Iris Tree photographed by Man Ray
Iris Tree
Iris Tree (1897 - 1968) fue una actriz y poetisa inglesa, descrita como una mujer bohemia, excéntrica, ingeniosa y aventurera.
Su padre fue Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Fue demandada, en su juventud, como modelo de artistas, siendo pintada por Augustus John, y simultáneamente por Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell y Roger Fry, así como esculpida por Jacob Epstein, mostrando su pelo corto, lo cual, junto a su conducta, fue motivo de escándalo. Fue fotografiada por Man Ray. Durante un tiempo estuvo asociada con Nancy Cunard, y actuó junto a Diana Cooper a mediados de la década de 1920.
Había estudiado en la Slade School of Art. Contribuyó en 1917 a la antología poética Wheels, del grupo literario The Sitwells; publicó colecciones llamadas Poems (1920) y The Traveller and other Poems (1927).
Se casó en dos ocasiones. Su primer marido fue Curtis Moffat, de Nueva York; el guionista Ivan Moffat fue hijo de ambos. Su segundo matrimonio fue con el actor y ex-oficial de la caballería austriaca, Friedrich von Ledebur-Wicheln. Tras divorciarse actuaron juntos en la película de 1956 Moby Dick. También hizo un cameo, esencialmente como ella misma, en el film de Federico Fellini La dolce vita.
Es la bisabuela de la actriz Georgina Moffat.
Somos los guardianes
Somos los guardianes de casas vacías,
La luna apoya su delgado cuerpo contra la puerta,
Pero el óxido hace chirriar la cerradura.
El sol mira a través de la ventana,
Pero los postigos cerrados son como ojos ciegos.
Nuestras almas están llenas de muerte y cosas maravillosas
Como cuencos llenos de objetos,
Un polvo de pétalos
Susurra entre los cansados dedos de un fantasma.
Poems, John Lane Company, Londres, 1919. The Project Gutenberg EBooks of Poems, 2014
Versión de Jonio González
WE ARE THE CARETAKERS...
We are the caretakers of empty houses,
The moon leans her slender body against the door,
But the lock, is jarred with rust.
The sun looks in through the window,
But its closed shutters are as blinded eyes.
Our souls are full of dead and beautiful things
Like bowls of potpourri,
A dust of petals
Rustling through the tired fingers of a ghost.
Iris Tree, por Amedeo Modigliani (1916)
ROCKETS AND ASHES
You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns,
You stop my heart and turn it into wood.
I serve not God, but make my idol fair
From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,
Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair
By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.
The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,
The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,
And moonlight clear as glass my great religion,
And sunrise falling on the quiet street.
The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,
And lovers in the secret sheets of night
Trembling like instruments of music, till the day
Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white.
Age creeps upon your timid little faces
Beneath each black umbrella sly and slow,
Proud in the unimportance of your places
You sit in twilight prophesying woe.
So dim and false and grey, take my compassion,
I from my pageant golden as the day
Pity your littleness from all my passion,
Leave you my sins to weep and whine away!
1914
We are the caretakers of empty houses,
The moon leans her slender body against the door,
But the lock is jarred with rust.
The sun looks in through the window,
But its closed shutters are as blinded eyes.
Our souls are full of dead and beautiful things
Like bowls of potpourri,
A dust of petals
Rustling through the tired fingers of a ghost.
1918
From far away the lost adventures gleam,
The print of childhood's feet that dance and run,
The love of her who showed me to the sun
In triumph of creation, who did seem
With vivid spirit like a rainbow stream
To paint the shells, young blossoms, one by one
Each strange and delicate toy, whose hands have spun
The woven cloth of wonder like a dream ...
The row of soldiered books, authority
Sharp as the scales I strummed upon the keys,
The priest who damned the things I dared not praise,
Rebellion, love made sad with mystery—
And like a firefly through the twilit trees
Romance, the golden play-boy of my days.
1917
Give me, O God, the power of laughter still,
I shall have need of humour, deftest foil
Against the army of infuriated pride,
Against the shields of reason, and the spears
Of savage moments, sharp-edged bitterness;
Against the blazoned armour of intolerance,
And all the flags of sentiment waved aloft....
Love, Humour, and Rebellion, go with me,
Three musketeers of faithful following.
We will fear nothing.—Is not laughter brave,
That unconcerned goes rippling through despair?
Is not rebellion brave, that fiercely moves
Against the buttressed prisons of the world?
And is not love the bravest of them all,
So frail to hold his white hands up to Heaven
While the red fists are threatening all around,
And hate is beating on the battledrums?
As d'Artagnan upon a starved grey horse
Goes singing ballads on adventurous roads,
I ride my fancy blithely into danger
To throw my gauntlet at the feet of pride
And stick my roses in the cap of Love....
