XXVIII
Discharged
CARRY me outInto the wind and the sunshine,Into the beautiful world.
O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!The stature and strength of the horses,The rustle and echo of footfalls,The flat roar and rattle of wheels!A swift tram floats huge on us …It’s a dream?The smell of the mud in my nostrilsBlows brave—like a breath of the sea!
As of old,Ambulant, undulant drapery,Vaguery and strangely provocative,Fluttersd and beckons. O, yonder—Is it?—the gleam of a stocking!Sudden, a spireWedged in the mist! O, the houses,The long lines of lofty, grey houses,Cross-hatched with shadow and light!These are the streets …Each is an avenue leadingWhither I will!
Free … !Dizzy, hysterical, faint,I sit, and the carriage rolls on with meInto the wonderful world.
The Old Infirmary, Edinburgh, 1873–75
ENVOY To CHARLES BAXTER
DO you rememberThat afternoon—that Sunday afternoon!—When, as the kirks were ringing in,And the grey city teemedWith Sabbath feelings and aspects,LEWIS—our LEWIS then,Now the whole world’s—and you,Young, yet in shape most like an elder, came,Laden with BALZACS(Big, yellow books, quite impudently French),The first of many timesTo that transformed back-kitchen where I laySo long, so many centuries—Or years is it!—ago?
Dear CHARLES, since thenWe have been friends, LEWIS and you and I,(How good it sounds, ‘LEWIS and you and I!’):Such friends, I like to think,That in us three, LEWIS and me and you,Is something of that gallant dreamWhich old DUMAS—the generous, the humane,The seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven!—Dreamed for a blessing to the race,The immortal Musketeers.
Our ATHOS rests—the wise, the kind,The liberal and august, his fault atoned,Rests in the crowded yardThere at the west of Princes Street. We three—You, I, and LEWIS!—still afoot,Are still together, and our lives,In chime so long, may keep(God bless the thought!)Unjangled till the end.
W. E. H.
CHISWICK, March 1888
THE SONG OF THE SWORD
(To Rudyard Kipling)
1890
The Sword Singing— The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword Clanging imperious Forth from Time’s battlements His ancient and triumphing Song.
In the beginning,Ere God inspired HimselfInto the clay thingThumbed to His image,The vacant, the naked shellSoon to be Man:Thoughtful He pondered it,Prone there and impotent,Fragile, invitingAttack and discomfiture;Then, with a smile—As He heard in the ThunderThat laughed over EdenThe voice of the Trumpet,The iron Beneficence,Calling his doomsTo the Winds of the world—Stooping, He drewOn the sand with His fingerA shape for a signOf his way to the eyesThat in wonder should waken,For a proof of His willTo the breaking intelligence.That was the birth of me:I am the Sword.
Bleak and lean, grey and cruel,Short-hilted, long shafted,I froze into steel;And the blood of my elder,His hand on the hafts of me,Sprang like a waveIn the wind, as the senseOf his strength grew to ecstasy;Glowed like a coalIn the throat of the furnace;As he knew me and named meThe War-Thing, the Comrade,Father of honourAnd giver of kingship,The fame-smith, the song-master,Bringer of womenOn fire at his handsFor the pride of fulfilment,Priest (saith the Lord)Of his marriage with victoryHo! then, the Trumpet,Handmaid of heroes,Calling the peersTo the place of espousals!Ho! then, the splendourAnd glare of my ministry,Clothing the earthWith a livery of lightnings!Ho! then, the musicOf battles in onset,And ruining armours,And God’s gift returningIn fury to God!Thrilling and keenAs the song of the winter stars,Ho! then, the soundOf my voice, the implacableAngel of Destiny!—I am the Sword.
Heroes, my children,Follow, O, follow me!Follow, exultingIn the great light that breaksFrom the sacred Companionship!Thrust through the fatuous,Thrust through the fungous brood,Spawned in my shadowAnd gross with my gift!Thrust through, and hearkenO, hark, to the Trumpet,The Virgin of Battles,Calling, still calling youInto the Presence,Sons of the Judgment,Pure wafts of the Will!Edged to annihilate,Hilted with government,Follow, O, follow me,Till the waste placesAll the grey globe overOoze, as the honeycombDrips, with the sweetnessDistilled of my strength,And, teeming in peaceThrough the wrath of my coming,They give back in beautyThe dread and the anguishThey had of me visitant!Follow, O follow, then,Heroes, my harvesters!Where the tall grain is ripeThrust in your sickles!Stripped and adustIn a stubble of empire,Scything and bindingThe full sheaves of sovranty:Thus, O, thus gloriously,Shall you fulfil yourselves!Thus, O, thus mightily,Show yourselves sons of mine—Yea, and win grace of me:I am the Sword!
