cover page is adapted from
Lights of Other Days,
a painting completed in 1906 by
John F. Peto.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

This edition was released on
March 26, 2026, 6:06 p.m.
and is based on
revision 05f7c08.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
July 27, 2022, 8:20 p.m.
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