* A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook * This ebook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the ebook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the ebook. If either of these conditions applies, please check gutenberg.ca/links/licence.html before proceeding. This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. Title: Journeys and Places Author: Muir, Edwin (1887-1959) Date of first publication: 1937 Edition used as base for this ebook: London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1937 [first edition] Date first posted: 27 September 2011 Date last updated: 27 September 2011 Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #859 This ebook was produced by: Barbara Watson, Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net JOURNEYS AND PLACES NEW POETRY CONRAD AIKEN _Landscape West of Eden_ GERALD BULLETT _The Bubble_ NORMAN CAMERON _Winter House_ RICHARD CHURCH _Twelve Noon_ HUGH SYKES DAVIES _Petron_ CLIFFORD DYMENT _First Day_ and _Straight or Curly_? LL. WYN GRIFFITH _Branwen_ RAYNER HEPPENSTALL _Sebastian_ FRANK KENDON _Tristram_ and _The Cherry Minder_ SYLVIA LYND _The Enemies_ EDWIN MUIR _Variations on a Time Theme_ MARGOT RUDDOCK _The Lemon Tree_ ERNEST RHYS _Song of the Sun_ BLANAID SALKELD _The Fox's Covert_ DYLAN THOMAS _Twenty-five Poems_ W. J. TURNER _Jack and Jill_ and _Songs and Incantations_ UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME JOURNEYS AND PLACES EDWIN MUIR LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. _All rights reserved Made in Great Britain at The Temple Press Letchworth for J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Aldine House Bedford St. London First Published 1937_ TO FLORA GRIERSON and JOAN SHELMERDINE AUTHOR'S NOTE Nineteen of the poems in this volume are new. The others were published some years ago in a hand-printed edition by the Samson Press under the title of _Six Poems_. All that remained of this edition was recently destroyed by fire, and partly for that reason, partly because these poems fit into the general scheme, I have included them here. I should like to express the gratitude I have long felt to the Samson Press for the beautiful volume, now so unfortunately lost, in which they presented these poems, and my regret that so much of greater value should have been destroyed along with it. The six poems in question are _The Stationary Journey_, _Tristram's Journey_, _The Fall_, _Judas_, _The Enchanted Knight_, and _The Threefold Place_. The references in one of the new poems may need some explanation, for Hölderlin is little known in this country except as the name of a German poet. The journey of which I try to give an imaginary account is one which he made in the summer of 1805. Hardly anything is known about it. He was at that time in Bordeaux as a tutor, having been driven from the house of the woman he loved in Germany by an angry husband. The woman was Susette Gontard, the wife of a Frankfort business man: she is the Diotima of the poems. In the midsummer heats of 1805 Hölderlin suddenly set out on foot from Bordeaux. He arrived in Germany several weeks later, ragged, emaciated, and out of his mind. It is recorded that he passed through Arles. Susette was dead when he arrived. He partly recovered, and during that short period wrote some of his finest poetry; but he presently relapsed again, and for the last forty years of his life suffered from a form of insanity. The Journeys and Places in this collection should be taken as having a rough-and-ready psychological connotation rather than a strict temporal or spatial one. The first deal more or less with movements in time, and the second with places reached and the character of such places; but I have also included in the latter division imaginary situations which by a licence of the fancy may perhaps pass as places, that is as pauses in time. The division, however, is merely one of convenience. Certain of the new poems have appeared in the _Spectator_, the _Listener_, the _London Mercury_, the _Criterion_, the _Modern Scot_, _Outlook_, and _Poetry_ (Chicago), to the editors of which my acknowledgments are due. CONTENTS JOURNEYS PAGE The Stationary Journey 3 The Mountains 6 The Hill 8 The Road 9 The Mythical Journey 11 Tristram's Journey 13 Hölderlin's Journey 17 PLACES The Fall 23 Troy I 26 Troy II 27 Judas 30 Merlin 33 The Enchanted Knight 34 Mary Stuart 35 Ibsen 36 The Town Betrayed 37 The Unfamiliar Place 39 The Place of Light and Darkness 41 The Solitary Place 43 The Private Place 45 The Unattained Place 47 The Threefold Place 50 The Original Place 51 The Sufficient Place 53 The Dreamt-of Place 54 JOURNEYS THE STATIONARY JOURNEY Here at my earthly station set, The revolutions of the year Bear me bound and only let This astronomic world appear. Yet if I could reverse my