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Title: One Foot in Eden Date of first publication: 1956 Author: Edwin Muir (1887-1959) Date first posted: Apr. 7, 2017 Date last updated: Apr. 7, 2017 Faded Page eBook #20170419 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net ONE FOOT IN EDEN _by the same author_ COLLECTED POEMS, 1921-1951 THE VOYAGE AND OTHER POEMS THE LABYRINTH PROMETHEUS EDWIN MUIR _One Foot in Eden_ FABER AND FABER _24 Russell Square_ _London_ _First published in mcmlvi by Faber and Faber Limited 24 Russell Square London W.C.1 Printed in Great Britain by R. MacLehose and Company Limited The University Press Glasgow All rights reserved_ To WILLA CONTENTS I Milton _page_ 15 The Animals 16 The Days 17 Adam's Dream 19 Outside Eden 22 Prometheus 24 The Grave of Prometheus 26 Orpheus' Dream 27 The Other Oedipus 28 The Charm 29 Telemachos Remembers 30 The Heroes 32 Abraham 33 The Succession 34 The Road 36 The Annunciation 37 The Christmas 38 The Son 39 The Killing 41 Lost and Found 43 Antichrist 44 The Lord 45 One Foot in Eden 46 The Incarnate One 47 Scotland's Winter 49 The Great House 50 The Emblem 51 II To Franz Kafka _page_ 55 Effigies 56 The Difficult Land 60 Nothing there but Faith 62 Double Absence 63 Day and Night 64 The Other Story 66 Dream and Thing 67 Song for a Hypothetical Age 68 The Young Princes 70 The Cloud 71 The Horses 73 Song 75 The Island 76 Into Thirty Centuries Born 77 My Own 79 The Choice 80 If I could Know 81 The Late Wasp 82 The Late Swallow 83 Song 84 I MILTON Milton, his face set fair for Paradise, And knowing that he and Paradise were lost In separate desolation, bravely crossed Into his second night and paid his price. There towards the end he to the dark tower came Set square in the gate, a mass of blackened stone Crowned with vermilion fiends like streamers blown From a great funnel filled with roaring flame. Shut in his darkness, these he could not see, But heard the steely clamour known too well On Saturday nights in every street in Hell. Where, past the devilish din, could Paradise be? A footstep more, and his unblinded eyes Saw far and near the fields of Paradise. THE ANIMALS They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place. For with names the world was called Out of the empty air, With names was built and walled, Line and circle and square, Dust and emerald; Snatched from deceiving death By the articulate breath. But these have never trod Twice the familiar track, Never never turned back Into the memoried day. All is new and near In the unchanging Here Of the fifth great day of God, That shall remain the same, Never shall pass away. On the sixth day we came. THE DAYS Issuing from the Word The seven days came, Each in its own place, Its own name. And the first long days A hard and rocky spring, Inhuman burgeoning, And nothing there for claw or hand, Vast loneliness ere loneliness began, Where the blank seasons in their journeying Saw water at play with water and sand with sand. The waters stirred And from the doors were cast Wild lights and shadows on the formless face Of the flood of chaos, vast Lengthening and dwindling image of earth and heaven. The forest's green shadow Softly over the water driven, As if the earth's green wonder, endless meadow Floated and sank within its own green light. In water and night Sudden appeared the lion's violent head, Raging and burning in its watery cave. The stallion's tread Soundlessly fell on the flood, and the animals poured Onward, flowing across the flowing wave. Then on the waters fell The shadow of man, and earth and the heavens scrawled With names, as if each pebble and leaf would tell The tale untellable. And the Lord called The seventh day forth and the glory of the Lord. And now we see in the sun The mountains standing clear in the third day (Where they shall always stay) And thence a river run, Threading, clear cord of water, all to all: The wooded hill and the cattle in the meadow, The tall wave breaking on the high sea-wall, The people at evening walking, The crescent shadow Of the light-built bridge, the hunter stalking The flying quarry, each in a different morning, The fish in the billow's heart, the man with the net, The hungry swords crossed in the cross of warning, The lion set High on the banner, leaping into the sky, The seasons playing Their game of sun and moon and east and west, The animal watching man and bird go by, The women praying For the passing of this fragmentary day Into the day where all are gathered together, Things and their names, in the storm's and the lightning's nest, The seventh great day and the clear eternal weather. ADAM'S DREAM They say the first dream Adam our father had After his agelong daydream in the Garden When heaven and sun woke in his wakening mind, The earth with all its hills and woods and waters, The friendly tribes of trees and animals, And earth's last wonder Eve (the first great dream Which is the ground of every dream since then)-- They say he dreamt lying on the naked ground, The gates shut fast behind him as he lay Fallen in Eve's fallen arms, his terror drowned In her engulfing terror, in the abyss Whence there's no further fall, and comfort is-- That he was standing on a rocky ledge High on a mountainside, bare crag behind, In front a plain as far as eye could reach, And on the plain a few small figures running That were like men and women, yet were so far away He could not see their faces. On they ran, And fell, and rose again, and ran, and fell, And rising were the same yet not the same, Identical or interchangeable, Different in indifference. As he looked Still there were more of them, the plain was filling As by an alien arithmetical magic Unknown in Eden, a mechanical Addition without meaning, joining only Number to number in no mode or order, Weaving no pattern. For these creatures moved Towards no fixed mark even when in growing bands They clashed against each other and clashing fell In mounds of bodies. For they rose again, Identical or interchangeable, And went their way that was not like a way; Some back and forward, back and forward, some In a closed circle, wide or narrow, others In zigzags on the sand. Yet all were busy, And tense with purpose as they cut the air Which seemed to press them back. Sometimes they paused While one stopped one--fortuitous assignations In the disorder, whereafter two by two They ran awhile, Then parted and again were single. Some Ran straight against the frontier of the plain Till the horizon drove them back. A few Stood still and never moved. Then Adam cried Out of his dream, 'What are you doing there?' And the crag answered 'Are you doing there?' 'What are you doing there?'--'you doing there?' The animals had withdrawn and from the caves And woods stared out in fear or condemnation, Like outlaws or like judges. All at once Dreaming or half-remembering, 'This is time', Thought Adam in his dream, and time was strange To one lately in Eden. 