a morning that’s already all in Spring,
there’s nothing in his head that could prohibit
the splendor of all poems from centering
upon us with an almost fatal shining;
for in his gaze as yet no shadow plays,
his temples are too cool for laurel’s twining,
and from his eyebrows not till later days
will that tall-stemmed rose garden be uplifting,
and loosened petals, one by one, be drifting
along the tremors of the mouth below,
as yet still silent, sparkling and unused,
just drinking something with its smile, as though
its singing were being gradually infused.
LOVE-SONG
How shall I hold my soul, that it may not
be touching yours? How shall I lift it then
above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot,
with some lost thing the dark is isolating
on some remote and silent spot that, when
your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.
You and me—all that lights upon us, though,
brings us together like a fiddle-bow
drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.
EASTERN AUBADE
Does it not, though, like a coast appear,
a strip of coast, this bed on which we’re lying?
Those lofty breasts of yours alone are clear
to my grown-dizzy feeling’s dim descrying.
For, oh, this night in which so much was screaming
in which beasts called and rent themselves in prey,
is it not grimly strange to us? And, gleaming
outside so slowly there and called the day,
is that too really more familiar-seeming?
One needs to be as much within another
as anthers are in petals: so unending
around us things immeasurably transcending
accumulate until they almost smother.
While, though, with these embraces we are keeping
unnoticed that in-closing enmity,
from you, from me, it still can be outleaping:
for, oh, our spirits live by treachery.
DAVID SINGS BEFORE SAUL
l
Can you hear, King, how my instrument
flings out distances through which we’re wending?
Stars encounter us uncomprehending,
and at last like rain we are descending,
and a flowering follows that descent.
Girls you still were able to possess
flower from women tempting my defenses;
scent of virgins reassails your senses;
slender boys stand, all excitedness,
panting where some hidden stair commences.
Would my strings could bring back everything!
But my music’s reeling drunkenly.
Ah, those nights of yours, those nights, my King—
and, grown heavier from your handselling,
how superb those bodies all could be!
I can match you their remembered splendor,
since I can divine it. How, though, render
for you their dark groans of ecstasy?
2
King, who had such blessings here below,
and who now with life that never ceases
overshadow me and overthrow:
come down from your throne and break in pieces
this my harp you are exhausting so.
Look, it’s like an amputated tree:
through its boughs, where fruits for you were growing,
depths now, as of days to come, are showing—
scarcely recognizable by me.
Let me by its side no more be sleeping;
look, King, at this boyish hand: do you
really think it cannot yet be leaping
through the octaves of a body too?
3
Though you’re hiding in the dark somewhere,
King, I have you still within my hold.
Look, my firm-spun song’s without a tear,
and the space around us both grows cold.
My deserted heart and your untended
in your anger’s clouds are both suspended,
madly bit into each other there
and into a single heart uprolled.
How we change each other, can you clearly
feel now? Burden’s being inspirited.
If we hold to one another merely,
you to youth, King, I to age, we’re nearly
like a star that’s circling overhead.
THE DEPARTURE OF
THE PRODIGAL SON
Now to depart from all this incoherence
that’s ours, but which we can’t appropriate,
and, like old well-springs, mirrors our appearance
in trembling outlines that disintegrate;
from all this, that with bramble-like adherence
is once more clinging to us—to depart,
and then to start
bestowing on this and that you’d ceased to see
(so took for granted was their ministration)
a sudden gaze:-all reconciliation,
tender and close and new-beginningly;
and to divine the whelming desolation,
the inexorable impersonality,
of all that childhood needed to withstand—
And even then depart, hand out of hand,
as though you tore a wound that had been healing,
and to depart: whither? To unrevealing
distance, to some warm, unrelated land,
that, back-clothwise, will stay, without all feeling,
behind all action: garden, sea or sand;
and to depart: why? Impulse, generation,
impatience, obscure hope, and desperation
not to be understood or understand:
To take on all this, and, in vain persistence,
let fall, perhaps what you have held, to die
alone and destitute, not knowing why—
Is this the way into some new existence?
