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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75422 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+  THE SIRENS
+  AN ODE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decoration]
+
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
+  MELBOURNE
+
+  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
+  DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO
+
+  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+  TORONTO
+
+
+
+
+  THE SIRENS
+
+  AN ODE
+
+  BY
+
+  LAURENCE BINYON
+
+  [Illustration: Decoration]
+
+  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+  ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
+  1925
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT
+
+
+  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+  TO
+  CICELY
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+This poem was printed by hand by Richard and Elinor Lambert at the
+Stanton Press and issued by them in 1924 in a limited edition. It has
+been revised for the present edition.
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+
+    I remember a night of my youth, I remember a night
+    Soundless!
+    The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened
+    Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height
+    Boundless
+    With stars, with stars, with stars.
+    I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled
+    Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty
+    Out of the ends of the air and the unsealed darkness
+    Poured in a rain, in a river,
+    Into my marrow,—thro’ all the veins of delight
+    Poured into me.
+    O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!
+    I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;
+    I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,
+    Born to be free.
+    In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,
+    A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;
+    For they came to me as lovers,
+    Those stars from on high.
+
+    Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,
+    I felt more than heard, like a whisper
+    Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting
+    Sound
+    Of waves, of waves, of waves.
+    And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,
+    That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:
+    In the midst of the worlds I trembled,
+    I in the night a mortal
+    Found!
+    What was I? What was I? Nothing
+    But a Moment, aware
+    Of the ruins of Time!
+    Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,
+    Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,
+    From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir
+    In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,
+    Rose to claim
+    This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;
+    To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.
+    And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,
+    For I was the word on Earth’s lips
+    That she needed to name.
+
+    But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,
+    Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,
+    Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,
+    The earth-child?
+    To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,
+    To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,
+    Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling
+    Earth-exiled?
+    But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,
+    In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,
+    As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind
+    At its core,
+    This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,
+    And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth
+    Shelter me more.
+    I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:
+    I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,
+    And feel within me, for this mortality’s answer,
+    Sea without shore.
+
+
+
+
+I. THE VICTORIES
+
+
+    Masters of the known and found
+    Singers of a world completed,
+    All to a time and end ordained,
+    Powers foredestined to their bound
+    And truth immutably contained,
+    A dominion mapped and meted,—
+    Like as in Egyptian noon
+    Gods of granite throned august
+    Gaze on old realms round them strewn
+    Far as the horizon dust,—
+    All beneath that searching sky
+    Gathered into wisdom’s eye!
+    Prophets of the found and known,
+    Chanters of the Laws unchanging,
+    Comes not an hour that undoes all
+    With a whispered homelessness,
+    With a sudden touch estranging?
+    Certainties you deemed your own,
+    Housing with a friendly wall,
+    Glide into a doubt and guess
+    Swift as when, the low light going,
+    Darkness on the wind comes flowing
+    Out of nothing; and surmise,
+    Dream, desire, are frontierless;
+    And the unroofed mind has skies
+    To breathe of, where a rumour sings
+    Of other mind and vaster things
+    Wooed to wilder destinies.
+    Thought throbs: there a power entices
+    (Like, on a wonder-night, all June
+    In a draught of stolen spices)
+    Not to stay, not to stay,
+    But to embark for the outer dark.
+    Only charms the untrodden way,
+    Only the unspelt secret rune.
+
+    Conqueror with foot superb
+    Planted on the last step won,
+    Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim
+    Destiny’s accepted son,
+    Robed in a resounding name,
+    What profounder pangs disturb
+    Something that’s unquarried yet
+    In the deep soul? All the gain
+    Weighs but as an ashy grain
+    In the world those pangs beget.
+    Fierce fruitions but betray
+    And deliver to the hard
+    Hope of things unhazarded.
+    Where that world is, who shall say?
+    Under western evening starred
+    Black waves tempt to far-away
+    Visioned walls of a wide shore,
+    Lands the only-coveted,
+    Gleaming as they gleamed before
+    Alexander’s dying eyes
+    In the tent at Babylon.
+    Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,
+    Dumb’d with grief that only saw
+    The pillar of the world undone,
+    Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw
+    The unsated mind with cruelties,—
+    Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies,
+    Sentinelled afar, deride him,
+    Mocking all that passion willed
+    With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.
+    O the inexorable Lure
+    Spur to the demon hearts of men!
+    Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,
+    And the empire-storming Saracen,
+    Fate’s infuriate charioteers,
+    Fly from a whisper in their ears
+    (Earth before them, Time behind)
+    Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill,
+    Storm and scatter, work your will!’
+    Hunters hunted in the mind,
+    Hunting what they cannot name,
+    Thunder over earth, to find
+    Nothing. Though the harvest black
+    Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,
+    There’s a thing they cannot tame.
