Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg

by Isaac Rosenberg

  And show what you hold.

  Sing! Let me hear you sing.

  A voice sings

  Upon my lips like a cloud

  To burst on the peaks of light,

  Sit cowled, impossible things

  To tie my hands at their prime and height.

  Power! break through their shroud.

  Pierce them so thoroughly,

  Thoroughly enter me,

  Know me for one dead.

  Break the shadowy thread,

  The cowering spirit’s bond

  Writ by illusions blonde.

  Ah! let the morning pale

  Throb with a wilder pulse.

  No delicate flame shall quail

  With terror at your convulse.

  Thin branches whip the white skies

  To lips and spaces of song

  That chant a mood to my eyes —

  Ah! sleep can be overlong.

  MOSES. Voices thunder, voices of deeds not done.

  Lo! on the air is scrawled in abysmal light

  Old myths never known, and yet already foregone,

  And songs more lost, more secret than desert light.

  Martyrdoms of uncreated things,

  Virgin silences waiting a breaking voice —

  As in a womb they cry, in a cage beat vain wings

  Under life, over life, — is their unbeing my choice?

  Dull wine of torpor — the unsoldered spirit lies limp,

  Ah! if she would run into a mould

  Some new idea unwalled

  To human by-ways, an apocalyptic camp

  Of utterest and ulterior dreaming,

  Understood only in its gleaming,

  To flash stark naked the whole girth of the world.

  I am sick of priests and forms,

  This rigid dry-boned refinement.

  As ladies’ perfumes are

  Obnoxious to stern natures,

  This miasma of a rotting god

  Is to me.

  Who has made of the forest a park?

  Who has changed the wolf to a dog?

  And put the horse in harness?

  And man’s mind in a groove?

  I heard the one spirit cry in them,

  ‘Break this metamorphosis,

  Disenchant my lying body,

  Only putrefaction is free,

  And I, Freedom, am not.

  Moses! touch us, thou!’

  There shall not be a void or calm

  But a fury fill the veins of time

  Whose limbs had begun to rot.

  Who had flattered my stupid torpor

  With an easy and mimic energy,

  And drained my veins with a paltry marvel

  More monstrous than battle,

  For the soul ached and went out dead in pleasure.

  Is not this song still sung in the streets of me?

  A naked African

  Walked in the sun

  Singing — singing

  Of his wild love.

  I slew the tiger

  With your young strength

  (My tawny panther)

  Rolled round my life.

  Three sheep, your breasts,

  And my head between,

  Grazing together

  On a smooth slope.

  Ah! Koelue!

  Had you embalmed your beauty, so

  It could not backward go,

  Or change in any way,

  What were the use, if on my eyes

  The embalming spices were not laid

  To keep us fixed,

  Two amorous sculptures passioned endlessly?

  What were the use, if my sight grew,

  And its far branches were cloud hung,

  You, small at the roots, like grass.

  While the new lips my spirit would kiss

  Were not red lips of flesh,

  But the huge kiss of power.

  Where yesterday soft hair through my fingers fell

  A shaggy mane would entwine,

  And no slim form work fire to my thighs.

  But human Life’s inarticulate mass

  Throb the pulse of a thing

  Whose mountain flanks awry

  Beg my mastery — mine!

  Ah! I will ride the dizzy beast of the world

  My road — my way.

  SCENE II.

  Evening before Thebes. The Pyramids are being built. Swarms of Hebrews labouring. Priests and Taskmasters. Two Hebrews are furtively talking. KOELUE passes by singing.

  KOELUE. The vague viols of evening

  Call all the flower clans

  To some abysmal swinging

  And tumult of deep trance;

  He may hear, flower of my singing,

  And come hither winging.

  OLD HEBREW (gazing after her in a muffled frenzy)

  Hateful harlot. Boils cover your small cruel face.

  O! fine champion Moses. O! so good to us,

  O! grand begetter on her of a whip and a torturer.

  Her father, born to us, since you kissed her.

  Our champion, O! so good to us.

  YOUNG HEBREW. For shame! Our brothers’ twisted bloodsmeared gums

  Tell, we only, have more room for wreck curtailed,

  For you, having no teeth to draw, it is no mercy

  Perhaps, but they might mangle your gums;

  Or touch a nerve somewhere. He barred it now.

  And that is all his thanks, he, too, in peril.

  Be still, old man, wait a little.

  OLD HEBREW. — Wait!

  All day some slow dark quadruped beats

  To pulp our springiness.

  All day some hoofed animal treads our veins,

  Leisurely — leisurely our energies flow out.

  All agonies created from the first day

  Have wandered hungry searching the world for us,

  Or they would perish like disused Behemoth.

  Is our Messiah one to unleash these agonies

  As Moses does, who gives us an Abinoah?

  YOUNG HEBREW. Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil

  Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood,

  Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me,

  He came by and bore me into the shade.

  O what a furnace roaring in his blood

  Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own

  Raging through me like a strong cordial.

  He spoke! since yesterday

  Am I not larger grown?

