Classic Poem

I

After the fierce-sunned tribes of Israel,
For generations wandering the desert
Clouded and pillared by the fire of God,
Had marched from Hazeroth, the hill of palms,
And barren lands of brass and wool, they saw
Across the wide unwatered plains of Moab,
The fabled mountains of the Promised Land
Against the skies; and aged fighting-men
Carried bedridden from the sheepskin tents
Gazed blindly, muttering of the mountain-gods
Beyond the cataracts when they were slaves
Mill-turning in the wheaten land of Nile,
Around them the sons of their second seed,
As lions whelped amid the burning sands,
There grown to lion-like manhood, by their wives
And suckling children, grimly stared at a dream
Until, out of the dazzle came twelve spies
Among the clamorous crowd, with sun-struck limbs
Dripping, the luscious boughs of pomegranate
And grape-bunch, oozing coolness through the air,
On their bruised shoulders and with slobbering breath
Babbled of barley, olive-yards, cloyed children's
Half-eaten honeycombs and of a rabble
Squabbling for a flung sword beneath four towers
And sun-doors, plated with a scorching bronze,
Chaldean concubines, their childless teats
Cupped with barbaric gold, who lay at noon
Beside the fountain trees on cold-veined marble
Among their tousled robes, a city's spoil,
Timbrelled by laughter.
Three days
The Israelites fought, skirmishing with tribes
While wind sang in the barbs and took for hire
A king wine-stained with wrath and naked drivers
Squatting behind the helpless hump or bales
That hid the women. When the desert sun
Went down with flies among the mountain-lands,
Trumpets of triplicated metal shrilled
And shawms and delicate-stringed psalteries
Silvered the dancing clash of the cymbals,
A blood-red moon peered through the thinning smoke
Of holocaust until the selfsame cloud
Had pillared the fiery square, whose multitudes
Were huddled round the shadows of the priests.
But in the tabernacle, silver candles
Dripped murmurs and the purple woven shade
Of curtains, belled with crimson of pomegranate,
Hung like the coiling fumes of frankincense,
Heavy with their own sweetness, from the rungs
Of sombre bronze: for there the cherubim,
Gazing on their twin brows among deep wings,
Gleamed beautiful as in the carver's brain
And the gorgeous imbedded fires of jasper,
Jacinth and emerald around the Ark
Sparkled in graven gloom. Upon the altar
That once blazed wrath between its mighty horns
When the unpurified had worshipped there,
Consuming them like drunken myrrh, the embers
Crumbled. Silent upon the sacred step
Like a dead king among his scarlet robes
Lay Moses.
At midnight he arose
Mighty of shoulder as a mountain shepherd
Keeping the clouds, majestic and undimmed
By age, and spoke among the patriarchs
Gathering at tent-door and treasury:
‘Greatest of Israel, who in grievous years
Have known the dragon Nile uncoil, and night
Burning around the brood of heathen gods,
Dagon and the false woman, Ashtoroth,
Whose rites are forest beds, or Baalim
Fire-browed, doting upon their images
Betwixt the brazen gates of Babylon,
Balbec and darker-citied lands, dragging
Kings down, though choked with fume of frankincense
And pillaged fire; how men took barren swords
To wife, and from the smoke of foreign plains
Hissing with flood, Nimrod, the sun-black king,
Came with his snarling yokes to build a wall
Of brass, and arrogant in his fierce brain
Brandished the towered earth against its sky,
And thought to topple heaven with a curse;
And how through myriads our jealous God
Has led us from the locust fields of bondage
And hidden on the darkening heights of Sinai,
Within a clouded blaze of wings, renewed
The covenant in words of shattered stone;
Forever in the deserts, in the wastes,
Where lions fainting in their strength for hunger,
Pestered with flies and vultures, die, He led
And in your generations nurtured ye,
O Lions of the tribes of Israel!
And barren rocks oozed honey, and the dew
Of morning curdled into cream of manna.
Ye, as the mother eagle loves her chicks,
Taking them, bearing them upon her wings,
His fierceness has brought forth, His strength upborne.
Joy such as theirs who in the ancient days
Roamed as their flocks across the peaceful plain,
With wives and children to the far blue pasture,
Hilled-water near the skies, and sacrificed
In the fire of dawn their annual lambs
Washed in the dew upon the mountain stones,
And the pigeons caught from a twilight gust,
And crumpled under melting lumps of myrrh,
Until with generations their aged bodies,
Craving but drowsy comfort, slowly followed
The shadows childing round their gathered tents
Till sundown, journeying from sleep to sleep,
You, too, shall know when I am dead
And called by songs of other prophets, reach
A land flowing with milk and honey, long
Promised to Abram, Jacob and their seed.’

