Classic Poem

“The sensual will have its moment? The brain”
Sleep? . . . You can prophesy? . . .'


—Thus laughed the woman,
Tall, thin, and bitter as an elder tree,
Lifting her white face like a crown of bloom.
And so I swore by darkness, trees, and blood,
And rivers underground, and felt my brain,
(Thus challenged by her brain) fall steeply down
Like a dead leaf upon the rushing flood.
‘Yes, I can prophesy,’ I laughed in answer;
And lost my life in hers, which brighter shone,
Radiant and derisive. ‘Never yet,’
She darkly smiled, ‘has voice of man flown in
To break my chords of being. You but waste
The evening, with its bank of clouds, where stars
Plunge down to swim . . . Look, how the lights now come
Like perforations in that wall of trees—
Where through the Ultimate winks!’


And she was still,
Clasping long hands around her lifted knee.
These touched I twice, with teasing finger-tip,
Three times and four, then wearied. But the darkness
And that profounder sound where rushed the river,
Nocturnal, under all, and moving all,—
Took both of us, annulled the brain, devoured
The elder tree, with white faint face of bloom,
And me, who sat beneath it.


Then my blood
Was filled with elder blossom cold and white,
My arms embraced the tree of singing wood,
My hands took leaves and broke them. We were lost,
Thus mingled, in the world. No speech we had.
Till suddenly (as at the end of death,
The darkness being silent) we stood up
Once more; the woman hushed, an elder tree,
And I a voice. And then she smiled, and said—
‘Ah, it is true! The sensual has its moment.
The trickster brain—thank God—can be deposed . . .’

Then I, ‘Look now! how all the trees rush back
From the dark stream! and every blade of grass
New-washed in starlight!’


‘Starlight?’ . . . She laughed, rustling,—
Rustling, nodding her elder-blossom face,—
‘Not starlight, no! The trees, the grass, the brain,
Come back again from blood; and they are strong.’