1916
Winding down the street in wearied gaiety, the barrel-organ dribbled out its song
Merged with the thud of feet forever dallying indifferent and indefinite along.
The houses stood like rows of cripples, some paralysed, some hunch-backed and some bent with age,
They seemed at war, their chimneys threatening, their brows hung heavy in a sombre rage.
Crab-like the children crawled, while always hammering above their heads the scolding shrewish tongue;
They grew as bloodless flowers unflourishing, waxen and pale from out the dust and dung.
Above I saw the strip of sunset fluttering, even as washed-out rags upon the line,
I listened to the sparrows twittering, and the hours ticking in a slow decline.
Then beaded on the hem of evening, the coloured lights were threaded here and there,
Till proud with sweets and plumes and oranges, the shops grew brilliant in the tinsel glare.
Grey was the death-bed of the twilight, shuddering the faint hands of the day stretched to the night,
Fending it off, or feebly wavering over the pallid glints of stolen light.
And grey the faces that were gathering among the fallen ashes of the day,
And red the faces, yellow, flickering, under the lamps upon the long highway.
And some were gashed with smiles, and quaint grimaces of hate and pain and hunger and despair,
And some wore coloured hats and meek frivolities, limp ribbons, and false pansies in their hair,
But all were cold, and all seemed passionless; there shone no zest or splendour in their lives,
Nor hope in anything but holidays, or watching funerals, or taking wives.
I dared not think, for truth rose horrible, slapping the face with coarse uncaring hand,
But like them cheated into merriment, I wilfully refused to understand;
Turned me away from wan-eyed poverty, trod pity underfoot, oh, danced on grief,
Bade the crowd sing and fill my desolation, bade them be glad and hide my disbelief.
Strange we so love the world—for presently, out of my window looking on the city,
I blessed the night, and the roofs slumbering all huddled, and I felt no shame nor pity
For all our dusty days of journeying amid the wreck and ruins of our dreams,
Meandering in a bleared forgetfulness, where lethe laps the wharf of sleeping streams.
I only breathed the air, intensified by the ascending breath of million lungs,
And heard the labouring metropolis, quickened by whispers of a million tongues;
And felt a king of splendid loneliness, and felt an atom of the peopled spaces,
And felt again my lordly egoism, one face distinct among the blur of faces.
1913
Tranquility stirred by a sudden spasm,
Knives of rain that cut the silence,
Storms that rattle the bones of the forest,
Calm of the marble-terraced night
Charred with the spattering of rockets.
Drums will I hear and battles now,
And the long death howl of wolves by night,
Watching the moon on the forest tops,
Walking with delicate frightened steps
To the slaughter-house of a red sunrise.
1918
I could explain
The complicated lore that drags the soul
From what shall profit him
To gild damnation with his choicest gold.
But you
Are poring over precious books and do not hear
Our plaintive, frivolous songs;
For we in stubborn vanity ascend
On ladders insecure,
Toward the tottering balconies
To serenade our painted paramours;
Caught by the lure of dangerous pale hands,
Oblivion's heavy lids on sleepless eyes
That cheat between unrest and false repose.
And we are haunted
By spectral Joy once murdered in a rage,
Now taking shape of Pleasure,
Disguised in many clothes and skilful masks.
I could disclose
The truth that hangs between our lies
And jostles sleep to semi-consciousness;
Truth, that stings like nettles
Our frail hands dare not pluck
From out our garden's terraced indolence.
We are not happy,
And you make us dumb with loving hands
Reproachful on our lips.
Nor can we sob our sorrows on your breast,
For we have bartered diamonds for glass,
Our tears for smiles,
Eternity for now.
1917
I feel in me a manifold desire
From many lands and times and clamouring peoples,
And I the Queen
Of crowding vagabonds,
Ghosts of lost years in seeming fancy dress,
With pathos of torn laces
And broken swords;
Cut-throats and kings and poets
Who have loved me
In visions wild, not knowing
What I was.
In me no end
Even where the last content
Clasps on my head a crown
Of shining endurance—
I slip from all my robes
Into the rags of a tattered romance;
The stars crowd at the window,
Their jealous destiny
Raps at the door—
They bob and wink and leer,
And I must leave the lamplight for the road
To keep strange company.
Farewell and Hail!
1917
Silence—
Somewhere on earth
There is a purpose that I miss or have forgotten.
The trees stand bolt upright
Like roofless pillars of a broken temple.
There is a purpose in Heaven,
But for me
Nothing.
1917
I should like to say to the world:
I have launched my soul like a ship upon free waters;
Beautiful she stands in the docks with proud masts cutting the sky,
Perfectly poised, her white sails spreading like wings,
Her figurehead a woman with breasts that daunt the spray,
Her flag a flutter of coloured exuberance.
I should like to see her plunging out of the idle harbour
Where the sulky tide drifts scum, and the sailors wrangle and shout,
In a thunder of churning waves ramping before her like dappled stallions,
Blossoming behind her a field of etiolate lilies....
