Classic Poem

T HIS was in Crete, and many years ago:
A lonely hut high on a mountain-side,
Under a peak that strained in icy stone
To thrust an endless gesture at the stars.

Two peasants in the hut, mother and son,
Were talking; and it sharpen'd their dispute,
That often it was troublesome to speak
Above the sound of rain, driven so hard
It smackt the walls like pebbles thrown in volleys,
And above surges of the sound of wind
That tore itself among the crags above them,
And made the mountain hollows and ravines
Snore like jars of bronze in its monstrous breath.

Yet it was time for pleasant days. The earth —
Her ground like tinder after the crumbling frosts —
Waited for spring to touch her and unseal
Her secret nature like the birth of fire.
Full time it was for the woods to toss their flame,
Burning with every green that water knows:
From oaks green-gold like waves against the sun
That roll a golden gleam in their green mounds,
To birches like the quiet depth beside
Sheer downward cliffs, where surface of green light
Is mixt with blue from under. And already
Flowers begin to hire the flight of bees
At a delicious wage to carry love,
Golden negotiation, to mates unknown.
But the storm came, and with its trampling rain
Trod out the first green sparks of the spring's fire.

Not heeding the loud air, these peasants talkt.
SON . But 'tis a trade despised.
MOTHER . By tongues that go
Like tails of cows in summer, flicking the clegs.
A trade despised? I ask you, is man a beast,
Or is he man?
SON . He's man until he's dirt;
And aren't they rightly scorned who deal with dirt?
MOTHER . The kitten miaows his scorn of the old cat!
But she can wash her own face still; and you,
Nice as you are now, think on this a little,
That all these years it is my trade you've lived on.
SON . I know, I know: but let it be my turn now;
I can be earning now for both of us,
And you can leave corpse-tending.
MOTHER . And why should?
You make your name abroad for a strong worker,
I'll keep my name for setting corpses right.
SON . My name's honest: I'ld be ashamed of yours.
MOTHER . Is man a beast, I say, or is he man?
And what is most the man in him? 'Tis pride.
And go through all his uses, you'll not see
The pride of man so sturdy as in my art:
Pride that will stand when all things else have fallen.
Man will not go to his corruption like
A pitiful beast, huddled as death has left him:
But decently, a corpse still proud to be man,
Dignity sleeping sound, as I have left him.
I'll tell you how to think of me. You've seen
A twisted shell, worn with an age of journeying
Under the sea among the knocking stones,
Beacht by the tide? And what the breath of a man
Can do with the marred and shabby thing, you known
He can blow such a call of trumpeting through it,
No thundering of the surf can roar him down.
I am a mean old crone; but in my trade
There is a great use made of me: I bid
The power of death make room for the pride of man.
SON . You give it out a fine thing. But I'm sure
It's a vile business you were best be quit of.
MOTHER . Nay, there 's an art with corpses; and I enjoy it,
Like a shaper of good statues. And the mourners
Thinking themselves important with their crying,
I enjoy them, I knowing all the while
Death would have none of their howling ceremony
Without my skill. And I will eat their sins
Sometimes. 'Twere pity if my corpses lookt
Proud to be dead, while all the company round
Felt cowering in the midst the spectre of sin.
SON . Who cares what a scavenging dog eats? Nothing to them
That you, the corpse-straker, should be defiled
By meals of their rank evil, so low they think you.
MOTHER . Let them be thinking. They give me their sins
Like children laying pranks of mischief on
Their easy nurse, who smiles to bear the blame.

