MOUNTAINS
Pure peaks thrust upward out of mines of energy
To scar the sky with symbols of ascent,
Out of an innermost catastrophe –
Schismatic shock and rupture of earth’s core –
Were grimly born.
O elemental statuary
And rock-hewn monuments, whose shadow we
Lie low and wasting in, a prey to inner void:
Preach to us with great avalanches, tell
How new worlds surge from chaos to the light;
And starbound snowfields, fortify
With the stern silence of your white
Our weak hearts dulled by the intolerably loud
Commotion of this tragic century.
c. 1943
WINTER GARDEN
The season’s anguish, crashing whirlwind, ice,
Have passed, and cleansed the trodden paths
That silent gardeners have strewn with ash.
The iron circles of the sky
Are worn away by tempest;
Yet in this garden there is no more strife:
The Winter’s knife is buried in the earth.
Pure music is the cry that tears
The birdless branches in the wind.
No blossom is reborn. The blue
Stare of the pond is blind.
And no one sees
A restless stranger through the morning stray
Across the sodden lawn, whose eyes
Are tired of weeping, in whose breast
A savage sun consumes its hidden day.
p. 1939
THE WALL
At first my territory was a Wood:
Tanglewood, tattering tendrils, trees
Whose Grimm’s-tale shadow terrified but made
A place to hide in: among traps and towers
The path I kept to had free right-of-way.
But centred later round an ambushed Well,
Reputed bottomless; and night and day
My gaze hung in the depths beneath the real
And sought the secret source of nothingness;
Until I tired of its Circean spell.
Returning to the narrow onward road
I find it leads me only to the Wall
Of Interdiction. But if my despair
Is strong enough, my spirit truly hard,
No wall shall break my will: To persevere.
c. 1943
THE FORTRESS
The socket-free lone visionary eye,
Soaring reflectively
Through regions sealed from macrocosmic light
By inner sky’s impenetrable shell,
Often is able to descry:
Beyond the abdominal range’s hairless hills
And lunar chasms of the porphyry
Mines; and beyond the forest whose each branch
Bears a lit candle, and the nine
Zigzagging paths which lead into the mind’s
Most dangerous far reach; beyond
The calm lymphatic sea
Laving the wound of birth, and the
Red dunes of rot upon its further shore:
A heaving fortress built up like a breast,
Exposed like a huge breast high on its rock,
Streaming with milky brightness, the domed top
Wreathed in irradiant rainbow cloud.
The shock
Of visions stuns the hovering eye, which cannot see
What caverns of deep blood those white walls hide,
Concealing ever rampant underneath
The dark chimera Death-in-life
Defending Life from death.
w. 1938, c. 1943
DICHTERSLEBEN
Lodged in a corner of his breast
Like a black hole torn by the loss
Of an ancestral treasure, like a thorn
Implanted ineradicably by his first
Sharp realization of the world, or like a cross
To which his life was to be nailed, he bore
Always the ache of an anxiety, a grief
Which nothing could explain, but which some nights
Would make him cry that he could fight no more.
Time ploughed its way through him; and change
Immersed him in disorder and decay.
Only the strange
Interior ray of the bleak flame
Which charred his heart’s core could illuminate
The hidden unity of his life’s theme.
He knew how the extremity of night
Can sterilize the final germ of faith;
Appearance crushed him with its steady weight;
Futility discoloured with its breath
His tragic vision. All his strength was spent
In holding to some sense from day to day …
Slowly he fell towards dismemberment.
Yet when he lay
At last exhausted under his stilled blood’s
Thick cover and eyes’ earth-stained lids,
The constant burden of his breast
(Long work of yeast) arose with joy
Into its first full freedom, metamorphosised, released.
c. 1943
I.M. BENJAMIN FONDANE
(1898–1944)
This is the osseous and uncertain desert
And valley of death’s shadow, where the desired
Sweet spiritual spring is sought for
But unfound.
