Man on a raft : more poems

Hervey, J. R. (John Russell), Caxton Press, Christchurch, N.Z., 1949

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The original publication details are as follows:

Title: Man on a raft: more poems

Author: Hervey, J. R. (John Russell)

Published: Caxton Press, Christchurch, N.Z., 1949

THE CAXTON POETS: No. 4

MAN ON A RAFT

By the same Author:

SELECTED POEMS

CAXTON PRESS 1940

NEW POEMS

CAXTON PRESS 1942

MAN ON A RAFT

More Poems

by 1 R. HERVEY

CHRISTCHURCH

THE CAXTON PRESS

1949

Acknowledgments are made to the following publications in which certain of these poems appeared:

(Dunedin), Poetry (Australia), Book (Caxton Press).

Sydney Bulletin, New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Observer, New Zealand New Writing, Evening Star

PRINTED AT THE CAXTON PRESS

CHRISTCHURCH NEW ZEALAND

JULY 1949

TO MY WIFE

CONTENTS

PAGE

Man on a Raft 11

The Opened Door 12

No Return 12

Other Worlds 13

We Look for the Footmarks 13

Adolescence 14

When the Morning Came 15

Mussolini 15

Country Cemetery 16

Hills 17

Mountain 17

Not Till Love Asks 18

This is not Folly 19

Newcomer 19

My Son 20

Shakespeare 20

House of Life 21

Unreported 22

Neighbour 22

John Donne’s Defiance 23

The Land Gave 25

The Empty Valley 25

The Watcher 26

Again Spring 27

PAGE

How Should a Ghost be Dancing? 27

Arrival 28

It Was Not So 29

Hirohito 29

Out of a Clear Sky 30

The Miracle of the Musk 31

Atomic Energy 31

Displaced Persons 32

Love is the Season 33

Address to Dante 33

The Old Year Remains 34

Plans to Exploit the Antarctic 35

Nightflight 35

This is not the Man 36

Baboushka 37

Poet to the Unborn 40

The Planners 40

Alone 41

Tatterdemalion 42

I Have Made Friends With Time 42

No Plain Path 43

Leaves 44

Out of the Murk 44

Renouncement 45

Shaping the Future 46

MAN ON A RAFT

IS'ot out of the war, not out of the agitated

House of life and wearing the brand of love,

He is yet no more than the diving bird between V ave and wave.

Only one is near, only one regards, death,

In the stare of the sky, in the cold watch of water:

And who but death trundles the eccentric tov,

The dancing timber.

But always he skirted the vortex of disaster,

For the crazy earth carried him and lost him

Among the witless stars and hostile calms,

Smothering knowledge.

His days have sickened in the heavy perfume

Of death hanging a flower on every season:

His hope has stumbled over crooked stones,

Pretending sleep.

Where shall be his landfall who resigns

The rudder, whose hands, twin-gods of deiign,

Are but fists that threaten doom and beat like flowers

On the iron doors?

Yet the rag at the mast was valid, it persuaded

The clean prow of love, and the man on the raft

Climbed to the assured deck, the rational voyage,

Drowning fear.

11

THE OPENED DOOR

Released like a spring from the rock.

Loosed to a careless freedom

Their laughters sprang on the dark

From the suddenly opened door.

Folly broke from the house

Swinging a wild bauble

In the pondering face of night,

The dire face of Dante.

How deep lie the roots of mirth,

Will they hold when death blows:

Breaking from the door will laughter

Silver the mood of the grave?

NO RETURN

My step would go back never

To the high road where day sings on forever-

Though age is colder,

Wisdom 1 carry captive on my shoulder.

No turning would I take

Back to the stunted playground,

Nor hazard hell

From the sly depths of the precarious wishing-well.

I ask no dainty sleep

Floral with vision through which the dancers leap:

I would not wake to find

Parade of pleasures in the mind.

Here I have found

The porch that hears no persuasions, the stable ground

My day is the dreamless herb, is silence

Smoothing away a curse,

Coo], dispassionate as a nurse.

12

OTHER WORLDS

The world is not a world but worlds, we inhabit

The obvious rock and the flaunting green but also

We live in a love, in a dream, in the total vision

The poet builds like a god, and we have our dwelling

On the stern slopes of faith.

Not once were we born,

But passing through winds and delaying circumstance

We slid to birth into a more logical sphere

Where the forms shone with permanence and where time

Scattered no death.

And there we walked easily.

Having come to our heritage and knowing that this

Was the authentic air of the spirit and not again

Would fear break from the woeful thickets of earth.

WE LOOK FOR THE FOOTMARKS

Not as the shepherds we came with faces frank

From the starlight,

And with minds washed

In the song of wonder.

