Classic Poem

My spirit is a bow unstrung,
My strength is as a twisted pod,
Yet I remember, once, a young
Exultant, wind-flushed, passionate god—
Who fled down the green colourless wave,
Burning the silence with a glittering scale,
Yet found no coral and no sea's floor;
Who plunged and soared and poised, but gave
Care to no thought but that his flail
Threshed a gold sheaf on an idle floor;
Who knew not whence he came, nor cared
While there remained that opening door
And a cloudy flight of palaces, staired
With mirrors, fragments of a separate sun.
Ages were woven and woven, unspun,
Before the delight of winnowed hair,
Of diving sheer from the whirlwind's brim,
Of feeling the runnels of space on bare
Unwearied limbs could weary him.
But slowly a questionless vast despair
Hooded his brain; on his heart an ache
Knocked like a sword against the thigh.
The winds were no longer stiff to slake
The thirst I had—for the god was I!
Centuries circled past with a cry
Like baying hounds. At last I arose
And plunged into the burning gyres
Where the intensest sun-slag glows,
And churned the spindrift till it whirled
Rocketing colours, metallic fires,
Vermilion, cobalt, frost and black-rose.
Urged by a blind, dark, sultry lust
I trampled the blazoned clouds of dust
Like a wild stallion in a pound—
Fire upon dust, dust upon spark—
Till a huge uncouth, unthought-of world
Went toppling blindly down the dark
With a hot unwieldy sound:
And wonder was there like a sudden wound!

Ages and ages were smuggled away
While I shaped with slowly subtle hand
A universe I had not planned:
Suns of inviolate sapphire burning
With stars to circle upon their light,
Choruses to one high voice returning;
Suns of amber and bluish light,
Shaken like dew on the boughs of night;
Comets with fluttering fetlocks and long tossing manes,
Plunging in triumph against their stiff reins,
Thudding a dust of white fire from their hoofs;
And the stars that have stars for company
When they sit at feast under heaven's roofs
And utter a sweet articulate cry.
Then out of a white wind wandering came
Lovely spirits nimbed in flame
Even against that illumined air;
Stripling they moved,
Bending each on each a remote stare
From arrogant eyes that were wise in love,
Dripping a sun's rain from smooth thighs
As they moved
And some of them had strength enough
To have followed with speed, unsandalled, unmewed,
The galloping thunders of the sun;
And some wore pointed wings upon
Poised and tremulous heels, subdued—
With a thin crescent of lifted wings,
Ivory-rich misted with silver—the flame
Which dawned a rose ardour from bright hair
Kindled and unbound by the great pair
Which from their shoulders beat or fluttered.
But all were courteous in their pride
Save one, lucescent as his name,
Who, when he would have spoken, uttered
A thin cry, dropped to his knees, and gazed
Down where the stars were, intricately mazed
As gleams of green phosphorus in the tide;
Crouched in a glare like one who has sent
Thick bloodhounds on his own son's scent
And looks into a network of winds.
Then gathering to his feet
He made as if his hands would beat
A dancing measure; and a song
Demon-sweet and wild and strong
Made his face strange—a song of light
And colours wheeling in the light,
Vermilion, saffron, blue-green and blue,
And the blind and unimaginable hue
Which trembles beyond the terror of white;
All things that were and things unknown:
Blindness of suns and staggering stars,
The red-brass pomp of battle cars,
The scraping of spears against a throne.
And all that high unsorrowing throng
Were hid from each other by their tears,
And pressed white brows, because of the song
Which Lucifer made among his peers.
And I too, sitting among them there,
Knew beauty's intimate despair,
And dreamed of a green wide-islanded star
With one white moon to follow her,
A place where immortal beauty should sit
With mortal eyes to ponder it.

And afterwards I remember, remember,
We sat like stars in the sun's feast chamber,
And I shared with them my mind;
And brooding upon their litheness assigned
Each a rollicking planet to ride,
A moon to tame, or to sit upon
A huge, unruly, turbulent sun.
I taught them all my wit had learned,
How starry speed was qualified
By bulk and distance; why this one burned
And that rolled darkling: all that I knew
And all I guessed might well be true.
They leapt and clashed their ivory spears,
And shouted; and down through the regions of night and morn
Fled like partridges frightened from corn.
I turned that none might see my tears.

And after, long after, I shaped a star
With one white moon to follow her.
A place where immortal beauty should sit
With mortal eyes to ponder it.
There out of odour, sound and colour
I made those shapes which seemed to wear
In the bronze lustre of that undimmed air
A beauty elaborate and austere,
Which now is shadowed, or grown duller
Than an old man's wit to a young man's ear.
I made all forms of greenery
Under the air or beneath the sea:
The tree that like a fountain soars,
The tree that like a cloud downpours
In a rustling rain of silver leaves;
The tree whose petals are gold at noon
And moonlight coloured in the moon;
And every sort of tree that weaves
A net of leaves from limb to limb.
I made green beetles smouldering dim
And pheasants fanned to a golden glare
In the white furnace of the air:
And the many strange sea-breathing things
Which sprawl in jellies and coil in rings,
Dripping slow slime from viscous eyes
Amid the deep sea's forestries.
I made the spider obese and hairy
And taught him to spin and thread an airy
Web of colourless polygons,
And shook against the twisted skein
Cool bubbles of translucent dew,
Violet-gold, and irised rain
The first windy light comes through
When hills are lowered before the dawn.
And still I might feel my breath indrawn
Could I but see that murderous seine
Dredging fat flies from the streams of air
And ugliness dragging up unaware
The careless iridescent dawn.

