Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg
Page 8
How can there be Spring?
5 I see the pink blossoms
That slept for a year,
But who could have woke them
While you were not near?
Birds sing to the blossoms,
10 Blind, dreaming your pink;
These blush to the songsters,
Your music they think.
So well had you taught them
To look and to sing,
15 Your bloom and your music,
The ways of the Spring.
ON A LADY SINGING
She bade us listen to the singing lark
In tones far sweeter than its own.
For fear that she should cease and leave us dark
We built the bird a feigned throne,
Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways
From sceptred hands of starred humility.
Praising herself the more in giving praise
To music less than she.
1913
AS A SWORD IN THE SUN
As a sword in the sun —
A glory calling a glory —
Our eyes seeing it run
Capture its gleam for our story.
Singer, marvellous gleam
Dancing in splendid light,
Here you have brought us our dream —
Ah! but its stay is its flight.
AT SEA-POINT
Let the earth crumble away,
The heavens fade like a breath,
The sea go up in a cloud,
And its hills be given to death.
5 For the roots of the earth are old,
And the pillars of heaven are tired.
The hands that the sea enfold
Have seen a new desired.
All things upon my sense
10 Are wasted spaces dull,
Since one shape passed like a song
Let God all things annul.
A lie with its heart hidden
Is that cruel wall of air
15 That held her there unbidden,
Who comes not at my prayer.
Gone who yet never came.
There is the breathing sea,
And the shining skies are the same,
20 But they lie — they lie to me.
For she stood with the sea below,
Between the sky and the sea,
She flew ere my soul was aware,
But left this thirst in me.
1914
O HEART, HOME OF HIGH PURPOSES
O heart, home of high purposes,
O hand with craft and skill,
Say, why this meagre dalliance
To do such greatness ill?
5 Marshal the flame-winged legions, yours, —
The thunder and the beauty;
Sweeten these sunsoiled days of ours,
We need your wizard duty.
Our parched lips yearn for music yet.
10 Find us some gate in air
To leave our world-stained lives behind,
And live a life more fair.
The vagrant clouds are alive with light
When the sun shines and sings,
15 When the wind blows they race in flight
So happy in their wings.
Help us, the helpless, breathe thy breath,
Show us new flowers, new ways to live,
Thy glory thaw our lips of death,
20 To you your feel of power we’ll give.
1914
OF ANY OLD MAN
Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness
With alien uproar and rude jolly cries,
Which satyr-like to a mild maiden’s pride
Ripens not wisdom, but a large recoil.
Give them their withered peace, their trial grave,
Their past youth’s three-scored shadowy effigy.
Mock them not with your ripened turbulence,
Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath,
While edging your boisterous thunders shivers one word,
Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth.
The feigned ramparts of bleak ignorance.
‘Experience’ — crown of naked majesties,
That tells us nought we know not — but confirms.
O think! you reverend, shadowy, austere,
Your Christ’s youth was not ended when he died.
1914
INVISIBLE ANCIENT ENEMY OF MINE
Invisible ancient enemy of mine
My house’s foe
To rich my pride with wrongful suffering
Your vengeful gain
5 Coward and striker in the pit lined dark
Lie to my friends
Feed the world’s jealousy and pamper woe.
When I had bowed
I felt your smile, when my large spirit groaned
10 And hid its fire
Because another spirit leaned on it,
I knew you near.
O that the tortured spirit could amass
All the world’s pains,
15 How I would cheat you, leaving none for life,
You would recount
All you have piled on me, self-tortured count
Through all eternity.
1914
AT NIGHT
Crazed shadow from no golden body
That I can see, embraces me warm;
All is purple and closed
Round by night’s arm.
5 A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices,
Wild lost voices of shadows white.
See the long houses lean
To the weird flight.
Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time
10 (Because the sun spreads wide like a tree
With no good fruit for them)
Thrill secrecy.
Pale horses ride before the morning
The secret roots of the sun to tread,
15 With hoofs shod with venom
And ageless dread,
To breathe on burning emerald grasses,
And opalescent dews of the day,
And poison at the core
20 What smiles may stray.
1914
SUBJECTIVITY
At my eyes’ anchoring levels
The pigmy skies foam over
The flat earth my senses see;
A vapour my lips might stir —
5 The heat of my breath might wither.
Strong eyes unfed, not baffled.
Yon bright and moving vapour
In a moment fades.
