MOONRISE
                   AND who has seen the moon, who has not seen
                   Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
                   Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
                   Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
                   Confession of delight upon the wave,
                   Littering the waves with her own superscription
                   Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards
                       us
                   Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
                   That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
                   That perfect, bright experience never falls
                   To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
                   Sooner than our full consummation here
                   In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

     THE sun immense and rosy
     Must have sunk and become extinct
     The night you closed your eyes for ever against me.

     Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings
     Since then, with fritter of flowers—
     Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings.

     Still, you left me the nights,
     The great dark glittery window,
     The bubble hemming this empty existence with
        lights.

     Still in the vast hollow
     Like a breath in a bubble spinning
     Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the
        bounds like a swallow!

     I can look through
     The film of the bubble night, to where you are.
     Through the film I can almost touch you.

       EASTWOOD

     THE stars that open and shut
     Fall on my shallow breast
     Like stars on a pool.

     The soft wind, blowing cool
     Laps little crest after crest
     Of ripples across my breast.

     And dark grass under my feet
     Seems to dabble in me
     Like grass in a brook.

     Oh, and it is sweet
     To be all these things, not to be
     Any more myself.

     For look,
     I am weary of myself!

     AH God, life, law, so many names you keep,
     You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep
     That does inform this various dream of living,
     You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving
     Us out as dreams, you august Sleep
     Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all
        time,

     The constellations, your great heart, the sun
     Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;
     Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep
     Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams
     We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said
     I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon

     For when at night, from out the full surcharge
     Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw
     The harvest, the spent action to itself;
     Leaves me unburdened to begin again;
     At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,
     Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands
     Complain of what the day has had them do?

     Never let it be said I was poltroon
     At this my task of living, this my dream,
     This me which rises from the dark of sleep
     In white flesh robed to drape another dream,
     As lightning comes all white and trembling
     From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about
     One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,
     In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,
     And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.

     If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows
          richer
     Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep
     Must in my transiency pass all through pain,
     Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude
     Dull meteorite flash only into light
     When tearing through the anguish of this life,
     Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn
     Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God
     To alter my one speck of doom, when round me
          burns
     The whole great conflagration of all life,
     Lapped like a body close upon a sleep,
     Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep
     Within the immense and toilsome life-time,
          heaved
     With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep?

     Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh
     Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul
     That slowly labours in a vast travail,
     To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow
     That carries moons along, and spare the stress
     That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?

     When pain and all
     And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep
     Rising to dream in me a small keen dream
     Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent—

       CROYDON

     IT is Isis the mystery
     Must be in love with me.

     Here this round ball of earth
     Where all the mountains sit
     Solemn in groups,
     And the bright rivers flit
     Round them for girth.

     Here the trees and troops
     Darken the shining grass,
     And many people pass
     Plundered from heaven,
     Many bright people pass,
     Plunder from heaven.

     What of the mistresses
     What the beloved seven?
     —They were but witnesses,
     I was just driven.

     Where is there peace for me?
     Isis the mystery
     Must be in love with me.

     You, you are all unloving, loveless, you;
     Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods,
     You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even,
     Threshing your own passions with no woman for
        the threshing-floor,
     Finishing your dreams for your own sake only,
     Playing your great game around the world, alone,
     Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to
        cherish,
     No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter.

     Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase
     Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed
        young;
     You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent,
        cold and callous,
     Naked of worship, of love or of adornment,
     Scorning the panacea even of labour,
     Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness
     Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's
        goings,
     Sea, only you are free, sophisticated.

     You who toil not, you who spin not,
     Surely but for you and your like, toiling
     Were not worth while, nor spinning worth the
        effort!

     You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift
     Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out;
     You who roll the stars like jewels in your palm,
     So that they seem to utter themselves aloud;
     You who steep from out the days their colour,
     Reveal the universal tint that dyes
     Their web; who shadow the sun's great gestures
        and expressions
     So that he seems a stranger in his passing;
     Who voice the dumb night fittingly;
     Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to
        death with your shadowing.