+    Still they keep their torrent-track,
+    Maddened by a shadowy song
+    Sung beyond the reach of sense.
+    What song is this which wastes the worth
+    Of human things, and distastes earth,
+    And fevers with magnificence
+    Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned,
+    Toward a goal that none has found?
+    Is it the song the Adventurer stole
+    Body-bound upon the mast
+    For the enchantment of his soul?
+    Over farthest foam of waves
+    That are sailors’ restless graves,
+    He heard exulting as he passed
+    Perilous voices challenging
+    The mortal heart of him, and fear
+    Became a glory, so to hear
+    Secure as an immortal, sing
+    The Sirens.
+
+
+I. 2
+
+    Whither is she gone, wing’d by the evening airs,
+    Yon sail that draws the last of light afar,
+    On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares
+    Than her own errand and her guiding star?
+    She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads
+    Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth.
+    She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms,
+    The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust,
+    And generations of men asleep in the old earth.
+    Between two solitudes she glides and fades,
+    And round us falls the darkness she invades.
+
+    Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters!
+    What have your wastes to do
+    With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail
+    Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens;
+    Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds,
+    And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass
+    In soil his fathers knew?
+    What shall he hope for from your careless desolation,
+    Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath?
+    What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers
+    But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage?...
+    Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.
+
+    I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon,
+    Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air,
+    Cry down the secret waters of the world,
+    Under the far sea-streams, to summon there
+    The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships.
+    In their ribb’d ruin and age-long sleep they heard,
+    Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed,
+    Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound;
+    Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread
+    In corners of all oceans, where the light
+    Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize:
+    And shapes at last were stirred
+    On glimmerless abysses’ oozy floors
+    Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;—
+    Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth
+    Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores,
+    Or questing up the white gloom of the North,
+    Or shattered in the glory of old wars,
+    The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!
+
+    I saw them clouding up over the verge,
+    Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave,
+    Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon
+    And strange to the idle glitter of the wave.
+    Magically re-builded, rigged and manned,
+    They stole in their slow beauty toward the land.
+    Mariners, O mariners!
+    I heard a voice cry; Home, come home!
+    Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here
+    Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace
+    Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb.
+    Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India?
+    Are not children’s kisses dearer than ivory and pearls?
+    And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water
+    And the cold, wandering foam?
+    Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer,
+    Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet
+    The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin.
+    But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music;
+    And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn;
+    We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go.
+    We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes,
+    But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win;
+    Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow,
+    And a world to wander in.
+
+
+I. 3
+
+    O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!
+    O alone soaring over care and stain!
+    Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?
+    Or who your spaciousness of light attain?
+    Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,
+    When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,
+    Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard
+    Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,
+    Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—
+    Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,
+    Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,
+    Silent in glory as of chanting quires.
+    Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences
+    In apparition from some world august,
+    Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy
+    That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.
+    Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,
+    And mid the void as on some dazzling shore
+    Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,
+    Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.
+
+    Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion
+    Surpassing all the measures of his kind,
+    He, a free rider of the undulating silences,
+    Has in himself begotten a new mind;
+    Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling
+    Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,
+    Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him
+    Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,
+    Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,
+    A soundless vapour that he pulses through,
+    Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again
+    And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—
+    Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery
+    Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire
+    Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,
+    A daring, a defiance, a desire!
+
+    Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,
+    Invading far and far the virgin sky,
+    Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man
+    (O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!
+    Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle’s ways
+    Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting
+    Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries
+    Of his condition, being so brief a thing,
+    Being a creature perishable and passionate,
+    To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo
+    Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,
+    A lover, else to his own faith untrue,
+    Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice
+    Upon the untried way that he must tread,
+    So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,
+    Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.
+    Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance
+    From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,
+    Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible,
+    He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone,
+    Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning
+    A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare?
+    Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate
+    World, and exulting to be native there?
+
+
+I. 4
+
+    Hymn the Finders! Hymn the bold
+    Trusters of Earth, those patient ones,
+    That listen to the subtle words
+    Of Silence in the streams and stones;
+    Ponderers of the secret-souled
+    Bodies quick with ignorant being;
+    Followers of the clues that thread
+    Differences and accords;
+    Wooers of what powers agreeing
+    May the hands of man bestead;
+    Seers who have turned aside
+    From the greeds that ask and ache
+    Blinded to all else beside,—
+    Letting the clear spirit take
+    Truth from vision open-eyed.
+    Breaks the bud for him that sees
+    In a world of promises.
+
+    Hymn the breaker of the dark,
+    Hymn the finder of the flame,
+    Troubler of the essential spark
+    Lurking in the withered pith
+    Or from stony prison freed,
+    Friend and fury, holy need
+    And fierce destroyer, hard to tame,
+    Risen, a God to wrestle with!
