But in that pit
All doubt-blindfolded souls must fall like stones –
Fall down without the power to cry out
Unless inspired by Anguish.
[Narration Two]
A stone that falls feels nothing, has no fear
And knows no need, and cannot cry.
A falling stone is not a fallen soul.
[First Mortal Soul]
Now Man benighted huddles in his cave,
In mighty ignorance of what he is and what he’s not:
Cave-night which every night
His all-aloneness drives him back into:
This is the dark, familiar, fearful place
Where once again flung down I fallen lie!
Oh! could I but release from far within
My own benighted selfish inmost dark, from deep within
The ever unknown part of me, could I release
One long, long harsh heartbreaking broken cry
That would for once express all that the night
Awakens in me, all that words betray,
Being too flimsy and approximate and too
Precise: could I unsay
All I have clumsily but half-expressed, O could I howl
Instead the protestation of my impotence against
The dull omnipotence of stifling soundlessness,
Dull swelling vacancy, that from all sides
Drives with the pressure of incessant passing time
Inwards on me, thrusting back into the lapsed
Being become non-being where annihilation waits
To swallow all that I have ever been,
Then might I sleep like one whom his own soul no longer hates.
[Narration Two]
The cry of mortal anguish from the soul’s dark night
Reaches you now, if you will hear it. I will ask
Myself whether you hearing it, if you were God
Would pay no heed but turn away your ear.
You have heard one, but there are countless cries.
[Second Mortal Soul]
Shut up, shut off that hateful voice.
Shut up, shut out the Night.
I do not want
To sense the world’s obscure plain spread
Out under empty heaven, or to know
That we lost in obscurity are stranded on a sphere
Of earth that spins amidst infinity
Among unnumbered galaxies of spinning spheres
Dispersed in distances so vast that human sight
Swerves backward sickened by the senselessness
Of so much space without a single sign
That consciousness, pinprick adrift in it,
Can seize on to decipher.
Let me be stupefied.
[Narration One]
We are always free
To turn away. Our hearts can always harden to refuse
To suffer mortal anguish. There are many anodynes.
[Third Mortal Soul]
Drink strength and comfort now out of the well
Of Night, that can so quickly quench our thirst
And as it slowly slakes its own, consumes us all.
The sun sank out of sight and darkness covered us.
I will sit down and close my eyes and wait; sit still and wait,
Though I still somehow cannot yet relax, I feel a weight
Of heaviness that will not let me rest, a load that stirs
And slackens in me, weighing down, wearing away,
With weary will to stay awake when I lie down,
My wish to give up vigil for repose.
[Nightwatcher’s Voice]
At Night, I often sit an hour out thus,
Attentive to a dull insistent roar –
Or not a roar, rather a kind of cry, and yet
No cry, for that would be a sound too clear,
And what I hear might come from underground,
It is so thick and muffled, and yet hollow-sounding too,
Although not resonant at all, but harsh and dead,
If dead is not too definite a word:
And whatsoever this dull urgent rumour be,
It holds me spellbound by the hour and more,
While I, with a great longing to be free
From doubt about what it can signify,
Gaze up through a small skylight’s panes and see
Nothing at all of my star’s watch-fire
That may be burning in the black neglected sky;
Do not see even that blank square the window frames –
As though all sight lay blinded in my ears.
And then, returning suddenly again
To consciousness of my immediate self,
I’ve had a moment’s glimpse into the depths
Of solitary absence through which stray
Our tired and restless bodies among all the dead things found
Strewn round them on all sides in an unanimated dream:
Dread has distracted us away from what is here
And what we really are when faithful to the truth;
So we must suffer hopelessly the sullen apathy
That reigns on a deserted theatre’s stage
Where all night long we play out our null roles,
In a Morality that could be called ‘No Man’.
[Second Nightwatcher’s Voice]
I hear a voice that speaks from No-Man’s Land
And when just now he said he’d heard a cry
Or some strange sort of sound I thought I recognized
That what I listened to him speaking of I too had heard:
For listen, listen, it begins again! It’s the same sound, I’m sure!
On many other nights before I have heard this,
Like sound of distant rioting, that angry voices’ sound,
Popular uproar from afar, as though crowds underground
Were pushing upwards boiling to invade the city streets
With hell-hordes hoarsely clammering for blood!
For Blood! For Justice! Bloodshed and Revenge! What cry
Is that I only hear an echo of? Why after all should I
Feel threatened by a thing so far away? Does no one else
Hear what I hear at night?
[Third Nightwatcher’s Voice]
Yes, neighbour, I can hear.
I too have heard those ominous night voices. I hear yours,
You are my neighbour, not a crowd, I’m not afraid of you,
Although I cannot see your face. Then let us not
Mistrust each other, nor be too much disturbed by them.