       BOURNEMOUTH

     MY love lies underground
     With her face upturned to mine,
     And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss
     That ended her life and mine.

     I dance at the Christmas party
     Under the mistletoe
     Along with a ripe, slack country lass
     Jostling to and fro.

     The big, soft country lass,
     Like a loose sheaf of wheat
     Slipped through my arms on the threshing floor
     At my feet.

     The warm, soft country lass,
     Sweet as an armful of wheat
     At threshing-time broken, was broken
     For me, and ah, it was sweet!

     Now I am going home
     Fulfilled and alone,
     I see the great Orion standing
     Looking down.

     He's the star of my first beloved
     Love-making.
     The witness of all that bitter-sweet
     Heart-aching.

     Now he sees this as well,
     This last commission.
     Nor do I get any look
     Of admonition.

     He can add the reckoning up
     I suppose, between now and then,
     Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult
     Ways of men.

     He has done as I have done
     No doubt:
     Remembered and forgotten
     Turn and about.

     My love lies underground
     With her face upturned to mine,
     And her mouth unclosed in the last long kiss
     That ended her life and mine.

     She fares in the stark immortal
     Fields of death;
     I in these goodly, frozen
     Fields beneath.

     Something in me remembers
     And will not forget.
     The stream of my life in the darkness
     Deathward set!

     And something in me has forgotten,
     Has ceased to care.
     Desire comes up, and contentment
     Is debonair.

     I, who am worn and careful,
     How much do I care?
     How is it I grin then, and chuckle
     Over despair?

     Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient
     Grief makes us free
     To be faithless and faithful together
     As we have to be.

                 FIRST PART

     UPON her plodding palfrey
     With a heavy child at her breast
     And Joseph holding the bridle
     They mount to the last hill-crest.

     Dissatisfied and weary
     She sees the blade of the sea
     Dividing earth and heaven
     In a glitter of ecstasy.

     Sudden a dark-faced stranger
     With his back to the sun, holds out
     His arms; so she lights from her palfrey
     And turns her round about.

     She has given the child to Joseph,
     Gone down to the flashing shore;
     And Joseph, shading his eyes with his hand,
     Stands watching evermore.

                 SECOND PART

     THE sea in the stones is singing,
     A woman binds her hair
     With yellow, frail sea-poppies,
     That shine as her fingers stir.

     While a naked man comes swiftly
     Like a spurt of white foam rent
     From the crest of a falling breaker,
     Over the poppies sent.

     He puts his surf-wet fingers
     Over her startled eyes,
     And asks if she sees the land, the land,
     The land of her glad surmise.

                 THIRD PART

     AGAIN in her blue, blue mantle
     Riding at Joseph's side,
     She says, "I went to Cythera,
     And woe betide!"

     Her heart is a swinging cradle
     That holds the perfect child,
     But the shade on her forehead ill becomes
     A mother mild.

     So on with the slow, mean journey
     In the pride of humility;
     Till they halt at a cliff on the edge of the land
     Over a sullen sea.

     While Joseph pitches the sleep-tent
     She goes far down to the shore
     To where a man in a heaving boat
     Waits with a lifted oar.

                 FOURTH PART

     THEY dwelt in a huge, hoarse sea-cave
     And looked far down the dark
     Where an archway torn and glittering
     Shone like a huge sea-spark.

     He said: "Do you see the spirits
     Crowding the bright doorway?"
     He said: "Do you hear them whispering?"
     He said: "Do you catch what they say?"

                 FIFTH PART

     THEN Joseph, grey with waiting,
     His dark eyes full of pain,
     Heard: "I have been to Patmos;
     Give me the child again."

     Now on with the hopeless journey
     Looking bleak ahead she rode,
     And the man and the child of no more account
     Than the earth the palfrey trode.

     Till a beggar spoke to Joseph,
     But looked into her eyes;
     So she turned, and said to her husband:
     "I give, whoever denies."