+    Hymn the bender of the wheel,
+    Mother of the shapes of speed!
+    Hymn the launcher of the keel
+    Carrying thought’s arrow-aim
+    Beyond the sundown,—sowing seed
+    Of man on coasts untrod before,
+    To widen memory’s haunted shore
+    And add the nearness of a name.
+
+    Far-descended old desire!
+    That stirred in swarming forest-ages,
+    Prowled by fear whose stealthy eye
+    Watched from glooms, where hunger-rages
+    Ravened; see at last the Hand
+    Emerging human, stretched to try
+    Shapes of things with wondering pleasure,
+    When its strength forgets to kill;
+    Tempted on to understand,
+    Serving ways of secret will,—
+    Fit and fashion, poise and measure.
+    Hymn the hand that builds the wall
+    And spans the river, and arches over
+    Man the worshipper and lover
+    Song-like stone; the hand so strong
+    To strike, yet in whose touch is all
+    Life’s mystery that wooes from things
+    Their strength, as music from the strings,—
+    Touch of the mind that seeks behind
+    The world for the befriending Mind.
+
+    Hymn the openers of the gates,
+    Hymn the changers of the fates!
+    Hymn the seekers! them that saw,
+    Past the seeming starry roof
+    Of human earth, in mazy plan
+    Bright eternities of law;
+    Them that neared those orbs to man,
+    Unafraid, and put to proof
+    Divination’s ancient scheme;
+    Stept into the timeless stream,
+    Star-like spirits among the stars!
+    Hymn the seekers! Chosen souls,
+    Grapnel’d in the very marrow
+    By a thought that night and day
+    Draws them whither their unknown
+    Mighty lover far away
+    Beckons them to the frore Poles
+    Or new meridians; like to him
+    Who climbed in Panama the tree,
+    And splendour of untravelled sea
+    Smote him like a glorious arrow:
+    Never shall he rest again
+    Till he sail that virgin main!
+    Or like him who quietly
+    Sitting in his Polar tent
+    Found so great a way to die;
+    Hope-forsaken, famine-spent,
+    Wrote his words of faith and cheer
+    Till the pen dropt from the hand
+    That wrote them.
+                     Hymn the lost, who never
+    Found, but kept high heart to steer
+    Onward toward the mark they meant,
+    Sailing out of sight of land.
+    Wail not them, nor lost endeavour,
+    For they heard what tranced the ear,
+    Filled the exulting soul, the song
+    Pale and prudent mortals fear,
+    Song of those who, out of Time,
+    Sing the heights the immortals climb,
+    The Sirens.
+
+
+
+
+II. PENUMBRA
+
+
+    Hearken to the hammers, endlessly hammering,
+    The din of wheels, the drone of wheels, the furnaces
+    Panting, where Man as in a demon-palace toils
+    To forge the giant creatures of his brain.
+    He has banished the spring and the innocence of leaves
+    From the blackened waste he has made; the infected sky
+    Glooms with a sun aghast, and the murk of the night
+    Is peopled with tall flames like spirits insane.
+
+    He strips himself to the heat, not of the jovial sun,
+    But of the scorch of furnaces; with naked breast
+    Sweating beneath the iron and blear glass, amid
+    The hammers’ hammering and the wheels’ roar.
+    Not with grapes of October trodden underfoot
+    Spurting juices of ripeness in runnels, his vats
+    Brim, but with gushes flickered-over and blinding,
+    Unshapen spilth and blaze of molten ore.
+
+    With a finger he lifts the weight of mountain-sides
+    Poised; the metal mass he shears red-hot in a trice;
+    He has given to the animate iron thews of force,
+    A Titan’s pulse, and breath of fiery draught.
+    Monsters mightier far than himself he creates
+    To swim storming seas, and to mount in miles of air,
+    To deride Space and the old opposition of Time:
+    Their speed is like strong drink that he has quaffed.
+
+    He has the tamed lightning to do his bidding, draws
+    Energies out of the veins of earth; he is armed
+    From all elements, woven as in a magic web;
+    He has stolen seeds of Death, wherewith to fight.
+    He holds fabled terrors of the ancient gods in his hand—
+    In a handful of dust, earthquake and pestilence;
+    He exults to destroy, to obliterate, to be
+    Lord of the powers of the engulfing night.
+
+    Deafened with the hammers, inebriate with the sound
+    Of the powers he has raised out of their jealous lair,
+    He has fever within him, he becomes dizzy,
+    And craves, and knows not whither he is bound.
+    Shall he attain god-like felicity of ease,
+    Supreme articulate voice of nature’s striving,
+    Or builds he a vast prison for himself, a slave
+    With iron of his own strong forging crowned?