'I must see', He cried, 'the faces. Where are the faces? Who Are you all out there?' Then in his changing dream He was a little nearer, and he saw They were about some business strange to him That had a form and sequence past their knowledge; And that was why they ran so frenziedly. Yet all, it seemed, made up a story, illustrated By these the living, the unknowing, cast Each singly for his part. But Adam longed For more, not this mere moving pattern, not This illustrated storybook of mankind Always a-making, improvised on nothing. At that he was among them, and saw each face Was like his face, so that he would have hailed them As sons of God but that something restrained him. And he remembered all, Eden, the Fall, The Promise, and his place, and took their hands That were his hands, his and his children's hands, Cried out and was at peace, and turned again In love and grief in Eve's encircling arms. OUTSIDE EDEN A few lead in their harvest still By the ruined wall and broken gate. Far inland shines the radiant hill. Inviolable the empty gate, Impassable the gaping wall; And the mountain over all. Such is the country of this clan, Haunted by guilt and innocence. There is a sweetness in the air That bloomed as soon as time began, But now is dying everywhere. This people guard in reverence Their proud and famous family tree Sprung from a glorious king who once Lived in such boundless liberty As never a one among the great Has known in all the kingdoms since; For death was barred from his estate. Lost long ago, the histories say, He and his consort lost it all. Guiltiest and least guilty, they In innocence discovered sin Round a lost corner of the day, And fell and fell through all the fall That hurled them headlong over the wall. Their children live where then they lay. Guilt is next door to innocence. So here this people choose to live And never think to travel hence, Nor learn to be inquisitive, Nor browse in sin's great library, The single never-ending book That fills the shelves of all the earth. There the learned enquirers look And blind themselves to see their face. But these live in the land of birth And count all else an idle grace. The simple have long memories. Memory makes simple all that is. So these the lawless world can love At ease, the thickets running wild, The thorny waste, the flourishing grove. Their knotted landscape, wrong and clear As the crude drawings of a child, Is to them become more dear Than geometrical symmetry. Their griefs are all in memory grown As natural as a weathered stone. Their troubles are a tribute given Freely while gazing at the hill. Such is their simplicity, Standing on earth, looking at heaven. PROMETHEUS The careless seasons pass and leave me here. The forests rise like ghosts and fade like dreams. All has its term; flowers flicker on the ground A summer moment, and the rock is bare. Alone the animals trace their changeless figure, Embodying change. Age-long I watch the leopard Glaring at something past the end of time, And the wild goat immobile on his rock, Lost in a trance of roaming through the skies: I look and he is there. But pilgrim man Travels foreknowing to his stopping place, Awareness on his lips, which have tasted sorrow, Foretasted death. These strangers do not know Their happiness is in that which leads their sorrow Round to an end. My hope is not like theirs. I pray for the end of all things and this pain Which makes me cry: Move faster, sun and stars, And bear these chains and bear this body away Into your flying circuit; freedom waits There in the blessed nothingness that follows The charging onset of the centaur-stars, Trampling time out. For when these clamorous races Lie silent in the ground from which they came, And all the earth is quiet, a hush may fall Even in the house of heaven, and the heedless gods May raise their eyes to look and bid me come Again among them, then when the feud is over And fire and those in whom it blazed and died Are strewn in ashes on the ashen hills. What shall I say to the gods? Heaven will be strange, And strange those scars inscribed in distant time. Who will give answer to the earth's dark story? Zeus with the ponderous glory of the bull, Or the boy Eros with his fretful quiver? What expectation there except at most That this my knowledge will be an aeon's gossip? The shrines are emptying and the peoples changing. It may be I should find Olympus vacant If I should return. For I have heard a wonder: Lands without gods; nothing but earth and water; Words without mystery; and the only creed An iron text to beat the round skulls flat And fit them for the cap of a buried master. Strange ritual. Now time's storm is rising, sweeping The sons of man into an emptier room, Vast as a continent, bare as a desert, Where the dust takes man's lifetime to revolve Around the walls, harried by peevish gusts And little spiteful eddies; nothing standing But the cast-iron cities and rubbish mountains. At the world's end to whom shall I tell the story? A god came down, they say, from another heaven Not in rebellion but in pity and love, Was born a son of woman, lived and died, And rose again with all the spoils of time Back to his home, where now they are transmuted Into bright toys and various frames of glory; And time itself is there a world of marvels. If I could find that god, he would hear and answer. THE GRAVE OF PROMETHEUS No one comes here now, neither god nor man. For long the animals have kept away, Scared by immortal cries and the scream of vultures; Now by this silence. The heavenly thief who stole Heaven's dangerous treasure turned to common earth When that great company forsook Olympus. The fire was out, and he became his barrow. Ten yards long there he lay outstretched, and grass Grew over him: all else in a breath forgotten. Yet there you still may see a tongue of stone, Shaped like a calloused hand where no hand should be, Extended from the sward as if for alms, Its palm all licked and blackened as with fire. A mineral change made cool his fiery bed, And made his burning body a quiet mound, And his great face a vacant ring of daisies. ORPHEUS' DREAM And she was there. The little boat, Coasting the perilous isles of sleep, Zones of oblivion and despair, Stopped, for Eurydice was there. The foundering skiff could scarcely keep All that felicity afloat. As if we had left earth's frontier wood Long since and from this sea had won The lost original of the soul, The moment gave us pure and whole Each back to each, and swept us on Past every choice to boundless good. Forgiveness, truth, atonement, all Our love at once--till we could dare At last to turn our heads and see The poor ghost of Eurydice Still sitting in her silver chair, Alone in Hades' empty hall. THE OTHER OEDIPUS Remembered on the Peloponnesian roads, He and his serving-boy and his concubine, White-headed and light-hearted, their true wits gone Past the last stroke of time into a day Without a yesterday or a to-morrow, A brightness laid like a blue lake around them, Or endless field to play or linger in. They were so gay and innocent, you'd have thought A god had won a glorious prize for them In some celestial field, and the odds were gone, Fate sent on holiday, the earth and heaven Thenceforth in endless friendly talk together. They were quite storyless and had clean forgotten That memory burning in another world; But they too leaf-light now for any story. If anyone spoke a word of other guilt By chance before them, then they stamped their feet In rage and gnashed their teeth like peevish children. But then forgot. The road their welcoming home. They would not stay in a house or let a door Be locked on them. The