Classic Poem

(To Siegfried Sassoon)

Alas, alas, your purblind bullets slay
Not merely wondrous hearts that beat away,
Awash with warm red blood of man and boy;
Alas, your dibbling bayonets destroy
Not only Life's fair edifice of clay —
The straight white body's belvedere of joy —
But the whole world of Beauty. When you kill,
Not only honey of a heart you spill,
Not only humours of a busy brain;
From every wounded artery and vein
There drip and drain
The blood of the blue billows of the seas,
The sap of corn, the balsam of the trees,
The lymph of lilies and anemones,
The silver drizzle of the summer rain.
Out of a little wound such rivers run,
They swamp the stars, they drown the very sun.

Behold, upon some golden April day
The purple hazes kindle into green
Upon the beeches, and like founts at play,
The leaping, lucent, viridescent spray
Of the young birches dances in the breeze!
Behold, like creamy surf of surgent seas,
Heaped by a storm, the glory of the may!
And see above its bloom
The tassel and the plume
Of lilac and laburnum swing and sway
Like flaming censers in the golden air!
These things are wondrous, and divine, and fair;
And yet the moment that a man we slay,
In his dead heart they wither all away —

Yea, all the colours marvellously made
By the miraculous breathing of the Lord,
Blacken before his eyes and fail and fade,
Pricked like a rainbow bubble by a sword.
Moreover, when you kill,
Not only do you still
On human lips some song or loving word.
You dumb far more; you dumb far more than these —
You dumb the multitudinous melodies
Of wood, and wind, and waterfall, and bird,
And thunder-roll, and ocean-tide, and river;
For these things by a living man are heard,
And when he dies, are hushed in him for ever.

Hark how the passion in the throstle's throat
Fills the whole welkin with a rapture fierce,
And how the skylark's anthems upward float,
Like flaming tongues of joy to burn and pierce
The final barriers 'twixt Heaven and Earth!
Hark to the hurricane's tremendous mirth,
The thunder in the storm-cloud's purple girth,
The river's lilt, the sighing of the trees,
The music that in human hearts gives birth
To terrors, and to loves and ecstasies!
How shall we dare to put an end to these,
And silence the great Voice Creation heard
When in the great beginning was The Word!

Your poison sears, your shrapnel scars
The shining faces of the stars;
Your fiery thunderbolts are hurled
Against the wonder of the world;
Your crawling tanks, and crazy guns
Crumble the hills, and crush the suns;
The cold grey lids your passion close,
Coffin the lily and the rose.

We who have learned Life's compass and Life's height,
And watched in misty limbuses afar
The cold dumb darkness blossom into light,
And barren Night
Bring forth a burning star, —
We who have seen the burning star unroll
To meadows, mountains, wildernesses, seas,
And mortal flesh become immortal soul
And finite comprehend Infinities —
We knowing that behind
All things is Mind,
We feeling that above
All Mind is Love, —
Shall we dare disembody, deafen, blind
The radiant spirit in the flesh enshrined?
Shall we the beauty of the world efface,
Darken the sun, strangle the summer wind,
Empty the ocean into empty space?

Shall we who in our flesh still feel the flame
Of the wild whorl of fire from which we came;
Who in our bones retain Archaean lime;
Who weep the salty waves of bygone time —
Shall we in whose blue veins there ebb and flow
The briny tides of aeons long ago,
In whose exiguous loins are stored the Past,
And lives that may mortality outlast,
Each life a soul, — shall we, with roots so far
Sunk in the fiery strata of a star, —
Shall we,
Who hold the promise of Futurity,
Uproot the Past and let the Future lie,
A dead seed rotting 'neath a darkened sky?
Dare we compel the born unripe to die,
The right of birth to the unborn deny?

O beating heart! O throbbing brain!
So multitudinously fraught
With dream and thought,
With joy and pain!
O flesh miraculously wrought
All Earth and Heaven to contain!
O, Earth and Heaven given so
For heart to love, and brain to know!
How dare we dungeon in a grave
Beauty and Love that Love and Beauty gave!
We dare not, for we know that if we slay,
We tear Love from the Hands of Love away —
Hands full of roses, full of suns and stars,
Hands that still bear the Cross's cruel scars.
By grace of these wise wounded Hands we live,
And dare not throw away the life they give.