+
+    Insatiable of ransacked worlds, and exulting
+    Furiously in feet-supplanting speed, the proud-eyed
+    Victor, he who has come so far, so far, looks forth
+    To achieve the eluded glory of his goal.
+    What solitude is this that suddenly he enters?
+    Voices of earth no more with anchoring kindness call.
+    The fevered hammers throb; but deep within he knows
+    The desert he has made in his own soul.
+
+    O where is now the dew-dropt radiance of morning,
+    That sistered with him leafing tree and rippling stream,
+    When simple of heart in the sun with a free body
+    He accepted all the boundaries of his mind?
+    Full of fears he was then, shadowed with helpless need
+    To propitiate Powers that threatened each footstep.
+    Has he escaped from those old terrors, to be prey
+    Of fears more terrible because less blind?
+
+
+II. 2
+
+    Ah, did men feign you once, triumphant Sirens,
+    Omnipotent in your lure
+    On a far spice-island over legendary surges
+    Singing, and divine you with the famished eyes of mariners,
+    Listen in a trance to your voices, but listen
+    In a dream secure?
+
+    Lost amid strange and hungry waters
+    They fabled the storm-worn sailor stung
+    By a vision of arms outstretched at the end of the world,—
+    Eternal woman, wonderful, with a bosom
+    Heaved as with love, and with warm, white eyelids
+    Over eyes cruel and young.
+    From those voluptuous throats, magical throats,
+    As out of a coral-lipped, an ivory-coloured
+    Dazzling flower, tormenting sweetness floats,
+    Sweetness of voices, odour of strange, strange longing
+    Felt on the flesh like trail of perfumed hair,
+    In sound that stole like soft arms round the soul
+    Drawn thither and inescapably aware
+    Of nothing but the extreme ache to press
+    Lips on those lips, that thirst to suck the breath,
+    The heart’s blood, into theirs, till eyes grow dull,
+    Till lips be lips no longer, and only a skull
+    Roll from your feast of death,
+    O sated Sirens!
+
+    But what if it be that fond perfidious Voices
+    With different music lure
+    Even us who have cast far from us the fables of old?
+    If the pride of our quest undo us, and they enchant us
+    Simple as those lost mariners, but no longer
+    In dream secure?
+
+    If not with sorcery of song in a scarlet mouth
+    And with eyes of desire
+    You ensnare the easy senses and perishing flesh,
+    But with spiritual lure you hunger to entice us
+    Beyond the borders of knowledge, O evilly enamoured,
+    O terrible choir?
+    If shadowy at the end of time you wait,
+    Wooing subtly the while Man’s spirit, tempted
+    On ever more extravagant quest, and bait
+    His blood with charm of secrecy and peril,
+    Ay, and waylay the longings of his mind,
+    Yielding by dear degrees what he exults to seize,
+    Until he glows to seem the unconfined
+    Master of earth, the world’s sole will, but only
+    That you may taste his glory, spent and shared,
+    Before you press upon his lips the last
+    Kiss of annihilation, and he be cast
+    Into the void prepared,
+    Malignant Sirens!
+
+
+II. 3
+
+    ‘Whither, Whither?’ I heard a crying
+    That asked of Night, and there was none replying.
+    ‘Whither, into what land of change and wrack,
+    Into what time out-racing thought and will,
+    With feet borne onward and mind beaten back
+    Over an earth that our lost loves has buried,
+    Against a dark wind blowing chill,
+    Whither are we driven, whither hurried?
+
+    ‘Lovely vales of our youth, where haunted
+    Peace of the ripening years, and hope that vaunted
+    Its strength so rooted in earth’s purposes
+    That children’s children should possess peace there!
+    O sunny vales, and corn, and guardian trees,
+    Shut off by the blind rain’s down-dropping curtain,—
+    Vanished, as if they never were,
+    And doubt alone were certain!
+
+    ‘Heaven we feigned in a time perfecting
+    Our missed design, and beauty of our neglecting.
+    There should we live completed in an age
+    Wise from our loss and rich with all our spoil,
+    A race redeeming its lost heritage,
+    Not by vain fears checked, nor by vain hopes cheated.
+    —If that heaven fade, and futureless we toil,
+    And battle already defeated?
+
+    ‘Words of beauty, words of assuaging
+    Majesty saw we on high above time’s raging
+    Inscribed as over some vast porch serene;
+    PARDON: the heart flowed out on tides of peace.
+    JUSTICE: the soiled soul hasted to be clean.
+    One word we named not, dreamed not, feared not even,
+    THE END.—If All utterly cease;
+    Earth, Time, Desire, Hell, Heaven?’
+
+    Titan spirit of god-like stature;
+    Star-measurer, holder of deep clues of nature;
+    Maker, but half-aware of what he makes,
+    Of what the extravagant flame in him devours,
+    And what unshapen Vastness he awakes,—
+    Toiled in the terrible webs his mind invented,
+    And caught in flame that twists and towers,
+    Man strives with himself tormented.
