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IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. _Title:_ Invitation and Warning _Date of first publication:_ 1942 _Author:_ Henry Treece (1911-1966) _Date first posted:_ Jan. 22, 2021 _Date last updated:_ Jan. 22, 2021 Faded Page eBook #20210157 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Jen Haines & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net [Cover Illustration] INVITATION AND WARNING by HENRY TREECE FABER AND FABER LIMITED 24 Russell Square London _First published in Mcmxlii_ _by Faber and Faber Limited_ _24 Russell Square, London, W.C.1_ _Printed in Great Britain by_ _Western Printing Services Ltd., Bristol_ _All Rights Reserved_ To MY MOTHER who did not live to see the flowers. Acknowledgments are due to the following periodicals, which have printed poems contained in this book: _Seven_, _The Voice of Scotland_, _The New English Weekly_, _Kingdom Come_, _Poetry_ (London), _Compass_, _Fantasy_, _Furioso_, _The Tramp_, _Diogenes_, _View_, _Poetry_ (Chicago), _The Virginia_, _Spectator_, _The Listener_, _Horizon_, and also to the following anthologies: _The Exiles’ Anthology_, _The New Apocalypse_, _View Poets_, _A Celtic Anthology_, and _The White Horseman_. H. T. CONTENTS PILGRIM _page_ 11 MYSTIC NUMBERS 13 WELSH CHOIR 15 THE DYKE-BUILDER 16 OLD WELSH SONG 17 POEM 18 POEM 19 WHAT THING AFFRIGHTS YOU . . . 20 THROUGH THE DARK VALLEY . . . 21 THE THREE HOUSES 22 THE HOUSE OF TRUTH 23 INVITATION AND WARNING 24 THREE AGES 25 POEM 26 TALE 27 POEM 28 THE CHARACTERS 29 SONG 30 BALLET 31 THE TWO SOULS 32 POEM 33 PASTORAL 34 CITY 35 THE GHOSTS 36 THE WARRIOR BARDS 37 HORROR 38 RUSTIC CHARM 39 DRAMATIC INTERLUDE 40 THE LYING WORD 41 HOW SWEET ARE THE FLUTES! 42 PASTORAL 1941 43 BALLAD OF THE RANTING LAD 44 HOMAGE TO A.E.H. 45 VENUS FROM THE WAVES 46 ELEGY UNENDING 47 POEM 48 WEDDING SONG 49 CONFESSION IN WAR-TIME 50 LEGEND 51 INSCRIPTION ON A BEGGING BOWL 52 THE HOUSE 53 THE NEVER-ENDING ROSARY—A SEQUENCE 55 INTRODUCTION 57 I. SLOW SARABANDE OF PAIN IN ALL THE AIR 58 II. SHARPER THAN EVER, THE BRIGHT BEAKS OF WORDS 59 III. FROM THAT HARD MINUTE WHEN THE TORTURED WOMB 60 IV. WHAT COINER CARVED HIS MARK UPON MY HEART 61 V. THE WILL THAT KEEPS ME FETTERED IN THE WORLD 62 VI. I HAVE SEEN WINTER’S PALE HAND HALT ON THE BUD 63 VII. I HAVE KNOWN WINTER IN A TIME OF TEARS 64 VIII. WHEN SPRING’S CARESS AND WHEN THE WINGS OF 65 LOVE IX. BETWEEN THE FEMALE STICKS I TASTED HELL 66 X. AFTER A LITTLE WHILE ALL GRIEF LIES DEAD 67 XI. THIS MINUTE HAD BEEN CENTURIES ON THE WAY 68 XII. IF THEN A STAR SHOULD FALL AND SINGE MY 69 SHROUD XIII. IN HEART’S CRACKED BOWL LIE PENCE, THAT BY 70 MY DREAM’S XIV. INVENTION IS THE SPIRIT’S SHARPEST PAIN 71 XV. SLOW SARABANDE OF PAIN IN ALL THE AIR 72 TOWARDS A PERSONAL ARMAGEDDON—A SEQUENCE 73 THE BOAT RETURNS 91 PILGRIM I step from a land no eye has seen To a land no hand may ever hold; My name with the sea’s cold tears is green, My words are the wind’s words graved in gold. This scrip upon my back holds hearts That saw their hero in a dream; This staff is ward against the darts That stiffen trout in silver stream. So, pilgrim, continents I tread, The cross-bones in my breast for rood, Breaking the shepherd’s dusty bread, The brittle beech leaves in the wood. MYSTIC NUMBERS WELSH CHOIR A bird sang to me out of Wales; But, O man, the blood and the tears! And the wild wild wailing in the hills, And Caradoc’s gore aflame on the moors. A man spoke to me out of Wales And the thin thin wind was in his voice; Black thunder rolled in the bellowing vowels And brought a drowned kingdom to my eyes. Ten children sang to me out of Wales, And the blood and the tears and the wind were there. But the bright bird whistled: ‘These little girls Know the words, not the agony. They were not there!’ THE DYKE-BUILDER On the seventh day the storm lay dead. The god who built the dyke strolled out to see Blind men, blind windows, widows and the daft, And the cracked shore carpeted with gulls. On the ninth day no sunset red Daubed the damp stubble: peacock-blue, bright harmony Of gold and purple laced the sky, and soft, Ripe as a plum with joy danced the quick girls. But on the eleventh day the dead Looked from their priest-holes, seeing only sea, And the green shark-cradles with their swift Cruel fingers setting the ocean’s curls. OLD WELSH SONG I take with me where I go A pen and a golden bowl; Poet and beggar step in my shoes, Or a prince in a purple shawl. I bring with me when I return To the house that my father’s hands made, A crooning bird on a crystal bough, And O, a sad sad word! POEM Oh, God, your blood swings in my heart, Your breath sweeps through my breast; My love flames upward like a torch, Link-bearer to your feast. Oh, man, your word rides on my tongue To praise this lovely land— But must my shade lie cruciform, This thorn pierce my thin hand? POEM Oh, little child, see how the flower You plucked bleeds on the iron ground; Bend down, your ears may catch its voice, A passionless low sobbing sound. Oh, man, put up your sword and see The brother that you did to death; There is no hatred in his eye, No curses crackle in his breath. Walk through the world, you men, with me As far as faith’s far parish bounds; Oh, brothers, fear not these great beasts, Who are but God’s own testing-hounds. WHAT THING AFFRIGHTS YOU . . . What thing affrights you, lovely ghosts, And why those staring eyes? Is it a terror I may know That starts those rending sighs? ‘Young man, young man, we know your face, We know the touch of your hand.’ What is it, brother, that brings you pain, I’ll crush it with that hand. ‘It is no horror with heart for your prayer Nor beast with blood for your sword.’ What is it comrade, my soul is yours? ‘It is your own dark word.’ THROUGH THE DARK VALLEY . . . Through the dark valley that I tread In my hempen robe with staff for sword, I see death’s buds on every bough, And smell decay in the raven’s word. Beneath each stone I know old lips Are waiting to mock as I make my way; Each stream will spawn a thousand snakes To fondle my thighs as I kneel to pray. But one thing keeps my head from harm, Though cross upon my breast should flame, Or knife should cut me to the heart— The simple knowledge of a name. THE THREE HOUSES Three flowers I tend in the house of faith, The white, the gold and the red; Speaking the spell through a silver horn That shall bring a princess to my bed. In death’s grim house I act a prayer, From the red-rimmed chalice drain a toast To the white-lipped guardians I hear in the air, And my father’s gentle ghost. In the house of love I name a name, The candle starts to hear my voice. But it’s not with fear that my heart leaps when I lift the latch and meet her eyes. THE HOUSE OF TRUTH Love has no limits like the year, Nor like the word depends on breath; Desire is started by a tear, And Passion dances after Death. All, all is truth for who dare seek, And seeking, never fear to find; From dreams a splendid house they make Build solid on the shifting wind. The knife that purifies the heart Leaves soldier bleaching in the sand; And rains that rot the future’s bread Make sweet the gardens of the mind. INVITATION AND WARNING Pluck my fruit, the pear-tree said, As you travel down the river. Stay and sleep in my green hair, The weed said to the drover. Watch for snake and poisoned dart As you cross the mountain; Guard against the broken heart As you pass the fountain. Fruit will feed and weed will soothe, But snake will sting and dart will pierce, Vaulting hailstones crack the bone, And hearts will give themselves to none. THREE AGES My dream’s steel mirror in this aspen-hand Brings me the bare grey steppes of understanding, Where on the oceanic hills of yesterday A corpse of hallowed sticks rocks in the wind. To-day’s young creature yet aflame with love Strides through life’s nettles with a wand of gold, Crops the foul fruits of evil, in the devil’s teeth, Smiling, knows not the world he soon shall leave. But the uncoffined lad who waits the dawn No prickle plucks, nor craves no silken sin, Sits silent, watching the frail father’s hand Steal softly towards the poisoned drinking horn. POEM I dropped the crock of my love across the years, Over the hills of joy, the woods of woe, Over the sibilant seas that sang of death, The deep unfathomed canyons of despair. I spilled the oil of my wonder, spilled my tears, Through the clouds of dismay: I watched them go, Trailing like phantoms across the heath, Where the three old men knelt, sad in prayer. And I came at the end of the road of my life To a hill and a throng and a man on a tree, And I saw the gold boy I had got in my dream Rise and come forward, with faith in his eyes. TALE There was a tale told on a winter’s night, Deep in the forest where never soul dared, How the hanging man from the tree came down And skipped in a polka with an old goat-herd. And they say, they say, as the crisp logs crack, ‘When Jack Frost comes, the ground is hard For poor bare feet, and the wind too sharp To dance in the woods with a wounded side.’ POEM I made a cloak of music from my dreams, Gilt-thread for joy, and jet for years of sin, Broidered the edges with the lace of love, Softened to grey with tears no eye could hold. And with this cloak about me, over streams That led to Heaven’s hills, I ran, Crying aloud my father’s name. His dove Dropped from the boughs of Paradise. Unfurled, The wings of wisdom warned me; many times Harsh blows upon my heart bade me begone. Yet thrust I sunward, till at close of eve, I saw my father—nailed across the world. THE CHARACTERS The man in the mask swings a sword of bright stars, The cloud of his breath is the shroud of the earth. But the man in the robe from a book reads our fears, And ticks off the minutes from death until birth. The woman in white is the mother of hope, And the twin doves of peace rest on her twin breasts. But the woman in black, with a knife and a rope, Is the watcher at gateway, the guardian of ghosts. SONG The song that the old woman sings in the lane Is the song of the girl with the golden hair, Of the gaunt old man who danced in the rain, And the soldiers who ran from his eyes in fear. And the song skips on, how the lass and the man Lived in the woods with roots for their meat: Friendly to fox, they laughed as they ran Over the hills, the stars their loot. But the tale ends, how in the full of their pride The goose-girl woke from her tinkling dreams, To find the man dead with a sword in his side, And his beautiful brow gashed with three sharp thorns. BALLET In a world of black velvet The pale figure leaps With a lath in his hand, while trumpet With icicle-fingers slips The bolts of the heart and enters the room, Proving to man that life is a dream And the man and the lath are things of the world, That the black velvet stays when the tale has been told. In a shroud of white cotton The pale figure lies With a bead in her hand. The beaten Earth tingles with feet of the wise Who this day have sung for a soul that has fled To the mansion they builded to house the wise dead. But men without wisdom are muttering now: ‘Which trumpet will warn us, and where shall we go?’ THE TWO SOULS The widowed soul sat staring through her hands, Robed in no raiment but despair’s thin shroud, Garbed in no garment but mad grief’s green shade, And the apples of her love lying rotten on the ground, And the long green-grief song moaning round the home. The solitary soul no mate had ever met, Walked in the talking shadow of the wood, Heard with her wise virginity the voice Of children from the barren bough of plum, And felt the brittle twig snap pointed in her side. POEM End and beginning are two wise words, Two ways the wind blows in one breath; Coming and going are movements both That swing the door and bend the boards. Four hands show weakness, stumble tongues; Both heads are bare, the eyes are dim. ‘Oh, the life of things is a difficult dream’: Two puzzled hearts croon fearful song. Starting and finishing are two known ways Of moving and halting, waking from sleep To the land where blind watch lame men leap: Two ways the leaf wags in the trees. PASTORAL I have learnt nothing from the marble urn That sparrow could not teach me. Overhead, The same cloud loiters that has loitered through A thousand poets’ summer dreams. ‘I have seen nothing new,’ says marble urn, ‘Since I was made. Alas, the many dead Are more, but that is all. Above, below, The same clouds, the same streams.’ CITY Abrupt, unfluid as an eagle’s love, Stone’s frozen tumult rears itself from fields, Housing from germ to worm the flower of faith, The pock-patched beggar and the marble saint. Here, Christ and Judas walk upon the stream, The strict stone river, in their hosts; Hard as a pauper’s prayer, the stone tree shades From tempest the unprofitable birds. Here, the stern moment hides above the cloud, Strange music shocks the hand of carven men Who knew no symphony but song of stone: ‘How will destruction fall,’ they beg, ‘how death?’ But, shut from terror and the toppling plinth, Drugged with the dream of plover’s scream on hills, Two lovers stand, and from reaction’s hand Scatter humanity across the park. THE GHOSTS Through the plumed valley of despair come riding ghosts, Their dripping lanterns swinging down my dreams, Guests of the broken heaven in my heart, Draping with dog-rose coffins that I carved For other heroes than my dram-slain self. Out of my breast breaks penance, like a sigh Lost in a silent room of dust, where dead Hands are clasped in memory, and clock Only in vision knows again the voice That spoke a music over half the world. But dreams and deeds, head, heart, and hands Tenant a tower of brilliants that flash Yet never burn. The dog before the gate Digs pleasure from his hide, forgets to watch— And so the ghosts ride howling to my door. THE WARRIOR BARDS So they came riding In red and in gold, With laughter and harping, Over the wold. No sword was among them, They fought with a song, Safe in their kingdom, The children of Spring. Only their falcons That watched from above Knew the grey tokens And heard the black hoof. And so broke the battle. I watched their gay dead Ride the gaunt cattle Back through the wood. HORROR Like the fey goose-girl in the enchanted wood, Whose cloth-of-gold hair curtained her swart sin So that the feckless linnets stricken by her flute For homage’ sake forgot the bodkin bright, And so lay waxen in among the moss About her feet. Like the gold boy, the weeping pauper prince Prisoned in a tower of tongues and eyes, Stumbling from floor to dusty screaming floor, Upstairs and down stone stairs, whose flaking edge Is brown with brother’s blood. And brother’s song Shrill in his ears. Like the old traveller, who knew this stormy road Even before the raven sowed its elms, Who comes by night upon a lighted house Where no house was in any other year, And stops, aghast, to see his own shade propped Stiff at the board. RUSTIC CHARM Wish in the well, at the lane’s crooked limb, Where the golden stoat his arabesque Of evil weaves, with hare-paw charm: That the sun-dappled apple tree fling her fruit With the crystal-crash of the catkin-bomb, And that where they fall five maids unmask The hurrying heart that keeps them warm, And five thin shifts slip to their feet. DRAMATIC INTERLUDE Out more than the death of a dream, the prince now stark in a sty, And the hunters after truffles tearing the parquet floor; More than that, the red lips raped by the shepherd’s bread And the banners scaring away the crows; yes, more than all, Is the sad stone room and the worm-pocked board, the spider’s husk Tinkling as truant winds play hide-and-seek in rafters; And the wild old man (his wife laid-out in the house in the wood) Scratching the walls for gold, his dusty bread forgot, Ransom for scriptural shades that glare