The skies over Bethlehem had not

Schooled us to peace,

Nor the camel bells of the wise men

Detained us from folly.

The sheep and the oxen

Were the mild-eyed simplicities,

~j „ u r " -■■■■» But that small voice foundered

In the surge of our pride.

13

With what shall we furnish

Love's house, what caskets open?

Have we no gifts but these,

The naked enmities'.''

Bethlehem was a town dreaming

On the fringes, a town by-passed:

Bethlehem was a light story

Blown across the day.

But now we look for the footmarks

Of the shepherds, having put on

The sandals of humility and surrendered

To the staff of pilgrimage.

ADOLESCENCE

Cries of childhood confound

The new hour, the austere ground.

Fingertips still feel

The soft fancies, the darting moods,

But explore also

The man severe as steel.

He is of two worlds

Who in one hand folds

A flower and in the other

The dreadful charter holds.

The sun was his fire,

Shepherding his growth, his desire,

But by a flame more imperative than it

Within he is lit.

So that he sees

New playgrounds, and his dreams discover

The profile of the lover.

14

WHEN THE MORNING CAME

(Written on the occasion of my wife undertaking an hazardous voyage)

Only once did the sea assume

The face of doom:

Only once made its immense

Resolve against my lover’s light defence.

The wind whispered against my hope,

The fretful rain

Recited its cold prophecy of pain.

But I sent out my prayer that swept

Like the wing of a gull the guilty wave,

And upon the waking anger fell the testimony

Of my songs shining with the pre-eminence of the sea.

When the morning came, touching me like a friend,

I knew that a ship glittered out of the grief,

And that our love outbraving the brief

Scowl of hazard had brought

A dream of death to its end.

MUSSOLINI

The sun each morning gave the land to him,

A private garden where his impulse strayed;

His eye was king, his glance a sword, his walk

The march of fate, and all his heavy words

Fell like the stern approaches of the storm.

No satisfactions calmed the eyes of one

Who looked beyond the servile lights, beyond

The flags protesting honour, beyond the hands

Whose rapt salute hemmed him with loyalty,

For in that breast of stone were clamouring prides

And pa93ions bred to stride the world for empire.

15

His head rang with a fury of steel, his vision

Was dark with smoke, his longing leapt beyond

The soft detentions of love —that he might lie

In warm surrenders of the scornful lands.

But death was in the thought, death stalked him through

The maze of his design, and followed him

Over a path of flowers sharing the grave

Gesture of banners, and death went with him

Under the arches of triumph; but death only

Was victor, leaving unquestioned the sharp acclaim,

And printing no premature shadow on the day.

Now death it is that's honoured when the chime

Is that of the chain, and the only shout is hate

Girding a gallows, and one obscene surrender,

A head hanging towards the untroubled earth.

COUNTRY CEMETERY

Here is no argument between death and life,

These stones are not the arrogance of dust,

No massive denial of the dance of hope.

The thunder of the pipes of death does not

Threaten the skylarks in their ringing empire:

The face of death staring out of the green

Is one with all the earth's benevolence.

22

HILLS

Hushed with memories the hills

Preserve their countenance, make much of

Sleep that outwears

The passionate histories.

Bare of loyalties they attain

The Buddhist dream, the clear Nirvana:

() eyes of generations tempered

By hills to a classic toleration:

This is the tall prophet whose bland

Gesture stays the agitated land.

I through whom storms the event,

1 dragged by the maternalism of time.

Will look up to the hills whose peace

Is of the world's morning, their indifference

Will quieten me like death till I am aware Of eternity calling from forgotten waters.

MOUNTAIN

I turn away from

The mountain that wears no bloom of kindness,

It strikes the day with its sword of resolution.

Its image

Is too vital for me, commands tne out of

My fragile reverie.

Save us from mountain men

\\ hose shoulders divide the elouds.

Beyond my window their strength stands

I npersuadablc, but over my sleep

Their shadow is lead, when my two hands

Are idle doves their fingers

Contrive a cage of destiny.

17

NOT TILL LOVE ASKS

You who complain of winter and remember only

Spring as the specimen of life, ask yourselves now

What winter could so chill the caress of comfort,

So successfully hunt our slender, hidden loves,

As war laying its hand on the thing devoted?

And spring is not yet, nor the song of the bells pining;

But friendship with fear, alliance with flinty death,

And age fumbles with a past like a broken doll

And youth demands as normal the doctored wine.

The children have never laughed in the pool of summer,

But they asked for a specimen of life and this was given—

They expect like a giant thief the thudding darkness;

Their faces, ignorant of the sun, are a winter of tears.

