GOLD, with an innermost speck Of silver, singing afloat Beneath the night, Like b.a.l.l.s of thistle-down Wandering up and down Over the whispering town Seeking where to alight!
Slowly, above the street Above the ebb of feet Drifting in flight; Still, in the purple distance The gold of their strange persistence As they cross and part and meet And pa.s.s out of sight!
The seed-ball of the sun Is broken at last, and done Is the orb of day.
Now to the separate ends Seed after day-seed wends A separate way.
No sun will ever rise Again on the wonted skies In the midst of the spheres.
The globe of the day, over-ripe, Is shattered at last beneath the stripe Of the wind, and its oneness veers Out myriad-wise.
Seed after seed after seed Drifts over the town, in its need To sink and have done; To settle at last in the dark, To bury its weary spark Where the end is begun.
Darkness, and depth of sleep, Nothing to know or to weep Where the seed sinks in To the earth of the under-night Where all is silent, quite Still, and the darknesses steep Out all the sin.
_"SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME"_
SHE said as well to me: "Why are you ashamed?
That little bit of your chest that shows between the gap of your shirt, why cover it up?
Why shouldn"t your legs and your good strong thighs be rough and hairy?--I"m glad they are like that.
You are shy, you silly, you silly shy thing.
Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come out of their covers. Like any snake slipping into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into your clothes.
And I love you so! Straight and clean and all of a piece is the body of a man, such an instrument, a spade, like a spear, or an oar, such a joy to me--"
So she laid her hands and pressed them down my sides, so that I began to wonder over myself, and what I was.
She said to me: "What an instrument, your body!
single and perfectly distinct from everything else!
What a tool in the hands of the Lord!
Only G.o.d could have brought it to its shape.
It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you had polished you and hollowed you, hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you under the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and brought you to the very quick of your form, subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow.
"When I was a child, I loved my father"s riding- whip that he used so often.
I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of him.
So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk.
Something seemed to surge through me when I touched them.
"So it is with you, but here The joy I feel!
G.o.d knows what I feel, but it is joy!
Look, you are clean and fine and singled out!
I admire you so, you are beautiful: this clean sweep of your sides, this firmness, this hard mould!
I would die rather than have it injured with one scar.
I wish I could grip you like the fist of the Lord, and have you--"
So she said, and I wondered, feeling trammelled and hurt.
It did not make me free.
Now I say to her: "No tool, no instrument, no G.o.d!
Don"t touch me and appreciate me.
It is an infamy.
You would think twice before you touched a weasel on a fence as it lifts its straight white throat.
Your hand would not be so flig and easy.
Nor the adder we saw asleep with her head on her shoulder, curled up in the sunshine like a princess; when she lifted her head in delicate, startled wonder you did not stretch forward to caress her though she looked rarely beautiful and a miracle as she glided delicately away, with such dignity.
And the young bull in the field, with his wrinkled, sad face, you are afraid if he rises to his feet, though he is all wistful and pathetic, like a mono- lith, arrested, static.
"Is there nothing in me to make you hesitate?
I tell you there is all these.
And why should you overlook them in me?--"
_NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH_
I
AND so I cross into another world shyly and in homage linger for an invitation from this unknown that I would trespa.s.s on.
I am very glad, and all alone in the world, all alone, and very glad, in a new world where I am disembarked at last.
I could cry with joy, because I am in the new world, just ventured in.
I could cry with joy, and quite freely, there is n.o.body to know.
And whosoever the unknown people of this un- known world may be they will never understand my weeping for joy to be adventuring among them because it will still be a gesture of the old world I am making which they will not understand, because it is quite, quite foreign to them.
II
I WAS so weary of the world I was so sick of it everything was tainted with myself, skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, nations, armies, war, peace-talking, work, recreation, governing, anarchy, it was all tainted with myself, I knew it all to start with because it was all myself.
When I gathered flowers, I knew it was myself plucking my own flowering.
When I went in a train, I knew it was myself travelling by my own invention.
When I heard the cannon of the war, I listened with my own ears to my own destruction.
When I saw the torn dead, I knew it was my own torn dead body.
It was all me, I had done it all in my own flesh.
III
I SHALL never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end when everything was me, I knew it all already, I antic.i.p.ated it all in my soul because I was the author and the result I was the G.o.d and the creation at once; creator, I looked at my creation; created, I looked at myself, the creator: it was a maniacal horror in the end.
I was a lover, I kissed the woman I loved, and G.o.d of horror, I was kissing also myself.
I was a father and a begetter of children, and oh, oh horror, I was begetting and conceiving in my own body.
IV
AT last came death, sufficiency of death, and that at last relieved me, I died.
I buried my beloved; it was good, I buried myself and was gone.
War came, and every hand raised to murder; very good, very good, every hand raised to murder!
Very good, very good, I am a murderer!
It is good, I can murder and murder, and see them fall the mutilated, horror-struck youths, a mult.i.tude one on another, and then in cl.u.s.ters together smashed, all oozing with blood, and burned in heaps going up in a foetid smoke to get rid of them the murdered bodies of youths and men in heaps and heaps and heaps and horrible reeking heaps till it is almost enough, till I am reduced perhaps; thousands and thousands of gaping, hideous foul dead that are youths and men and me being burned with oil, and consumed in corrupt thick smoke, that rolls and taints and blackens the sky, till at last it is dark, dark as night, or death, or h.e.l.l and I am dead, and trodden to nought in the smoke-sodden tomb; dead and trodden to nought in the sour black earth of the tomb; dead and trodden to nought, trodden to nought.
V