It is beyond
And far, and lost in the essential blue
Of space, among the rock and snow, the locked
Domain the instinct asks for. They who wait
Without the great thirst of despair are cursed;
And they who quench their thirst in death
Shall fall asleep among the mirages. But the
Inspired and the unchained and the endowed of desperate grace
Shall break through the last gate, by violence take
God’s Kingdom, and attain the certain State.
p. 1938
MOZART: SURSUM CORDA
For Priaulx Rainier
Filters the sunlight from the knife-bright wind
And rarifies the rumour-burdened air,
The heart’s receptive chalice in pure hands upheld
Towards the sostenuto of the sky
Supernal voices flood the ear of clay
And transpierce the dense skull: Reveal
The immaterial world concealed
By mortal deafness and the screen of sense,
World of transparency and last release
And world within the world. Beyond our speech
To tell what equinoxes of the infinite
The spirit ranges in its rare utmost flight.
p. 1939
CAVATINA
Now we must bear the final real
Convulsion of the breast, for the sublime
Relief of the catharsis; and the cruel
Clear grief; the dear redemption from the crime,
The sublimation of the evil dream.
Beneath, all is confused, dense and impure;
Extraordinary shiftings of a nameless mass
From plane to plane, then some obscure
Catastrophe:
The shattered Cross
High on its storm-lit hill, the searchlight eyes
Whose lines divide the black dome of the skies,
Are implicated; and the Universe of Death –
Gold, excrement and flesh, the spirit’s malady,
A secret animal’s hot breath …
Yet through disaster a faint melody
Insists; and the interior suffering like a silver wire
Enduring and resplendent, strongly plied
By genius’ hands into the searching fire
At last emerges and is purified.
Its force like violins in pure lament
Persists, sending ascending stairs
Across the far wastes of the firmament
To carry starwards all our weight of tears.
p. 1938
ARTIST
Caught in a web, and crushed within a vice;
Watched by an Eye, but out of sight;
By a brand burnt, and wounded by
More keen a rustless blade than ever cut
This earth’s black veins. – The voice
Of prophecy destroys the speaker. Bleak
As a scraped bone, the stony tablelands
On which he stands. – He cannot kill
The serpent of the blood: but his ghost shall.
Though armies of his enemy extend
In coiling ranks around his feet, still yet
Shall he transcend defeat, if his great wound
Be kept from healing. – ARTIST! hold that host
Once more at bay by offering your flesh
As sacrifice to the Void’s mouth in your own breast!
w. 1939
INSURRECTION
Turbulence, uproar, echo of a War
Beyond our frontier: burning, blood and black
Impenetrable smoke that only blast
Of Archangelic trumpet could transpierce!
What savagery
And what inhuman crime,
What odour of hot iron, nocturnal flesh
Of sexual animal these uncouth cries invoke!
Till round the naked hill of rearing rock
With roaring torches suddenly emerge,
Shaking archaic instruments of strife,
Infernal armies sent us to avenge
The too-long-suffered tyranny and
Celebrated scandal of man’s life!
w. 1938
LEGENDARY FRAGMENT
Below, in the dark midst, the opened thighs
Gave up their mystery. Myrrh, cassia
And spikenard obscurely emanated from
The inmost blackness. As from all around
There rose a heavy sighing and a troubled light:
Reverberated in the ears and eyes
And stunned the senses.
Thus the harlot queen
Was vanquished, while the outmost walls
Of that great town still echoed with her praise.
p. 1940–1
EVE
Profound the radiance issuing
From the all-inhaling mouth among
The blonde and stifling hair which falls
In heavy rivers from the high-crowned head,
While in the tension of her heat and light
The upward creeping blood whispers her name:
Insurgent, wounded and avenging one,
In whose black sex
Our ancient culpability like a pearl is set.
p. 1938
VENUS ANDROGYNE
With gaze impaired by heavy haze of sense
And sleep-dust, see: the blasphemy of flesh!
The breast is female, groin and fist are male,
But the red sphinx is hidden underneath the
Weed-rank hair: muscle and grain
Of man inextricably twined
With woman’s beauty.
Stand up, thorn
Of double anguish born, and pierce
The gentle athlete flank, that fierce pain
May merge like honey with the spirit’s blood,
Purging desire: with agony atone
For such abhorrent heresy of seed,
And weld twin contradictions in a single fire!
p. 1938
POST-MORTEM
O mercury-green glare, grey flesh, black hair,
Harsh, frigid spasm, the spilt pool and spreading stain,
Mixed in the spirit, sharply printed there
By nightly pressures, between web-like sheets,
Such horrifying sheets as cling in dreams:
How can timebound a memory escape
From so much detritus
And humus of the depths?
