SYLVIA BARNARD, born in Greenland, Mass., 1937, graduated from Northfield Massachusetts School with a classical diploma. A scholarship student, she was also and early award winner for poetry in prep school and received two Honourable Mentions in a contest sponsored by Atlantic Monthly. An Honours student in Classics at McGill, she holds the Peterson Memorial Scholarship here and has also received the Chester McNaughton Creative Writing Award. Eliot and Auden, she notes, have been the chief modern influences in her poetry, while classical and medieval sources provide the ground tones. Her poetry shows an interest in experiment with the hexameter line and irregular rhyme schemes. In addition to poetry, she has acted in the summer theatre at McGill and written a play on Tristan and Iseult which was produced by the Players’ Club. She plans to do graduate work in England.
Illustrated by Vera Frenkel
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THE TIMELESS FOREST
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NUMBER FOUR
MCGILL POETRY SERIES
Editor: Louis Dudek
Committee
Anne Westaway
Sally Rayner
Barbara Shulman
Janet Barclay
Vera Frenkel
Leslie Kaye
Isabelle Alter
Rowland Phillipp
Sue Grossman
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The Timeless Forest
by Sylvia Barnard
McGill Poetry Series
Montreal 1959
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Copyright by Sylvia Barnard, 1959.
Published for the McGill Poetry Series
by Contact Press
28 Mayfield Avenue, Toronto
Printed in Great Britain
by Poets’ and Painters’ Press
146 Bridge Arch, Sutton Walk, London, S.E.1.
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CONTENTS
The White Princess | 7 |
The Guidance of Clio | 8 |
Rivers | 9 |
Lacrimae Rerum | 10 |
The Philosopher-King | 11 |
The Monster | 12 |
The Two Cages | 13 |
The World of Perception | 14 |
The Village and the Forest | 15 |
The Lovers | 16 |
The Vows | 17 |
The Fates | 18 |
Sonnet | 19 |
Liberation | 20 |
The Seer | 21 |
Truth and Falsehood | 23 |
Perversion | 24 |
The Pursuit | 25 |
Persephone’s Daughter | 26 |
Paradoxes: Saint John | 27 |
The Conflict | 27 |
Epiphany | 28 |
The Rabbit | 28 |
The Tortured One | 29 |
The Prophecy | 29 |
Christ of the Villages | 31 |
The Forest | 32 |
Sir Thomas More | 33 |
The Angel | 34 |
The Acceptance of Evil | 35 |
Ode to a Century | 36 |
The Rebels | 37 |
The Sculptor | 38 |
Symbolism | 39 |
The Unicorn | 40 |
Easter | 41 |
The Five Seasons | 42 |
Buildings | 43 |
Dialectic | 44 |
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THE WHITE PRINCESS
On one side flocked the crows and starlings crying The brownness of the earth and ugliness— Behind their cry arose the stubborn sighing Of men who wait upon the white princess, Whose eyes are blocked by fields and dust and anger Against her coming in a peasant’s dress. Across the bridge of all their summer languor There may be coolness—birds about a tower Beating with their wings—singing without clangour. “You are my brothers—singing from this dawn-hour, But your skin must be black-burned by the hot sun. You must beware the white princess’s power, For she will bind you to the earth, till one Spring night you cease to ask at all for coolness But lie with laughter in the web she has spun.” [page 7]
THE GUIDANCE OF CLIO
The god in me who reads the history books And turns them into marching Roman armies, Parched Crusaders dying in a desert, Hungry Northmen slaying Irish monks In the green and misted islands fallen To the sea— This god commands that I shall dream forever Of man in three-dimensional disguise— The past, the present, and what we call future Imposed upon each child of Babylon So innocent of any heritage But death— This god compels me to say timeless prayers, Read Bronze Age poems of Asiatic wars, Cross oceans in my nights and waking dreams, Adhere to precepts only half-remembered, Reject the ways that seem marked out for me By time— This god betrays me in my efforts to Comprehend my one-dimensional world, Painlessly receive and grant my love, Show similitude of outward poise, And follow carelessly all inclinations Of my will. This god admits that every age was full Of men who only lived in present moments, But in each century the slow-willed ones Viewed in decision all the passing worlds, Anachronistically clothed, but shedding Clarity. [page 8]
RIVERS
Man has lived along the rivers Since the Tigris gave him birth Close to all the elements, Water, air, and earth. Man has lived in want and fear Since the days of dinosaurs Crouched unhappy in his dark Cramped and dirty lairs. Man has glorified his heroes Since old Abraham left Ur Chosen father of a race Set apart from her. Man has prayed by his great rivers Since the gods were nature-sprites, Moving worlds by supplication, Moved by wrongs and rights. Man has died or rotted living Since the lepers first began Populating river valleys Where brown waters ran. [page 9]
