Humanities in Action

I never saw a wild thing

sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

without ever having felt sorry for itself.

The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters

Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;

While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede,

Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after

The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed.

The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass

To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes

That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window glass.

The glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,

Goes trembling past me up the College wall.

Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping

The diasy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.

Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,

Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,

Passes the world with shadows at their feet

Going left and right.

Romoste, although I hear the beggar’s cough,

See the woman’s twinkling fingers tend him a coin,

I sit absolved, assured I am better off

Beyond a world I never want to join.

When she rises in the morning

I linger to watch her;

She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window

And the sunbeams catch her

Glistening white on the shoulders,

While down her sides the mellow

Golden shadow glows as

She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts

Sway like full-blown yellow

Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders

Glisten as silver, they crumple up

Like wet and falling roses, and I listen

For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.

In the window full of sunlight

Concentrates her golden shadow

Fold on fold, until it glows as

Mellow as the glory roses.

A wind comes from the north

Blowing little flocks of birds

Like spray across the town,

And a train, roaring forth,

Rushes stampeding down

With cries and flying curds

Of steam, out of the darkening north.

Whither I turn and set

Like a needle steadfastly,

Waiting ever to get

The news that she is free;

But ever fixed, as yet,

To the lode of her agony.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;

Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see

A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings

And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song

Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong

to the old Sunday evenings at home, with the winter outside

And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour

With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast

Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

When into the night the yellow light is roused like dust above the towns,

Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in the midst of the downs,

Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain along the street,

Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in expectancy to meet

The luminous mist which the poor things wist was dawn arriving across the sky,

When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town has driven so high.

All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,

All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in the sea,

Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round, and keep

The shores of this innermost ocean alive and illusory.

Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning looked in at their eyes

And the Cyprian’s pavement-roses are gone, and now it is we

Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a Paradise

On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of the town-dark sea.

A tiny moon as white and small as a single jasmine flower

Leans all alone above my window, on night’s wintry bower,

Liquid as lime-tree blossom, soft as brilliant water or rain

She shines, the one white love of my youth, which all sin cannot stain.

Yesterday the fields were only gray with scattered snow,

And now the longest grass-leaves hardly emerge;

Yet her deep footsteps mark the snow, and go

On towards the pines at the hills’ white verge.

I cannot see her, since the mist’s white scarf

Obscures the dark wood and the dull orange sky;

But she’s waiting, I know, impatient and cold, half

Sobs struggling into her frosty sigh.

Why does she come so promptly, when she must know

That she’s only the nearer to the inevitable farewell;

The hill is steep, on the snow my steps are slow—

Why does she come, when she knows what I have to tell?

The quick sparks on the gorse bushes are leaping,

Little jets of sunlight-texture imitating flame;

Above them, exultant, the pee-wits are sweeping:

They are lords of the desolate wastes of sadness their screamings proclaim.

Rabbits, handfuls of brown earth, lie

Low-rounded on the mournful grass they have bitten down to the quick.

Are they asleep?—Are they alive?—Now see, when I

Move my arms the hill bursts and heaves under their spurting kick.

The common flaunts bravely; but below, from the rushes

Crowds of glittering king-cups surge to challenge the blossoming bushes;

There the lazy streamlet pushes

Its curious course mildly; here it wakes again, leaps, laughs, and gushes.

Into a deep pond, an old sheep-dip,

Dark, overgrown with willows, cool, with the brook ebbing through so slow,

Naked on the steep, soft lip

Of the bank I stand watching my own white shadow quivering to and fro.

What if the gorse flowers shrivelled and kissing were lost?

Without the pulsing waters, where were the marigolds and the songs of the brook?

If my veins and my breasts with love embossed

Withered, my insolent soul would be gone like flowers that the hot wind took.

So my soul like a passionate woman turns,

Filled with remorseful terror to the man she scorned, and her love

For myself in my own eyes’ laughter burns,

Runs ecstatic over the pliant folds rippling down to my belly from the breast-lights above.

Over my sunlit skin the warm, clinging air,

Rich with the songs of seven larks singing at once, goes kissing me glad.

And the soul of the wind and my blood compare

Their wandering happiness, and the wind, wasted in liberty, drifts on and is sad.

Oh but the water loves me and folds me,

Plays with me, sways me, lifts me and sinks me as though it were living blood,

Blood of a heaving woman who holds me,

Owning my supple body a rare glad thing, supremely good.