An Anthem of Earth
PRŒMION
IMMEASURABLE Earth!Through the loud vast and populacy of Heaven,Tempested with gold schools of ponderous orbs,That cleav’st with deep-revolting harmoniesPassage perpetual, and behind thee draw’stA furrow sweet, a cometary wakeOf trailing music! What large effluence,Not sole the cloudy sighing of thy seas,Nor thy blue-coifing air, encases theeFrom prying of the stars, and the broad shaftsOf thrusting sunlight tempers? For, dropped nearFrom my removèd tour in the sereneOf utmost contemplation, I scent lives.This is the efflux of thy rocks and fields,And wind-cuffed forestage, and the souls of men,And aura of all treaders over thee;A sentient exhalation, wherein closeThe odorous lives of many-throated flowers,And each thing’s mettle effused; that so thou wear’st,Even like a breather on a frosty morn,Thy proper suspiration. For I know,Albeit, with custom-dulled perceivingness,Nestled against thy breast, my sense not takeThe breathings of thy nostrils, there’s no tree,No grain of dust, nor no cold-seeming stone,But wears a fume of its circumfluous self.Thine own life and the lives of all that live,The issue of thy loins,Is this thy gaberdine,Wherein thou walkest through thy large demesneAnd sphery pleasances,—Amazing the unstalèd eyes of Heaven,And us that still a precious seeing haveBehind this dim and mortal jelly.Ah!If not in all too late and frozen a dayI come in rearward of the throats of song,Unto the deaf sense of the agèd yearSinging with doom upon me; yet give heed!One poet with sick pinion, that still feelsBreath through the Orient gateways closing fast,Fast closing t’ward the undelighted night!
ANTHEM
In nescientness, in nescientness,Mother, we put these fleshly lendings onThou yield’st to thy poor children; took thy giftOf life, which must, in all the after-days,Be craved again with tears,—With fresh and still-petitionary tears.Being once bound thine almsmen for that gift,We are bound to beggary, nor our own can callThe journal dole of customary life,But after suit obsequious for’t to thee.Indeed this flesh, O Mother,A beggar’s gown, a client’s badging,We find, which from thy hands we simply took,Nought dreaming of the after penury,In nescientness.
In a little joy, in a little joy,We wear awhile thy sore insignia,Nor know thy heel o’ the neck. O Mother! Mother!Then what use knew I of thy solemn robes,But as a child, to play with them? I bade theeLeave thy great husbandries, thy grave designs,Thy tedious state which irked my ignorant years,Thy winter-watches, suckling of the grain,Severe premeditation taciturnUpon the brooded Summer, thy chill cares,And all thy ministries majestical,To sport with me, thy darling. Thought I notThou set’st thy seasons forth processionalTo pamper me with pageant,—thou thyselfMy fellow-gamester, appanage of mine arms?Then what wild Dionysia I, young Bacchanal,Danced in thy lap! Ah for thy gravity!Then, O Earth, thou rang’st beneath me,Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward,Even with the shiftedPoise and footing of my thought!I brake through thy doors of sunset,Ran before the hooves of sunrise,Shook thy matron tresses down in fanciesWild and wilfulAs a poet’s hand could twine them;Caught in my fantasy’s crystal chaliceThe Bow, as its cataract of coloursPlashed to thee downward;Then when thy circuit swung to nightward,Night the abhorrèd, night was a new dawning,Celestial dawningOver the ultimate marges of the soul;Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me,And like a windy arras waved with dreams.Sleep I took not for my bedfellow,Who could wakenTo a revel, an inexhaustibleWassail of orgiac imageries;Then while I wore thy sore insigniaIn a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy;Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee,Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman;Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot,But breathing warm of thee as infants breatheNew from their mother’s morning bosom. So I,Risen from thee, restless winnower of the heaven,Most Hermes-like, did keepMy vital and resilient path, and feltThe play of wings about my fledgèd heel—Sure on the verges of precipitous dream,Swift in its springingFrom jut to jut of inaccessible fancies,In a little joy.