+
+    Born for ever to move, the Dancer
+    Of dark Creation’s dream, its destined answer,—
+    Joy were those limbs created to express!
+    Now like one darkly stumbling, while his brain
+    Puzzles each motion with too anxious stress,
+    Under the glory of stars that move unhalting
+    He burns with the old need onward still to strain,
+    Mis-timed, way-lost, defaulting.
+
+
+II. 4
+
+    Hearken to the eternal lovers rejoicing!
+    A sunrise in their hearts, a music in their veins,
+    Their bodies make sweet singing to one another;
+    They bathe in beams from one another’s eyes.
+    They rejoice to belong to the Eternal Delight
+    Upon whose universe of buoyance they are launched,
+    That questions not of its way nor of its haven
+    But is both way and haven where it hies.
+
+    They marvel to be born in a new element,
+    To meet like streams as they go chiming to the sea,
+    To move like flames that touch and tremble; and marvelling
+    They look back on the voided shell they quit.
+    Dawn within dawn, light within light, unfolds for them
+    The secret of the world that flowing overflows
+    The sun and the moon and the farthest of the stars,
+    And it abounds in them, and they in it.
+
+    Beautiful are their fears as the shy-footed fawns
+    Safe only in wildness from the old hunter, Time,
+    To be assured in shadow of the heart’s solitude,
+    Where joy finds joy that never Time records.
+    They have made virgin words of that soiled alphabet
+    Wherewith have been written histories of sorrow,
+    Labour and long defeat, and proud and vain conquest;
+    And all their lore is those sufficing words.
+
+    Magnificent they match the music of a name
+    Against abhorred Silence and terrors of the abyss,
+    The trust of a smile against all-ignoring Night,
+    And one low voice against Oblivion’s greed.
+    Difference drew them to the enamoured wrestle,
+    Chosen, inevitable dear antagonists;
+    They cry one to the other; ‘Alone I was not I,’
+    ‘O lovely danger!’ and ‘O my angel need!’
+
+    ‘Because thy sweetness is so troubling and so sharp,
+    Full of blood-thrilling strangeness, unexplored peril,
+    Never to be possessed, always to be desired,
+    Thou unknown world, I will dare all for thee.’
+    ‘Though in a moment thou hast made me to forget
+    All that I was and had, triumphing I hold thee;
+    To thy darkness of strength I give and commit me;
+    Here is thy world, O sail upon my sea!’
+
+    As the East that quickens and flushes to the height
+    Answering the ardour of the West, and as a rose
+    Quivers on the western cloud before the dayspring,
+    Divided as the East and West they are:
+    But upon ways invisible to mortal sense
+    Moves their bright union, where was created new
+    Love’s wondrous world; from the darkness it emerges;
+    It is their Evening and their Morning Star.
+
+    Out of the hollows of unpenetrated Night
+    From afar calls to them, though they have known it not,
+    A voice that is theirs, yet is not theirs, a new voice
+    Never yet heard, yet older than all things;
+    Laughter of a child’s voice, sweeter than any sound
+    On the earth or in the air, voice of eternal joy,
+    Victorious over the bowed wisdom of mortals,
+    A well beyond the world, that springs and sings.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE UNDISCOVERED WORLD
+
+
+    O in a living stream to bathe
+    That runs its course from spring to sea!
+    And O to cast this aching mesh
+    Of iron bands that starkly swathe
+    Limbs that labour, neck to knee!
+    To feel the wind upon the flesh,
+    Wind that was before man was,
+    Blowing out of blue divine;
+    Feel the feet on morning grass
+    Lightly firm, and body bare
+    Over-showered with beams so fine
+    As cleanse the very heart of care!
+    Sages, had you found but this
+    For the mind, so it could use
+    What the body knows of bliss
+    When all thought it loves to lose
+    Merely poising in the sun,
+    Sure of powers a-spring within it
+    Rippling out to leap and run,—
+    Like for memory’s waiting ear
+    Silence, ere the music win it:—
+    When unreasoned joy alone
+    Brims the body, itself its own
+    Infinity unquestioning;
+    Careless, Life is O so near,
+    Death a legendary thing,
+    Breath and blood like bells that ring;—
+    Sages, had you art to find
+    Such a glory for the mind,
+    Not with eyes that are too wise
+    But the lover’s wonder-vision
+    Seeing far and seeing near
+    As within one radiant sphere
+    All things living, joined and whole,
+    Bloomed with light of Paradise;
+    Sages then—but who has taught
+    Such an end for labouring thought,
+    Such a nakedness of soul;—
+    What but probing, doubting, and division?
