The Tower Read online

  II

  I dream of a Ledæan body, bent

  Above a sinking fire, a tale that she

  Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event

  That changed some childish day to tragedy –

  Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent

  Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,

  Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,

  Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

  III

  And thinking of that fit of grief or rage

  I look upon one child or t’other there

  And wonder if she stood so at that age –

  For even daughters of the swan can share

  Something of every paddler’s heritage –

  And had that colour upon cheek or hair

  And thereupon my heart is driven wild:

  She stands before me as a living child.

  IV

  Her present image floats in to the mind –

  Did quattrocento finger fashion it

  Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind

  And took a mass of shadows for its meat?

  And I though never of Ledæan kind

  Had pretty plumage once – enough of that,

  Better to smile on all that smile, and show

  There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

  V

  What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap

  Honey of generation had betrayed,

  And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape

  As recollection or the drug decide,

  Would think her son, did she but see that shape

  With sixty or more winters on its head,

  A compensation for the pang of his birth,

  Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

  VI

  Plato thought nature but a spume that plays

  Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;

  Solider Aristotle played the taws

  Upon the bottom of a king of kings;

  World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras

  Fingered upon a fiddle stick or strings

  What a star sang and careless Muses heard:

  Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

  VII

  Both nuns and mothers worship images,

  But those the candles light are not as those

  That animate a mother’s reveries,

  But keep a marble or a bronze repose.

  And yet they too break hearts – O Presences

  That passion, piety or affection knows,

  And that all heavenly glory symbolise –

  O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

  VIII

  Labour is blossoming or dancing where

  The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

  Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

  Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

  O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

  Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

  O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

  How can we know the dancer from the dance?

  Colonus’ Praise

  (From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’)

  CHORUS

  Come praise Colonus’ horses and come praise

  The wine dark of the wood’s intricacies,

  The nightingale that deafens daylight there,

  If daylight ever visit where,

  Unvisited by tempest or by sun,

  Immortal ladies tread the ground

  Dizzy with harmonious sound,

  Semele’s lad a gay companion.

  And yonder in the gymnasts’ garden thrives

  The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives

  Athenian intellect its mastery,

  Even the grey-leaved olive tree

  Miracle-bred out of the living stone;

  Nor accident of peace nor war

  Shall wither that old marvel, for

  The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.

  Who comes into this country, and has come

  Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,

  Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter

  And beauty-drunken by the water

  Glittering among grey-leaved olive trees,

  Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;

  Who finds abounding Cephisus

  Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.

  Because this country has a pious mind

  And so remembers that when all mankind

  But trod the road, or paddled by the shore,

  Poseidon gave it bit and oar,

  Every Colonus lad or lass discourses

  Of that oar and of that bit;

  Summer and winter, day and night,

  Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.

  The Hero, the Girl, and the Fool

  THE GIRL

  I race at my own image in the glass,

  That’s so unlike myself that when you praise it

  It is as though you praised another, or even

  Mocked me with praise of my mere opposite;

  And when I wake towards morn I dread myself

  For the heart cries that what deception wins

  Cruelty must keep; therefore be warned and go

  If you have seen that image and not the woman.

  THE HERO

  I have raged at my own strength because you have loved it.

  THE GIRL

  If you are no more strength than I am beauty

  I had better find a convent and turn nun;

  A nun at least has all men’s reverence

  And needs no cruelty.

  THE HERO

  I have heard one say

  That men have reverence for their holiness

  And not themselves.

  THE GIRL

  Say on and say

  That only God has loved us for ourselves,

  But what care I that long for a man’s love?

  THE FOOL BY THE ROADSIDE

  When my days that have

  From cradle run to grave

  From grave to cradle run instead;

  When thoughts that a fool

  Has wound upon a spool

  Are but loose thread, are but loose thread.

  When cradle and spool are past

  And I mere shade at last

  Coagulate of stuff

  Transparent like the wind,

  I think that I may find

  A faithful love, a faithful love.

  Owen Ahern and his Dancers

  I

  A strange thing surely that my heart when love had come unsought

  Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade,

  Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out.

  It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.

  The south wind brought it longing, and the east wind despair,

  The west wind made it pitiful, and the north wind afraid.

  It feared to give its love a hurt with all the tempest there;

  It feared the hurt that she could give and therefore it went mad.

  I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind,

  I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer’s had,

  But oh my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind;

  I ran, I ran, from my love’s side because my Hear went mad.

  II

  The Heart behind its rib laughed out, ‘You have called me mad,’ it said.

  ‘Because I made you turn away and run from that young child;

  How could she mate with fifty years that was so wildly bred?

  Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.’

  ‘You but imagine lies all day, O murderer,’ I replied.

  ‘And all those lies have but one end poor wretches to betray;

  I did not find in any cage the woman at my side.

 
O but her heart would break to learn my thoughts are far away.’

  ‘Speak all your mind,’ my Heart sang out, ‘speak all your mind; who cares,

  Now that your tongue cannot persuade the child till she mistake

  Her childish gratitude for love and match your fifty years.

  O let her choose a young man now and all for his wild sake.’

  A Man Young and Old

  FIRST LOVE

  Though nurtured like the sailing moon

  In beauty’s murderous brood,

  She walked awhile and blushed awhile

  And on my pathway stood

  Until I thought her body bore

  A heart of flesh and blood.

  But since I laid a hand thereon

  And found a heart of stone

  I have attempted many things

  And not a thing is done,

  For every hand is lunatic

  That travels on the moon.

  She smiled and that transfigured me

  And left me but a lout,

  Maundering here, and maundering there,

  Emptier of thought

  Than heavenly circuit of its stars

  When the moon sails out.

