Authors: William Alexander Percy
It should be cold when the trees are so bare
Or the breezes spring-gentled for flight,
Not torturing thus the dogwood that writhes
Like a desperate immaculate light.
I am afraid of the night and the spring
And the terrible winds of the night!
Afraid of the rapture that grapples and tears
Till the cords of my heart are torn,
While the moonlight is crashing down canyons of cloud
Like blasts from a great silver horn,
And all the impenitent lovers, long dead,
Are blown past, lip to lip, unforsworn.
These are the seaward cliffs: let us sing and forget.
The daylight dazzles upon us, cloudless and clean,
And there, far down, where the crimson rocks are wet,
Shallows mottle the sapphire sea with green.
Come, let us forget,
And, healed of ancient tears and whole of ancient teen,
Sing with cold hearts of joy and no regret.
Fair from safe hill-tops seem the passing sails,
Fairer perhaps because they always pass,
And that far mountain-land, that quakes and pales
In the noon stillness, fair too and far, alas!
No rough sweet hails
Will glitter up our glens, nor will a bruised bright grass
Betray some parting’s anguish in our vales.
We are accursed. Why should our thoughts yet cling
To them that loved us when they knew us not,
But learning us despised? Come, let us sing
Forgetfully, loving this lovely spot
Where the swallows swing
Half down the cliff white-breasted, shrill, and the haze is hot
Plumbago blue like a witch’s eyes in spring.
Not the wind’s fingers scribbling on the floor
Of ocean write a rune more incomplete
And mad than that fate marked above the door
Of our strange hearts, set open to all feet.
Oh, seek no more
Its meaning. Sing, let our songs be ignorantly sweet
Like upland waters pluming as they pour.
Alas! no music sounds here save our tears
And all things we have won except forgetfulness!
Our longing veers
Back to the native land of our distress —
No sights may bless
Eyes the red needle of endurance sears.
Then let us sing again with heartbreak wise and mad
The terrible songs we sang once ere we came,
And win the round windy ocean that was glad
To be one sorrowing echo of our shame.
Never, never, never may we unlearn
The secret with which we burn,
Never appease
Our mortal hurt with these
Felicities.
Again
Lift we our voices,
Our music old with bitterness and bane,
For we weave our songs and our songs are woven
Of pain,
And the heart that sings is the heart that is cloven.
Aid my heart in its fidelity!
Though my unfaith were no regret to you
It would betray, O careless heart I love,
Not only you, but love itself, and me.
That I am absent brings no pain to you,
But every hour away is death to me —
Send me some word, though heartless as your love,
And aid my heart in its fidelity.
Give me a breath of air!
There is too much of sweetness here,
Too much of pain, pain blent with loveliness.
I am allured from all that we call living
And sickened of the harsh necessities.
The earth again! the earth where sweat is poured
To rise in bronze ripe undulant fields of grain,
Where here and now is sinewed hardihood
And intertwining effort vain and vast.
What now is Avalon, or purple ships that plow
The dim blue evening full of mists and tears?
Give me a breath of air, a sound of voices,
For I am drugged with dreams
And smothered with the smoke of old disasters.
Of what avail dead lovers laid in Avalon
Or purple ships outbound?
Merlin, Merlin’s gone away
With a limmer witch for spouse,
He’s gone to spend a sorry year
In the Queen o’ Fairies’ house.
For gear he’s took the sapphire bird
Wi’ the bubble in his throat;
His hat was prinked wi’ the wee wet flowers
That gaud daft April’s coat.
Sunny-cold the bold wind blew
As he strode off down the hill;
His red cloak bellied out and swirled,
His eyes burned gray and chill.
For promise of a warm high bed
And spiced renewing drink
He’s footed it to Fairyland
Where love’s the only swink.
He’s gone away, and not alone —
Brightly, oh, he sinned!
His red cloak glimmers on the thorn
And his laughter on the wind.
A green bird on a golden bush,
And the leaves chimed out and spake:
“What have you seen, what heard, green bird,
Since you heard the blue day break?”
“A sea, a sea, a saffron sea,
And a creamy warm full sail
Floating beneath me as I flew,
And my shadow stamped the sail
Like a clover leaf, a green clover leaf,
Blown from an Irish dale.”
“Did lovers pale stand by the sail
That furrowed the Irish sea?
Did you catch the glimmer of golden mail
And the glimmer of hair blown free?”
“Golden each scale of his burnished mail
And her hair was bronze and gold:
From an emerald cup I saw them sup
That their four hands scarce could hold.”
“Delight and woe, delight and woe,
Bird of the Irish sea —
These they drank up from the emerald cup
On the sun-swooned saffron sea.”
“Only delight, only delight,
While the beautiful burning blue daylight
Was dappled by me
With the green leaf-shadow shapen in three.
Delight I saw, delight I heard!”
Sang the sunlight-aureoled emerald bird
To the golden tree
Deliriously.
From Avernel the hills flow down
And leave it near the sky,
And it has birds and bells and trees
And fauns that never die.
When coral-pink azaleas fill
Its roomy woods with sweet,
And lilac spills of violets wait
For violet-veined swift feet;
When moths are budded by the oaks’
Uncrinkling rose and red
And high, high up, green butterflies
Reveal the poplars’ head;
When shaggy clouds in single bliss
Blaze up the sea-blue air,
Spilling their shadow-amethyst
Along the hills’ wide stair;
Then there is singing in the sun
And whispering in the shade
And dancing till the stars slope down
Their murmurous arcade.
