Chapter II (2)

Oh, apparition of me,
Ruddy flesh soon hueless,
Fade and show to my eyes
The lasting bare body;
Soul-sack fall away
And show what you hold!
Sing! Let me hear you sing.

A VOICE

[_Sings._]

Upon my lips, like a cloud
To burst on the peaks of light,
Sit cowled impossible things
To tie my hands at their prime and height.
Power, break through their shroud;
Pierce them so thoroughly,
Thoroughly enter me,
Know me for one dead;
Break the shadowy thread,
The cowering spirit’s bond
Writ by illusions blond!

Ah! Let the morning pale
Throb with a wilder pulse:
No delicate flame shall quail
With terror at your convulse.
Thin branches whip the white skies
To lips and spaces of song
That chant a mood to my eyes....
Ah! Sleep can be overlong.

MOSES

Voices thunder, voices of deeds not done:
Lo, on the air are scrawled in abysmal light
Old myths never known and yet already forgone,
And songs more lost, more secret than desert light:
Martyrdoms of uncreated things,
Virgin silences waiting a breaking voice—
As in a womb they cry, in a cage beat vain wings
Under life, over life: is their unbeing my choice?

Dull wine of torpor—the unsoldered spirit lies limp.
Ah! If she would run into a mould,
Some new idea unwalled
To human by-ways, an apocalyptic camp
Of utterest and ulterior dreaming,
Understood only in its gleaming,
To flash stark naked the whole girth of the world.

I am sick of priests and forms,
This rigid dry-boned refinement:
As ladies’ perfumes are
Obnoxious to stern natures,
This miasma of a rotting god
Is to me.
Who has made of the forest a park?
Who has changed the wolf to a dog?
And put the horse in harness?
And man’s mind in a groove?

I heard the one spirit cry in them,
“Break this metamorphosis,
Disenchant my lying body;
Only putrefaction is free,
And I, Freedom, am not.
Moses! Touch us, thou!”

There shall not be a void or calm,
But a fury fill the veins of time—
Whose limbs had begun to rot,
Who had flattered my stupid torpor
With an easy and mimic energy,
And drained my veins with a paltry marvel
More monstrous than battle;
For the soul ached and went out dead in pleasure.

Is not this song still sung in the streets of me?

A naked African
Walked in the sun
Singing—singing
Of his wild love.

I slew the tiger
With your young strength
(My tawny panther)
Rolled round my life.

Three sheep, your breasts
And my head between,
Grazing together
On a smooth slope.

Ah! Koelue!
Had you embalmed your beauty, so
It could not backward go
Or change in any way,
What were the use if on my eyes
The embalming spices were not laid
To keep us fixed,
Two amorous sculptures passioned endlessly?
What were the use if my sight grew
And its far branches were cloud-hung,
You small at the roots like grass;
While the new lips my spirit would kiss
Were not red lips of flesh,
But the huge kiss of power?
Where yesterday soft hair through my fingers fell
A shaggy mane would entwine;
And no slim form work fire to my thighs,
But human Life’s inarticulate mass
Throb the pulse of a thing
Whose mountain flanks awry
Beg my mastery—mine!
Ah! I will ride the dizzy beast of the world
My road—my way.

SCENE II.: _Evening before Thebes. The Pyramids are being built.
Swarms of Hebrews labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two Hebrews
are furtively talking._ KOELUE _passes by singing_.

KOELUE

The vague viols of evening
Call all the flower clans
To some abysmal swinging
And tumult of deep trance;
He may hear, flower of my singing,
And come hither winging.

OLD HEBREW

[_Gazing after her in a muffled frenzy._]

Hateful harlot! Boils cover your small cruel face. O, fine champion Moses: O, so good to us: O, grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer, Her father, born to us since you kissed her. Our champion, O so good to us!

YOUNG HEBREW

For shame! Our brothers’ twisted blood-smeared gums Tell we only have more room for wreck curtailed: For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy Perhaps; but they might mangle your gums Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now; And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril. Be still, old man; wait a little.

OLD HEBREW

Wait! All day some slow dark quadruped beats To pulp our springiness: All day some hoofed animal treads our veins, Leisurely—leisurely our energies flow out: All agonies created from the first day Have wandered hungry searching the world for us, Or they would perish like disused Behemoth. Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?