The day will not change, nor the season moderate,

Though the bells assert a brazen victory,

For a passion breeds in our bones and a winter blows

From the iced heart, and the man of terror reels

From the cave of thought and the amiable council-fire.

Not till love asks: what are the roots that roam?

And the poisoned wells are uncovered and the prim facades

Crash at the sun's inquiry. The alert spring

Waits but for these; and peace, the loitering stranger,

Seeks a wide heart for housing. The late-comer will

Lie down where no fear moans between the walls.

24

THIS IS NOT FOLLY

This is not folly, breaking out of the inn Of Christmas to flaunt a song in the face of life,

For there are moods creeping upon the world To tear the heart in the fenceless time of trust.

Therefore be strong from that fount of fantasy,

And feel your hope like a handclasp, fronting the night With the assurance of waking bells though the stars sleep.

NEWCOMER

(To A.C.—3 weeks old)

Out of the sleep that spun no dream,

Out of the dark that was kindness,

Giving nothing, to you discovering

No country, folding you in the content of blindness-

You have come, and the world sheers up

Like a wave, like a white mountain wall:

To you the living clouds give themselves, the cup

Of the sky tips rapture, and the birds

With anxious songs build festival.

You have come to the grief of twilight,

And to the perilous dawn:

You have strayed among winters weeping snow

But you have stumbled

On beauty by which

The primacy of the thorn is humbled.

You have lifted

The latch of love's house—

0, you shall he gifted

A sovereignty, and richer than rain fructifying the years,

Your tears, your tears.

25

MY SON

You will take roads that 1 have not taken,

You will walk in a country I have not sung:

By a strange event your day will he shaken,

New edicts on the wall of tomorrow be hung.

You will see new wonders stalking, wonders

Now shaping in the womb of a dream:

You will he alert when time thunders

Over my sleep its latest theme

Against the world's unpierced dilemma

You will see the new offensives leaping:

You will know what Change, the tall contemner,

Snatches from earth's infatuate keeping.

But I shall not stand with you, not see

The earth refreshed with revelation,

For in the blind cell of destiny

Time nods me to mv narrow station.

SHAKESPEARE

He is the fool who travels with the earth,

The guest of generations, his motley flames

V pon the night of fear, his laughter rolls

On pillared prides and confident facades.

He is the man forever at the gate,

And who shall pass this wisdom and he pure?

Not he the beggar hut nations who reeeive

Their moiety again -t slow inanition.

While Shakespeare rides the world and prospers it

We shall not polish in the moody pit.

26

HOUSE OF LIFE

I came to a house

Gnawed by corruption yet heeding not

The cunning rot —

A house which flung up a wall

Like a mirror in which the morning discovered

Its gold, a wall that thrashed

Even the iniquity of storms, guarding for a time

Lives blown about the wide and wasting floors.

There I saw only

Faces that could never dismiss

The original surprise:

Not solved, not illusory,

The clanking secret rivetted to feet.

Questions flew about like birds

Maddened by wire and sleep falling

Like a blanket could not subdue

The heart calling.

A child of laughter ran through that house,

And song was a sudden incandescence:

And there were hand- that (hooped heavy

With harvest, hut no pretence

Of fulfilment dulled those faces.

1 watched until the withering of age —till one

Calling himself darkness announced the sun.

21

UNREPORTED

For him there was no escape alley, he could not discover

The way back to life. In ceremonial pain

He sank finding death a voracious lover.

Not in the news, no light of honour received him,

His name was no more than a whisper behind walls:

No reparation wrapped the wound that grieved him.

No one saw the freakish onset of circumstance,

Nor the instant of courage that flared out of the ash

When man alone met the hot eyes of chance.

No crier called the street, rumour repeated

Its barren repertoire, and gossip slept

Believing the black narrative completed.

But he was dear to the hand of oblivion,

Sedulously over his honour the dust was strewn:

Unreported a man went down like a sun.

NEIGHBOUR

He is a hat and coat

Disappearing through the abrupt gate

That delivers him from

The scald of scrutiny.

He is my neighbour, further

From my knowledge than those

At the world’s edge of whom

The record flows.

22

I cannot follow him where he

Goes through mute corridors and where

His desires are known to himself,

And shines his unshared ecstasy.

His pilgrimage through the dark house

Is over mountains, he is broken,

But the fence is final, not to me

The news is spoken.

JOHN DONNE’S DEFIANCE

(John Donne, poet, formerly libertine, and latterly Dean of St. Paul’s — 1621 —a short time before his death commissioned a portrait of himself in which he was to be represented standing upon an urn and wrapped in his own burial shroud.)