LACRIMAE RERUM
Proud Hector knew the ultimate of hells When he went out to fight a hopeless war In horse-hair plume and armour—this his day, Tomorrow ever-changeless night, for all The charms Cassandra knew could not allay The fear of death. His wife Andromache To bite her chains and share a Danean bed— And nothing left but brightness of the sun Now setting, warmth of earth, and flow of blood, And the morning it will all be done. The pride of weapons and the strength of arms Still grant no pride to men—hubris is stifled— The gods have brought us to our frightened knees, Athene claims our garments and our cattle, But makes no answer to our voiceless pleas. [page 10]
THE PHILOSOPHER-KING
The gaunt philosopher could stand before The people of his deme and tear their souls To wizened shreds—forbid them to adore The idols who breathed from their incense-bowls. The craven want of power would not move Him nor the lips of prostitutes, but peace Would be his dream and his desire—to prove His love, he would command the snows to cease. But in his fullness he would know the fury Of reawakened devils in the night And at his trial the damned would form the jury, Twelve strong, vowed to obliterate his light. Down to the vortex of the human stream Go to components of his vital dream. [page 11]
THE MONSTER
The monster stirs and struggles from the depths Of ocean when he hears a lighthouse horn. The last of all his coiled and heavy race, He thinks another calls—a mate is born. He rises and the bricks that form the tower Topple beside him in the green sea’s heart Where nothing once concealed is ever told He and his lover learn that they must part. A curious story and without a point For Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty Found princes fit to rescue them from death— Was this not then the low-voiced lighthouse’ duty? Then must a prince or monster rise again Obtaining faultless flesh by sacrifice Or must he reconcile himself to know The emptiness of love, the thirst of vice? Oh, monster, how you must regret the day That knowledge placed you in the depths of sea! Had you died gasping on the island’s shore You would not be a source of guilt for me. [page 12]
THE TWO CAGES
The lion dreams in fury of his pray, The antelopes that he has town and sown, Making them rise again as living beasts As Jason made the dragon’s teeth become Hard warriors—the slayers and the slain. The lion dreams of how he walked the grass Of Africa—the proud, the swart, the king, With glory in the blood that flecked his mouth And glory in the ripping of his claws, The acting of a saga in disguise. So too the woman dreams in torment of The battles fought by Brunhilde bearing arms And winning Seigfried of the golden beard, The poems wrought by Sappho in the light Of torches kindled by Alcaeus’ hand. The lion stretches writhing in his cage Object of small boy’s mockery and taunts, The woman paces in her furnished room Lost in the loneliness of victory, Defeated by the glory that she sought. [page 13]
THE WORLD OF PERCEPTION
There is a strange, acute, and darkened world Where every minute act or sight or word Assumes importance far beyond its worth, Where every injured blade of grass is dead, Destroyed, object of our human pity, Recipient of the weeping Virgin’s prayers. And yet conversely all the sorrows that We hoarded in a mere discriminate Day become ridiculous and we Can laugh uncouthly at the ways that once Were precious to us in our act of hope— The gardens and the castles of our dreams. And then the Virgin who could pity birds And flowers seems remote from us—veiled in The grey obliqueness of a driving rain, The yellow half-light of a clouded sun, A vision of the Sunday morning sky That yields itself to earth by ten o’clock. [page 14]
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THE VILLAGE AND THE FOREST
I stand upon the porch between two lives— The mountain forest and the village fair— And in my mind I slowly picture each. In one are booths of candy and sweet punch, Strung with the coloured lights that I can see. The gala music must be from a band Playing the country brands of pops and jazz Or from a travelling carousel where all The children of the neighbourhood can ride Clasping the horses’ necks with sticky hands And dreaming of their prowess on the plains. The other forest life is dark and still, The calling of an owl or wild-cat’s wail, Leaves falling over one-time wells and rabbits Cowering in deserted house-spots where A hundred Christmases ago the dead Exchanged whatever seemed to them most rare, For they too knew the preciousness of time, The almost momentary bond of love. [page 15]
