The Great Valley

To the archangels and the fiery seed
Of mad Prometheus, fighting gods for men,
And heaven for earth, this greeting:
I led you once, I taught you, am the sire
Of hosts of you, but fellow to you all.
And when I fell, was chained upon this bed
By adamantine sickness, then I lay
And had you in my thought hour after hour,
Day after day, and saw you in dreams by night
Still fighting, bleeding, caring for the fallen,
Or objurgating heaven for the curse
It sheds on men, or arming for the fray
With steel of resisting thought; and so the sense
Of my responsibility has weighed
Upon me as my night has deftly dawned
To something clearer than the soul you knew,
Who led you once, with breath of iron horns,
Called to you: Charge! there is the trench of greed!
Avenge the poor! bring justice! purge the state
Of fraud! And so I lay and thought of you
Still guarding the old lines, fighting the old fights,
While I was changed, was not your leader now,
Cared no more for your battles, save as strife
That leads up higher, for upon my wall
I woke to see these words: He only wins
His freedom and existence who each day
Conquers them newly. How can I tell you
What has come over me?

You walk through galleries,
Devour the pictures in the different rooms,
Then gaze about you where you stand at last
Amid supernal canvases of light.
Try to recall the pictures you have studied,
What you have seen has helped you to perceive
The final beauties, but is blurred in mind,
It has been lived, has lost its vital power,
Is not the sovereign moment.

Climb a mountain
The whole day through, and at the time of stars
Stand on a peak and search infinity!
You have forgot the valleys, save perhaps
The torment of the flies of which you’re freed
In these cool heights.

So age cannot recall
The thrill and intimate complexities
That made the thought of youth. A sickness comes:
One has been metamorphosed, cannot live
The old emotions, habits, old delights.
And as for that we change each day and all
Our yesterdays are chrysalises whence
We crawled to what we are. In short, archangels,
I have become another soul. Now listen:

I have seen things I cannot tell you of.
I have gained understandings past my power
To give you clearly; yet upon me rests
The teasing call to tell you, here I lie
Revolving this new task of leadership.
How shall I make you see I have not failed you?
Not really played a treasonous soul to you?
Not scorned the cause I gave you, kept you in?
Or damned you for, or made you suffer for?
I railed at heaven, I instructed you
To rail as well. How can you understand
I now accept the fate? Will you despise me
For saying this? Or will you say disease
Has weakened me, cooled off the fire of soul
And damped my courage? Then go on your way
To find a worthier leader?

So to doubt
I taught you once, but now my mind believes.
And to deny the order of the world
I gave you words, now I affirm the plan.
To fight against the gods in man’s behalf,
I made my leadership. Now I perceive
The cause of gods and men made one. You see
It is not individual gain that counts
In these external benefits of freedom
And satisfaction of material wants,
That counts so much, I say, as inner chains
Struck from the wrists, and inner scales peeled off
From inner eyes. I grant the human cause,
And say this,—Can I make you understand?
To give you proof my heart is with you yet
Let me reveal my sacrifice.

Suppose
You’ve found a truth that others knew before you,
Seen, let us say, the cat, as single taxers
Are wont to say? You hunt up some adherent
Who’s labored with you, tell him, “I’m convinced,
I see the cat at last.” You want to share
Your joy with some one, want his dragging hope
To hear you have arrived. And so with me
I hungered to communicate my vision
To some one who had seen it, and who knew
Its meaning, what it meant to me.

But then
You archangels and hot Promethean seed
Each time I thought of making the confession
To some delighted spirit, ranged yourselves
In thought around my sick bed, with contempt,
Or pained compassion written on your brows,
And words like these: He has deserted us,
He has surrendered, cringed before the gods.
And so my sacrifice is this: You’ll be
The first to know my second birth, you can
In such case never charge it up to fear,
Or weakness, shrunken nerves, or spirit
That lost the human touch through the effects
Of some delirium. What mind so clear,
Or will so strong to die with this denial
For your sakes? For it may be best for you
To live the rebel out of you. And if
You thought—at least I fear it—if you thought
I had gone over to the hosts you hate,
As you are now, through weakness, made my peace
With heaven, as you’d call it, just to save
My wretched self, you’d have a mad regret,
A fine disgust to work through, added labor
To all you must achieve. That’s why I die,
And seal this message. Break it on the day
They make me ashes!

