The Lion and the Rose (7 page)

Now is detachment the supreme holy word

(Above all take no part nor risk your head);

Forgotten are Erasmus’ pilgrimages

By these who fabricate and love their cages—

Has truth then never buckled on a sword?

Never forget this when the talk is clever:

Wisdom must be born in the flesh or wither,

And sacred order has been always won

From chaos by some burning faithful one

Whose human bones have ached as if with fever

To bring you to these high triumphant places.

Forget the formulas, remember men.

Praise scholars, for their never-ending story

Is written out in fire and this is their glory.

Read faith as on a lover’s in their faces.

WHAT THE OLD MAN SAID

For Lugné-Poe, founder of the Oeuvre Theatre in Paris

At sixty-five said, “I fight every day.

My dear, nothing but death will stop

My uninterrupted élan in the play.”

Then wrote, “When I am forced to see

What happens to our old humanity,

All seems ignoble and I rage

To have been listed player on this stage.”

At sixty-five that anger conquered fear:

The old man raged, but he did not despair.

At sixty-seven then he laughed and said,

“My dear, how proud I am of all the haters

Who stand behind and wish that I were dead,”

Those who had tasted of his honesty,

Those usurers of mediocrity—

At sixty-seven he refused to praise

(And lost his job) their rotten little plays.

But when he told me how he shouted there,

The old man laughed, but he did not despair.

He said at seventy, “But we must work, my dear.

I see a certain look upon their faces.

Discouragement? Perhaps I dream it there.

The wicked times have put me back to school,

And I shall die a sensitive young fool.

The news is doing me to death at last.”

And then a note, “The evil eats me fast.

You must help men not to be slaves, my dear!”

(The old man died, but he did not despair.)

NOT ALWAYS THE QUIET WORD

No, not always the quiet word,

Sometimes scabbards must split

On the leaping fire of the sword,

A Cromwell break from it.

No, not always calm thought

And mind in contemplation,

But clarity, white-hot,

Swift’s savage indignation.

Not always the silent, strong,

Who means more than he states,

Sometimes the passionate song,

Fierce Dante, bitter Yeats.

Not always statesmen steadfast,

Ice-cool before their work,

Sometimes the fiery blast,

The eloquence of Burke.

No, not always calm lovers

Compassionate and wise,

But the world-shakers and movers

With anger in their eyes.

And not always peace-choosers,

Sometimes imperfect, brave,

Uncompromising fighters

Are given a world to save.

ROMAN HEAD

First Century A.D.

An empire closing in

Clamps round the virile head,

As if he wore a crown,

As if the cropped hair weighed.

An open world of roads

Once branched out from his hand,

Now broken colonnades,

The arch sucked up by sand.

From those intense blank eyes

The intellect looks out

On nineteen centuries

And reads its own defeat.

This is the mortal head,

The fiery gloom on shade,

The master mastered

By the world he made.

This is the Roman head,

Riddled with self-despair,

By power corrupted—

The spirit fled to air,

The brittle glory fled.

NAVIGATOR

This lazy prince of tennis balls and lutes,

Marvelous redhead who could eat and have his cake,

Collector of hot jazz, Japanese prints, rare books,

The charming winner who takes all for the game’s sake,

Is now disciplined, changed and wrung into a man.

For war’s sake, in six months, this can be done.

Now he is groomed and cared for like a fighting-cock,

His blood enriched, his athlete’s nerve refined

In crucibles of tension to be electric under shock,

His intellect composed for action and designed

To map a bomber’s passage to Berlin by stars,

Precision’s instrument that neither doubts nor fears.

This can be done in six months. Take a marvelous boy

And knead him into manhood for destruction’s joy.

This can be done in six months, but we never tried

Until we needed the lute-player’s sweet life-blood.

O the composed mind and the electric nerve

Were never trained like this to build, to love, to serve.

Look at him now and swear by every bomb he will release,

This shall be done. This shall be better done in peace!

UNLUCKY SOLDIER

This is my friend, the fair Mozartian boy,

Gangling and gay and sudden as a bee,

Music his difficult passion and his joy,

Princely in fire and in humility.

Before he knew the pattern of his will

Or recognized his own life, he was given

To the harsh will of war, impersonal;

For three years up and down was driven,

Used and misused, the grace ground down,

The body hardened and the spirit dulled

Until rebellion and despair were overthrown—

And yet not wounded or in danger, not yet killed.

For three years I have watched him grow

And sweeten, laughing his way through Hell,

This so uncelebrated, so inglorious, so

Unlucky soldier whom many have loved well

For princely fire, whose gifts were gifts of wonder

Not death—those meant for living

The visions and the dreams he must plough under,

The harvests stolen from him, but forgiving.

(Not wounded, not yet killed, not yet in danger.)

If, after all, enduring all, he lives to know his will,

Disarmed, he will appear a marvelous and potent stranger

To serve us well whom we have served so ill.

WHO WAKES

Detroit, June, 1943

Who wakes now who lay blind with sleep?

Who starts, bright-eyed with anger from his bed?

I do. I, the plain citizen. I cannot sleep.

I hold the torturing fire in my head.

