10 Our spirits tread your eyes’ infinities.
In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks
Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses?
Queen! Goddess! animal!
In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls?
15 When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow,
Do not our jealous pulses wake between?
You have dethroned the ancient God.
You have usurped his sabbath, his common days,
Yea! every moment is delivered to you.
20 Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God.
Our souls have passed into your eyes
Our days into your hair.
And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world.
Your world.
1914
HER FABLED MOUTH
Her fabled mouth, love hath from fables made.
She tells the same old marvels and sweet stories.
Chaos within her eyes his jewels laid.
Our lips and eyes dig up the antique glories.
The wonder of her heavy coloured hair
Still richly wears the hues of faded Eden;
There, where primeval dream hath made its lair,
Joy subtly smiles, in his arms sorrow hidden.
O! as her eyes grow wide and starlight wanes,
Wanes from our hearts that grow into her splendour,
We melt with wronging of love’s fabled pains,
Her eyes so kind, her bosom white and tender.
1914
A BIRD TRILLING ITS GAY HEART OUT
A bird trilling its gay heart out
Made my idle heart a cage for it
Just as the sunlight makes a cage
Of the lampless world its song has lit.
I was half happy and half vexed
Because the song flew in unasked
Just as the dark might angry be
If sudden light her face unmasked.
I could not shut my spirit’s doors
I was so naked and alone,
I could not hide and it saw that
I would not to myself have shown.
1914
SUMMER’S LIPS ARE AGLOW
Summer’s lips are aglow, afresh
For our old lips to kiss,
The tingling of the flesh
Makes life aware of this.
Whose eyes are wild with love?
Whose hair a blowing flame
I feel around and above
Laughing my dreams to shame?
My dreams like stars gone out
Were blossoms for your day;
Red flower of mine I will shout,
I have put my dreams away.
I HAVE LIVED IN THE UNDERWORLD TOO LONG
I have lived in the underworld too long
For you, O creature of light,
To hear without terror the dark spirit’s song
And unmoved hear what moves in night.
I am a spirit that yours has found
Strange, undelightful, obscure,
Created by some other God, and bound
In terrible darkness impure.
Creature of light and happiness,
Deeper the darkness when you
With your bright terror eddying the distress
Grazed the dark waves and shivering further flew.
1914
I AM THE BLOOD
I am the blood
Streaming the veins of sweetness; sharp and sweet,
Beauty has pricked the live veins of my soul
And sucked all being in.
I am the air
Prowling the room of beauty, climbing her soft
Walls of surmise, her ceilings that close in.
She breathes me as her breath.
I am the death
Whose monument is beauty, and forever
Although I lie unshrouded in life’s tomb,
She is my cenotaph.
BEAUTY I
An angel’s chastity
Unfretted by an earthly angel’s lures.
The occult lamp of beauty
Which holds? Is truth? Whose spreaded wing endures?
5 Say — beauty springs and grows
From the flushed night of the nun solitude
And the deep spirit’s throes.
Unconscious as in Eden — chaste and nude.
His self-appointed aim
10 Whose bloodless brows bloom with austere delight,
O’er his entombed fame,
Whose ghost, an unseen glory, walks in hidden light.
Her sire and her lover.
He burns the world to gloat on the bright flame,
15 Her absence doth him cover.
Her silence is a voice that calls his name.
From the womb’s antechambers
He list’ning, moves through life’s wide presence-hall,
Blindly its turret clambers,
20 Then searches his own soul for the flying bacchanal.
Is she an earthly care
Moulding our needs unto her gracious ends,
Making the rough world fair,
With softer meanings than its rude speech lends?
1914
BEAUTY II
Far and near, and now, from never,
My calm beauty burns for ever,
Through the forests deep and old
Which loose their miser secrets hold,
5 Unto the fountains of the sky,
Whose showers of radiant melody
Delight the laughter-burdened ways,
And dress the hours to light the days,
While hand in hand they reel their round;
10 For the burning bush is found.
Joy has blossomed, joy has burst;
And earth’s parched lips and dewy thirst
Have found a shroud of summer mirth,
And Eden covers all the earth
15 Whose lips love’s kisses did anoint,
And straight our ashes fell away.