But a strange voice was shaken there:

‘One cried,
Flying from the wrath among the hills,
Of fields beneath a city-wall, where our tribes
Ungirdled their knives and drove the stubborn plough
Yoked with oxen through the dawn, and girls
In time of the propped bough danced into wine
The bursting grapes. Yet stranger are these words
Of death. We dream too eagerly of joy
Unknown to us for our son's sons unborn,
Daring descent upon unharassed plains
Thick with the slavish chains, the iron scourge
And rattle of a dreadful tyrant. Prophet
Of Israel, whose hidden brow has flamed
Sunlike among the mountain clouds, will you
Abandon us, weary and sick with years,
Failing us when the many-headed wall
Resounds? I hear again the eunuch's cry
And we are swallowed in a greater darkness
Than many-plagued Egypt!’
His brows were angered
As the horns of the moon'd altar, and he cried:

‘O foolish voice, mocking these aged men,
Does not the halting leper know his angel,
Driven beyond doomed gates? The hewer of wood?
The women drawing water at the well
Beneath the palms? Does not the ancient sun
Nurture tender green things under the rocks
In the dew, urging their sweetness out
In gathered honey yet slay the beeless flowers
Flaunting in the high places? Have not your knives
By His command cut back the skin of men
And slain their filthy concubines by night!
I, too, would hear the trumpets of my priests
Below the battlement, seeing the ladder,
The wooden tower, go up into the flame,
But I, who faltered long ago, must look
Only far-off as the desolate peaks
Forever gaze upon the Promised Land.’
He called forth mighty Josuë
Whose pale hands grasped the darkness like a sword
And gave him brasslike strength in fire and doom
To lead great Israel.
Then sadly voiced
He spoke to them with graver utterance:

‘O men who are now aged in Jeshurun,
Following the lonely cloud of God
Across His wilderness, weep not. Rejoice,
O Levites, bear the Ark on gilded staves
Before the multitudes with bended song,
Timbrels and flowers that maidens gather, rich
With earth. O bear it as a king, the jewel
In his great shield against the sun; it gleams
Upon the blinded dwellers of the night
And they flee. Go down among their olive hills
With song and javelin, for your loud joy
Is bitter to them as strewn aloe blossoms,
Or the fox between their vineyard paths.
Bring in the corn and wheat, the bruised green oil,
Bullocks, the gifts of kings and trembling doves
Of women that give birth, burned with all spices
To build sweet savours for the Lord. Go down,
For ye shall eat the wine-bulged grape and cloud
His praise in frankincense through Israel.
From the high mountains to the setting sun
In lands whose ancient voices are the sea
Your tribes shall grow as cedars. Mighty ones
In Reuben, lions of the race of Dan,
Rear your maned strength for the new days are yours,
The sorrow and exulting of our people
Whose wanderings shall pass away like smoke
Of desolated cities.’
He went from them
Quickly into the night. Only the lepers
Scraping their jewels of moonlight with a flint
And the last sentinels could hear the sands
That sighed around his feet. But in that square
Through all the star-long hours the patriarchs
Sorrowed.
Around them Israel lay close
In sleep. The young conceived in darkness
And aged men, the slaves of memory,
Still trod the sand, dragging onward the millstone
Of every mile or tricked by happiness
They lay deliciously in lush oases
On an unwrinkled belly, hearing a lioness
That raged among her cubs within the pit
And by the fig-trees where the locusts bite,
The mouthy camels stepping to the pool,
Crackle of driven whip and naked children
Plash in the green-palmed water. But the sick,
Dreaming the little doors of pyramids
Had shut them in, fled down unending steps,
Tore gum-cloths from their leaded genitals,
Tumbled as beetles in the scale of Judgment
And wakened in a sweat while trumpets blared
The dawn and multitudes outside were calling
‘Wail, wail, for he is gone!’
And all that day
A little nation watched across the desert
Strange vultures passing into storm and God
Conceal the mountains of the Promised Land.