But to the mimicking, plotting, miserly, cynical,
To the rabble and gabble that dance and kill on the quay,
I can only say that my soul is a sleeping gondola
Lulled by a jester's mandolin, till night is atinkle with tunes
And lantern-lights, along the indolent backwaters.
1915
You pass as in a drugged delirium
Wrought strange upon the mind's distraction;
You sing a blasphemous Te Deum
To harlot virgins, and a fraction
Of your fulginous colour passes,
Stains my spirit's great conception
As it dips into your glasses.
I that am the sole exception
To your stillborn, false devices,
I that know you, I that hate you,
I that drank now spit your vices
Through my loathing reinstate you;
Dive once more into the stagnance,
Kiss your cynic lips and drink you,
Concentrate your cruel fragrance,
Steal your flowers before I sink you,
Lift with hate instead of praises,
Show you honour of my scorning,
Garlanded you go to blazes
With my rhymes for your adorning!
1913
O faces that look so coldly at me,
Colder than dawn through the windows of festival,
Colder than dawn with her grey nun's face.
You blame me, you curse me with your eyes,
While your lips are filled with flattering syllables,
With tinkling bells that harass my calm,
Disturb my silence and shatter my thoughts.
Your laughter waltzes like musical boxes,
How can I hear the triumphant symphonies?
The scarlet rhapsodies and beryl-cold sonatas? ...
Ah, strangers, ah, vacant tedious faces,
Bobbing beneath the feathery hats,
You have stolen the wings of birds for your garnishing,
And the stars and the dim pale petals of the sea
To make your breasts resplendent, to glitter your dress,—
How I might love you and weep for you,
Crowning your brows with a wreath of songs
If you could understand my singing,
If you could understand my love!
But you are waltzing with your marionettes
And marching to the music of the clock—
I cannot bear you to watch me
With those cold eyes through which I see,
Emptiness only and dust.
1918
I see myself in many different dresses,
In many moods, and many different places;
All gold amid the grey where solemn faces
Are silence to my mirth—a flame that blesses
From yellow lamp the darkness which oppresses ...
Or mid the dancers in their trivial laces
Aloof, as in the ring a lion paces,
Disdainful of their slander or caresses.
I see myself the child of many races,
Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;
Within my soul a thousand weary traces
Of pain and joy and passionate excesses—
Eternal beauty that our brief love chases
With snatch of desperate hands and dying tresses.
1917
There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:
Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon;
Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,
Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.
The long road unto nothing I will sing,
Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,
Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring
No more emotion than the fear to die.
Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,
Another house as grey and steep and still:
An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,
A sick child tired of chasing down the hill.
Shuffle and hurry, idle feet, and slow,
Grim face and merry face, so ugly all!
Why do you hurry? Where is there to go?
Why are you shouting? Who is there to call?
Lovers still kissing, feverish to drain
Stale juices from the shrivelled fruit of lust:
A black umbrella held up in the rain,
The raindrops making patterns in the dust.
If this distaste I hold for fools is such,
Shall I not spit upon myself as well?
Do I not eat and drink and smile as much?
Do I not fatten also in this hell?
Sadness and joy—if they were melted up,
Things that were great—upon the fires of time
Drop but as soup in the accustomed cup,
Settle in stagnance, trickle into grime.
Faith, freedom, art that fire a man or two
And set him like a pilgrim on his way
With Beauty's face before him—what of you,
Priest, Butcher, Scholar, King, upon that day?
The dullard-masses that no god can save!
If I were God, to rise and strike you down
And break your churches in an angry wave
And make a furious bonfire of your town!
God in a coloured globe, alone and still,
Embroidering wonders with a fearless brain,
On loom of spaces measureless, to fill
The empty air with passion and with pain.
Emblazon all the heavens with desire
And Wisdom delved for in the depths of time—
Thoughts sculptured mountainous, and fancy's fire
Caught in the running swiftness of a rhyme.
Passion high-pedestalled, pangs turned to treasure,
Perfected and undone and built afresh
With concentrated agony and Pleasure ...
If I were God, and not a weight of flesh!
1914
How often, when the thought of suicide
With ghostly weapon beckons us to die,
The ghosts of many foods alluring glide
On golden dishes, wine in purple tide
To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye
Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus: The sly
Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride
Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie
Resigned to death like heroes—July peas,
Expectant bottles foaming at the brink—
White bread, and honey of the golden bees—
A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink,
A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese,
And cup where berries float and bubbles wink.
1917
It is still something to have cheated God
And bored the Devil with so easy prey,
And in the midst of summer woods to raise
A leafless tree whose stark limbs mock at Heaven,
Flaunting an iron hatred in the midst of hope—
Yet sometimes in the loneliness of night
My buried longings blossom on the boughs,
My wistful longings come out star by star,
Till the great sky is light with my desire,
And on the winds my songs are galloping....
