Poems by Sir John Collings Squire Volume I Part 8

I knit my brows and clench my eyelids tight And focus to a point.... Streams of dark pinkish light Convolve; and now spasmodically there flit Clear pictures of you as you used to sit:-- The way you crossed your legs stretched in your chair, Elbow at rest and tumbler in the air, Jesting on books and politics and worse, And still good company when most perverse.

Capricious friend!

Here in this room not long before the end, Here in this very room six months ago You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so.

Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough, You saw books, pictures, as I see them now, The sofa then was blue, the telephone Listened upon the desk, and softly shone Even as now the fire-irons in the grate, And the little bra.s.s pendulum swung, a seal of fate Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying...

And then you never had a thought of dying.

IV

You are not here, and all the things in the room Watch me alone in the gradual growing gloom.

The you that thought and felt are I know not where, The you that sat and drank in that arm-chair Will never sit there again.

For months you have lain Under a graveyard's green In some place abroad where I've never been.

Perhaps there is a stone over you, Or only the wood and the earth and the gra.s.s cover you.

But it doesn't much matter; for dead and decayed you lie Like a million million others who felt they would never die, Like Alexander and Helen the beautiful, And the last collier hanged for murdering his trull; All done with and buried in an equal bed.

V

Yes, you are dead like all the other dead.

You are not here, but I am here alone.

And evening falls, fusing tree, water and stone Into a violet cloth, and the frail ash-tree hisses With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.

And a steamer softly puffing along the river pa.s.ses, Drawing a file of barges; and silence falls again.

And a bell tones; and the evening darkens; and in spa.r.s.e rank The greenish lights well out along the other bank.

I have no force left now; the sights and sounds impinge Upon me unresisted, like raindrops on the mould.

And, striving not against my melancholy mood, Limp as a door that hangs upon one failing hinge, Limp, with slack marrowless arms and thighs, I sit and brood On death and death and death. And quiet, thin and cold, Following of this one friend the hopeless, helpless ghost, The weak appealing wraiths of notable men of old Who died, pa.s.s through the air; and then, host after host, Innumerable, overwhelming, without form, Rolling across the sky in awful silent storm, The myriads of the undifferentiated dead Whom none recorded, or of whom the record faded.

O spectacle appallingly sublime!

I see the universe one long disastrous strife, And in the staggering abysses of backward and forward time Death chasing hard upon the heels of creating life.

And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over, Onward and never returning, leaving no mark behind.

There's nothing to hope for. Blank cessation numbs my mind, And I feel my heart thumping gloomy against its cover, My heavy belly hanging from my bones.

VI

Below in the dark street There is a tap of feet, I rise and angrily meditate How often I have let of late This thought of death come over me.

How often I will sit and backward trace The deathly history of the human race, The ripples of men who chattered and were still, Known and unknown, older and older, until Before man's birth I fall, shivering and aghast Through a hole in the bottom of the remotest past; Till painfully my spirit throws Her giddiness off; and then as soon As I recover and try to think again, Life seems like death; and all my body grows Icily cold, and all my brain Cold as the jagged craters of the moon....

And I wonder is it not strange that I Who thus have heard eternity's black laugh And felt its freezing breath, Should sometimes shut it out from memory So as to play quite prettily with death, And turn an easy epitaph?

I can hear a voice whispering in my brain: "Why this is the old futility again!

Criminal! day by day Your own life is ebbing swiftly away.

And what have you done with it, Except to become a maudlin hypocrite?"

Yes, I know, I know; One should not think of death or the dead overmuch; but one's mind's made so That at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death, And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breath Is clouded in winter's air, And all the faith one may have Lies useless and dead as a body in the grave.

THE MARCH

I heard a voice that cried, "Make way for those who died!"

And all the coloured crowd like ghosts at morning fled; And down the waiting road, rank after rank there strode, In mute and measured march a hundred thousand dead.

A hundred thousand dead, with firm and noiseless tread, All shadowy-grey yet solid, with faces grey and ghast, And by the house they went, and all their brows were bent Straight forward; and they pa.s.sed, and pa.s.sed, and pa.s.sed, and pa.s.sed.

But O there came a place, and O there came a face, That clenched my heart to see it, and sudden turned my way; And in the Face that turned I saw two eyes that burned, Never-forgotten eyes, and they had things to say.

