Chapter II: Paul

Paul the apostle, on the sacred hill
Of Mars at Athens, felt a hidden will
Working against his gospel. That was old
(It seemed), yet had the thrust of boyhood cold,
Yet tempered in wild fires, and sensing this
He prayed in silence. The Acropolis,
Making a final bid for beauty, took
The dying sun to her heart with the wild look
As of a woman yielding to her lover;
And he in flame confederate leaning over
With armfuls of clouded roses, blossom on blossom,
Rifled the sweets of evening, and for her bosom
Dismantling heaven’s high pavilion
With tumbled beauties wooed her thus and won.

This Paul from prayer rising saw, nor cared,
Watching a Cross in the East, if these had snared
The West with meshes trailing from the wrist
Of Venus, also an Evangelist.
“So little is the conquest of the flesh,
So like a spinner, weaving her small mesh
--And a boy tears it as he passes by--
Embroiders fruitlessly her tapestry
The Paphian woman, and the threads are thin
And ghostly as the new light enters in--
The tapestry that was the world and all
The curtain Jesus tears aside” says Paul:
“What is there worshipful here? These skies are fleeting,
This beauty made by hands of the sun is beating
Into the night that swallows her, and none
Is warm, when night has fallen, with the sun;
And the whole frame of the celestial
Firmament, though dusted with the stars, must fall
As being under death, and change in Hell,
When death is conquered, her corruptible
Beauty, and at the trumpet’s sound put on,
As ye must also, incorruption.”
And while he spoke the curtain of the sky
Night fretted with the cool embroidery
Of stars, and the moon upon her silent spindle
Did all the velvet warp to silver kindle.
But a young man of the philosophers,
Who stood about him, said “The moonlight stirs
With beauty in the heart, and in the mind
The things that seem do such a glory find
Lit with this wonder of the moon and star,
As almost to persuade us that they are,
But these we know are broken images
Of patterns laid-up in heaven. Socrates,
A citizen of Athens, was betrayed
To death for teaching this, and smiling laid
His cup of hemlock down, because his heart
Already of eternity was part,
And death for such is freedom. Yet for this
He did surrender the Acropolis,
That had all Hellas for a coronet
About her forehead radiantly set,
Island on island, and for this forsook
The friendship of his friends, his dreams, the look
Of hesitating spring that dare not stay
Yet will not leave the hills of Attica.
For this all gifts, all memories, he gave
Freely believing that the narrow grave
Was the end of all. Thus he passed out alone,
Content to face the gods no man had known
Because they beggar knowledge, and persuaded
It was enough, that, when for him had faded
The light, for us his death a light had lit
Would shew a path and we might walk by it.
‘This is the spirit of man; in vain it reaches
Beyond the limits ordained and vainly stretches
To where truth, beauty, goodness, three in one,
Find each in all supreme communion.
For what is greater than we know,’ he said
‘It is well to die,’ and smiling he was dead.
This he believed, all this he sacrificed.
Did he teach better, Jew, whom you call Christ?”