THE OLIVE GARDEN
And still he climbed, and through the gray leaves thrust,
quite gray and lost in the gray olive lands,
and laid his burning forehead full of dust
deep in the dustiness of burning hands.
After all, this. And, this, then, was the end.
Now I’m to go, while I am going blind;
and, oh, why wilt Thou have me still contend
Thou art, whom I myself no longer find.
No more I find Thee. In myself no tone
of Thee; nor in the rest; nor in this stone.
I can find Thee no more. I am alone.
I am alone with all that human fate
I undertook through Thee to mitigate,
Thou who art not. Oh, shame too consummate …
An angel came, those afterwards relate.
Wherefore an angel? Oh, there came the night,
and turned the leaves of trees indifferently,
and the disciples stirred uneasily.
Wherefore an angel? Oh, there came the night.
The night that came requires no specifying;
just so a hundred nights go by,
while dogs are sleeping and while stones are lying—
just any melancholy night that, sighing,
lingers till morning mount the sky.
For angels never come to such men’s prayers,
nor nights for them mix glory with their gloom.
Forsakenness is the self-loser’s doom,
and such are absent from their father’s cares
and disincluded from their mother’s womb.
PIET
À
So, Jesus, once again I am beholding
those feet that seemed so youthful to me there
when I unshod and washed them, greatly fearing;
oh, how they stood entangled in my hair,
like some white wild thing from a thorn-bush peering.
Those limbs, from every lover so withholding,
for the first time in this love-night I view.
We’ve never felt each other’s arms enfolding,
and now I only weep and watch for you.
But, look, how torn your hands have come to be—
not from my bites, beloved, not by me.
Your heart stands open now for all to share:
I only should have had the entry there.
Now you are tired, and your tired mouth is urged
by no desire for my sad mouth, alas!—
O Jesus, Jesus, when did our time pass?
How strangely both of us are being submerged.
THE POET’S DEATH
He lay. His high-propped face could only peer
in pale refusal at the silent cover,
now that the world and all this knowledge of her,
had fallen back to the unfeeling year.
Those who had seen him living saw no trace
of his deep unity with all that passes;
for these, these valleys here, these meadow-grasses,
these streams of running water, were his face.
Oh yes, his face was this remotest distance,
that seeks him still and woos him in despair;
and his mere mask, timidly dying there,
tender and open, has no more consistence
than broken fruit corrupting in the air.
BUDDHA
As though he listened. Stillness: something far …
We hold our breath; our hearing though’s too dim.
And he is star. And many a mighty star,
beyond our vision, is attending him.
Oh, he is all. Lingering, have we the least
hope that he’ll notice? Could he ever need?
And if we fell before him here to plead,
he’d still sit deep and idle as a beast.
For that in him which drags us to his feet
has circled in him for a million years.
He who forgets our hopes and fears
in thoughts from which our thoughts retreat.
L’ANGE DU MÉRIDIEN
Chartres
In storm, that round the strong cathedral rages
like a denier thinking through and through,
your tender smiling suddenly engages
our hearts and lifts them up to you:
O smiling angel, sympathetic stone,
with mouth as from a hundred mouths distilled:
do you not mark how, from your ever-filled
sundial, our hours are gliding one by one—
that so impartial sundial, upon which
the day’s whole sum is balanced equally,
as though all hours alike were ripe and rich?
What do you know, stone-nurtured, of our plight?
With face that’s even blissfuller, maybe,
you hold your tables out into the night.
THE CATHEDRAL
In those small towns where, clustered round about,
old houses squat and jostle like a fair,
that’s just caught sight of it, and then and there
shut up the stalls, and, silenced every shout,
the criers still, the drum-sticks all suspended,
stands gazing up at it with straining ears:
while it, as calm as ever, in the splendid
wrinkled buttress-mantle rears
itself above the homes it never knew:
in those small towns you come to realize
how the cathedrals utterly outgrew
their whole environment. Their birth and rise,
as our own life’s too great proximity
will mount beyond our vision and our sense
of other happenings, took precedence
of all things; as though that were history,
piled up in their immeasurable masses
in petrification safe from circumstance,
not that, which down among the dark streets passes
and takes whatever name is given by chance
and goes in that, as children green or red,
or what the dealer has, wear in rotation.