YOUNG HEBREW

Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,

Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me, He came by and bore me into the shade: O, what a furnace roaring in his blood Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own Raging through me like a strong cordial. He spoke! Since yesterday Am I not larger grown? I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul, Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight, And to their shop only heroes come; But all were cripples to this speed Constrained to the stables of flesh. I say there is a famine in ripe harvest When hungry giants come as guests: Come knead the hills and ocean into food, There is none for him. The streaming vigours of his blood erupting From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust Out of a madman’s piteous craving for A monstrous balked perfection.

OLD HEBREW

He is a prince, an animal Not of our kind; who perhaps has heard

Vague rumours of our world, to his mind An unpleasant miasma.

YOUNG HEBREW

Is not Miriam his sister, Jochabed his mother? In the womb he looked round and saw From furthermost stretches our wrong: From the palaces and schools Our pain has pierced dead generations Back to his blood’s thin source. As we lie chained by Egyptian men He lay in nets of their women, And now rejoices he has broken their meshes. O! His desires are fleets of treasure He has squandered in treacherous seas, Sailing mistrust to find frank ports; He fears our fear and tampers mildly For our assent to let him save us. When he walks amid our toil With some master-mason His tense brows, critical Of the loose enginery, Hint famed devices flat, his rod Scratching new schemes on the sand: But read hard the scrawled lines there— Limned turrets and darkness, chinks of light,

Half beasts snorting into the light, A phantasmagoria, wild escapade To our hearts’ clue; just a daring plan To the honest mason. What swathed meanings peer From his work-a-day council, washed to and from Your understanding till you doubt That a word was said— But a terror wakes and forces your eyes Into his covertly, to search his searching; Startled to life, starved hopes slink out Cowering, incredulous.

OLD HEBREW

[_To himself._] His youth is flattered at Moses’ kind speech to him.

[_To the_ YOUNG HEBREW.]

I am broken and grey, have seen much in my time, And all this gay grotesque of childish man Long passed; half blind, half deaf, I only grumble I am not blind or deaf enough for peace. I have seen splendid young fools cheat themselves Into a prophet’s frenzy; I have seen So many crazed shadows puffed away, And conscious cheats with such an ache for fame

They’d make a bonfire of themselves to be Mouthed in the squares, broad in the public eye: And whose backs break, whose lives are mauled, after It all falls flat? His tender airs chill me— As thoughts of sleep to a man tiptoed night-long Roped round his neck, for sleep means death to him. Oh, he is kind to us! Your safe teeth chatter when they hear a step: He left them yours because his cunning way Would brag the wrong against his humane act By Pharaoh; so gain more favour than he lost.

YOUNG HEBREW

Help him not then, and push your safety away: I for my part will be his backward eye, His hands when they are shut. Ah! Abinoah! Like a bad smell from the soul of Moses dipt In the mire of lust he hangs round him; And if his slit-like eyes could tear right out The pleasure Moses on his daughter had, She’d be as virgin as ere she came nestling Into that fierce unmanageable blood, Flying from her loathed father. O, that slave Has hammered from the anvil of her beauty

A steel to break his manacles: hard for us Moses has made him overseer. O, his slits Pry—pry.... For what?... To sell to Imra....

[ABINOAH _is seen approaching_.]

Sh! The thin-lipped abomination! Zig-zagging haschish tours in a fine style: It were delightful labour making bricks, Knowing they would kiss friendly with his head.

ABINOAH

[_Who has been taking haschish; and who has one obsession, hatred of
Jews._]

Dirt-draggled mongrels, circumcised slaves, You puddle with your lousy gibberish The holy air, Pharaoh’s own tributary: Filthy manure for Pharaoh’s flourishing, I’ll circumcise and make holy your tongues, And stop one outlet to your profanation.

[_To the_ OLD HEBREW.]

I’ve never seen one beg so for a blow; Too soft am I to resist such entreaty. [_Beats him._] Your howling holds the earnest energies You cheat from Pharaoh when you make his bricks.

AN AGED MINSTREL

[_Sings from a distance._]

Taut is the air and tied the trees,
The leaves lie as on a hand;
God’s unthinkable imagination
Invents new tortures for nature.

And when the air is soft and the leaves
Feel free and push and tremble,
Will they not remember and say
How wonderful to have lived?

[_The_ OLD HEBREW _is agitated and murmurs_.]

Messiah, Messiah.... That voice.... O, he has beaten my sight out.... I see Like a rain about a devouring fire....

