The Bird-Catcher (3 page)

In tumult and blown smoke. Then slowly rise

The pale forgotten faces of the dead,

Cast off the rust of Time, the mould of Earth,

And speak again and laugh and sing gay songs

And eat and drink in warm light of the sun

In the good fellowship of adventurous souls

Who have purged their hearts of fear. Too happy vision,

Vainly denying death and the iron fact

For those poor slaves of clay

And us sad children of mortality.

For the buglers take the bugles from their lips

And Time and Death return with the failing light

To numb the leaves and blind the lake's clear eyes

And shroud the water with a film of frost.

And the heart takes up its sure mechanic beat

And the dulled eyesight shrinks

To outward things and the narrow pen of Space.

Layer under layer, sluggish as falling snow,

The settling sediment of memory sinks

Till the mind is tranquil as a block of ice.

These are the unthrifty souls

Who watered dusty streets with wine;

Gathered pearls from Indian shoals

And cast them royally to swine;

Their most precious love who strowed

To be trampled by the crowd;

Freely broached their hearts' red blood

To dye the garments of the proud;

Who have sung away their years

To soothe the perjurer and the thief;

Poured for the heartless, healing tears;

Fed the tyrant with their grief;

Paid the price they never owed;

Prayed to gods who claim no prayer;

Climbed the high encumbered road

Never asking why or where.

Man seeks to cage delight

In vain, not seeing

That her strong-pinioned flight

Is all her being,

And sets about to frame

Dead fantasies—

Eternity, Infinity—to tame

The ecstasy that flies;

And vexed by bonds of Space,

By veils of Time,

He dreams a special grace,

A power sublime,

In these abstractions, vain

Unbodied signs,

Frail shadows of the ecstasy and pain

With which Orion shines,

With which the rose unwinds

Each scented fold,

With which man grows and finds

The note of gold

Hid in the heart of laughter,

Heart of sighs,

In measured golden music flying after

The golden voice that flies,

In love from marble wrought,

In love that chimes

Over clear-ringing thought

And well-tuned rhymes,

In love become a fact

Keen, swift, and fell,

When the whole self leaps forward to the act

Clean as the whistling shell.

For when the body and mind,

Fused in one fire,

Leap, like tiger on hind,

On the one desire,

Then the careful thoughts and schemes

Of barren years

Go down into the pit of ruined dreams

And crumbling hopes and fears.

For to be single, sure,

In one swift flash,

Pure flame or diamond pure;

To slough the ash

Of things burnt out; to gain

The fountain's powers

Gathered in little compass to attain

Its crown of glittering showers;

This is the eternal, this

The infinite,

The gods' immortal kiss

Set warm and bright

On heroes' brows. In these brief moments' span

Shall man outlive the thousand centuries

Of the blind life of man.

Therefore when I am sunk

To earth again

And thirsty earth has drunk

My joy and pain,

I shall not know or need

Pity or praise

Or thanks or love from you, the human seed

Sprung out of later days:

For on the burning crest

Of great extremes

Where the soul meets breast to breast

Its highest dreams,

Safe from stern Fate's decrees

Irrevocably

I have possessed and savoured to the lees

My own eternity.

Come, holy Spirit, pentecostal flame.

Out of the deep we cry to thee. The shame

Of feeble virtues, mild complacencies

Consumes our bodies like a foul disease.

Eat us as acid eats, burn us with fire,

Till every timid hope and pale desire,

All fond ideals, misty hopes that fly

Beyond the frontiers of reality,

Crumble to ash and leave us clean as light,

Essential strength, pure shapes of granite bright

Set up for no man's worship, no man's pleasure,

But fashioned by the slow, aeonian leisure

Of storms and blowing sands. Of thee is born

All power, all bravery, and the sharp-eyed scorn

That sees beneath bright gawds to the bare bone

Of naked Truth's relentless skeleton.

Save, lest we perish unrepentent, sped

To our last count without thy lance and shield,

Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

With all our small perfections on our head.

    When you in death shall lie

And coldly across the low, deep-windowed room,

Where table, chair, and bed emerge from gloom,

    Light from a pallid sky

Shall fall on the quiet hair and large white brow

And gleam along the sharp edge of the nose

    Austere, ascetic now;

And night's dim water, as it backward flows,

    Shall leave small pools of gloom

In the waxen hollow of each sunken eye,

Round the drawn mouth where the cheeks have fallen in,

And where the throat drops from the jutting chin;

      And under the cold sheet

The trunk shall stiffen and the stretched limbs pine,

Lapsing in one continuous hollow line

From the peaked face down to the long gaunt feet;

Then, Messaline, O most unhappy one,

That longing for the unattainable

That shakes your body like a vibrant bell,

Consumes it on the sacrificial pyre

      Of unassuaged desire,

Shall lose its hold. And you, poor wandered nun,

Thwarted idealist, at last shall know

Repose; pure, cold repose. For you shall go

Through death, corruption, to nonentity

Of small, clean dust; and parching winds shall blow

That senselesss dust far out upon the sea,

And all of you be drowned most utterly

In each small mote descending through profound

Blind gulfs of cold green water, far from sound

And touch and every sense that wove the mesh

That held your struggling spirit in the flesh.

