The Bird-Catcher

by Martin Armstrong

  Grouped about lamps and lanterns, and they pass

  The wine-flask, the brown loaf and honeyed figs

  And marbled mortadella and pale cheese.

  Then someone tunes a fiddle and scratches jigs

  Or softly from the darkness of the trees

  Jingles a mandoline, so sad, so faint,

  It sounds as though dead fingers touched the strings:

  And laughter comes in gusts and through the quaint

  Dark-huddled groups the yellow lamplight flings

  Brightness across the corner of a shawl

  Or fires a hand or gilds a laughing face

  Or, touching hidden boughs, reveals a fall

  Of emerald leaves with shadows frail as lace.

  Then lamps go out and laughter dies and each

  Creeps to his bed, and moonlight fills the square

  And silence, broken by the lone owl’s screech,

  While all lie dreaming of to-morrow’s fair

  Till the delicious coolness of early dawning

  Sharpens the air and all is fresh and gleaming,

  And a chill fragrance steals beneath the awning

  Of dewy boughs and stirs them from their dreaming.

  II

  Before the Battle

  Here on the blind verge of infinity

  We live and move like moles. Our crumbling trench

  Gapes like a long wound in the sodden clay.

  The land is dead. No voice, no living thing,

  No happy green of leaves tells that the spring

  Wakes in the world behind us. Empty gloom

  Fills the cold interspace of earth and sky.

  The sky is waterlogged and the drenched earth

  Rots, and the whining sorrow of slow shells

  Flies overhead. But memory like the rose

  Wakes and puts forth her bright and odorous blooms

  And builds green hanging gardens in the heart.

  Once, in another life in other places,

  Where a slow river coiled through broad green spaces

  And sunlight filled the long grass of the meadows

  And moving water flashed from shine to shadows

  Of old green-feathered willows, bent in ranks

  Along sun-speckled banks,—

  Lovely remembered things now gone forever;

  I saw young men run naked by the river,

  Thirty young soldiers. Where the field-path goes,

  Their boots and shirts and khaki lay in rows.

  With feet among the long warm grass stood one

  Like ivory in the sun,

  And in the water, white upon the shade

  That hung beneath the shore,

  His long reflexion like a slow flag swayed

  And at the trembling of the water frayed

  Into a hundred shreds, then joined once more.

  One, where the river, when the willows end,

  Breaks from its calm to swirl about a bend,

  Strong swimmer he, wrestled against the race

  Of the full stream. I saw his laughing face

  Framed by his upcurved arm. Another, slim,

  Hands above head, stood braced upon the brim,

  Then dived, a brother of the curved new moon,

  And came up streaming soon

  Ten feet beyond, brown shoulders shining wet

  And comic face and hair washed sleek as jet.

  Out on the further bank another fellow

  Climbed stealthily into a leaning willow

  And perched leaf-shrouded, crooning like a dove;

  Till from the pool below a voice was heard:

  “’Ere, Bert! Where’s Bert?” and Bert sang out above:

  “Up ’ere, old son, changed to a bloody bird!”

  And dived through leaves and shattered through the cool

  Clear watery mirror, and all across the pool

  Slow winking circles opened wide, till he

  Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.

  Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.

  Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere

  Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows

  Beat the shores, and the hanging boughs of willows

  Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,

  A bugle sounded, and their happy din

  Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline

  By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,

  Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright

  With bodies swarming up out of the stream.

  From the water and the boughs they came in sight:

  Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.

  Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.

  They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.

  One, stepping to the water, carefully

  Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:

  One sat with updrawn knee,

  Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.

  And gradually the bright and flashing crowd

  Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud

  Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.

  The ranks fell in: no sound, no movement stirred.

  The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:

  The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,

  Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream

  And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:

  Only the trodden meadow-grass reported

  Where all that gay humanity had sported.

  So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how

  Many of those smart boys no longer now

  Cast running shadows on the grass or make

  White tents with laughter shake,

  But lie in narrow chambers underground,

  Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound

  Of laughter. Round my post on every hand

  Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land

  Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost

  In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,

  Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed

  By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.

  The rainy evening fades. A rainy night

  Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay

  Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,

  All broken sounds and movements of the day,

  To emptiness and listlessness, a grey

  Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise

  Of hearts intent with fearful expectation

  And secret preparation,

  Silence that is not peace but bated breath,

  A listening for death,

  The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.

