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Title: The sirens

An ode

Author: Laurence Binyon

Release date: February 19, 2025 [eBook #75422]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Macmillan and Co, 1925

Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SIRENS ***

THE SIRENS

AN ODE

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

THE SIRENS

AN ODE

BY
LAURENCE BINYON

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1925

TO
CICELY

[Pg vii]

NOTE

This poem was printed by hand by Richard and Elinor Lambert at the Stanton Press and issued by them in 1924 in a limited edition. It has been revised for the present edition.

[Pg 1]

PRELUDE

I remember a night of my youth, I remember a night

Soundless!

The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened

Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height

Boundless

With stars, with stars, with stars.

I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled

Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty

Out of the ends of the air and the unsealed darkness

Poured in a rain, in a river,

Into my marrow,—thro’ all the veins of delight

Poured into me.

O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!

I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;

I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,

Born to be free.

In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,

A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;

For they came to me as lovers,

Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,

I felt more than heard, like a whisper

Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting

Sound

Of waves, of waves, of waves.

[Pg 2]

And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,

That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:

In the midst of the worlds I trembled,

I in the night a mortal

Found!

What was I? What was I? Nothing

But a Moment, aware

Of the ruins of Time!

Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,

Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,

From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir

In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,

Rose to claim

This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;

To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.

And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,

For I was the word on Earth’s lips

That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,

Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,

Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,

The earth-child?

To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,

To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,

Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling

Earth-exiled?

[Pg 3]

But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,

In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,

As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind

At its core,

This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,

And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth

Shelter me more.

I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:

I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,

And feel within me, for this mortality’s answer,

Sea without shore.

[Pg 4]

I. THE VICTORIES

Masters of the known and found

Singers of a world completed,

All to a time and end ordained,

Powers foredestined to their bound

And truth immutably contained,

A dominion mapped and meted,—

Like as in Egyptian noon

Gods of granite throned august

Gaze on old realms round them strewn

Far as the horizon dust,—

All beneath that searching sky

Gathered into wisdom’s eye!

Prophets of the found and known,

Chanters of the Laws unchanging,

Comes not an hour that undoes all

With a whispered homelessness,

With a sudden touch estranging?

Certainties you deemed your own,

Housing with a friendly wall,

Glide into a doubt and guess

Swift as when, the low light going,

Darkness on the wind comes flowing

Out of nothing; and surmise,

Dream, desire, are frontierless;

And the unroofed mind has skies

To breathe of, where a rumour sings

Of other mind and vaster things

Wooed to wilder destinies.

Thought throbs: there a power entices

[Pg 5]

(Like, on a wonder-night, all June

In a draught of stolen spices)

Not to stay, not to stay,

But to embark for the outer dark.

Only charms the untrodden way,

Only the unspelt secret rune.

Conqueror with foot superb

Planted on the last step won,

Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim

Destiny’s accepted son,

Robed in a resounding name,

What profounder pangs disturb

Something that’s unquarried yet

In the deep soul? All the gain

Weighs but as an ashy grain

In the world those pangs beget.

Fierce fruitions but betray

And deliver to the hard

Hope of things unhazarded.

Where that world is, who shall say?

Under western evening starred

Black waves tempt to far-away

Visioned walls of a wide shore,

Lands the only-coveted,

Gleaming as they gleamed before

Alexander’s dying eyes

In the tent at Babylon.

Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,

Dumb’d with grief that only saw

The pillar of the world undone,

Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw

[Pg 6]

The unsated mind with cruelties,—

Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies,

Sentinelled afar, deride him,

Mocking all that passion willed

With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.

O the inexorable Lure

Spur to the demon hearts of men!

Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,

And the empire-storming Saracen,

Fate’s infuriate charioteers,

Fly from a whisper in their ears

(Earth before them, Time behind)

Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill,

Storm and scatter, work your will!’

Hunters hunted in the mind,

Hunting what they cannot name,

Thunder over earth, to find

Nothing. Though the harvest black

Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,

There’s a thing they cannot tame.

Still they keep their torrent-track,

Maddened by a shadowy song

Sung beyond the reach of sense.

What song is this which wastes the worth

Of human things, and distastes earth,

And fevers with magnificence

Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned,

Toward a goal that none has found?

