The Lion and the Rose (4 page)

I believe we shall meet again and show each other

These curious marvels, the stone and the blue feather;

And we shall meet again when your own children are

Taught what they will not know for many a year.

PLACE OF LEARNING

Heavy, heavy the summer and its gloom,

The place, a place of learning, the difficult strange place,

And for what reason and from how far did you come,

To find the desolation and the thin soil,

To find the great heat and the sudden rain,

To listen for the long cry of the through train?

The time, a time of teaching, a curious time.

The birds alone made welcome in the morning sun

And all else strange. But this familiar, this well known,

This, in a sense, always the world where one moves

Opening the doors, opening the doors to push through alone,

And it is a way of many isolated deepening loves.

This we have known. It has been like this before.

The place of learning. The fear and trembling. The final opening of a door.

But here in the place of learning, in the time of teaching,

To find also, and surely not by accident,

Among the gifts of trees, of birds, the various gifts:

Coolness after long heat, a lightening sky after

Much heaviness, also to find—

The open heart, detached and open,

So feeling it has become impersonal as sunlight,

To find this curious one, creative and aloof:

From how far and for what reason did you come,

Stranger with a fire in your head, to this deep kind of welcome?

So what you gave was given and what you taught was learned,

Striking rock for water and the water falling from air,

Opening a door to find someone in the room, already there.

THE WORK OF HAPPINESS

NEW YEAR WISHES

May these delights be yours in the new year:

Above the pressure of chaotic fear,

Below the pressure of chaotic love—

An inward order set below, above.

Anxiety and passion both are sins

But pure creation is where joy begins.

But pure creation is where springs delight

Winged at birth and fully armed for flight,

The phoenix of the mind, who from despair,

Leaps to the radiant margins of the air:

These be your joys by the new year bestowed,

To make your raiment of celestial cloud.

Run down the forest-gamut of the notes to seize

(But never catch him) Mozart in the trees,

The prodigal, the flute-bird tossing songs

Into the timeless leaves in shining throngs.

To keep the book marked to the Rousseau-page

Where lies The Sleeping Gipsy’s entranced image,

His lute beside him, while the awed lion creeps

To sniff the marble quiet of this man who sleeps.

To keep another open so that Sabrina’s pool

May yield her up when the wild heart is cool,

And from the airy caverns of her wave,

That innocent, Imagination, rise and save.

This, the immaculate and ordered joy

Of pure creation, no trouble can destroy.

It is as nothing in the world can be

Absolved from change, the only certainty,

“The bracelet of bright hair about the bone”

That makes a living lover of the skeleton,

The timeless life, the fiery star that swings

In an eternal night and there forever sings.

DEFINITION

Match strictness to violence

Passion to formality

Before you learn the tense

Lesson life discovers

And your art imposes

You strange airy lovers

Imagination-driven

But held in the stern net

Difficult mind-woven

That you must suffer still

Till all that you might say

Is mastered by the will

To be words in a song

And all that you might feel

Translated to an image

Not real and more than real.

SONG

No, I will never forget you and your great eyes,

O animal and power.

You will be stalking

The wood where I am walking.

You will lie asleep

In the places where I weep,

And you will wake and move

In the first hour of love,

And in the second hour

Love flee before your power.

No, I will never forget you and your great eyes

Angel and challenger.

You will be there

Dressed in your wild hair

Angel and animal

Wherever I may dwell,

Wherever I may sleep

You have the dreams to keep.

Walking in the still landscape by the rock and the bone,

You will be beside me when I am most alone.

THE WORK OF HAPPINESS

I thought of happiness, how it is woven

Out of the silence in the empty house each day

And how it is not sudden and it is not given

But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.

No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark

Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.

No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,

But the tree is lifted by this inward work

And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours

And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:

The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,

White curtains softly and continually blown

As the free air moves quietly about the room;

A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall—

These are the dear familiar gods of home,

And here the work of faith can best be done,

The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,

The timeless sense of time when furniture

Has stood a life’s span in a single place,

And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir

The shining leaves of present happiness.

No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,

But where people have lived in inwardness

The air is charged with blessing and does bless;

Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

AFTER A TRAIN JOURNEY

My eyes are full of rivers and trees tonight,

The clear waters sprung in the green,

The swan’s neck flashing in sunlight,

The trees laced dark, the tiny unknown flowers,

Skies never still, shining and darkening the hours.

How can I tell you all that I have been?

My thoughts are rooted with the trees,

My thoughts flow with the stream.

They flow and are arrested as a frieze.

How can I answer now or tell my dream,

How tell you what is far and what is near?

Only that river, tree and swan are here.

Even at the slow rising of the full moon,

That delicate disturber of the soul,

I am so drenched in rivers and in trees,

I cannot speak. I have nothing to tell,

Except that I must learn of this pure solitude

All that I am and might be, root and bone,

Flowing and still and beautiful and good,

Now I am almost earth and almost whole.

NIGHT STORM

We watched the sky torn by the terrible light,

Bright presences whose jagged swords lash out

While their feet thunder on the stairs of cloud,

The flash of wings where light and darkness crowd.

We watched it all and, trembling, thought of Blake,

For whom these powers were angels and did speak.

The wings rushed past. The clouds were overthrown,

We lay there where the naked light leapt down,

Exposed to God’s impersonal and distant eyes

That gazed on us and on the Pleiades.

And then against your heart I leaned my fear

And heard it beat and knew that God was near:

The love that binds the stars’ sweet influence,

Heart-beat and thunder in a single Presence.

The angels did not speak a single word

And yet we were transfixed by what we heard.

O WHO CAN TELL?

What is experience, O who can tell?

Is it the senses holding the real world

To the heart’s ear as hands hold up a shell

To listen to the wave furled and unfurled?

What is it? Mind’s invention, human treasure,

An alchemy that plucks out joy from suffering,

Finds the hard stone at the core of pleasure,

Gently withdraws from guilt its waspish sting?

Is it the image, eyelid-flicker snapped

When lovers in suspension in the air

Know in one glance an island-world is mapped

Which each will secretly develop later?

The word is “later” when the senses yield

The meditative heart their curious plunder.

The inference is silence, where, distilled,

The wave unfurls and falls, translated wonder.

THE CLAVICHORD

She keeps her clavichord

As others keep delight, too light

To breathe, the secret word

No lover ever heard

Where the pure spirit lives

And garlands weaves.

To make the pure notes sigh

(Not of a human grief, too brief)

A sigh of such fragility

Her fingers’ sweet agility

Must hold the horizontal line

In the stern power of design.

The secret breathed within

And never spoken, woken

By music; the garlands in

Her hands no one has seen.

She wreathes the air with green

And weaves the stillness in.

SONG

Now let us honor with violin and flute

A woman set so deeply in devotion

That three times blasted to the root

Still she grew green and poured strength out.

Still she stood fair, providing the cool shade,

Compassion, the thousand leaves of mercy,

The cherishing green hope. Still like a tree she stood,

Clear comfort in the town and all the neighborhood.

Pure as the tree is pure, young

As the tree forever young, magnanimous

And natural, sweetly serving: for her the song,

For her the flute sound and the violin be strung.

For her all love, all praise,

All honor, as for trees

In the hot summer days.

THE WHITE-HAIRED MAN

For Richard Cabot

This man sowed faith wherever he moved.

It was in his hand when he held yours at meeting,

Never so called out of yourself, never so loved

Were you or anyone as by this man in greeting.

For he kept nothing of the thirsting flood.

It poured through him unstinted like a river,

A quickening essence transfused through the blood,

Afterwards strength was in you, he the giver.

For this man, each was given holiness in trust,

Each with a secret gift and none the same,

The gift of healing, healing because you must,

Because healing was in you in God’s name.

Never doubt. Never find it out too late,

But now flower and bear fruit in human meeting,

Love not transcending the person but incarnate

As in his own hand given you in greeting.

IN THAT DEEP WOOD

What forests have you known,

How deep within the dark groves gone

And by what paths, alone?

People with green-drenched eyes

And silver casques of hair, what is

The region of your mysteries?

How the first passage to that wood?

Under what avenues of beeches stood

Where silence poured itself into your blood?

That wilderness is always where we meet

And a cool shadow falls across your feet

As if the air were boughs over the street.

Although the city bells are loudly clanging

Defeat and terror, although doom is ringing,

In that dark wood the silences are singing,

In that deep wood a green and airy light

Preserves from time, from change, from war, from night

The wild and secret powers of delight.

IN MEMORIAM

I

“Veglio, fenso, ardo, piange” —P
ETRARCH

Think, weep, love, O watch

This casket that no keys unlatch

And may your eyes once locked in her

Gently release their prisoner.

Watch, love, weep, O think

Till it is thought not tears you drink

And thought can keep all pain apart

From her dissolved and open heart.

Love, watch, think, O weep

For her no love nor watch could keep

And may your tears be the release

Of what kept you not her from peace.

Weep, think, watch, O love

Her who lies here and cannot move

And may your love rest lightly on

Her quiet consummation.

II

Only the purest voices,

The formal, the most disciplined,

Those that spring fully armed

From the dark caverns of the mind

Can stand beside her name,

Bright crystal, not bright flame.

And when those inward rivers rise

And flood your outward-looking eyes,

Wring the essential oils from pain:

Go back to Mozart once again,