In love’s half sleep the curly faun’s
Uncertain if he sees
Orion or first fireflies
Between the clear dark trees.
When February brings the hopeless days
And there’s no cranny of the silent world
Where grass is green or boughs are fresh
Or birds recall their litanies of love,
And earth seems but a place where graves are dug
And dug too tardily —
Then turn for peace to those forgotten stars
That change not with the changes of the year,
But still pursue their purposed ministries
In the cold night,
Though loveliness lies dead upon the ground.
Then their serene proud ranks receive
From thick-starred equatorial climes
A lone and flaming guest,
The lord and love of all the southern sky.
Above, aye, just above the black horizon
When the first dark is clear,
You see him rise, superb and alien,
The fiery-haired Canopus, surging from the south.
But one vast scornful stare he flings
Across the full curve of the northern night
Wherein Arcturus and Aldebaran
Marshal the bright-helmed sons of heaven;
Then, meeting the blue gaze of Sirius,
Turns, and retreating down the crystal dark
Hides from our eyes his haughty slow return.
The serpentining Amazon
And many a lost lagoon, flamingo-stirred,
Mirror his golden shaggy hair;
The wide-palmed plantain-leaves
Receive in sleep his tread,
And glimmer, dreaming that the moon glows past;
In their rough pastures
Bronze Peruvian shepherds mark his course
And call his name, and vainly call.
For he strides on in his dim godly wrath
Past Ecuador
And the long samite carpet of the Argentine,
Past the incredible drear rooms of stone
The Incas built, by night, to helpless gods,
On precipices of the fearful Andes;
Nor stays his step till he descries, far down,
The ghostly mountainous antipodes,
Mute with blue cold.
There, trembling in his wreath of flames, he halts
And gazes on the glistering nether pole
Where his reflection shakes —
Contemplative
And sunk in his own thought.
But then our land is gay with polished leaves
And birds are nesting in the calm sweet sun.
There’s a blue flower grows in France
A tattered roadside thing,
Like flowers cut, by little girls,
Of paper while they sing,
Which when I see so far from home
I feel tears almost rise,
For it is blue with just the blue
Of one dear lady’s eyes.
The plowman breaks the smelling earth
And birds are in his wake;
He scatters seed for harvesting,
They, song for singing’s sake.
His heedful heart is happy as
Their hearts that take no heed —
But happiest the furrow’s heart
Where song is sown with seed.
When I see you I think of Mary, the mother of God,
Before she was a mother. But you are older,
Though young, so young that when I think of Calvary
I do not see you fainting at the cross
But bending over her who faints, your arms
About her, your tears upon her face, your voice
Comforting, were there comfort in the world.
Yet there’s no beauty of the sweet-aired earth
Not reminiscent to my heart of you:
Water, the very pure winds of heaven, and the dew,
Birds at their matins, all limpid-colored flowers,
Not those that blaze in peacock opulence,
But such compassionate and candid blooms
As hurt the throat: branches of half-blushed peach,
Anemones that have a just-born air,
Miraculous, blue, breathless morning-glories,
Crocuses far too cool to be like flames,
And cosmos only of the autumn host.
These certainly I know to be your kin.
Yet this, your outward self, could dull and tarnish
And still your loveliness would be no less
And still men could not fail to see in you
That which they always hope to find in women —
The unnameable gay goodness that they love,
Attained in tears, most evident in smiles,
And more worth dying for than creed or crown.…
No wonder, seeing you, I think of Mary,
The mother of God, before she was a mother.
The lambs are sleeping in the rain
Cuddled two and two together,
One alone might sleep in pain
On the hillside in such weather.
In the spring rain slow and steady,
Just before the leaves are ready,
Walking is contentment’s gain,
That is, walking with another,
Best a lover, then heart’s brother —
All alone might waken pain.
Come then, dear, be wise again,
Ramble with me in the soft spring rain —
Walking is contentment’s gain!
We’ll see weeping willow’s mane
Beaded with the moonstone rain,
Then the oat-field’s emerald stain,
Then a brambled dripping lane
Where johnny-jump-ups, pert and plain,
Are common as the inch-high grain.
If walking’s more than going’s art
Unaided by curt car or cart,
Your eyes a thief, a sleuth your heart,
We’ll find, I have no doubt at all,
Right in the cold wood’s hollow cove
Branches of blurry pink I love —
(The red-bud always has his anguish out
Before the leaves are there to laugh and flout).
We’ll surely see a redbird fall
And hear, if you’ll not breathe at all,
The tentative self-conscious call
Of the young mockingbird who slyly
Practises when he sings not shyly
At windows and from garden borders
When what he sings is what he orders.
(But men have lived and died quite near
And never heard his muted fear,
So exquisite and faint and clear.)
What if I should show to you
A plum tree and a cherry too,
Both white as lilies Mary grew,
And hazed about with rain?
Oh, if we go as I like best,
Haphazardly and with a zest,
You’ll have no need to seek for pleasure
In lands that other daytimes measure,
But every bush will be your treasure!
Come out, come out, be wise again
Before the spring begins to wane —
There’s nothing gladder, I maintain,
Than walking together in the rain!