II

Thunder was throned among the desolate peaks
Above; but in a waste of rock that noon
Dazzled with undiscoverable metals,
Moses had toiled on, feeling in the far air
The eyes of unseen eagles watching him.
He came, at last, into an upper gorge
Where, huddled in the sallow beams of light,
The ancient trees clinging to precipices
Were juniper and, starting from a chasm,
He heard the sullen roar of cataracts
Obedient to the higher storm. A shape
Brooding upon a dismal crag beyond
Him, got with sudden laughter on four wings
And startled by their own echo, the hid ravines
Sprang up and sank again. He called within
The night of Israel. No portent came.
Only the unfooted precipices kept
Their mockery. But now with certitude
Even as Noah when the familiar day
Was imaged in the sink of the lost world,
He raised his arms in prayer.
Vultures winging
The desert, wearied of the fly-stricken bone,
Had spied far-off an aged speck that toiled
Along a crag beneath the lower cloud
Of Abarim and, feathering their lice,
They hastened. Once in the rock-looming vapours
Moses had seen the peak of Nebo steam
In sunlight. Not as when in thunder hidden
Among the clouds of Sinai, seven days,
He prayed, and on the seventh saw Jehovah,
And at the hinders of that dreadful mountain
The Israelites waxed as the yearly stock
Amid fat grass, and with idolatrous tongues
Murmured among their heathen concubines:
‘Who is this man? This Moses? He has led us
Into the wilderness by his false gods.
Abandoned, from the flesh-pots, broken bread
And the cool mud-flats of the shifting Nile.’
Forgotten the shout and curse of overseers
In Memphis and in loftier Thebes, their gate—
The desert. There, along the sacred walls
Facing the fiery breath of frankincense
At nightfall, demigods peer from their columns
Into the purlieus of the city, while
The temple women, who serve man, unfasten
The praying-robe upon the inner pavement
Of bronze and lying back with wine-red paps
Fondle the lotus-bud in reverence.
Forgotten the command that Pharoah gave
Reluctant midwives: slay the Israelites'
Male children with the navel string at birth,
Or strangle them among their swaddling clothes,
And their own torture when the backward lash
Scorpioned their blood. ‘Give us new gods,’ they cried,
‘To worship. Break the scent o' the shrub for our
Desire and let young girls, who have not lain
By man, pumice their fingernails, forecast
The rod of yarn and quickly wreathe for us
These blossoms culled by the delicious wells
Amid the palms of Marah and of Elim
So all our instruments be garlanded.’
And as they tripped around the golden trash
With handclap, Moses came down from the thunder
Bearing the Tables of the Law. His face,
Unclouding, dazzled the wrath of Jehovah
On them, and blindly the naked multitudes,
Reeking with stale frankincense and sweat,
Bellied the trodden sand—
His arms outstretched
Solemn among the inner clouds, he called
With a loud voice, strange in that desolation,
On God.
The last vapours
Rolled back the sunlight and the precipices
Sharpened in floating air. Slowly he crossed
That gravel near the sky, and, silent, gazed
From an overwhelming brink.
Far below
Him, yet where seedling never fled or greenness
Had claw'd the rock, with thunder-bearing rains
Cataracts leaping from a cloud of spray
Soundless on crags into a chasm hung
With wraiths of storm-tormented trees, escaped
By sudden clefts of sunlight to ravines
Where ancient forest keeps the royal hunt
At bay.
In middle sky, the eagle soared
A speck of ravenous rage, but its loud screams
Taloned the remote unclutchable air
And sank into a wail.
He saw, beyond
The forest range, the scarps of a defile
That traders fear, and lesser slopes of myrtle
Where shepherds stray at morning from the groves
Of the sycamore.
As Scythians
That keep, beside the sun-reeds of the silt,
A leaning herd, must eye their haggard wives
And peevish children crawling from the tent,
And troubled by the midday weakness, dream
Of uplands where the spillings of the sky
Are swept by grass, of headstrong trees and brooks
That take a short-cut, dream and turn away
In sadness, or as Abram built at dawn
Stone altars horned with bullock on Beth-el
Smoking with entrails of yearling and kid,
And clouded through incense, godful, saw far-off
The multitudes sprung from his loins possess
The cities and the wine-fields of Canaan,
But in his exiled memory a land
Where she who lingered by a wayside well
At nightfall long ago, looked up and saw
The servants of her love with wearied camels
Beneath the palms, and of her trembling heart
Gave all to follow whither they would lead,
Though dangerous the way; so from the ledge
He watched with desert-narrowed eyes the sun
As Dagon, fishing in the west, assailed
By prayers of Philistine; until the drouth
And hunger of his peoples wandering
For generations through the desert sands
Stormed with their unassuageable pangs
Upon his heart, and shaken with the grief
And sudden joy of that far Promised Land,
Shading his eyes, half blind with aged tears
He gazed upon the plain.