BOMBYX

Sealed in a cocoon-cradle of white silk,
Locked fast in sleep;
Or bound for years as a chrysalid, while the neap
Creative tides rise to the spring and slough
The torn strands and the golden pupa stuff,
You tear wings free for the connubial flight—
Break suddenly the embryo trance, drift off,
Whole troops of you in a looped and colorful clutter
Wobbling like leaves in a fresh wind’s delight.
And over clover meadows in a flutter,
Or through sweet scented hollows,
You seek the expectant mate,
And the mad moment where life turns to death,
And both become one essence and one breath,
One undivided fate.

Together you fly
Drunken with life, yet mad to die,
Since soul achievement is death after all,
All rivals for the wedding festival.
Yet only one of you can win the prize;
The rest shall sink exhausted in defeat,
While the triumphant bridegroom dies
In his own rapture and creative fire—
All perish in the flame of their desire.

For none of you is given strength to live
Beyond the quest, or the hymeneal kiss;
The disappointed perish
One wins his joy, but may not keep or cherish
The moment which contains it, sudden doom
Falls on the winner of his bliss
And on the wings that quiver their frustration.

Bombyx! to have more life than is enough
To win the mate, achieve the one success,
And on that life to mount and half survey
The universe—
Build cities with it, letter precious scrolls,
Plan for the race to be and have the vision
To labor for of ages half elysian,
Is that a benediction or a curse?
Is it a good or evil to have strength
To soar beyond the sun, or planets even
If none of us at length
Reach heaven?
If none of our infatuate souls
Sip the bright fire of God?
If it be all a flying in a dream,
A lying down at last in deeper night,
To enrich the prodigal sod,
To breed new wings
For the same flight?

THE APOLOGY OF DEMETRIUS

Hyacinthus, your money, the idol you ordered isfinished.
May the grace of Diana be with you in strength undiminished.

Behold how the breast of it glitters, as if it were wrought in with stipples.
The Ephesian goddess is nature and these are her bountiful nipples.

So then do I fear for my trade? No, never! It’s past my conceiving.
There’ll be work for the artist while gods change to win our believing.

Come on then, you babblers and madmen from Jewry and tell us and show us—
Yes, come with your tumult the like of which never was known in Corinth or Troas.

They crowd in the markets and temples and gabble a story that palters.
Well, I whistle and hammer the silver, a maker of statues and altars.

Who says I am wroth lest in Samothrace, Lystra and Delos
The craft of the maker of images fail through the speech of these fellows?

And the temple of Artemis perish? Oh, well, however they hate us
Can they burn it as once it was burned by the wretch Herostratus?

But we built it again and carved it all newly in beauty and wonder—
Destroy it, oh man, who was crazed by lightning and roaring of thunder!

Oh virgin Diana, if virgin, what virgin whose altar is older!
If matron what breasts hang with milk for the eyes of her temples’ beholder!

For centuries gone—when these Jews prayed to serpents of bronze and calves that were golden
In Ephesus, Arcady, Athens, our reverent love was beholden

To the goddess of prophecy, music, the lyre, of light, inspiration,
Who guarded and watches the city and lays the foundation
Of nations and laws. What works we have done, yea still we would heed her—
And look at your barbarous ark in your temple of jewels and cedar!

What is our pollution, our idols, our sacrificed things which are strangled?
I ask you already divided in turbulent parties who wrangled

Concerning salvation of God to the faith of the uncircumcision
In Cyprus and Paphos, where poets of love keep the Hellenic vision.

I am filled with my loathing! Oh keep me a Greek though you make me a whoreson,
When the worship of beauty is dead you may pare off my foreskin.

When the symbol is dead which I mould to Diana our goddess
I’ll retire to the country of Nod, no matter where Nod is.

It will live when your temples are built, if any are builded,
And Jesus in silver is nailed on a cross which is gilded.