Just as a sudden astonishing shatter of din
Will stun the speech of those who talk in quiet:
So these who talkt amidst unheeded rage
Of noises, were struck speechless when there smote
Upon the hurlying outcry of the storm
About them, hugely and heavily a silence
Down like the shock of a hammer. No smallest whine
Of sound was left: though strangely in their ears
The tyrannous silence rang like jarring metal.
And in that breathless pause, fearfully startling
It was to hear a pushing at the door.
And the latch rattle: and feebly blundering in
An old man came, a hideous bent old man,
Barefoot and limping, foul to his knees with mud,
In sopt and tatter'd beggarly clothes. He stood
And bleared upon the candle, stoopt and gaping,
The tremble of his spare neck thrusting forward
The weight of his head, poised like a baboon's.
From pucker'd clefts as red as wounds his eyes
Lookt weeping; but behind the mask of age
The bone of his brow and face was framed to hold
Majesty and decree of mighty spirit,
Superb above control of common fate,
Before the scorching years such horrible skin
Had stretcht upon it. A little while he strove,
Remembering some old royal way of standing,
To right the crooked warping of his spine;
But could not. Then he spoke. His voice
Came like a trumpet when the brass is flawed:
Such resonant muster in that noble skull
Of tones that from such fretted strings began.

" O Cretans, he is dead!"
He stumbled back,
And then came burden'd in again. He bore,
Lapt in a goatskin bundle, some small weight
A boy might swing in single-handed play;
But gasping work for him to be its porter.
Then like a thing to be tenderly used, he set
His parcel on the bench; and to his hosts
Turned the absurd deformity of grief
Tormenting age: with dropt jaw quivering,
Eyebrows curved high-pitcht over their sockets
In anxious bridges, pushing his forehead rugged
Up to his pate in creases like half-rounds
Of ripples held by a buttress in a stream.
And leaning over the small thing that lay
Wrapt up before him, at last he spoke again.

OLD MAN . He is dead now, and you must be with me
In burying him.
MOTHER . A baby! And by your speech
You're some outlandish vagabond. I'll be bound
You've made some demon happy with the blood
And burnt fat of the child; ay, it has been
Some wizard's murder.
SON . You go too hard on him.
Look how his ancient mind peers from his face
To make your meaning out. He brings no harm.
MOTHER . What, no harm for a tramping rogue to bring
Out of a fiend's holiday of a storm,
A dead baby? I warrant he deals in them,
A sorcerers' body-monger. And the wind,
When he came in, fell headlong down to quiet,
Down like a drunk man bawling over a cliff:
Be sure there is some wickedness leagued with him. —
Whose is this baby? Have you strangled it?
SON . The grasp, see, of those tremulous hands would scarce
Strangle a worm.
OLD MAN . You said the storm had finisht?
I should have noted that. Indeed, it has done
The work they meant; ay, they would whistle it back
To kennel, now it has worried him to death.
Soon as I pickt him up to carry him here,
They loosed on us that baying storm to hound
My stumbling the whole way. With a hundred jaws
It tore at him to snatch him from my arms
Where he lay whimpering; and terror at last
Of all that hatred yelling in his face,
Mad to have him and savage him, wrung his heart
So hard, life could quiver no longer in it.
All's ended now; and now it is for you
To bury him. And will you eat his sins?

This was an eager question; and the consent
She nodded, seemed to be somehow startled from her.
But, to assure herself she gave it freely,
She chatted some stock wisdom of her trade.

MOTHER . O I will eat the sins of the poor bairn:
An easy mouthful that. The killjoy death,
To come so soon! Who knows, if he had grown
What lusty wickedness I might have had
To swallow for him? But as it is I think,
Baby, your little secret spawn of sins
Will trouble me with no heartburn. This is the way. —
And you, boy, be stirring: undo the brat.

She took a crust, sopt it and salted it,
And gave it to the crouching man; and he
Over the bundled thing upon the bench
Handed the morsel back. She muncht it down
Then went about the things her skill would neck.
Truly she was unwilling; but in their minds
The look of his tarnisht eyes strange thrill'd,
As if invisibly burning rays were piercing
Among their thoughts, and gathering them to his lape
The act of his desire, like dust of iron
Drawn into pattern of a magnet's power.