A cloud passed by the moon, and no one spoke,
Till suddenly her silver spear-head broke
The cloudy targe, and leaning from the place
She has in heaven struck with light the face
Of Pheidias’ god. And Paul cried “Even thus
Ye have your answer, superstitious
Who set this idol up, and worshipped it
In darkness, and behold the face is lit
With fire from on high. A period
Is set to ignorance and to the god
Ye ignorantly worship, and the stone
Or marble of the god ye have not known,
Changes beneath my hand and in my speech
Unto the living god I know and preach.
Do you rejoice because that Socrates
Died facing death and dark? I tell you these
In Christ are conquered. Death has lost her sting,
The dark her victory, and angels sing
At the empty mouth of the grave, because my king
Has made the grave a refuge and protection
From the pain of living by His resurrection.
Socrates sleeps; the god he did not know
Sleeps with him, and long since the grasses grow
Above their resting place, but flowers reach
In vain their roots to find Him whom I preach.
He is not there, but though we darkly see,
As in a glass, his immortality
Waits for us all, and beckons in the place
Where we who find Him see Him face to face.
Socrates, to death a prisoner, did well,
But death was all; Christ by the miracle
Of the open grave, his deity forsaken,
For all the world has death a prisoner taken.
Nor Socrates in vain all sacrificed
If here his fruitless death has pled for Christ.”
Dionysius the Areopagite
Cried loudly unto Paul “Were it not right
To shatter on his marble pedestal
This idol that has stood for death?” and Paul
Answered “What say ye brethren, for His sake
Who vanquished death shall we the idol break?”
But even as Paul raised his hand the light
Faded upon the sculptured face. The night
Cloaked it, and, though Paul pressed, the threatened blow
Hung in the air and fell not. For a low
Strange glory changed upon the face, and seemed
A face that Paul had seen before or dreamed
To see when near Damascus, and instead
Of Pheidias’ god unknown another Head
Sorrowful-sweet on Paul astonished shone
And, ere his threatening hand could fall, was gone.
But a voice whispered “Art thou after all
Thine unknown God still persecuting, Saul?”

CASSIO HEARS OTHELLO.

Thus for the last last time with the first kiss!
O my white bird, here is the precipice!
I throw you like a homing carrier
Into the footless spaces of the air!
And your spread wings, set free, beat up and out
In mounting circles, storming death’s redoubt
And the cloudy fortress of Avilion.
Gone, my white bird, beyond all dreaming, gone!
And my hands warm that held her. Cassio
It was well done! Always to let her go
In the grave they shall be open thus, and yet
Feeling the half-poised wings--poor hands! Forget
My madness, Cassio, and think of me
As of a man who set his sea-bird free
From the prison of his heart to see her win
The deep blue floors of heaven and enter in.
O I am glad, I am glad, I dared this thing.
Even now my bird is home, awakening
Among her shining sisters, far--so far,
Not even the thoughts I have can trouble her.
So carve upon the stone that marks my grave:
“All that he had to death Othello gave,
And has kept nothing back but the sweet wound
Of life, that grew so dear, because he found
The mortal knife, that stabbed him, slit the strings
That gave his bird the guerdon of her wings.”

THE FIRST AIRMAN.

Give me the wings, magician. I will know
What blooms on airy precipices grow
That no hand plucks, large unexpected blossoms,
Scentless, with cry of curlews in their bosoms,
And the great winds like grasses where their stems
Spangle the universe with diadems.
I will pluck those flowers and those grasses, I,
Icarus, drowning upwards through the sky
With air that closes underneath my feet
As water above the diver. I will meet
Life with the dawn in heaven, and my fingers
Dipped in the golden floss of hair that lingers
Across the unveiled spaces and makes them colder,
As a woman’s hair across her naked shoulder.
Death with the powdered stars will walk and pass
Like a man’s breath upon a looking-glass,
For a suspended heart-beat making dim
Heaven brighter afterwards because of him.

Give me the wings, magician. So their tune
Mix with the silver trumpets of the moon
And, beyond music mounting, clean outrun
The golden diapason of the sun.
There is a secret that the birds are learning
Where the long lanes in heaven have a turning
And no man yet has followed; therefore these
Laugh hauntingly across our usual seas.
I’ll not be mocked by curlews in the sky;
Give me the wings magician, or I die.

His call for wings or death was heard and thus
Came both to the first airman, Icarus.

MARY.

(Sister of Martha.)