Like desolate stars they shone one moment, and were gone, And I sank down and put my arms across my head, And felt them moving past, nor looked to see the last, In steady silent march, our hundred thousand dead.

PROLOGUE: IN DARKNESS

With my sleeping beloved huddled tranquil beside me, why do I lie awake, Listening to the loud clock's hurry in the darkness, and feeling my heart's fierce ache That beats one response to the brain's many questionings, and in solitude bears the weight Of all the world's evil and misery and frustration, and the senseless pressure of fate?

Is it season of ploughing and sowing, this long vigil, that so certainly it recurs?

In this unsought return of a pain that was ended, is it here that a song first stirs?

Can it be that from this, when to-night's gone from memory, there will spring of a sudden, some time, Like a silver lily breaking from black deadly waters, the thin-blown shape of a rhyme?

THE LILY OF MALUD

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.

It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen, And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen.

It blooms once a year in summer moonlight, In a valley of dark fear full of pale moonlight: It blooms once a year, and dies in a night, And its petals disappear with the dawn's first light; And when that night has come, black small-breasted maids, With ecstatic terror dumb, steal fawn-like through the shades To watch, hour by hour, the unfolding of the flower.

When the world is full of night, and the moon reigns alone And drowns in silver light the known and the unknown, When each hut is a mound, half blue silver and half black, And casts upon the ground the hard shadow of its back, When the winds are out of hearing and the tree-tops never shake, When the gra.s.s in the clearing is silent but awake 'Neath a moon-paven sky: all the village is asleep And the babes that nightly cry dream deep: From the doors the maidens creep, Tiptoe over dreaming curs, soft, so soft, that not one stirs, And stand curved and a-quiver, like bathers by a river, Looking at the forest wall, groups of slender naked girls, Whose black bodies shine like pearls where the moonbeams fall.

They have waked, they knew not why, at a summons from the night, They have stolen fearfully from the dark to the light, Stepping over sleeping men, who have moved and slept again: And they know not why they go to the forest, but they know, As their moth-feet pa.s.s to the sh.o.r.e of the gra.s.s And the forest's dreadful brink, that their tender spirits shrink: They would flee, but cannot turn, for their eyelids burn With frenzy, and each maid, ere she leaves the moonlit s.p.a.ce, If she sees another's face is thrilled and afraid.

Now like little phantom fawns they thread the outer lawns Where the boles of giant trees stand about in twos and threes, Till the forest grows more dense and the darkness more intense, And they only sometimes see in a lone moon-ray A dead and spongy trunk in the earth half-sunk, Or the roots of a tree with fungus grey, Or a drift of muddy leaves, or a banded snake that heaves.

And the towering unseen roof grows more intricate, and soon It is featureless and proof to the lost forgotten moon.

But they could not look above as with blind-drawn feet they move Onwards on the scarce-felt path, with quick and desperate breath, For their circling fingers dread to caress some slimy head, Or to touch the icy shape of a hunched and hairy ape, And at every step they fear in their very midst to hear A lion's rending roar or a tiger's snore....

And when things swish or fall, they shiver but dare not call.

O what is it leads the way that they do not stray?

What unimagined arm keeps their bodies from harm?

What presence concealed lifts their little feet that yield Over dry ground and wet till their straining eyes are met With a thinning of the darkness?

And the foremost faintly cries in awed surprise: And they one by one emerge from the gloom to the verge Of a small sunken vale full of moonlight pale.

And they hang along the bank, clinging to the branches dank, A shadowy festoon out of sight of the moon; And they see in front of them, rising from the mud A single straight stem and a single pallid bud In that little lake of light from the moon's calm height.

A stem, a ghostly bud, on the moon-swept mud That shimmers like a pond; and over there beyond The guardian forest high, menacing and strange, Invades the empty sky with its wild black range.

And they watch hour by hour that small lonely flower In that deep forest place that hunter never found.

It shines without sound, as a star in s.p.a.ce.

And the silence all around that solitary place Is like silence in a dream; till a sudden flashing gleam Down their dark faces flies; and their lips fall apart And their glimmering great eyes with excitement dart And their fingers, clutching the branches they were touching, Shake and arouse hissing leaves on the boughs.