I am the feast-maker:Hark, through a noiseOf the screaming of eagles,Hark how the Trumpet,The mistress of mistresses,Calls, silver-throatedAnd stern, where the tablesAre spread, and the mealOf the Lord is in hand!Driving the darkness,Even as the bannersAnd spears of the Morning;Sifting the nations,The slag from the metal,The waste and the weakFrom the fit and the strong;Fighting the brute,The abysmal Fecundity;Checking the gross,Multitudinous blunders,The groping, the purblindExcesses in serviceOf the Womb universal,The absolute drudge;Firing the charactryCarved on the World,The miraculous gemIn the seal-ring that burnsOn the hand of the Master—Yea! and authorityFlames through the dim,Unappeasable GrislinessProne down the nethermostChasms of the Void!—Clear singing, clean slicing;Sweet spoken, soft finishing;Making death beautiful,Life but a coinTo be staked in the pastimeWhose playing is moreThan the transfer of being;Arch-anarch, chief builder,Prince and evangelist,I am the Will of God:I am the Sword.
The Sword Singing— The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword Clanging majestical, As from the starry-staired Courts of the primal Supremacy, His high, irresistible song.
ARABIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS
(To Elizabeth Robins Pennell)
1893
‘O mes chères Mille et Une Nuits!’—Fantasio.
ONCE on a timeThere was a little boy: a master-mageBy virtue of a BookOf magic—O, so magical it filledHis life with visionary pompsProcessional! And PowersPassed with him where he passed. And ThronesAnd Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,Thronged in the criss-cross streets,The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,Of the unseen, silent City, in his soulPavilioned jealously, and hidAs in the dusk, profound,Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.—
I shut mine eyes … And lo!A flickering snatch of memory that floatsUpon the face of a pool of darkness fiveAnd thirty dead years deep,Antic in girlish broideriesAnd skirts and silly shoes with strapsAnd a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walksPlain in the shadow of a church(St. Michael’s: in whose brazen callTo curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),Sedate for all his hasteTo be at home; and, nestled in his arm,Inciting still to quiet and solitude,Boarded in sober drab,With small, square, agitating cutsLet in a-top of the double-columned, close,Quakerlike print, a Book! …What but that blessed briefOf what is gallantest and bestIn all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?The Book of rocs,Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,And ghouls, and genies—O, so hugeThey might have overed the tall Minster TowerHands down, as schoolboys take a post!In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,Schemselnihar and Sindbad, ScheherezadeThe peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour,Cairo and Serendib and Candahar,And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk—Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms—Of Kaf! … That centre of miracles,The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!
Old friends I had a-many—kindly and grimFamiliars, cronies quaintAnd goblin! Never a Wood but housedSome morrice of dainty dapperlings. No BrookBut had his nunneryOf green-haired, silvry-curving sprites,To cabin in his grots, and paceHis lilied margents. Every lone HillsideMight open upon Elf-Land. Every StalkThat curled about a Bean-stick was of the breedOf that live ladder by whose delicate rungsYou climbed beyond the clouds, and foundThe Farm-House where the Ogre, gorgedAnd drowsy, from his great oak chair,Among the flitches and pewters at the fire,Called for his Faëry Harp. And in it flew,And, perching on the kitchen table, sangJocund and jubilant, with a soundOf those gay, golden-vowered madrigalsThe shy thrush at mid-MayFlutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still,In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring,For Pan’s own whistle, savage and rich and lewd,And mocked him call for call!