Is it the song the Adventurer stole

Body-bound upon the mast

For the enchantment of his soul?

Over farthest foam of waves

[Pg 7]

That are sailors’ restless graves,

He heard exulting as he passed

Perilous voices challenging

The mortal heart of him, and fear

Became a glory, so to hear

Secure as an immortal, sing

The Sirens.

[Pg 8]

I. 2

Whither is she gone, wing’d by the evening airs,

Yon sail that draws the last of light afar,

On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares

Than her own errand and her guiding star?

She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads

Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth.

She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms,

The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust,

And generations of men asleep in the old earth.

Between two solitudes she glides and fades,

And round us falls the darkness she invades.

Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters!

What have your wastes to do

With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail

Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens;

Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds,

And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass

In soil his fathers knew?

What shall he hope for from your careless desolation,

Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath?

What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers

But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage?...

Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.

I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon,

Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air,

Cry down the secret waters of the world,

Under the far sea-streams, to summon there

[Pg 9]

The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships.

In their ribb’d ruin and age-long sleep they heard,

Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed,

Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound;

Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread

In corners of all oceans, where the light

Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize:

And shapes at last were stirred

On glimmerless abysses’ oozy floors

Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;—

Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth

Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores,

Or questing up the white gloom of the North,

Or shattered in the glory of old wars,

The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!

I saw them clouding up over the verge,

Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave,

Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon

And strange to the idle glitter of the wave.

Magically re-builded, rigged and manned,

They stole in their slow beauty toward the land.

Mariners, O mariners!

I heard a voice cry; Home, come home!

Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here

Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace

Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb.

Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India?

Are not children’s kisses dearer than ivory and pearls?

And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water

And the cold, wandering foam?

[Pg 10]

Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer,

Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet

The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin.

But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music;

And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn;

We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go.

We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes,

But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win;

Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow,

And a world to wander in.

[Pg 11]

I. 3

O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!

O alone soaring over care and stain!

Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?

Or who your spaciousness of light attain?

Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,

When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,

Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard

Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,

Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—

Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,

Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,

Silent in glory as of chanting quires.

Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences

In apparition from some world august,

Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy

That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.

Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,

And mid the void as on some dazzling shore

Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,

Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.

Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion

Surpassing all the measures of his kind,

He, a free rider of the undulating silences,

Has in himself begotten a new mind;

Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling

Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,

Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him

Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,

Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,

A soundless vapour that he pulses through,

[Pg 12]

Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again

And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—

Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery

Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire

Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,

A daring, a defiance, a desire!

Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,

Invading far and far the virgin sky,

Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man

(O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!

Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle’s ways

Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting

Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries

Of his condition, being so brief a thing,

Being a creature perishable and passionate,

To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo

Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,

A lover, else to his own faith untrue,

Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice

Upon the untried way that he must tread,

So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,

Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.

Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance

From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,

Serving a spirit of swiftness irresistible,

He makes his pilgrimage, alone, alone,

Seeking a privacy of boundlessness, abandoning

A self surpassed, yet other worlds to dare?

Nay, in that element hailing his predestinate

World, and exulting to be native there?

[Pg 13]

I. 4

Hymn the Finders! Hymn the bold

Trusters of Earth, those patient ones,

That listen to the subtle words

Of Silence in the streams and stones;

Ponderers of the secret-souled

Bodies quick with ignorant being;

Followers of the clues that thread

Differences and accords;

Wooers of what powers agreeing

May the hands of man bestead;

Seers who have turned aside

From the greeds that ask and ache

Blinded to all else beside,—

Letting the clear spirit take

Truth from vision open-eyed.

Breaks the bud for him that sees

In a world of promises.

Hymn the breaker of the dark,

Hymn the finder of the flame,

Troubler of the essential spark

Lurking in the withered pith

Or from stony prison freed,

Friend and fury, holy need

And fierce destroyer, hard to tame,

Risen, a God to wrestle with!

Hymn the bender of the wheel,

Mother of the shapes of speed!

Hymn the launcher of the keel

Carrying thought’s arrow-aim

[Pg 14]

Beyond the sundown,—sowing seed

Of man on coasts untrod before,

To widen memory’s haunted shore

And add the nearness of a name.

Far-descended old desire!