course Through ever-deepening yesterday, Retrace the path that led me here, Could I find a different way? I would see eld's frosted hair Burn black again and passion rage On to its source and die away At last in childhood's tranquil age. Charlemagne's death-palsied hand Would move once more and never rest, Until by deadlier weakness bound It lay against his mother's breast. Saint Augustine gives back his soul To stumble in the endless maze, After Jesus Venus stands In the full centre of his gaze, While still from death to life to naught Gods, dynasties, and nations flit; Though for a while among the sand Unchanged the changing Pharaohs sit. Fast the horizons empty. Now Nothing's to see but wastes and rocks, And on the thinning Asian plains A few wild shepherds with their flocks. . . . So, back or forward, still we strike Through Time and touch its dreaded goal. Eternity's the fatal flaw Through which run out world, life and soul. And there in transmutation's blank No mortal mind has ever read, Or told what soul and shape are, there, Blue wave, red rose, and Caesar's head. For there Immortal Being in Solidity more pure than stone Sleeps through the circle, pillar, arch, Spiral, cone, and pentagon. To the mind's eternity I turn, With leaf, fruit, blossom on the spray, See the dead world grow green within Imagination's one long day. There while outstretched upon the Tree Christ looks across Jerusalem's towers, Adam and Eve unfallen yet Sleep side by side within their bowers. There while fast in the Roman snare The Carthaginian thinks of home, A boy carefree in Carthage streets, Hannibal fights a little Rome, David and Homer tune their harps, Gaza is up, sprung from its wreck, Samson goes free, Delilah's shears Join his strong ringlets to his neck. A dream! the astronomic years Patrolled by stars and planets bring Time led in chains from post to post Of the all-conquering Zodiac ring. THE MOUNTAINS The days have closed behind my back Since I came into these hills. Now memory is a single field One peasant tills and tills. So far away, if I should turn I know I could not find That place again. These mountains make The backward gaze half-blind, Yet sharp my sight till it can catch The ranges rising clear Far in futurity's high-walled land; But I am rooted here. And do not know where lies my way, Backward or forward. If I could I'd leap Time's bound or turn and hide From Time in my ancestral wood. Double delusion! Here I'm held By the mystery of the rock, Must watch in a perpetual dream The horizon's gates unlock and lock, See on the harvest fields of Time The mountains heaped like sheaves, And the valleys opening out Like a volume's turning leaves, Dreaming of a peak whose height Will show me every hill, A single mountain on whose side Life blooms for ever and is still. THE HILL And turning north around the hill, The flat sea like an adder curled, And a flat rock amid the sea That gazes towards the ugly town, And on the sands, flat and brown, A thousand naked bodies hurled Like an army overthrown. And turning south around the hill, Fields flowering in the curling waves, And shooting from the white sea-walls Like a thousand waterfalls, Rapturous divers never still. Motion and gladness. O this hill Was made to show these cliffs and caves. So he thought. But he has never Stood again upon that hill. He lives far inland by a river That somewhere else divides these lands, But where or how he does not know, Or where the countless pathways go That turn and turn to reach the sea On this or that side of the hill, Or if, arriving, he will be With the bright divers never still, Or on the sad dishonoured sands. THE ROAD There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runs Time's deer is slain, And lies where it has lain. That busy clock shows never an hour. All flies and all in flight must tarry. The hunter shoots the empty air Far on before the quarry, Which falls though nothing's there to parry. The lion couching in the centre With mountain head and sunset brow Rolls down the everlasting slope Bones picked an age ago, And the bones rise up and go. There the beginning finds the end Before beginning ever can be, And the great runner never leaves The starting and the finishing tree, The budding and the fading tree. There the ship sailing safe in harbour Long since in many a sea was drowned. The treasure burning in her hold So near will never be found, Sunk past all sound. There a man on a summer evening Reclines at ease upon his tomb And is his mortal effigy. And there within the womb, The cell of doom, The ancestral deed is thought and done, And in a million Edens fall A million Adams drowned in darkness, For small is great and great is small, And a blind seed all. THE MYTHICAL JOURNEY First in the North. The black sea-tangle beaches, Brine-bitter stillness, tablet strewn morass, Tall