Now is the hour of the bell, now am I caught

Out of the war whose sullen stain I wear:

Yet must I first oppose the final malice

Of death to whom my wall’s a window inviting

His freezing stare on my enfeeblement.

My enemy has been a cloud confronting

The sun, has been a snake whose poison glittered

Over the environs of love, for in the midst

Of ecstasy even has this dismal horn

Usurped the hour, so that my sweets dissolved.

Turning to bitter the leniency of love.

The sensual night in which my joys appeared

As stars was still the night, and this life heavy

With satisfactions was but death dispensing

The sly draught of destruction. My song was fed,

No less than my desire, with casual loves,

But when these blew away like petals, remained

Oracular death loading the time with judgment.

29

I would not be taken by death in sleep, nor snatched

Out of an idle temper, but he must win

My body in battle, outwit the constant will:

Yet is the victory mine for every blow

But makes that prison to perish wherein the King,

My soul, awaits the august deliverance.

This room that reeks corruption, here have 1 laid

My strength away hut not athletic hope.

And 1 have drawn the curtains of repentance,

So that no loves may pry and pierce with guilt

The man now altogether bled of passion.

Christ, my Anchor, will hold this ship against

The urgent tide, and out of this lane of sorrow

Will God the Father bring me to broad estate:

Therefore I summon death that he may see

The front of ray faith, and know that the bell tolls

For him out of this clear and calm event.

Bring then the urn that prates of dust and I

Will stand upon it, setting my foot on fear,

And trampling stern pretences of the grave,

For He enables this boldness Whose feet were iron

On the snake's head, the tempter, sliming the ages.

Now lightly on arm 1 hear my heavy shroud

Thai ye may bind my body affixing knots

At head and foot like locks that cry forbiddance

To thought and life's decorous liberty:

But let my face be Been that its defiance

May arm the trembler dreaming dissolution.

So do I make an end. my portrait shall be

\ -coin of symbols advertising doom —

What a death is this life, and what a resurrection

This death, this fitful dark declaring light.

30

THE LAND GAVE

The land gave

The pattern, built the event

From these have I grown, for me was spent

The wind, the wave.

How should love go

Smoothing another soil

When the integrity of tin?, the harvest toil,

In me 1 know?

Could death even

Prune the possessive root,

Or in its blind internment loot

The earth-given?

THE EMPTY VALLEY

(If. B. 5 eats was possessed by a sense of the nearness of the unseen world. He would often excitedly ascribe a boy’s mere whistle or a passing step to supernatural agencies.)

Yeats could not walk in the disarming field without

Feeling at elbow spirit or devil,

Nor hear an idle shout

But be proclaimed a shred of ghostly revel.

If but the countryman, he said,

Had the keen ear and eagle sight

Of Swedenborg he would hear the noise

Of swords in the empty valley—shall we go at the side

Of the poet and mingle

With inarches of spirit or stand

With the countryman who sees as single

The abundant land?

25

This beauty shall be my love, I shall not ask

If nature be an ineffectual mask

Through which death-chastened eyes

Persuade the wise,

I shall not look to left or right

For a cold companion nor suspect the night,

Nor regard the rally

Of irrelevant swords —

What so replete as the empty valley?

THE WATCHER

Marooned here on the margin I see

Trees that are content

To let the winds make free

With them even to ecstasy.

The cattle go

In sunlight, seeming not to know

How skies can go black, the throat be torn

Though surrounded by the innocence of corn.

But thoughts, with a longer range than eyes,

Are aware of other fields whose cries

Celebrate no summer, whose green

Blood has hastened into an autumn scene.

I am the watcher whose tower

Of solitude looks on life and death:

But I see hope that was blinded

Walking free again in the earlli and beauty

Breathing resurrection into ruin.

32

AGAIN SPRING

The iron that winter has left in me shall not

Long repel the overtures of spring,

For I feel in my breast the proud night collapsing

And storms like winded hounds fainting and dying.

I who have come so far, never escaping

The battering speech and winter's woeful breath,

See now dissolve the glacial memories,

And spring, crowned, mounting the mercy seat.

Out of the soil and sky unerring loves

Beset my door and joy comes at a stride:

This is the spring in me, a new song marching,

And hope laughing out of an ambuscade.

HOW SHOULD A GHOST BE DANCING?

My ghost went down the world's way

Looking for this and that,

But the landscape like a lady

Left nothing to wonder at.

The landscape like a lady

Who had paid her pledge to time

Could not be a poet’s mistress

Giving a wealthy rhyme.

For the grave’s cordial window

Had flourished a good complete—

How should a ghost be dancing

In this dejected street?

33

ARRIVAL

{To Paula, in celebration of her birth)

I bis is the one arrival

That runs not into rest:

Birth breaks the eel] of slumber

And throws tu on the quest.