surly Spartan farmers Were kind to them, pitying their happiness. THE CHARM There was a drug that Helen knew. Dropped in the wine-cup it could take All memory and all grief away, And while the drinker, wide awake, Sat in his chair, indifference grew Around him in the estranging day. He saw the colours shine and flow, The giant lineaments break and change, But all storyless, all strange. The crystal spheres on Helen's brow Took and gave back the coloured world, Yet only seemed to smile or glare At nothing but the empty air. The serving women crossed the floor, Swept by a silent tempest, whirled Into the light and through the door. This he saw and nothing more, While all the charities, unborn, Slept soundly in his burdened breast As he took his heavy rest, Careless, thoughtless and forlorn. So strong the enchantment, Homer says, That if this man's own son had died, Killed at his feet, his dreaming gaze (Like a false-hearted summer day Watching the hunter and his prey At ease) would not have changed at all, Nor his heart knocked against his side. But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall, And sorrow break upon his heart. TELEMACHOS REMEMBERS Twenty years, every day, The figures in the web she wove Came and stood and went away. Her fingers in their pitiless play Beat downward as the shuttle drove. Slowly, slowly did they come, With horse and chariot, spear and bow, Half-finished heroes sad and mum, Came slowly to the shuttle's hum. Time itself was not so slow. And what at last was there to see? A horse's head, a trunkless man, Mere odds and ends about to be, And the thin line of augury Where through the web the shuttle ran. How could she bear the mounting load, Dare once again her ghosts to rouse? Far away Odysseus trod The treadmill of the turning road That did not bring him to his house. The weary loom, the weary loom, The task grown sick from morn to night, From year to year. The treadle's boom Made a low thunder in the room. The woven phantoms mazed her sight. If she had pushed it to the end, Followed the shuttle's cunning song So far she had no thought to rend In time the web from end to end, She would have worked a matchless wrong. Instead, that jumble of heads and spears, Forlorn scraps of her treasure trove. I wet them with my childish tears Not knowing she wove into her fears Pride and fidelity and love. THE HEROES When these in all their bravery took the knock And like obedient children swaddled and bound Were borne to sleep within the chambered rock, A splendour broke from that impervious ground, Which they would never know. Whence came that greatness? No fiery chariot whirled them heavenwards, they Saw no Elysium opening, but the straitness Of full submission bound them where they lay. What could that greatness be? It was not fame. Yet now they seemed to grow as they grew less, And where they lay were more than where they had stood. They did not go to any beatitude. They were stripped clean of feature, presence, name, When that strange glory broke from namelessness. ABRAHAM The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks With the meandering art of wavering water That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way. He came, rested and prospered, and went on, Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms, And over each one its own particular sky, Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed, That went with him but when he rested changed. His mind was full of names Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues, And all that was theirs one day he would inherit. He died content and full of years, though still The Promise had not come, and left his bones, Far from his father's house, in alien Canaan. THE SUCCESSION Legendary Abraham, The old Chaldean wanderer, First among these peoples came, Cruising above them like a star That is in love with distances And has through age to calmness grown, Patient in the wilderness And untarrying in the sown. At last approached his setting mark. Thence he sent his twin star out, Isaac, to revolve alone. For two great stars that through an age Play in their corner of the sky, Separate go into the dark, And ere they end their roundabout One must live and one must die. Isaac in his tutelage Wheeled around the father light. Then began his pilgrimage, Through another day and night, Other peoples, other lands. Where the father could not go There is gone the careless son. He can never miss his way. By strangers' hands to strangers' hands He is carried where he will. Free, he must the powers obey, Serve, be served by good and ill, Safe through all the hazards run. All shall watch him come and go Until his quittance he has won; And Jacob wheels into the day. We through the generations came Here by a way we do not know From the fields of Abraham, And still the road is scarce begun. To hazard and to danger go The sallying generations all Where the imperial highways run. And our songs and legends call The hazard and the danger good; For our fathers understood That danger was by hope begot And hazard by revolving chance Since first we drew the enormous lot. THE ROAD The great road stretched before them, clear and still, Then from in front one cried: 'Turn back! Turn back!' Yet they had never seen so fine a track, Honest and frank past any thought of ill. But when they glanced behind, how strange, how strange, These wild demented windings in and out-- Traced by some devil of mischief or of doubt?-- That was the road they had come by. Could it change? How could they penetrate that perilous maze Backwards, again, climb backwards down the scree From the wrong side, slither among the dead? Yet as they travelled on, for many days These words rang in their ears as if they said, 'There was another road you did not see.' THE ANNUNCIATION The angel and the girl are met. Earth was the only meeting place. For the embodied never yet Travelled beyond the shore of space. The eternal spirits in freedom go. See, they have come together, see, While the destroying minutes flow, Each reflects the other's face Till heaven in hers and earth in his Shine steady there. He's come to her From far beyond the farthest star, Feathered through time. Immediacy Of strangest strangeness is the bliss That from their limbs all movement takes. Yet the increasing rapture brings So great a wonder that it makes Each feather tremble on his wings. Outside the window footsteps fall Into the ordinary day And with the sun along the wall Pursue their unreturning way That was ordained in eternity. Sound's perpetual roundabout Rolls its numbered octaves out And hoarsely grinds its battered tune. But through the endless afternoon These neither speak nor movement make, But stare into their deepening trance As if their gaze would never break. THE CHRISTMAS Now Christmas comes. The menial earth Lays by its worn and sweaty gear And strews with emblems of rebirth The burial of the solar year. Midnight strikes. One star awake Watches the Mother and the Child Who with his little hands will make Spring blossom in the winter wild. This star that left the ordered throng Caused no confusion in the night, Nor strayed to prove his brothers wrong, But told that all the stars were right. Three little days with lengthening glow Sets the great year upon its way; An infant's cry across