In a little thought, in a little thought,We stand and eye thee in a grave dismay,With sad and doubtful questioning, when firstThou speak’st to us as men: like sons who hearNewly their mother’s history, unthoughtBefore, and say—‘She is not as we dreamed:Ah me! we are beguiled!’ What art thou, then,That art not our conceiving? Art thou notToo old for thy young children? Or perchance,Keep’st thou a youth perpetual-burnishableBeyond thy sons decrepit? It is longSince Time was first a fledgling;Yet thou may’st be but as a pendant bullaAgainst his stripling bosom swung. Alack!For that we seem indeedTo have slipped the world’s great leaping-time, and comeUpon thy pinched and dozing days: these weeds,These corporal leavings, thou not cast’st us new,Fresh from thy craftship, like the lilies’ coats,But foist’st us offWith hasty tarnished piecings negligent,Snippets and wasteFrom old ancestral wearings,That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-fleshAfter our father’s surfeits; nay with chinks,Some of us, that if speech may have free leaveOur souls go out at elbows. We are sadWith more than our sires’ heaviness, and withMore than their weakness weak; we shall not beMighty with all their mightiness, nor shall notRejoice with all their joy. Ay, Mother! Mother!What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,Thou lustingly engender’st,To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?From nightly towersHe dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,And yet is he successive unto nothingBut patrimony of a little mould,And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouthAvid of all dominion and all mightiness,All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,All beauty, and all starry majesties,And dim transtellar things;—even that it may,Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,Confess—‘It is enough.’ The world left emptyWhat that poor mouthful crams. His heart is buildedFor pride, for potency, infinity,All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,Arrased with purple like the house of kings,—To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-wormStatelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,Who bringest forth no saying yet so darkAs we ourselves, thy darkest! We the young,In a little thought, in a little thought,At last confront thee, and ourselves in thee,And wake disgarmented of glory: as oneOn a mount standing, and against him stands,On the mount adverse, crowned with westering rays,The golden sun, and they two brotherlyGaze each on each;He faring downTo the dull vale, his Godhead peels from himTill he can scarcely spurn the pebble—For nothingness of new-found mortality—That mutinies against his gallèd foot.Littly he sets him to the daily way,With all around the valleys growing grave,And known things changed and strange; but he holds on,Though all the land of light be widowèd,In a little thought.
In a little strength, in a little strength,We affront thy unveiled face intolerable,Which yet we do sustain.Though I the Orient never more shall feelBreak like a clash of cymbals, and my heartClang through my shaken body like a gong;Nor ever more with spurted feet shall treadI’ the winepresses of song; nought’s truly lostThat moulds to sprout forth gain: now I have on meThe high Phœbean priesthood, and that cravesAn unrash utterance; not with flaunted hemMay the Muse enter in behind the veil,Nor, though we hold the sacred dances good,Shall the holy Virgins mænadize: ruled lipsBefit a votaress Muse.Thence with no mutable, nor no gelid love,I keep, O Earth, thy worship,Though life slow, and the sobering Genius changeTo a lamp his gusty torch. What though no moreAthwart its roseal glowThy face look forth triumphal? Thou put’st onStrange sanctities of pathos; like this knollMade derelict of day,Couchant and shadowèdUnder dim Vesper’s overloosened hair:This, where embossèd with the half-blown seedThe solemn purple thistle stands in grassGrey as an exhalation, when the bankHolds mist for water in the nights of Fall.Not to the boy, although his eyes be pureAs the prime snowdrop is,Ere the rash Phœbus break her cloisterOf sanctimonious snow;Or Winter fasting sole on HimalaySince those dove-nuncioed daysWhen Asia rose from bathing;Not to such eyes,Uneuphrasied with tears, the hierarchicalVision lies unoccult, rank under rankThrough all create down-wheeling, from the ThroneEven to the bases of the pregnant ooze.This is the enchantment, this the exaltation,The all-compensating wonder,Giving to common things wild kindredWith the gold-tesserate floors of Jove;Linking such heights and such humilitiesHand in hand in ordinal dances,That I do think my tread,Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass,Flickers the unwithering stars.This to the shunless fardel of the worldNerves my uncurbèd back; that I endure,The monstrous Temple’s moveless caryatid,With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things,In a little strength.