Ah, to what dismal greyness creeps the soul
Too weak, too tired, to struggle from the slough!
My weapons rust, my pen is in the dust,
The moulting feathers plucked from out my wings
Lie dangling in the hats I stole them for.
My heart is floating in a claret cup,
My brain is toppling drunken at the brim,
My life is drowned within the lurid dregs.
I turn and fold my hands in a last appeal,
What heaven shall I pray to and for what,
Now that my songs to penny tunes are set,
And nothing is to save of me but flesh?
1913
What words that move on wings in a long drift
Can waft this silence into weary ears,
And steal into the veins and fingertips
Of restless bodies, like magnificent ships
Proud from the seas that calmly sail through fears,
Mean streets, and miseries, with passage swift.
What words pricked from the stars and shimmering together,
Or swept like little winds through leaves alert,
Can filter through the chinks of bolted doors
Deaf to the clamours knocking without pause,
Steeled with indifference against all hurt,
Deaf to the cry of man, and rack of weather:
To sing the hubbub of this glittering night,
Where all the lamps each with a separate soul
Throb to the ecstasies of dancing life;
And Beauty, gleaming high her magic knife
Cuts free the tethered heart from long control
And flings it like a ball with mad delight
Into the silver lap of the young moon.
What needles quick, what threads, what fingers fine
Can broider tapestries as rich as these,
Stranger than dreams and drifting melodies,
Transparent as the gods we half divine,
Frail as the thoughts that dwindle in a swoon
Ghostly before begetting. Tinged with pain
That glimmers pale on hands we cannot find,
And visioned faces that our dreams create
Born in the land forbidden us of fate
And longed for all our lives ... What words can bind
Forever Joy, that never comes again!
1915
I think myself
The fool of tragedy strutting upon the stage
Where murder creeps and whispers.
The jester clad in piebald tights
Half black, half golden, with no company
Save bells that jingle,
And an effigy,
The grinning image painted like myself
Upon a stick....
I think myself
The fool of comedy mournfully straying
Amid the revellers,
Loving the moon and my own shadow
With its strange solemn gestures—
Loving the painted moon
That lets me play with shadows.
I am the jester on an empty stage
Playing a pantomime
To spectres in the stalls,
Listening at last
For ghostly mirth and phantom hands applauding,
And for some king with decadent tired fingers
To fling a white gardenia at my feet.
1918
The adored, wild, strange, irresistible,
How they fail one at the last!
What is there in your faces
That we should worship with our souls?
Most lovable, perfidious,
Vague—
Molesting even our visions
With treacherous pathos.
O vulgarity, mediocrity, stupidity,
What is it in you that makes us lavish our love,
Covering your meagre bodies
With our passionate mantle, dyed with blood and dreams?
Life and its grey days, and time
Are a thin curtain through which you shadow,
Or a dim glass through which you peer.
You climb in at the windows of our souls
With ladders and stratagems,
You mope in corners with reproachful eyes.
But what do you do for us
Lute players, dancers, deceivers,
Other than lie with red lips
And cajole with tears of beryl?
People—
Men and women with laughable, tragic faces
Winking at love,
Treading our songs and illusions
Under petulant feet!
1917
A ROSE
What do you ask of me with your beauty, what are you urging
Of labour and painful aspiring to flatter your perfection?
What secretness of love with terrible blushes surging
Unseen, have found in you at last their passionate reflection?
What dreams that lovers knew, as sleep with subtle magic
Tore off the rags of life and made her dance with body spangled,
Drew back the vacant hours, the tedious and the tragic,
And showed the glittering souls from bodies we had mangled;—
What visions made you, emblem of longing and love that has died unrequited,
And all lost joys, and tears, and beauty passionately given,
Winked at by folly, skewered by the butcher, danced on and slighted,
That now spring up from death, showing their slayers the colours of Heaven?
You have burst from the ground with your joy, you are pining and bleeding,
Your scent is heavy with sorrowful love; oh, memories clinging,
What do you ask of my soul with such fierceness of pleading,
I that was glad to forget ... What do you need of my singing?
1916
Like flocks of tired birds when autumn comes,
My spirit flags across the darkening fields
And melts into the drabness of the sky
And falls like dust upon the huddled corn.
But many wizened faces brown and sad
Peer from the bushes as I wander past,—
They tell me all those things that old men say
As youth looks up through tears with pallid cheek.
"When you are grey and crooked as ourselves,
When you have bowed before all other gods,
And found them false, then shall you come at last
To that dark King of grief, and he shall bless
Your bread with tears, and manacle your hands,
And call you slave and lover." ...
Shall not a child take Pain for company
And share her loneliness with him?
Does not a youth know tears
In the first bitterness of broken love?