There was no star in the East the night I came
With spikenard in hushed Jerusalem--
But a light in an upper chamber dimly lit
Was star enough--I would have followed it
Through lonelier streets unto the smaller room
Where afterwards it blossomed in the tomb.
Light of the world, but how much more to me
The light that other women also see!
No choiring angels in gold groups adored
Their king that night, but searching for my Lord
Unchoired, uncrowned, whose Kingdom had not come,
I heard none call, but dumb, as death is dumb,
The night misled his angels, or may be
Night and the angels made a way for me.
My footfalls in the street rang very clear
As I drew on. It seemed that all must hear
My coming, eyes that peered behind the grating,
Cloaked hands to hold me at each corner waiting.
But nothing stirred till suddenly there ran
The flame of the moon in heaven for a span
Less than a heart-beat, and I saw a man
Steal out of Simon’s house, and pass me by
With such a horror on his lips that I,
Also a traitor, shrunk and knew him not--
Him that was Judas called Iscariot.
Also a traitor I, because I came
Not worshipping the Master in that Name
That his disciples called him, not the Christ
Of God for me that night. I sought a tryst
With a man of men, and if my heart had won
The Son of God had died in Mary’s son,
And he, who, knowing the appointed evil,
Sent forth Iscariot to his task, a devil,
Also accepted, though this was more hard,
The sweet betrayal of the spikenard.
He knew me what I meant and in his eyes,
That for a moment smiled, was Paradise
Lost unto love, that for the greater sin
Than even Judas’ might not enter in.
And when the disciples would have stayed my hands,
“She does but good” He said “she understands.”
And I who poured the unguent understood,
But good it was not, as a man means good.
For I forget the Master, I but see
(A woman taken in adultery
With a dream and a dream) his human face
I would have saved from God, and in the place
Of Gospel and of resurrection I
Hear him say “Mary” and behold him die.
Judas, to death who sold him for a kiss,
Sinned less than I, who’d buy him back for this.
And Christ forgave me--How shall I forgive
Jesus, my love, the man who would not live?

THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION.

To-day the Triremes sailed for Sicily
With no wind stirring on a soundless sea;
But a great crying of birds beat up and filled
The empty caverns of the air and stilled
The thrashing of the oars. The level sun
Unto himself, it seemed, drew one by one
With strings of gold the ships that no one heard
Move on the waters, till at last one bird
(Of all the wings past knowledge and past counting)
Wheeled upwards on the air and mounting, mounting,
Rose out of human sight, but all the rest
Passed with the passing fleet into the West.

To-day the Triremes sailed--and will their sailing
Prosper or fail because a gull was wailing
For crumbs about the prows? Who but a fool
Would find a message in a screaming gull?
For if gods use such messengers as these
The less gods they (or so says Socrates).
They are not gods (he says) of fear and hate,
A swollen type of man degenerate,
Catching at flattery, at sorrow fleering
And every spiteful whisper overhearing;
But largely on their mountain they attend
Unflinchingly the one appointed end,
When what was nobly done and finely striven
Will find the archetype laid up in heaven.
Not these by gulls pronounce or suffer doom,
Nor cries among the ships (and yet the gloom
Settles about Athene’s temple. If
An injured god used his prerogative
Of anger, might not Hermes?)--that’s the gull
Stirring the superstition of a fool!
What if a week ago we, waking, found
The Hermae spoiled or fallen to the ground?
Shall Fate be altered or a doom be spoken
Because an image was in malice broken?
Or Athens, that remembers Marathon,
Rock in her empire for a splintered stone?
How dear she is--was never city else
So loved, or lovely in her strength; like bells
Pealed in the brain her beauty. This is she,
Athens, whose sweeter name is liberty.

To-day the Triremes sailed--as Zeus decrees
All shall be done; but hardly Socrates,
As Westward in the dark our captains wear,
Would frown if an Athenian spoke a prayer
Even to Hermes, (even though it seem
We fear the flight of birds and cries in him),
Thus saying simply for the love of her--
Athens--“O Hermes, called the Messenger,
God of the wings, since now the sails are set,
If aught was evil, evil now forget!
If aught was left undone, think not of this
But her remember, Hermes, what she is,
A city leaning to the sea, and shod
With freedom on her feet, as thou a god
With wings art poised for flight--O, if the gull
Were bird of thine, Hermes, be merciful.”

CAESAR AND ANTHONY.