Yet as she turned from bolting down the crush
Her casual rite had made bitter as tears
For the reproach of sin: to see her go
Busily searching in her corners and cupboards
Arrested him in a staring blank of wonder;
Like an astonisht plowman at a fair,
Who gapes after a juggling tightrope-walker,
Seeing him, when his risky show is done,
Push unconcerned and whistling through the crowd:
In such a puzzle the old man stood, to find
She made so little of those eaten sins.

Meanwhile, she ferreting for cloths and pan,
And the doddering man lost in his feckless gas,
The son was fingering the knots that kept
That sorry luggage fasten'd. Loath though he was
To open it, he could not fumble long,
Such folly was the slack and feeble tying.
A stealing cat, left in a room alone
Where supper's on the table, smelling out
A dram of milk low down in a narrow jug:
Careful not to be noisy and not to spill.
Her dainty paw dips in and soaks her fur,
Then daintily draws out again and licks
The dripping theft. Even so gingerly
Into the bundle's folds his hand went loosening.

She heard, the mother bustling with her things,
Suddenly heard, from where she left her son,
Such a harsh force of desperate breath as comes
From lungs coopt in hard agony of terror,
When muscles fiercely clench about the ribs
Like a red-hot tyre shrunk on a smoking wheel.
She turned, and saw her boy in palsy, his arms
Fixt half-way raised, and eyes that could not wink
But only glare into the open'd pack.
She scurried to him; and a grim thing lay
For her to see: no baby, but a man
Unbelievably wither'd into age,
The cinder of a man, parcht and blasted
As puny and brown as the mummy of a baby,
His body all drawn up into a fist;
The pined legs, crooked as burnt candle-wicks,
So taut with perisht sinews that their knees
Thrusted the shrivelled belly; and his arms
Hugg'd his chest with little twisted hands.
But nothing babyish the great famisht head
Contorted down: the sharp edge of the jaws,
With thin beard scanted to a snowy wool;
The lean nose peaking like a puffin's bill;
And brow and brainpan glistening like wrought wood,
And vaulted for a god's imagination.

But he, the wretch who brought that dreadful parcel,
Still lookt towards where the woman had been busy,
A standing shivering swoon. They turned on him;
The life in them broke loose from pausing aghast,
And clamoured like a stream bursting a weir.
Angrily afraid, she wrung his shoulder:
" Leave off your doating, you horrible old man;
What's this you've brought us?" Then again he tried
To brave the burden of his years and stand
Upright before their question; and again
He summon'd from his wreck of royal life
Commanding voice: five words were toil enough
Now for the voice of his greatness to endure
Before it broke:
" Zeus! It is Father Zeus!"

Grief humbled him to the ground. Down he fell
" As low as worship before these poor folk,
Hiding his face, sobbing for shame, and muttering:
" The thundering Zeus! His favour was the prayer
Of gods and men, his sentence was their lives:
And now that little loathsome thing! And I,
This dying misery of crippled age,
I am Apollo, I am Apollo."

A long while, breathing shrill and quick, he lay;
At last, a little raising his abasement,
And giving something of Olympian manner
To the poor dwindled voice, that yet must rasp
Laborious whisper like the drag of a rope
Over a whining pulley when he that hauls
Pauses often for breath — he told his tale.

APOLLO . We were upon the mountainous height of the gods
That has the whole world under it; and thence —
Like purity of mountain-water streaming
Down to salt seas from crags that gleam in heaven —
Our divine life down from that lofty quiet
Descended to the brackish tides of men:
Fresh heavenly water sweetening the vast salt,
A shining song into the helpless roaring.