And touching this thing is it different to worship a man or abstraction?
Or an idol of silver or stone?—go talk to your spirit’s distraction!

Areopagus listened to Paul, I am told, for Athens is spending
Her time, as of old, in weighing new things and attending.

They heard him in silence! Let his arguments pass uncorrected—
Why, Plato had told us of Er from the dead resurrected!

Now, mark me! For showing the wisdom, compassion of poets and sages
That silence like lightning will aureole Paul to the end of the ages.

Oh Athens, who set up that shrine, do you think it was just superstition
Which carved for all passers to see that profoundest inscription:

To the unknown God? Do you think it was cowardice even?
Make altars and gods as you will, unknown is the planeted heaven.

And we who are richest in gods—have exhausted all thought in creating
Both symbols and shapes for interpreted loving and hating

Still sense the Unknown, though in blindness, in love as in duty
Would worship it most—the Unknown is the ultimate beauty.

Yes, Athens who set up the altar and chiseled the worshipful letters
To the Unknown God—what ignorance fastened with fetters

Did you loosen, oh wonder of Tarsus, how help their unknowing
Who told them he dwelt not in temples, nor needed the flowing

Of prayers from men’s hearts—the Giver of life and of all things, and seeing
He is lord of the heavens, in whom we are living and having our being.

So quoting our poet who centuries since with the monarch Gonatas
Lived and wrote the Phaenomena, known to the Greeks as Aratus.

And yet Hyacinthus I pity this Paul for profoundest compassion
Of Jesus before him. This sky and this earth I can fashion

Through mystical wonder or fear to the Sphinx or the Minotaur dreaded.
There’s Persephone dying and rising, and Cerberus the dog many-headed.

We have thought it all through! Yet I say if a virtue Elysian
Resides in the doctrine I’ll leave off the goddess Ephesian;

Sell my tools, shut my shop, worship God in a way that is safer,
Make the Unknown the known! Have they shown you a magical wafer?

A PLAY IN FOUR ACTS

Act One

There was slight rain that afternoon,
And tempest in the apple trees;
But as the sun went down the moon
Sailed swiftly to a western breeze.

Day kindled something in your blood,
Your fancies roved with dove and hawk;
There was no promise in your mood
Nor soft assurance in your talk.

I felt you might mislead my trust
And slight a love too surely yours;
You were so wild, I felt you must
Be kindred to the woods and moors.

But when we passed the orchard through
The dusk had crept into the sky;
Your eyes betrayed a dream which grew
Until I thought I heard you sigh.

You were an ardent star that waited
For night to be yourself and show
How surely afternoon had fated
A love that nothing could forego.

Act Two

The sky was full of clouds at rest
Like dolphins in a waste of blue.
We tramped along a country road
Into the village, I and you.

The dogwood bloomed along the fences.
We heard the songs of larks and thrushes.
The country door-yards teemed with hues
Of lilac trees and almond bushes.

The long blaze of the setting sun
Shone in your eyes and analyzed
Their little rifts of gray and brown,
And left your secret undisguised.

And I was silent thinking over
The old threads raveled from your heart.
I hear you clearer now than then:
“How can we part? How can we part?”

Act Three

Shadows upon the wall
And the ghost of a past on the floor,
Here where the hours made carnival
In the days that are no more.

And the chamber is cold and bare,
And the wax from the taper drips;
But I bury my face in your hair,
And swoon at the touch of your lips.

We went from the house to the wood,
But never a word we spoke;
And an eerie wind like our mood
Rustled the leaves of the oak.

Dead leaves, tremulous, crisp,
That breathed a forgotten tune;
A cloud the shape of a wisp
Blotted the soaring moon.

Silent we walked the path,
And then the wild farewell;
I saw your form like a wraith
Fade in the forest’s dell.

If joy would never depart,
If we could but still the pain—
Dear, I awoke with a pang in my heart
And heard the sound of the rain.

Act Four

Michigan Avenue streams with people—
Ten years alter the avenue.
It’s April again, and there are dolphin
Clouds at rest in a waste of blue.