                 SIXTH PART

     SHE gave on the open heather
     Beneath bare judgment stars,
     And she dreamed of her children and Joseph,
     And the isles, and her men, and her scars.

     And she woke to distil the berries
     The beggar had gathered at night,
     Whence he drew the curious liquors
     He held in delight.

     He gave her no crown of flowers,
     No child and no palfrey slow,
     Only led her through harsh, hard places
     Where strange winds blow.

     She follows his restless wanderings
     Till night when, by the fire's red stain,
     Her face is bent in the bitter steam
     That comes from the flowers of pain.

     Then merciless and ruthless
     He takes the flame-wild drops
     To the town, and tries to sell them
     With the market-crops.

     So she follows the cruel journey
     That ends not anywhere,
     And dreams, as she stirs the mixing-pot,
     She is brewing hope from despair.

       TRIER

     THE night was a failure
       but why not—?

     In the darkness
        with the pale dawn seething at the window
        through the black frame
        I could not be free,
        not free myself from the past, those others—
        and our love was a confusion,
        there was a horror,
        you recoiled away from me.

     Now, in the morning
     As we sit in the sunshine on the seat by the little
          shrine,
     And look at the mountain-walls,
     Walls of blue shadow,
     And see so near at our feet in the meadow
     Myriads of dandelion pappus
     Bubbles ravelled in the dark green grass
     Held still beneath the sunshine—

     It is enough, you are near—
     The mountains are balanced,
     The dandelion seeds stay half-submerged in the
          grass;
     You and I together
     We hold them proud and blithe
     On our love.
     They stand upright on our love,
     Everything starts from us,
     We are the source.

       BEUERBERG

     "AND OH—
       THAT THE MAN I AM
       MIGHT CEASE TO BE—"
     No, now I wish the sunshine would stop,
     and the white shining houses, and the gay red
         flowers on the balconies
     and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed
         out
     between two valves of darkness;
     the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with
         muffled sound
     obliterating everything.

     I wish that whatever props up the walls of light
     would fall, and darkness would come hurling
         heavily down,
     and it would be thick black dark for ever.
     Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,
     nor death, which quivers with birth,
     but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.

     What is sleep?
     It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill,
     but it does not alter me, nor help me.
     And death would ache still, I am sure;
     it would be lambent, uneasy.
     I wish it would be completely dark everywhere,
     inside me, and out, heavily dark
     utterly.

       WOLFRATSHAUSEN

     THE pale bubbles
     The lovely pale-gold bubbles of the globe-flowers
     In a great swarm clotted and single
     Went rolling in the dusk towards the river
     To where the sunset hung its wan gold cloths;
     And you stood alone, watching them go,
     And that mother-love like a demon drew you
        from me
     Towards England.

     Along the road, after nightfall,
     Along the glamorous birch-tree avenue
     Across the river levels
     We went in silence, and you staring to England.

     So then there shone within the jungle darkness
     Of the long, lush under-grass, a glow-worm's
        sudden
     Green lantern of pure light, a little, intense, fusing
        triumph,
     White and haloed with fire-mist, down in the
        tangled darkness.

     Then you put your hand in mine again, kissed me,
        and we struggled to be together.
     And the little electric flashes went with us, in the
        grass,
     Tiny lighthouses, little souls of lanterns, courage
        burst into an explosion of green light
     Everywhere down in the grass, where darkness was
        ravelled in darkness.

     Still, the kiss was a touch of bitterness on my mouth
     Like salt, burning in.
     And my hand withered in your hand.
     For you were straining with a wild heart, back,
        back again,
     Back to those children you had left behind, to all
        the æons of the past.
     And I was here in the under-dusk of the Isar.

     At home, we leaned in the bedroom window
     Of the old Bavarian Gasthaus,
     And the frogs in the pool beyond thrilled with
        exuberance,
     Like a boiling pot the pond crackled with happiness,
     Like a rattle a child spins round for joy, the night
        rattled
     With the extravagance of the frogs,
     And you leaned your cheek on mine,
     And I suffered it, wanting to sympathise.