+    Hark, on iron iron’s endless clamour!
+    The hours, the hours, drive swifter than we strain—
+    Earth changes not, but who has changed us,
+    As if a Fury with a shadowy hammer
+    Nailed the nails into the fiery brain?
+    Who has estranged us?
+
+    What dark enemy within
+    Makes of Earth an enemy?
+    Is it not he who sought of old
+    Secrets of her wealth to win,
+    Hot with greed and overbold,
+    Aching to possess her? he,
+    Searching labyrinthine veins,
+    Thirsted for yet rarer gains,
+    And through patient nights perused
+    Each divided element,
+    Curious of that pregnant dust
+    Which with intent hand he bruised;
+    Crucibled in fire the grains
+    That should subtly be cajoled
+    In the end to yield his lust
+    Feasts of gold—a continent
+    Molten into dazzling gold!
+    (Were not heard the Sirens then
+    Deriding the poor dreams of men?)
+    Nay, but he would scrutinize
+    Even Night’s deep-ordered scheme,
+    And spell his own proud destinies
+    In scripture of the starry stream.
+    Coveting what power those skies
+    Might enthrone, he sought a charm
+    That should warp them and should woo.
+    To his use, and by such aid
+    To disimperil of one harm
+    This brief body, would undo
+    A universe. And he arrayed
+    In a constellated robe
+    His heaven-projected effigy,
+    Because his spirit was afraid
+    Of its nakedness, nor dared
+    Terrors of the truth to probe;
+    Rather chose itself to ensky
+    In a dream. But no night bared
+    To him her grandeur, swerved no spheres
+    To the wrench of human fears.
+    Earth and Night to crave of lust
+    Yield but fruitlessness and dust;
+    Dust to lust, to greed a weed!
+    Mockers rise from those forgotten years:
+    ‘This is he, the self-dupe, still the same
+    Vaunter of a world of his defiling!
+    Claiming heavens, with only will to maim.
+    Who is this to own an earth’s empire,
+    In whose blood is mud, and this aviling
+    Squalor of desire?’
+
+    Lo, with feet on fiery ashes
+    Earth’s foiled master casts his eyes
+    Round his world-abode. Time’s heir,
+    Freed by blood of martyrs, wise
+    With myriad lives of thought and care,
+    Into Doubt’s dim future gropes,
+    Black with omen, lit with flashes!
+    Lo, beneath his heaven of hopes
+    Falling palaces of dream,
+    Proudly pillared; regions wreckt,
+    Peopled with stray flames that seem
+    Hot greeds from his burning brain
+    And the very earth infect.
+    Lo, like bodies for his fear
+    Shadowy shapes of force insane
+    Menacing in murk appear,
+    Primed with energy to kill,—
+    Engines of his intellect,
+    Incarnations of his will!
+    Those old siren-songs of air
+    Change into a song abhorred,
+    Chanting softly, Revel, Lord!
+    Triumph, Master! This you sought!
+    This your own proud hands have wrought!
+    Now the lover’s loathing taste
+    Comes on him for what he burned
+    So imperiously to clutch.
+    Where is now the bliss embraced,
+    Where the conquest? At a touch
+    All’s to desolation turned.
+    Is it he, or Earth, betrays?
+    She that seemed to sting him on
+    To possession, once possessed,
+    Dispossesses him. Her breast
+    Stony grows, and hard her gaze.
+    —Yet, oh, could she again be wooed
+    In her own, her chosen ways,
+    Shall she not transform her mood,
+    Glorify with truth his quest,
+    Give, as lovers give, entire
+    Body to body, mind to mind,
+    Ay, and more than these can find,—
+    Spirit to spirit? Beauty of Desire,
+    Beauty beyond possession still is breathing,
+    Beauty in us defaced!
+    O secret spring eternal, muddied here,
+    Soiled and sunken, troubled into seething!
+    Torrent of Desire, by greed and fear
+    Spilled into waste!
+
+
+III. 2
+
+    Be still! Wash out this dull roar from the ear
+    That fevers Time; be emptied the hot brain
+    Of clamorous, intricately-teasing toil.
+    Let spiritual Silence brim again
+    The mind’s well to a mirror virgin-clear;
+    All these invented cares smoothe and uncoil.
+
+    Contemplate Silence; the wild Silence, ere
+    Music or word was; waste, unshapen sound;
+    Crying of wind; moaning of sea; stammer of storm;
+    Gropings as for a being nowhere found;
+    Mateless desires, frustrated throbs of air,
+    Without home, without form.
+
+    They sought a lodge in haunted flesh, they sought
+    The inward tingling sense’s touched accord;
+    To be delivered, to be born perfect
+    On shapes of lips, a breathed, a living word,
+    A flower that seeds its riches, thought from thought,
+    Incarnate sound, mysterious and elect.