[_The Minstrel sings._]

Ye who best God awhile, O hear: your wealth Is but His cunning to see to make death more hard, Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking; And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy although you die to sell.

OLD HEBREW

I am crazed with whips.... I hear a Messiah.

YOUNG HEBREW

The venerable man will question this.

ABINOAH

[_Overhearing._] I’ll beat you more, and he’ll question The scratchiness of your whining; or, may be, Thence may be born deep argument With reasons from philosophy, That this blow, taking longer, yet was but one, Or perhaps two; or that you felt this one— Arguing from the difference in your whine— Exactly, or not, like the other.

MINSTREL

You labour hard to give pain.

ABINOAH

[_Still beating._] My pain is ... not ... to labour so.

MINSTREL

What is this greybeard worth to you now, All his dried-up blood crumbled to dust?

[_Motions_ ABINOAH _to desist, but not in time to prevent the old man
fainting into the hands of the_ YOUNG HEBREW.]

ABINOAH

Harper, are you envious of the old fool? Go! Hug the rat who stole your last crumbs, And gnawed the hole in your life which made time wonder Who it was saved labour for him the next score of years. We allowed them life for their labour—they haggled. Food they must have, and (god of laughter!) even ease; But mud and lice and Jews are very busy Breeding plagues in ease.

[_The Minstrel pulls his beard and robe off._]

ABINOAH

Moses!

MOSES

You drunken rascal!

ABINOAH

A drunken rascal! Isis, hear the Prince! Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal.

MOSES

You may think it your duty to get drunk; But get yourself bronze claws before You would be impudent.

ABINOAH

When a man’s drunk he’ll kiss a horse or king, He’s so affectionate. Under your words There is strong wine to make me drunk; you think, The lines of all your face say, “Her father, Koelue’s father.”

MOSES

This is too droll and extraordinary. I dreamt I was a prince—a queer droll dream Where a certain slave of mine, a thing, a toad, Shifting his belly, showed a diamond Where he had lain; and a blind dumb messenger Bore syllabled messages soaked right through with glee: I paid the toad, the blind man; afterwards They spread a stench and snarling. O, droll dream!

I think you merely mean to flatter me, You subtle knave, that, more than prince, I’m _man_ And worth to listen to your bawdy breath.

ABINOAH

Yet my breath was worth your mixing with.

MOSES

A boy at college flattered so by a girl Will give her what she asks for.

ABINOAH

Osiris! Burning Osiris! Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair....

[_He looks inanely at_ MOSES, _saying to himself_.]

Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards: Isis, to let a Jew have her for nothing!

[_He sings under his breath._]

Night by night in a little house
A man and woman meet;
They look like each other,
They are sister and brother;
And night by night at that same hour
A king calls for his son in vain.

MOSES

[_To himself._] So, sister Miriam, it is known then. Slave, you die. [_Aloud._] O, you ambiguous stench, You’ll be more interesting as a mummy I have no doubt.

ABINOAH

I’m drunk, yes—drenched with the thought Of a certain thing. [_Aside._] I’ll sleep sounder to-night Than all the nights I’ve followed him about Worrying each slight clue, each monosyllable To give the word to Imra: the prince is near, And Moses’ eyes shall blink before next hour To a hundred javelins. I’ll tease him till they come. [_Aloud._] On Koelue’s tears I swam to you, in a mist Of her sighs I hung round you; As in some hallucination I’ve been walking A white waste world, we two only in it.

MOSES

Doubtless the instinct balked to bully the girl, Making large gapings in your haschish dreams,

Led you to me in whom she was thoroughly lost. Pah, you sicken me!

[_He is silent awhile, then turns away._]

ABINOAH

Prince Imra is Pharaoh’s choice now, and Koelue’s.

[MOSES _turns back menacingly_.]

MOSES

Silence, you beast!