Groves of cedar
And walnut burnished by the wind that comes
From Taurus shaded the vales of sesame
And lesser slopes, jotted with juniper
And silver aspen, where the countryfolk
Pile, in the temple-basket, pomegranate
And gourd still unmatured, with apricots,
Fearing the jealous sun and the first speckle
Of war upon the rock.

A lake shore
Where thirst has cracked the earthen cylinder
That boasts a tyrant, glittering with deceits
And more fantastic than the half-baked past
Was far beyond, for there in ancient days
Godless and proud rose Sodom and Gomorrah,
Columned at length, marble-drained, palace-mounded;
Not fabled greater than those satrap cities—
Babylon, bricked with hanging roseries,
Semiramis had queened by the Two Waters
Among a moult of doves: high Nineveh
Whose hawkhead godling, Nisroch, stared from tile
Of bronze within the gateway of the gryphon;
Upon the craven wall above the rabble,
Mailed kings had held the budding sceptre, crowned
With magic cap among castrated captives,
The manacled who bent with unstrung knee
And fierce stone-eye around the heavy horse-car,
Under colossal wings of eagled bulls
Dewlapped with sacrificial wreath; lions
Struggling in midward bound, forever chained
In their reluctant granite; obelisks
And pyramids that had been brazed with metals
Squaring the central temple of the Sun
And colonnades, disking with several gold,
The trade of Ophir; private palaces
Pannelled with cedar hewn in stately forests
Long mellowing their resin, rich with sunlight
On Lebanon, thence diapered with gold
Or tessellated lapis lazuli;
Fragrance of rooms withdrawn by pampered damask,
Red-flowered as the mulberries that fed their silk
Twilled on the loom, tuned as a sounding-board
To sweetness, fashionable with sad tales
Of sylvan love and the tired hands that pull
The softer fruit of sleep; piled luxuries
From the world's wharf, told in the counting-houses
Of Tyre and three-harbour'd Sidon where men fish
For purple; the sea-scum of ambergris,
Breath-taking nacre from the sunlit sharps
Of ocean, Arabian flowers to sweeten,
To bestrew the beds of pale lascivious queens—
Not more luxurious Sodom and Gomorrah,
With smell of cooking, noise of gum and dish,
Until God's patient anger broke, angelic,
In burning brimstone, thunder and in might
That smote the lechery of young and old,
Finding in splint of painted furniture
And ewers of Egyptian glass, women
Whose bodies at the toilet, soaked in spikenard
And rubbed by the docile fingers of their slaves
In such obedience could despise the eye
Of Nubian eunuchs, holding their black toys,
And men, lust-maddened, taken in strange sin.
But the counted years wait with the unborn vulture
Upon the hills and Babylon, too, shall fall,
The proud, the mighty, be abashed and all
Her lofty ones crushed by a common wheel;
In ragged purple, as a harlot, she
Shall wail the instruments of her dead love.
Too soon the warnings of her gods are heard
At night in the rumbled temple. Capturings
Upon her terra-cotta walls are terrified
And in the mounting dreams of men take flight.
The voice of Israel that was despised
Calls through her populace in mockery
‘Babylon, the mighty, is fallen, fallen, fallen!’
And vaulted echoes cry among themselves,
‘O fallen, fallen!’
So shall her temples rock,
Her towers, her innumerable pillars, topple
Into the thoroughfare and all be still
As in the desolate regions of Gomorrah,
Where heron once had made her stilted nest
By the salt-glittering shores of the Dead Sea
Undesolated and blue, beautiful
Though there no tangled splash of net is heard
Nor children play.
Beyond, the Jordan flows
Through gorges of wild palm: a narrowing land
Of wine and saffron. There on his rock of war
The ram still feeds the dreadful horn that locks
The gate of smaller cities. There in the grass
At early spring, the uncomplaining cows
Tethered by trickling milk can hear, far off,
Happiness coming from the shelter, when
Night-dews are dropping through the olive leaves
Below.
Amid the irrigated steps,
Orchards of sacred pomegranate, of prune
And citron, crouching on the granite hills,
He saw, changing or sullen in the sunlight,
Contemptuous with temple plat and tower,
A tiny traffic at each battlemented
Gate—
the Cities of the Plain.