+
+    Contemplate Silence! The unwithered womb
+    Of all music infinite as desire;
+    All words, releasing tears and bliss; all song,
+    That wins at last a universe for choir,
+    And there the enlarged spirit has full room,
+    There its desires and its delights belong.
+
+    All speech, all song, all music still unborn,
+    Waits there for its futurity of mind
+    To become human; yet it holds some tone
+    Drawn from a something vaster than mankind,
+    As from profounder heart-strings torn,
+    And yet complete in man alone;
+
+    As if behind him travailing, the whole
+    Dark world were seeking in this eloquent flesh
+    Some other self, and sighing here to be
+    Born afresh, born afresh;
+    To win a world yet undiscovered in the soul:
+    ‘O Voice,’ it cries, ‘utter; O Hands, deliver me!’
+
+    With such a dark quest in desirous eyes,
+    From the ancient East, as through a silent gate
+    In the mind’s city and labyrinth of thought,
+    Those Magian Kings, of knowledge satiate,
+    Of riches satiate, and forlornly wise,
+    Down desert gorges brought
+
+    Gifts for the Unknown: nay, but Earth from far
+    In yearning sent them, her ambassadors.
+    Rocks opened veins of gold, trees oozed their blood,
+    Spices sighed, gems burned up from cavern-floors,
+    The very Night had made Desire a star,
+    That over against them, strange and certain, stood;
+
+    And thither laden with Earth’s hope and want,
+    Her symbol’d sighs and riches of her pain,
+    Down separate passes of the mountain streaming
+    Wound onward each amid his marvelling train,
+    Those sages drawn from towers of midnight haunt
+    By their prophetic dreaming;
+    And trumpet thrilled to trumpet thro’ the night,
+    And torches told of glistering strange attire,
+    Where met those three kings on one errand led.
+    What image shaped they of the World’s Desire,
+    What presence throned in majesty and might,
+    As they went musing, deep in hope and dread,
+
+    And under vast cope of the wheeling skies
+    Found but a naked child, a child new-born?
+    Wisdom resigned the crown of her enthroning;
+    All her impassioned question was forsworn:
+    In wonder she saw all things with new eyes.
+    Then, there were songs of joy; now, sound of a world groaning.
+
+
+III. 3
+
+    Mystery of Dawn, ere yet the glory streams
+    Risen over earth, and pauses in that hush
+    When far, as from an ecstasy, clouds flush,
+    And hills lift up their pureness into dreams
+    Of light that not yet colours the cold flower,
+    And the earth-clasping, heaven-desiring tree
+    Trembles in virginal expectancy—
+    What breath of the unknown Power
+    Is this that, spirit to spirit, as with a spousal kiss
+    Comes seeking us, even us, through shadow and dew,—
+    Seeking in this soiled flesh what undiscovered world
+    Beyond tears, beyond bliss, beyond wisdom, beyond
+    Time? what recaptured harmony of earth and heaven?
+    What world made new?
+
+    A world so strange, the spirit thrills to flame,
+    Transfigured in a wonder of release!
+    A world so near, it has no other name
+    Than light and breath! Where lost we, then, this peace?
+    Wanting what charm to cleanse
+    Our eyes? To see; is this the last of gifts,
+    That, as the scales drop, the heart so uplifts?
+    O world where no possession is of men’s,
+    Where the will rages not with fever to destroy
+    Differing wills, or warp another life to its use,
+    But each lives in the light of its own joy!
+    In one wide vision all have share, and we in all,
+    Infinitely companioned with the stars, the dust,
+    Beasts of the field, and stones, and flowers that fall!
+    This body that we use seems in that air
+    Marvellous; secret from ourselves; a power
+    Without which were no speech, nor deed done anywhere,
+    Nor could thought range and tower,
+    Nor seed be sown for the unborn time to reap;
+    Whose natural motion was ordained to be
+    Beautiful as a wave out of a sea
+    Boundless as mind asleep;
+    So passionately shaped, in every part perfect,
+    Universes are wounded in its abasement,
+    Crying from stone to star;
+    The unimagined height, the immeasurable deep,
+    Hungers, abysses, heavens, millions of ghosts from far
+    Meet in this body born to laugh and weep.
+
+    Weep; not for the endured, ancestral ill,
+    Perils and plagues, that ambush all our ways,
+    Time’s injury, and pain’s deep-wandered maze;
+    These need not eyes to see, but only flesh to feel.
+    But of the eternal vision to partake,
+    And see what we have done, and what refused,
+    To what accepted blindness we grow used,
+    And what marred shapes of one another make,
+    This is to weep such tears as no flesh-throes have cost,
+    Weep for our loves, our loves, that we ourselves have slain,
+    The powers of loveliness that we have left forlorn.
