by A. S. Byatt
Half sable serpent, half a mourning Queen
Crowned and thick-veiled. Then they cross themselves
And make their peace with Heaven’s blessed King
And with a cry of pain she vanishes,
Unable, so they say, to hear that Name,
Forever banished from the hope of Heaven.
The old nurse says, within the castle-keep
The innocent boys slept in each other’s arms
To keep away the chill from hearts and limbs.
And in the dead of night a slender hand
Would part the hangings, and lift sleepy forms
To curl and suck the mother’s milky breasts
As they had dreamed they did, and all the while
Warm tears in silence mingled with the milk
In dreaming mouths combining sweet and salt,
So that they smile for warmth, and weep for loss,
And waking, hope and fear to dream again.
So says the old nurse, and the boys grow strong.
Outside our small safe place flies Mystery.
We hear it howl adown the winds; we see
Its forces set great whirlpools on the spin
In the dark deeps, as a child sets a top
Idly in motion, whips it for a while
Then tires and lets it stagger. On grey walls
We see the indents of its viewless teeth.
We hear it snake beneath the forest floor
Weaving the lives and deaths of roots, the weft
And warp of pillar-boles and tracery
Of twigs and sighing sunkist canopies
Which sway and change, glow and decay and fall.
Inhuman Powers cross our little lives.
The whale’s warm milk runs beneath icy seas.
Electric currents run from eye to eye
And pole to pole, magnetic messages
From out our Beings, through them, and beyond.
The whelk’s foot grips; the waves pile fragments up
Smooth sands compacted, skull on shell on scrap
Of horny carapace on silex sparks
Sandstone and chalk and grit, and out of these
Sculpts dunes like dinosaurs and mammoth banks
And breaks them back to flying specks of stuff.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I read, writ in the ancient chronicle
By John of Arras (who wrote for his Lord
To please and to instruct), “King David said
The judgments of the Lord are like vast deeps
With neither wall nor bottom, where the soul
Spins in a place without foundation
Which comprehensively engulfs the mind
That cannot comprehend it.” The monk, John,
Humbly concludes the human soul should not
Use reason where it cannot stretch to work.
A reasonable man, says the good monk,
Must see that Aristotle told the truth
Who stated firmly that the world contained
Creatures invisible and visible
Both in their kind. He cited next St Paul
Who claimed the first Invisibles of the world
As witnesses to their Creator’s Power,
Beyond the scope of men’s inquiring mind
Save as revealed from time to time in Books
Writ by wise men, as guides to wandering wits.
And in the air, says the brave Monk, there fly
Things, Beings, Creatures, never seen by us
But very potent in their wandering world,
Crossing our heavy paths from time to time,
And such, he says, are faeries or Fates
Who Paracelsus said were Angels once
Now neither damn’d nor blessèd, simply tossed
Eternally between the solid earth
And Heav’n’s closed golden gate.…
Not good enough to save, spirits of air
Not evil neither, with no steadfast harm
In their intents, but simply volatile.
The Laws of Heaven run through the earth as poles
That twist and turn this Globe at His command
Or net (to change the metaphor) the skies
And seas and all the swaying, moving mass
In fine constraining meshes, beyond which
Matter slips not, and mind may never step
Save into vacant Horror and Despair
Forms of illusion only
What are they
Who haunt our dreams and weaken our desires
And turn us from the solid face of things?
Sisters of Horror, or Heav’n’s exiled queens
Reduced from spirit-power to fantasy?
The Angels of the Lord, from Heaven’s Gate
March helmeted in gold and silver ranks
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
As quick as thought between desire and deed.
They are the instruments of Law and Grace.
Then who are those who wander indirect
Those whose desires mount precipice of Air
As easy as say wink, or plunge again
For pleasure of the terror in the cleft
Between the dark brow of a mounting cloud
And plain sky’s opal ocean? Who are they
Whose soft hands cannot shift the fixèd chains
Of cause and law that bind the earth and sea
And ice and fire and flesh and blood and time?
When heavenly Eros lay at Psyche’s side,
Her envious sisters said, the light of day
Would show a monstrous serpent was her Lord.
When she transgressed and held the trembling flame
Over the bed, the drops of wax fell fast
On love in perfect human form, who rose
In burning anger from his place and fled.
But let the Power take a female form
And ’tis the Power is punished. All men shrink
From dire Medusa and her writhing locks.
