The Five Books of Youth | Page 5

the dust of history?
He raises his
wet eyes and looks at me,
His boyish face full of a yearning,
An
ancient pain,
As of a ghost long dead who yearns to live again,
And
answers, "In myself, thy thoughts returning
To other times shall
slumber in the past,
And be a child again, and die at last
In the
protecting arms of our great Mother
Who bore us both, O
well-beloved brother.
Thou in thy sorry dreams, I in my childish grief,

Thy heart in tears, mine eyes amazed with tears,
Thy sorrow rich
with the repining years,
My sorrow frail as childhood, and 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