That in its stillness you can hardly stir
Or in its nearness, lift your hand,
So great that you have simply got to stand
Looking at it through tears, through tears.
Then straight from these there broke the kiss,
I think you must have known by this
The thing, for what it was, that had come to you:
She did not love you like the rest,
It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best,
She gave you something altogether new.
And through it all, from her, no word,
She scarcely saw you, scarcely heard:
Surely you knew when she so touched you with her hair,
Or by the wet cheek lying there,
And while her perfume clung to you from head to feet all through
the day
That you can change the things for which we care,
But even you, unless you kill us, not the way.
This, then, was peace for her, but passion too.
I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew,
The only one that I would care to take
Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake.
Almost as happy as the caravan dead
In some dim chancel lying head to head
We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through—
One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing
behind our lips was endless life,
Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly
dawn, his ‘Are you there?’
And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs.
So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to
her of night and day,
It is the only truth: it is the dream in us
That neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away:
But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of her dream
Could she have cared so much?
She was a sinner, we are but what we are:
The spirit afterwards, but first, the touch.
D O V E R B E A C H
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
A U T U M N
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Hope Rosenthal
A sensation of falling is not unique or new.
My failing falling hand
Has got the falling sickness even Caesar
Could not withstand.
Yet underneath I know another hand
A falling universe cannot fall through.
S U D D E N L I G H T
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallows soar
Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
T H E F L O W E R
by George Herbert
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring,
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring,
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amiss,
This or that is.
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
O that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring shower,
My sins and I joining together.
But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,
Thy anger comes and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide;
Which when we once can find and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
T H E F I E L D S A R E F U L L O F S U M M E R S T I L L
by Edward Shanks
The fields are full of summer still
And breathe again upon the air
From brown dry side of hedge and hill
More sweetness than the sense can bear.
So some old couple, who in youth
With love were filled and over-full,
And loved with st
rength and loved with truth,
In heavy age are beautiful.
AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2004
Copyright © 2004 by William Nicholson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
CAUTION: This play is protected in whole, in part, or in any form, under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Empire, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, and is subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, radio, television, and public reading are strictly reserved. All inquiries concerning performance rights should be addressed to the author’s agent: Joyce Ketay, 1501 Broadway, Suite 1908, New York, New York, 10036.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: “The Impulse” from “The Hill Wife” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright 1916, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Co., copyright renewed 1944 by Robert Frost. Rights in the United Kingdom administered by Jonathan Cape, London. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC, The Estate of Robert Frost, and The Random House Group Limited. “Autumn” by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated here courtesy of Hope Rosenthal. “The Confirmation” from Collected Poems by Edwin Muir. Used by permission of the publisher, Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholson, William.
The retreat from Moscow: a play / William Nicholson.
p. cm.
1. Married people—Drama. 2. Divorce—Drama. I. Title.
PR6064.I235R48 2003
822’.914—dc22
2003063572
www.anchorbooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-49015-5
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