from the ash Of his grey fire, muttering alone, bidding arise And walk again in beauty his pale mate. None Hears him, knows him, but the rat hid in the thatch. THE LYING WORD Truth and lie by lip and tooth Chase the face of every world; Proud behind the probing eye Is dream that throat throws out as word. The ghost that jumps from dancing jaws, Festive as creature crouched in a flower, Pricks his tracks in plastic time, For a future that fails with the falling hour. Present and past pace in a vowel, A consonant brings birth or death; From womb to tomb is a letter’s length Where Capricorn can belt the earth. Mouth’s cavern mothers a brood of bright rats; An alphabet of peace the tongue Shapes to a shuddering treachery, A carol with a death-bell clang. The dead who died but yesterday, The dead who yet dare to be born, Know, and shall know this golden sword That swings from the stump of the healing thorn. But who can save us, who shall master This mumming mould behind the mask? The foetal fact that a gesture gags? O what is this wind-shape word, this husk? HOW SWEET ARE THE FLUTES! How sweet are the flutes, whose mellow notes Travel together through flower-flecked fields, Husband and wife; Question and Answer Harnessed in harmony, waking old worlds. Swift snakes of sound, fresh with desire, They slide through the thickets Time has let slay The proud palace garden that clamoured with colour, To strike the low windows blind in bright day. They pierce the high hedges, writhe over walls, To the room where the lady waits, white with love; They redden her lips and put pearls in her hair, And leave the heart fluttering quick as a dove. O sweet are the flutes! Their maddening notes Tie with silk melody’s noose the hands, Keep shackled the sword and stabled the steed, And leave men in mocking, impossible lands! PASTORAL 1941 From bread and wine and the holy sticks Now comes no peace. High in the wind the bound bell rocks; Should binding break, the brazen voice Yell horror through the hand-sized cottage panes, And herdsman finger bayonet in the lanes. The walnut gipsy high on the downs Stifles his fire, Stills children’s voices as the groans Of dying cities plead in his ear. There are no seasons now for pipe and drum; The steel birds never migrate from our dreams. BALLAD OF THE RANTING LAD He built him a home, the rapscallion lad, In a turned-up boat on a lonely shore, And peopled it with a prince’s dream, Was happy in rags if the fire burned clear. He took him a wife, this bright-eyed boy, With snowy breast and golden hair, And they laughed the length of a summer’s day If pear-tree bore and the fish leaped fair. He got him a boy, young devil-may-care, To talk to and dangle upon his knee, And gave him a name and a cloak of wool, And gospels heard in the words he would say. Then wild waves broke and broke the home, And fever came for the golden child. When grey dawn knocked, in her workhouse shift, The girl lay stiff as a stone with cold. But the rollicking boy, the rapscallion lad, Took up his stick, made a fool of his pain, And walked on the hills with a dream in his sack, Of a house and a wife and a twittering bairn. HOMAGE TO A.E.H. Oh, sigh no more, my lady, Sweet Spring must come again To glad the hedge with violet And bless the bud with rain. Oh, weep no more, my poppet, Though hell fall from the skies; You’ll want those golden tresses, He’ll need those sparkling eyes. For many a man there’ll be still, Oh, many a lusty lad. Don’t let them go a-begging For what they never had. The lark must sing his song, love, If from a splintered wood; And bayonet’s edge grow rusted, Though rusted in my blood. So sigh no more, my lady, Sweet sleep shall come again To kiss you in your bed, lass, With some peace-lucky man. VENUS FROM THE WAVES See the dying girl float In her bed’s pale shell. Stripped of its flowers, her boat Swings on the intermittent swell. The weeping world stops In its plaintive sombre song, Its tears are crystal drops Shed for a love gone wrong. The girl in a vision meets Love drowned in green furrows, dead . . . In the foam of the ruffled sheets Her long hair floats like weed. _From Federico Garcia Lorca._ ELEGY UNENDING A rose is in the hand, A tear is in the eye; You will never understand Why I must cry. A wind disturbs the water And bends the back of tree; In wind there is a laughter. But not in me. My eyes tell me a house Is empty now and bare; My ears say not a mouse Can forage there. My fingers tell a stone That bears a graven name; Oh, body that is bone Is not the same! In sleep I hear a song Whose words I knew before. They sing it still, along The tidal shore. By day I smell the scent Of Austria’s lilac-tree; I feel its balm is lent By her to me. And a rose is in the hand, A tear is in the eye; But you’ll never understand Why I must cry. POEM What song is sweet Beside the touch of hand upon the head? What marble goddess Half so fair as wife beside my bed? What word is strong Beside the thrust of flower through the soil? What worth the mail That’s stet against the isolated soul? I have known death March in the mind of smiling-gestured saint; I have seen love Choose for his home the harlot-ridden haunt. Shall song and sword, Saint, drab and death, draw patterns in the air, To die straightway; Or shall their warning flare like forest fire? WEDDING SONG You shall have roses, my sweet, And a lantern to frighten the owl, And a nutmeg tree in the garden, And pears in a golden bowl. And I will buy you a bird With feathers bright as blood, And a door with lock and key For our lonely house in the wood. CONFESSION IN WAR-TIME Once, long ago, I ran beneath the sun, Loved his warm hand upon me, kind as fur; With arms and legs I swung a wide world over, Brother to men of ice and girls of fire. Then, words were air, and only hands showed hearts, And only hearts showed love, or only hate; Between the two worlds tinkling in my head There was no place for poetry, no seat Where I as white-haired shadow of myself Could sit and count the hours, call to the feet Of lusty bone and blood that bore my soul Each minute nearer to perdition’s gate. Now, not so much older, yet so old, The fire is smothered, and my roaring men Have whisked away my maidens to a land Where they can laugh beneath another sun. This hand, poor prince, that swung a rascal’s stave, Now prideless, begs a favour from the pen; These eyes, now dull, that once a god’s world knew, Will glitter only in that moment when They see I still exist upon a page. My two worlds gone, I tread now like a ghost, Intangible and featureless, alive Only as letters crossing in the post. LEGEND There was a man With a coloured coat of rags Who left his body and blood on a tree. But the thieves at his side gave the bones to the dogs, And the black-thorn cock sang merrily. The lads of the town Drank down to the dregs Then took a sharp axe to lop the tree. But the thieves had been there first gathering logs, And the black-thorn cock sang steadily. One day at dawn Upon their nags Twelve tinkers came and their hearts were free, For they cut twelve whistles from the knuckles of the dogs, To bear the black cock company. INSCRIPTION ON A BEGGING BOWL The way a cloak falls Is majesty; The way an eye falls Is modesty; The way a bird falls Is destiny; The way a coin falls Is charity. How then when the cloak is flaunted by leper, And hidden eye is the eye of a whore? How then when the hawk shall fall for a feather, Coin pay the reckoning for bloody war? THE HOUSE The hollow shell of a house Is not the body and blood; The brain, the fire and the flesh Live not in bones of wood. The soul is never seen, Intangible as air; It is the love of the man Whose children live there. THE NEVER-ENDING ROSARY—A SEQUENCE INTRODUCTION I dig this sonnet from a soil of years Manured by mournful minutes, wet by the rain Of carefree summers spent by God’s salt seas. The pale boy staring through the dusty pane, Small finger tracing future