The Five Books of Youth | Page 5

as brief."?Who art thou, haunting boy, nocturnal elf??"I am the Dead; the Dead that was thyself."?Then falls a darkness on that starless shore.?Afar I hear the closing of a door....
I see on a sharp hill above the Styx,?The bruised Christ upon his crucifix,?And racked in anguish on his either side?Hang Buddha and Mohammed crucified.?Their heavy blood falls in a monotone?Like deep well-water dropping on a stone.?None moves, none breaks the silence; on those roods?Eternal suffering triumphant broods.?Prometheus from his cliff of wild unrest?Mocks them and draws the vulture to his breast.?Each year upon a darker Calvary?Are hung the pallid victims of the tree,?And none will watch with them, for none can see?As I once saw, unending agony,?Save where Prometheus from his dizzy place?Regards those sufferers with scornful face,?And his loud laughter rings through empty Space....
I can see nothing now, and only hear?Through the thick atmosphere?A deep perpetual well, that sad and slow,?Intones the knell of ages long ago,?And ages that no man can tell or know,?Whose shadows roll before them on the sky,?Black with forebodings of futurity.
Sweet sounds through midnight, liquid interlude,?Voice of the lonely souls that yearn and brood,?Voice of the unseen Life, the unsubdued,?What wonder that He draweth nigh to taste?Of your cool waters. Hail thou nameless One,?Fair stranger from a realm beyond the Sun,?Knowing that thou art God I do not fear,--?Speak to me, raise me from my life's long dream.?"The whole night through thou liest here?Beside the well that waters Lethe's stream,?And still thou dost not drink; O Man make haste;?Ere long the dawn will pour adown the waste,?And show thee, reft from the embrace of night,?The barren world, barren of revelry.?Happy art thou, O Man, happily free,?Who wilt never see?A thousand ages shed their life and light?As petals fall at eventide.?Thou shalt not see the radiant stars subside?Into the frozen ocean of the Vast,?Nor see thy world absorbed at last?Into a nothingness, an airless void,?Nor see the thoughts that Man has glorified?Swept from the world, and with the world destroyed.?This have I seen a thousand times repeated,?Unhappy as I am, unhappy God!?As many times as thou hast greeted?The rising sun against the broad?And tranquil clouds, so many times have I?Greeted the dawn of a new Universe,?And seen the molten stars rehearse?The lives and passions of the stars gone by.?When worlds are growing old, and there draw nigh?The shadows that shall cover them for ever,?(Shadows like these which doom your ancient sky)?Then to the well that feeds the sacred river?I come, and as the liquid music drips?Far in the ground, I plunge my lips?Deep in forgetfulness, and wash away?All the stains of the old griefs and joys,?That with His lips as smiling as a boy's,?God may rejoice in His created day."?He stoops and drinks; a moment the cool bell?Pauses its ringing in the well:?A mist flies up against the dawn; the young winds weep;?Is it too late? I too would drink, drink deep,?But weariness is on me and I sleep.
Cambridge, 1915
XIII - EPILOGUE
Dawn has come.?Faint hazes quiver with the faltering light;?Some airy skein draws in the shadows from?The broken forest where the war has passed,?The Forest Terrible, the grey despair,?The forest broken in the withering blight?Of the lean years,--the blight, the years, have passed,?Leaving a solitary watcher there,?Silence at last.
She watches by the dead,?Her deep white shadow overspreads their faces.?Here in the outland places,?She watches by the dead.
How many dawns have driven her afar?With the loosed thunder of tempestuous wrong!?Today she will remain.
Silence familiar to the morning star,?Standing, her finger to her lips,?Hushing the battle-cry, the victor's song,?Standing inviolate above the slain.
The fugitive sunlight slips?Over the fragment of a cloud,?And the sky opens wide,?Behold the dawn!
Where is the nightmare now? the angry-browed??The lowering imminence--the bloody eyed??Fled, as the threat of midnight, fled away,?Gone, after four dark timeless ages, gone.?Hail the day!
Silence, robed in the morning's golden fleece,?Folding the world's torn wings to stillness, giving?Peace to the dead, and to the living,?Peace.
Tours, 1918
XIV - THERMOPYLAE
Men lied to them and so they went to die.?Some fell, unknowing that they were deceived,?And some escaped, and bitterly bereaved,?Beheld the truth they loved shrink to a lie.?And those there were that never had believed,?But from afar had read the gathering sky,?And darkly wrapt in that dread prophecy,?Died trusting that their truth might be retrieved.
It matters not. For life deals thus with Man;?To die alone deceived or with the mass,?Or disillusioned to complete his span.?Thermopylae or Golgotha, all one,?The young dead legions in the narrow pass;?The stark black cross against the setting sun.
Pomfret, 1919
BOOK II?DAYS AND SEASONS
I
Winds blowing over the white-capped bay,?Winds wet with the eager breath of spray,?Warm and sweet from the oceans we have dreamed of;
From gardens of Cathay.
The empty factory windows, row on row,?Warm sullenly beneath the afterglow,?Burn topaz out of dust and dim the flare
Of the street-lamps below.
In