I could not passThe half-door where the cobbler sat in viewNor figure me the wizen Leprechaun,In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes,Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and knowJust how he tapped his brogue, and twitchedHis wax-end this and that way, both with wristsAnd elbows. In the rich June fields,Where the ripe clover drew the bees,And the tall quakers trembled, and the West WindLolled his half-holiday awayBeside me lolling and lounging through my own,’Twas good to follow the Miller’s Youngest SonOn his white horse along the leafy lanes;For at his stirrup linked and ran,Not cynical and trapesing, as he lopedFrom wall to wall above the espaliers,But in the bravest topsThat market-town, a town of tops, could show:Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tailA banner flaunted in disdainOf human stratagems and shifts:King over All the Catlands, present and pastAnd future, that moustachedArtificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots!Or Bluebeard’s Closet, with its plenishingOf meat-hooks, sawdust, blood,And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases—Odd-fangled, most a butcher’s, partA faëry chamber hazily seenAnd hazily figured—on dark afternoonsAnd windy nights was visiting of the best.Then, too, the pelt of hoofsOut in the roaring darkness toldOf Herne the Hunter in his antlered helmGalloping, as with despatches from the Pit,Between his hell-born Hounds.And Rip Van Winkle … often I lurked to hear,Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall,The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowlsDown the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;For, listening, I could help him playHis wonderful game,In those blue, booming hills, with MarinersRefreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.
But what were these so near,So neighbourly fancies to the spell that broughtThe run of Ali Baba’s CaveJust for the saying ‘Open Sesame,’With gold to measure, peck by peck,In round, brown wooden stoupsYou borrowed at the chandler’s? … Or one timeMade you Aladdin’s friend at school,Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and LampIn perfect trim? … Or Ladies, fairFor all the embrowning scars in their white breastsWent labouring under some dread ordinance,Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while,Strange Curs that cried as they,Till there was never a Black Bitch of allYour consorting but might have goneSpell-driven miserably for crimesDone in the pride of womanhood and desire …Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night,While you lay wondering and acold,Your sense was fearfully purged; and soonQueen Labé, abominable and dear,Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom,Scattered the yellow powder (which I sawLike sulphur at the Docks in bulk),And muttered certain words you could not hear;And there! a living stream,The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flagsAnd cresses, glittered and sangOut of the hearthrug over the nakedness,Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! …
I was—how many a time!—That Second Calendar, Son of a King,On whom ’twas vehemently enjoined,Pausing at one mysterious door,To pry no closer, but content his soulWith his kind Forty. Yet I could not restFor idleness and ungovernable Fate.And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame(That wonder-working word!),Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans,And soaring, soaring onFrom air to air, came charging to the groundSheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds,And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I sprawledFlicked at me with his tail,And left me blinded, miserable, distraught(Even as I was in deed,When doctors came, and odious things were doneOn my poor tortured eyesWith lancets; or some evil acid stungAnd wrung them like hot sand,And desperately from room to roomFumble I must my dark, disconsolate way),To get to Bagdad how I might. But thereI met with Merry Ladies. O you three—Safie, Amine, Zobëidé—when my heartForgets you all shall be forgot!And so we supped, we and the rest,On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates,Almonds, pistachios, citrons. And HarounLaughed out of his lordly beardOn Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the ThreeFor all their Mossoul habits). And outsideThe Tigris, flowing swiftLike Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamedWith broken and wavering shapes of stranger stars;The vast, blue nightWas murmurous with peris’ plumesAnd the leathern wings of genies; words of powerWere whispering; and old fishermen,Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shoreDead loveliness: or a prodigy in scalesWorth in the Caliph’s Kitchen pieces of gold:Or copper vessels, stopped with lead,Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed,In durance under potent charactryGraven by the seal of Solomon the King …
Then, as the Book was glassedIn Life as in some olden mirror’s quaint,Bewildering angles, so would LifeFlash light on light back on the Book; and bothWere changed. Once in a house decayedFrom better days, harbouring an errant show(For all its stories of dry-rotWere filled with gruesome visitants in wax,Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes),I wandered; and no living soulWas nearer than the pay-box; and I staredUpon them staring—staring. Till at last,Three sets of rafters from the streets,I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room,With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene,Guarding the door: and there, in a bedroom-set,Behind a fence of faded crimson cords,With an aspect of frillsAnd dimities and dishonoured privacyThat made you hanker and hesitate to look,A Woman with her litter of Babes—all slain,All in their nightgowns, all with Painted EyesStaring—still staring; so that I turned and ranAs for my neck, but in the streetTook breath. The same, it seemed,And yet not all the same, I was to find,As I went up! For afterwards,Whenas I went my round alone—All day alone—in long, stern, silent streets,Where I might stretch my hand and takeWhatever I would: still there were Shapes of Stone,Motionless, lifelike, frightening—for the WrathHad smitten them; but they watched,This by her melons and figs, that by his ringsAnd chains and watches, with the hideous gaze,The Painted Eyes insufferable,Now, of those grisly images; and IPursued my best-belovéd quest,Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear.So the night fell—with never a lamplighter;And through the Palace of the KingI groped among the echoes, and I feltThat they were there,Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes,Hall after hall … Till lo! from farA Voice! And in a little whileTwo tapers burning! And the Voice,Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was—whose?Whose but Zobëidé’s,The lady of my heart, like meA True Believer, and like meAn outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale! …