I made when I had learned to smile
The knobbed and scaly crocodile,
Blue-buttocked, feathery-whiskered apes,
And monkeys with brown tendril shapes;
I made when I had learned to laugh
The painted ludicrous giraffe,
The sluggish hippopotamus,
Leathery, lewd, preposterous:
The dwarfed and bulked grotesquery
Under the winds and beneath the sea.

But beauty alone had terror
To lay delight on my youth, so that I shook
As when the first of morning ripples to clearer
Green the swift lustres of a brook,
And a naked bather wades and is chill.
Yet never was I so seamed with pain,
And for her sake, that not one vein
Was quiet, and carved in wind I ran,
As when the hour was come to fulfil
The breathing body of man.
Lying unstirred, one knee upturned,
Through ruddy loose hair and the broad
Sloped shoulders, down to the noble thigh, there burned
The gracious indolent ardour and
Cloudy repose of a god.
I breathed on his face, and my breath
Went sharp through his side; stretched out my hand—
A shudder of light tumbled his hair,
And he turned his sleep to a stare, aware
Of beauty and aware of death.
And something came back to my blood, I recalled
Lucifer's face, and the circled crowd—
Dim crescents of wings, flushed faces enthralled,
And the lifted throat despair had made proud!
It is long since I have done aught but look
Through blinkered eyes at images
Which once had halted my heart's blood,
As an old man shrunk to a hood
Sits quiet, pondering a book,
For which in his youth he had foregone ease,
Or the mouth of a girl, or gold.
Crouched over my bones and old,
I have long leaned chin upon wrist
And let my thought twist and untwist
Like a black weed dragged in a stream,
And wondered indeed if I exist,
Or am but the end of a dream.
Ah, why must all things come upon trouble
And all that sultry passion seem
A rustle of wind in the dry stubble—
Unless from the first I failed in thought?

The wheels of the chariots were wrought
Of purest bronze, but with a broken rim;
The unshod chargers fell in the long wars.
For all their silver ribaldry the stars
Go mad in their courses, a dry skull
Rots where the moon was beautiful;
The suns were pocked at birth with scars.

Oh, violent and young, distraught
And exulted with undrunk wine, I brought
Vast splendours from the earlier night,
Yet failed because I held in despite
The labour and repose of thought.
Is this shrunk star the flaming dream
Which came with islands and bright-scaled water,
Wheeling a dark and a radiant rim
As near and away from the sun it sped?
Was it for this I sought or
Sat in labour? for this that Lucifer
Sang, the unshadowable light-bearer?
And of man, of man, what shall be said?
I would my heart were piteous
That I might pity him! He lifts his head
So bravely to the sun, is amorous
Of beauty, conquest and delight;
Spends blood upon banners; drums the earth
With adventurous tramplings; shrills the air
With the insolent envy of his mirth.
What have I made of him? What—to requite
A love more desperate than despair?
A poor creature smeared with his own dung,
Who struts a little, being young,
And has scarcely sounded his own distress
Before he has crumbled to rottenness.
Distinguished on a gilded couch
He mutters under his dying breath
Of some old plan of lust or wrath,
Unaccomplished, beyond his touch.
Or left beneath a broken rafter
Crouched on a straw heap, unwarmed, alone,
A stench of frayed flesh about a bone,
He counts that best which never was,
Remembering how the wise drew laughter,
And dead madmen were accounted wise;
How lovers had but their blinded eyes
And Caesar's armies a tune of brass.

Has the sun no molten core where I may be hid?
Is there no penitential fire to shrive me?
O man, man, man, forgive me,
I wrought, not knowing what I did!
I will start up, dragging these bones
Knee after knee,—if it must be,
Drag this loose strength, knee after knee,
And come at last on the shaken thrones
Of the last golden dynasties
Of time; startle the suns, and leave their skies
A smouldering heap of palace stones
Set in the flaring dusk of a city
Where none is loud for pain or for pity.
I will loose the stars from their high stud
And lash their heavy-hooved stampede
Till foundering they darken, broken with speed;
Dabble the moon's face with earth's blood,
That not one man shall be left at length
To taunt me with enduring youth.

I have forgot—I have no strength!
I am gnawn clean by a ravening tooth.
The blood in my wrist is so sucked and thinned
I cannot drag my beard from the wind
Where its ravelled cords are tossed and lying.
It is not man but god who is dying!
But how had I known that a god should grow old
And his bright hair thin to a streaked whiteness,
His beard fall long and clotted with mould
Whose heart had been as the dawn for lightness?
How had I dreamt that at last I should look
On the stars in their tumult, and find such pain
In a world I had thought to have made without stain
That my head would sink in my elbow's crook,
My throat give sobs in the place of breath,
My mouth ask easily after death?

My face is turned toward death, and yet,
Weak, bewildered and blind, I grope
Still for the unappeasable hope
That sleep, not death, shall touch my brain,
And touch my eyelids, and restore
Youth and all youth lacked before.
It may be I shall start up again
And put on strength like golden greaves
To the oily shins of a young man set,
And shake the stars till they fall like leaves
In an autumn drift along the air;
Know tumult again and wisdom, and tear
In the delighted lust of my heart
The broad beams of the world apart,
To build again, in another kind,
The orbs and whirlwinds of my mind.