I, an American, call the dead Negro’s name,

And in the hot dark of the city night

I walk the streets alone and sweat with shame.

Too late to rise, to raise the dead too late.

This is the harvest. The seeds sown long ago—

The careless word, sly thought, excusing glance.

I reap now everything I let pass, let go.

This is the harvest of my own indifference.

I, the plain citizen, have grown disorder

In my own world. It is not what I meant.

But dreams and images are potent and can murder.

I stand accused of them. I am not innocent.

Can I now plant imagination, honesty,

And love where violence and terror were unbound,

The images of hope, the dream’s responsibility?

Those who died here were murdered in my mind.

RETURN TO CHARTRES

We came to Chartres, riding the green plain,

The spear of hope, the incorruptible towers,

The great tree rooted in the heart of France

Blazing eternally with sacred flowers;

We came to Chartres, the house without a stain,

The mastery of passion by belief,

With all its aspiration held in balance;

We came to Chartres, the magic spear of grain,

The spear of wheat forever nourishing,

The never-wasted stalk, the ever blessing.

And there we meditated on our tragic age,

Split at the heart, flowering without a stem,

For we are barren men haunted by rage

Who cannot find our hope here though we came,

Now all the hope we have is human love:

Passion without belief destroys our love.

TO THE LIVING

I

Now we must kill or perish, desolate choice—

Indifference not hatred brought us to this place.

There was a time when charity still had a voice.

There was a time for love’s imaginative face

And healing touch, for the deep searching eyes

That may behold the miracles of grace.

We could have beaten down the dangerous lies

If we had helped the helpless in their lonely stand,

And made a real peace, peace where no one dies,

And never watched the hearts spilt out on sand,

The best and dearest, the innumerable lost,

Nor come too late, too late to understand.

Now we must pay the full, the fearful cost,

Now we must fight the war we could have won

Without becoming what we hated most.

Now we must kill or perish. It is done.

And we fight for ourselves with little grace;

Who sold out human lives, now spend our own.

But through destruction fight back to the place

Where in the end the pure and healing touch,

The searching eyes and love’s long hidden face,

Turning toward us in our self-made desolation,

May teach us all through suffering so much

What might have been learned through imagination.

II

Who is the refugee,

The homesick one,

Climbing the long stairs of exile

And always alone?

Who is the wanderer,

At peace nowhere,

The burning leaf before hot winds

Blown here and there?

Who is the sick stranger

Whose thirst no well

In all the world can slake,

Nor fever, cool?

Who is the poor beggar

Bound in a cart

To wander everlasting desert sand

And eat his heart?

That thirst, that hunger and that homesickness,

The lonely burning day and sleepless night,

When all seemed desert-waste and bitterness

To be escaped in flight—

That never was escape, nor rest, nor sleep

But only long pursuit and pain—

Who has not known it? Who so wholly blest

Such loneliness could be to him unknown?

Each is an exile from the whole. The agony

Of separation is the human agony.

From the four corners of the earth

How bring us home into humanity?

How bring us home, how bring us home at last,

Who bear the old divisions of the past,

The ancient hatreds and the ancient evils

Held in the heart as if a thousand devils?

How exorcize, how purify, how bless

This fearful universal loneliness?

III

How faint the horn sounds in the mountain passes

Where folded in the folds of memory

All the heroic helmets lie in summer grasses,

Who wore them vanished utterly.

How dry the blood on ancient cross and stone

Where folded in the folds of memory

The martyrs cry out where each fails alone

In his last faithful agony.

How fresh and clear the stains of human weeping

Where folded in the folds of memory

The millions who have died for us are sleeping

In our long tragic history.

IV

The need to kill what is unknown and strange

Whether it be a poem or an ancient race,

The fear of thought, fear of experience

That might demand some radical heart-change—

These are the mountains that hem a narrow place

Out of the generous plains of our inheritance:

Speak to the children of the world as whole,

Whole as the heart that can include it all,

And of the fear of thought as the first sin;

Tell them the revolution is within.

Open the mind, and the whole earth and sky

Are freed from fear to be explored and known.

Nothing so strange it is does not hold delight

Once it is seen with clear and naked eye.

The thinking man will never be alone—

He travels where he sits, his heart alight:

Speak to the children of a living Greece

As real as Texas, and the whole earth a place

Where everywhere men hope and work to be

More greatly human and responsible and free.

Tell them the deepest changes rise like rivers

From hearts of men long dead; tell them that we

Are borne now on the currents of their faith—

The saints and martyrs and all great believers,

As well at Rome with Paul as at Thermopylae:

Our freedom rises from the body of this death.

Tell them the rivers are rich to overflowing

And as we love our fraction of the past in growing

These floods of change are to be loved and cherished;

That we may live, millions of men have perished.

Give them their rich, their full inheritance:

Open the whole past and see the future plain—

The long treks across China, all the voyages.

Look deep and know these were not done by chance.

Look far enough ahead and see the fruits of pain,

And see the harvests of all pilgrimages:

Speak to the children now of revolution

Not as a violence, a terror, and a dissolution,

But as the long-held hope and the long dream of man,

The river in his heart and his most pure tradition.

THE TORTURED

Cried innocence, “mother, my thumbs, my thumbs!