Or, sailing to the IslesOf Khaledan, I spied one evenfallA black blotch in the sunset; and it grewSwiftly … and grew. Tearing their beards,The sailors wept and prayed; but the grave ship,Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad,Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman’s hand,And, turning broadside on,As the most iron would, was haled and suckedNearer, and nearer yet;And, all awash, with horrible lurching leapsRushed at that Portent, casting a shadow nowThat swallowed sea and sky; and then,Anchors and nails and boltsFlew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang,A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sidesOf the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay,A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemealAbout the waters; and her crewPassed shrieking, one by one; and I was leftTo drown. All the long night I swam;But in the morning, O, the smiling coastTufted with date-trees, meadowlike,Skirted with shelving sands! And a great waveCast me ashore; and I was saved alive.So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes,And, faring inland, in a desert placeI stumbled on an iron ring—The fellow of fifty built into the Quays:When, scenting a trap-door,I dug, and dug; until my biggest bladeStuck into wood. And then,The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs,Sunk in the naked rock! The cool, clean vault,So neat with niche on niche it might have beenOur beer-cellar but for the rowsOf brazen urns (like monstrous chemist’s jars)Full to the wide, squat throatsWith gold-dust, but a-topA layer of pickled-walnut-looking thingsI knew for olives! And far, O, far away,The Princess of China languished! Far awayWas marriage, with a Vizier and a ChiefOf Eunuchs and the privilegeOf going out at nightTo play—unkenned, majestical, secure—Where the old, brown, friendly river shapedLike Tigris shore for shore! Haply a GhoulSat in the churchyard under a frightened moon,A thighbone in his fist, and glaredAt supper with a Lady: she who tookHer rice with tweezers grain by grain.Or you might stumble—there by the iron gatesOf the Pump Room—underneath the limes—Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers,Just as the civil Genie laid him down.Or those red-curtained panes,Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatilyOf beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes,Might turn a caravansery’s, whereinYou found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk,And that fair Persian, bathed in tears,You’d not have given awayFor all the diamonds in the Vale PerilousYou had that dark and disleaved afternoonEscaped on a roc’s claw,Disguised like Sindbad—but in Christmas beef!And all the blissful whileThe schoolboy satchel at your hipWas such a bulse of gems as should amazeGrey-whiskered chapmen drawnFrom over Caspian: yea, the Chief JewellersOf Tartary and the bazaars,Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind.—
Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heartThe magian East: thus the child eyesSpelled out the wizard message by the lightOf the sober, workaday hoursThey saw, week in week out, pass, and still passIn the sleepy Minster City, folded kindIn ancient Severn’s arm,Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,Whose floating populace of ships—Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters—broughtTo her very doorsteps and geraniumsThe scents of the World’s End; the callsThat may not be gainsaid to rise and rideLike fire on some high errand of the race;The irresistible appealsFor comradeship that soundSteadily from the irresistible sea.Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,Telling itself anewIn terms of living, labouring life,Took on the colours, busked it in the wearOf life that lived and laboured; and Romance,The Angel-Playmate, raining downHis golden influencesOn all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,Walked with me arm in arm,Or left me, as one bediademed with strawsAnd bits of glass, to gladden at my heartWho had the gift to seek and feel and findHis fiery-hearted presence everywhere.Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,Sends the same silver dewsOf happiness down her dim, delighted skiesOn some poor collier-hamlet—(mound on moundOf sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalkSullenly smoking over a rowOf flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty airA web of rails and wheels and beams; with stringsOf hurtling, tipping trams)—As on the amorous nightingalesAnd roses of Shíraz, or the walls and towersOf Samarcand—the Ineffable—whence you espyThe splendour of Ginnistan’s embattled spears,Like listed lightnings.Samarcand!That name of names! That star-vaned belvedereBuilded against the Chambers of the South!That outpost on the Infinite!And behold!Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tideMight overtake you: for one fringe,One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but oneFloats founded vagueIn lubberlands delectable—isles of palmAnd lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,The promise of wistful hills—The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.