the snow Rouses the never-setting day. A Child, a God, he will respire Obediently time's mortal breath, Freely work out his double hire, Endless enact a Birth, a Death, Accomplishing the miracle, The marriage feast of heaven and earth, Of which on earth we cannot tell Save in such words: a Death, a Birth. The childish starlight glimmers near In the green firmament of the tree, And the soft dreaming of the year Leads in Judaea and Galilee. THE SON This hungry flesh and bone That white and black and brown Share was shared by One Once who to death went down. Son of God and of Man, He breathed as ours his breath, And in this body ran The crooked road to death. Night and day and night Wheeled him through time and space, Whose hour was changeless light, Infinity his place. Time's essential heat Bound him inside the womb And in his arteries beat The proud march to the tomb. He from eternity Stared now through a little eye, That God and Man might see The good and the wicked die. Born, his babbling tongue Told infancy's helplessness, Disgrace of being young, Adolescent distress, Till manhood's brutal force Through all his veins rolled on Wild as a headstrong horse, Though he was Heaven's son. Thirst like a rusty knife, Dry hunger he withstood, Who had the water of life And the immortal food. The skill of the carpenter, The sailor's dauntless heart He learned, lest he should mar, A God, his second part. Happiness not of Heaven, And unimmortal sorrows He chose, talk in the evening, And the wild mounting morrows That wound in narrowing rings Up to the waiting Tree Through treachery of things And men's treachery. Till only despair was left; 'Me why hast Thou forsaken?' God of God bereft Down from the tree was taken, That so the Light shine through The first to the last pain, And all be made new Down to the last grain. Ordinary men Saw him take his fall. All is changed since then; He is joined with all. THE KILLING That was the day they killed the Son of God On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem. Zion was bare, her children from their maze Sucked by the demon curiosity Clean through the gates. The very halt and blind Had somehow got themselves up to the hill. After the ceremonial preparation, The scourging, nailing, nailing against the wood, Erection of the main-trees with their burden, While from the hill rose an orchestral wailing, They were there at last, high up in the soft spring day. We watched the writhings, heard the moanings, saw The three heads turning on their separate axles Like broken wheels left spinning. Round _his_ head Was loosely bound a crown of plaited thorn That hurt at random, stinging temple and brow As the pain swung into its envious circle. In front the wreath was gathered in a knot That as he gazed looked like the last stump left Of a death-wounded deer's great antlers. Some Who came to stare grew silent as they looked, Indignant or sorry. But the hardened old And the hard-hearted young, although at odds From the first morning, cursed him with one curse, Having prayed for a Rabbi or an armed Messiah And found the Son of God. What use to them Was a God or a Son of God? Of what avail For purposes such as theirs? Beside the cross-foot, Alone, four women stood and did not move All day. The sun revolved, the shadow wheeled, The evening fell. His head lay on his breast, But in his breast they watched his heart move on By itself alone, accomplishing its journey. Their taunts grew louder, sharpened by the knowledge That he was walking in the park of death, Far from their rage. Yet all grew stale at last, Spite, curiosity, envy, hate itself. They waited only for death and death was slow And came so quietly they scarce could mark it. They were angry then with death and death's deceit. I was a stranger, could not read these people Or this outlandish deity. Did a God Indeed in dying cross my life that day By chance, he on his road and I on mine? LOST AND FOUND That by which we have lost and still shall lose Even what we win (but never fully win,) It gave the choice without the skill to choose, The rough-cast world, the broken Eden within, Taught us the narrow miss and the accident, The countless odds and the predestined plot, Action and thought to every bias bent, And chance, the winning and the losing lot. It gave us time, and time gave us the story, Beginning and end in one wild largesse spent, Inexplicable. Until the heavenly Glory Took on our flesh and wrought the meaning. Since, Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters of that Prince Are we, by grace, although in banishment. ANTICHRIST He walks, the enchanter, on his sea of glass, Poring upon his blue inverted heaven Where a false sun revolves from west to east. If he could raise his eyes he would see his hell. In him all is reversed; evil is good. He is no spirit, nor a spirit's shadow, But a mere toy shaped by ingenious devils To bring discomfiture on credulous man. He's the false copy where each feature's wrong, Yet so disposed the whole gives a resemblance. When he's in anguish smiles writhe on his lips And will not stop. His imperturbable brow Is carved by rage not his but theirs that made him, For he's a nothing where they move in freedom, Knowing that nothing's there. When he forgives It is for love of sin not of the sinner. He takes sin for his province, knows sin only, Nothing but sin from end to end of the world. He heals the sick to show his conjuring skill, Vexed only by the cure; and turns his cheek To goad the furious to more deadly fury, And damn by a juggling trick the ingenuous sinner. He brings men from the dead to tell the living That their undoing is a common fetch. Ingeniously he postures on the Tree (His crowning jest), an actor miming death, While his indifferent mind is idly pleased That treason should run on through time for ever. His vast indulgence is so free and ample, You well might think it universal love, For all seems goodness, sweetness, harmony. He is the Lie; one true thought, and he's gone. THE LORD They could not tell me who should be my lord, But I could read from every word they said The common thought: Perhaps that lord was dead, And only a story now and a wandering word. How could I follow a word or serve a fable, They asked me. 