women against the sky with heads covered, The witch's house below the black-toothed mountain, Wave-echo in the roofless chapel, The twice-dead castle on the swamp-green mound, Darkness at noon-day, wheel of fire at midnight, The level sun and the wild shooting shadows. How long ago? Then sailing up to summer Over the edge of the world. Black hill of water, Rivers of running gold. The sun! The sun! Then the free summer isles. But the ship hastened on and brought him to The towering walls of life and the great kingdom. Where long he wandered seeking that which sought him Through all the little hills and shallow valleys. One whose form and features, Race and speech he knew not, shapeless, tongueless, Known to him only by the impotent heart, And whether at all on earth the place of meeting, Beyond all knowledge. Only the little hills, Head-high, and the winding valleys, Turning, returning, till there grew a pattern, And it was held. And there stood each in his station With the hills between them. And that was the meaning. Though sometimes through the wandering light and shadow He thought he saw it a moment as he watched The red deer walking by the riverside At evening, when the bells were ringing, And the bright stream leapt silent from the mountain Far in the sunset. But as he looked, nothing Was there but lights and shadows. And then the vision Of the conclusion without fulfilment. The plain of glass and in the crystal grave That which he had sought, that which had sought him, Glittering in death. And all the dead scattered Like fallen stars, clustered like leaves hanging From the sad boughs of the mountainous tree of Adam Planted far down in Eden. And on the hills The gods reclined and conversed with each other From summit to summit. Conclusion Without fulfilment. Thence the dream rose upward, The living dream sprung from the dying vision, Overarching all. Beneath its branches He builds in faith and doubt his shaking house. TRISTRAM'S JOURNEY He strode across the room and flung The letter down: 'You need not tell Your treachery, harlot!' He was gone Ere Iseult fainting fell. He rode out from Tintagel gate, He heard his charger slowly pace, And ever hung a cloud of gnats Three feet before his face. At a wood's border he turned round And saw the distant castle side, Iseult looking towards the wood, Mark's window gaping wide. He turned again and slowly rode Into the forest's flickering shade, And now as sunk in waters green Were armour, helm, and blade. First he awoke with night around And heard the wind, and woke again At noon within a ring of hills, At sunset on a plain. And hill and plain and wood and tower Passed on and on and turning came Back to him, tower and wood and hill, Now different, now the same. There was a castle on a lake. The castle doubled in the mere Confused him, his uncertain eye Wavered from there to here. A window in the wall had held Iseult upon a summer day, While he and Palomide below Circled in furious fray. But now he searched the towers, the sward, And struggled something to recall, A stone, a shadow. Blank the lake, And empty every wall. He left his horse, left sword and mail, And went into the woods and tore The branches from the clashing trees Until his rage was o'er. And now he wandered on the hills In peace. Among the shepherd's flocks Often he lay so long, he seemed One of the quiet rocks. The shepherds called and made him run Like a tame cur to round the sheep. At night he lay among the dogs Beside a well to sleep. And he forgot Iseult and all. Dagonet once and two came by Like tall escutcheoned animals With antlers towering high. He snapped their spears, rove off their helms, And beat them with his hands and sent Them onward with a bitter heart, But knew not where they went. They came to Mark and told him how A madman ruled the hinds and kept The wandering sheep. Mark haled him to Tintagel while he slept. He woke and saw King Mark at chess And Iseult with her maids at play, The arras where the scarlet knights And ladies stood all day. None knew him. In the garden once Iseult walked in the afternoon, Her hound leapt up and licked his face, Iseult fell in a swoon. There as he leaned the misted grass Cleared blade by blade below his face, The round walls hardened as he looked, And he was in his place. HÖLDERLIN'S JOURNEY When Hölderlin started from Bordeaux He was not mad but lost in mind, For time and space had fled away With her he had to find. 'The morning bells rang over France From tower to tower. At noon I came Into a maze of little hills, Head-high and every hill the same. 'A little world of emerald hills, And at their heart a faint bell tolled; Wedding or burial, who could say? For death, unseen, is bold. 'Too small to climb, too tall to show More than themselves, the hills lay round. Nearer to her, or farther? They Might have stretched to the world's bound. 