A girl goes by with a spray of lilacs
Pinned at her breast, and quick as thought
Country fences, dogwood blossoms
Over the granite scene are wrought.

You come in my mind! It’s spoiled by the glimpse
Of a monster diamond that glints and glows;
A black-eyed Gadarene goes past
Insolent, heavy, and hooked of nose.

I scan his face that runs with fat,
And the fleshly sag of his under lip;
Then back to the diamond again, the hand
Holds your arm with a master grip!

THEODORE DREISER

Jack o’ Lantern tall shouldered,
One eye set higher than the other,
Mouth cut like a scallop in a pie,
Aslant showing powerful teeth.
Swaying above the heads of others.
Jubilant with fixed eyes, scarcely sparkling.
Moving about rhythmically, exploding in laughter.
Touching fingers together back and forth,
Or toying with a handkerchief.
And the eyes burn like a flame at the end of a funnel.
And the ruddy face glows like a pumpkin
On Halloween!

Or else a gargoyle of bronze
Turning suddenly to life
And slipping suddenly down corners of stone
To eat you:
Full of questions, objections,
Distinctions, instances.
Contemptuous, ironical, remote,
Cloudy, irreverent, ferocious,
Fearless, grim, compassionate, yet hateful,
Old, yet young, wise but virginal.
To whom everything is new and strange:
Whence he stares and wonders,
Laughs, mocks, curses.
Disordered, yet with a passion for order
And classification—hence the habitual
Folding into squares of a handkerchief.

Or else a well cultivated and fruitful valley,
But behind it unexplored fastnesses,
Gorges, precipices, and heights
Over which thunder clouds hang,
From which lightning falls,
Stirring up terrible shapes of prey
That slink about in the blackness.
The silence of him is terrifying
As if you sat before the sphinx.
The look of his eyes makes tubes of the air
Through which you are magnified and analyzed.
He needs nothing of you and wants nothing.
He is alone, but content,
Self-mastered and beyond friendship,
You could not hurt him.
If he would allow himself to have a friend
He could part from that friend forever
And in a moment be lost in wonder
Staring at a carved rooster on a doorstep,
Or at an Italian woman
Giving suck to a child
On a seat in Washington Square.

Soul enwrapped demi-urge
Walking the earth,
Stalking Life!

JOHN COWPER POWYS

Astronomer and biologist
And chemical analyst and microscopist,
Observer of men’s involuted shells
Where they conceal their hate and even their love
Under insipid ooze or nacreous stuff.
Tracer of criss-cross steps made when great hells
Kept lime as soft as wax
Which thereupon took the imprint of the air
From gnat-like wings of joy or shadowy care.
He makes hard secrets stand in the cul de sac’s
Entrance and face him till he lays all bare
That eyes hold or heart of blood contains,
And curious traits in diverse curious brains,
And starved desires in hearts and hopes forgot
Under the sifting ashes of one’s lot.

X-ray photographer who flashes
What’s in you out of you with sudden crashes
Of wit or oratory in a flood.
He samples and tests the book’s, also your blood.
Shows what you are and whence you came,
And who your kindred are, and what your flame
In heat and color is. Poet and wag,
Prophet, magician taking from a bag
Eggs, rabbits, silver globes; the old engram!
Scoffer with reverence, visioned, quick to damn,
Yet laugh at, looking keenly through the sham.
Confessing his own sins, devoid of shame.
He knows himself and laughs,
Or blames himself as he would others blame.
A naughty boy who kicks away the staff
Which poor decrepits walk by, nearly blind,
Then hurrying up with varied thought to find
Medicinal clay with which dim eyes to heal.

What is the human secret but Proteus’?
And who can catch the old man but his kind?
He was Poseidon’s herdsman, knew the streams
Of early being, sea-filled ponds and sluices,
Where life took birth through elemental dreams.
And Proteus glanced with lightning and divined
The cause of Bacchus’ madness. But at noon
He counted his sea-calves and ocean-sheep
On Carpathos where waters made a tune
Following the Orphic sun out of the deep—
Then in his cave he hid him, turned to sleep....