That stirred in swarming forest-ages,

Prowled by fear whose stealthy eye

Watched from glooms, where hunger-rages

Ravened; see at last the Hand

Emerging human, stretched to try

Shapes of things with wondering pleasure,

When its strength forgets to kill;

Tempted on to understand,

Serving ways of secret will,—

Fit and fashion, poise and measure.

Hymn the hand that builds the wall

And spans the river, and arches over

Man the worshipper and lover

Song-like stone; the hand so strong

To strike, yet in whose touch is all

Life’s mystery that wooes from things

Their strength, as music from the strings,—

Touch of the mind that seeks behind

The world for the befriending Mind.

Hymn the openers of the gates,

Hymn the changers of the fates!

Hymn the seekers! them that saw,

Past the seeming starry roof

[Pg 15]

Of human earth, in mazy plan

Bright eternities of law;

Them that neared those orbs to man,

Unafraid, and put to proof

Divination’s ancient scheme;

Stept into the timeless stream,

Star-like spirits among the stars!

Hymn the seekers! Chosen souls,

Grapnel’d in the very marrow

By a thought that night and day

Draws them whither their unknown

Mighty lover far away

Beckons them to the frore Poles

Or new meridians; like to him

Who climbed in Panama the tree,

And splendour of untravelled sea

Smote him like a glorious arrow:

Never shall he rest again

Till he sail that virgin main!

Or like him who quietly

Sitting in his Polar tent

Found so great a way to die;

Hope-forsaken, famine-spent,

Wrote his words of faith and cheer

Till the pen dropt from the hand

That wrote them.

Hymn the lost, who never

Found, but kept high heart to steer

Onward toward the mark they meant,

Sailing out of sight of land.

Wail not them, nor lost endeavour,

For they heard what tranced the ear,

[Pg 16]

Filled the exulting soul, the song

Pale and prudent mortals fear,

Song of those who, out of Time,

Sing the heights the immortals climb,

The Sirens.

[Pg 17]

II. PENUMBRA

Hearken to the hammers, endlessly hammering,

The din of wheels, the drone of wheels, the furnaces

Panting, where Man as in a demon-palace toils

To forge the giant creatures of his brain.

He has banished the spring and the innocence of leaves

From the blackened waste he has made; the infected sky

Glooms with a sun aghast, and the murk of the night

Is peopled with tall flames like spirits insane.

He strips himself to the heat, not of the jovial sun,

But of the scorch of furnaces; with naked breast

Sweating beneath the iron and blear glass, amid

The hammers’ hammering and the wheels’ roar.

Not with grapes of October trodden underfoot

Spurting juices of ripeness in runnels, his vats

Brim, but with gushes flickered-over and blinding,

Unshapen spilth and blaze of molten ore.

With a finger he lifts the weight of mountain-sides

Poised; the metal mass he shears red-hot in a trice;

He has given to the animate iron thews of force,

A Titan’s pulse, and breath of fiery draught.

Monsters mightier far than himself he creates

To swim storming seas, and to mount in miles of air,

To deride Space and the old opposition of Time:

Their speed is like strong drink that he has quaffed.

He has the tamed lightning to do his bidding, draws

Energies out of the veins of earth; he is armed

[Pg 18]

From all elements, woven as in a magic web;

He has stolen seeds of Death, wherewith to fight.

He holds fabled terrors of the ancient gods in his hand—

In a handful of dust, earthquake and pestilence;

He exults to destroy, to obliterate, to be

Lord of the powers of the engulfing night.

Deafened with the hammers, inebriate with the sound

Of the powers he has raised out of their jealous lair,

He has fever within him, he becomes dizzy,

And craves, and knows not whither he is bound.

Shall he attain god-like felicity of ease,

Supreme articulate voice of nature’s striving,

Or builds he a vast prison for himself, a slave

With iron of his own strong forging crowned?

Insatiable of ransacked worlds, and exulting

Furiously in feet-supplanting speed, the proud-eyed

Victor, he who has come so far, so far, looks forth

To achieve the eluded glory of his goal.

What solitude is this that suddenly he enters?

Voices of earth no more with anchoring kindness call.

The fevered hammers throb; but deep within he knows

The desert he has made in his own soul.