THE LOVERS
In summer’s midnight dusk a rattling car Came up the driver, silenced the watching dog And went behind the buildings, down the hill. An hour later but less rattling now, The car returned and vanished through the columned trees. How much did these two people love each other To come like this into the summer night Or were they following the laws of seasons, The pulses known to men since Stonehenge was A place of prayer and sacrifice in summer solstice? Were they restrained in reverence or bold In want and pain? Do they exchange shy looks At Mass or share a Baptist hymnal? Will Tonight be sweet in retrospect or will It finds its bitter way to the confessional? These are omnipresent alternatives— To give in white-burnt offering or kill The thing one loves in one’s own ego-flame, In this most delicate of all the arts, The understanding of two isolated hearts. [page 16]
THE VOWS
Fragility is the binding thread Of the promise that cannot be bound, As earthliness is the breaking-load That casts unbroken vows to the ground. Men and women, young or grey, Pass like shadows in a street— If a hand touches a hand, It is to bless and not to greet. Children come, the shadows of Shadows falling across each other. They join the passage in the street— Their father never touched their mother. These strangers cry, each from his own Strait-bounded world—they try to make Ephemerals take earthly forms— They press frail vows until they break. [page 17]
THE FATES
Some children walk the hills and see the Fates In every bush and spider-web. They read The epitaphs on fallen tombs and cry At Thomas Hardy and the Theban plays. Such children are the moulders of their lives And when against a background of red hills The Oedipus-like blow is bound to fall Yet they can weep in bitter vast surprise As if they’d spent their lives at football games And known the pain-joy of the Senior Prom, And this, the tragedy expected from Their births, were strange and unfamiliar doom. Unreasoning they mourn what they have made And asked for often and cannot evade. [page 18]
SONNET
Unholy prevalence of bronze desire Striking the placid waters of the sea, Encircle hungry animals with fire, Betray the blessed beasts, but still spare me! The keen embarrassments of sterile pride, The loneliness of wine and love-making, The stirrings of the worship that has died Pervert the weak and leave the strong quaking. The nights and winds and rain upon the mouth Are memories of still half-conscious dreams, Though in the after-months of summer drouth The world sometimes reverts to what it seems, For in the forests of the hidden mind The ghostly dogs will chase a slender hind. [page 19]
LIBERATION
Small boys have always looked across the seas, Beyond the mountains, and far up the rivers To where the known world ends and life begins. The camel caravans, the dragon-ships Have all led to this same far monument, This obelisk engraved in ninety tongues. The clipper-ships and covered wagons form Twin symbols of an epoch and the tales Of their exploits have passed from son to son. The first unwieldy railroad train gave way To long black hounds whose nightly calls have touched A thousand children shut in boarding-schools. And then the probing of the sky in young White planes made man yet freer and Even the planets less remote to him. But still upon the every threshold of The moon the inward struggle lasts—the heart Cries out to gain its perfect freedom there. [page 20]
THE SEER
The seer watches power-hungry men Betraying saints who died unbloodied deaths— The matchless curve of evil magnifying Good—the strait bewilderment it knows Upon its failure—Seer, you are more Than saint—you lead the unanticipated Dance and bind the world within your silver Chain—but you did not create the chain, For even you are marked by time, and time Is but the fondest figment of imagination. . . . By months we measure out the progress of the land, The beating of the snow upon the grass, The dying of the winds with hopeless cries, And all the estimates of time’s rebirth— Astutely mapped by clocks, by water, and by sand. Sometimes we come to have belief in these oblique Methods of following the parched events, Forgetting how their life was once imbibed Within the centre and without the range Of seasons—in the solitude we glibly seek. When we, the children of the never-silent voice, Speak of retreat and loneliness, we mean A conjured picture of a forest home So ringed with water and the fruits of light That Milton’s singing spheres would hasten to rejoice. We do not