We are the bloodless echoes of the past,

    Blown between vast and vast:

Miserable automata, we check

    Each impulse at the beck

Of dead, forbidding hands. Dancing, we tread

    The footsteps of the dead,

And by their laws make love; and when we sing,

    Dead fingers pluck the string

And twist our music to a stale old song;

    And when we walk along

Green valleys and wide fields of reddening wheat,

    Grey phantoms dog our feet

And their sere joys, voiced in a tongue outworn,

    Turn all our joy to scorn.

An unsubstantial shadow dulls our light,

    And when we sit to write

A ghost stands by the chair to guide the pen

    Lest we should write for men

Some vivid truth, some song with potency

    To set the whole world free.

And when we think, ghosts in our spirits cast

    Dust of a ruined past,

Lest we should see and feel and, knowing our strength,

    Rise in revolt at length

Against the iniquitous tyranny of the dead.

    But still we bow the head,

And still the blind obstruction of the past

    Builds over us a vast

Cold sepulchre, an incubus of stone.

When the wet earth dreamed of spring

In early February

And the first gnats danced on fragile wing,

I stood where the air was warm and still

In a deep lane under a hill

Gazing at a copse of birches

That ran uphill to meet blue sky.

From slim white trunks the tapering branches spread

To a web of rosy twigs. But from their perches

In the high hawthorn-fence

Two robins chuckled loudly, and one said

In his clear, dewy speech: “look how he stares

Like a daft owl in the sun!” The other broke

To trills of scornful laughter and then spoke:—

“These huge unfeathered creatures are so dense

That their slow vision sees

Nothing but rooted wooden trees

In those white, living flames that leap from the hill

And the crown of rosy smoke that hangs so still.”

      Cloud-films that hardly stain

          The sky's blue hall

      Gather, dissolve, and fall

In sudden visitations of bright rain.

      Then the soft voice of seas

Is heard in the green precincts of the trees—

A long, still hushing; then the subtler hiss

Of thousand-bladed grass: then, over this,

      Out of the trees' high tops

      The ticking of larger drops

      That small leaf-tricklings fill

Till, one by one, whenever the wet leaves stir,

From leaf to overweighted leaf they spill,

      Heavy as quicksilver.

These are the showers of spring,

          Pilgrims that pass

And scatter crystal seed among the grass;

      That make the still ponds sing

Delicate tunes and leave the hedgerows filled

With moist and odorous warmth, brim with blue haze

      Hollows of hills and glaze

Each leaf with lacquer cunningly distilled

      From sunlight; they that fling

A brightness along the edge of everything,

And the frail splendour of the rainbow build

To span six miles of meadowland, as though

      Each rain-dipped flower below

Had breathed its colour up through the bright air

      To hang in beauty there.

      Blue waves of Night

Brim the warm hollows of the hills

      And wrap from sight

Fields of our earth and the high fields of air.

Slowly the great bowl of the evening fills

With heavy darkness, till the fading sense

Of sight falls from us, and beneath a dense

And denser gloom all visible things are thinned

To empty shades,—to nothing. But we hear,

Mysteriously swayed, now far, now near,

      The long hush of hidden rivers,

      This hiss of a hidden bough that shivers

      Beneath an unfelt wind.

Here where the lark sings overhead

And the grey sheep nibble the short salt herb

And the bugloss lifts a sky-blue head

And only the sea's long sighs disturb

The silence spread

Like a great arch overhead;

Here where the very air is peace

And our footfalls stir not the smallest sound

On a turf as soft as the ewes' soft fleece,

Passion has walked, till the very ground

Pulsed like a monstrous heart, and fear

And struggle and hate roared down the breeze

Till even the hill-perched farms could hear.

For see, in a spiny whin-bush bleached,

This seaweed that was flung to parch

A mile inland, when the sea thrice breached

The long sea-wall and the whins were whirled

Breast-high in a tumbling tide, wind-hurled

On a stormy night in March.

      Lifeless, still, in the frosty air

      The old stone houses round the square

      Look out upon grey lawns whose grass

Is frozen to brittle blades of steel or glass;

And on black beds through whose ice-welded crust,

Hollow and hard, no gardener's spade can thrust;

And on black branches that forget to grow

And hang benumbed and hypnotized as though

The sap stood still. The very air seems dead,

All sound dried out of it. No ringing tread

Warms the numbed silence. Even the sun himself,

An orange disk in a grey frost-laden sky,

Hangs lightless, like a plate upon a shelf.

This is not life. Some ghost of otherwhere

Takes shadowy substance from the frozen air

To hover briefly till the spell is broken,—

A dream, a passing thought, a faint word spoken.

But suddenly from a corner of the square

A shimmering fount of sound leaps clear and rare,

A small, thin, frosty cheer like tinkling glass.

      Is it shouts of boys that pass

Running in file to slide on the icy kerb,

      Or Dryad, sick for spring,

Wailing forlornly under the frozen herb?

O light of youth, O flower of life in death!

      We listen with bated breath;

So sad, so clear the delicate, wistful spell;

Till frost lays hold on the sound and all is still.

      Frost-bound the garden stands.

The claws of the frost are sharp upon my hands.

      On the harsh lawn each blade of grass