Part 3

Worm-eaten pages, clasped in old brown vellum, shrunk From over-handling, by some anxious monk. Or Virgin's Hours, bright with gold and graven With flowers, and rare birds, and all the Saints of Heaven, And Noah's ark stuck on Ararat, when all the world had sunk.

They soothe us like a song, heard in a garden, sung By youthful minstrels, on the moonlight flung In cadences and falls, to ease a queen, Widowed and childless, cowering in a screen Of myrtles, whose life hangs with all its threads unstrung.

A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.

They have watered the street, It shines in the glare of lamps, Cold, white lamps, And lies Like a slow-moving river, Barred with silver and black. Cabs go down it, One, And then another. Between them I hear the shuffling of feet. Tramps doze on the window-ledges, Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks. The city is squalid and sinister, With the silver-barred street in the midst, Slow-moving, A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window, The moon cuts, Clear and round, Through the plum-coloured night. She cannot light the city; It is too bright. It has white lamps, And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the moon. She is thin and lustreless, But I love her. I know the moon, And this is an alien city.

Astigmatism

To Ezra Pound

With much friendship and admiration and some differences of opinion

The Poet took his walking-stick Of fine and polished ebony. Set in the close-grained wood Were quaint devices; Patterns in ambers, And in the clouded green of jades. The top was of smooth, yellow ivory, And a tassel of tarnished gold Hung by a faded cord from a hole Pierced in the hard wood, Circled with silver. For years the Poet had wrought upon this cane. His wealth had gone to enrich it, His experiences to pattern it, His labour to fashion and burnish it. To him it was perfect, A work of art and a weapon, A delight and a defence. The Poet took his walking-stick And walked abroad.

Peace be with you, Brother.

The Poet came to a meadow. Sifted through the grass were daisies, Open-mouthed, wondering, they gazed at the sun. The Poet struck them with his cane. The little heads flew off, and they lay Dying, open-mouthed and wondering, On the hard ground. "They are useless. They are not roses," said the Poet.

Peace be with you, Brother. Go your ways.

The Poet came to a stream. Purple and blue flags waded in the water; In among them hopped the speckled frogs; The wind slid through them, rustling. The Poet lifted his cane, And the iris heads fell into the water. They floated away, torn and drowning. "Wretched flowers," said the Poet, "They are not roses."

Peace be with you, Brother. It is your affair.

The Poet came to a garden. Dahlias ripened against a wall, Gillyflowers stood up bravely for all their short stature, And a trumpet-vine covered an arbour With the red and gold of its blossoms. Red and gold like the brass notes of trumpets. The Poet knocked off the stiff heads of the dahlias, And his cane lopped the gillyflowers at the ground. Then he severed the trumpet-blossoms from their stems. Red and gold they lay scattered, Red and gold, as on a battle field; Red and gold, prone and dying. "They were not roses," said the Poet.

Peace be with you, Brother. But behind you is destruction, and waste places.

The Poet came home at evening, And in the candle-light He wiped and polished his cane. The orange candle flame leaped in the yellow ambers, And made the jades undulate like green pools. It played along the bright ebony, And glowed in the top of cream-coloured ivory. But these things were dead, Only the candle-light made them seem to move. "It is a pity there were no roses," said the Poet.

Peace be with you, Brother. You have chosen your part.

The Coal Picker

He perches in the slime, inert, Bedaubed with iridescent dirt. The oil upon the puddles dries To colours like a peacock's eyes, And half-submerged tomato-cans Shine scaly, as leviathans Oozily crawling through the mud. The ground is here and there bestud With lumps of only part-burned coal. His duty is to glean the whole, To pick them from the filth, each one, To hoard them for the hidden sun Which glows within each fiery core And waits to be made free once more. Their sharp and glistening edges cut His stiffened fingers. Through the smut Gleam red the wounds which will not shut. Wet through and shivering he kneels And digs the slippery coals; like eels They slide about. His force all spent, He counts his small accomplishment. A half-a-dozen clinker-coals Which still have fire in their souls. Fire! And in his thought there burns The topaz fire of votive urns. He sees it fling from hill to hill, And still consumed, is burning still. Higher and higher leaps the flame, The smoke an ever-shifting frame. He sees a Spanish Castle old, With silver steps and paths of gold. From myrtle bowers comes the plash Of fountains, and the emerald flash Of parrots in the orange trees, Whose blossoms pasture humming bees. He knows he feeds the urns whose smoke Bears visions, that his master-stroke Is out of dirt and misery To light the fire of poesy. He sees the glory, yet he knows That others cannot see his shows. To them his smoke is sightless, black, His votive vessels but a pack Of old discarded shards, his fire A peddler's; still to him the pyre Is incensed, an enduring goal! He sighs and grubs another coal.

Storm-Racked

How should I sing when buffeting salt waves And stung with bitter surges, in whose might I toss, a cockleshell? The dreadful night Marshals its undefeated dark and raves In brutal madness, reeling over graves Of vanquished men, long-sunken out of sight, Sent wailing down to glut the ghoulish sprite Who haunts foul seaweed forests and their caves. No parting cloud reveals a watery star, My cries are washed away upon the wind, My cramped and blistering hands can find no spar, My eyes with hope o'erstrained, are growing blind. But painted on the sky great visions burn, My voice, oblation from a shattered urn!

Convalescence

From out the dragging vastness of the sea, Wave-fettered, bound in sinuous, seaweed strands, He toils toward the rounding beach, and stands One moment, white and dripping, silently, Cut like a cameo in lazuli, Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands Prone in the jeering water, and his hands Clutch for support where no support can be. So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch, He gains upon the shore, where poppies glow And sandflies dance their little lives away. The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch The weeds about him, but the land-winds blow, And in the sky there blooms the sun of May.

Patience

Be patient with you? When the stooping sky Leans down upon the hills And tenderly, as one who soothing stills An anguish, gathers earth to lie Embraced and girdled. Do the sun-filled men Feel patience then?

Be patient with you? When the snow-girt earth Cracks to let through a spurt Of sudden green, and from the muddy dirt A snowdrop leaps, how mark its worth To eyes frost-hardened, and do weary men Feel patience then?