The beamy air, the roofless silence,
10 The smoke-throated, man-thundered street,
Die to an essence, a love spirit.
Whose feet compounded are
As my own breath back brought.
All things, that, brooding, are still,
15 Speak to me, untwist and twine
The shifting links of consciousness,
Speak to the all-eyed soul,
And tread its intricate infinities.
Immured in two hands’ breadth
20 Behind the mask of man.
1914
WISTFULLY IN PALLID SPLENDOUR
Wistfully in pallid splendour
Drifts the lonely infinite,
A wan perfume vague and tender,
Dim with feet of fragile light.
5 Drifts so lightly through the spirit,
Breathes the torch of dreams astir
Till what promised lands he near it
Wavering are betrayed to her.
Ghostly foam of unheard waters,
10 And the gleam of hidden skies,
Footsteps of Eve’s whiter daughters
Tremble to our dreaming eyes.
O! sad wraith of joy lips parted,
Hearing not a word they say —
15 Even my dreams make broken hearted
And their beauty falls away.
1914
HAVE WE SAILED AND HAVE
WE WANDERED
Have we sailed and have we wandered,
Still beyond, the hills are blue.
Have we spent and have we squandered,
What’s before us still is new.
See the foam of unheard waters
And the gleam of hidden skies,
Footsteps of Eve’s whiter daughters
Flash between our dreaming eyes.
Soundless waning to the spirit,
Still — O still the hills are blue,
Ever and yet never near it,
There where our far childhood grew.
1914
FAR AWAY
By what pale light or moon-pale shore
Drifts my soul in lonely flight?
Regions God had floated o’er
Ere He touched the world with light?
Not in Heaven and not in earth
Is this water, is this moon;
For there is no starry birth,
And no dawning and no noon.
Far away — O far away,
Mist-born — dewy vapours rise
From the dim gates of the day
Far below in earthly skies.
GIRL’S SONG
The pigmy skies cover
No mood in my eyes,
The flat earth foams over
My pallour’s moonrise.
5 Thin branches like whips
Whiten the skies
To gibbous lips
Calling for my mad lover.
What is his knowledge
10 Knowing not this?
I’ll send him a message,
My life in a kiss.
Why is he mad?
I hold fire for him, bliss
15 He has not had
And dare not aspire.
I KNOW YOU GOLDEN
I know you golden
As summer and pale
As the clinging sweetness
Of marvels frail.
A touch of fire,
A loitering thrill,
My dancing spirit
Has passed the will.
And love and living
And Time and space —
My naked spirit
Hath seen its face.
SACRED, VOLUPTUOUS HOLLOWS DEEP
Sacred, voluptuous hollows deep
Where the unlifted shadows sleep
Beneath inviolate mouth and chin.
What virginal woven mystery
5 Guarding some pleadful spiritual sin
So hard to traffic with or flee,
Lies in your chaste impurity?
Warm, fleshly chambers of delights,
Whose lamps are we, our days and nights,
10 Where our thoughts nestle, our lithe limbs
Frenzied exult till vision swims
In fierce delicious agonies;
And the crushed life bruised through and through,
Ebbs out, trophy no spirit slew,
15 While molten sweetest pains enmesh
The life sucked by dissolving flesh.
O rosy radiance incarnate,
O glowing glory of heaven-dreamt flesh,
O seraph-barred transplendent gate
20 Of paradisal meadows fresh.
O read — read what my pale mouth tells.
God! could that mouth be but the air
To kiss your chasteness everywhere
Bound with lust’s shrivelling manacles!
25 As weary water dreams of land
While waves roll back and leave wet sand,
Their white tongues fawning on its breast,
But turns it to the thing that prest,
Though my thoughts crown you sweet, and cover,
30 Your shape in me is my mad lover.
1914
THE EXILE
A northern spray in an all human speech
To this same torrid heart may somewhat reach,
Although its root, its mother tree
Is in the North.
5 But O! to its cold heart, and fervid eyes,
It sojourns in another’s paradise,
A loveliness its alien eyes might see
Could its own roots go forth.
O! dried up waters of deep hungering love!
10 Far, far, the springs that fed you from above,
And brimmed the wells of happiness
With new delight.
Blinding ourselves to rob another’s sun
Only its scorching glory have we won,
15 And left our own homes in bleak wintriness
Moaning our sunward flight.
