Returning from the antipodes of time,
What did you find, adventurer seeking your home?
What were you doing there in the dragon’s kingdom!
Did you see yourself when you were not looking,
Or take the desert lion by surprise,
Entering his gaze following the antelope
To the watering place, watching the watcher, still
So far away from the unreachable beginning,
A soul seeking its soul in fell and claw?
Did you plunge in the smothering waters to peruse
In shell and glaucous eye your dateless scripture,
Or scan the desert with the desert’s eyes,
Watching the sand-storm racing round the plain
On the vacant trace like a pack of spectral hounds?
Did they bring you comfort?
What were you doing there at the back of the world?
Returning now from the other side of time
My steps are measured and processional
In the archaic march led by the sun.
So it must be, the light leading, the foot
Stepping into the world in the opening moment.
Now, passing, I see that all is in its place,
The good and the evil, equal and strange order:
Hunter and quarry, each in a separate day,
The hecatombs of slaughter upon the hulls,
The shepherds watching from the eastern slopes,
New gods and kings sitting upon their chairs
(I cannot read their faces),
War and peace, generation and death,
Shameful and sad concurrences of time,
The uncanny stillness of the savage keep,
The blackened gorge nothing can clean again
Where thirty thousand, men and women and children,
Were slaughtered once (no one will walk there now),
The hungry waste advancing and retiring,
Violent or invisible alteration,
The transmutations, child and youth and man,
Maiden and mother, maiden and mother again,
A man and a woman building their changing house
On patient mutability. And Jack and Jill
And Kate and Harry, black and brown and white,
Who keep the bond when faith and beauty leave,
And are there for their own and the world’s good.
And the house-dog and the cat, timeless companions,
The bird that sang one day in the dragon’s bower
And nests beneath my eaves, a little house-god,
The cattle in the meadow, and this my home.
But now, looking again, I see wall, roof and door
Are changed, and my house looks out on foreign ground.
This is not the end of the world’s road.
Yet sometimes on an evening when all is still
And the bird in flight hangs tranced upon the air,
Flying and yet at rest, as if time’s work were over,
And the sun burns red and still on the bole of the yew-tree,
And the workman, his day ended, stands and listens,
Thinking of home, yet held in the bright stillness,
I see you stand at your window and softly arrest
Tree, bird and man and the nightward hastening sun
In an endless stasis, and what was given before
You opened your eyes upon the changing earth
Is there, and for a moment you are at home.
That was a moment, now a memory.
I do not live in the house of memory.
For my kinsmen say: “Long since we lost a road,
Then reached this place, on earth the first and last,
Neither good nor bad, the right place nor the wrong;
A house, and there we nourish a heavenly hope.
For this a great god died and all heaven mourned
That earth might, in extremity, have such fortune.
This we know. Yet in half-memory,
Not in complaint and scarcely im desire,
Sometimes we say: Long singe we lost a road,
And feel the ghost of an ethereal sorrow
Passing, and lighting or darkening all the house,
Lighting or darkening, which, we do not know.
Does that road still run somewhere in the world?
Question on question.
Hope and sorrow ethereal roof our house.”