Authors: William Alexander Percy
You say this poppy blooms so red
Because its roots were daily fed
On last year’s cold and festering dead?
Such is the blessèd way of earth;
Oblivious, intent on mirth,
To turn rank death to gorgeous birth!
Even this brutal agony,
So hideous, so foul, will be
Romance to others, presently.
And would it not be proud romance
Falling in some obscure advance
To rise, a poppy field of France?
I have reached a green, green island
In a sea without a shore.
Behind the grey waves crumble,
And I will not look before.
Here there are music and leisure
And the touch of a tender hand;
Here is my golden river
And the warm, wide river land.
I am safe to-day, if never;
They have given me love and rest;
Sailing the sea of sorrow
I have touched at the isle of the blest.
Her spirit’s loveliness was such
Her body’s loveliness I could not see;
I only know her eyes were heavenly blue
That now are grey with tears for me.
Let not a foreign earth weigh down my head,
Nor mingle with the dust that was my heart!
Lay me among my own when I am dead,
In my own land, eternally a part
Of all I know and love. I could not sleep
With strangers here, and there is aching need
Of sleep after much weariness, and deep
Were mine at home. It is a place, indeed,
For long, untroubled sleep. All summer there
The pale somnambulists of heaven pass
Immense and silver through the turquoise air,
Trailing their purple garments on the grass.
Though friendless, childless, honorless I come,
They will know I am theirs; they will make room.
We are the sons of disaster,
Deserted by gods that are named,
Thrust in a world with no master,
Our altars prepared but unclaimed;
Wreathed with the blood-purple aster,
Victims, foredoomed, but untamed.
Behold, without faith we were fashioned,
Bereft the assuaging of lies;
Thirsty for dreams we have passioned,
Yet more for truth that denies;
Aware that no powers compassioned,
We have turned to our hearts and grown wise.
Leisure we loved and laughter;
Our portion is labor and pain;
For home we are given a rafter
Of wind and a lintel of rain,
And all that our hearts followed after
Is taken and naught doth remain.
Yet never a new generation
But shall live by the battle we fight,
And prosper of our immolation
And reap of our anguish, delight.
Accepting the great abnegation
We are fathers, not children, of light.
Bruised with the scourges of sorrow,
Broke with the terrible rod,
Bidden for respite to borrow
A poppy-red swathe of the sod,
Yet this is our hope — that to-morrow
Will yield of our strivings, God.
Voice of Earth:
These are my children’s voices! Born
Not of the sun, who, for a heritage,
Giveth a light wherewith to see, a fire
To burn away the dross gat from my loins;
Nor of the moon whose sons are mad with beauty;
Nor of the stars, for they, thro’ change and drift,
Behold the steadfast heavens and the pole.
But these are mine, unfathered and unclaimed,
Sustained by shining from no sun nor moon
Nor fixed nor vagrant star.
Yea, they are mine —
Dust that is black with my ferocious blood
And brackish with my tears.
Their days are short at best, and they return
With shuddering to my bosom’s dark, yet now
They rob each other of the little years their due,
And choke the houses of the whimpering dead!
And why? O why?
Another’s folly wrought this holocaust,
Calling it falsely by a sacred name,
Turning the shambles to an altar stone,
And butchery to sacrifice!
I have sung me a stave, a stave or two,
I have drunk me a stoop of wine,
I have roystered across a world that was dew
And a sea that was sunlight and brine.
And now I’ll go down where the need is not
Of a singing heart, but a sword;
I’ll fight where the dead men welter and rot
With the hard-pressed hosts of the Lord.
And should I come back again, ‘twill be
With accolade and spurs,
And many a tale of chivalry,
And the deeds of warriors.
And should I not, O break for me
No buds nor funeral boughs —
I go with the noblest company
That ever death did house.
How blossomy must be the halls of Death
Against the coming of the newly dead!
How sweet with woven garlands gatherèd
From pastures where the pacing stars take breath!
And with what tender haste, each with his wreath
Of welcome, must the elder dead return
To greet about the doors with dear concern
These much-loved, proud-eyed farers from beneath.
For these that come, come not forspent with years,
Nor bent with long despair, nor weak with tears,
They mount superbly thro’ the gold-flecked air,
The light of immolation in their eyes,
The green of youth eternal in their hair,
And Honor’s music on them like sunrise.
The dreamy rain comes down,
And cotton’s in the grass.
The farmers all complain —
But I watch armies pass.…
The ones that did not come
From Ivoiry again
Are marching down the road
And whistling in the rain.
The forty-two I saw
In Olsene, prone and pale,
With packs and helmets on
Pass by me, young and hale.
I hear their laughter plain —
Some blasphemous, quaint jest
That livens up their step
More than an hour’s rest.
They talk of Montfaucon,
Of Thielt and Chryshautem;
My cotton rows, it seems,
Are turnip fields to them.
It’s hard to stay indoors
With soldiers marching by.
And if you’ve hiked and fought
It’s hard until you die.
. . . . .
Dim Flanders rain comes down,
The cotton’s in the grass;
But I watch wistfully
Gay phantom armies pass.
