Chapter I: Standing in the Street

I standing in the street, I standing,
Gaze on the unwashed windows, dingy walls,
When lo! a clarion ...
Lo! thro' the slum a spring-time trumpet calls.
Lo! on the roofs a rose-leaf magic falls.
Thro' all the windows dance and jewels shine.
Thro' all the rooms go lissome girls with scent.
The window-frames are tendrilled with the vine.
(Ah, God! I weep in my content.)

I standing in the street, I standing,
Gaze on my vision splendid and most dear,
When lo! a chimney ...
Lo! on my dreams the soot drifts dry and sere.
Lo! all my flowers wilt in a reek of beer.
On the drab flags squat children dusty-eyed,
Cursed at by blousy women with dank hair.
Just down the street there sprawls a suicide.
(Ah, God! I laugh in my despair.)

SLUM EVENING

A dove-grey evening, dusk empearled
By lamps along the fading slums.
Out of the sky a silence comes,
A honey on the wormwood world.

The flirting adolescents stand
And hush their tingling turbid vows.
For softly on their foolish brows
The evening lays a sober hand.

Even the butcher, he who shares
The corner-shop with "Boots and Shoes,"
Although he has no time to lose,
Delays to light the naphtha flares.

A bleary woman down the road
With a large twin on either arm,
Her wits are stolen by the charm,
She quite forgets her puling load.

I know not in what twilight stream
She bathes her dropsy-swollen feet,
But they were fair as dawn and fleet,
In the dead girlhood of her dream.

FIRES OF CHANGE

Think you that Athens and Jerusalem
Rot in the places where they builded them?
This is the Temple, this the Parthenon
The priests of old days laid their hands upon?
No more a stream sends the same waters twice
Along its channels to sea-sacrifice.
Not God Himself shall bid Time stand to lock
The midmost atom in the mightiest rock.
Still the most secret atom shall be hurled
Into the riotous wind-ways of the world.
Still, the most ancient town, up wrenched, shall float
Freer than flame and light as a bird's note.
Still shall the crumbling globe itself be spun
Into fresh ethers conquered by the sun.

So, even so, my soul shall wear no more
The countless shapes my soul endued of yore.
Yea, the stout granite of my soul shall range
Molten across the blasting fires of change.
Not this am I you saw an hour ago.
Me fluid as thought your science shall not know.
Hourly my conquering spirit digs and delves
A grave to hold a hundred slaughtered selves.
Hourly through cowering moons and stellar dins,
I stride across buried virtues and slain sins.

POETRY

A star that was mute
Was heard to sing.
A flower took wing,
A bird took root.

The Right is a Wrong,
The Wrong is a Right.
I fought with the Night,
I sang you a song.

I slaughtered Time,
For the path I trod
To the feet of God
Was the road of a rhyme.

A flower took wing,
A bird took root.
A star that was mute
Was heard to sing.

THE PRISONER

If you have not a bird inside you,
You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
A beak and a bleeding wing,
Then you have reason to sing.

If merely you are clever
With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
The veins of our singing-birds,
With blades of glinting words.

Yet if a Song, without ending,
Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
Tear through your lungs for breath,
Sing--or you bleed to death.

NERVES

You are like an ebony sea with derelict ships,
Cold as my lover is cold;
Until Beauty rises like the moon and whips
You into shivering gold.

You are like a tree-top at the bleak last hour
When birds to the tombs belong;
Until Beauty blows like the dawn, and you flower
Into buds of innumerable song.

You are like a virginal and a most pale
Girl in a secret mead;
Until Beauty, like the indomitable Male,
Enflames you with innermost seed.

You are like a corpse with worms in the holes of the head,
Between a board and a board;
Until Beauty shouts like the Trump that convulses the dead,
And you enter the House of the Lord.

A POET

He has a voice so exquisite
You can hardly hear it at all:
Tragedy's there and there is wit,
Both faint as a leaf's fall.

His feet pass hardly like human feet,
Five-toed and leathern-shod,
But more with the sound of bended wheat,
Swayed by the skirts of God.

His eyes are a wistful and grey sea,
Till a song stir his blood.
Then are they flowers that suddenly
Open from the pent bud.

But when at the shutting of the day,
He sings faint songs for me,
Then is it very hard to say
If the wind sings or he.

FOR MY FRIEND

(F. V. B.)

Go forth and conquer with the wind for a sword,
O scorching might;
Go forth and blaze through the jungles of night,
Lead in the tameless stars with a cord;
Go forth, Lover of Right!

Make moons thy pebbles and suns thy coins,
And thy language light.
Fill highest space with thy depth and height;
Gather the nebulæ round thy loins;
Go forth and fight!

Go forth and conquer--return, return,
When the hawthorn's white.
Encompass the void; then turn and learn
The veins of the grass and the bee's delight;
Return, Lover of Right!

"I SHALL BE SPLENDIDLY AND TENSELY YOUNG"

I shall be splendidly and tensely young,
While yet my limbs are mine.
Each of them shall be strung
As a bowstring by an archer
With fingers strict and fine.

I shall be splendidly and tensely young,
My heart being whole, my brain
Keen as a hawk's flight flung
Against my victim seen securely
From my austere Inane.

But when my limbs no more are mine,
My feet to walk, my hands to hold,
I shall be most supremely young.
Then shall my flawless songs be sung,
My brow be sealed with a proud sign:
When I am deaf and blind and fleshless,
I shall be most supremely young,
When I am old.

"I"

I shall slough my self as a snake its skin,
My white spots of virtue, my black spots of sin.
I shall abandon my sex, my brain,
My scheming for pleasure, escaping from pain.
I shall dig roots deep down and be
A weed or a reed, a flower, a tree.
I shall lose body and miry feet,
Float with the clouds and sway with the wheat.
I am a fool and foolisher than
Anything else that is not a man.
For of all the things that I see or feel,
The I-that-is-I is far the least real.
And only when I shall learn at the last
That a stream-bed pebble is far more vast
In the scale of Mind and its secret schemes
Than all my passion and blunders and dreams;
Then only that I that shall not be I
Shall play due part beneath sun and sky,
Ranked below sparrow, just above sod,
I shall take my place in the Self of God.