Augustus Caesar, aging by the sea,
Remembered, musingly, dead Anthony,
And wondered as he thought upon his days
Which had been better, laurel leaves or bays.
“Bays for the victor, when his fight is over,
But laurels” thought Augustus “for the lover.
That brown Egyptian woman, the fierce queen
Who with a serpent died--she came between
Him and the world’s dominion, whispering
‘Does empire burn so, has thy crown the sting
These lips have when they touch thee--thus and thus?
Choose then!’ ‘I choose!’ replied Antonius.”
“I wonder” thought Augustus as he lay
Watching the menial clouds of conquered day
Applaud with vehement reflection
The cold triumphant ending of the sun.
“The sun’s an emperor, and all the sky
Burns to a flame for his nativity,
And not less beautiful nor unattended
By conquered flocks of cloud he passes splendid,
Throwing his slaves this laminated gold.
Master in death, but in his death how cold!
But to have died astonished on a kiss
Had heat to the end and Anthony had this.”

THE DANCERS.

This was the way of it, or I forget
How visions end. The flaming sun was set
Or setting in a sky as green as grass,
Stained here and there like a window, where there was
A martyr-cloud with halo dipped in gold
Or red as the Sacred Heart is. From the old
Low house--a country house not built with hands
And of that country where the poplar stands
Whose leaves have shivered in our dreams--there came
With the rising moon the dancers to the same
Tune we have heard we scarce remember when,
Nor care so only that it sound again.
Each dancer wears a fancy for a dress,
This one with starlike tears is gemmed no less
Than that is crowned with roses as of lips
That kissed and do not kiss. There also trips
Pierrot, because we all have lost, and thin,
Cruelly swift, victorious Harlequin,
Because some find and keep, but both entwine,
Because she needs them both, with Columbine.
Then lanterns on the trees to radiant fruit
Burn till dawn plucks them, and the light pursuit
Of dancers on the lawn is done, and laughter
Of those who fled and those who followed after
Dies; to a little wind the darkened trees
Bend gravely and resume their silences.

BATTERSEA.

I have always known just where the river ends
(Or seems to end) that I shall find my friends,
Who are my friends no longer, being dead,
And hear the ordinary things they said,
That now seem wonderful, some evening when
I take the Number Nineteen bus again
To Battersea. It will, I think, be clear
With stars behind the four great chimneys. Dear
In the moon, young and unchanging, they
Will cry me welcome in the boyish way
They had before they went to France, but I,
A boy no more, will greet them silently.

THE WOODCUTTERS OF HÜTTELDORF.

“The plan by which individual Viennese are allowed to obtain their
own wood supplies has already been described by more than one
observer. It will, however, in time to come appear so incredible,
and it so completely sums up the misery of the people and the
breakdown of civilization and administration, that no excuse is
needed for placing it once more formally and definitely on record.

In the immediate neighbourhood of Vienna lies a forest known as the
Wienerwald, the nearest point being on hills to the north, two or
three miles from the centre of the city.

The two chief centres of wood collection are the suburbs of
Hütteldorf and Dorhbach.

The prevalence of women and children among the collectors is the
most painful feature of the proceedings.”

_From_ “Peace in Austria,” _by Sir W. Beveridge_.

Nous n’irons plus au bois: the woods are shut:
Les lauriers sont coupés: the laurels cut.
Thus love, when still his pitiful sweet cry
For youth and spring, his play-boys, sensibly
Touched at the heart. But now he does not care
What woods, what trees are standing anywhere.
For there’s no wood in the world to be found
That does not stab his feet, and the trees wound
His eyes with thorns--the eyes which did not see
In joy, but find their sight in misery.

