Authors: William Alexander Percy
And me … No archer thou of His!
Back, back! This death, this suffering
Are but thy sport … Lift not my head! …
O pale-eyed man, art
thou
the King?
Is it enough to feel the opal spring
Burst quivering on branch and bush and wing?
To kiss the soft-cheeked air?
To know the world is fair? —
Is it enough?
Is it enough to see man’s passionate
Divinity break shimmering on fate?
His soul’s devout desire
Flame and go out like fire? —
Is it enough?
Will beauty and nobility descried,
Will anything save touching hands and side
Assuage us to confess
Through life’s unhappiness,
It is enough?
Ah, dreamy world and liquid-sounding leaves,
Ah, skies that on your bosom bear the dawn
And evening, and recurrent, trembling stars,
Why are we strangers to your certain calm,
Your joy, perennial and effortless?
We strive to understand; our desperate faith
Leans listening against the universe
To catch some meaning, some deep harmony
To still the throbbing silence that we hear.
In vain, in vain! There is an inner music,
But ’tis no serenade to please our ears.
When the last human heart is underground,
Great sunsets still will aureole the west,
No whit less gorgeous for that they’re unseen.
And this divine frail moon will not delay
Because her lovers’ lips are yet more pale
Than when her yearning parted them. Ah, no —
Not listeners we, but part, ourselves, of some
Mysterious harmony, perhaps heard elsewhere.
Not long ago it was a bird
In vacant, lilac skies
Could stir the sleep that hardly closed
His laughing eyes.
But here, where murdering thunders rock
The lintels of the dawn,
Although they shake his shallow bed
Yet he sleeps on.
Another spring with rain and leaf
And buds serenely red,
And this wise field will have forgot
Its youthful dead.
And, wise of heart, who loved him best
Will be forgetting, too,
Even before their own beds gleam
With heedless dew.
Yet what have all the centuries
Of purpose, pain, and joy
Bequeathed us lovelier to recall
Than this dead boy!
A delirious voice:
Sweeter than sleep and the dream of death
To float on the flow of the tempest’s breath —
A leaf in the lift of the air’s caresses,
A bloom in the sway of the sea’s brown tresses,
A bird that the hawk of the storm possesses!
Death, thou art best,
Being rest.
Voice of a youthful Turk:
If only up the straits the tempest flew,
Up the blue waters, past the perilous spray
To where the clustered cypresses are blue
Above pale stairs that touch the lisping bay,
I should not care, I should not greatly care —
If only up the straits the tempest flew!
If only up the straits my spirit flew
As once it flew when sails were all my wings,
To that deep garden where the moon is blue
And sea-sounds soften close-lipped whisperings,
I should not care, I should not greatly care —
If only up the straits my spirit flew!
Death could not keep me from the arms of you,
But I should die again upon your mouth
While all the swaying garden changed from blue
To red, and softer grew your bosom’s south.
I should not care, I should not greatly care,
Dying again upon the mouth of you!
An English voice:
I knew the stars would come,
Brighter than English stars
And purer than the stars of battle!
They shine on Thessaly,
On the pale Argive plain,
And leave a lovelier light on Lesbos.
O Grecian stars, how oft
At home, in the grey sea,
I longed to know the lands ye guard!
Now death, propitious, speeds
My soul on those dark tides
Whose foam ye lit when Helen fled.
Blow, wind of Tauris, blow!
This is the sea that heard
The Lesbian’s cry, and further south
The shining song of him
Whose heart was washed with tears.
O southward blowing wind, blow on!
Voice of a Breton Fisherman:
Douarnenez! Douarnenez!
O little town on the fishing bay!
O southern sea, too soft, too blue,
Let me thro’! let me thro’!
Till the green and the cold of the western sea
And the lonely cliffs of Brittany
And home, my home, Douarnenez,
Break on mine eyes with the breaking day!
Voice of an English poet:
South! … These stars I know! … And south is Greece!
O Death, one gentleness I pray —
Let me find rest on that divine, sweet shore,
And have for spirit-home some strip of Hellas!