And do not be afraid of it. If you can hear
The echoes of your own anxiety, if you can bear
To listen to that rumour, then you know at least that dread
Of hearing what you fear has not yet deafened you.
[Anonymous Mass Voice]
Fear, fear: you speak of fear.
What is this fear? Is it the fear we dare not fear,
That fear of fear itself, or fear of other’s fear,
Such fear as ends
In passionate untruth, self-justifying falsehood without end?
Demonic fear
Of individual guilt, of being caught, of doing wrong,
And fear of failure or of being found a fool,
And fear of anything that might contrast with me
And thus reveal my insufficiency,
My lack, my weakness, my inferiority,
In showing up my difference from itself;
Fear of uncertainty and loss, fear of all change,
Fear of all strangeness and all strangers; and above all else the fear
Of Love, of being loved, of being asked for love,
Of being loved yet knowing one has no love to return;
Fear of forgiveness –
Fear of that love which is so great it can forgive
And the exhausting fear of Death and Mystery,
The Mystery of
Death, of Life and Death,
The huge appalling Mystery of everything;
Arid fear of Nothing,
Yes, after all the fear of Nothing really,
Fear of Nothing, Nothing
Fear of Nothing, Nothing, absolutely Nothing.
[Voice C]
Dread of life, and fear of Nothing,
Anxiety and dream assail the vigilant
Watchman who waits in solitude for the Night to pass.
[Voice A]
A blind wind whispers in the sleeping grass.
2 MEGALOMETROPOLITAN CARNIVAL
[Voice A]
When Night has been announced as theme, will it not cause surprise
If there is nothing said about the stars? Also it has
Been immemorially the custom to apostrophize the Moon –
In courtly terms, calling her Queen of Night, and to refer
To Cynthia’s argent chariot, or some such-like stage-property,
Or improvise some image like that Gallic wit’s who saw
The Moon above a steeple like the dot above an I.
Planets and constellations tend to lend themselves to rhapsody,
Having like hosts of lesser stars most ornamental names:
Orion, Mars and Venus, Betelgeuse and all the rest,
That are godsends to poets, shedding lustre on their lines.
[Voice B]
But if I stand tonight,
Not in a poem but in actual fact in, say, Trafalgar Square,
And stare up at the heavens there, what can they mean to me,
The glories of the Zodiak, the lovely names of stars?
Do I see splinters of old myths stuck in the sky above my head?
If stars are visible at all, they’re but a sprinkling of pinpricks
Blurred into insignificance by the brilliance on the ground,
Where the City round me celebrates the triumph of the brain
Of man over his darkness, in the effervescent blaze
Of a commerce-sponsored carnival of multicoloured bulbs.
The soot-suffused sky-canopy, shot through with bluish red,
Shuts off from me as surely as do too-familiar names
The mystery of Space.
[Voice C]
At night I’ve often walked on the Embankment of the Thames
And seen the Power Station’s brick cliffs dominate the scene
Over on the South Bank, and its twin pairs of giant stacks
Outpouring over London their perpetual offering
Of smoke in heavy swags fit for a sacrificial rite
Propitiating some brute Carthaginian deity;
And thought they stood like symbols for the worship of our age:
The pillars of a temple raised to man-made Power and Light.
[Voice A]
And I have sometimes gone out towards midnight
Through streets of dwelling-houses and apartment–blocks
Behind the rows of window-squares of which
Innumerable tired executives prepared for bed,
While past street-corner lamps dogs’ pensive escorts
Tugged them on leads along their late patrol;
Through districts full of narrow shady gardens
With strips of black lawn stretching from french windows
To sooty shrubberies, a seedy tree or two,
Laburnum to o’erhang the pavement pilgrim
When summer has transformed these dormitories
By splashing blossom-sprays across their drabness
For a few weeks each year. And have walked on
Until I came out on an open hillside,
A public park space from which one looks down
Upon the mighty Nocturne of the Capital
Whose twinkling panorama’s spread below:
Arena sprawling dazed in concrete gloom,
Freckled with sparks and smeared with arc-lights’ gleams,
With crawling glares and melancholy glazes,
Slow-sinking monuments and stoic lighthouses:
Mile after mile of tenements and terraces,
League after league of palaces and parks.
Here hover hazes of green sick-ward light,
And there red neon blurs flick on and off,
In fixed directions avenues stretch sleekly
To disappear in ultimate uncertainty
In regions where the bottom of the sky
Mingles with fumes that rise from the abyss …
Fearful and wonderful, that sleepless monster,
Sphinx among cities, Megalometropolis,
Stuns with her grave immensity all eyes beholding her:
One’s wonder gapes and quickly palls and falls into dismay,
Knowing the roaring labyrinth deepsunk in Night below
Teems with noctambulists too multitudinous
For any now to fear the Minotaur.
