The Tower Read online

  These stones remain their monument and mine.

  V

  THE ROAD AT MY DOOR

  An affable Irregular,

  A heavily built Falstaffan man,

  Comes cracking jokes of civil war

  As though to die by gunshot were

  The finest play under the sun.

  A brown Lieutenant and his men,

  Half dressed in national uniform,

  Stand at my door, and I complain

  Of the foul weather, hail and rain,

  A pear tree broken by the storm.

  I count those feathered balls of soot

  The moor-hen guides upon the stream,

  To silence the envy in my thought;

  And turn towards my chamber, caught

  In the cold snows of a dream.

  VI

  THE STARE’S NEST BY MY WINDOW

  The bees build in the crevices

  Of loosening masonry, and there

  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

  My wall is loosening; honey-bees

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We are closed in, and the key is turned

  On our uncertainty; somewhere

  A man is killed, or a house burned,

  Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  A barricade of stone or of wood;

  Some fourteen days of civil war;

  Last night they trundled down the road

  That dead young soldier in his blood:

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  We had fed the heart on fantasies,

  The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,

  More substance in our enmities

  Than in our love; oh, honey-bees

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  VII

  I SEE PHANTOMS OF HATRED AND OF THE HEART’S FULLNESS AND OF THE COMING EMPTINESS

  I climb to the tower top and lean upon broken stone,

  A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,

  Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon

  That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,

  A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind

  And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.

  Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;

  Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

  ‘Vengeance upon the murderers,’ the cry goes up,

  ‘Vengeance for Jacques Molay.’ In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,

  The rage driven, rage tormented, and rage hungry troop,

  Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,

  Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide

  For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray

  Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried

  For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

  Their legs long delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,

  Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs,

  The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,

  Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,

  Have closed the ladies’ eyes, their minds are but a pool

  Where even longing drowns under its own excess;

  Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full

  Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

  The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,

  The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,

  Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,

  Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place

  To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,

  Nor hate of what’s to come, nor pity for what’s gone,

  Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye’s complacency,

  The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

  I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair

  Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth

  In something that all others understand or share;

  But oh, ambitious heart had such a proof drawn forth

  A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,

  It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,

  The half read wisdom of daemonic images,

  Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

  1923

  Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

  I

  Many ingenious lovely things are gone

  That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,

  Protected from the circle of the moon

  That pitches common things about. There stood

  Amid the ornamental bronze and stone

  An ancient image made of olive wood –

  And gone are Phidias’ famous ivories

  And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

  We too had many pretty toys when young;

  A law indifferent to blame or praise,

  To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong

  Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;

  Public opinion ripening for so long

  We thought it would outlive all future days.

  O what fine thought we had because we thought

  That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

  All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,

  And a great army but a showy thing;

  What matter that no cannon had been turned

  Into a ploughshare; parliament and king

  Thought that unless a little powder burned

  The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting

  And yet it lack all glory; and perchance

  The guardsmen’s drowsy chargers would not prance.

  Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

  Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery

  Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

  To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

  The night can sweat with terror as before

  We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

  And planned to bring the world under a rule,

  Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

  He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned

  Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant

  From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,

  Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent

  On master work of intellect or hand,

  No honour leave its mighty monument,

  Has but one comfort left: all triumph would

  But break upon his ghostly solitude.

  But is there any comfort to be found?

  Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

  What more is there to say? That country round

  None dared admit, if such a thought were his,

  Incendiary or bigot could be found

  To burn that stump on the Acropolis,

  Or break in bits the famous ivories

  Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees?

  II

  When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound

  A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,

  It seemed that a dragon of air

  Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round

  Or hurried them off on its own furious path;

  So the platonic year

  Whirls out new right and wrong,

  Whirls in the old instead;

  All men are dancers and their tread

  Goes to the barbarous clangour of gong.

  III

  Some moralist or mythological poet

  Compares the solitary soul to a swan;

  I am satisfied with that,

  Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it

  Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,

  An im
age of its state;

  The wings half spread for flight,

  The breast thrust out in pride

  Whether to play, or to ride

  Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

  A man in his own secret meditation

  Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made

  In art or politics;

  Some platonist affirms that in the station

  Where we should cast off body and trade

  The ancient habit sticks,

  And that if our works could

  But vanish with our breath

  That were a lucky death,

  For triumph can but mar our solitude.

  The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:

  That image can bring wildness, bring a rage

  To end all things, to end

  What my laborious life imagined, even

  The half imagined, the half written page;

  O but we dreamed to mend

  Whatever mischief seemed

  To afflict mankind, but now

  That winds of winter blow

  Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

  IV

  We, who seven years ago

  Talked of honour and of truth,

  Shriek with pleasure if we show

  The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

  V

  Come let us mock at the great

  That had such burdens on the mind

  And toiled so hard and late

  To leave some monument behind,

  Nor thought of the levelling wind.

  Come let us mock at the wise;

  With all those calendars whereon

  They fixed old aching eyes,

  They never saw how seasons run,

  And now but gape at the sun.

  Come let us mock at the good

  That fancied goodness might be gay,

  And sick of solitude

  Might proclaim a holiday:

  Wind shrieked – and where are they?