May love defend, unmask

The malice of the wav,

And brave be your journey

Through a surprising day.

What though the leisured clouds

Hold back the eager light'.'

Go, carry in your heart

The songs that quell the night.

Already the sun is caught

In tangles of your hair —

Go, match your shining mood

Against the frown of care,

Let love be your tune, let wonder

Wake you to beauty flowing.

And from vour rich arrival

Golden shall be your going.

34

IT WAS NOT SO

He fears for the young generation, his armchair throne

Confronts the cloudless eye, the face that subdues

New territories. He sees those limbs as stained

From baths of passion, hands as outlaws. It was not

So in my day when towards the sedate goal

Youth marched despising the devil's window display.

But the man at anchor, the man becalmed forgets

The wind that ruled him, seas in which he went

I nder the shouting wave, forgets the blood

W recking resolve and dreams that looked like galleons

Turning to black slavers. His desire

Drummed at flood level, but todav's dry watercourse

Denies excess, the pulse consenting to passion.

HIROHITO

(Written on the occasion of the Emperor of Japan disclaiming his divinity)

Always the voices about me crying.

A god! A god!

Never the candles dving

From the altar place:

The ruthless gongs declaring

The light of heaven in my face.

The waves of worship flowed

Toward me, the air

Rippled with prayer:

It was then that the flattering incense

Drugged me into a -cnse of deity,

el I knew myself to be a man

And like another limped with infirmity.

35

They bowed, the people I could not know,

Expecting always the shining word.

But their hope, finding no warm Divinity

But only the wall of my mortality,

Fell like a broken bird.

But now I go down to them, having shaken

From me the hand of legend,

And I walk the free road

Never by Caesar taken.

Of my divinity all that remains

Is the vesture flung down before the shrine,

A strange and shrunken god that there must die

Defeated by the splendour of a Lie.

OUT OF A CLEAR SKY

I know that out of a clear sky

Will come the hailstone to stun

My garden that like a musing eye

Expected only the indulgence of the sun.

For long my blooms have lain

Pampered by the mild perfidious days,

But time shall finger his lance of pain,

Tremors shall mar the mouth of praise.

Death is the curtain of tears that falling

Closes this wan, impetuous play:

It is the forgotten silence calling,

The unseen shoulders the rock away.

36

THE MIRACLE OF THE MUSK

(The musk plant, which 20 years ago possessed a delightful perfume, has, in all parts of the world, quite unaccountably and almost miraculously, lost its scent. —From a broadcast talk.)

In the garden of earth

The musk that was kind

Has lost its scent, brings no smiles to birth

Is neutral, has declined

The side of the angels, is sour

Like a recluse hugging his lonely hour.

Shall the skylark refuse

The cycle of rapture

So that the song that could raise

The head of a man we lose

In legendary haze?

Let us guard love whose sweetness

Is unconfined, whose fleetness

Disperses the hunched sorrows;

For if love like the musk deliver

Its balm to oblivion it shall be said

Over the earth that love is dead.

ATOMIC ENERGY

We have expected surprises and events like arrows

In the valley of the future, and our eyes prepared

For the leap of the unknown and we knew that strange

Voices would call out of the heart of twilight.

But we knew that trees of home and paths of old

Would lead us there, and days like we have known

Would wrap us in their royalty bringing us to

Night and its unshaken ministries.

37

Now we have no confidence. Can we say

To-morrow will be as to-day and life surely

Yield to our key? As free men shall we walk,

Or bent and broken under the arch of power?

When the clouds acknowledge a new shepherd and when

The lime is driven to desperate goals we shall turn

To song like a sudden prophet pure from the fields

Affirming above our dismay the rule of love

Even against this new and stormy banner.

DISPLACED PERSONS

Like trees they stood behind a wall of contentment.

The winds knew them, the soil was obedient

To their devoted touch, the vear? found them

Always the bondmen to place, rooted with the rocks.

No vision raised them above the forbidding hills.

Ambition the incendiary spared their harvest of peace:

No highway to the world, but the gentle road*

Returned them to home, preserved the dear design.

But the anchor of their content could not withstand

The fiery storm and they were carried like dust

Across the world to rest in a field of pain.

In a hissing land whose stare was very death.

Bowed and dumb, lost in a thicket of hate.

How shall they find the way to the lap of home —

While on their shoulder heavy the stranger's hand.

How shall they keep iho olil appointment with joy?

38

LOVE IS THE SEASON

(Christmas, 1943)

Do not decry

j The feast bordered with laughter,

Nor the fool letting his words fly

Like frantic birds. Do not frown

Mischief out of the bell-bewitched town.