[_He changes his tone to a winning softness._]

I hate these family quarrels: it is so Like fratricide. I am a rebel, well? Soft! You are not, and we are knit so close It would be shame for a son to be so honoured And the father still unknown: come, Koelue’s (so _my_) father, I’ll tell my plans—you’ll beg to be rebel then. Look round on the night— Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done; She has never seen, though dreamt perhaps of the sun, Yet only dawn divides; could a miracle

Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with light, No night or light would be, but a new thing: So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom, Egypt was in the way; I’ll strike it out With my ways curious and unusual. I have a trouble in my mind for largeness, Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours lack: Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew; Here are the springs, primeval elements, The roots’ hid secrecy, old source of race, Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct. I’d shape one impulse through the contraries Of vain ambitious men, selfish and callous, And frail life-drifters, reticent, delicate— Litheness thread bulk, a nation’s harmony: These are not lame nor bent awry, but placeless With the rust and stagnant. All that’s low I’ll charm, Barbaric love sweeten to tenderness, Cunning run into wisdom, craft turn to skill; Their meanness, threaded right and sensibly, Change to a prudence envied and not sneered; Their hugeness be a driving wedge to a thing

Ineffable and useable, as near Solidity as human life can be: So grandly fashion these rude elements Into some newer nature, a consciousness Like naked light seizing the all-eyed soul, Oppressing with its gorgeous tyranny Until they take it thus—or die.

[_While speaking, he places his hand on the unsuspecting Egyptian’s head
and gently, caressingly, pulls his hair back until his chin is above
his forehead, and holds him so till he is suffocated. In the darkness
ahead is seen the glimmer of javelins and spears: it is Prince Imra’s
cohorts come to arrest_ MOSES.]

THE END.

POEMS FROM CAMP AND TRENCH

And like the artist who creates
From dying things what never dies....
_Fragment._

DAUGHTERS OF WAR

Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs,
Their naked dances with man’s spirit naked
By the root side of the tree of life
(The under side of things
And shut from earth’s profoundest eyes).

I saw in prophetic gleams
These mighty daughters in their dances
Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse
To mix in their glittering dances:
I heard the mighty daughters’ giant sighs
In sleepless passion for the sons of valour
And envy of the days of flesh,
Barring their love with mortal boughs across—
The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life.
The old bark burnt with iron wars
They blow to a live flame
To char the young green days
And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure,
No softer lure than the savage ways of death.

We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun
To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth—
These maidens came—these strong everliving Amazons,
And in an easy might their wrists
Of night’s sway and noon’s sway the sceptres brake,
Clouding the wild, the soft lustres of our eyes.

Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights;
Driving the darkness into the flame of day
With the Amazonian wind of them
Over our corroding faces
That must be broken—broken for evermore,
So the soul can leap out
Into their huge embraces.
Though there are human faces
Best sculptures of Deity,
And sinews lusted after
By the Archangels tall,
Even these must leap to the love-heat of these maidens
From the flame of terrene days,
Leaving grey ashes to the wind—to the wind.

One (whose great lifted face,
Where wisdom’s strength and beauty’s strength
And the thewed strength of large beasts
Moved and merged, gloomed and lit)
Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men’s earth fell away;
Whose new hearing drank the sound
Where pictures, lutes, and mountains mixed
With the loosed spirit of a thought,
Essenced to language thus—

“My sisters force their males
From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee
And hankering of hearts.
Frail hands gleam up through the human quagmire, and lips of ash
Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings
Far-sunken and strange.
My sisters have their males
Clean of the dust of old days
That clings about those white hands
And yearns in those voices sad:
But these shall not see them,
Or think of them in any days or years;
They are my sisters’ lovers in other days and years.”

ON RECEIVING THE FIRST NEWS OF THE WAR

Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Has asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know;
No man knows why.

In all men’s hearts it is:
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face,
God’s blood is shed:
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.

O ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume;
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.

_Cape Town, 1914._

SPRING, 1916

Slow, rigid, is this masquerade
That passes as through a difficult air:
Heavily—heavily passes.
What has she fed on? Who her table laid
Through the three seasons? What forbidden fare
Ruined her as a mortal lass is?

I played with her two years ago,
Who might be now her own sister in stone;
So altered from her May mien,
When round the pink a necklace of warm snow
Laughed to her throat where my mouth’s touch had gone.
How is this, ruined Queen?

Who lured her vivid beauty so
To be that strained chill thing that moves
So ghastly midst her young brood
Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow?
Where are the strong men who made these their loves?
Spring! God pity your mood!

THE TROOP SHIP

Grotesque and queerly huddled
Contortionists to twist
The sleepy soul to a sleep,
We lie all sorts of ways
And cannot sleep.
The wet wind is so cold,
And the lurching men so careless,
That, should you drop to a doze,
Winds’ fumble or men’s feet
Are on your face.

MARCHING

(AS SEEN FROM THE LEFT FILE).