There is a wood they named the Wienerwald.
There when the spring was new the throstle called
Spring to her ball-room, and the Viennese
Heard her light foot provoking the grave trees,
Half willingly at first, young leaves to stir,
That later passionately danced with her.
And here the cannon-fodder used to feed
The altar-fire of the older need,
And sweeter than the need of death. In spring
The Austrian boys saw love awakening
Here, and as English boys in English wood
Have given all to love, all that they could
These gave--their childhood, dawn’s relentless star
That is put out with kisses. These they gave
And buried childhood lightly in her grave
So that a man might hear her calling yet,
“Primrose farewell, good-morrow violet!”--
Might yet have heard her, but the woods are shut
To those who would return: the laurels cut.

There are many go to-day to Wienerwald,
But love does not go with them. He has failed
In the Great War, who had so little skill
In the Will to Murder, love who was the Will
To live and make live, but the War has shewn
His Will is treachery, and love’s alone
In a great wilderness. For if he cries
Aloud, they mock him in their Paradise--
The Angels of Armageddon. “This is he
Who ruled us, being blind, now let him see”
They say, “a prisoner, what we have done,
The priests of mankind’s last religion.
Let him look deep and celebrate in Hell
How we reverse the Christian miracle,
Stealing their spirits from the sullen swine
And consecrating them as yours and mine,
So that we rush together suddenly
Down a steep place, where by an empty sea
Our worshippers pile on a flaming wharf
The trees that were the woods at Hütteldorf.”

Ares, the god of battles, has prevailed.
At Hütteldorf, deep in the Wienerwald,
They go to the woods for fuel, and one sees
A child that beats upon the laurel trees
With starved small hands that hold an axe, and how
The spring returns to find a hooded crow
Waiting and waiting, as the thrush once waited
For childhood’s end. But this, it seems, was fated
That all should change, save only that these seem
Still unsubstantial as the lover’s dream,
As unsubstantial, but with blossoms set
That have no traffic with the violet
And primrose. Here the purple flowers of Dis
Burn their young foreheads and they fade with this,
Who find a different end and different haven,
Where the hooded crow is waiting with the raven.

In Wienerwald the starving Viennese
Have spoiled the woods and cut the laurel trees,
Nous n’irons plus au bois: oh love, oh love!
Will you not go the more because they prove
So shattered, the poor woods? and will you shut
Your heart, O love, because the trees are cut?
Les lauriers sont coupés, but you can heal
Even the broken laurel, and reveal
Where in the valley of death the children falter
That, though all else doth change, love does not alter,
And, though the woods were dead, there is a tree
You know of, love, planted in Calvary.

Go back to the woods; replant the laurel trees.
Still love than war hath greater victories,
And while the devils beat the warlike drum
Into their kingdom of peace the children come.

HEINE’S LAST SONG.

Life’s a blonde of whom I’m tired
(Being fair is just a knack
Women learn to be desired
By a Jew--who answers back).

Blonde, oh blonde, ye lost princesses
With the shadow in your eyes
As of bodiless caresses
Known ere birth in Paradise.

Little ears of alabaster,
Where like ocean in a shell
Gentle murmurs drown the vaster
Voice of rapture or of Hell.

Tender bodies--ah too tender
To be given or be lent
Unto love the money-lender
Who demands his cent per cent.

Thus you took a man and tricked him,
Life and ladies, to a will
In your favour, but the victim
Cheats you with a codicil.

All I had, you thought, was given--
Life and ladies, you were wrong:
In a poet’s secret heaven
There is always one last song.

Even he is half afraid of,
Even he but hears in part,
For the stuff that it is made of,
Ladies, is the poet’s heart.

Not for you, oh blonde princesses
Is that final tune, but I
Sing it drowning in the tresses
Of a darker Lorelei.

For her hair than yours is stranger;
Wilder lights are lost in hers
Where the heart’s immortal danger,
That you cannot know of, stirs.

Life and ladies, it is over:
Blonde asks all, gives nothing back;
You must find another lover,
For the poet chooses black.

Where death’s raven marriage blossom
Falls in clouds about her breast,
On his dark beloved’s bosom
Heinrick Heine is at rest.

IMPERSONALITIES.

THE SATYR.