Yet it may be sometimes, ages of water
Will grind a steep of ancient rock to soil,
And soil will flourish into moss and weed,
Till where bright water plunged, a sloth of moisture
Soaks down from ledge to ledge of sodden turf:
Had some change grown betwixt our height and men,
To hold the speed and plenty of our gift,
And we knew nothing of it? — And to our sight,
Lightly scanning the haze of things to come
(For scope we had in time as easily
As in the distance of the earth), appeared
Low down, like darkness charged with slumbering fire,
The far-off patience of some grand event
Biding its time, dreaming itself set free
In dreams that made its darkness suddenly blaze.
We glanced at it as feasted men will look
At lightning, when the storm is so far off
The winking glare burns noiseless as the stars
Along the rim of pale sweet summer night,
Casting a moment's shadow from the trees.
Or if fear toucht our minds, it was as light
As tickling threads of spider-work will touch
The face of one who loiters in the evening.

Zeus the Father assembled us, and spoke:
" Not only our divinely streaming mountain,
But gods like wandering rains into that brine,
The life of man, have poured replenishing purity.
Bacchus we found conferring himself on men
Out of the flying winds of unknown spirit:
Dying into them like a rain at sea,
Shedding divine fresh water of his life
Over their salty unrest, and thence again
From out the depths of them rising a ghost
Pure of the bitter earth they have dissolved,
Again to pour down in immortal sweetness.
Him we entreated to dwell here, and take
A heavenly name, and be our Dionysus.
So we did well, and he."

We turned to smile
Brotherly pleasure on our lovely guest.
He was not in his place; he was not found
In heaven that day, the last of heaven's days.
Where had he gone, our belov'd Dionysus?

Zeus spoke again: " And now another god
Begins. Despise him not, Olympian gods!
We will persuade him too into our league."

We bent our gaze to earth. Our eager sense
Devoured the height that made the life of man
One swaying tide of motion to and fro;
We saw it in its swarming particles —
Multitudinous atoms of passionate will
Seething in separate purposes. But one place
We noted, where the wrangling little lives
Were ruled by some great passage of event,
All packt one way: as when there have been floods
Sweeping across the meadows, twigs and straws
Lie combed and matted by the vehement water.
So stroked together were these lives, amasst
Towards where, aloft against the cloudy flame
Of scarlet evening, three of their kind they had
Hung up on gallows crosses. A bare mound
Lifted those tall black spikes into the sky,
So that it seemed the nave, and the gaunt poles
The jutting spokes, of a great ruin'd wheel
Sunk to the axle and rotting in a fen.
But in the heaven behind it, the sun's rays
Had made another wheel, with white-hot gold
For nave, and spouted fire for whirling spokes,
The blazing pillars of a wheel that seemed
Gloriously travelling over the earth.

For we had found the new god: and once more
A dying god. His death was while we lookt:
And instantly his deity arose
And blinding stood above his death, and scorned us.
In fierce obedience close behind him croucht
That black and hungry hour we long had seen
Far off. He pointed at us; and in a leap
Darkness was perfect over us. It was
Time, the whole disaster of time compact
In one dense moment, that from the heart of it struck
Accumulated fire, the vengeance stored
For all the debt we had not heeded owing;
And then withdrew, and left us charred with age
To feel our misery awhile. But I,
When I saw Zeus sunk to that infant shape,
Rocking his head and twitching helpless limbs,
Set out to nurse him hither, bearing him
To end where he was born, in Crete.

He stopt.
He was so still they thought it was his death;
But presently they saw his shuddering hands
Work on the floor as they would dig their hold
Clutching into it; and stealing a pace forward,
The woman found his eyes wide and appalled
And fixt upon the door. She turned and lookt:
Something was shining out there in the darkness,
Shining and coming nearer; swords of light
Into the room at sill and lintel pierced,
And lances where the warping boards had parted.
Ever closer and brighter it came, as white
As winter stars, eager as morning sun,
And jetting like the force of a weight of water.
They thought the timber would have shaken and given
Such pressure of light burst through at every seam;
And now the door's whole wood was full of light
As if it were thin paper against the glare,
The grain like a fine web of glowing threads.
And suddenly there was no door, but space
Of insupportable light, and in the midst
A presence like a beautiful young man.
He stood among them, lookt at Apollo, and laught.