Do not interrupt even with vour tired thoughts

The old man in his ivied story:

Do none of these things lest you build a road-block

Against the progress of glory.

For love is the season,

And it will suffice

If by roads of unreason

And the friendly gate of mirth

Goodwill discover the lonely house of earth.

ADDRESS TO DANTE

When they saw you pass they surmised

A man whose physical eye 3 had been lashed by a vision

Of torment fixing on your face

A sorrow that was lord of all the eloquent sorrows.

We do not need your pen

Of passion or invective, we do not covet

The shining of your sword

Within our dusty wars, your political fury.

But we need to return to your face.

That grim instructor; come with your perfect sorrow

Against your old enemies,

Lust, the leopard, and the wolf that is never satisfied.

39

Come in the confidence of one

Who knows that the world from hell's victorious burning

May appeal to the hand of wisdom,

And to a Throne above the wrath of rulers.

Our day is no better than yours—

As you were exile from Florence so we are exile

By our own redoubtable appetites

From the Citv of cities where our hearts could be at home.

Bend your dark face

On us for that only is the sun of deliverance

Rend us with your reproach,

Frown us into a hell of self-revelation.

THE OLD YEAR REMAINS

Imagine not that midnight

Saw the old year in flight

Riding the bells to limbo.

That which passed was no more

Than a page the wind bore

Torn from a calendar.

For the year remains the year

That was hope, that was love, that was fear.

You may shake ofl the sudden hand

Of a stranger, but you may not disown

The year that nested with your bone.

It cannot leave you as you cannot leave yourself:

It has become you, for it was its dawns of dread.

-_ j —, .. __ Its heavy amorous nights, its whirling days

That left you as you are yet uncompleted

Till other years with sure and fateful fingers

Shall build in you the figure of hope or doom.

40

PLANS TO EXPLOIT THE ANTARCTIC

But I think that they were forbidden,

That this most private treasure

Was denied to them by that glistening death.

These are they whose pride

Stole the aloofness of

The forest, trod down the wonder of the seas.

They wrestled with the mountain

And brought it down until

It took its place among the domestic mounds.

They broke the dominon of dust,

Taming Saharas so that

No secret remained where the ancient fire had watched

But I think that they were forbidden,

That this most lovely terror

Must keep its maidenhood, its occult fame.

Fretted by the familiar

The last mystery shall lave

My spirit, my rest shall be the rich unknown.

NIGHT FLIGHT

(Contradicting Eglamor in Browning’s ‘Bordello’, who said : ‘ Man shrinks to nought If matched with symbols of immensity ’.)

The flat complacency of the moon

Covers the night,

But prevents not the probing

Of an insect light.

Catapulted from

His frail and derelict home,

Man's greatness outsoars

The imperious dome.

41

What are the immensities,

Or the stars that outface

Time, to this plane, this thought,

That tramples space?

He is not made small

Whose flesh-guarded renown

And sinewed significance

Drag eternities down.

THIS IS NOT THE MAN

This is not the man who laid

His hand on winds running free—

Not the man who made

The storm a dutiful child.

Into a sea mined with ice

He took no ship,

Nor ever nerved himself to

The night of jungle grip.

A towering mountaineer

He planted no record,

Crowning a peak with humiliation,

Making it the playground of a nation.

But he has come beneath the arches

Of many dawns,

Reassuring approach to

Desperate marches.

Who is hero if not he

Who, lamed by time, bears

Time as an eagle, and against the climate of age

His thin infirmity wears?

42

His courage flares on the night, his hope

Outshines the day, his shoulder

Drives against doom; but this is not news —

Though a grave be in ambush and the heart colder.

We, isled in calm, consider

Ulysses matched against magic seas,

Or we are dumb with Scott in the white danger

Of the Pole looking on the flag of a stranger.

But we do not follow

The old man, canoe in a roaring hollow:

We, chasing wisps of glory,

Leave him to his duel with the universe—

That is no story.

BABOUSHKA

(An Eastern legend tells of Babouska who, having been invited by the Three Kings to accompany them to the birthplace of the Messiah, agreed to go. Instead of joining them immediately, however, she gave her attention to some house-task. Afterwards, she found that the Three Kings had gone. Hastening after them, she could not overtake them. Thus it became her doom to wander perpetually, seeking the birthplace of the Messiah but never finding it.)

The Three Kings in their journeying pause before the humble house of Baboushka. In response to their invitation to go with them she speaks:

Lords, as you see, I am a woman lost

In a jealous land, a woman long frustrated

By the indifference of days —they passed me by;

But now this day that wears your royalty

Pauses beside my simple wall to gather

Babouska from her gloom. Yet I confess

To a dream that made my feet forget the stones,

Wrapping me in their favour even against

The sleet of sorrow.