'Here are lords a-plenty. Take Service with one, if only for your sake; Yet better be your own master if you're able.' I would rather scour the roads, a masterless dog, Than take such service, be a public fool, Obstreperous or tongue-tied, a good rogue, Than be with those, the clever and the dull, Who say that lord is dead; when I can hear Daily his dying whisper in my ear. ONE FOOT IN EDEN One foot in Eden still, I stand And look across the other land. The world's great day is growing late, Yet strange these fields that we have planted So long with crops of love and hate. Time's handiworks by time are haunted, And nothing now can separate The corn and tares compactly grown. The armorial weed in stillness bound About the stalk; these are our own. Evil and good stand thick around In the fields of charity and sin Where we shall lead our harvest in. Yet still from Eden springs the root As clean as on the starting day. Time takes the foliage and the fruit And burns the archetypal leaf To shapes of terror and of grief Scattered along the winter way. But famished field and blackened tree Bear flowers in Eden never known. Blossoms of grief and charity Bloom in these darkened fields alone. What had Eden ever to say Of hope and faith and pity and love Until was buried all its day And memory found its treasure trove? Strange blessings never in Paradise Fall from these beclouded skies. THE INCARNATE ONE The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream, And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae. I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream, Christ, man and creature in their inner day. How could our race betray The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake Who chose this form and fashion for our sake? The Word made flesh here is made word again, A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook. See there King Calvin with his iron pen, And God three angry letters in a book, And there the logical hook On which the Mystery is impaled and bent Into an ideological instrument. There's better gospel in man's natural tongue, And truer sight was theirs outside the Law Who saw the far side of the Cross among The archaic peoples in their ancient awe, In ignorant wonder saw The wooden cross-tree on the bare hillside, Not knowing that there a God suffered and died. The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down, Pagan and Christian man alike will fall, The auguries say, the white and black and brown, The merry and sad, theorist, lover, all Invisibly will fall: Abstract calamity, save for those who can Build their cold empire on the abstract man. A soft breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown Far out to sea and lost. Yet I know well The bloodless word will battle for its own Invisibly in brain and nerve and cell. The generations tell Their personal tale: the One has far to go Past the mirages and the murdering snow. SCOTLAND'S WINTER Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill, The sun looks from the hill Helmed in his winter casket, And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky. The water at the mill Sounds more hoarse and dull. The miller's daughter walking by With frozen fingers soldered to her basket Seems to be knocking Upon a hundred leagues of floor With her light heels, and mocking Percy and Douglas dead, And Bruce on his burial bed, Where he lies white as may With wars and leprosy, And all the kings before This land was kingless, And all the singers before This land was songless, This land that with its dead and living waits the Judgment Day. But they, the powerless dead, Listening can hear no more Than a hard tapping on the sounding floor A little overhead Of common heels that do not know Whence they come or where they go And are content With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment. THE GREAT HOUSE However it came, this great house has gone down Unconquered into chaos (as you might see A famous ship warped to a rotting quay In miles of weeds and rubbish, once a town.) So the great house confronts the brutish air, And points its turrets towards the hidden sky, While in the dark the flags of honour fly Where faith and hope and bravery would not dare. Accident did not do this, nor mischance. But so must order to disorder come At their due time, and honour take its stance Deep in dishonour's ground. Chaos is new, And has no past or future. Praise the few Who built in chaos our bastion and our home. THE EMBLEM I who so carefully keep in such repair The six-inch king and the toy treasury, Prince, poet, realm shrivelled in time's black air, I am not, although I seem, an antiquary. For that scant-acre kingdom is not dead, Nor save in seeming shrunk. When at its gate, Which you pass daily, you incline your head, And enter (do not knock; it keeps no state) You will be with space and order magistral, And that contracted world so vast will grow That this will seem a little tangled field. For you will be in very truth with all In their due place and honour, row on row. For this I read the emblem on the shield. II TO FRANZ KAFKA If we, the proximate damned, presumptive blest, Were called one day to some high consultation With the authentic ones, the worst and best Picked from all time, how mean would be our station. Oh we could never bear the standing shame, Equivocal ignominy of non-election; We who will hardly answer to our name, And on the road direct ignore direction. But you, dear Franz, sad champion of the drab And half, would watch the tell-tale shames drift in (As if they were troves of treasure) not aloof, But with a famishing passion quick to grab Meaning, and read on all the leaves of sin Eternity's secret script, the saving proof. EFFIGIES 1 His glances were directive, seemed to move Pawns on a secret chess-board. You could fancy You saw the pieces in their wooden dance Pass in geometrical obedience From square to square, or stop like broken clockwork When silence spoke its checkmate. Past that arena Stretched out a winding moonlight labyrinth, A shining limbo filled with vanishing faces, Propitious or dangerous, to be scanned In a passion of repulsion or desire. His glances knew two syllables: 'Come' and 'Go'. When he was old and dull his eyes grew weary, Gazing so long into the shifting maze, And narrowed to the semi-circle before him, The last defence. There if a stranger entered, His heart, that beat regardless far within, Grew still, a hawk before the deadly drop, Then beat again as his quick mind found the gambit. All this he hardly knew. His face was like The shining front of a rich and loveless house, The doors all shut. The windows cast such brightness Outwards that none could see what was within, Half-blinded by the strong repelling dazzle. Set in the doors two little judas windows Sometimes would catch the timid visitor's eye And he would grow aware of a nameless something, Animal or human, watching his approach, Like darkness out of darkness. When he was dying The pieces sauntered freely about the board Like lawless vagrants, and would not be controlled. He would whisper 'Stop,' Starting awake, and weep to think they were free. 2 Pity the poor betrayer in the maze That closed about him when he set the trap To catch his friend. Now he is there alone, The envied and beloved quarry fled Long since for death and freedom. And the maze Is like an odd device to marvel at With other eyes if other eyes could see it; As curious as an idle prince's toy. There he is now, lost in security, Quite, quite inside, no fissure in the walls, Nor any sign of the door that let him in; Only the oblivious labyrinth all around. He did not dream of the trap within the trap In the mad moment, nor that he would long Sometime to have the beloved victim there For the deep winding dialogue without end. Pity him, for he cannot think the thought Nor feel the pang that yet might set him free, And Judas ransomed dangle from the tree. 3 Revolving in his own Immovable danger zone, Having killed his enemy And betrayed his troublesome friend To be with himself alone, He watched upon the floor The punctual minutes crawl Towards the remaining wall That opened in eternity, And thought, 'Here is the end.' Cut off in blind desire, From the window he would see, Twisting in twisted glass, The devastated street, The houses all gone wrong, Watch hats and hurrying