Volume Iii Part 16 (1/2)

The sister Hours in circles linked, Daughters of men, of men the mates, Are gone on flow with the day that winked, With the night that spanned at golden gates.

Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed; They bear us grain or flower or weed, As we have sown; is nought extinct For them we fill to be our Fates.

Life of the breath is but the loan; Pa.s.sing death what we have sown.

Pearly are they till the pale inherited stain Deepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flow Darken to feature and nature: a volumed chain, Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.

Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to read Leaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed: There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting sane Stand as a tree whereon numberless cl.u.s.ters grow: Legible there how the heart, with its one false move Cast Eurydice pallor on all we love.

Our fervid heart has filled that Book in chief; Our fitful heart a wild reflection views; Our craving heart of pa.s.sion suckling grief Disowns the author's work it must peruse; Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed, A round of harvests red from crimson seed, It marks the current Hours show leaf by leaf, And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues; Though sometimes it may think what novel light Will strike their faces when the mind shall write.

II

Succourful daughters of men are the rosed and starred Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings, Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.

Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward, They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs, That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close, Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.

Only to Earth's best loved, at the breathless turns Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung, And a ghostly lamp of their moment's union burns, Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.

Voice of Earth's very soul to the soul she would see renewed: A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the breast Sobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves' bells upon ferns In sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.

Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood; Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest; Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair; Snouts at hunt through the scented gra.s.ses; enhavened scuts Flas.h.i.+ng escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed burrow-mouth.

Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of huts, To greet those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.

Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South, Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.

Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive's grey; A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies; The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay, Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.

Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long colonnades; Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert; Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed gra.s.s-blades, On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in dirt.

Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to receive Balm of a sound Earth's primary heart at its active beat: The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve; Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit: Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes; Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes; Its day's hard business done, the score to the good accompt.

Creatures of forest and mead, Earth's essays in being, all kinds Bound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray, They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds, Cut man's tangles for Earth's first broad rectilinear way: Admonis.h.i.+ng loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots, Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air; Not always the sprouts of Earth's root-Laws preserving her brutes; Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.

Yet the like aerial growths may chance be the delicate sprays, Infant of Earth's most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal For entry on Life's upper fields: and soul thus flouris.h.i.+ng pays The martyr's penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.

Her, from a nerveless well among stagnant pools of the dry, Through her good aim at divine, shall commune with Earth remake; Fraternal unto sororial, her, where abashed she may lie, Divinest of man shall clasp; a world out of darkness awake, As it were with the Resurrection's eyelids uplifted, to see Honour in shame, in substance the spirit, in that dry fount Jets of the songful ascending silvery-bright water-tree Spout, with our Earth's unbaffled resurgent desire for the mount, Though broken at intervals, clipped, and barren in seeming it be.

For this at our nature arises rejuvenescent from Earth, However respersive the blow and nigh on infernal the fall, The chastis.e.m.e.nt drawn down on us merited: are we of worth Amid our satanic excrescences, this, for the less than a call, Will Earth reprime, man cherish; the G.o.d who is in us and round, Consenting, the G.o.d there seen. Impiety speaks despair; Religion the virtue of serving as things of the furrowy ground, Debtors for breath while breath with our fellows in service we share.

Not such of the crowned discrowned Can Earth or humanity spare; Such not the G.o.d let die.

III

Eastward of Paris morn is high; And darkness on that Eastward side The heart of France beholds: a thorn Is in her frame where s.h.i.+nes the morn: A rigid wave usurps her sky, With eagle crest and eagle-eyed To scan what wormy wrinkles hint Her forces gathering: she the thrown From station, lopped of an arm, astounded, lone, Reading late History as a foul misprint: Imperial, Angelical, At strife commingled in her frame convulsed; Shame of her broken sword, a ravening gall; Pain of the limb where once her warm blood pulsed; These tortures to distract her underneath Her whelmed Aurora's shade. But in that s.p.a.ce When lay she dumb beside her trampled wreath, Like an unburied body mid the tombs, Feeling against her heart life's bitter probe For life, she saw how children of her race, The many sober sons and daughters, plied, By cottage lamplight through the water-globe, By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms, Afield, in factories, with the birds astir, Their nimble feet and fingers; not denied Refreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs.

So like Earth's indestructible they were, That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride, To feel where in each breast the thought of her, On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs, Was constant; spoken sometimes in low tone At lip or in a fluttered look, A shortened breath: and they were her loved own; Nor ever did they waste their strength with tears, For pity of the weeper, nor rebuke, Though mainly they were charged to pay her debt, The Mother having conscience in arrears; Ready to gush the flood of vain regret, Else hearken to her weaponed children's moan Of stifled rage invoking vengeance: h.e.l.l's, If heaven should fail the counter-wave that swells In blood and brain for retribution swift.

Those helped not: wings to her soul were these who yet Could welcome day for labour, night for rest, Enrich her treasury, built of cheerful thrift, Of honest heart, beyond all miracles; And likened to Earth's humblest were Earth's best.

IV

Brooding on her deep fall, the many strings Which formed her nature set a thought on Kings, As aids that might the low-laid cripple lift; And one among them hummed devoutly leal, While pa.s.sed the sighing breeze along her breast.

Of Kings by the festive vanquishers rammed down Her gorge since fell the Chief, she knew their crown; Upon her through long seasons was its grasp, For neither soul's nor body's weal; As much bestows the robber wasp, That in the hanging apple makes a meal, And carves a face of abscess where was fruit Ripe ruddy. They would blot Her radiant leap above the slopes acute, Of summit to celestial; impute The wanton's aim to her divinest shot; Bid her walk History backward over gaps; Abhor the day of Phrygian caps; Abjure her guerdon, execrate herself; The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Guelph, Admire repentant; reverently prostrate Her person unto the belly-G.o.d; of whom Is inward plenty and external bloom; Enough of pomp and state And carnival to quench The breast's desires of an intemperate wench, The head's ideas beyond legitimate.

She flung them: she was France: nor with far frown Her lover from the embrace of her refrained: But in her voice an interwoven wire, The exultation of her gross renown, Struck deafness at her heavens, and they waned Over a look ill-gifted to aspire.

Wherefore, as an abandonment, irate, The intemperate summoned up her trumpet days, Her treasure-galleon's wondrous freight.

The cannon-name she sang and shrieked; transferred Her soul's allegiance; o'er the Tyrant slurred, Tranced with the zeal of her first fawning gaze, To clasp his trophy flags and hail him Saint.

V

She hailed him Saint: And her Jeanne unsainted, foully sung!

The virgin who conceived a France when funeral glooms Across a land aquake with sharp disseverance hung: Conceived, and under stress of battle brought her forth; Crowned her in purification of feud and foeman's taint; Taught her to feel her blood her being, know her worth, Have joy of unity: the Jeanne bescreeched, bescoffed, Who flamed to ashes, flew up wreaths of f.a.ggot fumes; Through centuries a star in vapour-folds aloft.

For her people to hail her Saint, Were no lifting of her, Earth's gem, Earth's chosen, Earth's throb on divine: In the ranks of the starred she is one, While man has thought on our line: No lifting of her, but for them, Breath of the mountain, beam of the sun Through mist, out of swamp-fires' lures release, Youth on the forehead, the rough right way Seen to be footed: for them the heart's peace, By the mind's war won for a permanent miracle day.

Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed, The heart of that high-hallowed Jeanne Into the furnace-pit she tossed Before her body knew the flame, And sucked its essence: warmth for righteous work, An undivided power to speed her aim.