Classic Poem

I

G EOGRAPHY OF T HIS T IME

The peninsulas are held by an ancient people
And races skillful in iron, makers of amulets
Keep the sea isles.

These are they who interpret the flight of birds,
Who foretell the dawn from the light in the west at sunset.
These have been long in the earth, they know the seasons,
They know by the stinging of flies when the rains come,
They smell the snow on a dry wind, they are wise
In the changing of gales when the shape of the moon changes,
They stir in their sleep at night when the tide turns:

Only they speak in the tongue of another country.
There are names in their speech of fruits unknown in these valleys.
Also their gods are carved with the muzzles of jackals,
And their proverbs are proverbs made in a dry place:
Their festivals do not keep the days of the sea.
Their word for the sea is a word meaning the sorrow.
Only their songs are of high lands beyond mountains:
Their songs are of horses grazing a wide land,
Of stars through the roofs of tents woven of horsehair.
Theirs they say were the wars fought by the heroes:
Theirs were the battles the shouting of which comes over us
Like a sound of sleet in the dead grass in the marshes.

At the time of the floods in spring they have seen on the rivers
Branches bearing a round leaf and bridles
Knotted of straw and the wooden bow of a saddle.
They have seen the bodies of birds of a white plumage.
They have smelled the reek of the pastures in stale pools.
(The sea smells in spring of the thaw water ...)
They draw their nets in spring by the brown streams.

II

E XHORTATION TO THE L IVING

that here by this unremembering
Sea O my people
and we have not known
Always the sea sound nor the taste of salt
Always
rebuild these roofs of stone

can we
O winter starved
eaters of fish guts
blind

With reeking sod fires in the windy room
Can we return no more
take ship and call
The long rope over
ride the landward surge
High on the sea bar and where first the blue
Streaks with the dribble of the brown fresh foam
Drive up the channel with all oars
can we

No more return
that on these beaches O
Sea scalded eyes
salt broken nails
rebuild

O Miserable the loose stones that were
Houses before us of forgotten men
On these last shores
can we no more
no more

Return again to our own lands

III

R ESPONSE OF THE A NCESTORS

These men do not speak, they sit
Right and left of the coals slicing
Thongs from seal leather, cleaning their long
Knives; they listen as men to bat talk,
Men to the whimper of dead old ones.
Ho! they are free, they can sleep where they will,
They are not afraid as we are here
For they know what the world is: they have seen
Actual shapes, things solid,
Not visions, not fog shapes only, not
Glister under the stone of fish gill
Nor images hanging in pools among
The sea anemones deeper than clouds are
Down or the underneath wings of the gulls go.
Sounds they have heard too, not the wave sound:
Not the no sound of the wind
Nor tide moan under drowned ledges —
Cry of gulls, gulls crying from
Water ... No! but real things:
Riders, running of dogs, deer-fall.
Weight they have had in their hands of dead
Birds, of the breasts softly of women —
No! and love, the weed smell of it:
Front against front, not hair blown
Dark over eyes in a dream and the mouth gone.

These men do not speak; we have told them
Tales we know of the last seas,
Tales of the great waves and the wind there:
They listen, they do not speak, they have come
From the old lands of our people:
Hunters they are from father to son,
Herdsmen, drivers of plowshares.
These are men without names; they are called
After their lands, after their handwork.
Men will remember the smell of their garments,
Not as of us the sound only
Of words over earth door; not as the unborn
Dead shall remember the sounds we were called by.

These men do not speak: they have seen
Shapes solid and real, live things.