My eyes catch ruddy necks
Sturdily pressed back—
All a red-brick moving glint.
Like flaming pendulums, hands
Swing across the khaki—
Mustard-coloured khaki—
To the automatic feet.

We husband the ancient glory
In these bared necks and hands.
Not broke is the forge of Mars;
But a subtler brain beats iron
To shoe the hoofs of death
(Who paws dynamic air now).
Blind fingers loose an iron cloud
To rain immortal darkness
On strong eyes.

BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES

The darkness crumbles away—
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand—
A queer sardonic rat—
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies
(And God knows what antipathies).
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German—
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

KILLED IN ACTION

Your “Youth”[2] has fallen from its shelf,
And you have fallen, you yourself.
They knocked a soldier on the head,
I mourn the poet who fell dead.
And yet I think it was by chance,
By oversight you died in France.
You were so poor an outward man,
So small against your spirit’s span,
That Nature, being tired awhile,
Saw but your outward human pile;
And Nature, who would never let
A sun with light still in it set,
Before you even reached your sky,
In inadvertence let you die.

Footnote 2:

“Youth,” a volume of poems by I. Rosenberg.

RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS

Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl’s dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES

They left their Babylon bare
Of all its tall men,
Of all its proud horses;
They made for Lebanon.

And shadowy sowers went
Before their spears to sow
The fruit whose taste is ash,
For Judah’s soul to know.

They who bowed to the Bull god,
Whose wings roofed Babylon,
In endless hosts darkened
The bright-heavened Lebanon.

They washed their grime in pools
Where laughing girls forgot
The wiles they used for Solomon.
Sweet laughter, remembered not!

Sweet laughter charred in the flame
That clutched the cloud and earth,
While Solomon’s towers crashed between
To a gird of Babylon’s mirth.

THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE

Fierce wrath of Solomon,
Where sleepest thou? O see,
The fabric which thou won
Earth and ocean to give thee—
O look at the red skies.

Or hath the sun plunged down?
What is this molten gold—
These thundering fires blown
Through heaven, where the smoke rolled?
Again the great king dies.

His dreams go out in smoke.
His days he let not pass
And sculptured here are broke,
Are charred as the burnt grass,
Gone as his mouth’s last sighs.

HOME-THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE

Wan, fragile faces of joy,
Pitiful mouths that strive
To light with smiles the place
We dream we walk alive,

To you I stretch my hands,
Hands shut in pitiless trance
In a land of ruin and woe,
The desolate land of France.

Dear faces startled and shaken,
Out of wild dust and sounds
You yearn to me, lure and sadden
My heart with futile bounds.

THE IMMORTALS

I killed them, but they would not die.
Yea, all the day and all the night
For them I could not rest nor sleep,
Nor guard from them nor hide in flight!

Then in my agony I turned
And made my hands red in their gore.
In vain—for faster than I slew
They rose more cruel than before.

I killed and killed with slaughter mad;
I killed till all my strength was gone;
And still they rose to torture me,
For Devils only die for fun.

I used to think the Devil hid
In women’s smiles and wine’s carouse;
I called him Satan, Balzebub;
But now I call him dirty louse.

LOUSE HUNTING

Nudes, stark and glistening,
Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces
And raging limbs
Whirl over the floor one fire;
For a shirt verminously busy
Yon soldier tore from his throat
With oaths
Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice,
And soon the shirt was aflare
Over the candle he’d lit while we lay.

Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood.
Soon like a demons’ pantomime
This plunge was raging.
See the silhouettes agape,
See the gibbering shadows
Mixed with the baffled arms on the wall.
See Gargantuan hooked fingers
Pluck in supreme flesh
To smutch supreme littleness.
See the merry limbs in that Highland fling
Because some wizard vermin willed
To charm from the quiet this revel
When our ears were half lulled
By the dark music
Blown from Sleep’s trumpet.

GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE

I love you, Titan lover,
My own storm-days’ Titan.
Greater than the son of Zeus,
I know whom I would choose.

Titan—my splendid rebel—
The old Prometheus
Wanes like a ghost before your power:
His pangs were joys to yours.

Pallid days, arid and wan,
Tied your soul fast:
Babel-cities’ smoky tops
Pressed upon your growth

Weary gyves. What were you
But a word in the brain’s ways,
Or the sleep of Circe’s swine?
One gyve holds you yet.

It held you hiddenly on the Somme
Tied from my heart at home:
O must it loosen now? I wish
You were bound with the old, old gyves.