Our lives are now a burning point,
And faded are their walls of clay,
Purged of the flames that loved the wind
20 Is the pure glow that has not sinned.
1914
AUGURIES
Fading fire that does not fade
Only changing its nest,
Sky-blown words of cloudlike breath
Live in another sky.
5 Days that are scrawled hieroglyphs
On thunder stricken barks,
First our souls have plucked the fruit.
Here are Time’s granaries.
Were we not fed of summer, but warmth and summer sang to us.
10 Has my soul plucked all the fruit?
Not all the fruit that hung thereon —
The trees whose barks were pictured days,
One waits somewhere for me
Holding fresh the fruit I left,
15 And I hold fruit for one.
What screen hid us gathering
And lied unto our thirst,
While two faces looked singly to the moon?
But the moon was secret and chill.
20 Will my eyes know the fruit I left?
Will her eyes know her own?
This broken stem will surely know
And leap unto its leaf.
No blossom bursts before its time
25 No angel passes by the door
But from old Chaos shoots the bough
While we grow ripe for heaven.
1914
ON RECEIVING NEWS OF THE WAR
Snow is a strange white word;
No ice or frost
Have asked of bud or bird
For Winter’s cost.
5 Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know,
No man knows why.
In all men’s hearts it is.
10 Some spirit
old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.
Red fangs have torn His face.
God’s blood is shed.
15 He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.
O! ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume.
Give back this universe
20 Its pristine bloom.
Cape Town, 1914
THE FLEA
A flea whose body shone like bead
Gave me delight as I gave heed.
A spider whose legs like stiff thread
Made me think quaintly as I read.
10 A rat whose droll shape would dart and flit
Was like a torch to light my wit.
A fool whose narrow forehead hung
A wooden target for my tongue.
A meagre wretch in whose generous scum
15 Himself was lost — his — (dirty living)tomb.
But the flea crawled too near
His blood the smattered wall doth smear
And the spider being too brave
No doctor now can him save.
20 And when the rat would rape my cheese
He signed the end of his life’s lease.
O cockney who maketh negatives,
You negative of negatives.
1914
A WOMAN’S BEAUTY
A woman’s beauty is a strong tree’s roots.
The tree is space, its branches hidden lutes,
Wherefrom such music spreads into the air
That all it breathes on doth its spirit share,
5 And all men’s souls are drawn beneath and lie
Mixed into her as words mix with the sky.
And as some words before they mix are stayed
And old thoughts live new spirits by their aid,
So souls of some men meet the spirit of love
10 That sentinels.
A woman’s beauty is like kisses shed,
A colour heard, or thoughts that have been said.
It covers, with infinity between.
The memory sees, but ‘twixt you and that seen
15 A million ages lie. It is a wave
That in old time swept Gods, and did enslave
As the broad sea imprisons, savage lands.
It is a wind that blows from careful hands
The grains of gathered wheat, and golden grains
20 To others bears.
It is a diver into seas more strange
Than fishes know. No poison makes such change
As her swift subtle alchemy.
BUT I AM THROWN WITH BEAUTY’S BREATH
But I am thrown with beauty’s breath
Climbing my soul, driven in
Like a music wherein is pressed
All the power that withers the mountain
And maketh trees to grow.
From the neck of a God your hands are odorous.
Now I am made a God and he without you is none.
Your eyes still wear the looks of Paradise.
I look upon its shining fields and mourn for the outcast angels
Who have no Eden now since it shines in your eyes.
* * *
My soul is a molten cup with brimming music of your mouth;
Somewhere is a weeping silence and I feel a happy thief.
1914
IN HALF DELIGHT OF SHY DELIGHT
In half delight of shy delight,
In a sweetness thrilled with fears,
Her eyes on the rich storied night,
Reads love and strangely hears
Love guests with wintered years.
We know the summer-plaited hours,
O maiden still plaiting
Your men-unruffled curls
For fierce loving and hating —
No trap to keep you girls.
She walks so delicately grave
As lovely as her unroofed fancies
Of love’s far-linked dances
In waters of soft night they lave
Through measureless expanses.
1914
PAST DAYS ARE HIEROGLYPHS
Past days are hieroglyphs
Scrawled behind the brows
Scarred deep with iron blows,
Upon the thundered tree
Of memory.
Marvellous mad beliefs
(To believe that you believed!),
Plain and time-unthieved,
Scratched and scrawled on the tree
Of memory.