'A shallow candour was their all, And the mean riddle, How to tally Reality with such appearance, When in the nearest valley 'Perhaps already she I sought, She, sought and seeker, had gone by, And each of us in turn was trapped By simple treachery. 'The evening brought a field, a wood. I left behind the hills of lies, And watched beside a mouldering gate A deer with its rock-crystal eyes. 'On either pillar of the gate A deer's head watched within the stone. The living deer with quiet look Seemed to be gazing on 'Its pictured death--and suddenly I knew, Diotima was dead, As if a single thought had sprung From the cold and the living head. 'That image held me and I saw All moving things so still and sad, But till I came into the mountains I know I was not mad. 'What made the change? The hills and towers Stood otherwise than they should stand, And without fear the lawless roads Ran wrong through all the land. 'Upon the swarming towns of iron The bells hailed down their iron peals, Above the iron bells the swallows Glided on iron wheels. 'And there I watched in one confounded The living and the unliving head. Why should it be? For now I know Diotima was dead 'Before I left the starting place; Empty the course, the garland gone, And all that race as motionless As these two heads of stone.' So Hölderlin mused for thirty years On a green hill by Tübingen, Dragging in pain a broken mind And giving thanks to God and men. PLACES THE FALL What shape had I before the Fall? What hills and rivers did I seek? What were my thoughts then? And of what Forgotten histories did I speak To my companions? Did our eyes From their foredestined watching-place See Heaven and Earth one land, and range Therein through all of Time and Space? Did I see Chaos and the Word, The suppliant Dust, the moving Hand, Myself, the Many and the One, The dead, the living Land? That height cannot be scaled again. My fall was like the fall that burst Old Lear's heart on the summer sward. Where I lie now I stood at first. The ancient pain returns anew. Where was I ere I came to man? What shape among the shapes that once Agelong through endless Eden ran? Did I see there the dragon brood By streams their emerald scales unfold, While from their amber eyeballs fell Soft-rayed the rustling gold? It must be that one time I walked By rivers where the dragon drinks; But this side Eden's wall I meet On every twisting road the Sphinx Whose head is like a wooden prow That forward leaning dizzily Over the seas of whitened worlds Has passed and nothing found to see, Whose breast, a flashing ploughshare, once Cut the rich furrows wrinkled in Venusberg's sultry underworld And busy trampled fields of sin, Whose salt-white brow like crusted fire Smiles ever, whose cheeks are red as blood, Whose dolphin back is flowered yet With wrack that swam upon the Flood. Since then in antique attitudes I swing the bright two-handed sword And strike and strike the marble brow, Wide-eyed and watchful as a bird, Smite hard between the basilisk eyes, And carve the snaky dolphin side, Until the coils are cloven in two And free the glittering pinions glide. Like quicksilver the scales slip down, Upon the air the spirit flies, And so I build me Heaven and Hell To buy my bartered Paradise. While from a legendary height I see a shadowy figure fall, And not far off another beats With his bare hands on Eden's wall. TROY I He all that time among the sewers of Troy Scouring for scraps. A man so venerable He might have been Priam's self, but Priam was dead, Troy taken. His arms grew meagre as a boy's, And all that flourished in that hollow famine Was his long, white, round beard. Oh, sturdily He swung his staff and sent the bold rats skipping Across the scurfy hills and worm-wet valleys, Crying: 'Achilles, Ajax, turn and fight! Stop, cowards!' Till his cries, dazed and confounded, Flew back at him with: 'Coward, turn and fight!' And the wild Greeks yelled round him. Yet he withstood them, a brave, mad old man, And fought the rats for Troy. The light was rat-grey, The hills and dells, the common drain, his Simois, Rat-grey. Mysterious shadows fell Affrighting him whenever a cloud offended The sun up in the other world. The rat-hordes, Moving, were grey dust shifting in grey dust. Proud history has such sackends. He was taken At last by some chance robber seeking treasure Under Troy's riven roots. Dragged to the surface. And there he saw Troy like a burial ground With tumbled walls for tombs, the smooth sward wrinkled As Time's last wave had long since passed that way, The sky, the sea, Mount Ida and the islands, No sail from edge to edge, the Greeks clean gone. They stretched him on a rock and wrenched his limbs, Asking: 'Where is the treasure?' till he died. TROY II I've often wandered in the fields of Troy Beneath the walls, seen