So runs our life to change! and who can catch
The Protean thought must watch,
And be adept at wrestling, in the chase.
And know the god whatever be his face,
Through roar of water where the porpoises
And extravagant dolphins play, in silences
Of noon or midnight. So John Cowper Powys
You stand before us gesturing, shoulder bent
A little like King Richard, frizzed of hair,
Rolling your eye for secrets, for the word.
The thresher of your mind is eloquent
With hulls and flakes of words, until at last
The kernel itself pops out, not long deferred....

Here is our wrestler then,
Hunter of secrets of creative souls.
Eluded he may be, he tries again.
His hand slips clutching at the irised shoals
Of rapturous thought. And at times his eyes
Are blinded by a light, or a disguise.
But finally both eye and hand
Obey the infallible senses’ brave command—
He catches Proteus then, and with a shout,
The god shouts too, and we who watch the bout
Join in the panic of their merriment!

NEW YEAR’S DAY

She was a woman who even as a child
Hungered for gifts with hunger passionate
And in her childhood made a hard fate
For a father who had failed and who was wild
With a kind of laughing despair,
That comes of having failed.
She had plain dresses, only a little strand
Of coral beads, and ribbons for her hair
Bestowed by grandmama. And on her hand
A ring of beads that maddened her and paled
Beside the gold rings other girls could show.
So she grew up out of this woe
Of wanting and not having things.
And round this nucleus of desire
Her nature wound itself into a spire,
As a vine climbs up and clings
Till it becomes the tree;
So she became all fire
For the world’s glittering glory.

Then in the process of her being’s story
She married a man of riches and took over
Dresses and jewels, houses, with her lover.
And learned the ways of Paris and New York,
And how to sit, or look, or use one’s fork.
And how to speak in French, and how to dress.
And how to find and use the loveliness
That gold brings. And she lived where thought is white
With its great longing for the infinite,
Where pale youths dream and write,
And starve and lie awake at night;
Where sculpture, music and where painting is
On priceless canvases.
But none of this saw she
In feeding her desire with jollity
In the cafés and in society;
Wherever the denials of her youth
Could be made whole, or leveled up
With idle splendor or the champagne cup.
That was her dream of making her life truth,
Till she devoured her husband like a leman—
She was at last one of this kind of women.
Then as a widow she came journeying back
With trunks and maids upon a New Year’s day
Over her childhood’s disappointed track.

Her father meanwhile had gone on the way
Which was his at the start.
His life was like a bruise which does not smart
Now that it has grown hard.
And he was stoical like one who hugs
His inner self until sensation dies,
Or dulls his fears or sorrows with strong drugs.
There was a light of hardness in his eyes
Through which no one could see his secret pain.
Failure had made him so—he could explain
To no one how he had been caught in life;
Sometimes it seemed himself, sometimes his wife,
And he had thought of it so much he lost
Perspective of himself, therefore he kept
Great silence, speaking little, even then
But trivial things. He trod his path and slept,
And rose to tread the path and slept again.
He was resolved to pay the bitter cost
And not cry out—his thinking stood on guard
To this end chiefly.

With impassive heart
He wrote his daughter on a postal card
To come, if it should please her, and be home
On Christmas, if she could, on New Year’s day
If she preferred, but anyway to come.

If a ghost could patch its tomb
With a trowel from time to time,
If it had a little lime,
So as to stop the cracks and growing rifts,
That would be like this man who hated gifts
Because he scarce could give them, and had patched
With hardness where his heart had broken
In years gone for the holidays when she
Cried in such ignorance of his poverty.
Now with walled feelings he could sit unspoken
Of what he felt, regretted, or had lost—
He was that kind of ghost.
So when the daughter came he only had
Her mother and the dinner, greetings glad,
And certain pride because her life had matched
With childhood’s hopes—but still he had no gifts
For Christmas or for New Year’s, and the daughter
Wept when she found it so,—’twas always so,—
It made her youthful bitterness alive.
And so she spilled her water
Out of a trembling hand at dinner and arose
And left the table. But with specs on nose
Self-mastered, not revealing
What was his feeling,
The father ate the dinner alone, while mother
Was comforting the daughter.