O where is now the dew-dropt radiance of morning,

That sistered with him leafing tree and rippling stream,

When simple of heart in the sun with a free body

He accepted all the boundaries of his mind?

Full of fears he was then, shadowed with helpless need

To propitiate Powers that threatened each footstep.

Has he escaped from those old terrors, to be prey

Of fears more terrible because less blind?

[Pg 19]

II. 2

Ah, did men feign you once, triumphant Sirens,

Omnipotent in your lure

On a far spice-island over legendary surges

Singing, and divine you with the famished eyes of mariners,

Listen in a trance to your voices, but listen

In a dream secure?

Lost amid strange and hungry waters

They fabled the storm-worn sailor stung

By a vision of arms outstretched at the end of the world,—

Eternal woman, wonderful, with a bosom

Heaved as with love, and with warm, white eyelids

Over eyes cruel and young.

From those voluptuous throats, magical throats,

As out of a coral-lipped, an ivory-coloured

Dazzling flower, tormenting sweetness floats,

Sweetness of voices, odour of strange, strange longing

Felt on the flesh like trail of perfumed hair,

In sound that stole like soft arms round the soul

Drawn thither and inescapably aware

Of nothing but the extreme ache to press

Lips on those lips, that thirst to suck the breath,

The heart’s blood, into theirs, till eyes grow dull,

Till lips be lips no longer, and only a skull

Roll from your feast of death,

O sated Sirens!

But what if it be that fond perfidious Voices

With different music lure

Even us who have cast far from us the fables of old?

If the pride of our quest undo us, and they enchant us

[Pg 20]

Simple as those lost mariners, but no longer

In dream secure?

If not with sorcery of song in a scarlet mouth

And with eyes of desire

You ensnare the easy senses and perishing flesh,

But with spiritual lure you hunger to entice us

Beyond the borders of knowledge, O evilly enamoured,

O terrible choir?

If shadowy at the end of time you wait,

Wooing subtly the while Man’s spirit, tempted

On ever more extravagant quest, and bait

His blood with charm of secrecy and peril,

Ay, and waylay the longings of his mind,

Yielding by dear degrees what he exults to seize,

Until he glows to seem the unconfined

Master of earth, the world’s sole will, but only

That you may taste his glory, spent and shared,

Before you press upon his lips the last

Kiss of annihilation, and he be cast

Into the void prepared,

Malignant Sirens!

[Pg 21]

II. 3

‘Whither, Whither?’ I heard a crying

That asked of Night, and there was none replying.

‘Whither, into what land of change and wrack,

Into what time out-racing thought and will,

With feet borne onward and mind beaten back

Over an earth that our lost loves has buried,

Against a dark wind blowing chill,

Whither are we driven, whither hurried?

‘Lovely vales of our youth, where haunted

Peace of the ripening years, and hope that vaunted

Its strength so rooted in earth’s purposes

That children’s children should possess peace there!

O sunny vales, and corn, and guardian trees,

Shut off by the blind rain’s down-dropping curtain,—

Vanished, as if they never were,

And doubt alone were certain!

‘Heaven we feigned in a time perfecting

Our missed design, and beauty of our neglecting.

There should we live completed in an age

Wise from our loss and rich with all our spoil,

A race redeeming its lost heritage,

Not by vain fears checked, nor by vain hopes cheated.

—If that heaven fade, and futureless we toil,

And battle already defeated?

‘Words of beauty, words of assuaging

Majesty saw we on high above time’s raging

Inscribed as over some vast porch serene;

Pardon: the heart flowed out on tides of peace.

[Pg 22]

Justice: the soiled soul hasted to be clean.

One word we named not, dreamed not, feared not even,

The end.—If All utterly cease;

Earth, Time, Desire, Hell, Heaven?’

Titan spirit of god-like stature;

Star-measurer, holder of deep clues of nature;

Maker, but half-aware of what he makes,

Of what the extravagant flame in him devours,

And what unshapen Vastness he awakes,—

Toiled in the terrible webs his mind invented,

And caught in flame that twists and towers,

Man strives with himself tormented.

Born for ever to move, the Dancer

Of dark Creation’s dream, its destined answer,—

Joy were those limbs created to express!