+    Eyes we had and saw not, ears and we did not hear!
+    Ah, when the heart, full-visioned, breaks in shame and pain,
+    Then is the world’s hope born.
+
+    The cry of desolation turns to praise.
+    If falsehood first enchant the eager mind,
+    And if desire be cruel, being blind,
+    Each by its own infirmity betrays,
+    And some profounder, more imperious need
+    Drives through all smart, whatever world to lose,
+    The pure vision to choose,
+    And tho’ Truth kill, there in the end be freed.
+    Open, open, gates of deliverance, open!
+    See, liberated spirits, see, victorious ones,
+    For testimony of us from homes of glory shine,
+    Vindicators of this brief flesh, they mingle us,—
+    Soiled and despoiled,—with beauty and with felicity,
+    And sting us from afar with the Divine.
+
+    Hands of men stretched out in so dark a craving!
+    Baffled heart, clouded vision; filled with ache
+    To know you have maimed the world you sought to make
+    Your instrument and minister, enslaving
+    Powers of earth and air—Hands that have wrought
+    So glorious things, the thoughts of joy to house!
+    Heart that has pulsed so ardent for its vow’s
+    Accomplishment,—O heart so hardly taught!
+    O stretched-out hands! of you Eternity has need.
+    Give but your sacred passion and your shaping art,
+    The hunger of Eternity is there,—
+    Barren else, barren: chaos and a wilderness
+    Of feud and everlasting greed devouring greed,
+    The unshapen dream’s despair!
+
+    Spirit of Man, dear spirit, sore opprest
+    With self-estrangement, and mis-choosing will,
+    And all satiety of gainful skill,—
+    Possession that was never yet possessed,—
+    You that have been so great a lover, giving
+    In innocency all for sacrifice;
+    Whom neither Time nor earth’s regions suffice—
+    You too are sought, where still your dream is living.
+    Over the secret oceans of uncharted mind
+    Who knows what voyagers, what sails invisibly
+    Press on, for all the lost, the foundered hopes untrue?
+    Who knows, through ignorant mists and storm upon that sea
+    What Lover, what unweariable Adventurer,
+    Makes still his quest of you?
+
+    O world that is within us, yet must still
+    Out of the eternal mystery be wooed
+    Ere it be ours and, breathing in the blood,
+    Live in its beauty, as the miracle
+    Of the divine colour of flowers in night
+    Was not, and is not of themselves alone
+    Nor of the dawn-beam, but of both made one,—
+    A marriage-mystery of earth and light!
+    O undiscovered world that all about us lies
+    When spirit to Spirit surrenders, and like young Love sees
+    Heaven with human eyes!
+    World of radiant morning! Joy’s untravelled region!
+    Why lies it solitary? and O why tarry we?
+    Why daily wander out from Paradise?
+
+
+III. 4
+
+    World-besieging Storm, from horizon heaped and menacing
+    Rear up the walls of thunder, till they tower
+    Shattering over earth, and from heart to heart reverberate,
+    Lancing that bright fear through the ruin-shower!
+    Revel, Winds, severing the bough of leafy promises
+    With rages from returning chaos sent!
+    Mockers and Destroyers, come; here is Man, predestinate
+    To all your arrows at his bosom bent.
+    Strip him of his splendours, of his conquests and dominions,
+    His secure boast to be earth’s lord enthroned,
+    Humble him: he stands forth greater in his nakedness
+    Than in the wealth and safety that he owned.
+    He that has so loved peril in all experience,
+    He that has gone with Sorrow all her way,
+    Will not now refuse or shrink; prove him to the innermost,
+    With worse than worst confront him: come what may,
+    Lo, you awake, O Trumpets of Calamity,
+    Some fragment of old Darkness in his breast;
+    Lo, to him fraternal is the stony and the terrible place:
+    His stricken Genius out of deeps unguessed
+    Rises up, grappling his reality to reality,
+    And still the secret in himself explores,
+    Bound beyond fear, the discovered and discoverer,
+    And in his own soul touches farthest shores.
+    Though he be stript of all, Powers from far replenish him,
+    Powers of the streaming worlds that through him stream.
+    O throbbing heart, O lifted arms, O tenderness,
+    O only capable of grief supreme!
+    O earth for ever mingled with unearthliness
+    Because the eternal with the brief is twined!
+    Wonder of breath that is momentary and tremulous
+    Suffices him who breathes eternal mind.
+    Vision that dawns beyond knowledge shall deliver him
+    From all that flattered, threatened, foiled, betrayed.
+    Lo, having nothing, he is free of all the universe,
+    And where light is, he enters unafraid.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Decoration]
+
+  LONDON: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
+  CHISWICK PRESS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75422 ***