Some mountain cove in hearing of the sea,
Some fabled fold, perhaps, of Helicon,
Trod once by silver feet, now silvery
With heliotrope and sprinkled sheep,
There bide in quiet death’s prepared event.…
After the snows, when April nights grow warm
And lilies of the moon blanch field and crag,
When tenderly the wind blows down from Thessaly,
And dews are deep, and down the mountains glide
On feather feet the drifting dreams
Whose land is not the land of sleep —
Ah, then, perhaps, the spirit that incited so
My heart to song in earthlier days,
Balked of the dear delight of utterance,
Muted beyond all hope of speech,
May tinge with sharper longing the lament
Of that sole bird that sings unto his heart,
Or deeplier dye the coral-mouthèd blooms
That hide but do not hush the river’s brink.…
A Canadian voice:
God, God, how well they meant,
How utterly they failed!
Why wilt Thou give us strength,
Courage and fortitude,
But leave us without reason, impotent?
They poured us out like water.
The thirsty ground still drank,
And still they poured; until
The hills above the sea
Were red as sunset, but unconquered still.
Such blood, so young, so proud!
No Homer will rise up
To sing their deeds; for deeds
There be too great for song,
And heroes must be few to stir the rage.
All Canada was Ajax,
And India, to a man,
As fierce as Hector was!
The young isles of the south
Blazed like Achilles when they killed his friend.
And all for what? For nothing!
We, who in the west
Had crossed perhaps the Rhine,
Have crossed but Lethe here,
And won but failure for our only fame.
There never was a cause
So worthy to be won!
If France and England die,
Freedom and faith are dead —
Give them, O God, not heroes’ hearts, but brains!
Voice of a French poet:
And so the songs must go unsung,
The dreams be only dreams.…
But I have died for France! There is no fate
So worthy them her august blood endues.…
When all is said, what is the poet’s life?
The vulture’s ebb between sky ecstasy
And carrion of earth! Raptured, superb,
He wheels against the sun, then falls
And battens on the refuse beasts refuse!
Somewhere i’ the compound, rainbow stuff
And sunset-cloud and green-winged spray,
There creeps the taint, the particle of earth,
That marks it with the black of madness, sin, or quirk.
Only the great are phœnix of the sun,
Unfathered save of flame and dizzy light;
They only keep, unpausingly and pure,
The blue enfeoffments of their gorgeous sire.
Say I had lived; which height had I attained?
The vulture’s? Or the phœnix’ flaming zone?
Death makes all questions foolish now.…
Yet in my soul I know there was a thing in me
Of most immortal lineaments,
Whose speech was beauty and whose thought was
prayer! …
But even so, a year, a hundred years,
A thousand — the loveliest words of men
Are leaves with but a redder tint to time.
The singers pass; the song endures: I die;
But somewhere will gush up the crimson fire
That lit my heart to songs I might not sing.
And there was France to die for! A splendor’s there
Beyond the dimming of eternity!
Who would be singer now, not soldier, who
Would live for Fame when he could die for France,
Fame, too, I must believe, will scorn as bastard.…
She had no need of songs who asked my life.
Songs! Here was a deed to do
More gracious and more splendid than all songs!
And I have done that deed;
And I am well content.
A host of spirits:
We fought and saw the stars and fell.
To fight and win were better;
To fight and fall is well.
Perhaps a god directed so
We should be overcome;
Perhaps; we may not know.
We knew the trumpet call of life;
We knew the call was not
To victory, but strife.
And if, indeed, no god there be
That hung the stars we saw,
Yet we who fought, yea, we
Who died, out on the bloody sod,
We know beyond all doubt
In us there was a god.
Strong Spirit, who hast wrought
A fighting world for men,
Take us; like men we fought.
Over the roofs the swallows fly
In the quiet evening air.
Though just above the homes of men,
They have not any care.
The women on the balconies,
That watch and seem to see,
The birds could touch them with their wings,
They stand so quietly.
So quietly! But if the birds
Had cognizance of pain,
Could hear the prayers that quiver past,
They would not fly again.