Classic Poem

He is sitting beneath a cherry-tree in bloom,
And the thought of the ripe cherries is in his mouth,
And his eyes love the tall daisies in the grass
And his children playing in the meadow.

The light strikes truly through the lenses of his eyes,
And a fair image falls upon the retina;
The wind brings him many odours —
Earth, grasses, trees, flowers,
And the oakwood burning in the fireplaces.
His ears catch the rustle and song of many things,
And the taste of the cherries is subtle in his mouth.
He knows by their touch the things that frame his life.

This is he who am I, without my cares and weaknesses;
The channels of his soul are not clogged; his life flows freely;
And my heart aches at the thought of the millions of miles of space —
The millions of millions of miles that lie between us.
He is there, I know, — I am there,
Since every combination exists;
He must be there, I must be there:
I must be happy somewhere.
And yet he is so far away that I am sure
No light from the star that lights and warms him can reach me,
Even though it travel the unimaginable number of miles a second
That prove the kinship of light and electricity —
So my physics-master taught me,
They are charlatans, these physicists.
There is room in space for every combination: he is there;
And he lifts his head and gazes at the cherry-blossom,
And at the sky that must be blue, for me to care for it,
With a scud of white clouds over it
And a warm sun shining through it;
And he gazes care-free,
For he knows that, just as yesterday,
To-morrow there will be no call upon him,
No invisible, gnawing bondage.
He knows, I say; but I mean that I know.
He knows that to-morrow will be like to-day and yesterday,
Full of work that is a pain, a pleasure, and an enlargement,
With the brain and heart working together with the hands.

Whatever I imagine, or you imagine, exists:
I can see the lilac in great bushes about my house,
And the laburnums with their rain of gold,
The chestnuts and hawthorns in bloom of red and white:
These are trees and blossoms that must be there.
There are other worlds, I know, where I walk
In not such pleasant places:
Many that are worse than this on which I write my dream;
Many that are hells where I suffer
In greater agony of body and spirit
Than I have known, or shall know.
But there is also this one world, where I am leaving
The cherry-tree in bloom that will bear in due season,
To go back to my work after my morning meditation,
That is more a satisfaction, a feeding, of the senses —
Sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing —
Than the probing and the solving of a problem.
If the five pathways of my soul are free and cleanswept
(As they are) for the swift feet of sensation,
Thought is joyance, and its words are songs and images.
These I carry with me to the long room that is mine,
Where my books are in their clean white cases,
And the wide oaken table that bears my papers —
A firm and solid table, whose strength is a friendly pleasure,
With its drawers that slide so smoothly in and out
That you think always of its maker as a brother.
On my walls I have placed (they are there now)
Pictures and drawings by my friends,
Which have not so much the shape of what they see about them
As the form of their souls — the curves and lines, the colours
That call to mind their talk, their actions,
And the intimate, wordless conversation by which you love them.
I have a chair, designed and carved for me by the carpenter
Who lives in the house behind the ash-trees,
Where the road turns at right-angles
To go through the village —
The carpenter whose garden is full of roses,
That clamber up and over the walls and roof of his house.
He comes to me sometimes of an evening,
And talks of the stars, the constellations,
That light the nocturnal dreams of this far-away world.
And he proves to me —
Taking them star by star, and building them petal by petal —
That they form on the whole black dome
The shape of a cluster of roses.
Sometimes, in return, I read to him some of my poems,
And he laughs in a queer way,
With his hand on his chin in his beard,
And his eyes on the roses he has brought me,
That stand near the lamp on my table.
This is the room where I write my poems,
Where I become conscious through them
Of what my wife and children and friends,
My orchard, the meadows, the trees, the grasses, the flowers,
The roads, the hills, and the sea mean to me;
And I put it into words and rhythms that explain nothing,
But that open the mind and the heart
To a new sunshine and new perfumes.

(I have just gone out to look at the night; beyond there — oh, how far beyond! —
Is the star I speak of, is the man I know to be myself — but yet how different!
The pollard plane-trees are wretched in the damp and darkness and mud;
The air bites rawly on your ribs, and the sky is full of menace.)

Must I tell you of each moment of my day, for you to know
Why I have chosen this one world of all the myriads?
How, in the morning, as the sunshine enters my bedroom,
Dream after dream falls from me,
And I awake to the greater dream of this full life,
And my brain is rich with words and visions,
And my heart is eager with emotions
That have grown there in the night
From the seed of yesterday?
Through the open, inner door I hear in the next room
The rustling and the stirring of my mate,
The mother of my children;
And she hears me, too, I know, but we do not speak:
Is there need to?
She knows the meaning of my silence,
And she will not jar the full cup of my morning treasures.
It is all, and yet how much,
If I see her golden head
In the mirror of her room;
And she turns, and, seeing me watching,
Smiles to the mirror;
For her smile seems to overarch with the blue of her eyes,
And to fill with tenderness the world I bear within me —
All that field of tall grasses that is singing
With the hum of bees in the buttercups and clover,
And the music of the morning wind
Sifting its notes through the innumerable, earth-held strings.
My children, too, have learned to love my strange ways;
I hear their voices, and they hear me
As I pass down to my walk in the orchard
Beneath the plum-trees;
But their door does not open.
Not till I have caught all the words and the rhythms
With which my heart and brain are busy
Shall I see them.
The, plum-trees are in bloom,
And the air smells sweet with hawthorn.
If I stop and lean on my gate,
I can see a mile away the blue-brown hills,
Beyond wide meadows, flowering hedges, cornland.
And the words come to my pencil unsought,
The beginning and the end, perhaps,
With a phrase or two and full knowledge of the rest,
Images, a rhythm, a complete passage,
The outline, with some parts roughed in, of my poem —
A song as artless as the thrush's on the plum-tree.