Now like one darkly stumbling, while his brain

Puzzles each motion with too anxious stress,

Under the glory of stars that move unhalting

He burns with the old need onward still to strain,

Mis-timed, way-lost, defaulting.

[Pg 23]

II. 4

Hearken to the eternal lovers rejoicing!

A sunrise in their hearts, a music in their veins,

Their bodies make sweet singing to one another;

They bathe in beams from one another’s eyes.

They rejoice to belong to the Eternal Delight

Upon whose universe of buoyance they are launched,

That questions not of its way nor of its haven

But is both way and haven where it hies.

They marvel to be born in a new element,

To meet like streams as they go chiming to the sea,

To move like flames that touch and tremble; and marvelling

They look back on the voided shell they quit.

Dawn within dawn, light within light, unfolds for them

The secret of the world that flowing overflows

The sun and the moon and the farthest of the stars,

And it abounds in them, and they in it.

Beautiful are their fears as the shy-footed fawns

Safe only in wildness from the old hunter, Time,

To be assured in shadow of the heart’s solitude,

Where joy finds joy that never Time records.

They have made virgin words of that soiled alphabet

Wherewith have been written histories of sorrow,

Labour and long defeat, and proud and vain conquest;

And all their lore is those sufficing words.

Magnificent they match the music of a name

Against abhorred Silence and terrors of the abyss,

The trust of a smile against all-ignoring Night,

And one low voice against Oblivion’s greed.

[Pg 24]

Difference drew them to the enamoured wrestle,

Chosen, inevitable dear antagonists;

They cry one to the other; ‘Alone I was not I,’

‘O lovely danger!’ and ‘O my angel need!’

‘Because thy sweetness is so troubling and so sharp,

Full of blood-thrilling strangeness, unexplored peril,

Never to be possessed, always to be desired,

Thou unknown world, I will dare all for thee.’

‘Though in a moment thou hast made me to forget

All that I was and had, triumphing I hold thee;

To thy darkness of strength I give and commit me;

Here is thy world, O sail upon my sea!’

As the East that quickens and flushes to the height

Answering the ardour of the West, and as a rose

Quivers on the western cloud before the dayspring,

Divided as the East and West they are:

But upon ways invisible to mortal sense

Moves their bright union, where was created new

Love’s wondrous world; from the darkness it emerges;

It is their Evening and their Morning Star.

Out of the hollows of unpenetrated Night

From afar calls to them, though they have known it not,

A voice that is theirs, yet is not theirs, a new voice

Never yet heard, yet older than all things;

Laughter of a child’s voice, sweeter than any sound

On the earth or in the air, voice of eternal joy,

Victorious over the bowed wisdom of mortals,

A well beyond the world, that springs and sings.

[Pg 25]

III. THE UNDISCOVERED WORLD

O in a living stream to bathe

That runs its course from spring to sea!

And O to cast this aching mesh

Of iron bands that starkly swathe

Limbs that labour, neck to knee!

To feel the wind upon the flesh,

Wind that was before man was,

Blowing out of blue divine;

Feel the feet on morning grass

Lightly firm, and body bare

Over-showered with beams so fine

As cleanse the very heart of care!

Sages, had you found but this

For the mind, so it could use

What the body knows of bliss

When all thought it loves to lose

Merely poising in the sun,

Sure of powers a-spring within it

Rippling out to leap and run,—

Like for memory’s waiting ear

Silence, ere the music win it:—

When unreasoned joy alone

Brims the body, itself its own

Infinity unquestioning;

Careless, Life is O so near,

Death a legendary thing,

Breath and blood like bells that ring;—

Sages, had you art to find

Such a glory for the mind,

[Pg 26]

Not with eyes that are too wise

But the lover’s wonder-vision

Seeing far and seeing near

As within one radiant sphere

All things living, joined and whole,

Bloomed with light of Paradise;

Sages then—but who has taught

Such an end for labouring thought,

Such a nakedness of soul;—

What but probing, doubting, and division?

Hark, on iron iron’s endless clamour!

The hours, the hours, drive swifter than we strain—

Earth changes not, but who has changed us,

As if a Fury with a shadowy hammer

Nailed the nails into the fiery brain?

Who has estranged us?