feet, Wild birds and horses pass, Think, 'All shall go up in fire, Horse, man and city, all.' Or dream a whole day long Of miles and miles of way Through hills down to the sea At peace in a distant day; Gazing upon the floor. No knock upon the door. 4 We fired and fired, and yet they would not fall, But stood on the ridge and bled, Transfixed against the sky as on a wall, Though they and we knew they were dead. Then we went on, Passed through them or between; But all our eyes could fasten upon Was a great broken machine, Or so it seemed. Then on the ridge ahead We watched them rise again. I do not think we knew the dead Were real, or really dead, till then. 5 She lived in comfort on her poor few pence And sweetly starved to feed her swelling dream Where all she had done came back in grievous blessing. She had left her house and was by her lover left, Her flying wings struck root upon his shoulders, And in the self-same flight bore him away. Her life was all an aria and an echo, And when the aria ceased the echo led her Gently to alight somewhere that seemed the earth. There gradually she withered towards her harvest, That grew as she grew less, until at last She stared in grief at mounds and mounds of grain. THE DIFFICULT LAND This is a difficult land. Here things miscarry Whether we care, or do not care enough. The grain may pine, the harlot weed grow haughty, Sun, rain, and frost alike conspire against us: You'd think there was malice in the very air. And the spring floods and summer droughts: our fields Mile after mile of soft and useless dust. On dull delusive days presaging rain We yoke the oxen, go out harrowing, Walk in the middle of an ochre cloud, Dust rising before us and falling again behind us, Slowly and gently settling where it lay. These days the earth itself looks sad and senseless. And when next day the sun mounts hot and lusty We shake our fists and kick the ground in anger. We have strange dreams: as that, in the early morning We stand and watch the silver drift of stars Turn suddenly to a flock of black-birds flying. And once in a lifetime men from over the border, In early summer, the season of fresh campaigns, Come trampling down the corn, and kill our cattle. These things we know and by good luck or guidance Either frustrate or, if we must, endure. We are a people; race and speech support us, Ancestral rite and custom, roof and tree, Our songs that tell of our triumphs and disasters (Fleeting alike), continuance of fold and hearth, Our names and callings, work and rest and sleep, And something that, defeated, still endures-- These things sustain us. Yet there are times When name, identity, and our very hands, Senselessly labouring, grow most hateful to us, And we would gladly rid us of these burdens (Which yet are knit to us as flesh to bone), Enter our darkness through the doors of wheat And the light veil of grass (leaving behind Name, body, country, speech, vocation, faith) And gather into the secrecy of the earth Furrowed by broken ploughs lost deep in time. We have such hours, but are drawn back again By faces of goodness, faithful masks of sorrow, Honesty, kindness, courage, fidelity, The love that lasts a life's time. And the fields, Homestead and stall and barn, springtime and autumn. (For we can love even the wandering seasons In their inhuman circuit.) And the dead Who lodge in us so strangely, unremembered, Yet in their place. For how can we reject The long last look on the ever-dying face Turned backward from the other side of time? And how offend the dead and shame the living By these despairs? And how refrain from love? This is a difficult country, and our home. NOTHING THERE BUT FAITH Nothing, it seemed, between them and the grave. No, as I looked, there was nothing anywhere. You'd think no ground could be so flat and bare: No little ridge or hump or bush to brave The horizon. Yet they called that land their land, Without a single thought drank in that air As simple and equivocal as despair. This, this was what I could not understand. The reason was, there was nothing there but faith. Faith made the whole, yes all they could see or hear Or touch or think, and arched its break of day Within them and around them every way. They looked: all was transfigured far and near, And the great world rolled between them and death. DOUBLE ABSENCE The rust-red moon above the rose-red cloud, Ethereal gifts of the absconding sun That now is shining full on other lands And soon will draw its track a hundred miles Across the quiet breast of the hushed Atlantic. The smoke grows up, solid, an ashen tree From the high Abbey chimney. A sycamore Holds on its topmost tip a singing thrush, Its breast turned towards the sign of the buried sun. Chance only brings such rare felicities Beyond contrivance of the adventuring mind, Strange past all meaning, set in their place alone. Now the moon rises clear and fever pale Out from the cloud's dissolving drift of ashes, While in my mind, in double absence, hangs The rust-red moon above the rose-red cloud. DAY AND NIGHT I wrap the blanket of the night About me, fold on fold on fold-- And remember how as a child Lost in the newness of the light I first discovered what is old From the night and the soft night wind. For in the daytime all was new, Moving in light and in the mind All at once, thought, shape and hue. Extravagant novelty too wild For the new eyes of a child. The night, the night alone is old And showed me only what I knew, Knew, yet never had been told; A speech that from the darkness grew Too deep for daily tongues to say, Archaic dialogue of a few Upon the sixth or the seventh day. And shapes too simple for a place In the day's shrill complexity Came and were more natural, more Expected than my father's face Smiling across the open door, More simple than the sanded floor In unexplained simplicity. A man now, gone with time so long-- My youth to myself grown fabulous Like an old land's memories, a song To trouble or to pleasure us-- I try to fit that world to this, The hidden to the visible play, Would have them both, would nothing miss, Learn from the shepherd of the dark, Here in the light, the paths to know That thread the labyrinthine park, And the great Roman roads that go Striding across the untrodden day. THE OTHER STORY How for the new thing can there be a word? How can we know The act, the form itself, unnamed, unheard, Or for the first time go Again on the road that runs ere memory Snares it in syllables And rings its burial bells In gossip or music or poetry? Yet we would not remember, but would be. Why should we muse On this great world that always is no more, Or hope to hear sometime the great lost news? It was all before. And we would be where we were bred, In Eden an hour away, Though still our cheeks are red For what is only in remembrance Revolt or sin or guilt or shame, Or some word much the same, But was a haze of blood from foot to head, Was that, and nothing said. Innocent, knowing nothing of innocence, We learned it from the sad memorial name First uttered by the offence. And now the two words seem A single, fabulous, reciprocal glory, A dream re-enacted in another dream, And all accomplished as we plucked the bough. Stories we know. There is another story. If one of you is innocent let him tell it now. DREAM AND THING This is