APOLLO . Unhurt, unaged! Dionysus! Thou!
BACCHUS . Call me no more the Olympian name. I am
All Bacchus now again, and have put off
Olympian name and nature. Ay, and wisely,
Now that I study you! To bid farewell
To you and what is left you of your heaven,
I come. It seems you have not learnt the art
Of dying divinely, you Olympian gods.
APOLLO . I am disguised to thee, Bacchus, I think.
BACCHUS . I know you, cripple, easily as I know
That curl of husk yonder was Father Zeus.
APOLLO . And thou hast mightier divinity!
Where hast thou been? How art thou grown so radiant
Escaping our destruction, thriving in it?
BACCHUS . You never understood me in Olympus.
Your bland and ignorant friendship grew to me
More tiresome than a wheedling fondling love
To one in whom love sickens. You courteous gods! —
What ailed me, siding with that refuse there,
Your Zeus? — Those serene feasts of yours! — And I
Scarcely able to hold in my dark heart
The hatred tugging there to hunt you down
The slope of heaven to graves in the base earth.
You to think yourselves the life of the world!
Not even now you know why death to you
Is the disgraceful end, and I can die
A thousand times and still be living god.
APOLLO . Why must we die? O Bacchus, why must we die?
BACCHUS . Why must the phantom music of a dream
Break, and the lovely colour of its light
Be known no more? You gave no life to the world;
But as the sleepless spirit in the brain
Of a sleeping man fashions delicious dream
Out of the dull pulses of his body:
So the imagining spirit sealed within
The murmuring life of the world, charms its rumour
Into the story of a dream — the life
Of gods, the life uncertain of a dream.
APOLLO . Then what art thou?
BACCHUS . Ay, know me now at last!
A dream dreamt by the world I am indeed:
But yet a dream of what is not the world.
I am the rapture of the measureless force
For ever passing into and beyond
The measured form of the world. The form abides;
But wavering, inconstant, variable:
Even as on the surface of a stream
The whorl of an eddy shifts and slides and totters,
And yet the whorl remains. But like the water
Incessantly supplied, continual haste
Pouring through the frail round of the eddy,
Eternally impetuous is the force
Narrowed into the world and thence escaping.
I am the dream of that unchanging energy,
You of the eddying pattern of the world.
Must there not be, between your dream and mine,
Enmity unappeasable: between
My infinite element that would be nothing
But its own speed for ever, and the small
Shapeliness of your world that catches it
Into a spinning circle: between my dream's
Unseizable joy and unendurable woe,
And your stately manners of order'd feeling,
The graceful pleasure and the decent grief?
Ay, but that is finisht! The Olympian dream
Vanishes: mine is the dream that triumphs now!
The shape of the whorl has stirred and changed: the world
Is no more what it was when you were dreamt
Its images. But what is that to me?
For I am always dreamt and to be dreamt,
I the nameless force that runs for ever.
APOLLO . And will there never be our like again?
Surely again the dream of the world will be
Of gods in whom the shapely measure of things
Lives adorable in its present beauty,
Loving the appointed bounds as songs their music.
BACCHUS . Nay, I am rid of you now: the mind of the world
Is mine; and I will ravish it with desire
Anguishing to be out of the world, despising
All you could give of beauty, for the hope
My passion in its flight beyond all nature
Gives of amazing and incredible freedom.
And let your new gods come: I shall be there
Discrediting them; the world will shift again
To some new manner, and their dream will end;
And I unharmed, the everlasting dream,
Once more shall bid to the departing gods,
Even as now to you, — is it Fare well?
Fare as ye may, dead god and dying god!