on the glass, Is my small ghost; the very lad who strode The yawning plains of Europe, round whose fires Poet and beggar broke a dreamer’s bread, Spinning such webs of magic that their words Sped in the tree-tops, joyful as quick jays, Made Christ a comrade, tender of the herds Out on wind’s acre, one of the roaring boys; And Hamlet, silent at the wood’s edge by my side, Another lad with grey hairs in his head. I Slow sarabande of pain in all the air; Everywhere cadence, decay of a tune, of time, Death of the gold days and the feathered joy, And across the purple hills and the purple sky The long undying rosary of despair. It has come too soon, this sorrow’s psalm, The dog-faced cloud-rack scowling in the West, Where brethren moving like uprooted trees In a Birnam of blood drop aching twigs of hands, And from leaves in an ancient way stare round about At callous undulating plains of salt, Where nightjar leers through a broken note, And the scarecrow dog at the end of his rope Gnaws at the door, howls as he feels as we, The wide immeasurable knowledge of an end. II Sharper than ever, the bright beaks of words Charm my slim finger. In a full-table time Even the sockets of my head sprout words That scream and whimper through my dreams like birds Lost in a desert, or, as the mandrake calls, A purple rhetoric among the midnight stones. As flood upon the drum inside my head Knocks with a ghostly hammer, so my heart, Mistress of ice and heat, strings out a song Of words and more than words, that baffle tongue, And the red wine course after thought and thinker Through lanes that bind my sword-hand to my sword. In this winter it is the frozen word That groans upon my doorstep; as Spring buds, The word whose nest of gold hangs in the sticks; The tale that kindles in the hyacinth, Sweeter than civet in a lady’s bower, is word, And word that wrinkles as the red leaf falls. The bones of words long dead ride on the wind That sweeps my searching eyes along the years From blackness into blackness, till like the bird Our fathers guessed, the word of truth, in light Stands bare for one brief footfall—then is gone, And wind blows where he listeth through the tombs. III From that hard minute when the tortured womb Dropped me, the wailer, in a stone-faced world, My double-crossing soul has worn two masks; One hides the singer, his shy foot in the tomb, While summer poems to the stars he whirls; One, the hard-handed, keeper of the home, Hater of blue-eyed darling and the frilled Fancies of the boy who takes no risks. ‘Love and let thrive,’ says one, ‘the bearded word Wait on the marring morrow for its answer; Let me sing softly,’ says this lad of love, ‘Stroking the minutes, precious in my palm, Winding my wishes round me when the wind’s hard. I’ll move from danger like a supple dancer, My feet familiar with the flowers they cleave, And in the coloured caverns build my home.’ ‘What whirlpool’s in the skull that with my hand I dare not halt? What passion could not purge? I tower above the pigmy centuries, Blow the years down and chuckle at their crash,’ Says other, laughing through the tired land. ‘What songs might I declaim for horny age, Who know not size of pain, or where fear is? Duty alone is death and foreign to my wish.’ Which shall be mine, worn as my daily face, When penny’s itch and duty’s pen have etched Their laws upon me? Which my safe epitaph? Will either swing a sword and dry my fears? Bosom, hold both! that both the boys I hatched Bend a blind ear to Satan as he roars; So shall my devil from his rock be dashed, Death fall face downwards, riddled by one truth. IV What coiner carved his mark upon my heart Before the womb forsook me, flung me to fate? These hands that feel the future, whose are they? Some monster strung my veins in lover’s knot And wrapped my eyes with words his father wrought But never taught me. Whose this mad mummery? ‘Who is this mocker, my maker,’ I ask, ‘my friend?’ Not God, whose bread explodes inside my mouth? Pied-piper madness this benefactor loves, Whose words of peace ignite within my hand As I offer his leaden pence for food; his truth Fickle as breeze-twitched boughs about the eaves; Not Time that paints his dearth upon the bough, For death upon the rose is my death too, Rings my heart’s bells and drinks my babbling blood, And over the salt seas blows my frail fever. Though Tongueless, my fingers’ voice attack this foe The nagging winds, his henchmen, waste my word. When Death has pressed his image in my face There can be no more doubt, no more despair; And love and loss, soft in a bed together, Talk me a dirge meet for my fruitless age, Laugh at my corpse, who on its broken bier Wide-eyed with terror waits this forgotten father. V The will that keeps me fettered in the world Is not my own. Mine is no lackey-love For spindle-shanks, and, listening to the old, I save my breath to snigger up my sleeve At Sunday-face with bibles in his voice Who, gospel-gargling, treads upon the rose. A candle shows me where the sword has bred The lightless eye, the dead bird on the bough, And ravening counties eating flesh for bread: Lift up those boards and you will find below A bullet-riddled prayer-book on whose leaves Another decade’s rats have writ their loves! World’s womb, unchilded, shelters in its rooms A treeless country and a crippled god, And southern suns, never more near than dreams, Slide like a tipsy wench across the globe. I could have saved them, but they burnt my heart, And wrapped their ears with riddles while I roared. God, that the mole should dig and threadbare wolves Howl round the vineyards at a hungrier foe! What is the reason that the rain should fail, That fruit should fall, and fish rot in the sea? To me it is divine incompetence That shall go loveless if we love our sons. VI I have seen Winter’s pale hand halt on the bud With the charm of a saint, and a serpent’s wile, And the cow-patched path a-swarm with folk Whose garnished caps in festival Flew between eyes and the broken byre And the dank straw mouldering from the roof. I have watched, as I walked, in the boy’s hard hand The fractured bird, the fruitless egg: In the innocent eye, the oaken step, And the dewdrop diamonds in his hair, Heart has discerned the disease of youth, Wild screams from the stairs in a lonely house. These things are known as a knot is tied, As a pitcher breaks they are forgot; So the merry huntsman, red in the woods, Draws not his rein as the hare’s heart breaks, But rides with a song to his father’s gate, There to be gay with death’s next guest. VII I have known Winter in a time of tears Walk through the land with burning eyes To lay men low. In Spring, on rack of words, Gold hearts have twisted, all because a wind Has with a ruffian-hand bid blood be high, And swing his bully shoulders in a crowd. I have known Summer tell another tale Than Summer in the song and dance has told; How in the fields, under a feathered sky, Young hand has slackened and the eye seen shapes That haunt the mother-season in a land Sick to the heart with words, with words of brass. Only in Autumn, only before the knock Of bone upon the sheltering oak is heard, Shall the still peace of suffering be known: Only in Autumn, when rash blood be let And garden-spirals show the end of lust, Smiles tired heart and hearthside words fly free. VIII When Spring’s caress and when the winds of love Undo the dog that whines within my blood And canker in my heart withdraws his siege, Masters, my hands hew patterns in the airs, Weave pick-lock magic, open up the grave! Power more than Moses struck for rocks my head, Masking my mewler with a wizard face Whose maledictions flicker, bright as stars. What body’s sin has severed I can knit In that mad moment: what the heart desires These hands can hold, hold healing of the pain That rocks a monarch on his painted throne. These feeble hands set fallen mountains up, This little finger flicks out forest fires. I am the