the thing, this truly is the thing. We dreamt it once; now it has come about. That was the dream, but this, this is the thing. The dream was bold and thought it could foretell What time would bring, but time, it seems, can bring Only this thing which never has had a doubt That everything is much like everything, And the deep family likeness will come out. We thought the dream would spread its folded wing; But here's a thing that's neither sick nor well, Stupid nor wise, and has no story to tell, Though every tale is about it and about. That is the thing, that is the very thing. Yet take another look and you may bring From the dull mass each separate splendour out. There is no trust but in the miracle. SONG FOR A HYPOTHETICAL AGE Grief, they have said, is personal, Else there'd be no grief at all. We, exempt from grief and rage, Rule here our new impersonal age. Now while dry is every eye The last grief is passing by. History takes its final turn Where all's to mourn for, none to mourn. Idle justice sits alone In a world to order grown. Justice never shed a tear, And if justice we would bear We must get another face, Find a smoother tale to tell Where everything is in its place And happiness inevitable. (Long, long ago, the old men say, A famous wife, Penelope, For twenty years the pride of Greece, Wove and unwove a web all day That might have been a masterpiece-- If she had let it have its way-- To drive all artistry to despair And set the sober world at play Beyond the other side of care, And lead a fabulous era in. But still she said, 'Where I begin Must I return, else all is lost, And great Odysseus tempest-tossed Will perish, shipwrecked on my art. But so, I guide him to the shore.' And again the web she tore, No more divided from her heart.) Oh here the hot heart petrifies And the round earth to rock is grown In the winter of our eyes; Heart and earth a single stone. Until the stony barrier break Grief and joy no more shall wake. THE YOUNG PRINCES There was a time: we were young princelings then In artless state, with brows as bright and clear As morning light on a new morning land. We gave and took with innocent hands, not knowing If we were rich or poor, or thinking at all Of yours or mine; we were newcomers still, And to have asked the use of that or this, Its price, commodity, profit would have been Discourtesy to it and shame to us. We saw the earth stretched out to us in welcome, But in our hearts we were the welcomers, And so were courteous to all that was In high simplicity and natural pride To be so hailed and greeted with such glory (Like absentminded kings who are proffered all And need not have a penny in their pockets). And when the elders told the ancestral stories, Even as they spoke we knew the characters, The good and bad, the simple and sly, the heroes, Each in his place, and chance that turns the tale To grief or joy; we saw and accepted all. Then in the irreversible noonday came, Showering its darts into our open breasts, Doubt that kills courtesy and gratitude. Since then we have led our dull discourteous lives, Heaven doubting and earth doubting. Earth and heaven Bent to our menial use. And yet sometimes We still, as through a dream that comes and goes, Know what we are, remembering what we were. THE CLOUD One late spring evening in Bohemia, Driving to the Writers' House, we lost our way In a maze of little winding roads that led To nothing but themselves, Weaving a rustic web for thoughtless travellers. No house was near, nor sign or sound of life: Only a chequer-board of little fields, Crumpled and dry, neat squares of powdered dust. At a sudden turn we saw A young man harrowing, hidden in dust; he seemed A prisoner walking in a moving cloud Made by himself for his own purposes; And there he grew and was as if exalted To more than man, yet not, not glorified: A pillar of dust moving in dust; no more. The bushes by the roadside were encrusted With a hard sheath of dust. We looked and wondered; the dry cloud moved on With its interior image. Presently we found A road that brought us to the Writers' House, And there a preacher from Urania (Sad land where hope each day is killed by hope) Praised the good dust, man's ultimate salvation, And cried that God was dead. As we drove back Late to the city, still our minds were teased By the brown barren fields, the harrowing, The figure walking in its cloud, the message From far Urania. This was before the change; And in our memory cloud and message fused, Image and thought condensed to a giant form That walked the earth clothed in its earthly cloud, Dust made sublime in dust. And yet it seemed unreal And lonely as things not in their proper place. And thinking of the man Hid in his cloud we longed for light to break And show that his face was the face once broken in Eden, Beloved, world-without-end lamented face; And not a blindfold mask on a pillar of dust. THE HORSES Barely a twelvemonth after The seven days war that put the world to sleep, Late in the evening the strange horses came. By then we had made our covenant with silence, But in the first few days it was so still We listened to our breathing and were afraid. On the second day The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer. On the third day a warship passed us, heading north, Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter Nothing. The radios dumb; And still they stand in corners of our kitchens, And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms All over the world. But now if they should speak, If on a sudden they should speak again, If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak, We would not listen, we would not let it bring That old bad world that swallowed its children quick At one great gulp. We would not have it again. Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness. The tractors lie about our fields; at evening They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting. We leave them where they are and let them rust: 'They'll moulder away and be like other loam'. We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs, Long laid aside. We have gone back Far past our fathers' land. And then, that evening Late in the summer the strange horses came. We heard a distant tapping on the road, A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again And at the corner changed to hollow thunder. We saw the heads Like a wild wave charging and were afraid. We had sold our horses in our fathers' time To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield Or illustrations in a book of knights. We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited, Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent By an old command to find our whereabouts And that long-lost archaic companionship. In the first moment we had never a thought That they were creatures to be owned and used. Among them were some half-a-dozen colts Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world, Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden. Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads, But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts. Our life is changed; their coming our beginning. SONG This will not pass so soon, Dear friend, this will not pass, Though time is out of tune With all beneath the moon, Man and woman and flower and grass. These will not pass. For there's a word 'Return' That's known among the quick and the dead, Making two realms for ever cry and mourn. So mourns the land of darkness when Into the light away the lily is led, And so gives thanks again When from the earth the snow-pale beauty goes Back to her home. Persephone, Surely all this can only be A light exchange and amorous interplay In your strange twofold immortality; And a diversion for a summer day The death and resurrection of the rose. THE ISLAND Your arms will clasp the gathered grain For your good time, and wield the flail In merry fire and summer hail. There stand the golden hills of corn Which all the heroic clans have borne, And bear the herdsmen of the plain, The horseman in the mountain pass, The archaic goat with silver horn, Man, dog and flock and fruitful hearth, And dynasties stretched beneath the grass. Harvests of men to men give birth. These the ancestral faces bred And show as through a golden glass Dances and temples of the dead. Here speak through the transmuted tongue The full grape bursting in the press, The barley seething in the vat, Which earth and man as one confess, Babbling of what both would be at In winding story and drunken song. Though come a different destiny, Though fall a universal wrong More stern than simple savagery, Men are made of what is made, The meat, the drink, the life, the corn, Laid up by them, in them reborn. And self-begotten cycles close About our way; indigenous art And simple spells make unafraid The haunted labyrinths of the heart, And with our wild succession braid The resurrection of the rose. _Sicily_ INTO THIRTY CENTURIES BORN Into thirty centuries born, At home in them all but the very last, We meet ourselves at every turn In the long country of the past. There the fallen are up again In mortality's second day, There the indisputable dead Rise in flesh more fine than clay And the dead selves we cast away In imperfection are perfected, And all is plain yet never found out! Ilium burns before our eyes For thirty centuries never put out, And we walk the streets of Troy And breathe in the air its fabulous name. The king, the courtier and the rout Shall never perish in that flame; Old Priam shall become a boy For ever changed, for ever the same. What various sights these countries show: The horses on the roundabout Still flying round the glittering ring That rusted fifty years ago. The gunboat in the little bay, A mile, and half an age away. Methuselah letting the years go by While death was new and still in doubt And only a dream the thought, 'To die'. And round a corner you may see Man, maid and tempter under the tree: You'd think there was no sense in death. And nothing to remedy, nothing to blame; The dark Enchanter is your friend. Is it fantasy or faith That keeps intact that marvellous show And saves the helpless dead from harm?-- To-morrow sounds the great alarm That puts the histories to rout; To-morrow and to-morrow brings Endless beginning without end. Then on this moment set your foot, Take your road for everywhere, And from your roving barrier shoot Your arrow into the empty air. Follow at a careful pace, Else you may wander in despair. Gathered at your moving post Is all that you have but memory. This is the place of hope and fear, And faith that comes when hope is lost. Defeat and victory both are here. In this place where all's to be, In this moment you are free, And bound to all. For you shall know Before you Troy goes up in fire, And you shall walk the Trojan streets When home are sailed the murdering fleets, Priam shall be a little boy, Time shall cancel time's deceits, And you shall weep for grief and joy To see the whole world perishing Into everlasting spring, And over and over the opening briar. MY OWN There's nothing here to keep me from my own.-- The confident roads that at their ease beguile me With the all-promising lands, the great unknown, Can with their gilded dust blind me, defile me. It's so. Yet never did their lies deceive me, And when, lost in the dreaming route, I say I seek my soul, my soul does not believe me, But from these transports turns displeased away. But then, but then, why should I so behave me, Willingly duped ten, twenty times an hour, But that even at my dearest cost I'd save me From the true knowledge and the real power? In which through all time's changeable seasons grown, I might have stayed, unshaken, with my own. THE CHOICE The prisoner wasting in the pit, The player bending over the strings, The wise man tangled in his wit, The angel grafted to his wings Are governed by necessity, Condemned to be whatever they are Nor once from that to move away, Each his appointed prisoner. But the riddling sages say, It is your prison that sets you free, Else chaos would appropriate all. Out of chaos you built this wall, Raised this hovel of bone and clay To be a refuge for liberty. IF I COULD KNOW If I could truly know that I do know This, and the foreshower of this show, Who is myself, for plot and scene are mine, They say, and the world my sign, Man, earth and heaven, co-patterned so or so-- If I could know. If I could swear that I do truly see The real world, and all itself and free, Not prisoned in my shallow sight's confine, Nor mine, but to be mine, Freely sometime to come and be with me-- If I could see. If I could tell that I do truly hear A music, not this tumult in my ear Of all that cries in the world, confused or fine; If there were staff and sign Pitched high above the battle of hope and fear-- If I could hear. Make me to see and hear that I may know This journey and the place towards which I go; For a beginning and an end are mine Surely, and have their sign Which I and all in the earth and the heavens show. Teach me to know. THE LATE WASP You that through all the dying summer Came every morning to our breakfast table, A lonely bachelor mummer, And fed on the marmalade So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able To prise you from the sweet pit you had made,-- You and the earth have now grown older, And your blue thoroughfares have felt a change; They have grown colder; And it is strange How the familiar avenues of the air Crumble now, crumble; the good air will not hold, All cracked and perished with the cold; And down you dive through nothing and through despair. THE LATE SWALLOW Leave, leave your well-loved nest, Late swallow, and fly away. Here is no rest For hollowing heart and wearying wing. Your comrades all have flown To seek their southern paradise Across the great earth's downward sloping side, And you are alone. Why should you cling Still to the swiftly ageing narrowing day? Prepare; Shake out your pinions long untried That now must bear you there where you would be Through all the heavens of ice; Till falling down the homing air You light and perch upon the radiant tree. SONG This that I give and take, This that I keep and break. Is and is not my own But lives in itself alone, Yet is between us two, Mine only in the breaking, It all in the remaking, Doing what I undo. With it all must be well, There where the invisible Loom sweetly plies its trade. All made there is well-made. So be it between us two; A giving be our taking, A making our unmaking, A doing what we undo. [The end of _One Foot in Eden_ by Edwin Muir]