“He might have given me a dollar, a little book,
A handkerchief, or any other
Little thing, he always acted so.”
The mother tried to soothe her daughter’s woe.
But while they were together, the father took
His steps up town and when the two came back
They found him gone and the room growing black
From falling night....

But later he came in
And sat by the fire all silent. This had been
His New Year’s day! And later his wife came
And sat across him silent in her blame
Of him and of his life.

She said at last:
“Blanche is heart sick.”

“Well, I am sixty-five,”
He answered her, “and never while I’m alive
Will I remember Christmas or a New Year’s day.
I’m glad so many of such days are past,
They have been always this way. We had dinner
And ourselves for her and she brought herself
And nothing else. This is the way to win her
Admiration, yet this thing of giving
Dollars or books, wins only a little thrill
Of tickled pride or egotism, still
I might have done it, just to have the peace
Of her self-satisfaction.”

Said the wife:
“You might find happiness in her happiness.
The only thing you understand in living
Is how to stand your misery, one can guess
The working of your thought.”

Ere she could cease
The daughter entered like the devil’s elf,
And saw her father bent before the fire,
And saw the back of his head which spoke to her
Of hardness, or of something that she hated
Which moved her pity and her hate at once.

And then the mother said: “You two are fated
To be as blind as two cliffs to each other.
You need I think a spiritual re-birth,
Something that you could have upon this earth.
For I can see a book or handkerchief
Would give one happiness and one relief
From hardness which is girding in your soul.
That would be rich return for small outlay,
God give us all another New Year’s day.”

PLAYING BLIND

You used to play at being blind—
Now you are blind—you used to say:
“Play I am blind and help me find
Where the gate opens on the way.”

I laughed at you, we laughed together
When you were playing blind, your staff
My walking cane of varnished leather—
Now you are blind and still you laugh.

You sit beneath the reading lamp
With long lashed eyelids closed and pale
And make me read you Riley’s Tramp,
And Grimm and many a fairy tale.

Sometimes I stop—you see I choke
Before the tale is done by half—
One’s eyes blur from tobacco smoke—
I cannot laugh now when you laugh.

I SHALL NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN

If I could only see you again—
If I could only see you again!
How can it be
I shall never see you again?
For the world has shown it can roll on its way
And blot you out forever—
And I shall never see you again!
I thrill as one who slips on the edge of a gulf
When I think I shall never see you again!

As a dead leaf is hurtled over the tops of trees;
As a dead leaf is dizzily driven through woodland valleys
I am driven and tossed in the storms of living.
But as the dead leaf escapes the breeze’s fingers,
And sinks till it nestles motionless under a rock
So in quiet moments I dream
Of you,
I dream of all that you were—
And I shall never see you again!

There never was any one like you!
There never yet was such joy in a heart,
Such strength to live whatever the fate,
Such love to love,
Such thought to see how life is good,
Such maternal passion,
Such breasts eager to nurse child after child—
And I shall never see you again!

Your breasts were made to suckle conquerors,
Warriors, prophets,
Invincible souls
Loving life, and loving death at last.
And now your breasts are dust,
You are all dust,
You are lost save for my memory.

And this morning I woke
As a leaf might wake in its sheltered place
Under the rock
Stirred by a breath of April.
And I lived again the last time I saw you—
The last visit!
You were almost ninety then.
But there was the old zest in your heart
To do all things and have all things
Unchanged, as I had known them
As a boy.
You gave me the same room,
Nothing was changed,
Not a chair, a curtain, a picture.
And you came up-stairs before it was day
And lighted a fire in the little stove
To have the room warm for me to dress in—
There never was love like yours!

And I went down to the kitchen and found you
Frying batter cakes, and laughing,
And bringing back my boyhood days
With the old stories.
And how you kissed me, and hugged me
With your withered arms!
And then you sat down with me,
And ate with me as of old,
And brought out priceless jars of things
Which you had made and saved for me!

The breath of memory stirs me
Under the rock.
I must have the madness of life to drive me,
To toss me
Into forgetfulness of my loss of you—
For I shall never see you again!

About This Book