“Hollow” he cries and “hollow, hollow.”
Mark how the creeping moon is yellow
On the cold stones, enmeshing feet
That are not soft, with blood not sweet.

Though in the night one cry his Name
The shuddering air shrinks from the aim;
And failing eddies will not stir
To let him through to Lucifer.

What answers where no echoes fly?
None where the moon looks balefully.
Unheard, far-off “O hollow, hollow”
The satyr crieth to his fellow.

BALDER’S SONG.

It may be raining now, that first warm rain
That melts the heart of earth beneath the snows,
Our Northland snows (she feels the swimmer’s pain
Who catches breath, half-drowned, when the blood flows
Shuddering back into the frozen vein).
And did ye think I should not come again
At the long last in spring-time with the rain?

Or may be there is singing in the air
At building-time where the tall windy trees,
By sap and young leaves hurt, can hardly bear
The spring’s reiterated urgencies
That at the woods with actual fingers tear.
And did ye, when these songs are everywhere,
Of Balder, who first taught them song, despair?

Or it may be where once my altar stood
And where my worshipped name in prayer ascended,
Blue, like a trumpet, in the solitude
Harebells, that ring before the winter’s ended,
Have with the wind my litanies renewed.
Did ye forget (alas! that any could)
That I, the god of flowers, found these good?

And may be where the dog-rose remedies
With her wild flush the hedge, and spring begins,
Born of all these there trembles the first kiss
That from Valhalla brings the Paladins
And ladies, who for all the immortal bliss
Of heaven, have no joy as sharp as this.
Did ye not know in your own memories
That where are love and spring there Balder is?

It may be raining now, that first warm rain
That melts the heart of earth beneath the snows,
Our Northland snows (she feels the swimmer’s pain
Who catches breath, half-drowned, when the blood flows
Shuddering back into the frozen vein).
And did ye think I should not come again
At the long last in spring-time with the rain?

MARY THE MOTHER.

(Cradle Song.)

So great a lady, so dear is she,
Princess in heaven, but mother to me!
When little Jesus lay in her arm
It was enough for him that he was warm.

When the small head at her bosom did nod
Did she remember that He was the God?
Or when she sang to Him low in His ear,
Did she say “Master” or did she sob “Dear”?

Was it the star on the manger that shone
Crowned her an empress, or was it her Son?
So great a lady to lie in a stall--
But only a mother (she thought) after all.

So great a lady, so dear is she,
Princess in heaven! but who does not see
How against Godhead, in spite of the Cross,
She holds to her bosom her Jesus that was?

APPLES.

When there is no more sea and no more sailing
Will God go vintaging the wine-dark seas,
Reaping gold apples of the storm and trailing
To harvest home the lost Hesperides?

Will God, the gates that guard the river breaking,
Annul the blinding gesture of the sword,
And find the Tree, all other dreams forsaking,
Whose apples are the knowledge of the Lord?

Forsaking dreams--forgiveness and salvation,
Sins that were needless needlessly forgiven,
Hell where he knew vicarious damnation
And ghosts of rapture in a ghost of heaven?

No longer from self-knowledge then exempted
Shall God the apple tasting Eve repeat
Thus altered, saying, “By the devil tempted
Through all these years I could and did not eat.”

Thus at the last shall Man and Maker pardon
Eve’s ancient wrong, seeing that, though He cursed,
Knowledge, alone of those who used the Garden
God was afraid of apples from the first.

Thereafter as it was in the beginning,
Before the spirit moved upon the deep,
There shall be no more sea and no more sinning
And God will share with his beloved sleep.

THE SKIES.

Though the world tumble tier by tier,
Down, down the broken galleries,
By day the sun would shine as clear
By night the moon would ride her seas.

Though man and all was meant by men
Upon the empty air were spent,
Irrevocably Charles’s Wain
Would swing across the firmament.

So large they are and cool the skies;
God’s frozen breath in dreams, or worse:
Beautiful unsupported lies
That simulate a universe.

THREE EPITAPHS.