He spoke and laught again and was not there.
The glimmering room came back about them like
The blackness of a cavern: and they stood still.
At last that old Apollo, without words,
Bade their blank minds be his. The woman washt
The crumpled thing that had been Zeus; the son
Gather'd it in the goatskin to his breast;
And in the quiet night the three went out
To climb the Cretan mountain. " Haste! Before
I see the sun, bring me and my business
To the last height of the peak": so the god's thought
Workt in their minds and drove them. Misty dawn
Was known already by the crags, that seemed
To watch each other in their lonely frosts,
While all the earth beneath still slept in cloud.
These peasants and the god at length had climbed
The top of Crete; and like a usual task,
To throw aside the loose and weather'd stones
The son bent down, scooping a shallow hole,
The grave of Zeus; and there the panting woman
Laid in its package the Olympian corpse.

Apollo spoke to them across the grave.

APOLLO . You and these desolate rocks and some few minutes
Are all the world to me now. But it is still
Apollo's world, and the voice of the god is in it,
Announcing, as heretofore, a divine thing.
Hear you the last, ay, and the first and greatest,
Of the Olympian truths: we lived in it,
And out of it our majesty arose,
And that we perish is the witness to it:
Whatever seems, is true! This was our glory,
This is our doom. Not as these cliffs now stand,
Cut off from the earth by cloud, may we survive.
Like the endeavour of arduous faculties
To reach sublime experience, the earth
Exalted them; but now there seems no earth,
Nothing but cloud, and these unfounded crags
Issuing from it, for themselves alone
Maintaining their remote and lofty honour.
So may it not be with the gods. Our world
Required us, and we were. A change has come;
Our world has clouded, and we cannot see it;
The ground of our existence seems annulled:
And to the gods, whatever seems is truth.
The world is ours no more, and we must go;
You look your last upon the broken gods.
Bacchus remains: I know not what new Bacchus
But what his godhead in your minds will be
I know — the uncreated passion taking
Vengeance on that which holds it in creation,
You, the living world: and you yourselves
Shall worship the revenge he takes on you.
" I the real, the true, the eternal,'
Thus will he cry to you, piercing and thrilling you,
" I am your rescue from the seeming world;
Follow me out of seeming, and I will give you
Inconceivable things." This is the god
Henceforth: and a breath of the infinite of being
Will touch your minds; and you will scorn to be there
In your mortality under the stars;
And to adore your god you will make yourselves
Worthless lives, the dupes of a worthless world:
And you make Bacchus happy in his revenge!
How long before whatever seems become
Olympian truth again? How long before
You know again the miracle you are,
You minds that master that same infinite being
Into the seeming of establisht world? —
And if it seems, it is! — Here find your gods,
Or be your own contempt: here in your world
Of measured fires rejoicing in the law
That fills the sky with glittering certainty;
The times of earth, and waters in their turns
Of seas and rains and rivers, varying sound
And varying colour of glee; the commonwealth
The exquisite habits of living things contrive;
And that most marvellous creator, thought.
Will you be life once more that loves itself,
And justifies its being to itself?
Then of your world seized into bounded seeming
In midst of flux, let there be gods again:
Zeus, and another son of Zeus, a new
Apollo, god of the life that knows itself
Made of eternal being, but made with power
To overcome the infinite and shape it
Into the beauty of mortality.

But now the warning came: the sun arose,
And struck on him a dreadful finger of light.
He quailed beneath it in a wretched kneeling;
His mouth gaped as if to be speaking still,
But only choked; his hands went to his throat,
Like crazed self-murder at his windpipe gripping;
And then he bowed his head, and tumbled down
Beside that other. Quickly the peasants moved,
Released from him, but not from fear of him,
To load his death, piling a cairn of boulders.

Back in their hut, son and mother no word
Had for each other a long while. At last
The woman, stirring about dinner, spoke:
" Well, you shall have your way. From to-day on,
Let no one come to me for washing corpses:
Nor for sin-eating. — Boy, do you understand
What I have done? — I have eaten the sins of Zeus!"