mean the silence of a vision’s pain— We were not burned with strength at Ostia Or blinded faring the Damascus road. The centre of the world is closed to us— We search its thin periphery with this refrain. [page 21] “We are the crust of earth—the puppets of the gods We dance in tune to their inaudible songs. However much we sift the earth and chart The stars, swift death and violence return And these our friends betray us with their scourging rods.” We fear the centre lest the Pauline fishing-net Enclose us in its fine-wrought meshes and Make every cross-bar pole a crucifix A warning and a challenge in one sign A place where unbent will and changeless patterns met. We may dismiss the traitor as a man condemned By all these patterns; pre-commanded by A god whose means are less than ends or by Psycho-heredity as iron master. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, this ancient trend. Greece saw the opposition of man and the fates, Who spin in darkness. The Anglo-Saxon thane Could sing the bee-wolf’s striking at the serpent His mangling of the monster Grendel and His weakness before Wyrd who firmly smiles and waits. Time is the culprit—measuring how stars are hurried And seeing each occurrence as an act Apart, denying from our feared and willed Responsibility the winter web Of loves, desires, passions, violences forming World. [page 22]
Truth is the strongest of the wills of God A seven-fold citadel of pure philosophy, The arch of physics, arrow of astronomy, Scourge of the foul, defender of the odd. The masters of deceit are masters in Negation—holding back the terrible from fear And mouthing platitudes so barren, coarse, and sere That shame may seem a virtue, love a sin. For shame is self-concerned, self-reproduced, With its religion cinemas and sexual sports, A fear of love and truth pervades all its reports. Fear of its own destruction is deduced. Freedom is serfdom’s cherished middle name, Wisdom the slogan of agnosticism’s void. Lies make a rectangle into a trapezoid And swear at oath both figures are the same. Yet truth is latent in the works of man, Truth is a cry that echoes through the wilderness Of filth it will absolve and scars it will redress, Itself the product and itself the plan. [page 23]
Blood is the food that marks release From all the cabinets of stone— The blood is followed by a peace That lets the spirit be alone. This is why people eat their gods Expose their children on a hill Defy their criminals with rods And spur with whips a flagging will, The peace is temporal and vain, You fight with guns for abstract truth And wonder why the concrete pain Is so unabstract and uncouth. For to the victims of the night A pity comes for you who kill— Their bodies’ injury is less Than your perversion of the will. [page 24]
The ghostly huntsman of my dream Pursuing ghostly golden wolves Is part of that recurrent theme The slaying of intangibles. In that green-brooding landscape there Was all the mystery of death— I did not ask the man to spare Either my vision or my breath. I sat upon a throne of snow In that expanse of grass and stone, The tower above, the earth below, And I in whiteness quite alone. Raising my arms in penitence I bade the huntsman have his way. He turned aside in impotence, I stripped him of his power to slay. And still I sat upon my throne, Filled with a savage, holy peace. Sweetness of grass and strength of stone Would stay forever and increase. [page 25]
Let me tell you the birth of Persephone’s daughter, Child of Pluto, princess of the dead, No one prepared any linen for swaddling When Dis and Persephone sadly were wed. After killing barren heifers, Golden calves in Semite lands, Barren because birth was hateful To Baal-Pluto’s blood-stained hands. Hear a child’s crying, disturbing the shades, Listen in wonder, such weeping is wild, An omen of light that is springing from darkness, Persephone’s daughter shall bear a child. [page 26]
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PARADOXES
1
Saint John
Thin, shrunken, infinitely old, he came To Patmos, followed in all his dreams by linking words, life and death, darkness and light, paradox in paradox and by the faces of the living dead and those who died to life. These memories and linking words he placed on parchment scrolls— giving strange meanings to familiar nouns, wine and blood, shepherd and sheep, bread that is never consumed and wine that never fails, the vine that grows forever. Then he dreamed of dragons, angels, and the Lamb of God. But since we do not live on ancient Patmos these books are closed to us far more than all the hieroglyphics solvable by science, for they are literal or lies, we kill each other to determine which.