Paris as a boy Before youth made him vicious. Hector's smile And untried lion-look can still beguile My heart of peace. That was before the fall, When high still stood Troy's many-tunnelled wall. Now I am shackled to a Grecian dolt, Pragmatic, race-proud as a pampered colt. All here is strange to me, the country kings, This cold aspiring race, the mountain-rings On every side. They are like toppling snow-wreaths Heaped on Troy's hearth. Yet still an ember breathes Below to breed its crop of yearly ills, The flowering trees on the unreal hills. These bring Troy back. And when along the stone The lizard flickers, thirty years I'm thrown At odds and stand again where once I stood, And see Troy's towers burn like a winter wood. For then into their country all in flame, From their uncounted caves the lizards came And looked and melted in a glaze of fire, While all the wall rustled and sang with ire As heat ate all. I saw calamity In action there, and it will always be Before me in the lizard on the stone. But in my heart a deeper spite has grown, This, that they would not arm us, and preferred Troy's ruin lest a slave should snatch a sword And fight even at their side. Yet in that fall They lost no more than we who lost our all. Troy was our breath, our soul, and all our wit, Who did not own it but were owned by it. We must have fought for Troy. We were its hands, And not like them mere houses, flocks, and lands. We were the Trojans; they at best could swell A pompous or a bloody spectacle. And so we watched with dogs outside the ring Heroes fall cheap as meat, king slaughtering king Like fatted cattle. Yet they did not guess How our thoughts wantoned with their wantonness. They were too high for that; they guessed too late, When full had grown our knowledge and our hate. And then they thought, with arms as strong as theirs, We too might make a din with swords and spears, And while they feared the Greeks they feared us most, And ancient Troy was lost and we were lost. Now an old man--why should that one regret, When all else has grown tranquil, shake me yet? Of all my life I know one thing, I know, Before I was a slave, long, long ago, I lost a sword in a forgotten fight, And ever since my arm has been too light For this dense world, and shall grow lighter still. Yet through that rage shines Troy's untroubled hill, And many a tumbled wall and vanished tree Remains, as if in spite, a happy memory. JUDAS Judas Iscariot drearily Wheeling round the deadly tree: Adders sleep Awake and keep Their watch, encircling scale to scale The tree of bale. From whose cleft fastnesses glare out Basilisks furnace-eyed, Within whose shade like matted hair, About, about, Pronged hornets cruise and glide, Sting, sting the glassy air. And all around the labouring ground is torn; Hoof and horn Thrice-deep their hieroglyphs have lined, Lead in and in his mind, And wind him in a maze forlorn. Judas, awake and pass Dryfoot the charmed morass, Break the bright fence of glass, Lift up your eyes! Asleep in light great-limbed Judaea lies; Dark wood and sunny hill Will let you where you will, And by some road perhaps young Judas waits, Not found yet by his twelve doom-bearing mates. _O that all time had stopped then, had rolled back A little way, let Judas out again! I saw Him stand in the Garden, by the snare The dove-eyed Decoy. Had I taken my life Just then it would have been in time. O that I had stumbled and fallen then, died suddenly! I stumbled and did not fall; the vast earth turned, Then stopped awry, half-way, all mad and strange, The ponderous heavens heeled over, stars, rocks, soldiers, The very roots run wrong, locked wrong forever! Now Time beats on, all changed, and yet the same._ Judas Iscariot wearily, Wheeling round the darkening tree: Now winds the sting Deeper, Now the faint fairy death-bells ring, Now the mind's surly keeper Makes the thirty death-coins spin, Winding Judas in: _With such thin-edged unearthly sound As ours the stones cry from the ground: The little stones that cut the feet Of travellers going up the hill, Of sad and merry, lame and fleet, And cannot show Compassion though Their little arrows striking make With such mean war some heart to break That thought to die undaunted on the hill._ Now all the air is still. _He chose, and I was chosen. No one knew Him._ Judas Iscariot by the tree. MERLIN O Merlin in your crystal cave Deep in the diamond of the day, Will there ever be a singer Whose music will smooth away The furrow drawn by Adam's finger Across the meadow and the wave? Or a runner who'll outrun Man's long shadow driving on, Break through the gate of memory And hang the apple on the tree? Will your magic ever show The sleeping bride shut in her bower, The day wreathed in its mound of snow And Time locked in his tower? THE ENCHANTED KNIGHT Lulled by La Belle Dame