  HUMAN DIGNITY

  Like the moon her kindness is,

  If kindness I may call

  What has no comprehension in’t,

  But is the same for all

  As though my sorrow were a scene

  Upon a painted wall.

  So like a bit of stone I lie

  Under a broken tree.

  I could recover if I shrieked

  My heart’s agony

  To passing bird, but I am dumb

  From human dignity.

  THE MERMAID

  A mermaid found a swimming lad,

  Picked him for her own,

  Pressed her body to his body,

  Laughed; and plunging down

  Forgot in cruel happiness

  That even lovers drown.

  THE DEATH OF THE HARE

  I have pointed out the yelling pack,

  The hare leap to the wood,

  And when I pass a compliment

  Rejoice as lover should

  At the drooping of an eye

  At the mantling of the blood.

  Then suddenly my heart is wrung

  By her distracted air

  And I remember wildness lost

  And after, swept from there,

  Am set down standing in the wood

  At the death of the hare.

  THE EMPTY CUP

  A crazy man that found a cup,

  When all but dead of thirst,

  Hardly dared to wet his mouth

  Imagining, moon accursed,

  That another mouthful

  And his beating heart would burst.

  October last I found it too

  But found it dry as bone,

  And for that reason am I crazed

  And my sleep is gone.

  HIS MEMORIES

  We should be hidden from their eyes,

  Being but holy shows

  And bodies broken like a thorn

  Whereon the bleak north blows,

  To think of buried Hector

  And that none living knows.

  The women take so little stock

  In what I do or say

  They’d sooner leave their cosseting

  To hear a jackass bray;

  My arms are like the twisted thorn

  And yet there beauty lay;

  The first of all the tribe lay there

  And did such pleasure take –

  She who had brought great Hector down

  And put all Troy to wreck –

  That she cried into this ear

  Strike me if I shriek.

  THE FRIENDS OF HIS YOUTH

  Laughter not time destroyed my voice

  And put that crack in it,

  And when the moon’s pot-bellied

  I get a laughing fit,

  For that old Madge comes down the lane

  A stone upon her breast,

  And a cloak wrapped about the stone,

  And she can get no rest

  With singing hush and hush-a-bye;

  She that has been wild

  And barren as a breaking wave

  Thinks that the stone’s a child.

  And Peter that had great affairs

  And was a pushing man

  Shrieks ‘I am King of the Peacocks’,

  And perches on a stone;

  And then I laugh till tears run down

  And the heart thumps at my side,

  Remembering that her shriek was love

  And that he shrieks from pride.

  SUMMER AND SPRING

  We sat under an old thorn-tree

  And talked away the night,

  Told all that had been said or done

  Since first we saw the light,

  And when we talked of growing up

  Knew that we’d halved a soul

  And fell the one in t’other’s arms

  That we might make it whole;

  Then Peter had a murdering look

  For it seemed that he and she

  Had spoken of their childish days

  Under that very tree.

  O what a bursting out there was,

  And what a blossoming,

  When we had all the summer time

  And she had all the spring.

  THE SECRETS OF THE OLD

  I have old women’s secrets now

  That had those of the young;

  Madge tells me what I dared not think

  When my blood was strong,

  And what had drowned a lover once

  Sounds like an old song.

  Though Margery is stricken dumb

  If thrown in Madge’s way,

  We three make up a solitude;

  For none alive to-day

  Can know the stories that we know

  Or say the things we say:

  How such a man pleased women most

  Of all that are gone,

  How such a pair loved many years

  And such a pair but one,

  Stories of the bed of straw

  Or the bed of down.

  HIS WILDNESS

  O bid me mount and sail up there

  Amid the cloudy wrack,

  For Peg and Meg and Paris’ love

  That had so straight a back,

  Are gone away, and some that stay,

  Have changed their silk for sack.

  Were I but there and none to hear

  I’d have a peacock cry

  For that is natural to a man

  That lives in memory,

  Being all alone I’d nurse a stone

  And sing it lullaby.

  The Three Monuments

  They hold their public meetings where

  Our most renowned patriots stand,

  One among the birds of the air,

  A stumpier on either hand;

  And all the popular statesmen say

  That purity built up the state

  And after kept it from decay;

  Admonish us to cling to that

  And let all base ambition be,

  For intellect would make us proud

  And pride bring in impurity:

  The three old rascals laugh aloud.

  From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’

  I

  Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;

  Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;

  Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.

  II

  Even from that delight memory treasures so,

  Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,

  As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.

  III

  In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,

  The bride
is carried to the bridegroom’s chamber through torchlight and tumultuous song;

  I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.

  IV

  Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;

  Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;

  The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

  The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid

  Kusta ben Luka is my name, I write

  To Abd Al-Rabban; fellow roysterer once,

  Now the good Caliph’s learned Treasurer,

  And for no ear but his.

  Carry this letter

  Through the great gallery of the Treasure House

  Where banners of the Caliphs hang, night-coloured

  But brilliant as the night’s embroidery,

  And wait war’s music; pass the little gallery;

  Pass books of learning from Byzantium

  Written in gold upon a purple stain,

  And pause at last, I was about to say,

  At the great book of Sappho’s song; but no,

  For should you leave my letter there, a boy’s

  Love-lorn, indifferent hands might come upon it

  And let it fall unnoticed to the floor.

  Pause at the Treatise of Parmenides

  And hide it there, for Caliphs to world’s end

  Must keep that perfect, as they keep her song

  So great its fame.

  When fitting time has passed

  The parchment will disclose to some learned man

  A mystery that else had found no chronicler

  But the wild Bedouin. Though I approve

  Those wanderers that welcomed in their tents

  What great Harun Al-Rashid, occupied

  With Persian embassy or Grecian war,

  Must needs neglect; I cannot hide the truth

  That wandering in a desert, featureless