  I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul

  Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence

  They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight.

  And to their shop only heroes come.

  But all were cripples to this speed

  Constrained to the stables of flesh.

  I say there is a famine in ripe harvest

  When hungry giants come as guests.

  Come knead the hills and ocean into food.

  There is none for him.

  The streaming vigours of his blood erupting

  From his halt tongue is like an anger thrust

  Out of a madman’s piteous craving for

  A monstrous baulked perfection.

  OLD HEBREW. He is a prince, an animal

  Not of our kind, who perhaps has heard

  Vague rumours of our world, to his mind

  An unpleasant miasma.

  YOUNG HEBREW. Is not Miriam his sister, Jochabed his mother?

  In the womb he looked round and saw

  From furthermost stretches our wrong.

  From the palaces and schools

  Our pain has pierced dead generations

  Back to his blood’s thin source.

  As we lie chained by Egyptian men

  He lay in nets of their women,

  And now rejoice, he has broken their meshes.

  O! his desires are fleets of treasure

  He has squandered in treacherous sea
s

  Sailing mistrust to find frank ports.

  He fears our fear and tampers mildly

  For our assent to let him save us.

  When he walks amid our toil

  With some master mason

  His tense brows critical

  Of the loose enginery.

  Hints famed devices flat, his rod

  Scratching new schemes on the sand.

  But read hard the scrawled lines there,

  Limned turrets and darkness, chinks of light,

  Half beasts snorting into the light,

  A phantasmagoria, wild escapade,

  To our hearts’ clue; just a daring plan

  To the honest mason. What swathed meanings peer

  From his workaday council, washed to and from

  Your understanding till you doubt

  That a word was said.

  But a terror wakes and forces your eyes

  Into his covertly, to search his searching.

  Startled to life starved hopes slink out

  Cowering, incredulous.

  OLD HEBREW (to himself)

  His youth is flattered at Moses’ kind speech to him.

  (To the YOUNG HEBREW)

  I am broken and grey, have seen much in my time,

  And all this gay grotesque of childish man

  Long passed. Half blind — half deaf, I only grumble

  I am not blind or deaf enough for peace.

  I have seen splendid young fools cheat themselves

  Into a prophet’s frenzy; I have seen

  So many crazed shadows puffed away,

  And conscious cheats with such an ache for fame

  They’d make a bonfire of themselves to be

  Mouthed in the squares, broad in the public eye.

  And whose backs break, whose lives are mauled, after

  It all falls flat? His tender airs chill me

  As thoughts of sleep to a man tiptoed night-long

  Roped round his neck, for sleep means death to him.

  Oh! he is kind to us.

  Your safe teeth chatter when they hear a step.

  He left them yours because his cunning way

  Would brag the wrong against his humane act

  By Pharaoh; so gain more favour than he lost.

  YOUNG HEBREW. Help him not then, and push your safety away.

  I for my part will be his backward eye,

  His hands when they are shut. Ah! Abinoah!

  Like a bad smell from the soul of Moses dipt

  In the mire of lust, he hangs round him.

  And if his slit-like eyes could tear right out

  The pleasure Moses on his daughter had,

  She’d be as virgin as ere she came nestling

  Into that fierce unmanageable blood,

  Flying from her loathed father. O, that slave

  Has hammered from the anvil of her beauty

  A steel to break his manacles. Hard for us,

  Moses has made him overseer. O, his slits

  Pry — pry... for what?... to sell to Imra...

  [ABINOAH is seen approaching]

  Sh! the thin-lipped abomination!

  Zigzagging haschish tours in a fine style.

  It were delightful labour making bricks,

  And know they would kiss friendly with his head.

  ABINOAH {who has been taking haschish, and has one obsession,

  hatred of Jews) Dirt draggled mongrels, circumcised slaves.

  You puddle with your lousy gibberish

  The holy air, Pharoah’s own tributary.

  Filthy manure for Pharaoh’s flourishing.

  I’ll circumcise and make holy your tongues,

  And stop one outlet to your profanation.

  [To the OLD HEBREW]

  I’ve never seen one beg so for a blow,

  Too soft am I to resist such entreaty.

  [Beats him]

  Your howling holds the earnest energies

  You cheat from Pharaoh when you make his bricks.

  AN AGED MINSTREL [sings from a distance]

  Taut is the air and tied the trees,

  The leaves lie as on a hand.

  God’s unthinkable imagination

  Invents new tortures for nature.

  And when the air is soft and the leaves

  Feel free and push and tremble,

  Will they not remember and say

  How wonderful to have lived?

  [The OLD HEBREW is agitated and murmurs]

  Messiah, Messiah... that voice...

  O, he has beaten my sight out... I see

  Like a rain about a devouring fire...

  [The MINSTREL sings]

  Ye who best God awhile, — O, hear, your wealth

  Is but His cunning to make death more hard.

  Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking.

  And he has made the market for your beauty

  Too poor to buy although you die to sell.

  OLD HEBREW. I am crazed with whips... I hear a Messiah.