What dark enemy within

Makes of Earth an enemy?

Is it not he who sought of old

Secrets of her wealth to win,

Hot with greed and overbold,

Aching to possess her? he,

Searching labyrinthine veins,

Thirsted for yet rarer gains,

And through patient nights perused

Each divided element,

Curious of that pregnant dust

Which with intent hand he bruised;

Crucibled in fire the grains

That should subtly be cajoled

In the end to yield his lust

[Pg 27]

Feasts of gold—a continent

Molten into dazzling gold!

(Were not heard the Sirens then

Deriding the poor dreams of men?)

Nay, but he would scrutinize

Even Night’s deep-ordered scheme,

And spell his own proud destinies

In scripture of the starry stream.

Coveting what power those skies

Might enthrone, he sought a charm

That should warp them and should woo.

To his use, and by such aid

To disimperil of one harm

This brief body, would undo

A universe. And he arrayed

In a constellated robe

His heaven-projected effigy,

Because his spirit was afraid

Of its nakedness, nor dared

Terrors of the truth to probe;

Rather chose itself to ensky

In a dream. But no night bared

To him her grandeur, swerved no spheres

To the wrench of human fears.

Earth and Night to crave of lust

Yield but fruitlessness and dust;

Dust to lust, to greed a weed!

Mockers rise from those forgotten years:

‘This is he, the self-dupe, still the same

Vaunter of a world of his defiling!

Claiming heavens, with only will to maim.

Who is this to own an earth’s empire,

[Pg 28]

In whose blood is mud, and this aviling

Squalor of desire?’

Lo, with feet on fiery ashes

Earth’s foiled master casts his eyes

Round his world-abode. Time’s heir,

Freed by blood of martyrs, wise

With myriad lives of thought and care,

Into Doubt’s dim future gropes,

Black with omen, lit with flashes!

Lo, beneath his heaven of hopes

Falling palaces of dream,

Proudly pillared; regions wreckt,

Peopled with stray flames that seem

Hot greeds from his burning brain

And the very earth infect.

Lo, like bodies for his fear

Shadowy shapes of force insane

Menacing in murk appear,

Primed with energy to kill,—

Engines of his intellect,

Incarnations of his will!

Those old siren-songs of air

Change into a song abhorred,

Chanting softly, Revel, Lord!

Triumph, Master! This you sought!

This your own proud hands have wrought!

Now the lover’s loathing taste

Comes on him for what he burned

So imperiously to clutch.

Where is now the bliss embraced,

Where the conquest? At a touch

[Pg 29]

All’s to desolation turned.

Is it he, or Earth, betrays?

She that seemed to sting him on

To possession, once possessed,

Dispossesses him. Her breast

Stony grows, and hard her gaze.

—Yet, oh, could she again be wooed

In her own, her chosen ways,

Shall she not transform her mood,

Glorify with truth his quest,

Give, as lovers give, entire

Body to body, mind to mind,

Ay, and more than these can find,—

Spirit to spirit? Beauty of Desire,

Beauty beyond possession still is breathing,

Beauty in us defaced!

O secret spring eternal, muddied here,

Soiled and sunken, troubled into seething!

Torrent of Desire, by greed and fear

Spilled into waste!

[Pg 30]

III. 2

Be still! Wash out this dull roar from the ear

That fevers Time; be emptied the hot brain

Of clamorous, intricately-teasing toil.

Let spiritual Silence brim again

The mind’s well to a mirror virgin-clear;

All these invented cares smoothe and uncoil.

Contemplate Silence; the wild Silence, ere

Music or word was; waste, unshapen sound;

Crying of wind; moaning of sea; stammer of storm;

Gropings as for a being nowhere found;

Mateless desires, frustrated throbs of air,

Without home, without form.

They sought a lodge in haunted flesh, they sought

The inward tingling sense’s touched accord;

To be delivered, to be born perfect

On shapes of lips, a breathed, a living word,

A flower that seeds its riches, thought from thought,

Incarnate sound, mysterious and elect.

Contemplate Silence! The unwithered womb

Of all music infinite as desire;

All words, releasing tears and bliss; all song,

That wins at last a universe for choir,

And there the enlarged spirit has full room,

There its desires and its delights belong.