[Voice D]
Effulgent filaments in bulging bulbs
Persist in stinging blackness till they’ve tinged with pallid stain
All wilting areas of opaque obscurity;
Innumerable bulbs that like frost-glazed unpupilled eyes
Pour out incessant bleared lacklustre glare
Upon all public places all night long.
[Voice E]
No trace remains in any place of daytime’s busy throng.
[Voice F]
Behold how every building-block, each bank,
Walls behind which wait bales of ware in yards,
Forums, exchanges, business-houses, stores,
Stand back drawn up behind a film of blankness,
A foreign aspect hazing all façades.
[Voice E]
The absent inmates have locked all their doors.
[Voice D]
Scarcely a soul is to be seen on any sidewalk at this hour.
Scarcely the word is soul perhaps for such as might be seen.
[Voice F]
Their desultory feet move slow and furtively,
Few footsteps far between.
[Voice E]
Seeing it now, you’d hardly know the city scene.
[Voice D]
Street-crossing islands stand becalmed; round them no traffic roars.
[Voice E]
All waking feelings now are dimmed, the day-time’s passions
curbed.
[Voice F]
The decent sleep in duty bound. They may emit some snores;
Otherwise they are mute and must by no means be disturbed.
They’ve made their beds; now they must lie in them.
[Voice D]
They have retired in consequence to do so and are prone.
[Voice F]
Between the sheets, beneath the blankets, parked in cots and bunks,
Stretched out in alcoves, side by side or all alone,
In double-beds or on divans, with lamps out, curtains drawn,
Immobile many millions lie, all interchangeable,
All horizontal humans out of use until next morn.
[Voice E]
No household has been able any longer to refuse
Sleep’s standing invitation to its old home castle-keep
There to recline like lords at ease unconscious till next day.
[Voice D]
Everything now has been closed down, shut up and locked away.
The population’s breathing is slow regular and deep.
[Voice F]
Although Megalometropolis is unsleeping, night and day,
At times even the city seems to doze off for a spell.
Whether or not it sleeps is hard to tell. I couldn’t say.
Brought to a standstill it stands waiting. Empty.
[Narration One]
Enter the Dreams.
[Narration Two]
The Dreams enter the City.
Drifting in swiftly twisting clouds above the roofs,
Their whirling fever-coloured smoke crosses the moon;
As they race past, its contours blur and tremble.
A moment after, real clouds blot its face.
[Narration One]
Enter the Dream.
[Narration Two]
Enter the Dream’s great glimmering park.
Only at first is it still dead of night.
Slide softly, stepping rapidly, at first.
Here there still lingers a strange stealth and stillness.
The beams that fill the early dreams are soft as twilight
In the first place. In this faint light you must move swift as swimmers,
Move with short strokes beneath the lowslung boughs,
The grey, long-bearded, overhanging branches
Of ancient trees still lining all these avenues.
You’ll have to hurry down these thoroughfares,
Though splendid shops and gardens catch your eye.
All signposts point in only one direction.
[Narration One]
Follow the fingers, you can’t lose your way,
It won’t take long to reach the central space,
That is the special place you have to find.
Just one street further. Here at last you are.
[Narration Two]
Here is the Circus in the Square that represents
The very heart of the primeval City. Now’s the time
To recollect that you’ve received a secret summons
To a rendezvous with the Unknown, at the foot of the Fountain
That leaps without spray, a thin glimmering quicksilver pillar,
Above the memorial marking the first fatal spot,
The meeting place of the First Person with Persons Unnamed
At the heart of the Forest that grew where the City now stands.
[Narration Three]
The quicksilver Fountain that’s hovering there like a column allures
All who enter the lair of the Labyrinth-Omphalos Boss,
Whose domain lies beneath, in the earth. Yet if anyone nears
The Basin too closely, at once it will sink underground.
By the time you’ve got right to the axis round which the square circles,
You will find that it’s no longer there.
[Narration One]
Just stand still for a moment. No need to be scared.
Pay no heed to the thunder of traffic, the dazzle of lights
On the walls flashing messages round you on every side.
Soon, just where the Fountain has vanished, the earth at your feet,
At the heart of empirical hubbub, will yawn open wide
And the cavernous Subway’s mouth show you the way down inside.
[Narration Two]
Now you follow the steps and descend to the City’s true heart,
And are soon in a Plaza illumined more brightly than day
Where more people are hurrying in all directions than up there above.
New Collected Poems Page 26