43

First King:

Woman, what manner of dream?

Was it of One Who opens a door of life

To such as I, before whom rises up

Death like a mocking wall?

Second King:

Was it of One,

A Captain riding against the muttering dark

Until the world lie down in light and peace?

Third King:

Or did your dream behold the Sage Whose wisdom

Shall smile upon the earth like a new dawn?

Baboushka:

My Lords, He came, Captain, Sage, and Prince,

The Hope of Israel, so that a faithful torch

Gave light to my poor labour, and now Kings

Shining out of the desert have lit with honour

Thi9 low house of God. Yes, now I go

With you to that far birth, but first I must

To the house task that instantly calls my hands.

The Three Kings, after waiting some time, continue their journey, believing that Baboushka has repented of her decision. When, at last, she appears at the door, they have disappeared beyond the mounds of the desert.

Baboushka:

I did but ask the mercy of a moment.

But they have gone leaving Baboushka's life

Like an empty room. How could my spirit breathe

In the clutching cell after a pledge inviting

To a world unfenced? Oh, I must follow and find

That pure place of Birth, though burning leagues

Be sorrow to my strength and a wild wasting

To endeavouring mind.

44

Centuries pass.

Baboushka seated on a rock in a remote valley

She Speaks:

Still am I penned in pilgrimage, still my hope

Whips me across the world so that I am

Acquainted with the coloured lands and live

With mountains as with majesty, but close

Upon my heels the laughters of the world:

Yet must I on, in leash to a flying rumour,

But, faultless contriving of the centuries,

The Bliss eludes me —for the placid sky

Husbands the secret of the hanging star.

I am Baboushka, a beggar, to whom was offered

Beatitude—the rare word came to me.

But while I crouched to a miserable crumb

The enigmatical event whose nod

Betrays to certain splendour faded from me:

In this my cry all cries of cold remorse

Are heard again—but down the flinty days

Again I hasten having no guide but only

A pitiless hope . . .

She passes like a silver ghost

Through the nights, but painfully and in a cloud of cries.

Some say her beauty refuses

The autumn touch of the years, others know

Of a woman dry and driven like a leaf,

The tattered bride of time; yet one whose eyes,

So hot with hope, have shrivelled the hand of death,

So that the grave, the door to her desire,

Is closed and earth promises nothing

But memories that whisper about the walls.

45

POET TO THE UNBORN

In the time of your dark slumber

My word sang into light.

And in my word the deathless tree,

And the stintless herb of ecstasy,

A world washed of umber.

In the time of your hungry blindness

My eyes loved the corn:

So never that harvest bowed to knife,

And the bird above flew into life,

Caught in a poem’s kindness.

In the time of your discerning

When your look questions the earth,

The dying bird, the piteous grain.

In my warm verse shall live again,

In you my rapture burning.

THE PLANNERS

These doors, locked and chained, defeat

Even the eavesdropper, if such as he

Were elevated out of his folly

By suspicion to balk these makers of history.

While men walk in a light of innocence.

Finding life honest as the sky.

They forget the old men having no future

Who plan for them, fencing plots in which to die.

These are the architects who having no master.

No precedent resting heavy on hand.

Compel events, tie up innovation.

And snare in regimentation the quivering land.

46

Shall we continue with our loves, maintain

The dance whose lights are already dying down,

While these controllers from whom rush no reports

Prepare to tame the truant town?

Now is the time to speak, or wake

To face direction posts, our path defined,

Or if it go further feel a paralysis

Creeping towards impulses of the mind.

ALONE

(In a book written in 1938 under the title ‘ Alone’, Admiral Byrd tells of his terrible experiences, both mental and physical, during his solitary occupation of the Bolling Advance Weather Base during the Antarctic winter night of 1934)

I am acquainted with night for I saw the sun

As a god fall from the altar place:

I saw in the east the baffled face

A moment haunting the mocked horizon.

Something within me died with incipient day,

Cut from the common heritage I shared

No longer the golden plenty, I was snared .

In the dark ice, in a crevasse brought to bay.

The fingers of frost charged with death

Were fire to my flesh, they found

The innermost cell, with iron skill they bound

The drooping will and laid a load on breath.

I was alone like one dead, tossed

To an islet of pain, flung

Across a forgotten sea and wrung

By remembrance of a world supremely lost.

47

TATTERDEMALION

He blows like a rag across the fields, he blows

Along the crazy roads—

Tatterdemalion.

No man’s slave, no man’s son.

Life goes on without him, he

Sits on a fence abstractedly,

And blowing in the wind his rags

Are more to him than blazing flags.