Time, good graver of griefs,
Those words sapped with my soul,
That I read as of old and whole,
What eye in the world shall see
On this covered tree?
1915
WHO LOSES THE HOUR OF THE WIND?
Who loses the hour of the wind
Where the outer silence swings?
But frail — but pale are the things
We seek and the seekers blind.
They seek us on broken wings.
No cold kiss blown from the surge
Of the dark tides of the night.
We sleep and blind is their flight
The dreams of whose kisses urge
The soul to endure its plight.
Blown words, whose root is the brain,
Live over your ruined root.
For other mouths is the fruit
And the songs so rich with pain
Of a splendour whose lips were mute.
1915
DUSK AND THE MIRROR
Where the room seems pondering,
Shadowy hovering,
Pictured walls and dove-dim ceiling,
Edgeless, lost and spectral,
5 In a quaint half farewell
Away the things familiar fall
In some limbo to a spell.
Mutation of slipped moment
When nothing and solid is blent,
10 O! dusk palpitant!
Prank fantastical!
You hide and steal from morning
What you give back from hiding,
You prank before the dawning
15 And run from her frail chiding,
And all my household Gods
When he who worships nods
You tweak and pinch and hide
And dabble under your side
20 To drop upon the shores
Of an old tomorrow
Shut with the same old doors
Of sleep and shame and sorrow.
But naked you have left
25 One jewel, dripping still
From plundering plashless fingers.
Lying in a cleft
Of your own surging bosomed hill,
It dreams of dreams bereft
30 And warm dishevelled singers,
Safe from your placeless will.
Or you are like a tree now,
And that is like a lake,
Sinister to thee now
35 Its glimmer is awake.
Like vague undrowning boughs
Above the pool
You float your gloom in its low light
Where Narcissian augurs browse,
40 Dreaming from its cool
Apparition a fear;
Behind the wall of hours you hear
The tread of the arch light.
1915
THE MIRROR
It glimmers like a wakeful lake in the dusk narrowing room.
Like drowning vague branches in its depth floats the gloom,
The night shall shudder at its face by gleams of pallid light
Whose hands build the broader day to break the husk of night.
No shade shall waver there when your shadowless soul shall pass,
The green shakes not the air when your spirit drinks the grass,
So in its plashless water falls, so dumbly lies therein
A fervid rose whose fragrance sweet lies hidden and shut within.
&nbs
p; Only in these bruised words the glass dim-showing my spirit’s face,
Only a little colour from a fire I could not trace,
To glimmer through eternal days like an enchanted rose,
The potent dreamings of whose scent are wizard-locked beneath its glows.
SIGNIFICANCE
The cunning moment curves its claws
Round the body of our curious wish,
But push a shoulder through its straitened laws —
Then are you hooked to wriggle like a fish.
5 Lean in high middle ‘twixt two tapering points,
Yet rocks and undulations control
The agile brain, the limber joints
The sinews of the soul.
Chaos that coincides, form that refutes all sway,
10 Shapes to the eye quite other to the touch,
All twisted things continue to our clay
Like added limbs and hair dispreaded overmuch.
And after it draws in its claws
The rocks and unquiet sink to a flat ground.
15 Then follow desert hours, the vacuous pause
Till some mad indignation unleashes the hound.
And those flat hours and dead unseeing things
Cower and crowd and burrow for us to use,
Where sundry gapings spurn and preparing wings —
20 And O! our hands would use all ere we lose.
WEDDED
They leave their love-lorn haunts,
Their sigh-warm floating Eden;
And they are mute at once;
Mortals by God unheeden;
5 By their past kisses chidden.
But they have kist and known
Clear things we dim by guesses —
Spirit to spirit grown —
Heaven, born in hand caresses —
10 Love, fall from sheltering tresses.
And they are dumb and strange;
Bared trees bowed from each other.
Their last green interchange
What lost dreams shall discover?
15 Dead, strayed, to love-stranged lover.
MIDSUMMER FROST II.
A July ghost, aghast at the strange winter,
Wonders, at burning noon, (all summer seeming),
How, like a sad thought buried in light words,
Winter, an alien presence, is ambushed here.
5 See, from the fire-fountained noon there creep
Lazy yellow ardours towards pale evening,
Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg Page 9