In a little sight, in a little sight,We learn from what in thee is credibleThe incredible, with bloody clutch and feetClinging the painful juts of jaggèd faith.Science, old noser in its prideful straw,That with anatomising scalpel tentsIts three-inch of thy skin, and brags—‘All’s bare,’The eyeless worm, that boring works the soil,Making it capable for the crops of God;Against its own dull willMinisters poppies to our troublous thought,A Balaam come to prophecy,—parables,Nor of its parable itself is ware,Grossly unwotting; all things has expoundedReflux and influx, counts the sepulchreThe seminary of being, and extinctionThe Ceres of existence: it discoversLife in putridity, vigour in decay;Dissolution even, and disintegration,Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder,Finds in God’s thoughts irrefragable order,And admirable the manner of our corruptionAs of our health. It grafts upon the cypressThe tree of Life—Death dies on his own dartPromising to our ashes perpetuity,And to our perishable elementsTheir proper imperishability; extractingMedicaments from out mortalityAgainst too mortal cogitation; tillEven of the caput mortuum we do thusMake a memento vivere. To such usesI put the blinding knowledge of the fool,Who in no order seeth ordinance;Nor thrust my arm in nature shoulder-high,And cry—‘There’s nought beyond!’ How should I so,That cannot with these arms of mine engirdleAll which I am; that am a foreignerIn mine own region? Who the chart shall drawOf the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths,The spacious tenements and wide pleasances,Innumerable corridors far-withdrawn,Where I wander darkling, of myself?Darkling I wander, nor I dare exploreThe long arcane of those dim catacombs,Where the rat memory does its burrows make,Close-seal them as I may, and my stolen treadStarts populace, a gens lucifuga;That too strait seems my mind my mind to hold,And I myself incontinent of me.Then go I, my foul-venting ignoranceWith scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth!Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls o’ the world,And vow—A goodly house, but something ancient,And I can find no Master? Rather, nay,By baffled seeing, something I divineWhich baffles, and a seeing set beyond;And so with strenuous gazes sounding down,Like to the day-long porer on a stream,Whose last look is his deepest, I besideThis slow perpetual Time stand patiently,In a little sight.
In a little dust, in a little dust,Earth, thou reclaim’st us, who do all our livesFind of thee but Egyptian villeinage.Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm,Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows;Descended passions sway it; it is distraughtWith ghostly usurpation, dinned and frettedWith the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement,Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries.Thou giv’st us life not half so willinglyAs thou undost thy giving; thou that teem’stThe stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,The lion maned with curlèd puissance,The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin,Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin;And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat’st.Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon,And many a floating bank of fangs,The scaly scourges of thy primal brine,And the tower-crested plesiosaure.Thou fill’st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slowOn purple æons of kings; man’s hulking towersAre carcase for thee, and to modern sunDisglutt’st their splintered bones.Rabble of Pharaohs and ArsacidæKeep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked downHow many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi,And perished cities whose great phantasmataO’erbrow the silent citizens of Dis:—Hast not thy fill?Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink,Even till thy dull throat sicken,The draught thou grow’st most fat on; hear’st thou notThe world’s knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience!Much offal of a foul world comes thy way,And man’s superfluous cloud shall soon be laidIn a little blood.
In a little peace, in a little peace,Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposesOf imposed being, and relenting, mend’stToo much, with nought. The westering Phoebus’ horsePaws i’ the lucent dust as when he shockedThe East with rising; O how may I traceIn this decline that morning when we didSport ’twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence,Which had not yet learned rending? we did thenDivinely stand, not knowing yet against usSentence had passed of life, nor commutationPetitioning into death. What’s he that ofThe Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop,Even where the low hic jacet answers him;Thus low, O Man! there’s freedom’s seignory,Tellus’ most reverend sole free commonweal,And model deeply-policied: there noneStands on precedence, nor ambitiouslyWoos the impartial worm, whose favours kissWith liberal largesse all; there each is freeTo be e’en what he must, which here did striveSo much to be he could not; there all doTheir uses just, with no flown questioning.To be took by the hand of equal earthThey doff her livery, slip to the worm,Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance,And that soiled workaday apparel cast,Put on condition: Death’s ungentle buffetAlone makes ceremonial manumission;So are the heavenly statutes set, and thoseUranian tables of the primal Law.In a little peace, in a little peace,Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers,We draw together to one hid dark lake;In a little peace, in a little peace,We drain with all our burthens of dishonourInto the cleansing sands o’ the thirsty grave.The fiery pomps, brave exhalations,And all the glistering shows o’ the seeming world,Which the sight aches at, we unwinking seeThrough the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith’s finedThe muddy wine of life; that earth doth purgeOf her plethora of man; Death, that doth flushThe cumbered gutters of humanity;Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned,Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o’ the strong;Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence drawsOf the high-tided man; skull-housèd aspThat stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth,Where he that dips is deathless; being’s drone-pipe;Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars,And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun;Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridgeTo the steep and trifid God; one mortal birthThat broker is of immortality.Under this dreadful brother uterine,This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike,To turn thy weanlings’ mouth averse, embitter’stThine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at lastShall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,Here I pluck loose the body’s cerementing,And break the tomb of life; here I shake offThe bur o’ the world, man’s congregation shun,And to the antique order of the deadI take the tongueless vows: my cell is setHere in thy bosom; my little trouble is endedIn a little peace.