man my father envied men, Whose lucky soul lives lecherous as the wren! What man has done and lived to tell the world I’ll do again. I’ll dare the dragon’s wrath, And in the company of angels bawl the word That baffles oracles, makes dead bones ring, And palm the celestial ace in Jahweh’s fold. Or let the tiger-smiling, suave boy of truth, Track my heart down, my wanderer in the wood, Twitch the bent stick and put an end to song. Yet time shall be, noiseless as sea-shell sounds, When death shall knock me cold and my last word Wail like a little ghost about the parks; When tiny shapes with flowers in their eyes And sick-room voices, weeping from their wounds, Move slow as centuries about my bed. Then what my gain, if scorpion-terrors lurk To tear my Hamlet-heart out on the rose? IX Between the female sticks I tasted hell Garnished with flowers: under its mask the skull Mocked my poor flesh’s labour; foisted the lilt Of lust upon me, led me a dance and laughed At body’s fever. Dour death in bone Bent my frail twig, turned song to stone. The King, my father, wrought me sunlight songs, Meet for the golden board, the blood-red wine: The Queen, men’s mistress, mastered me in wrongs, Then plucked my eyes to feed her noble swine, Shot me the hawk who took my message, Left me a cell, a dungeon dotage: Built in a breath, the magic of the morning, Killed at a glance, the beauty of the night: (Nothing is sacred when I tell its story, And flowers rot where flowers grew in my heart) Call high, call low, the ghost you’ll find The day you can surprise the wind. Heart-high the callow hangman swings my fears, The scarecrow deeds that shudder in the light, He knows my price (a ducat buys my tears), He knows my fate—love in the dog-days bought, Holds me for less than gutter-nurtured creature Who does deny his blood, his very nature. And who denies him? Darnel, dock and rue The only chorus when he runs me through. (Heaven’s outcast, clasping the dark ducat in his claw! The twisted emblem of age is in me now!) Let the play follow, the arrased rat play high, If it go well, then I will name a comedy! X After a little while all grief lies dead, And hands and madness in the eyes are still; Worn heart awakes to find all tears are shed, To shout a new song as feet climb other hill. So they can rant, who can no longer feel, Though Death with scissors nicks them like a fool. I was the lad caught thunder in his cap, And taught the hawk to carve his name on clouds, Ragged the dumb oracle and drained the cup Of sorrow for a wager; he whose needs Were those alone that motivate the birds To ride wild winds or rest content in woods. But after faith and fame the gale blew round, Back to its caverned home, and left him loose. Then leaden words fell thud upon the ground, Buying no tithe of truth, but only tears, Bringing no candle to light him to his board And bed, only Death’s chopper to chop off his head: Which had been there for him straight from pistol’s crack To croak of doom, from lilting cradle-rock To the last strand of hemp that breaks his neck, God’s gift (whose presents must be given back) To this soft dreamer, who, banquets in his soul, Stumbles from Heaven with a ticket for the dole: Whose words, like young unbedded virgins wail About Love’s temple, or in the midnight bed Rap on his heart as blindly as the mole. But they can knock till hand and heart are dead. The corpse they crave is still as cold as stone, And no flame flickers where there’s only bone! XI This minute had been centuries on the way, And centuries had ground my granite smooth; Walls had grown high about my eyes, my ears, But I had looked to love to fling these down. Yes, the long years had nightly promised flowers, Preached me a paradise, syrups in my mind. But cloak hid sword and clock the swing of youth, Flower sheltered adder, under stones a sting Lurked, dreaming unwary feet: my feet, my heart, Urchin though ancient, cozener, were fleeced; And wind’s voice, sack of orts, my centuries’ dower, Blown seed, was sea-thrown, rotten to the tongue. The brittle world broke round me as I shrank, Less-love and lack-pence, waiting for the blow; Now ran the raping winter at my heels, Promised before my cradle clutched its lord; My making, my undoing, were not mine But lay in the hands of angels, hands like claws. So I lie shamed, discovered in a night As dark as death, deeper than history; Mocked from the flower’s bell, scorned by the worm, That pock-patched bitter brother whose is right To shelter in my shroud, my final friend; Thus taste I glory, friends, banquet on bones. See-saw, my ticking heart will last to-day, But the next and the next will be a reign of tears; Some hill may own me once before the rats Break through my box and forage for my hopes. But hope has gone, and heaven’s voice is thin; Now only scarecrow deaf can know the dumb. XII If then a star should fall and singe my shroud So that the gold-lipped legates of my god Hold before horror fingers cruciform, To purge the lilied pools where goddesses And none but milk-white, sweet my pure-in-heart, Had in delight bequeathed reflection: If in my March-hare, turncoat breast The elfin, festering barb of doubt should prick Quick and cry halt! to fingers’ templar-trade— So should the promise slip from paradise, Let lie along the lane my carrion hopes, And the thin children of decay crouch in the hearth. But, lest my lord should see me in such ruin, Mountains should crumble, caverns pock the plains, Strict columns rattle on the parchment fields Like play-day drumsticks on a heaven of tin; And like a looting angel’s rod of fire, Proud poplars prick the slow sun from the sky. XIII In heart’s cracked bowl lie pence, that by my dream’s Slick counterfeit are coined, spun from the air Like fabulous cloth-of-gold, prophet’s cast clout Upon the patient fool who waits below, Spendthrift of molten minutes ere the Lord Shall call him close to whisper in his ear; The wastrel watcher of the weasel’s craft, Delicate instrument upon whose page will be Forever stamped the poor daft coney’s testament. If at this bowl’s rim flutes of other times With salt-eyed melody and gilt despair Make sharp assault, or red with ancient fire The rage that burnt my fate upon my brow, Crack the frail platter on whose side is scored My history, shall faith fly out as fear? Or may it be that, from the garden-croft Another bright boy wrote of, blackbird’s plea Will soften even Satan’s merriment? Sometimes my finger, itching in the flames Trull-tongue has kindled, knots for me a snare, Or points me to the crowd like any liar; Sometimes these eyes in riding high and low Tease me with paradise as hawk plays bird. Inner and outer tread the road to war, And all Atlantis’ sands left me to sift . . . If laughter shake me from salvation’s knee Who shall be judge upon the harm I meant? I only know the faggot of my flames Is this same limb my father bade me bear; This name that tumbles like a sodden lout Out of the world’s prim mouth shall come and go Whatever weather fall, be frost so hard That angler, patient at the future’s weir, Pluck it like feckless trout, stiff as a gift Where given-to and giver smell the lie That lurks unbidden underneath the scent. XIV Invention is the spirit’s sharpest pain, A midnight lamentation in the cell Bled white with lack of saying. Quick as a fungus In the crevice of the soul, stirs thought That knows no word, no sunlight on the world, And, like the silken-veinéd dove, about The iron door of meaning breaks its pride. Like rotting seas, with Moloch’s harvest home Writhing away to farthest journey of the eye, Almost to end of limit-line of life, The poems, that forever in my womb Must suck their banquet only from my dreams, Cry like a breastless babe in some strange house, Forgotten, at the end of no-man’s road. So, think you not, when in a time of iron My hand arises like a lilied saint And begs the means from warder-world to carve For future’s dalliance, in