Chapter VII: Coda

_Largo, Marcato_

In that dark house at the road-end
lives the old fiddler. Some folks say
he’s ninety past. Others pretend
he’s older. I don’t know. I’ve heard him play.
I ask no more. The jasmine-lovely twilight
settled to dark. The moon’s grace entered in
like a tall girl, and softly, in the shy light
’twixt eve and night, he touched his violin.
“The moon was in it first.
The shepherd he played,
Endymion, whose thirst
with that cold star was stayed.
‘Youth, youth,’ the sobbing string
called, and love that is still
with the moon murmuring
in the night, on her hill....
Softly; and louder then
he played on colder string
how, though they lose love, men
forgive the heartbreaking;
how they say: it is over,
and her beauty is passed,
but love is a lover
we love to the last....
Then, on a rising chord,
failure he played, and ending,
when the dream adored
is broke, and there’s no mending,
save in courage that is
more than the dream, and stays
when all her witcheries
have gone their golden ways.
Courage, he played, to face
hope changing from little to less,
and age, and the heart’s disgrace
in her own ugliness.
Courage, when nothing is there
but the long empty road,
and the grey traveller
with naught in life but his load.
Courage to the road-end, and after,
he played, and the last breath
crying ’twixt a sob and laughter
‘Death? What is death?’
The moon was in it last,
and wings that brush
the soul in the dark, and go past
with a single beat in the hush.”

THUS FREEDOM COMES, THUS PEACE

And I shall say to these:
“You cannot traffick in peace,
and you cannot quote it as priced
in the Stock Exchange list. For Christ,
(or whatever name is given
to the secret kingdom of heaven,
in which we are, and have
this shadow of life, that shadow of the grave)
to those who remain has said:
‘Leave the dead to bury the dead!
Rich though they be, you cannot sell
or buy their miracle,
nor be enriched by it, nor in Jerusalem,
sweet with the bugles blowing over them,
set up your market place, and have increase--’
Not thus comes peace,
nor freedom thus. But slowly,
making more holy what is holy,
from the guarded pool
of the spirit swift, cold, and beautiful,
in mists diaphanous his rain
a god draws back again.
And, as the sun builds with the clouds, of these
he builds his city of peace--
those stoneless streets, at whose sweet end
friend meets with friend,
those star-hung towers, in which the light of the sun
with the moon’s light is one,
with love as visible and exquisite
as the little lamps with which the yew is lit,
(so luminously red in the translucent green
of that deep air the lanterns of love are seen)
and the music of meeting, and the trumpet at the gate
sounding: ‘All ye, who enter here, abandon hate.’
Thus freedom comes, thus peace.”
I shall say to these.

SPRING AND DEATH

Time, old and fertile serpent that endures
from spring to spring, softly beneath the ground,
now at the root of life snake-darkness pours
in feathered coils, that choke without a sound
winter, the death, that dies each spring to rise
on the right hand of May in Paradise.

Here in the North the black and haggard beech,
as though the nails were driven through the palm,
stretches gaunt arms too twisted to beseech
even the spear, and death’s atrocious calm,
nor dreams she earns by her slow agony
the green and drifting kingdom of the tree.

But in your South the earth is Magdalene
to death, and wins him, leaning from gold sheaves
her white, prevailing arms, that out of green
lift his pale head against her through the leaves;
and death looks upward through her heavy hair
finding all colour, song and fragrance there.

Wild lavender and pomegranate-tree,
cypress and blue grape-hyacinth, and pale
wind-flower that we call anemone,
you are life’s brief and many-coloured veil,
with which death, like a bridegroom, in the South
covers his bride, and sinks against her mouth.

Death--but there is no death where these things be,
and, though the snake may coil his feathered ring,
grape-hyacinth and pomegranate-tree!
Where is his victory, what is his sting,
when even the Judas-blossom, bursting the prison
of old dead treasons, whispers “He is risen.”

And hark! as though death were the fabled thorn,
upon which life, to give her soul release
in music, leaned, the nightingale’s high scorn
touches the flute of night on moonlit keys,
and with the silver star-dust of her breath
muffles the wings triumphant over death.

THE IMMORTAL HOUR

I. SEMI-CHORUS:

We have no tears, who are the source of weeping,
and what is laughter to us, whose laughter first
of laughter woke in the man the sweet unsleeping
hunger and thirst?
We are the words the poets hear and fail of,
we are the note beyond the fiddle’s cry,
we for all lovers of beauty are a tale of
beauty that passes by.

II. SEMI-CHORUS:

Cried a ghost-king by night “Divine Augustus,
you tread the ends of the world only to find
that the long roads of dreams go sweeping past us
into a world behind.
A fleeting throne, a shadow godhead these are,
whose symbol is the axes and the rod,”
saying “There is another kingdom, Caesar,
a further heaven, God.”