  YOUNG HEBREW. The venerable man will question this.

  ABINOAH [overhearing] I’ll beat you more, and he’ll question

  The scratchiness of your whining; or may be,

  Thence may be born deep argument

  With reasons from philosophy

  That this blow, taking longer, yet was but one,

  Or perhaps two; or that you felt this one —

  Arguing from the difference in your whine —

  Exactly, or not, like the other.

  MINSTREL. YOU labour hard to give pain.

  ABINOAH [still beating] My pain is... not... to labour so.

  MINSTREL. What is this greybeard worth to you now,

  All his dried-up blood crumbled to dust?

  [Motions ABINOAH to desist, but not in time to prevent the old man

  fainting into the hands of the YOUNG HEBREW]

  ABINOAH. Harper, are you envious of the old fool?

  Go! hug the rat who stole your last crumbs,

  And gnawed the hole in your life which made Time wonder

  Who it was saved labour for him the next score of years.

  We allowed them life for their labour — they haggled.

  Food they must have — and (god of laughter!) even ease;

  But mud and lice and Jews are very busy

  Breeding plagues in ease.

  [The MINSTREL pulls his beard and robe off)

  ABINOAH. Moses!

  MOSES. YOU drunken rascal!

  ABINOAH. A drunken rascal! Isis! hear the Prince.

  Drunken with duty, and he calls me rascal.

  MOSES. YOU may think it your duty to get drunk;

  But get yourself bronze claws before

  You would be impudent.

  ABINOAH. When a man’s drunk he’ll kiss a horse or king,

  He’s so affectionate. Under your words

  There is strong wine to make me drunk; you think,

  The lines of all your face say, ‘Her father, Koelue’s father.’

  MOSES. This is too droll and extraordinary.

  I dreamt I was a prince, a queer droll dream,

  Where a certain slave of mine, a thing, a toad,

  Shifting his belly, showed a diamond

  Where he had lain. And a blind dumb messenger

  Bore syllabled messages soaked right through with glee.

  I paid the toad — the blind man; afterwards

  They spread a stench and snarling. O, droll dream!

  I think you merely mean to flatter me

  You subtle knave, that, more than prince, I’m man,

  And worth to listen to your bawdy breath.

  ABINOAH. Yet my breath was worth your mixing with.

  MOSES. A boy at college flattered so by a girl

  Will give her what she asks for.

  ABINOAH. Osiris! burning Osiris!

  Of thee desirable, for thee, her hair...

  [He looks inanely at MOSES, saying to himself ]<
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  Prince Imra vowed his honey-hives and vineyards.

  Isis! to let a Jew have her for nothing.

  [He sings under his breath]

  Night by night in a little house

  A man and woman meet.

  They look like each other,

  They are sister and brother;

  And night by night at that same hour

  A king calls for his son in vain.

  MOSES [to himself] So, sister Miriam, it is known then.

  Slave, you die.

  [Aloud] O, you ambiguous stench.

  You’ll be more interesting as a mummy

  I have no doubt.

  ABINOAH. I’m drunk, yes — drenched with the thought

  Of a certain thing. [Aside] I’ll sleep sounder to-night

  Than all the nights I’ve followed him about.

  Worrying each slight clue, each monosyllable

  To give the word to Imra. The prince is near,

  And Moses’ eyes shall blink before next hour

  To a hundred javelins. I’ll tease him till they come.

  [Aloud] On Koelue’s tears I swam to you, in a mist

  Of her sighs I hung round you,

  As in some hallucination I’ve been walking

  A white waste world, we two only in it.

  MOSES. Doubtless the instinct baulked to bully the girl,

  Making large gapings in your haschish dreams,

  Led you to me, in whom she was thoroughly lost.

  Pah! you sicken me.

  [He is silent awhile, then turns away]

  ABINOAH. Prince Imra is Pharaoh’s choice now, and Koelue’s.

  [MOSES turns back menacingly]

  MOSES. Silence, you beast!

  [He changes his tone to a winning softness]

  I hate these family quarrels: it is so

  Like fratricide. I am a rebel, well?

  Soft! You are not, and we are knit so close

  It would be shame for a son to be so honoured

  And the father still unknown. Come, Koelue’s (so my) father,

  I’ll tell my plans. You’ll beg to be rebel, then.

  Look round on the night,

  Old as the first, bleak, even her wish is done,

  “O She has never seen, (though dreamt perhaps of the sun),

  Yet only dawn divides; could a miracle

  Destroy the dawn, night would be mixed with light,

  No night or light would be, but a new thing.

  So with these slaves, who perhaps have dreamt of freedom,

  Egypt was in the way; I’ll strike it out

  With my ways curious and unusual.

  I have a trouble in my mind for largeness,

  Rough-hearted, shaggy, which your grave ardours lack.

  Here is the quarry quiet for me to hew,

  Here are the springs, primeval elements,

  The roots’ hid secrecy, old source of race,

  Unreasoned reason of the savage instinct.

  I’d shape one impulse through the contraries