The stones are shaped as loaves of bread On which the children bit and fed— The view upon the pinnacle Showed dreams wherein the children bled From which the hungry foxes fled Material and clerical. Of what can we make wine and bread Except the dreams of those who led The war against the Oracle? For though you see where men have sped Fleeing the gardens of the dead This fight is but the versicle. Respond that where a stream is red [page 27] There more than stones have washed its bed There love which sought no miracle.
I stood at Ephrata within the wood And watched the bridge above the wide ravine. The trucks were passing, and each trailer could Carry a drop more oil, a bit more food Than could the last as homage to the ego queen. I saw below a golden-bodied fox A rabbit dancing figure-eights of death. Twisting his way among the sticks and rocks, He, spared this long from the assaults of hawks, Remembers someone’s garden with his painting breath. But I have lived beneath a different law Within these walls. The Kings of Tarshish and The Isles shall bring their gifts. Arabia And Saba shall bring presents—and I saw Unstolen homage borne by an ungrasping hand.
4
The Rabbit
This is the rabbit—this is the hypocrite The weak, the innocent, who could not live Except by hiding in some bramble pit And foraging for what the meadows give. This, too, has stolen and not known the theft, The woman sitting in a rocking-chair Has never known the mountain-side, the cleft, Of rock surveying realms of air. And yet there too is death—there too are fears, The sin of Pilate was to wash his hands And gain the venom of a thousand years For what we all will do if life demands. But even here is hope—to stand alone To live and bleed and not to feed on stone. [page 28]
This is the tortured one—the one who keeps A vigil with blue candles at the shrine Of some veiled saint while all the forest sleeps Not knowing it is thirsty for red wine. The oracle is strong and will defeat The one who fights him—it is a strange Enchanted forest where the birds entreat, The foxes hunger, rabbits change and change. But when the tortured one has made his sure Reply, the oracle demands him crucified. Foxes despair, the birds do not endure, The rabbits kill one whom they deified. Have mercy, you who have been tortured twice, In your own name and at their painful price.
I have not promised such a bitter love As blood may signify. The rocks may look Upon a fertile field one day—the brook Will run with wine in earnest and a dove Will lead the birds and foxes from each mountain-nook. Perhaps then pleasure will give way to pain Entirely, and boredom will be dead—by grace Will all the rocking-chairs be splintered—space Must not be granted them, for cleansing rain Must wash the pious souls of rabbits from that place. The gifts will then be offered timidly The gold and myrrh and frankincense of prayer, The stones which belong to the realms of air, These will be given too, but ignorantly, [page 29] For who believes in worlds where stones may have no share? The foxes too will bring their gifts—before They are aware, they will be sceptred kings— They knew themselves, and transformation clings To knowledge. True adorers shall adore The crucified in the womb of the mornings. The doors will open in a curious way Before the shrine, before the candlesticks, It is not long before it will be day— The forest does not sleep in its old way, Even the nervous candles tighten on their wicks. [page 30]
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CHRIST OF THE VILLAGES
The wanderer went through white villages, His loneliness apparent and unsheathed By circumstance—he watched the silent homes, He passed the woman standing on her steps, The churches’ squat and earthbound towers. He went through trees where warning signs couched in Mysterious language forced the mind to feel The same unsubtle horror that a prince In a mediaeval forest felt for dwarfs And wolves and thin barbaric peoples. However much he wished to stop, he knew Time’s pressure and the emptiness of each Closed door—more perfectly he knew the walls That rose within each house—what was concealed By the tranquility of gardens. And still he waited, locked in love as no Man ever could be locked in hatred’s known, Communal nature—he must wait until, His exile sealed, his presence might be met By hatred’s well-trained emissaries. Then three days later may redemption come For all the dead, the witches, and the thieves. May suffering be poetry and may art Display the gaunt and tortured traveller Still dying on his cross of silence. [page 31]