Sans Merci he lies In the bare wood below the blackening hill. The plough drives nearer now, the shadow flies Past him across the plain, but he lies still. Long since the rust its gardens here has planned, Flowering his armour like an autumn field. From his sharp breast-plate to his iron hand A spider's web is stretched, a phantom shield. When footsteps pound the turf beside his ear Armies pass through his dream in endless line, And one by one his ancient friends appear; They pass all day, but he can make no sign. When a bird cries within the silent grove The long-lost voice goes by, he makes to rise And follow, but his cold limbs never move, And on the turf unstirred his shadow lies. But if a withered leaf should drift Across his face and rest, the dread drops start Chill on his forehead. Now he tries to lift The insulting weight that stays and breaks his heart. MARY STUART My brother Jamie lost me all, Fell cleverly to make me fall, And with a sure reluctant hand Stole my life and took my land. It was jealousy of the womb That let me in and shut him out, Honesty, kingship, all shut out, While I enjoyed the royal room. My father was his, but not my mother, We were, yet were not, sister, brother, To reach my mother he had to strike Me down and leap that deadly dyke. Over the wall I watched him move At ease through all the guarded grove, Then hack, and hack, and hack it down, Until that ruin was his own. IBSEN Sollness climbs the dwindling tower And all the hills fall flat. Hilda Wandel down below Now is no bigger than her hat. Sollness steps into the air. All Norway lies below him, Brand Frowning on the rusty heath, Peer's half-witted fairyland, Nora stumbling from a door, Hedda burning a book, Doctor Stockman fishing up Bacilli from the brook, Rebecca circling in the weir, The Rat Wife whipping round a wall; The Pillars of Society Fall thundering with his fall. And flashing by his house he sees it Split from earth to sky, And his wife and children sitting Naked to every passer-by. THE TOWN BETRAYED Our homes are eaten out by Time, Our lawns strewn with our listless sons, Our harlot daughters lean and watch The ships crammed down with shells and guns. Like painted prows far out they lean: A world behind, a world before. The leaves are covering up our hills, Neptune has locked the shore. Our yellow harvests lie forlorn And there we wander like the blind, Returning from the golden field With famine in our mind. Far inland now the glittering swords In order rise, in order fall, In order on the dubious field The dubious trumpets call. Yet here there is no word, no sign But quiet murder in the street. Our leaf-light lives are spared or taken By men obsessed and neat. We stand beside our windows, see In order dark disorder come, And prentice killers duped by Death Bring and not know our doom. Our cattle wander at their will. To-day a horse pranced proudly by. The dogs run wild. Vultures and kites Wait in the towers for us to die. At evening on the parapet We sit and watch the sun go down, Reading the landscape of the dead, The sea, the hills, the town. There our ancestral ghosts are gathered. Fierce Agamemnon's form I see, Watching as if his tents were Time And Troy Eternity. We must take order, bar our gates, Fight off these phantoms. Inland now Achilles, Siegfried, Lancelot Have sworn to bring us low. THE UNFAMILIAR PLACE I do not know this place, Though here for long I have run My changing race In the moon and the sun, Within this wooded glade Far up the mountainside Where Christ and Caesar died And the first man was made. I have seen this turning light For many a day. I have not been away Even in dreams of the night. In the unnumbered names My fathers gave these things I seek a kingdom lost, Sleeping with folded wings. I have questioned many a ghost Far inland in my dreams, Enquired of fears and shames The dark and winding way To the day within my day. And aloft I have stood And given my eyes their fill, Have watched the bad and the good Go up and down the hill, The peasants on the plain Ploughing the fields red, The roads running alone, The ambush in the wood, The victim walking on, The misery-blackened door That never will open again, The tumblers at the fair, The watchers on the stair, Cradle and bridal-bed, The living and the dead Scattered on every shore. All this I have seen Twice over, there and here, Knocking at dead men's gates To ask the living way, And viewing this upper scene. But I am balked by fear And what my lips say To drown the voice of fear. The earthly day waits. THE PLACE OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS Walking on the harvest hills of Night Time's elder brother, the great husbandman, Goes on his ancient round. His massive lantern, Simpler than the first fashion, lights the rows Of stooks that lean like little golden graves Or