Anguished
He gazed on that sun-guarded land, finding
No promise of his peace. But faint and clear
As a leaf-shadow where the young vine tends
Her house, scarce-breathed on the gentleness
Of distance, he could see at last the hills
Of Giliad. For there are little valleys
Odorous with balsam boughs and fair
As those ravines beneath the steeper pines
That hide Caucasian peaks of star-blue ice
Where the red cliffs of rhododendron are
A lasting sunset—milder those with sound
Of enshrined water and the merry chime
Of anklets, as the Gentile women spread
A dance beneath the almond-blossom trees
By starlight to the nod of sombre lemans
Or sadly sing to the hushed nightingale
A lullaby that their own mothers crooned
In ancient tongues of mighty Tubal Cain,
Him that first wrought in smelted iron, brass
And golden ore, and of his mightier brother,
Jubal; he first had strung the ivoried harp
And wandered, musical, by the flaming walls
Of Paradise at eveningtide.

Clouded
By vision, Moses sank. But prophecy
Sustained his arms again and in the darkening
Of sight, he saw tremendous forms of doom,
Ranked demigods like their own images
Of hammered brass by man and clouded gods,
The mountain gods whom dwellers on the plain
Have known in sleep: amid a fiery wheel
Of jealous wings, alone, between the horns
Of thunder, Him, whom men have never graven,
Him—that chose poor tents and had a foot
Among the clouds of Sinai. He foresaw
The nations of the earth increase in will
And ignorance, building their city walls
In pride and hate until all vengeance came—
The sworded cries of desolating angels
Swept down, headlong as Heaven and the ages,
Unpeopled, dropped in flame and flaming, lit
The abyss. . . .
But the self-slaying sun
Was rayed with tempest. Cloud hid every rock
Beyond Philistia, while in the gorges
The cataracts were glittering. Near forests
Of gloom, along a purple-stemming slope
A flight of men, stuck fast among their flocks
Still far from home, let fall the skinpipe and turning
With longer shades that shook both horn and fleece,
Stared mountainward.

The saturn cities
Smouldered as bronze within the smelting-yard
Where in the night are cast the uncubbed lions
And monstrous shapes of bull and godhead. For
It was the hour when the fire services
Are held outside the greater temples; mall
And street were smaller than themselves, car-owners
Had cursed in vain the whip that picks the rich
From poor, while, corner'd by palaces, the crowd
Went; litanies were upraised and the priests
Banded against the brazen-pillar'd sunset:
Unseeing the shadow of the desert wrath
That stood among them.

So the Promised Land
Was hidden and each city knew a cry
Of lamentation. Star beyond bickering star
The heavens came, defended. There the war-scale
Of Ur sultried the sky and Urthaka
Like a rich drop of blood hung motionless
Above a chasm. But the fires of Baal
Brought terror in the dark and from the pit,
Even to the last unhuman peak, the mountains
Loomed with the ancient mystery of earth.