My lovers, do not seek to drive away Enchanted birds from an enchanted forest— They will fly up with flash of blue-black wings And meet you with no fear and no surprise. Some tempt the unicorn to virgin laps To take his blood and tear away his horn, But there are more who let him go at last In pity for his barren forest home. He will traverse a bitter mountain road, The way of pain and childbirth, flood and fire, But you will shrink in terror from its rocks, You will succumb again to senseless fears. But why do you watch images, chained in Your cave, the swaying forms of market-women Or ranks of stolid soldiers marching on To death? I shall show you the daylight’s wonders, The cries and calls of forest animals, The angry rush of rivers and the endless quest For food, undying water and unending bread Contained in the seed of the white snow-flower. [page 32]
Creator of the country parchment where Contented people lived mediaeval lives With modern justice and Hellenic care For wisdom and that which its art contrives. You, the great lawyer and the Latinist Wise in how economic systems fail, Host of Erasmus, England’s humanist, The learned reader of Vespucci’s tale They say you died for blind authority Or lingering tradition in your blood, Who do not know the Civitas Dei, Eternal city dedicate to Good. They only see the evils of the land And not the blessings of the unpraised hand. [page 33]
This is the angel who will sing forever Bearing its burdens on its gold-tipped wings— This is the child who laments by the river Weeping to hear how low the angel sings. Have we not met the angel in the mornings Under the elm-trees and beneath the clocks? Have we not turned away from him with spurning And barred our doors to him with curious locks? Behind the priest he hovers with a “Kyrie” Upon his lips—over the bed he bends And waits in consolation till the day Of strange beginnings and too-final ends Wait for the angel—listen to his song, The day is pitiless and the weeping long. [page 34]
The flagrant intermingling of good And evil in our breasts is far too strong— An ever-present Zoroastrian flood— The elements of water and of mud— A deluge wild and turbulent and long. The bearded rebels and the powdered wives Have made their vows and cleave unto their oath. They lightly and directly spend their lives With patterned pleasures and well-ordered drives. They spend their energies extolling both. In us there are two visions—one of night— The throbbing and the terror of despair, Of revelations made by candlelight— And one of day—a day so veiled in white That it is more aerial than air. Who could accept what is ethereal And live perpetually in troubled search For unsymbolic rocks corporeal For dreams that are more than ephemeral For idols holier than any church? Between despair and dreamland find a mean, Between the brave romantic life and that Which is the spirit’s death, and I have seen The verge of both and neither, for the queen Of my dominion still may watch a cat. [page 35]
Here come the people, surging over the earth— Have the Fertile Crescents ceased to feed them? In tents and roadways women will give birth Blaming God and locusts for the nipples Which give no milk. Will you create a brave New world, dreaming poet, on your faith in Man? Man begets himself nor can free love, Chemistry, or new religion give him Life. You, Pinocchio, will not become Flesh and bone until you know a reason To desire bones and flesh, for not a crumb Under any table falls to sad-eyed puppets. I utterly scorn your mock despair And wave my pencil in the air, Follow me laughing if you dare, It is you who have strangled life and love. [page 36]
And those who cry against their world grow old Bald, senile, and a bit ridiculous. They find their early ardour growing cold, And when they wish to be most beautiful They are most hampered by the commonplace. Who wants to say “I love you” may but say “Lend me your pen” for earth presents its face Of ugliness and this is all the heart Resplendent in its inner rooms reveals. A friend once said, “It is a dreadful thing When one is never thought of as one feels.” My child, be thankful you have secret strength.