All speech, all song, all music still unborn,

Waits there for its futurity of mind

To become human; yet it holds some tone

[Pg 31]

Drawn from a something vaster than mankind,

As from profounder heart-strings torn,

And yet complete in man alone;

As if behind him travailing, the whole

Dark world were seeking in this eloquent flesh

Some other self, and sighing here to be

Born afresh, born afresh;

To win a world yet undiscovered in the soul:

‘O Voice,’ it cries, ‘utter; O Hands, deliver me!’

With such a dark quest in desirous eyes,

From the ancient East, as through a silent gate

In the mind’s city and labyrinth of thought,

Those Magian Kings, of knowledge satiate,

Of riches satiate, and forlornly wise,

Down desert gorges brought

Gifts for the Unknown: nay, but Earth from far

In yearning sent them, her ambassadors.

Rocks opened veins of gold, trees oozed their blood,

Spices sighed, gems burned up from cavern-floors,

The very Night had made Desire a star,

That over against them, strange and certain, stood;

And thither laden with Earth’s hope and want,

Her symbol’d sighs and riches of her pain,

Down separate passes of the mountain streaming

Wound onward each amid his marvelling train,

Those sages drawn from towers of midnight haunt

By their prophetic dreaming;

[Pg 32]

And trumpet thrilled to trumpet thro’ the night,

And torches told of glistering strange attire,

Where met those three kings on one errand led.

What image shaped they of the World’s Desire,

What presence throned in majesty and might,

As they went musing, deep in hope and dread,

And under vast cope of the wheeling skies

Found but a naked child, a child new-born?

Wisdom resigned the crown of her enthroning;

All her impassioned question was forsworn:

In wonder she saw all things with new eyes.

Then, there were songs of joy; now, sound of a world groaning.

[Pg 33]

III. 3

Mystery of Dawn, ere yet the glory streams

Risen over earth, and pauses in that hush

When far, as from an ecstasy, clouds flush,

And hills lift up their pureness into dreams

Of light that not yet colours the cold flower,

And the earth-clasping, heaven-desiring tree

Trembles in virginal expectancy—

What breath of the unknown Power

Is this that, spirit to spirit, as with a spousal kiss

Comes seeking us, even us, through shadow and dew,—

Seeking in this soiled flesh what undiscovered world

Beyond tears, beyond bliss, beyond wisdom, beyond

Time? what recaptured harmony of earth and heaven?

What world made new?

A world so strange, the spirit thrills to flame,

Transfigured in a wonder of release!

A world so near, it has no other name

Than light and breath! Where lost we, then, this peace?

Wanting what charm to cleanse

Our eyes? To see; is this the last of gifts,

That, as the scales drop, the heart so uplifts?

O world where no possession is of men’s,

Where the will rages not with fever to destroy

Differing wills, or warp another life to its use,

But each lives in the light of its own joy!

In one wide vision all have share, and we in all,

Infinitely companioned with the stars, the dust,

Beasts of the field, and stones, and flowers that fall!

[Pg 34]

This body that we use seems in that air

Marvellous; secret from ourselves; a power

Without which were no speech, nor deed done anywhere,

Nor could thought range and tower,

Nor seed be sown for the unborn time to reap;

Whose natural motion was ordained to be

Beautiful as a wave out of a sea

Boundless as mind asleep;

So passionately shaped, in every part perfect,

Universes are wounded in its abasement,

Crying from stone to star;

The unimagined height, the immeasurable deep,

Hungers, abysses, heavens, millions of ghosts from far

Meet in this body born to laugh and weep.

Weep; not for the endured, ancestral ill,

Perils and plagues, that ambush all our ways,

Time’s injury, and pain’s deep-wandered maze;

These need not eyes to see, but only flesh to feel.

But of the eternal vision to partake,

And see what we have done, and what refused,

To what accepted blindness we grow used,

And what marred shapes of one another make,

This is to weep such tears as no flesh-throes have cost,

Weep for our loves, our loves, that we ourselves have slain,

The powers of loveliness that we have left forlorn.

Eyes we had and saw not, ears and we did not hear!

Ah, when the heart, full-visioned, breaks in shame and pain,

Then is the world’s hope born.

The cry of desolation turns to praise.