Here, where the craggy mountains edge the skies,
Whose profound spaces stare to our vain eyes;
Where our thoughts hang, and theirs, who yearn
20 To know our speech.
O! what winged airs soothe the sharp mountains’ brow?
From peak to peak with messages they go,
Withering our peering thoughts that crowd to learn
Words from that distant beach.
1914
MY SOUL IS ROBBED
My soul is robbed by your most treacherous eyes
Treading its intricate infinities,
Some pale light hidden in light and felt to stir
In listening pulse, an audible wonder
5 Delighting me with my immortal loss;
While you stay in its place, rich robbers, that is dross.
Wine of the Almighty who got drunk with thee.
(The reason sin — God slumbering then — flew free.)
Alas! if God thus, what will hap to me?
10 Ah! even now drunken while your sweet light beams,
You, far as Heaven, I am drunk on my dreams.
Not yet, that glance engendered ecstasy,
That subtle, unspaced, mutual intimacy,
Whereby two spirits of one thought commune,
15 Like separate instruments that play one tune.
The music of my playing is lost in thine.
Does the sun see when noonday torches shine?
Mine is not yours though you have stolen mine.
Beautiful thieves, I cannot captive ye,
20 Being so bound even as ye rifle me.
My limbs that moved in trembling innocence
You harden to knowledge of experience
Till honour rings upon the ear as crime.
NIGHT
With sleek lascivious velvety caresses
The nestling hair of night strays on my cheeks.
My heart is full of brimless fervid fancies
Ardent to hear the imperious word she speaks.
5 O purple-hued — O glimmering mouth that trembles!
O monstrous dusky shoulders lost above,
Wrapt in bleak robes of smoke from eye, star embers;
You smouldering pyres of flaming aeons of love.
The straining lusts of strenuous amorists,
10 Smoking from crimson altars of their hearts,
In burning mists are shed upon my dreaming.
Relax — relax. I have not strength to withstand thee;
My soul will not recoil, so full of thee.
Thy loathsomeness and beauty fill my hunger,
15 O! splendid, thy lithe fingers gripping me.
Naked and glorious, like a shining temple
I fill with adorations, fervent psalm,
Anoint with honey of kisses, while thy bosom
Throbs music to my unprofaning palm.
20 See! how thy breasts, those two white grapes of passion,
Look mixed in mine, like globed fruit mixed with leaves.
Lo! where I press, what crimson stains come leaping,
Bright juice of inexhaustible dreams lust weaves.
WHAT IF I WEAR YOUR BEAUTY
What if I wear your beauty as this present
Wears infinite aeons yet is only now.
The spirit opens but to receive,
Close hid, nought yet departing —
5 But the world’s gaze lessens love.
O softer pearl whose iridescent fountain
Hath been my sky, my sun, my stream of light
From the first dazzling dayspring, the enfolden
Sweet thirst, a mother prattle
10 To a new babbled birth.
I like an insect beautiful wings have gotten,
Shed from you. Let me hide, O like a vessel
That you have marvel laden, burdened
With new rich fears of pirates
15 I droop dark penurous sails.
1914
DAWN
O tender, first cold flush of rose,
O budded dawn, wake dreamily;
Your dim lips as your lids unclose
Murmur your own sad threnody.
5 O as the soft and frail lights break
Upon your eyelids, and your eyes
Wider and wider grow and wake,
The old pale glory dies.
And then, as sleep lays down to sleep
10 And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,
(While naked day digs goldly deep
For light to lie uncovered),
Your own ghost fades with dream-ghosts there,
Our lorn eyes see mid glimmering lips,
15 Pass through the haunted dream-moved air,
Slowly, their laden ships.
1914
UNDER THESE SKIES
Under these skies, that take the hues
Of metals locked beneath earth,
According as the spirit woos
What changing mood to birth.
Delicate silver gleaming
In threads of tender thought;
Gold in a proud dreaming
Our dream ships have brought;
But the skies of lead
When our hearts are dead,
And the skies relentless
Of an iron petal scentless,
That brooding like a shadow
Weighs down the sunless meadow.
THE FEMALE GOD
We curl into your eyes.
They drink our fires and have never drained.
In the fierce forest of your hair
Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.
5 In your eyes’ subtle pit
Far down, glimmer our souls.
And your hair like massive forest trees
Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.
Like a candle lost in an electric glare