Love! You love me—your eyes
Have looked through death at mine.
You have tempted a grave too much.
I let you—I repine.

SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY

I love you, great new Titan!
Am I not you?
Napoleon and Cæsar
Out of you grew.

Out of unthinkable torture,
Eyes kissed by death,
Won back to the world again,
Lost and won in a breath,

Cruel men are made immortal.
Out of your pain born,
They have stolen the sun’s power
With their feet on your shoulders worn.

Let them shrink from your girth,
That has outgrown the pallid days
When you slept like Circe’s swine
Or a word in the brain’s ways.

THE JEW

Moses, from whose loins I sprung,
Lit by a lamp in his blood
Ten immutable rules, a moon
For mutable lampless men.

The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy,
With the same heaving blood,
Keep tide to the moon of Moses.
Then why do they sneer at me?

THE DYING SOLDIER

“Here are houses,” he moaned,
“I could reach, but my brain swims.”
Then they thundered and flashed,
And shook the earth to its rims.

“They are gunpits,” he gasped,
“Our men are at the guns.
Water!... Water!... Oh, water!
For one of England’s dying sons.”

“We cannot give you water,
Were all England in your breath.”
“Water!... Water!... Oh, water!”
He moaned and swooned to death.

DEAD MAN’S DUMP

The plunging limbers over the shattered track
Racketed with their rusty freight,
Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
To stay the flood of brutish men
Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched;
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman;
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,
All the time of their growth
Fretting for their decay:
Now she has them at last!
In the strength of their strength
Suspended—stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
Earth! Have they gone into you?
Somewhere they must have gone,
And flung on your hard back
Is their souls’ sack,
Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
Immortal seeming ever?
Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
A fear may choke in our veins
And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called “An end!”
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man’s brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer’s face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay
Their sinister faces lie,
The lid over each eye;
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead.
His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
And the choked soul stretched weak hands
To reach the living word the far wheels said;
The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
Swift for the end to break
Or the wheels to break,
Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight,
“Will they come? Will they ever come?”
Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
The quivering-bellied mules,
And the rushing wheels all mixed
With his tortured upturned sight.

So we crashed round the bend,
We heard his weak scream,
We heard his very last sound,
And our wheels grazed his dead face.

IN WAR

Fret the nonchalant noon
With your spleen
Or your gay brow,
For the motion of your spirit
Ever moves with these.

When day shall be too quiet,
Deaf to you
And your dumb smile,
Untuned air shall lap the stillness
In the old space for your voice—

The voice that once could mirror
Remote depths
Of moving being,
Stirred by responsive voices near,
Suddenly stilled for ever.

No ghost darkens the places
Dark to One;
But my eyes dream,
And my heart is heavy to think
How it was heavy once.

In the old days when death
Stalked the world
For the flower of men,
And the rose of beauty faded
And pined in the great gloom,

One day we dug a grave:
We were vexed
With the sun’s heat.
We scanned the hooded dead:
At noon we sat and talked.

How death had kissed their eyes
Three dread noons since,
How human art won
The dark soul to flicker
Till it was lost again:

And we whom chance kept whole—
But haggard,
Spent—were charged
To make a place for them who knew
No pain in any place.

The good priest came to pray;
Our ears half heard,
And half we thought
Of alien things, irrelevant;
And the heat and thirst were great.

The good priest read: “I heard....”
Dimly my brain
Held words and lost....
Sudden my blood ran cold....
God! God! It could not be.

He read my brother’s name;
I sank—
I clutched the priest.
They did not tell me it was he
Was killed three days ago.

What are the great sceptred dooms
To us, caught
In the wild wave?
We break ourselves on them,
My brother, our hearts and years.

THE DEAD HEROES

Flame out, you glorious skies,
Welcome our brave;
Kiss their exultant eyes;
Give what they gave.

Flash, mailed seraphim,
Your burning spears;
New days to outflame their dim
Heroic years.

Thrills their baptismal tread
The bright proud air;
The embattled plumes outspread
Burn upwards there.

Flame out, flame out, O Song!
Star ring to star;
Strong as our hurt is strong
Our children are.

Their blood is England’s heart;
By their dead hands
It is their noble part
That England stands.

England—Time gave them thee;
They gave back this
To win Eternity
And claim God’s kiss.

FRAGMENTS OF “THE UNICORN”