Yet the bespittled hidden face,
Vile and reviled
Emerges out of life as from a sleep,
The complex hatred and long-implicating lie
At last released that heavy skein unwound.
w. 1937, rev. 1940, p. 2007
AMOR FATI
Beloved enemy, preparer of my death,
When there’s no longer any garment left
To lessen the clenched impact of our limbs,
When there is mutual drought in our swift breath
And twin tongues struggle for the brim
Of swollen flood – an aching undertow
Sucking us inward – when the blood’s
Lust has attained its whitest glow
And the convulsion comes in quickening gusts,
Speaking is fatal: Do not break
That vacuum out of which our silence speaks
Of its sad speechless fury to the star
Whose glitter scars
The heavy heaven under which we lie
And injure one another O incurably!
p. 1940
SIGNS
There fell down on the shadowed sand
Like dead birds from an evil nest
Across a livid space of sky:
A writhing hand,
The pale globe of a breast
And a dismembered thigh.
But from the dark’s most secret place
Across the curtains of the air
There presently began to rise
A dream-transfigured face
With lips exhaling prayer
And lambent eyes.
p. 1938
THE HERO
The laurelled profile with the Caesar’s nose and lip
Beneath the garlanded triumphal arch
Is not the Hero, for he has no face
But is as featureless as light.
Only the hands,
Possessing all, are human as hands are: only
The hands, the heart
Which turns from side to side like searchlight rays,
Unresting, through the night, proclaim him man,
Because the man has died.
He is unknown in death. He brings
No music with him. But he seems
Still listening to the moment of the vast
Explosion which has snatched him out of life,
So hugely deafening that it cannot end
But is forever everywhere,
As the dust of a lost glory fills
Even the crevices of furthest stars.
p. 1938
THE FAULT
To live, and to respire
And to aspire, to feel the fire
Urge upward through the mortal part and gain
Through burnt-out veins still higher!
But who has lived an hour
In the condemned condition of our blood
And not known how a wound like a black flower,
Exquisite and irreparable, can break
Apart in the immortal in us, or not felt
An intimation of the fault: to be alive!
p. 1938
THE DESCENT
Where everything sinks down,
Is petrified in its descent, as still as vast
Perspectives full of ragged mountain and
Black forest of mortality
And azure air,
Sink swollen slowly downward frozen tears.
All is reflected in that Angel’s eye
Who sees beyond the inward depth
Into the glittering schist of the far floor.
Naked the beautiful remembered limbs
And downward clustering hung
And mirrored in the dark encircling floods;
Suspended like a wreath and tremulous
In the mysterious wind of their blind flight and fall:
Unnumbered wings: and Ah! voluminous
The cloudy chasm like a gasping mouth
From whence the last deep
cry so throughly torn
Unseals the Sepulchre of holy rock.
p. 1939
THE OPEN TOMB
Vibrant with silence is the last sealed room
That fever-quickened breathing cannot break:
Magnetic silence and unshakably doomed breath
Hung like a screen of ice
Between the cavern and the closing eyes,
Between the last day and the final scene
Of death, unwitnessed save by one:
By Omega! the angel whose dark wind
Of wings and trumpet lips
Stirs with disruptive storm the clinging folds
Of stalagmatic foliage lachrymose
Hung from the lofty crypt, where endlessly
The phalanx passes, two by three, with all
The hypnotizing fall of stairs.
Their faces are unraised as yet from sleep;
The pace is slow, and down the steep descent
Their carried candles eddy like a stream;
While on each side, through window in the rock,
Beyond the tunnelled grottoes there are seen
Serene the sunless but how dazzling plains
Where like a sea resounds our open tomb.
p. 1939
THE PLUMMET HEART
In Memory of Hart Crane
Down, Hart, you fell down sound-
lessly, as though through shaft of lift,
leaving the roar of birth’s wind-parted rift
around the topmost floor, no ground
beneath, no wreath of rock
to crown your exit from this crux;
and as you dropped through the restricted flux
of such duration as the clock
controls, on swift walls shone
in mirrors as you hurtled by
the scripture chiselled by your heart: until
the sea received you, azure antiphon
whose octave answer is the sky
where your wrecked smile drifts still.
w. 1939, p. 1941
THE THREE STARS
A Prophecy
The night was Time:
The phases of the moon,
Dynamic influence, controller of the tides,
Its changing face and cycle of quick shades,
Were History, which seemed unending. Then
Occurred the prophesied and the to be