II
Still there are people fighting with the rain Who want imaginary summer in the earth, Who have not learned the lesson of their pain But dream discordant music and strange violent birth. They are not rebels—they are swift to love, Swift to accept the water and the Latin word. Unconscious of their height they rise above The vision of the free that has become absurd. But yet they are the movers of the world Who change the actual abyss to what they will. By vivid burning hands the stones are hurled Away that built the walls, the prison, and the mill. [page 37]
From the impersonal body that he did not love The sculptor made a mould of classic beauty— Blank eyes and Roman nose preside above The large erotic breasts he felt his duty To provide her. In her arms and legs The indolence of harems is implicit, And her plumb out-stretched hand astutely begs Whatever alms its softness can elicit. But from the body he desired profoundly He formed a twisted, sharp, and harsh design. The rib-framed breasts unable to flow roundly Contrast with large eyes and the slender line Of long gaunt arms. The bony feet express Searching the world for an aesthetic Grail— The hungry face and hands tend to distress Those men who see no glory in the frail. [page 38]
SYMBOLISM
There is a latent symbolism in Whatever men find necessary to Their lives—their eating is a shadow of Their seeking strength—their illness and their sin Are intertwined mysteriously—they do The sexual act as outward sign of love. The private miracles of pain and art Which men hold hidden in their places of fear Presage the sharp realities of life, The twistings and the turnings of the heart, Eternity unwaning with the year, The veil of matter torn without a knife. But men still eat and breathe and copulate With no regard for stark reality. They do not see in war a sign of Hell Nor keep their laughter free of languid hate— Not seeing life in its totality, They think the shadow-world is just as well. The circle of the beautiful is wrought In stone—more precious than the well of an Oasis—freer than the hidden song Of nightingales—the tortured ones have fought To find this beauty, and its slender span Embraces all the scourged and makes tem strong. The beauty which is truth beyond the true Is built of all the love that sees itself Rejected but returns to grasp its cross And abnegate its will—the sum of you Who meditate the spirit, not the shelf Of dry despair that feels the body’s loss. [page 39]
THE UNICORN
The thin proverbial beast of mistranslation Invoked a legend for the shadow years Whose holy dreams and fires are most forgotten In our strange knowledge and new foreign fears. Its white and transient form is seen throughout The forests that lie over the old world. Where women walk by stark secluded lakes, It shows its horn protuberant and curled. And all the vanished victims of the plagues, The guillotines, and nightmares of the past Rally about the unicorn’s white neck— The lion and the leopard did not last. [page 40]
EASTER
This is the day of urban Resurrection After the darkness of the city’s Lent When we have gone with scarved heads to confession, Emotionless and dust-grimed to repent. I, too, have seen the shattered pane of glass Have seen it cutting sharply in my breast, And waited vainly for the freeing grass, The winds from some far-coasted boundless West. And now at last the world is dim with incense, The high procession passes through the church. We have another spring to make our imprints Upon some new-born thrusting piece of earth. [page 41]
THE FIVE SEASONS
Within the circle of unhurried moments There lies a season that is neither spring Nor autumn—still less the cold extreme Of winter or the burden of July, The season that is given not by earth Nor by the movements of the animals, The season that is given inwardly to man, His revelation and his solitude. During this season of his life he knows Growth in philosophy as in spring fields, Passion of summer in his eagerness, Autumnal peace and angry winter’s fury. The cravings of the winter-hungry mind Absorb the mystery of ritual spring, Mature as do the leaves and birds in summer, Ripen with all the richness of the fall. [page 42]
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BUILDINGS
The pilgrims going to Jerusalem Paused every summer at a certain tower Grey-green with moss and drifted in with leaves. There were long stories told by travelling bards Shaping their dusty fingers to their lutes And singing songs of lion-hearted men. The pilgrims going to Jerusalem Would stop in sleepy taverns where the floors Were strewn with heavy straw and on the board Were always broth and sour wine to drink, And in the gabled lofts were always beds With feather mattresses and fur-lined rugs. The pilgrims going to Jerusalem Endowed new churches when they came again To Europe—their new Gothic towers rose, Became the home of incense and plainsong, Refuge of birds and heart of singing bells, Wind-towers of angels chanting psalms to men. [page 43]
DIALECTIC
The source of poetry is beyond its reach For words themselves degrade the height of truth. However long the poet may beseech The language he must always be uncouth. The vastness of the evening death Is unapproachable by Hebrew chants Or Latin whispers—every secret breath Echoes upon the fiercely astral dance. The passions clothed and carried through the day Become the fire and hopelessness of heart Presaging wisdom, while the surface way Of life is less than real, a work of art. Enflamed mediaeval symbols fill the sky Where planets softly sing and white birds fly. [page 44]
BOOKS IN THIS SERIES
1. Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies (O.P.)
2. Daryl Hine, The Carnal and the Crane
3. George Ellenbogen, Winds of Unreason
$1.50 each
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