  Mock mockers after that

  That would not lift a hand maybe

  To help good, wise or great

  To bar that foul storm out, for we

  Traffic in mockery.

  VI

  Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;

  Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded

  On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,

  But wearied running round and round in their courses

  All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:

  Herodias’ daughters have returned again

  A sudden blast of dusty wind and after

  Thunder of feet, tumult of images,

  Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;

  And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter

  All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,

  According to the wind, for all are blind.

  But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon

  There lurches past, his great eyes without thought

  Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,

  That insolent fiend Robert Artisson

  To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought

  Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

  1919

  The Wheel

  Through winter-time we call on spring,

  And through the spring on summer call,

  And when abounding hedges ring

  Declare that winter’s best of all;

  And after that there’s nothing good

  Because the spring-time has not come –

  Nor know that what disturbs our blood

  Is but its longing for the tomb.

  Youth and Age

  Much did I rage when young,

  Being by the world oppressed,

  But now with flattering tongue

  It speeds the parting guest.

  1924

  The New Faces

  If you, that have grown old, were the first dead,

  Neither catalpa tree nor scented lime

  Should hear my living feet, nor would I tread

  Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of time.

  Let the new faces play what tricks they will

  In the old rooms; night can outbalance day,

  Our shadows rove the garden gravel still,

  The living seem more shadowy than they.

  A Prayer for my Son

  Bid a strong ghost stand at the head

  That my Michael may sleep sound,

  Nor cry, nor turn in the bed

  Till his morning meal come round;

  And may departing twilight keep

  All dread afar till morning’s back,

  That his mother may not lack

  Her fill of sleep.

  Bid the ghost have sword in fist:

  Some there are, for I avow

  Such devilish things exist,

  Who have planned his murder for they know

  Of some most haughty deed or thought

  That waits upon his future days,

  And would through hatred of the bays

  Bring that to nought.

  Though You can fashion everything

  From nothing every day, and teach

  The morning stars to sing,

  You have lacked articulate speech

  To tell Your simplest want, and known,

  Wailing upon a woman’s knee,

  All of that worst ignominy

  Of flesh and bone;

  And when through all the town there ran

  The servants of Your enemy,

  A woman and a man,

  Unless the Holy Writings lie,

  Hurried through the smooth and rough

  And through the fertile and waste,

  Protecting, till the danger past,

  With human love.

  Two Songs from a Play

  I

  I saw a staring virgin stand

  Where holy Dionysus died,

  And tear the heart out of his side,

  And lay the heart upon her hand

  And bear that beating heart away;

  And then did all the Muses sing

  Of Magnus Annus at the spring,

  As though God’s death were but a play.

  Another Troy must rise and set,

  Another lineage feed the crow,

  Another Argo’s painted prow

  Drive to a flashier bauble yet.

  The Roman Empire stood appalled:

  It dropped the reins of peace and war

  When that fierce virgin and her Star

  Out of the fabulous darkness called.

  II

  In pity for man’s darkening thought

  He walked that room and issued thence

  In Galilean turbulence;

  The Babylonian Starlight brought

  A fabulous, formless darkness in;

  Odour of blood when Christ was slain

  Made Plato’s tolerance in vain

  And vain the Doric discipline.

  Wisdom

  The true faith discovered was

  When painted panel, statuary,

  Glass-mosaic, window-glass,

  Straightened all that went awry

  When some peasant gospeller

  Imagined Him upon the floor

  Of a working-carpenter.

  Miracle had its playtime where

  In damask clothed and on a seat,

  Chryselephantine, cedar boarded,

  His majestic Mother sat

  Stitching at a purple hoarded,

  That He might be nobly breeched,

  In starry towers of Babylon

  Noah’s freshet never reached.

  King Abundance got Him on

  Innocence; and Wisdom He.

  That cognomen sounded best

  Considering what wild infancy

  Drove horror from His Mother’s breast.

  Leda and the Swan
r />   A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

  Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

  By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

  He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

  How can those terrified vague fingers push

  The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

  And how can body, laid in that white rush

  But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

  A shudder in the loins engenders there

  The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

  And Agamemnon dead.

  Being so caught up,

  So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

  Did she put on his knowledge with his power

  Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

  1928

  On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmond Dulac

  Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,

  Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.

  My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.

  I knew that horse play, knew it for a murderous thing.

  What wholesome sun has ripened is wholesome food to eat

  And that alone; yet I, being driven half insane

  Because of some green wing, gathered old mummy wheat

  In the mad abstract dark and ground it grain by grain

  And after baked it slowly in an oven; but now

  I bring full flavoured wine out of a barrel found

  Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew

  When Alexander’s empire past, they slept so sound.

  Stretch out your limbs and sleep a long Saturnian sleep;

  I have loved you better than my soul for all my words,

  And there is none so fit to keep a watch and keep

  Unwearied eyes upon those horrible green birds.

  Among School Children

  I

  I walk through the long schoolroom questioning,

  A kind old nun in a white hood replies;

  The children learn to cipher and to sing,

  To study reading-books and history,

  To cut and sew, be neat in everything

  In the best modern way – the children’s eyes

  In momentary wonder stare upon

  A sixty year old smiling public man.