  O give us one more day of sun and leaves,

  The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,

  And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves

  The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,

  Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)

  We climb the trench and cross the wire and start,

  We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart

  Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.

  Immortality

  When on the sluggish tide of time

  The immortal moment comes

  Whose bugle-summons cleaves with gleaming edge

  Flesh and all stuff of the material world,

  The soldier-soul, with that swift discipline

  Wherewith keen life answers the heart’s desire,

  Leaps on the deed as tiger leaps on fawn,

  As powder answers fire.

  Soul is the perfect athlete running free

  Among the clear winds of reality;

  For whom dim speculation and the thought

  That measured, weighed, and sought

  In worlds
unreal the cloudy paradises

  And comfortable prizes

  For loveless rules obeyed, are less than nought.

  The eternal moment being his vital air,

  He cannot ask nor care

  Whether his burning deed shall sow the seeds

  Of other life and deeds,

  Or if his being, ardent, pure, intact,

  Die on the summit of the immortal act.

  Bugles

  Mournful and clear and golden on the dusk

  The sudden fire of bugles. Fervid flights

  Of burning wings flash up from the dark hill

  Where like a growth of giant lilies glow

  The lighted tents. That piercing music rouses

  The slumbrous memory. Forests of the past

  Answer those fervid notes with fainter notes

  Sepulchral, far, whose clear reveille shakes

  The dark unfretted waters of the mind

  Till all the surface quivers with keen pain

  And depth to depth the searching trouble stirs

  Till all that watery world

  Thrills with new life that urges to the top

  Layers of dim memory hidden long from light,

  And years long dead, victories, endurances,

  And terrible happenings live again. Again

  In rainswept darkness down the broken roads

  The drenched and sweating troops swarm towards the line,

  Stumbling with burdened backs and burdened hearts

  Into their new ordeal: on and on

  Through tunnels of the blind and timeless night,

  By wallowing lorries thrust into the ditch

  And pulsing tractors hauling monstrous guns,

  Or in cold rain interminably impeded

  By some unknown obstruction miles ahead:

  Through fields that stink of carnage, yawn with holes

  Full of pale stagnant water; thicket-snares

  Of sharp-fanged wire, through roar of murderous shells

  And gas and blood and flame, till the shocked mind

  Flares up in terror and the memory dies

  In tumult and blown smoke. Then slowly rise

  The pale forgotten faces of the dead,

  Cast off the rust of Time, the mould of Earth,

  And speak again and laugh and sing gay songs

  And eat and drink in warm light of the sun

  In the good fellowship of adventurous souls

  Who have purged their hearts of fear. Too happy vision,

  Vainly denying death and the iron fact

  For those poor slaves of clay

  And us sad children of mortality.

  For the buglers take the bugles from their lips

  And Time and Death return with the failing light

  To numb the leaves and blind the lake’s clear eyes

  And shroud the water with a film of frost.

  And the heart takes up its sure mechanic beat

  And the dulled eyesight shrinks

  To outward things and the narrow pen of Space.

  Layer under layer, sluggish as falling snow,

  The settling sediment of memory sinks

  Till the mind is tranquil as a block of ice.

  Epitaph

  These are the unthrifty souls

  Who watered dusty streets with wine;

  Gathered pearls from Indian shoals

  And cast them royally to swine;

  Their most precious love who strowed

  To be trampled by the crowd;

  Freely broached their hearts’ red blood

  To dye the garments of the proud;

  Who have sung away their years

  To soothe the perjurer and the thief;

  Poured for the heartless, healing tears;

  Fed the tyrant with their grief;

  Paid the price they never owed;

  Prayed to gods who claim no prayer;

  Climbed the high encumbered road

  Never asking why or where.