Is Grief so proud a king that none shall come
To seek him save the blind, the halt, the lame? ...
He is a tramp, a beggar, and a clown,
He sits a jester at the feet of kings
And scurries with the leaves in Autumn's train.
He rides the wooden horses at a fair,
And dances with the jiggers on the stage.
Led by the violins of discontent
That whine their music to my listening soul,
I dance with him the dance of withered leaves,
We dance together to the tunes of rain
Played on one note upon the only string.
1913
Oh, just beyond the curve of ideal quest
That changes as a sea wave to the wind,
Beyond the cloud that folds around a star,
And dawn, that stands ajar to let us in,
Lies that to which our loves and dreams have gone,
The paradise of all we might have been,
While we are washed back downwards in the dark
Where tides recede, to dwindle with the foam.
1917
Ah! you, from the small high-walled acre of your lives,
Your windows only looking upon gardens,
Only perceiving love and death and truth
As facts that come to pass,
That pass and leave you still
Within your safe small prisons,
Older, duller,
To walk and talk among the evergreens.
You have never known
Delight of dying slowly,
Poisoned with raptures
In many hues from the slim-cut decanters of death—
The tunes
That dishevel and smooth,
Cajole and melancholize—
The dance
Which is a whirling of leaves
In their last scorn of sorrow
Flung upwards by the wind
Into the haggard face of winter—
Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons
Tossed by impulsive hands;
Nor slid as skaters swiftly
Over the crackling crystals of perilous ice,
Buffeted with bouquets and blinded with confetti ...
You have not felt the abandon
Of light love
Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor....
1916
Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,
Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,
Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,
Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.
For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,
For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,
For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air
My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.
For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great
Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,
For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,
Science for giving wounds, and healing science.
For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,
Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,
For you the unborn child that I prepare,
You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!
1913
The curtains are drawn as though it still were night,
A slip of dawn between them is a dangling silver ribbon;
And all about the room is quietness—Each patient chair
Erect, alert, in place. A letter on the table and a book
Lie as you left them, now bereft of purpose—
Garish a little in the room's sedateness, you
Returning dressed so frivolously in all your coloured clothes!
How grey and sober, full of placid wit
The furniture, the pictures on the wall;
How steely swift the light, stabbing you to the heart
As you stand at the window, bright as rushing blood.
Garish your hair, your shoes, your startling chalky face
And white, white gloves ...
What time is it? ... Still ticks the tireless clock,
With face grimacing ... nearly six it is....
Yet hurries not nor lingers, like our hearts,
For in its dial eternity is housed—
A cock should crow ... there are no cocks in town!
But a water cart with surly noise below
Grates unconcerned along the disconsolate street.
How cold and how familiar all these things,
To you so lonely in the enormous dawn
Slowly unfastening that vermilion dress ...
1916
BLACK VELVET
The darkness of the trees at deep midnight
And sombreness of shadows in the lake;
A mountain in the starlight wide awake
Dreaming to Heaven with imperial might
Of lifted shoulders, huge against the bright
Bespattered jewelry of stars—the ache
Of silence, and the sobbing tides that break
From music. Slumbering cities—candle light
Snuffed in the flooding darkness, and the train
Of Queens that go to scaffold for a sin—
Or splash of blackness manifest of pain,
Hamlet among his court, a Harlequin
Of tragedies ... Mysterious ... And again
Venetian masks against a milky skin.
1917
NERVES
These curious looms where we have spun our fancies,
These intricate webs where our desires are threaded,
These weird trapezes that our passion frenzies
Strange acrobats to catch them dizzy headed.
These tightening strings upon our spirit's fiddles
Tuneful or out of tune where music hungers
From writhing bow, these intertwining riddles
Mazes and labyrinths and storms and languors.
These colours twinging on a prism's edges,
These speckled patterns of fanatic madness
From glittering eyeballs, these unresting dredges
For pearls within the depths of sadness and of gladness—
O tortuous thoughts, what are you seeking after
As flies around a carcass with a humming dreary,
Gibing the silent dead with treacherous laughter,
Molesting quietness and waking up the weary!
What then, what then, can sleep not crush you to forgetting
With all her body's beauty, cannot peace submerge you
O wrangling, juggling, jangling, pirouetting—
What hope can drag you from the small desires that urge you?
You have lassoed the moon and trapped the sun's bright lion,
And trodden out the red stars into ashes,
Destroyed night's temple and broken the pillars of iron,
And striped the snowy horses of the clouds with zebra gashes ...
You have debauched the world! And as I sit here weary,
Deafened with your demands and torn in tatters,
The world seems suddenly most passionless and dreary,
A poor bewildered clown—and nothing matters.
1916
My pain has all the patience of a nun
Who kneels and prays for Heaven on the stone,
In some chill cellar where the amens moan,
Ave Maria, the long penance spun
Forever. And the tapers one by one
Stand like cold angels round the Virgin's throne.