     At last, as you stood, your white gown falling from
        your breasts,
     You looked into my eyes, and said: "But this is
        joy!"
     I acquiesced again.
     But the shadow of lying was in your eyes,
     The mother in you, fierce as a murderess, glaring
        to England,
     Yearning towards England, towards your young
        children,
     Insisting upon your motherhood, devastating.

     Still, the joy was there also, you spoke truly,
     The joy was not to be driven off so easily;
     Stronger than fear or destructive mother-love, it
        stood flickering;
     The frogs helped also, whirring away.
     Yet how I have learned to know that look in your
        eyes
     Of horrid sorrow!
     How I know that glitter of salt, dry, sterile,
        sharp, corrosive salt!
     Not tears, but white sharp brine
     Making hideous your eyes.

     I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my
        chest, my belly,
     Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through
        my defenceless nakedness.
     I have been thrust into white, sharp crystals,
     Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated.

     Ah, Lot's Wife, Lot's Wife!
     The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column
        of salt, like a waterspout
     That has enveloped me!
     Snow of salt, white, burning, eating salt
     In which I have writhed.

     Lot's Wife!—Not Wife, but Mother.
     I have learned to curse your motherhood,
     You pillar of salt accursed.
     I have cursed motherhood because of you,
     Accursed, base motherhood!

     I long for the time to come, when the curse against
        you will have gone out of my heart.
     But it has not gone yet.
     Nevertheless, once, the frogs, the globe-flowers of
        Bavaria, the glow-worms
     Gave me sweet lymph against the salt-burns,
     There is a kindness in the very rain.

     Therefore, even in the hour of my deepest, pas-
        sionate malediction
     I try to remember it is also well between us.
     That you are with me in the end.
     That you never look quite back; nine-tenths, ah,
        more
     You look round over your shoulder;
     But never quite back.

     Nevertheless the curse against you is still in my
        heart
     Like a deep, deep burn.
     The curse against all mothers.
     All mothers who fortify themselves in motherhood,
        devastating the vision.
     They are accursed, and the curse is not taken off
     It burns within me like a deep, old burn,
     And oh, I wish it was better.

     BEUERBERG

     IN front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost
        ribbon of rainbow;
     And between us and it, the thunder;
     And down below in the green wheat, the labourers
     Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.

     You are near to me, and your naked feet in their
        sandals,
     And through the scent of the balcony's naked
        timber
     I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the
        limber
     Lightning falls from heaven.

     Adown the pale-green glacier river floats
     A dark boat through the gloom—and whither?
     The thunder roars. But still we have each other!
     The naked lightnings in the heavens dither
     And disappear—what have we but each other?
     The boat has gone.

       ICKING

     You have come your way, I have come my way;
     You have stepped across your people, carelessly,
        hurting them all;
     I have stepped across my people, and hurt them
        in spite of my care.

     But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding
     We have come our ways and met at last
     Here in this upper room.

     Here the balcony
     Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons
        slowly
     Go by with their loads of green and silver birch-
        trees
     For the feast of Corpus Christi.

     Here from the balcony
     We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-
        green river
     Goes between the pine-woods,
     Over and beyond to where the many mountains
     Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the
        morning.

     I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through
        me, like the first
     Breeze of the morning through a narrow white
        birch.
     You glow at last like the mountain tops when they
        catch
     Day and make magic in heaven.

     At last I can throw away world without end, and
        meet you
     Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white;
     At last you can throw immortality off, and I see you
     Glistening with all the moment and all your
        beauty.

     Shameless and callous I love you;
     Out of indifference I love you;
     Out of mockery we dance together,
     Out of the sunshine into the shadow,
     Passing across the shadow into the sunlight,
     Out of sunlight to shadow.

     As we dance
     Your eyes take all of me in as a communication;
     As we dance
     I see you, ah, in full!
     Only to dance together in triumph of being together
     Two white ones, sharp, vindicated,
     Shining and touching,
     Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.