tasselled barges foundering low In the black stream. He sees that all is ready, The trees all stripped, the orchards bare, the nests Empty. All things grown Homeless and whole. He sees the hills of grain, A day all yellow and red, flowers, fruit, and corn. The soft hair harvest-golden in darkness. Children playing In the late night-black day of Time. He sees The lover standing by the trysting-tree Who'll never find his love till all are gathered In light or darkness. The unnumbered living Numbered and bound and sheaved. O could that day Break on this side of Time! A wind shakes The loaded sheaves, the feathery tomb bursts open, And yellow hair is poured along the ground From the bent neck of Time. The woods cry: _This is the resurrection._ O little judgment days lost in the dark, Seen by the bat and screech-owl! He goes on, Bearing within his ocean-heart the jewel, The day all yellow and red wherein a sun Shines on the endless harvest lands of Time. THE SOLITARY PLACE I O I shall miss With one small breath these centuries Of harvest-home uncounted! I have known The mead, the bread, And the mounds of grain As half my riches. But the fields will change, And their harvest would be strange If I could return. I should know again Only the lint-white stubble plain From which the summer-painted birds have flown A year's life on. But I can never See with these eyes the double-threaded river That runs through life and death and death and life, Weaving one scene. Which I and not I Blindfold have crossed, I and not I Will cross again, my face, my feet, my hands Gleaned from lost lands To be sown again. O certain prophecy, And faithful tragedy, Furnished with scenery of sorrow and strife, The Cross and the Flood And Babel's towers And Abel's blood And Eden's bowers, Where I and not I Lived and questioned and made reply: None else to ask or make reply. II If there is none else to ask or reply But I and not I, And when I stretch out my hand my hand comes towards me To pull me across to me and back to me, If my own mind, questioning, answers me And there is no other answer to me, If all that I see, Woman and man and beast and rock and sky, Is a flat image shut behind an eye, And only my thoughts can meet me or pass me or follow me, O then I am alone, I, many and many in one, A lost player upon a hill On a sad evening when the world is still, The house empty, brother and sister gone Beyond the reach of sight, or sound of any cry, Into the bastion of the mind, behind the shutter of the eye. THE PRIVATE PLACE This stranger holding me from head to toe, This deaf usurper I shall never know, Who lives in household quiet in my unrest, And of my troubles weaves his tranquil nest, Who never smiles or frowns or bows his head, And while I rage is insolent as the dead, Composed, indifferent, thankless, faithful, he Is my firm ally and sole enemy. Come then, take up the cleansing blade once more That drives all difference out. The fabled shore Sees us again. Now the predestined fight, The ancestral stroke, the opening gash of light: Side by side myself by myself slain, The wakening stir, the eyes loaded with gain Of ocean darkness, the rising hand in hand, I with myself at one, the changed land, My home, my country! But this precious seal Will slowly crumble, the thief Time will steal Soft-footed bit by bit this boundless treasure Held in four hands. I shall regain my measure, My old measure again, shrink to a room, a shelf Where decently I lay away myself, Become the anxious warder, groan and fret My thankless service to this martinet Who sleeps and sleeps and rules. I hold this life Only in strife and the aftertaste of strife With this dull champion and thick-witted king. But at one word he'll jump into the ring. THE UNATTAINED PLACE We have seen the world of good deeds spread With its own sky above it A length away Our whole day, Yet have not crossed from our false kindred. We could have leapt straight from the womb to bliss And never lost it after, Been cradled, baptized, bred in that which is And never known this frontier laughter, But that we hate this place so much, And hating love it, And that our weakness is such That it must clutch All weakness to it and can never release The bound and battling hands, The one hand bound, the other fighting The fellow-foe it's tied to, righting Weakness with weakness, rending, reuniting The torn and incorruptible bands That bind all these united and disunited lands,-- While there lies our predestined power and ease, There, in those natural fields, life-fostering seas. If we could be more weak Than weakness' self, if we could break This static hold with a mere blank, with nothing, If we could take Memory and thought and longing Up by the roots and cast them behind our back, If we could stop this ceaseless ringing and singing That keeps our fingers flying in