My soul is tired from kneeling all alone,
Its little candles yearning to the sun.
Long have I dreamed of Paradise and seen
Bright mirages of glory on the grey
Of sad horizons; I have kept the green
Surprise of spring through winter and dismay,
Tasting within the bitter dregs of spleen
Drugs that bring peace, and wine that maketh gay.
1917
The scandal-monger after all is right—
The old and cunning voice with weary repetition
Is justified in all dull words and warnings.
I see at last how you,
Spendthrift of passion
In love's bankruptcy,
Borrow new beauty from each passing face—
How being too lavish you did steal
From generous hands—
You are the idol builder and the robber of temples,
Praising with passionate psalms
The thing you cannot worship—
And yet your prayers have stirred
Belief in us—
We see beyond the false and weary face
Into your haggard soul and trust from pity—
We hear beyond the idle music of your voice,
A wisdom taught by cruelty
And a tired scorn of treachery and guile—
We see your wounds and weep,
You meet our pity with a traitor's kiss—
For, you are schooled in suffering and schooled
In teaching pain to others—
And all that mob of furious accusation
To which you turn the cheek, or curse so well,
Are but the ghosts of bodies you have murdered,
That drive you on in vengeance to fresh crime.
1917
Woods of brown gloom sombring with the hush of death,
Wind's lassitude that sets the tired leaves shivering,
Starved yellow leaves sighing beneath the feet, a breath
Consumptive, old, and fever-red leaves quivering,
As with an earthward flutter like a ghostly butterfly
Listless they perish, wavering and hovering.
Skeleton branches where the rooks flap wings and cry,
Perched upon ribs and fingers; and the white mists covering
The far-off hills and bloodless visage of the sun.
No noise save the meandering dribble of a rivulet,
No noise save of the slow hours dropping one by one
As embers, no colour save Time's ashen coverlet....
How melancholy here the gayest tunes would sound
From shrill carousers riotous and merry all,
As echoes of lost joy their dancing feet upon the ground,
As funeral bagpipes at a burial.
And I who wander passionless and forlorn,
A leaf-forsaken tree symbolic of dejection,
In rags of old desires, dispirited and torn,
See in the stagnant glass of Time my soul's reflection.
1916
I feel so much alone,
And yet I know that many hopes are storming
My shut heart;
For I am bolted fast in my own house.
I pace distracted through its corridors
To the music of Love's knocking hands
Against the gate,
Or silence when they sleep.
I cannot find the key to let them in,
I, my own host and guest and ghost,
Imprisoned in myself!
1917
THE COMPLEX LIFE
I know it to be true that those who live
As do the grasses and the lilies of the field
Receiving joy from Heaven, sweetly yield
Their joy to Earth, and taking Beauty, give.
But we are gathered for the looms of Fate
That Time with ever-turning multiplying wheels
Spins into complex patterns and conceals
His huge invention with forms intricate.
Each generation blindly fills the plan,
A sorry muddle or an inspiration of God
With many processes from out the sod,
The Earth and Heaven are mingled and made man.
We must be tired and sleepless, gaily sad,
Frothing like waves in clamorous confusion,
A chemistry of subtle interfusion,
Experiments of genius that the ignorant call mad.
We spell the crimes of our unruly days,
We see a fabled Arcady in our mind,
We crave perfection that we may not find.
Time laughs within the clock and Destiny plays.
You peasants and you hermits, simple livers!
So picturesquely pure, all unconcerned
While we give up our bodies to be burned,
And dredge for treasure in the muddy rivers.
We drink and die and sell ourselves for power,
We hunt with treacherous steps and stealthy knife,
We make a gaudy havoc of our life
And live a thousand ages in an hour.
Our loves are spoilt by introspective guile,
We vivisect our souls with elaborate tools,
We dance in couples to the tune of fools,
And dream of harassed continents the while.
Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion
Delirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint,
Make cryptic perorations of complaint,
Inverted religion, and perverted passion.
But since we are children of this age,
In curious ways discovering salvation,
I will not quit my muddled generation,
But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.
Although I know that Nature's bounty yields
Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
Will I give back my body to the fields.
1917
Shall we be christened poets, children of God,
For blowing sighs into the listeners' ears,
For tugging at the moaning bells of death,
And coming as the autumn grave-digger
To close the eyes of flowers, and shut the fingers
Of wind upon the rushes,
Of music upon silence?
Shall we be given wreathes of bay and laurel
For forcing tragedy into a rhyme
As a gaunt beggar in a spangled vest?
The poet ever wanders after Death,
The flunkey on a funeral chariot
Pouring the wine at feasts of burial;
And all the roses that he plucks from summer
Are carried to the crypts to deck a corpse....
How shall the world learn how to laugh again
When all its songs have only learnt to weep?