     A BLOTCH of pallor stirs beneath the high
     Square picture-dusk, the window of dark sky.

     A sound subdued in the darkness: tears!
     As if a bird in difficulty up the valley steers.

     "Why have you gone to the window? Why don't
        you sleep?
     How you have wakened me! But why, why do
        you weep?"

     "I am afraid of you, I am afraid, afraid!
     There is something in you destroys me—!"
     "You have dreamed and are not awake, come here
        to me."
     "No, I have wakened. It is you, you are cruel to
     me!"
     "My dear!"—"Yes, yes, you are cruel to me. You
        cast
     A shadow over my breasts that will kill me at last."
     "Come!"—"No, I'm a thing of life. I give
     You armfuls of sunshine, and you won't let me live."
     "Nay, I'm too sleepy!"—"Ah, you are horrible;
     You stand before me like ghosts, like a darkness
        upright."
     "I!"—"How can you treat me so, and love me?
     My feet have no hold, you take the sky from above me."
     "My dear, the night is soft and eternal, no doubt
     You love it!"—"It is dark, it kills me, I am put out."
     "My dear, when you cross the street in the sun-
        shine, surely
     Your own small night goes with you. Why treat
        it so poorly?"

     "No, no, I dance in the sun, I'm a thing of life—"     "Even then it is dark behind you. Turn round,
        my wife."

     "No, how cruel you are, you people the sunshine
     With shadows!"—"With yours I people the
     sunshine, yours and mine—"

     "In the darkness we all are gone, we are gone
        with the trees
     And the restless river;—we are lost and gone
        with all these."

     "But I am myself, I have nothing to do with these."     "Come back to bed, let us sleep on our mys-
        teries.

     "Come to me here, and lay your body by mine,
     And I will be all the shadow, you the shine.

     "Come, you are cold, the night has frightened you.
     Hark at the river! It pants as it hurries through

     "The pine-woods. How I love them so, in their
        mystery of not-to-be."
     "—But let me be myself, not a river or a tree."
     "Kiss me! How cold you are!—Your little breasts
     Are bubbles of ice. Kiss me!—You know how
        it rests

     "One to be quenched, to be given up, to be gone
        in the dark;
     To be blown out, to let night dowse the spark.

     "But never mind, my love. Nothing matters,
        save sleep;
     Save you, and me, and sleep; all the rest will
        keep."

     MUTILATION

     A THICK mist-sheet lies over the broken wheat.
     I walk up to my neck in mist, holding my mouth up.
     Across there, a discoloured moon burns itself out.

     I hold the night in horror;
     I dare not turn round.

     To-night I have left her alone.
     They would have it I have left her for ever.

     Oh my God, how it aches
     Where she is cut off from me!

     Perhaps she will go back to England.
     Perhaps she will go back,
     Perhaps we are parted for ever.

     If I go on walking through the whole breadth of
          Germany
     I come to the North Sea, or the Baltic.

     Over there is Russia—Austria, Switzerland, France,
          in a circle!
     I here in the undermist on the Bavarian road.

     It aches in me.
     What is England or France, far off,
     But a name she might take?
     I don't mind this continent stretching, the sea far
          away;
     It aches in me for her
     Like the agony of limbs cut off and aching;
     Not even longing,
     It is only agony.

     A cripple!
     Oh God, to be mutilated!
     To be a cripple!

     And if I never see her again?

     I think, if they told me so
     I could convulse the heavens with my horror.
     I think I could alter the frame of things in my
          agony.
     I think I could break the System with my heart.
     I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break.

     She too suffers.
     But who could compel her, if she chose me against
          them all?
     She has not chosen me finally, she suspends her
          choice.
     Night folk, Tuatha De Danaan, dark Gods, govern
          her sleep,
     Magnificent ghosts of the darkness, carry off her
          decision in sleep,
     Leave her no choice, make her lapse me-ward,
          make her,
     Oh Gods of the living Darkness, powers of Night.

       WOLFRATSHAUSEN