hate and love, If we could cut off, If we could unmake What we were made to make: But that we then should lose Our loss, Our kingdom's crown, And to great Nothing toss Our last left jewel down, The light that long before us was, The land we did not own, The choice we could not choose. For once we played upon that other hill, And from that house we come. There is a line around it still And all inside is home. Once there we pored on every stone and tree In a long dream through the unsetting day, And looking up could nothing see But the right way on every way. And lost it after, No foot knows where, To find this mourning air, Commemorative laughter, The mask, the doom Written backwards, The illegible tomb Pointing backwards, The reverse side Where strength is weakness, The body, pride, The soul, a sickness. Yet from that missing heaven outspread Here all we read. THE THREEFOLD PLACE This is the place. The autumn field is bare, The row lies half-cut all the afternoon, The birds are hiding in the woods, the air Dreams fitfully outworn with waiting. Soon Out of the russet woods in amber mail Heroes come walking through the yellow sheaves, Walk on and meet. And then a silent gale Scatters them on the field like autumn leaves. Yet not a feathered stalk has stirred, and all Is still again, but for the birds that call On every warrior's head and breast and shield. Sweet cries and horror on the field. One field. I look again and there are three: One where the heroes fell to rest, One where birds make of iron limbs a tree, Helms for a nest, And one where grain stands up like armies drest. THE ORIGINAL PLACE _This is your native land. By ancient inheritance Your lives are free, though a hand Strange to you set you here, Ordained this liberty And gave you hope and fear And the turning maze of chance._ To weave our tale of Time Rhyme is knit to rhyme So close, it's like a proof That nothing else can be But this one tapestry Where gleams under the woof A giant Fate half-grown, Imprisoned and its own. _To your unquestioned rule No bound is set. You were Made for this work alone. This is your native air. You could not leave these fields. And when Time is grown Beneath your countless hands They say this kingdom shall Be stable and beautiful._ But at its centre stands A stronghold never taken, Stormed at hourly in vain, Held by a force unknown That neither answers nor yields. There our arms are shaken, There the hero was slain That bleeds upon our shields. THE SUFFICIENT PLACE See, all the silver roads wind in, lead in To this still place like evening. See, they come Like messengers bearing gifts to this little house, And this great hill worn down to a patient mound, And these tall trees whose motionless branches bear An aeon's summer foliage, leaves so thick They seem to have robbed a world of shade, and kept No room for all these birds that line the boughs With heavier riches, leaf and bird and leaf. Within the doorway stand Two figures, Man and Woman, simple and clear As a child's first images. Their manners are Such as were known before the earliest fashion Taught the Heavens guile. The room inside is like A thought that needed thus much space to write on, Thus much, no more. Here all's sufficient. None That comes complains, and all the world comes here, Comes, and goes out again, and comes again. This is the Pattern, these the Prototypes, Sufficient, strong, and peaceful. All outside From end to end of the world is tumult. Yet These roads do not turn in here but writhe on Round the wild earth for ever. If a man Should chance to find this place three times in Time His eyes are changed and make a summer silence Amid the tumult, seeing the roads wind in To their still home, the house and the leaves and birds. THE DREAMT-OF PLACE I saw two towering birds cleaving the air And thought they were Paolo and Francesca Leading the lost, whose wings like silver billows Rippled the azure sky from shore to shore, They were so many. The nightmare god was gone Who roofed their pain, the ghastly glen lay open, The hissing lake was still, the fiends were fled, And only some few headless, footless mists Crawled out and in the iron-hearted caves. Like light's unearthly eyes the lost looked down, And heaven was filled and moving. Every height On earth was thronged and all that was stared upward. I thought, This is the reconciliation, This is the day after the Last Day, The lost world lies dreaming within its coils, Grass grows upon the surly sides of Hell, Time has caught Time and holds it fast for ever. And then I thought, Where is the knife, the butcher, The victim? Are they all here in their places? Hid in this harmony? But there was no answer. TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES Minor variations in spelling and punctuation have been preserved. [Journeys and Places, by Edwin Muir]