For birth was here, within this deep foundation,
and strength and purpose in this aspiration,
and love, like bread and wine, was all around,
and porches full of lovers’ lamentation.
In the tolled hours was heard life’s hesitation,
and in those towers that, full of resignation,
ceased all at once from climbing, death was found.
THE ROSE WINDOW
In there: the lazy-pacing paws are making
a silence almost dizzying you; and then
how suddenly one cat-like creature’s taking
the glance that strays to it and back again
into its great eye irresistibly—
the glance which, grasped as in a whirlpool’s twist,
floats for a little while revolvingly
and then sinks down and ceases to exist,
when that eye, whose reposefulness but seems,
opens and closes with a raging clasp
and hales it in to where the red blood streams—
Thus from the darkness there in days gone by
would the cathedrals’ great rose-windows grasp
a heart and hale it into God on high.
GOD IN THE MIDDLE AGES
And they’d got him in themselves upstored,
and they hung on him (a last endeavor
to withhold his journey heavenward
and to have him near them in their slumbers)
their cathedrals’ massive weights. He must
merely wheel across his boundless numbers
pointingly and, like a clock, adjust
what they daily toiled at or transacted.
But he suddenly got into gear,
and the people of the stricken town
left him—for his voice inspired such fear—
running with his striking-works extracted,
and absconded from his dial’s frown.
THE PANTHER
Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His gaze those bars keep passing is so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
He feels as though a thousand bars existed,
and no more world beyond them than before.
Those supply-powerful paddings, turning there
in tiniest of circles, well might be
the dance of forces round a center where
some mighty will stands paralyticly.
Just now and then the pupil’s noiseless shutter
is lifted.—Then an image will indart,
down through the limbs’ intensive stillness flutter,
and end its being in the heart.
THE GAZELLE
Gazella Dorcas
Enchanted thing: however can the chime
of two selected words attain the true
rhyme that, as beckoned, comes and goes in you?
Out of your forehead leaf and lyre climb,
and all you are has been in simile
passing through those love-songs continually
whose words will cover, light as leaves of rose,
the no-more-reader’s eyes, which he will close:
only to look upon you: so impelled
as though each limb of yours with leaps were laden,
and held its fire but while the neck upheld
the head in hearkening: as when a maiden
breaks off from ba
thing in some lonely place,
the forest-lake within her swift-turned face.
THE UNICORN
And then the saint looked up, and in surprise
the prayer fell like a helmet from his head:
for softly neared that never-credited
white creature, which, like some unparented,
some helpless hind, beseeches with its eyes.
The ivory framework of the limbs so light
moved like a pair of balances deflected,
there glided through the coat a gleam of white,
and on the forehead, where the beams collected,
stood, like a moon-lit tower, the horn so bright,
at every footstep proudly re-erected.
Its mouth was slightly open, and a trace
of white through the soft down of grey and rose
(whitest of whites) came from the gleaming teeth;
its nostrils panted gently for repose.
Its gaze, though, checked by nothing here beneath,
projecting pictures into space,
brought a blue saga-cycle to a close.
THE DONOR
The painters’ guild was given this commission.
His Lord, perhaps, he did not really see;
perhaps, as he was kneeling in submission,
no saintly bishop stood in this position
and laid his hand upon him silently.
To kneel like this was everything, maybe
(just as it’s all that we ourselves have known):
to kneel: and hold with choking breath one’s own
contracted contours, trying to expand,
tight in one’s heart like horses in one’s hand.
So that, if something awesome should appear,
something unpromised and unprophesied,
we might dare hope it would not see nor hear,
and might approach, until it came quite near,
deep in itself and self-preoccupied.
ROMAN SARCOPHAGI
Why should we too, though, not anticipate
(set down here and assigned our places thus)
that only for a short time rage and hate
and this bewildering will remain in us,
as in the ornate sarcophagus, enclosed
with images of gods, rings, glasses, trappings,