  Man Seeks to Cage Delight

  Man seeks to cage delight

  In vain, not seeing

  That her strong-pinioned flight

  Is all her being,

  And sets about to frame

  Dead fantasies—

  Eternity, Infinity—to tame

  The ecstasy that flies;

  And vexed by bonds of Space,

  By veils of Time,

  He dreams a special grace,

  A power sublime,

  In these abstractions, vain

  Unbodied signs,

  Frail shadows of the ecstasy and pain

  With which Orion shines,

  With which the rose unwinds

  Each scented fold,

  With which man grows and finds

  The note of gold

  Hid in the heart of laughter,

  Heart of sighs,

  In measured golden music flying after

  The golden voice that flies,

  In love from marble wrought,

  In love that chimes

  Over clear-ringing thought

  And well-tuned rhymes,

  In love become a fact

  Keen, swift, and fell,

  When the whole self leaps forward to the act

  Clean as the whistling shell.

  For when the body and mind,

  Fused in one fire,

  Leap, like tiger on hind,

  On the one desire,

  Then the careful thoughts and schemes

  Of barren years

  Go down into the pit of ruined dreams

  And crumbling hopes and fears.

  For to be single, sure,

  In one swift flash,

  Pure flame or diamond pure;

  To slough the ash

  Of things burnt out; to gain

  The fountain’s powers

  Gathered in little compass to attain

  Its crown of glittering showers;

  This is the eternal, this

  The infinite,

  The gods’ immortal kiss

  Set warm and bright

  On heroes’ brows. In these brief moments’ span

  Shall man outlive the thousand centuries

  Of the blind life of man.

  Therefore when I am sunk

  To earth again

  And thirsty earth has drunk

  My joy and pain,

  I shall not know or need

  Pity or praise

  Or thanks or love from you, the human seed

  Sprung out of later days:

  For on the burning crest

  Of great extremes

  Where the soul meets breast to breast

  Its highest dreams,

  Safe from stern Fate’s decrees

  Irrevocably

  I have possessed and savoured to the lees

  My own eternity.

  To Hate

  Come, holy Spirit, pentecostal flame.

  Out of the deep we cry to thee. The shame

  Of feeble virtues, mild complacencies

  Consumes our bodies like a foul disease.

  Eat us as acid eats, burn us with fire,

  Till every timid hope and pale desire,

  All fond ideals, misty hopes that fly

  Beyond the frontiers of reality,

  Crumble to ash and leave us clean as light,

  Essential strength, pure shapes of granite bright

  Set up for no man’s worship, no man’s pleasure,

  But fashioned by the slow, aeonian leisure

  Of storms and blowing sands. Of thee is born

  All power, all bravery, and the sharp-eyed scorn

  That sees beneath bright gawds to the bare bone

  Of naked Truth’s relentless skeleton.

  Save, lest we perish unrepentent, sped

  To our last count without thy lance and shield,

  Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,

  With all our small perfections on our head.<
br />
  III

  To Messaline

  When you in death shall lie

  And coldly across the low, deep-windowed room,

  Where table, chair, and bed emerge from gloom,

  Light from a pallid sky

  Shall fall on the quiet hair and large white brow

  And gleam along the sharp edge of the nose

  Austere, ascetic now;

  And night’s dim water, as it backward flows,

  Shall leave small pools of gloom

  In the waxen hollow of each sunken eye,

  Round the drawn mouth where the cheeks have fallen in,

  And where the throat drops from the jutting chin;

  And under the cold sheet

  The trunk shall stiffen and the stretched limbs pine,

  Lapsing in one continuous hollow line

  From the peaked face down to the long gaunt feet;

  Then, Messaline, O most unhappy one,

  That longing for the unattainable

  That shakes your body like a vibrant bell,

  Consumes it on the sacrificial pyre

  Of unassuaged desire,

  Shall lose its hold. And you, poor wandered nun,

  Thwarted idealist, at last shall know

  Repose; pure, cold repose. For you shall go

  Through death, corruption, to nonentity

  Of small, clean dust; and parching winds shall blow

  That senselesss dust far out upon the sea,

  And all of you be drowned most utterly

  In each small mote descending through profound

  Blind gulfs of cold green water, far from sound

  And touch and every sense that wove the mesh

  That held your struggling spirit in the flesh.

  Puppets

  We are the bloodless echoes of the past,

  Blown between vast and vast:

  Miserable automata, we check

  Each impulse at the beck

  Of dead, forbidding hands. Dancing, we tread

  The footsteps of the dead,

  And by their laws make love; and when we sing,

  Dead fingers pluck the string

  And twist our music to a stale old song;