The Lion and the Rose (2 page)

Suggests that passion is compassion.

THE WINDOW

Finite, exact, the square

Frames the long curve

Of hills and perpendicular

Spray of the delicate tree.

Wires, slanting, swerve

Off the flat scene;

And shining through

The mathematical window

The burning sky and the blue sun

Create a flowing fourth dimension:

The square explodes in space.

Then through the abstract window

Darkness comes down so deep

The exact mountains show

Sleep in a flowing line,

Earth in a flowing sleep.

But suddenly alive

The rivers of the air

Invade the static square;

As the stars only move

Obedient to Love,

Heart opens into time.

The square explodes in space,

The window opens into time—

As poems breathe within their strict design,

As holiness may look out from a face.

THE LION AND THE ROSE

Vision is locked in stone.

The lion in the air is gone

With the great lion of the sun.

The sky is wild and cold.

The tawny fire is gone.

The hill where love did open like a rose

Is black. It snows.

Emptiness flows.

The flowers in the heart all close

Drowned in a heavy white. Love knows

That poverty untold,

The cave where nothing grows.

The flaming lions of the flesh are gone,

Their power withdrawn.

God of the empty room,

Thy will be done. Thy will be done.

Now shine the inward sun,

The beating heart that glows

Within the skeleton,

The magic rose, the purer living gold,

Shine now, grown old.

All that is young and bold,

The lion’s roar, the flaming skin and wild,

Unearthly peace now cherish and enfold

And fresh sleep overcome,

That in this death-in-life, delicate, cold,

The spiritual rose

Flower among the snows—

The love surpassing love.

AMERICAN LANDSCAPES

WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA

All day I had seen a nearer dot on the map, this town,

A night’s sleep and the end of speeding and climbing

The steep magnificent hills, a way of coming home.

It is a still town where the past lies dreaming.

Drenched in the old sun, washed in the gold light,

Orderly and gay with white sills gleaming

And brick that glows by day and frames the night.

It is a warm town where the past is living.

The ancient walls draw comfort from the ancient trees.

Their roots are bound together in the earth and breathing.

They wear their double beauty with a marvelous ease.

It is a deep town where the past is sleeping,

And in the silence on the sills the soldiers’ spurs

Are stilled and all the shouting and the women weeping

As the town is taken and lost in those unburied wars.

It is a strange town where the past is breathing.

For nothing is lost that has happened, nothing is over.

The traveller walking dark streets is silently leaving

His step beside Stonewall Jackson’s like a lover—

For all foresees him here and he remembers all and knows

That from this past the future rises streaming,

And from this town relationship is born and flows.

It is a good town where the past is growing

Into the whole stretch of the land and touches all

With warmth about the heart and gives a form to living,

A still town where the stranger listens to his footsteps fall.

MONTICELLO

This legendary house, this dear enchanted tomb,

Once so supremely lived in and for life designed,

Will none of mouldy death nor give it room,

Charged with the presence of a living mind.

Enter and touch the temper of a lively man.

See, it is spacious, intimate and full of light.

The eye, pleased by detail, is nourished by the plan;

Nothing is here for show, much for delight.

All the joy of invention and of craft and wit

Are freely granted here, all given rein,

But taut within the classic form and ruled by it,

Elegant, various, magnificent—and plain,

Europe become implacably American!

But Mozart still could have been happy here,

And Monroe riding from his farm again,

As well as any silversmith or carpenter—

As well as we, for whom this elegance,

This freedom in a form, this peaceful grace

Is not our heritage, although it happened once:

We read the future, not the past, upon his face.

The time must come when, from the people’s heart,

Government grows to meet the stature of a man,

And freedom finds its form, that great unruly art,

And the state is a house designed by Jefferson.

IN DEEP CONCERN

Guilford College, North Carolina

Quakers define the hour when thoughts begin to burn,

And faith leaps from the heart into the hands,

That great turbulence of spirit, “a concern”,

The hour when contemplation breaks its bonds.

Poems are written, colleges are built, states live

When people go out from their thinking to the street

With a faith in their hands so deep and positive

It makes the vision truth. Here thought and action meet.

So the idea of a college, a hundred years ago,

Was born from Quakers’ deep concern, and with their hands

They dug and baked clay into bricks that warmly glow

Still with the heat of faith. That college stands.

But still we, later, are not sure. We are bound fast.

We do not know for certain. We have not got it clear:

Paul Revere rode, and Franklin went to France, John Brown

Was hanged because thought burned to action in the past,

Because thought grew so deep and hot it cast out fear.

And it is matter for concern whether we shall go down,

Or from the deeps of thought and prayer take up our stand

Where faith moves from the mind into the working hand.

CHARLESTON PLANTATIONS

You cannot see them from the road: go far and deep,

Down the long avenues where mosses cover up the leaves,

Across the empty terraced lawns neglected and asleep,

To the still place where no dog barks and no dove grieves,

And a black mirror gives you back your face too white

In pools dyed jet by cypress roots: go deep and far,

Deep into time, far into crumbling spaces and half-light

To where they stand, our Egypt and our Nineveh.

Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

The garlands and the little foxes’ faces carved

Upon the mantels look on empty walls and water-stains

And the stairs tremble though so elegantly curved,

(Outside are waiting the bright creeping vines)

And as your foot falls in the silences, you guess

Decay has been arrested for a moment in the wall

But the grey plumes upon the trees in deathly loveliness

Will stir when you have passed, and somewhere a stone fall.

Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

There is no rice now and the world that sprang from it

Like an azalea, brilliant from the swamps, has crumbled.

A single century, it is embalmed as Egypt,

A single century, and all that elegance was humbled—

While we who fired that world and watched it burn

Come every spring to whisper near the tomb,

To stare, a little shaken, where the mosses mourn

And the azaleas and magnolias have not ceased to bloom.

Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

WHERE THE PEACOCK CRIED

Natchez, Mississippi
The Cotton Kings

Nothing could match the era’s dazzling façade,

The white grace of the pillars in a gloom of trees;

No sword has scarred, no vulgar hand has overlaid

The pure triumphant form of this American Acropolis:

Nothing could match the era’s marvelous shell.

But push the heavy door and enter the dark chill

Of empty halls. Listen while you are told,

“The locks are solid silver, floors the old cypress still,

Mantels Italian marble and twenty-carat gold

Gilds the great mirrors”—that reflect the shabby places

In the imported carpet and the tourists’ vacant faces.

This was a beauty bought intact, mourning no dream,

Paid for in cash, perhaps, but with no human breath.

It is as brutal, savage as a peacock’s scream,

Emblem of luxury and emptiness and death—

Look for the heart within the house, the center of the cult,

Look for the hearth, the household god, the mystery;

You will not find it where all is perfect to a fault,

Buried and cold under the weight of history,

Gone with the swans that swam the artificial lakes.

Did they with violent beating of white wings

Vanish—for all wild beauty death forsakes—

To leave the house to die among its things?

Nothing could match the era’s dazzling façade,

Nothing more lovely than the white Grecian portico,

Where, if there was a dream, did the dream go?

Where is the life lived here and what it made?

That when you ask, the smug descendants say,

“We lit a thousand candles here for Henry Clay.”

The answer is not war that always has intensified

A living dream.

But here the peacock cried.

IN TEXAS

In Texas the lid blew off the sky a long time ago

So there’s nothing to keep the wind from blowing

And it blows all the time. Everywhere is far to go

So there’s no hurry at all, and no reason for going.

In Texas there’s so much space words have a way

Of getting lost in the silence before they’re spoken

So people hang on a long time to what they have to say;

And when they say it the silence is not broken,

But it absorbs the words and slowly gives them

Over to miles of white-gold plains and grey-green hills,

And they are part of that silence that outlives them.

Nothing moves fast in Texas except the windmills

And the hawk that rises up with a clatter of wings.

(Nothing more startling here than sudden motion,

Everything is so still.) But the earth slowly swings

In time like a great swelling never-ending ocean,

And the houses that ride the tawny waves get smaller

As you get near them because you see them then

Under the whole sky, and the whole sky is so much taller

With the lid off than a million towers built by men.

After awhile you can only see what’s at horizon’s edge,

And you are stretched with looking so far instead of near,

So you jump, you are startled by a blown piece of sedge;

You feel wide-eyed and ruminative as a ponderous steer.

In Texas you look at America with a patient eye.

You want everything to be sure and slow and set in relation

To immense skies and earth that never ends. You wonder why

People must talk and strain so much about a nation

That lives in spaces vaster than a man’s dream and can go

Five hundred miles through wilderness, meeting only the hawk

And the dead rabbit in the road. What happens must be slow,

Must go deeper even than hand’s work or tongue’s talk,

Must rise out of the flesh like sweat after a hard day,

Must come slowly, in its own time, in its own way.

BOULDER DAM

Not in the cities, not among fabricated towers,

Not on the super-highways has the land been matched.

Beside the mountains, man’s invention cowers.

And in a country various and wild and beautiful

How cheap the new car and the lighted movie look.

We have been hourly aware of a failure to live,

Monotonous poverty of spirit and the lack of love.

But here among hills bare and desert-red,

A violent precipice, a dizzy white curve falls

Hundreds of feet through rock to the deep canyon-bed;

A beauty sheer and clean and without error,

It stands with the created sapphire lake behind it,

It stands, a work of man as noble as the hills,

And it is faith as well as water that it spills.

Not built on terror like the empty pyramid,

Not built to conquer but to illuminate a world:

It is the human answer to a human need,

Power in absolute control, freed as a gift,

A pure creative act, God when the world was born!

It proves that we have built for life and built for love

And when we all are dead, this dam will stand and give.

COLORADO MOUNTAINS

Plain grandeur escapes definition. You

Cannot speak about the mountains well.

About the clear plane, the sharp shadow

You cannot tell.

Mountains define you. You cannot define

Them. And all your looking serves to set

What you have learned of the stern line

Against an absolute.

The frail taut structure of a human face

Beside the sheer cliff drawn, all that you loved,

All that can stand in such a bare clear place

Is to be proved.

And love that is a landscape in the past

Becomes, like mountains, changeless. It is there.