a freckled stone, These agonies of heart, sharp knives of tune— So think you not assassin other hand Which leaps like flame and plucks heart’s twanging cord; Which had been best done, as it was to be, Before the sire had crept plague-blooded to His purple palace of delight; before Cell’s curt invention to the winter light Thrust out for all the grinning globe to see, An alabaster angel, frail with truth, Whose body be invention’s battlefield. XV Slow sarabande of pain in all the air; Everywhere cadence, decay of a tune, of time, Death of the gold days and the feathered joy, And across the purple sky and the purple hills The long undying pattern of despair. It has come too soon, this sorrow’s psalm, And the black cloud-rack scowling in the West, Where brethren moving like uprooted trees In a Birnam of blood drop aching twigs of hands, And from leaves in an ancient way stare round about At callous, undulating plains of salt, Where nightjar leers through a broken note, And the scarecrow dog at the end of his rope Gnaws at the door, howls as he feels as we, The wide, immeasurable knowledge of an end. TOWARDS A PERSONAL ARMAGEDDON—A SEQUENCE I The shapes of Truth are no man’s history Or hope; born in the horny womb of Time, They die with the daylight, ere the Surgeon’s hand Can grasp the knife to solve the mystery Of feeling and the half-formed word. Sand Trickles slyly through the palm like this, Playing the hour-glass with the living bone, Wife to the midnight sigh, the foetal wish. The tired poet in his reeling room Twists thoughts to clothe his bare hypnotic words; Distracted by the rain on sodden thatch, He moves towards the window, lifts the latch, Cries, crazed by some bloody incubus of doom, ‘Oh, listen to the laughter of the birds!’ II All life came to me in the bed of love. I, blushing puppet, shaped in rose’s mould, Whose eyes rode southern airs, whose lips Lisped the leaves’ song and nailed the world with words. From inch to acre is the eagles’ vision, Who clasp the tawny counties in a claw; From now to ever is a hail of years, Slow snail’s the master and the stammering crows! But in my passion lives of all I lived And spoke their voices for a thousand years. West-wind, my brother, took me by the hand And showed me over hells my other homes; So nightly, under sodden thatch I lay And times before the tomb I heard my ends. III Before my tales began, before the light Burst like a devil’s howl behind my lids, Words flickered in my skull and tied my tongue; Twisting my garment’s hem to gain a blessing, Turning the words of love to gain a home, I was the lad of sin whose heart bled tears. Whose fickle pulse beat out all bodies’ message? And who but I had heard the weasel’s woe? Who told the tick of tide in petals’ fall, Knew how a world of years rides in a wind? (That was a black beginning.) In my brain The future’s noisy crotchet scratched a niche, Twisted my sombre soul in arabesque. This was the fanfare to my fair-ground fate. IV Like a deft lecher, laughing in his hand, Or flaming like gigantic stalactite, I burst the web that kept me in the thighs, Scattering my bloody pearls across the land. Stars shook as my silver scream shore high Into their hearts, and heaved a sigh that I Should in that midnight minute shout A song that other ears and other stars Find but the birthing-ballad of a boy, The baby-babble as the tooth breaks through. From that dark minute I have felt my future Stalk through the land and scythe the hours through, While in the warm womb’s cavern even, I saw my hearse, felt the rough prick of shroud. V My tale of horror was the dry-dugged virgin, The eyeless child with flowers in his claw. My land of terror was the treeless country, Whose warping womb held nothing but my fear, Whose stone songs died before the mourning light. These were my tale, my land, and these my tears. If they had taught me ways and wiles of winds, The fever of the cracked bone in the thigh, I should have known the worst, and these dead days Would not have dragged me like a dog to die, Here in a land where no hand holds a greeting, Where the slack jaw only the death-day mouths; I could have known and could have swung my heart To the place where lips labour alone with laughter. VI The wry world sucked me, gave me for a home A leper’s chancel; following the lion I knew what banquets slept within a stone, How that the cautious raven for his sins Must pluck from lime-dry planets sustenance And smile when gay-garbed adder milks the moon. From this rock I chipped a short-life’s grace And flaked the minutes in my palm like rime, Tasting them before they fell to dust. Yet came the dawn when jackal-coat I sloughed And, compound with treachery, I moved with snake; Two-wise I stepped, deceiving as I dealt, Learning to live on lies and love the pit; Was this the start, or page before the end? VII Then slew I brother with a knife of words. His body fell, and failing breathed the Spring. Tree’s hand and heart’s side would have kept him warm, But for the beggar in his blood that crowed, Waking my pilgrim from his forest dream. Alas, masters, who shall paint the corse To make it feast-ways ready for my bride? Who hold the chalice, lest the coursing stream Should nourish ants who’d grow and rend my box, Should teach the hawk my message through his tongue And bring upon me terror as I slept? The deed is dun: my hand’s too weak for jet, Justice would give me syrops for my brows, Where others brandish thorn-crowns on a hill. VIII I took a man with eyes of pain, whose pearls Pranking the rubble robbed me of my sleep: I loved a man with a dagger of lath, lithe, Lissom and lying, cut-purse with poet’s tongue. And these two-hearted chuckled at my ruin, Crack-wit they called me, whispering to the trees. But on the morrow, and the morrow’s mother, I, With gloves of silk and eagle’s feathers fraught, Crossed paths and sticks and let the black pool run For one; for other, Jack the man of string Did me a duty, then my fellow-trees Braced bone and with their knotted muscle sank A rope for dangling dalliers in the breeze. Sap throve on bleeding, I on the living gold. IX Yet move they many, all their words are false, And though their tongues swing sweetly southern airs, The man they carve their image on is lost. Stab one, swing one, drop one in the ditch, Stitch ten for fishes in the miser’s bag; Rack one, crack one, bury deep in lime, Yet rising sun shall see them, ten on ten, Knocking the old note out of sea-shore shells, Cozening the old man ready for the hearse, Alive, loved and moving, many in their lies, While I, time-master, lord of gallow-tree, Shall watch them speechless, dancing as they go, Shaking the rooftree, dropping blight on bough: And mountains toppling from their velvet feet. X ‘Come night and come the sliding of the stars: Come Angelus and sway the swinging teat, That planets, suckled like a hungry stone In henpecked heaven, scatter plaints abroad. Colour me, lanterns, with a gibbet-dye That tongue and eye out of my lantern skull Shall chase the body-tasters from the globe, And leave the mountain-summit free for love.’ This, in my mystic missal, wrote a saint, Washing the sword and nail-prints in his side, Watching the faded ages in his hair: It was so long ago when I heard this; The seeds I spat while walking in the fields Now flourish figs and tempt my poacher-lips. XI A sack of weasels from the land of graves Unwinds my wishes, strews abroad my hope. And in the moonlight out upon the plains A mole-dance stammers words from unboxed bones That chill my ears and spike my habits through. For peace I pack my eye, my altar change, And sew nine stitches where was once a stake; For love I lash flame nine-pins to my breast And finger-way break minutes as they bud. But it is useless: for along the lanes The briar-claws clutch, the adder’s nests lie low, And it is only seconds till the sword Shall nail me palmwards up against the oak. (All which was writ me in a dream of rats.) XII There is a hill and over that a cross Swung in a cloud, and over that a star. There is a man, and over him a sword Swung in a hand, and over that a god. Who pays the piper if he is a demon? Who calls the tune, if Michael rips it out From gold-strings at heaven-gate when earth below is black With ant-plague and penny itch and fever in the heart? There is a mountain crawling as we sing, Whose woods clothe giants’ navels as we love. And who shall bar the door against its day, And who shall cut the bough and bow the churl? Don’t guess, don’t labour for the word that’s sped: Don’t lie awake, don’t love, don’t speak your name. XIII A dog coughs; who then shall doubt a wolf? If clouds weep thistles, shall the bomber’s egg Bore, burrow its mole-hole in the coffin-wall? Long have I watched the madness in my hand And long felt terror chipping in my bone; But I would hack this half-heart from its stalk, Crush between mill-stones these my milksop struts If finger’s voice stroked mercy out of steel Or visiting the hills I found I ran. A wolf sings and who would smell a rat, If ducat’s devil had him, in the walls? No, flags dance, and coloured altars rise To praise the Spring that gives us ears to hear, Hands to hold the weather, fledgling to feed. XIV A snake in thatch can spell the end of dreams, Spill sun, the desert’s cousin, out of doors And drum the twitching hours from my wrist. But snake in man spells not nor dreams a sun, Spoils the bright flower and lets the red blood run, Cozens the lock and knows all stars are free. So of the two, the twin-legged and the none—, Which shall we follow, festoon with our fears? And which the one nail twisting to the barn To brother weasel? Once in my life a dwarf Lurched from an oak and rapiered a god, Smiling, mouse-footed, with an arm of stone, Then turned, curtsied to our smiles and tears, Vanished between the rafters and the thatch. XV These many-storied pence will etch my dream In pink-rock caverns underneath the moon; Where, safe from the Age’s rack, I’ll spin a doom For every stick that stabbed my wishes. Fame, Fearful and frenzy-footed now my sable hand Clasps hard and strangles earldoms in a trice, Shall with a female gesture offer gold, Toss with a downward glance the Indies’ sack And prayer of grasping. Yet I shall stand aloof, Alone, building with words and winds a turret Which my black book and block shall furnish quite; Whose doors, deaf to the gold-edged pauper’s paw, Shall give no message of the man who waits, Shall open suddenly without a sign. XVI For it was told me in a dream I heard, When the ice-night blew windwise through my head And taught my linnet-loves to rest in stones: That night I saw an eagle twist a wheel, Saw my own numbered name flash through a fire, Heard my blood whisper that a time had trod His passage round the stars and now had come; Waiting, was tickling my heart-door with his scythe, Counting his fretful hours till my hand knocked Away the bolts to let him walk within. So he stands here, grows old inside my veins. Smaller than crags now, weaker than young lions, His home became a place of hissing, leopard’s fair, I, masters, shelter, yet am his Master-grave! XVII The dancing man with the dagger of lath Slashes the bubbles growing out of grief, And drops the leaden hours through the loam. He is the rainmaker, son of the fatal plight; But the stumbling woman dressed in straw Strews thorns, and scythes the merry moment’s corn: Her womb drops woe before her limbs have lived, And her to-morrow died before the dawn. Yet of the two, the lathman and the sheaf, I’d give my ring where sorrow rings the clock. We who are merely planets’ tennis balls Hold fast to tinsel, letting diamonds drop Like damsel plums, into the poacher’s hand, And never read the world till we are blind. XVIII The bubble-word is nectar to the dumb, And ghosts have wept at trifles over Thebes, Where between sackcloth’s lips and water’s whip Old men have spoke the deathbed of an Age. Likewise the deaf have shuddered at the word Wailed by a suckling scarcely dry from womb; And scholars turned uneasy pages as Crows croaking cross the silent pane. What is the shape of truth? I ask. Are words Coined in the catchpenny midnight, armour plate, Bourn from the mourning moan, the morn Of madness, when the roving eye feels rooms And finds an empty house, his side-man stone? Will words heal wounds that sharpen heartslike knives? XIX When yellow spots do on your hands appear Think twice, thank God, but do not hope to act. For midnight daggers rust in morning dew, And sunlight on a wound will breed a fruit. Wait, watch how the cypress dances for the moon, The fluid geometry of bats, the black mole’s trade, And you will know how much a limb is worth, How much St. Francis gathered in his cap: And you will know what song the beetle sings, And how the straw-built prophet comes to hell. A white horse proudly walked along a hill, Bearing an eagle, who with bloody claw, Tore out its entrails just before the wall; I saw the horse blaze banners from his eye. XX ’Tis not the painted stick, the golden boy, The figure cut in alabaster pays Me for the bearing burden of a name: These baubles sat my eyes like shiftless wench, Heated my loin, but left it cold as stone, And no love lost, and no love to be gained. Twelve-tongued the Bell Hosannah paints a grave, One-piped the devil-kestrel Eden wings: And I am here in matter without mould, Manwise to walk where walking brings no home, Where homes can hold no hearts a moment’s space, Where walls hold mirrors which alone hold walls. If there’s a hill worth climbing, tell me, boy, What’s on the other side, mountains or plains? XXI What hand of stone has stabbed my hope, And writ my fate upon a talking dial? Was it the same forking limb that hacked a cross Out of a pasture-hill and hanged a saint? The same that, giving birds a tale of heaven, Could fill the space behind the lids with lies, And throng with devils hour’s careless word? If it is so, the friend who keeps my side Is he not apt to cause a wound of words, Much more of iron, where I am most weak? The sea that tells an endless tale of peace, On whose broad breast the peaceful packet walks, Might it not suddenly become a fiend, Crush sleeping centuries, rock with joy at wreck? XXII How shall we man this mountain when it rocks, Only by lying wait and trapping clouds? If, as the tucket sounds, the winking winds Would join us, we might be safe: but, no. Young men, with terror from the lap of love, Leap! Know in that minute the vice-locked bone, The twining veins that stammer out their tale Before the fleeing blood cuts off their dole. Know that the word, the southern sound, is false, That truth’s in tendons and the sobbing heart. For me, there’ll wailing be among the elms, And there will dirges sing about the barns. Pie-fingering thumb pulled out my waited prize, Gave me a grave to tend, an empty home. XXIII Though cities fall we cannot hold the hour When dream-built phoenix sheltered in the leaves, And the proud pilgrim with his marble thighs Strode through the forest years before our birth. It is another tale, made before sound Prompted the patriarch behind the eyes, While the weak globe, uncertain of his goal Still swung in space, in matter without mould. Yet song was there, growing through the lids, Gradual, child-footed, wanting but the grave To snap the leash and cast it into light. Now cries the blood and the plucked bone cries, And only the heart lies still as nerveless hands Scatter the perfect years, the perfect years. XXIV Not drum, nor trembling tucket-sound shall stay The falling hammer, the forgotten word; The halting foot be fast upon the shift And lock of laughing sand as on this rock, Racked with the Age’s weevils, pulled in parts By a straw-haired Nemesis whose babbling blood Scoffs in man’s head and turns his heart to flint. This is no moment for the lover’s word, When cracked-bone terror