Who weeps for Scylla in her cave of bones,
Thrashing her tail and howling for her fate
With yelping hound-mouths, though she once was fair,
Loved by the sea-god for her mystery
Daughter of Hecate, beautiful as Night?
Who weeps the fall of Hydra’s many heads?
The siren sings and sings, and virtuous men
Bind ears and eyes and sail resolved away
From all her pain that what she loves must die,
That her desire, though lovely in her song
Is mortal in her kiss to mortal men.
The feline Sphinx roamed free as air and smiled
In the dry desert at those foolish men
Who saw not that her crafted Riddle’s clue
Was merely Man, bare man, no Mystery,
But when they found it out they spilt her blood
For her presumption and her Monstrous shape.
Man named Himself and thus assumed the Power
Over his Questioner, till then his Fate—
After, his Slave and victim.
And what was she, the Fairy Melusine?
Were these her kin, Echidna’s gruesome brood,
Scaly devourers, or were those her kind
More kind, those rapid wanderers of the dark
Who in dreamlight, or twilight, or no light
Are lovely Mysteries and promise gifts—
Whiteladies, teasing dryads, shape-changers—
Like smiling clouds, or sparkling threads of streams
Bright monsters of the sea and of the sky
Who answer longing and who threaten not
But vanish in the light of rational day
Doomed by their own desire for human souls,
For settled hearths and fixèd human homes.
Shall I presume to tell the Fairy’s tale?
Medd
le with doom and magic in my song
Or venture out into the shadowland
Beyond the safe and solid? Shall I dare?
Help me Mnemosyne, thou Titaness,
Thou ancient one, daughter of Heaven and Earth,
Mother of Muses, who inhabit not
In flowery mount or crystal spring, but in
The dark and confin’d cavern of the skull—
O Memory, who holds the thread that links
My modern mind to those of ancient days
To the dark dreaming Origins of our race,
When visible and invisible alike
Lay quietly, O thou, the source of speech
Give me wise utterance and safe conduct
From hearthside storytelling into dark
Of outer air, and back again to sleep,
In Christian comfort, in a decent bed.
BOOK I
A draggled knight came riding o’er the moor.
Behind him fear, before him empty space.
His horse, besprent with blood, dispirited,
Came slowly on, and stumbled as he came,
Feeling the rider’s slackness, and the reins
Slack too, against his sweat-streaked neck. The day
Drew in, and on the moor small shadows stirred
And ate the heather-roots, and flowed in tongues
Of seal-skin soft and sly insidious shape
Between the hill’s clefts and the dark gill’s mouth
Whither, for lack of will, they two were drawn.
For all the moor, immense, characterless
Shrubby and shapeless, stretched about their feet
Off ring no point of hold, nor track to guide
Save witless wanderings of nibbling sheep.
Between the wild moor and the mother Sun
Is reciprocity of flash and frown.
When she is hid, the heather’s knotted mat
Of purple bell-heather and pinker ling
Lies in an unreflective sullen gloom,
A rough black coat, indifferently cast o’er
The peat and grit and flints, extending on
As far as eye can see, to the high riggs.
But when she smiles, a thousand thousand lights
Gleam out from sprig and floret or from where
The white sand on the crow-stones in the peat
Glitters in tracery ’neath amber pools
Of shining rain, and all the moor is live
Basking and smiling up, as She smiles down.
And after rain, live vapours rise and play
Curvet and eddy over the live ling,
Current and counter-current, like a sea
Or, as the shepherds say, like summer colts
At play above a meadow, or like geese
Who skim the air and water in their flight.
So uniform, so various, is the Moor.
But he rode on, nor looked to right nor left
All lustreless, his first fine fury gone
With which he fled the boar-hunt and the death—
Death at his hand, and death at random dealt
To Aymeri, his kinsman and his Lord.
Defensive stroke working an unkind Fate
On him most kind, most genial and most brave
Whom most he loved and most he wished to spare.
Before his weary eyes a veil of blood
Beat, and his brain beat with its motion
Despair and die, for what is left to do?
Between two boulders bald the horse stepped down
Into a narrow track within a cleft
Whose flanks were wind-blown, clothed with juniper,
Bilberry and stunted thorn-trees. Water oozed
Out of the clammy rock-face, water brown
With juice of peat, and black with powdered soot
From ancient swidden. Neath the heavy hoofs
Broke little trains of stones which jounced a while
And clattered down into the brook beneath.
The stone struck chill. The cleft wound in and down.
How long he was descending, he knew not.
But in his blood-grief and extreme fatigue
He slowly knew that he had heard the sound