Stranger: He is a carpenter.
Captain: A carpenter!
Why, for a good one I"ld give all my purse.
Stranger: No, twenty silver pieces is the price; Though "tis a slave a king might joy to own.
I"ve taught him to imagine palaces So high, and tower"d so n.o.bly, they might seem The marvelling of a G.o.d-delighted heart Escaping into ecstasy; he knows, Moreover, of a stuff so rare it makes Smaragdus and the dragon-stone despised; And yet the quarries whereof he is wise Would yield enough to house the tribes of the world In palaces of beautiful shining work.
Captain Lo there! why, that is it: the carpenter I am to bring is needed for to build The king"s new palace.
Stranger: Yea? He is your man.
Captain: Come on, my man. I"ll put your cunning heels Where they"ll not budge more than a shuffled inch.
My lord, if you"ll bide with the rascal here I"ll get the irons ready. Here"s your sum.--
Stranger: Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear; Easily may a man crouch down for fear, And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face The hailing storm of the world with graver courage.
But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin, And one that groweth deep into a life, With hardening roots that clutch about the breast.
For this refuses faith in the unknown powers Within man"s nature; shrewdly bringeth all Their inspiration of strange eagerness To a judgment bought by safe experience; Narrows desire into the scope of thought.
But it is written in the heart of man, Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire.
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit"s sight To pore only within the candle-gleam Of conscious wit and reasonable brain; But search into the sacred darkness lying Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast Measureless fate, full of the power of stars, The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.
Keep thy desire closed in the room of light The labouring fires of thy mind have made, And thou shalt find the vision of thy spirit Pitifully dazzled to so shrunk a ken, There are no s.p.a.cious puissances about it, But send desire often forth to scan The immense night which is thy greater soul; Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it Into impossible things, unlikely ends; And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire Grow large as all the regions of thy soul, Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being, And of created purpose reach the ends.
GORDON BOTTOMLEY
THE END OF THE WORLD
The snow had fallen many nights and days; The sky was come upon the earth at last, Sifting thinly down as endlessly As though within the system of blind planets Something had been forgot or overdriven.
The dawn now seemed neglected in the grey Where mountains were unbuilt and shadowless trees Rootlessly paused or hung upon the air.
There was no wind, but now and then a sigh Crossed that dry falling dust and rifted it Through crevices of slate and door and cas.e.m.e.nt.
Perhaps the new moon"s time was even past.
Outside, the first white twilights were too void Until a sheep called once, as to a lamb, And tenderness crept everywhere from it; But now the flock must have strayed far away.
The lights across the valley must be veiled, The smoke lost in the greyness or the dusk.
For more than three days now the snow had thatched That cow-house roof where it had ever melted With yellow stains from the beasts" breath inside; But yet a dog howled there, though not quite lately.
Someone pa.s.sed down the valley swift and singing.
Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning; But if he seemed too tall to be a man It was that men had been so long unseen, Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow.
And he was gone and food had not been given him.
When snow slid from an overweighted leaf, Shaking the tree, it might have been a bird Slipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings; Yet never bird fell out, save once a dead one-- And in two days the snow had covered it.
The dog had howled again--or thus it seemed Until a lean fox pa.s.sed and cried no more.
All was so safe indoors where life went on Glad of the close enfolding snow--O glad To be so safe and secret at its heart, Watching the strangeness of familiar things.
They knew not what dim hours went on, went by, For while they slept the clock stopt newly wound As the cold hardened. Once they watched the road, Thinking to be remembered. Once they doubted If they had kept the sequence of the days, Because they heard not any sound of bells.
A b.u.t.terfly, that hid until the Spring Under a ceiling"s shadow, dropt, was dead.
The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepened As a sound deepens into silences; It was of earth and came not by the air; The earth was cooling and drew down the sky.
The air was crumbling. There was no more sky.
Rails of a broken bed charred in the grate, And when he touched the bars he thought the sting Came from their heat--he could not feel such cold ...
She said "O, do not sleep, Heart, heart of mine, keep near me. No, no; sleep.
I will not lift his fallen, quiet eyelids, Although I know he would awaken then-- He closed them thus but now of his own will.
He can stay with me while I do not lift them."
BABEL: THE GATE OF THE G.o.d
Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat: Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up And rhythms of change within the heart begun By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters; Pylons and monoliths went on by ages, Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about; Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex; Then postulants for the stars" previous wisdom Standing on Carthage must get nearer still; While in Chaldea an alt.i.tude of G.o.d Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed Upon a mountain stirring a surmise Of floods and alterations of the sea, A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaar Temple and escape to G.o.d the ascertained.
These are decayed like Time"s teeth in his mouth, Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows And memories of man"s earliest theme of towers.
s.p.a.ce--the old source of time--should be undone, Eternity defined, by men who trusted Another tier would equal them with G.o.d.
A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations, Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles Of low packed smoke, a.s.semblages of thunder That glowed upon their under sides by night And lit like storm small shadowless workmen"s toil.
Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remained In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves; While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers Knelt on a flank to clip its sweaty coat.
A builder leans across the last wide courses; His unadjustable unreaching eyes Fail under him before his glances sink On the clouds" upper layers of sooty curls Where some long lightning goes like swallows downward, But at the wider gallery next below Recognise master-masons with p.r.i.c.ked parchments: That builder then, as one who condescends Unto the sea and all that is beneath him, His hairy breast on the wet mortar, calls "How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!"
On the next eminence the orgulous king Nimroud stands up conceiving he shall live To conquer G.o.d, now that he knows where G.o.d is: His eager hands push up the tower in thought ...
Again, his s.h.a.ggy inhuman height strides down Among the carpenters because he has seen One shape an eagle-woman on a door-post: He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted day.
Little men hurrying, running here and there, Within the dark and stifling walls, dissent From every sound, and shoulder empty hods: "The G.o.d"s great altar should stand in the crypt Among our earth"s foundations"--"The G.o.d"s great altar Must be the last far coping of our work"-- It should inaugurate the broad main stair"-- "Or end it"--"It must stand toward the East!"
But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out "Womanish babblers, how can we build G.o.d"s altar Ere we divine its foreordained true shape?"
Then one "It is a pedestal for deeds"-- ""Tis more and should be hewn like the king"s brow"-- "It has the nature of a woman"s bosom"-- "The tortoise, first created, signifies it"-- "A blind and rudimentary navel shows The source of worship better than horned moons."
Then a lean giant "Is not a calyx needful?"-- "Because round grapes on statues well expressed Become the nadir of incense, nodal lamps, Yet apes have hands that cut and carved red crystal"-- "Birds molten, touchly talc veins bronze buds crumble Ablid ublai ghan isz rad eighar ghaurl ..."
Words said too often seemed such ancient sounds That men forgot them or were lost in them; The guttural glottis-chasms of language reached, A rhythm, a gasp, were curves of immortal thought.
Man with his bricks was building, building yet, Where dawn and midnight mingled and woke no birds, In the last courses, building past his knowledge A wall that swung--for towers can have no tops, No chord can mete the universal segment, Earth has not basis. Yet the yielding sky, Invincible vacancy, was there discovered-- Though piled-up bricks should pulp the sappy balks, Weight generate a secrecy of heat, Cankerous charring, crevices" fronds of flame.
RUPERT BROOKE