Paul of Tarsus, I have enquired of Jesus
And meditated much and read your words
Directed to the wise Corinthians
Of whom am I. There is much beauty in
His life and therefore comfort, and there is beauty
In that unreasoning rush of eloquence
Of yours, so much it almost caught me up
And made me Christian. Such is the power of faith
Ablaze in one we know to be no fool!
I watched you as you preached that day in Athens:
You are no fool, nor saint, but one I judge
Of intellect that somehow has caught fire
And so misleads when it is shiningest.
I had hoped to find in you or in your Christ
Some answer to the questions that unanswered
Slay our wills.… There’s so much lost!
Parnassus there across the turquoise gulf
Still holds its rose and snow to the blown sun,
But no young Phoebus guides the golden car,
Nor will the years’ returning loveliness
For all its perfumed broidure bring again
The Twelve to the bright mountain place they loved.
The gods of Greece are dead, forever dead:
The Romans substitute idolatry;
And there’s such peace and idleness in the world
As gives the thinking powers full scope to soar,
And soar they do, but in red-beakèd bands
That darken all the sun and nurture find
On the Promethean bare heart of man.
How strange to see the labor of the world
Straining for plenteous food and drink and warmth,
For ease and freedom and the right to choose,
But winning these win only doubt and anguish!
Is this accessory to our coming here?
Is there no answer waiting to be found?
I judge the struggle for perfection if
Engaged in long enough, say thro’ the years
Of gorgeous youth, the ashen middle years,
Will end in calm, a kind of stale content —
No gush and quiver in the leafless tree!
But that’s the body’s dying, not the fight’s
Reward, old age not victory!
Yet who, save those few souls and stern
That passionate unto perfection walk
The alien earth scornful and sure,
Would pledge themselves to life-long virtue
Except exchanged for happiness, here
Or hereafter? Who, I ask and hear no answer.
‘Twas for the few that Socrates had thought:
Your Jesus had profounder bitterness
And, wroth against a universal woe,
Conceived a universal anodyne —
Heaven, his father’s Kingdom, Paradise.
Hence his success with slave and sick and poor —
The solace for their skimped experience
They find in dreams of restitution and
A promised land, whose king will dower and
Reward their loyalty with bliss eternal.
This promise of his kingdom and the immense
Illusion that he had, shared still by you,
Of coming once again and shortly to
Select mankind for punishment or saving
Are above all the concepts that ensure
His following, which when the fact disproves
Will fall away and be forgotten till
His name will vanish and the careless years
Hide with their passing sandals’ dust his dream.
Yet in this Jesus I detect always
Something more true and sound and saving than
The postulates of his philosophy.
Compared with Socrates his intellect
Lacked wonder, self-delight, sufficiency.
The Athenian in his noblest eloquence
Assumed himself a son of God, yet him
I understood, somehow: it seemed at least
Poetically true. But when your Jew
Speaks of his father, all that I never learned
Is near, I cannot think, but I can feel,
And ‘spite of me, I have the sense of wisdom
Simpler and fruitfuller and wiser than
All wisdom we had hardly learned before,
That turns irrelevant and pitiful
Much we had frayed and tattered our poor souls
In guessing. Yet when I turn to you for counsel —
And who of his untutored band but you
Is qualified in wide and leisured learning
To parley equal-minded with a Greek? —
I find a blur of words, a wall of thought,
That more completely hide the god I sense
Than the fantastic patter of his humble
Ignorant worshipers … Paul, Paul, I’d give
My Greek inheritance, my wealth and youth,
To speak one evening with that Christ you love
And never saw and cannot understand!
But he is dead and you alone are left,
Irascible and vehement and sure,
For me to turn to with the bleak bad question —
Do we then die? Or shall we be raised up? …
There is the hope always of other life,
After this choking room a width of air,
A star perhaps after this sallow earth,
After this place of prayer, a place of deeds.
No man but in his heart’s locked privacy
Dares hope this muffled transiency we hate
For its most bitter and ignoble failure
Ends not with what our ignorance calls death.
A Christ with promise of eternity
And proof could Christianize a hundred hundred worlds!
There are such glimpses of the never-seen,
Such breathings from the outer infinite,
The possible hath such nobility
As makes us suppliants for further chance —
Not repetition, but more scope, O Powers!
Yet better purposeless mortality
Than this mad answer you proclaim to us.
We shall rise up, you say: so far well said.
This essence that disquieteth itself
With less than truth, that will not tolerate
The fare whereon ’tis fed, but sickens so
For immortalities that it doth shape
Of its own yearning — piteously methinks —
Gods and a dwelling place of distant stars,
This surely hath a strength beyond mere days!
But then you add, with equal certainty,
“There’s too a resurrection of the flesh.”
This is your creed and final comfort, Jew,
That these our gyves and chains are never slipped,
That this captivity we thought a term
Carks to eternity, do what we will!
The impediments to every high resolve,
The traitors to our nascent deity,
The perfumed, warm, corporeal parts of us
That drug to sleep or death the impetuous will,
These are partakers of such after-life
As our fierce souls may grievously attain!
Tarsus, I’ll not accept eternal life
Hampered and foiled by this vile thing of flesh!
There is no fire can burn it pure, no rain
Can wash it clean, no death can scourge it slave!
The spirit that is holier than light
Its touch will stain, its vesture will pollute!