If falsehood first enchant the eager mind,

[Pg 35]

And if desire be cruel, being blind,

Each by its own infirmity betrays,

And some profounder, more imperious need

Drives through all smart, whatever world to lose,

The pure vision to choose,

And tho’ Truth kill, there in the end be freed.

Open, open, gates of deliverance, open!

See, liberated spirits, see, victorious ones,

For testimony of us from homes of glory shine,

Vindicators of this brief flesh, they mingle us,—

Soiled and despoiled,—with beauty and with felicity,

And sting us from afar with the Divine.

Hands of men stretched out in so dark a craving!

Baffled heart, clouded vision; filled with ache

To know you have maimed the world you sought to make

Your instrument and minister, enslaving

Powers of earth and air—Hands that have wrought

So glorious things, the thoughts of joy to house!

Heart that has pulsed so ardent for its vow’s

Accomplishment,—O heart so hardly taught!

O stretched-out hands! of you Eternity has need.

Give but your sacred passion and your shaping art,

The hunger of Eternity is there,—

Barren else, barren: chaos and a wilderness

Of feud and everlasting greed devouring greed,

The unshapen dream’s despair!

Spirit of Man, dear spirit, sore opprest

With self-estrangement, and mis-choosing will,

And all satiety of gainful skill,—

Possession that was never yet possessed,—

[Pg 36]

You that have been so great a lover, giving

In innocency all for sacrifice;

Whom neither Time nor earth’s regions suffice—

You too are sought, where still your dream is living.

Over the secret oceans of uncharted mind

Who knows what voyagers, what sails invisibly

Press on, for all the lost, the foundered hopes untrue?

Who knows, through ignorant mists and storm upon that sea

What Lover, what unweariable Adventurer,

Makes still his quest of you?

O world that is within us, yet must still

Out of the eternal mystery be wooed

Ere it be ours and, breathing in the blood,

Live in its beauty, as the miracle

Of the divine colour of flowers in night

Was not, and is not of themselves alone

Nor of the dawn-beam, but of both made one,—

A marriage-mystery of earth and light!

O undiscovered world that all about us lies

When spirit to Spirit surrenders, and like young Love sees

Heaven with human eyes!

World of radiant morning! Joy’s untravelled region!

Why lies it solitary? and O why tarry we?

Why daily wander out from Paradise?

[Pg 37]

III. 4

World-besieging Storm, from horizon heaped and menacing

Rear up the walls of thunder, till they tower

Shattering over earth, and from heart to heart reverberate,

Lancing that bright fear through the ruin-shower!

Revel, Winds, severing the bough of leafy promises

With rages from returning chaos sent!

Mockers and Destroyers, come; here is Man, predestinate

To all your arrows at his bosom bent.

Strip him of his splendours, of his conquests and dominions,

His secure boast to be earth’s lord enthroned,

Humble him: he stands forth greater in his nakedness

Than in the wealth and safety that he owned.

He that has so loved peril in all experience,

He that has gone with Sorrow all her way,

Will not now refuse or shrink; prove him to the innermost,

With worse than worst confront him: come what may,

Lo, you awake, O Trumpets of Calamity,

Some fragment of old Darkness in his breast;

Lo, to him fraternal is the stony and the terrible place:

His stricken Genius out of deeps unguessed

Rises up, grappling his reality to reality,

And still the secret in himself explores,

Bound beyond fear, the discovered and discoverer,

And in his own soul touches farthest shores.

Though he be stript of all, Powers from far replenish him,

Powers of the streaming worlds that through him stream.

O throbbing heart, O lifted arms, O tenderness,

O only capable of grief supreme!

O earth for ever mingled with unearthliness

Because the eternal with the brief is twined!

Wonder of breath that is momentary and tremulous

[Pg 38]

Suffices him who breathes eternal mind.

Vision that dawns beyond knowledge shall deliver him

From all that flattered, threatened, foiled, betrayed.

Lo, having nothing, he is free of all the universe,

And where light is, he enters unafraid.

THE END

LONDON: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
CHISWICK PRESS, TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The sirens

THE SIRENS

PRELUDE

I. THE VICTORIES

II. PENUMBRA

III. THE UNDISCOVERED WORLD

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE