The Lion and the Rose (5 page)

Play Beethoven’s great Emperor,

Play Monteverdi, Bach for her.

Hear trumpet Milton and the flutes of Marvell:

Triumph not grief is what they have to tell.

The mastery that comes from discipline,

The joy that springs from form

(Where fumbling and facility are sin)

This was her element, her power, her charm—

On luminous and stern foundations

Built her detached, creative meditations.

Now fling the arches high and far from grief,

The light-swung bridges of your work and days.

Live now with knowledge, with compassion, and with praise.

Wherever spirit triumphs is her faith designed,

“By this great light upon our mind.”

III

Now you blood-richness, brilliance of nerve,

Spring of the spirit, you all-human wonder,

Break out of all the houses and unlock the doors!

You who can turn to ash the body’s pain,

Now burn grief too, now turn all grief to praise!

The point of intersection of all time and space

Where the huge face of death meets the small human face,

Where all is lost and all forever found,

Where all is loosed and all is bound,

Where all is stricken and all healed,

Where all is opened and all sealed,

Where all is unity, all separation,

Pure metaphysics, pure sensation,

Where love is nowhere and is everywhere

As light as ash, as light as blessed air,

Gift to the living from the palm of dust,

Fill us with your tremendous gust!

Leap from the green gloom of the summer trees,

Leap from the grasses and the glittering seas,

O terrible, life-giving marvelous shock,

The source that jets up from the rigid rock,

You, Praise, break from our hearts and change all grief

Into the living rivers of belief!

POEM IN AUTUMN

Now over everything the autumn light is thrown

And every line is sharp, and every leaf is clear.

Now without density or weight the airy sun

Sits in the flaming boughs, an innocent fire,

That shines but does not burn nor wither.

The leaves, light-penetrated, change their essence,

Take on the gold transparence of the weather,

Are touched by death, then by light’s holy presence.

So we, first touched by death, were changed in essence,

As if grief grew transparent and turned to airy gold,

And we were given days of special radiance,

Light-brimmed, light-shaken and with love so filled

It seemed the heart-beat of the world was in our blood;

And when we stood together, love was everywhere,

And no exchange was needed if exchange we could

The blessedness of sunlight poised on air.

NOW VOYAGER

Now voyager, lay here your dazzled head.

Come back to earth from air, be nourishèd,

Not with that light on light, but with this bread.

Here close to earth be cherished, mortal heart,

Hold your way deep as roots push rocks apart

To bring the spurt of green up from the dark.

Where music thundered let the mind be still,

Where the will triumphed let there be no will,

What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

Here close to earth the deeper pulse is stirred,

Here where no wings rush and no sudden bird,

But only heart-beat upon beat is heard.

Here let the fiery burden be all spilled,

The passionate voice at last be calmed and stilled

And the long yearning of the blood fulfilled.

Now voyager, come home, come home to rest,

Here on the long-lost country of earth’s breast

Lay down the fiery vision and be blest, be blest.

MY SISTERS, O MY SISTERS

I

“Nous qui voulions poser, image ineffaceable

Comme un delta divin notre main sur le sable”

ANNA DE NOAILLES

Dorothy Wordsworth, dying, did not want to read,

“I am too busy with my own feelings,” she said.

And all women who have wanted to break out

Of the prison of consciousness to sing or shout

Are strange monsters who renounce the treasure

Of their silence for a curious devouring pleasure.

Dickinson, Rossetti, Sappho—they all know it,

Something is lost, strained, unforgiven in the poet.

She abdicates from life or like George Sand

Suffers from the mortality in an immortal hand,

Loves too much, spends a whole life to discover

She was born a good grandmother, not a good lover.

Too powerful for men: Madame de Stael. Too sensitive:

Madame de Sévigné, who burdened where she meant to give.

Delicate as that burden was and so supremely lovely,

It was too heavy for her daughter, much too heavy.

Only when she built inward in a fearful isolation

Did any one succeed or learn to fuse emotion

With thought. Only when she renounced did Emily

Begin in the fierce lonely light to learn to be.

Only in the extremity of spirit and the flesh

And in renouncing passion did Sappho come to bless.

Only in the farewells or in old age does sanity

Shine through the crimson stains of their mortality.

And now we who are writing women and strange monsters

Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,

Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands

More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.

To be through what we make more simply human,

To come to the deep place where poet becomes woman,

Where nothing has to be renounced or given over

In the pure light that shines out from the lover,

In the warm light that brings forth fruit and flower

And that great sanity, that sun, the feminine power.

II

Let us rejoice in

The full curve of breast,

The supple thigh

And all riches in

A woman’s keeping

For man’s comfort and rest

(Crimson and ivory)

For children’s nourishment

(Magic fruits and flowers).

But when they are sleeping,

The children, the men,

Fed by these powers,

We know what is meant

By the wise serpent,

By the gentle dove,

And remember then

How we wish to love.

Let us rejoice now

In these great powers

Which are ours alone.