1919
When I am weary at the antic chance,
The hobby-horses and the wooden lance,
The hope and fear in jugglery, and see
How starved the juggler, mean and miserly,
And life a laboured trick—the years advance
A shrilling chorus in affected dance
With lust of many eyes that watch and wink
Fixed on them; or a clown in feverish pink
Will draw gross laughter by a hideous prance—
Vulgarity and sin and souls askance,
Where fiddles squeal and all the follies spin—
Till, when the stage is empty, Harlequin
Through curtained silence trips as from a trance
With blushing flowers for Columbine—Romance.
1917
MOODS
I
I crouched upon cushions and wallowed in their somnolent caresses,
And—listening with dread for the moment of my own silence
Rending the flimsy lace of whisperings—
My gnome dances before me
Behind a fan of smoke,
My dwarf squats on my shoulders
Tweeking their moulted wings,
My ape peers in the mirror of my face
Mimicking my soul's gaunt gestures—
My wolf bays through my moonly loneliness
Blotching the night with howls—
My laughter goes whining away on the wind,
Laughs that are whipped by a soul too sick with merriment,
Too satiate with humour's emptiness!...
II
Ah! loveliness with little pointed feet
Dancing across the leer of ugliness,
Skimming like a gold thread
Through a necklace of vile masks—
Lifting with lotus fingers
The blue arras of nightmare—
Loveliness like a delicate silver flute
Pressed to a negro's lips—
III
Do you then wish for all those griefs
Whose snarling hands you kiss,
Kneeling in adoration to a dagger
As saints before a cross?
You who have tossed all flowers away,
Coveting the drenched red peonies of blood
Their javelin-petals wet with slaughter,—
Do you then crave your own blood's offering,
Your own breast's pallor pierced with knives of flame?
In your ears are the pattering of the hunter's feet,
Softer than death, and omens mouthed by winds of twilight,
You lean across the precipice of time
Calling and crying
For the last abyssmal passion of self-slaughter—
IV
Waiting,
Like grey cloud-giants climbing the hills of Heaven
Carrying vast burdens over the crags of chaos—
Waiting,
Like trees that hear the far-off moan of winds,
Like listening trees that hug their branches round them,
Their leaves whispering lividly the rumour of storms,
Waiting like a vast arch of quietness
Through which a screaming messenger shall dart—
Like a dense hood of silence
Pierced by a sword of music—
Waiting, like the deathly stillness of a pool
Reflecting the diver poised before he plunges....
1919
SMOKE
Now is the evening dipped knee-deep in blood
And the dun hills stand fearful in their places.
Cunning in sin, we shuffle down the streets
With burdens of vainglory on our backs,
Spinning with spider-hands the miser's web
Or sitting placid, gay and fat with ease.
But out beyond, the armies of the world
March doomwards to the rhythm of the drum
Under the thirsting sun. Death holds his state:
His skeleton hands are filled with scarlet spoil:
He stands on flaming ramparts, waving high
The ensign of decay. All his bones are dressed
With livid roses; all his pillars black
Are girt in ashen poppies, and on dust
He raises up his awful golden throne.
Oh! your fierce shrieks have fainted on deaf ears;
Your tears have flowed on feet of carven stone;
Your blood is spilt for the boiling-pot of God
Where good and evil mix; and all your rage
Is but a thin smoke wafted in His face.
1914
Blow upon blow they bruise the daylight wan,
Scar upon scar they rend the quiet shore;
They ride on furious, leaving every man
Crushed like a maggot by the hoofs of war:
Gods that grow tired of paradisial water
And fill their cups with steaming wine of slaughter.
I fear a thing more terrible than death:
The glamour of the battle grips us yet—
As crowds before a fire that hold their breath
Watching the burning houses, and forget
All they will lose, but marvel to behold
Its dazzling strength, the glamour of its gold.
I fear the time when slow the flame expires,
When this kaleidoscope of roaring color
Fades, and rage faints; and of the funeral-fires
That shone with battle, nothing left of valour
Save chill ignoble ashes for despair
To strew with widowed hands upon her hair.
Livid and damp unfolds the winding-sheet,
Hiding the mangled body of the Earth:
The slow grey aftermath, the limping feet
Of days that shall not know the sound of mirth,
But pass in dry-eyed patience, with no trust
Save to end living and be heaped with dust.
That stillness that must follow where Death trod,
The sullen street, the empty drinking-hall,
The tuneless voices cringing praise to God,
Deaf gods, that did not heed the anguished call,
Now to be soothed with humbleness and praise,
With fawning kisses for the hand that slays.
Across the world from out the fevered ground
Decay from every pore exhales its breath;
A cloak of penance winding close around
The bright desire of spring. And unto Death,
As to a conquering king, we yield the keys
Of Beauty's gates upon our bended knees.
The maiden loverless shall go her ways,
And child unfathered feed on crust and husk;
The sun that was the glory of our days
Shining as tinsel till the moody dusk
Into our starving outstretched arms shall lay
Her silent sleep, the only boon we pray.
1914
A ragged drummer rides along the street,
And at his coming
The silence fills with tunes and rustling feet
And voices humming.
He rode a year ago from far away,
On charger prancing,
With bright new buttons and with ribbons gay,
And banners dancing.
Oh, he was fatter than the bursting drum
He bore so proudly,
His roaring music woke the silence dumb
To thunder loudly.
And by his side the old men and the young
Had followed cheering
Into the sunset smiling as they sung,
Nor thought of fearing.
They left their lovers and their mothers' lap,
Their homes demolish,
"For, look, I have a ribbon for my cap,
A sword to polish!"
And so the town was silent once again,
Though tunes of battle
Beat fearful in the wind, or in the rain
Ghost drums would rattle.
But at the chuckling dice or careful loom,
Or candled churches
A few forgot or prayed or followed doom
With drunken lurches....
Now loom and bar and church disgorge the throng,
In huddled masses
They stand aghast to hear the drummer's song
As back he passes—
Palsied and drear and bent he turns alone
In rags and tatters,
And on a soundless barrel with a bone
He beats and batters.
"Where march your feet so gaily, careless crowd,
That we may kiss them?
Where sound your little songs that rang so loud
To us that miss them?"
There are no songs, no happy marching feet,
No favours flying:
The drummer passes ... on the quiet street
The sun is dying.
Sun that must bleed to death so red and brave!...
Have done with weeping,
But put your ribbons on a soldier's grave
As he lies sleeping.
1914
ZEPPELINS
MIDNIGHT
Suddenly
Shutting our lips upon a jest
As we are sipping thoughts from little glasses,
A gun bursts thunder and the echoing streets
Quiver with startled terrors—
How swift runs fear: quicksilver that is free!
Now every muscle weakens, every pulse
Is set at gallop-pace and every nerve
Stretched taut with horror and a wild revolt....
How sweetly spins the world to noise of music,
How sweet to live life's arrogant adventure!
Live in a vain world wracked with a thousand pangs,
Limp in a dull street housed with crumbling dreams,
To breathe and eat and sleep and love and sigh
A little longer, oh a little year!
Forgotten prayers rise up in resurrection,
And resolutions of new wondrous lives
Choke up our hearts and fling us to our knees....
Worms creep in dreadful hunger from the ground,
The lurid silent people loved by death,
And peer into our eyes with sly forebodings
To drag our body's glory from the light.
Though all the world should fall into their cells
And lie within their larders shelf on shelf—
Yet will I toss the sheets of dust away,
Yet will I be the mistress of the sun!
* * * * *
1 A. M.
Look how they struggle in a mist of fire,
Those hunchbacked chimneys and distorted domes—
Now gloat on Hell, the colour seems to roar,
An army fierce upon its own destruction,
A famished monster tearing in its claws
Gigantic foods to glut its lean desire
Digesting all the world!...
Look at the eager people open-mouthed
That stand as foolish rabbits hypnotised
By the uncoiling rhythm of a snake,
Their earth adoring senses caught awhile
In the red whirlwind of ascending wings;
Their spirits straining upward upon strings
Like kites and air balloons, but more grotesque,
Lacking the ephemeral beauty of a toy—
Yet for an hour
Dyed with the colour that their drabness fears
They kiss the feet of beauty as she passes
Starwards, tremendous in a coat of fire.
* * * * *
3 A. M.
The dawn seems drained of blood so colourless—
Slowly the river moves as though in sleep
While silent barges
Slide from the mist like dreams;
The intricate patterns of the scaffolding
Are drawn against the sky
More delicate than lace.
All the shimmering lights
Have shrunk away from morning
As a blue peacock sheaves his starry tail....
I am alone, most utterly alone,
More lonely than the last man in the world
Straying amid the dust of vanished lives.
More lonely than a spirit stolen from heaven
Who stands beside that nebulous cold river
Dividing sleep from death,
Eternity from time....
Nothing disturbs the white peace of the dawn,
She brings no feverous memories of night
And sheds no tears.
Only two hours ago
Fire walked in crimson armour through the city
Piercing the night's black tent with glittering javelins,
While shrieks and whispered omens flew like bats
Among the silver foliage of the stars....
But rage has left no furrow in the sky,
No wake of sparks across the placid water....
This is the ominous and sacred hour
When priest-like the world kneels
Bowed low toward the empty throne of day—
Soon will the herald trumpet-blast be heard
And the flamingo messengers will come
Flocking from out the burnished cage of sunrise....
This is the hour of nothing,
Colourless and chill
Oblivion's hands are folded on the world,
As sits an idol holding in his fingers
A scentless lotus carven out of stone.
-