He has no loyalties except

Allegiance to the aimless road:

He outwits time, the accent of doom

Beats not within his boundless room.

They who walk in lordly leathers

Find but the narrow city,

But he with his thorn and broken shoe

And all the weight of weathers

A kingdom finds—he alone

Swept to a wide and windy throne.

I HAVE MADE FRIENDS WITH TIME

I have made friends with time although I have seen

His fingers close on many a meek treasure:

Friends, although in the time of the dark visit

There was no silver word of recompense.

Time makes no contract, softens with no pledge

The onset of event 9, but like the seasons

His moods return so that today lies

A petted lover but tomorrow dies.

48

Yet I have made friends with time,

Having taken his cloud-burst of pain

A» earth takes the rain.

\nd in ihe threatening twilight

Have been as an evening lark in whose throat

Day lingers though lost over the mountains.

Friends with time although

He brings death like a blow.

For then I shall no more walk with mystery

Speaking but telling nothing like the sea,

No more be wistful with winds,

No more with the necessity of the lark

Publish the day to the dark . . . .

And all this

At the turn of the road

Or beyond the secretive hills

NO PLAIN PATH

No plain path and no brisk highway

For us who are caught in ruts left by the wheels

Of war, therefore no deft approach

To a probable inn, no solution

Of problems falling on the brain like sleep, no care

For a past coloured with shame, no confidence

Bringing tomorrow with trumpets, softening

The face of the future, how shall we sing

While grief shakes the house of memory and

Indignation withers the blade of love?

Only by seeing unstained the earth

Like birds that are too swift for sorrow,

Or by looking beyond the stubborn cloud towards

The sky clean of reproach, the arch of truth,

Considering also the wisdom of

Stars dreaming the earth's deliverance.

49

LEAVES

To the earth but not to humiliation

The leaves fell breaking

Intimacies with the wind, forsaking

The prefecture of the sun and the bird’s elation.

They were balanced on levels of life.

Over the day like a devouring sea

They scattered their islets of shadow.

On the dismissals of autumn drifting,

That was no abject dispersal, no retreat to death

But they returned like fire

To warm the earth, like desire

To the soil awaiting the infant, Spring.

OUT OF THE MURK

Out of the pause and murk of history

Broke Bethlehem; the night was mystery,

When of a town forgotten

Beauty was begotten.

The wise men left their watchful turrets afar,

Bowed to the admonition of a star.

For somewhere the singing earth

Cradled the comely Birth.

But we have left no towers; belated eye»

Travel for some stray token the barren skies

The wise we will not follow

To Bethlehem’s meek hollow.

50

Are not our hopes pilgrims, coveting

The acres of peace, the renovating spring?

But our faces have turned away

From Bethlehem's tinkling day.

Yet, exile from our pride, of no renown,

Now must our tutor be a little town —

Our desires be domiciled

Within the orbit of the Child.

RENOUNCEMENT

Shall I be as the river that slides away

From the city’s edge, that shepherds its life

Through shadows, that fondles a fancy,

And hears not the shout of our delirious day?

Here by the waters I know

I am one with them, I follow

Them through darkness, nor do I reckon

Pleasures that beckon.

Though I despise the city, yet these hands

Acknowledged the promising vistas, the passionate gardens

When my youth was master of lands,

But now I run to the refuge of pardons.

I strutted my day in the street of unease,

It was my gold that lit the marketplace,

And it was my foiled astonished face

*—« -- .. — j Night took between her knees.

But my spirit has come to pasture, I go

With the river, I ferret no favours:

My gain

To receive what the hours bestow

Whether it be the touch of the tolerant sun,

Or a wind without gossip of pain.

45

SHAPING THE FUTURE

(United Nations Conference)

Tomorrow is a wild lass

Hiding in the wood,

She will not wear the careful clothes

We make her—as she should.

She will not wed with our desire,

Nor crouch to our decree,

This maid who laughs at every snare

That men make solemnly.

Though they confer, each man as strong

As a nation, she succeeds

Against their wit when she puts on

Her own free-fashioned weeds.

And when the dark discourses end,

With plans proud as the skies,

Tomorrow will take the queenly path

To substitute, Surprise.

52

THE CAXTON POETS SERIES

No. 1 Christopher Columbus W. Hart-Smith

No. 2 Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness James K. Baxter

No. 3 Disputed Ground Charles Brasch

No. 4 Man on a Raft /. R. Hervey

No. 5 At Dead Low Water & Sonnets lllcrt Cunwic

No. 6 Canterbury & Other Poem- Basil Dowling

IN PREPARATION

arc collections bj Charles Spear, K.A. K. Mason

and A. R. D. Fairburn.

Price 6/-