And trust what we know:

First the green hand

That can open flowers

In the deathly bone,

And the magic breast

That can feed the child,

And is under a hand

A rose of fire in snow

So tender, so wild

All fires come to rest,

All lives can be blest—

So sighs the gentle dove,

Wily the serpent so,

Matched in a woman’s love.

III

Eve and Mary the mother are our stem;

All our centuries go back to them.

And delicate the balance lies

Between the passionate and wise:

Of man’s rib, one, and cleaves to him;

And one bears man and then frees him.

This double river has created us,

Always the re-discovered, always the cherished.

(But many fail in this. Many have perished).

Hell is the loss of balance when woman is destroyer.

Each of us has been there.

Each of us knows what the floods can do.

How many women mother their husbands

Out of all strength and secret
Virtu
;

How many women love an only son

As a lover loves, binding the free hands.

How many yield up their true power

Out of weakness, the moment of passion

Betrayed by years of confused living—

For it is surely a lifetime work,

This learning to be a woman.

Until at the end what is clear

Is the marvelous skill to make

Life grow in all its forms,

Is knowing where to ask, where to yield,

Where to sow, where to plough the field,

Where to kill the heart or let it live;

To be Eve, the giver of knowledge, the lover;

To be Mary, the shield, the healer and the mother.

The balance is eternal whatever we may wish;

The law can be broken but we cannot change

What is supremely beautiful and strange.

Where find the root? Where re-join the source?

The fertile feminine goddess, double river?

IV

We think of all the women hunting for themselves,

Turning and turning to each other with a driving

Need to learn to understand, to live in charity,

And above all to be used fully, to be giving

From wholeness, wholeness back to love’s deep clarity.

O, all the burning hearts of women unappeased

Shine like great stars, like flowers of fire,

As the sun goes and darkness opens all desire—

And we are with a fierce compassion seized.

How lost, how far from home, how parted from

The earth, my sisters, O my sisters, we have come.

For so long asked so little of ourselves and men,

And let the Furies have their way—our treasure,

The single antidote to all our world’s confusion,

A few gifts to the poor small god of pleasure.

The god of passion has gone back into the mountain,

Is sleeping in the dark, deep in the earth.

We have betrayed a million times the holy fountain,

The potent spirit who brings his life to birth,

The masculine and violent joy of pure creation—

And yielded up the sacred fires to sensation.

But we shall never come home to the earth

Until we bring the great god and his mirth

Back from the mountain, until we let this stranger

Plough deep into our hearts his joy and anger,

And we shall never find ourselves again

Until we ask men’s greatness back from men,

Until we make the fertile god our own,

And giving up our lives, receive his own.

LOVE POEMS

THE LADY AND THE UNICORN

The Cluny Tapestries

I am the unicorn and bow my head

You are the lady woven into history

And here forever we are bound in mystery

Our wine, Imagination, and our bread,

And I the unicorn who bows his head.

You are all interwoven in my history

And you and I have been most strangely wed

I am the unicorn and bow my head

And lay my wildness down upon your knee

You are the lady woven into history.

And here forever we are sweetly wed

With flowers and rabbits in the tapestry

You are the lady woven into history

Imagination is our bridal bed:

We lie ghostly upon it, no word said.

Among the flowers of the tapestry

I am the unicorn and by your bed

Come gently, gently to bow down my head,

Lay at your side this love, this mystery,

And call you lady of my tapestry.

I am the unicorn and bow my head

To one so sweetly lost, so strangely wed:

You sit forever under a small formal tree

Where I forever search your eyes to be

Rewarded with this shining of our tragedy

And know your beauty was not cast for me,

Know we are woven all in mystery,

The wound imagined where no one has bled,

My wild love chastened to this history

Where I before your eyes, bow down my head.

SPRING SONG

When I came here in the evening

Long long ago

The apple blossoms foamed

Under my window,

Stiff coral branches, rich and still,

So still and fair,

It seemed a holy presence floated

On green air.

And that night peace was with me

For I did not know

That I would wake to find those riches melted

All like snow,

All gone, and the whole orchard green

Instead of white,

My love, my love, the fruit already knotted

After a single night.

THE HARVEST

Earth opens to the eyes

As though never seen,

All new, all fresh surprise

Greener than green

Where crystal streams are flowing

Through velvet banks,

Grass under water glowing:

The roots give thanks.

Within the cottonwood

Leaves, water-bright,

Glitter as if rain shook

Down drops of light.

And our hearts tired

By the blaze within

See all that they desired

Fulfilled in green.

The cobalt mountains stand

Above all passing hours

And we are hand in hand

Like elements or flowers.

For after love comes birth:

All we have felt and said

Is now of air, of earth,

And love is harvested.

DEFINITION OF LOVE

Not so much terrible as pure,

So pure it is nothing. It is alone.

Not so much pure perhaps as round,

Round as a note empty and sure,

Not so much pure and round as There,

Stripped like the almond-stone,

The nerve of the leaf, the heart-beat

Which is life itself, beyond sense,

Beyond feeling, neither harsh nor sweet,

The attar of being, essence of essence,

Not so much terrible as pure.

SONG

When I imagine what to give you

It is always silence, silence that falls