I have seen Alexandria, imperial Rome,
And the sultry backlanes of Jerusalem
One late spring evening thirty years ago
Trouble me still. It was a holy day:
The inns and taverns packed to the very door,
Goods, cattle, families, fellowships, clans;
And some time after a man was crucified,
So it is said, who died for love of the world.
Strange deeds, strange scenes. I have passed through war and peace,
Watched populations driven along the roads
To emptiness, movements like bird-migrations
Of races and great families, bare at the last,
Equal in destitution. I have felt
Fear in my throat and fury in my heart,
Dreaded the shadow of the waving palm,
The rustling of the lizard, have been caught
In battles where armies shouted foreign cries,
Fought for strange purposes; and in an eddy
Deep in the slaughter once I watched
A madman sitting happy in the sand,
Rapt in his world. I have seen more than I know.
I was a brisk young merchant, brazen as youth
When youth is brazen. Now I am old and wait
Here in my country house in quiet Greece.
What have I gathered?
T have picked up wisdom lying
Disused about the world, available still,
Employable still, small odds and scraps of wisdom,
A miscellaneous lot that yet makes up
A something that is genuine, with a body,
A shape, a character, more than half Platonic
(Greek, should I say?), and yet of practical use.
I have learnt a host of little things, and one
Too great for thinking, scarcely to be borne:
That there’s a watershed in human life,
A natural mountain which we have to scale;
And once at the top, our journey all les downward,
Down the long slope to age and sleep and the end,
(Sadder but easier than the hills of youth,
And sometimes shot with gleams of sunset light).
Oh the air is different on this side of the hill,
The sunset side. And when I breathed it first
I felt dismay so deep and yet so quiet,
It was a silence rather, a sea of silence.
This is my trouble, the common trouble.
I have seen
Troy’s harbour deep im the fields with turf grown over
And poppies nodding on the rustic quays;
And temples and curious caverns in the rocks
Scrawled thick with suns and birds and animals,
Fruit, fire and feast, flower-garlanded underworld;
Past reading.
I have learned another lesson:
When life’s half done you must give quality
To the other half, else you lose both, lose all.
Select, select: make an anthology
Of what’s been given you by bold casual time.
Revise, omit; keep what’s significant.
Fill, fill deserted time. Oh there’s no comfort
In the wastes of empty time. Provide for age.
Life must be lived; then live. And so I turn
To past experience, watch it being shaped,
But never to its own true shape. However,
I have fitted this or that into the pattern,
Caught sight sometimes of the original
That is myself—should rather be myself—
The soul past price bartered at any price
The moment bids, cheap as the cheapest moment.
I have had such glimpses, made such tentative
Essays’to shape my life, have had successes,
Whether real or apparent time may tell,
Though there’s no bargain you can drive with time.
All this is insufficient.
I have watched
In cheering ports the great fleets setting out,
And on another and a darkest day
Returning with disaster at the helm,
Death at the prow—and then the punishments,
The crucifixions on the burning hills,
Hour-long day-long slow death. And once I came
Upon the gaunt-ribbed skeleton of a wreck
Black underneath the toothed black promontory;
Nothing but these to comfort one another,
And the spray and grinding sea.
I have seen such things.
I have begotten life and taken away
Life lent to others. I have thought of death,
And followed Plato to eternity,
Walked in his radiant world; have trod the fields
My fathers’ sins have trampled richly down,
Loam warmed by a sun that burns at the world’s heart,
Sol of the underworld. My heart is steady,
Beats in my breast and cannot burn or break,
Systole and diastole for seventy years.
Set up the bleak worn day to show our sins,
Old and still ageing, like a flat squat herd
Crawling like sun on wall to the rim of tame,
Up the long slope for ever.
Light and praise,
Love and atonement, harmony and peace,
Touch me, assail me; break and make my heart.