and the lurking barb Lie in the flower’s bell nor show their eyes: O hands, O heart, how many centuries Must we be stifled in this stony grave? How many bloody minutes roll across The land, before the love we bear is born? XXV Which is the final shape, then, which the sharp Edge to cut from history its coat of brass And bear unto the forty winds a sign? Which of these voices leans on silver tongue, Learning a weapon that will dull the sword, And blazing stalactite reduce to dust? Which fling my devil down and let me sleep? Patience, my masters, while the children weep Their unborn bodies’ blood for my poor beast, Whose shackles falter in his wordy ruin, Whose worlds are nothing more than angels sing From coloured pages, unbelieved, unheard Of men. Patience again, I ask you, lest In carving we may cut the throat of hope. THE BOAT RETURNS THE BOAT RETURNS The boat had drifted, battered, to the beach That rings my heart’s deep sea, crusted with grief, Decked as for festival with tropic flower, A slim green lizard grinning at the prow. What pain has spoken prophecy aboard You, gushing from the hatch? Oh, what black sun Has blistered your gold sides to make gold mouths? To cry, ‘O whither now, wild waves, O where?’ I saw this boat against the summer moon: I caught her music in my summer ear: I felt her tackle pulling in my breast: Her prow against my heart-bone making way. Then blood spun skywards like the frantic lark, Speaking a language tongue had never known; Singing an ancient song, forgotten when Twelve sturdy Greeks pulled out to sea from Tyre. Oh, Mistress Mine, oh, Traveller! What land Is poorer for your leaving? What the tale Your lips, if lips they are that crack your sides, Could tell, in sighs between the shiftings of the tides? And while heart spoke a circling gull called, ‘Speak!’ ‘Speak!’ croaked the raven from the ruined wharf. ‘Oh, tell your tale!’ the grim crab cackled. And A thousand creatures from the sea sighed, ‘Tell!’ . . . . . . ‘Long time ago, a time too proud for years, Too great with grief to bear a century’s name, I trod, a virgin, on the sea’s soft breast, Full in my pride and stepping like a queen. ‘Born in the misty heaven between the sun And the far poles of suffering and delight, Fashioned by tearful hands whose eyes sang praise, I walked the earth’s small floor on holiday. . . . ‘With deck awash, and foundering under fruits, I heard the hammer fall and saw men fall Beneath the lash, agape with leather throats, So that Rome’s tables be complete with lime! ‘I carried a pale prophet, safe in chains, Whose crime was that inside his wagging head A story would not cry itself to sleep— A yarn about a madman and two thieves. ‘And after time unmeasured I beheld Tall cliffs, a hoped-for haven, white with chalk; But rest was only iron in the heart, And conqueror burning blue-limbed men in woods. ‘From my tall tree, the pale-eyed wanderers saw Dark men in feathers, happy under heaven, And left them when they sailed again, plucked crows, Black stinking bundles rolling on the shores. ‘It was all waste, or woe, or blood upon my decks; Young lovers parted by a salty dream; Husband from wife and warm fire dragged away, To cough inside my hold among the ice: ‘Man torn from mother, father from his son, To watch with blackening eyes the Southern Cross; Or wait with thickening tongue while wars were won, And dripping life, to singe King Philip’s beard. ‘So many years! Oh, how the time has dragged! And not an inch of ocean not my own; No sight unknown, from Dutchman at the Cape To green Sargasso’s serpents and their stench! ‘So many years! So many brave bones bleached! So many tears to swell the salt sea’s dower! And so much blood; ah, so much useless blood, That might have relearned love, discovered God!’ . . . . . . But was there not a time, I whispered, when With proud, knife-fingered boy upon your prow, You won again your maidenhead and stepped, Lissom as linnet through a poet’s dream? When winds brought not the message of decay, And decks were dressed with diamond-flashing song? When the great snowy albatross beat time, Close in your wake, to poet’s golden rhyme? Have I not heard that as the moon sank low Beneath the tides, strange creatures from below Crept up your sides, and panted on your boards To hear the magic leave the dark boy’s lips? . . . . . . ‘We danced through latitudes no chart has dreamed, In bays reported by no map we stayed; It seemed we sailed another globe, as though Like thieves we crept away while men still slept. ‘With this young god as steersman, many sights I saw. I watched bergs born, heard mother’s scream As silver-blue babe toppled from the womb, Moving the waters even to the Poles. ‘I heard the many-coloured birds that speak The language that created men from slime; And watched the torpid serpents dreaming worlds No eyes would see, among the rotting trees. ‘Had we been mates, he boat or I a bride, Time would have stayed for us, our legend kind. But sap had dried within me, blood in him. And so the morning broke when, in my sight ‘The shores he had invented groaned and wept, Heaved with a death-bed sickness, slowly shrank, A damp, amorphous, sickening heap of filth, Stinking to heaven, washed by a putrid sea. ‘And from that minute, he whose hand had led Leaned on my mast and let the tiller swing; His peace polluted and his gods unmanned, He watched the obscene seas with eyeless holes. ‘Speaking no word, his tongue cracked like dry straw; Thinking no thought, his brain like dew dissolved; Dreaming no dream, his heart became a stone. . . . And so my captain leaned against my mast. ‘Then one night while I slept beneath the lee Of a shadow that had come before the moon, A tempest rose from all the dead men’s throats, Who pined for home, chill on the ocean’s floor. ‘I woke in anguish from my desert-dream And heard the thunder crackling in my hold; All emptiness I felt, no one to love. And by the dawn I found my love had gone. ‘And in his place an ancient thing I found, Gaunt as the love that madness bears for peace, Deaf, blind and helpless, lying on my decks, Waiting for death since this red world began. ‘And as the years wore thin, I learned to hear The reed-weak whimperings that seemed to crawl, Faint as a pauper’s joy, from this sad ape, Words that no ear might trap but nearing death: ‘_I see him trading metal rods for pearls;_ _Spitting on verses in some sunny town:_ _I see him trading pearls for women’s limbs;_ _And burning sonnets as the sun goes down._ ‘_I see him, wild with wine, in narrow streets,_ _Creating ways of passion for a friend:_ _I see him, sad and sleepless in a cell,_ _Weeping that justice cannot slay with fire._ ‘_But, last of all, upon a rusty bed,_ _Troubled with flies and noises from the docks,_ _I hear him shrieking as his thick blood turns,_ _“Where lies she now? Oh, where my lovely bark?”_’ ‘I listened softly, stilled the rocking waves With my broad bosom and my oaken strength; I waited breathless, like a heated maid For raping whisper, but no whisper came. ‘And then, in anger with this weary thing, Impatiently I swung my shoulders, flapped The tatters of my mast-head, asked again. But all I heard was shark’s disgusted scream. . . . ‘So now you find me, sheltering in this shore, Away from tempest and the sad-eyed boy Whose fingers still reach out across the seas, Across the blood that’s washed my creaking boards.’ . . . . . . And will you stay? I asked the tired boat, And bear the sea’s sweet harvest to the world? And will you stay, I asked, that poets may Find rest for once upon your hallowed breast? ‘That may not be,’ I thought the words came back, ‘For I am weary and my heart is old. . . .’ The tower-clock spoke night, and as I watched, The wailing bark sank silently from sight. THE END TRANSCRIBER NOTES Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed. Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur. [The end of _Invitation and Warning_ by Henry Treece]