I.
I take my journey back to seek my kindred,
Old founts dried up whose rivers run far on
Through you and me. Behind, the water-beds
Stone-white with drought; in front the riverless future
Through which our myriad tributaries will wander
When this live patchwork land of green and brown
With all ics load of corn and weeds is withered.
But here, but here the water, clear or muddied.
Seek the beginnings, learn from whence you came,
And know the various earth of which you are made.
So I set out on this calm summer evening
From this my house and my father’s. Looking back
I see that all behind is pmed and shrunken,
The great trees small again, the good walls gone,
The road grown narrow-and poor, wild heath and thorn
Where comfortable houses spread their gardens.
Only the sea and sky the same. But quiet
Deeper than I had breathed. Yet in this place,
Most strange and most familiar, my heart says
In a friend’s voice, “I beat in surety;”
My hands grow firm, my father’s farmer hands,
And open and shut on surety while I walk
In patient trust. This is my father’s gift
Left here for me at the first friendly station
On the long road.
But past it all is strange.
I must in other lives with many a leap
Blindfold, must lodge in dark and narrow skulls
With a few thoughts that pad from wall to wall
And never get out, must moulder in dusty hearts,
Inhabit many a dark or a sunny room:
Be in all things. And ndw I’m locked inside
The savage keep, the grim rectangular tower
From which the fanatic neighbour-hater scowls;
There all is emptiness and dirt and envy,
Dry rubbish of a life in anguish guarded
By mad and watchful eyes. From which I fall
To gasp and choke in the cramped miser’s body
That winds its tightening winch to squeeze the soul
In a dry wooden box with slits for eyes.
And when I’m strangling there I flutter out
To drift like gossamer on the sunny wind,
A.-golden thistledown fool blown here and there,
Who for a lifetime scarcely knows a grief
Or thinks a thought. Then gasp in the hero’s breast
That like a spring day in the northern seas
Is storm and shine and thunder all commingled,
A long-linked chain of lightning quenched in might.
Perhaps a murderer next, I watch those hands
That shall be always with me, serve my ends,
Button, unbutton for my body’s needs,
Are intimate with me, the officious tools
That wash my face, push food into my mouth,
Loathed servants fed from my averted heart.
So I usurp, grown avid for the end,
Body on body, am both father and child,
Causer and actor, spoiler and despoiled,
Robbing myself, myself, grinding the face
Of the poor, I poorest, who am both rich and poor,
Victor and victim, hapless Many in One.
In all these lives I have lodged, and each a prison.
I fly this prison to seek this other prison,
Impatient for the end—or the beginning
Before+the walls were raised, the thick doors fastened,
And there was nothing but the breathing air,
Sun and soft grass, and sweet and vacant ease.
But there’s no end, and I could break my journey
Now, here, without a loss, but that some day
I know I shall find a man who has done good
His long lifelong and is
Image of man from whom all have diverged.
The rest is hearsay. So I hie me back
To my sole starting-point, my random self
That in these rags and tatters clothes the soul.
2.
Through countless wanderings,
Hastenings, lingerings,
From far I come,
And pass from place to place
In a sleep-wandering pace
To seek my home.
I wear the silver scars
Of blanched and dying stars
Forgotten long,
Whose consternations spread
Terror among the dead
And touched my song.
The well-bred animal
With coat of seemly maul
Was then my guide.
I trembled in my den
With all my kindred when
The dragon died.
Through forests wide and deep
I pa$sed and as a sleep
My wandering was.
Before the word was said
With animal bowed head
I kept the laws.
I thread the shining day;
The mountains as mn play
Dizzily turn
My wild road round and round.
No one has seen the ground
For which I burn.
Through countless wanderings,
Hastenings, lingerings,
Nearer I come,
In a sleep-wandering pace
To find the secret place
Where is my home.
3.
And I remember in the bright light’s maze
While poring on a red and rusted arrow
How once I laid my dead self in the barrow,
Closed my blank eyes and smoothed my face,
And stood aside, a third within that place,
And watched these two at their strange ritual,
And grieved for that day’s deed so often done
When the poor child of man, leaving the sun,
Walks out into the sun and goes his way,
Not knowing the resurrection and the life,
Shut in his simple recurring day,
Familiar happiness and ordinary pain.
And while he lives content with child and wife
A million leaves, a million destinies fall,
And over and over again
The red rose blooms and moulders by the wall.
4.
And sometimes through the air descends a dust
Blown from the scentless desert of dead time
That whispers: Do not put your trust
In the fed flesh, or colour, or sense, or shape.
This that I am you cannot gather in rhyme.
For once I was all
That you can name, a child, a woman, a flower,
And here escape
From all that was to all,
Lost beyond loss.
So in the air I toss
Remembrance and rememberer all confused
In a light fume, the last power used,
The last form found,
And child and woman and flower
Invisibly fall through the air on the living ground.
5.
I have stood and watched where many have stood
And seen the calamities of an age
Where good seemed evil and evil good
And half the world ran mad to wage
War with an eager heart for the wrong,
War with a bitter heart for the right,
And many, many killed in the fight.
In those days was heard a song:
Blessing upon this time and place,
Blessing upon the disfigured face
And on the cracked and withered tongue
That mouthing a blessing cannot bless,
Blessing upon our helplessness
That, wild for prophecy, is dumb.
Without the blessing cannot the kingdom come.
6.
They walk high in their mountamland in light
On winding roads by many a grassy mound
And paths that wander for their own delight.
There they like planets pace their tranquil round
That has no end, whose end is everywhere,
And tread as to a music underground,
An ever-winding and unwinding air
That moves their feet though they in silence go,
For music’s self itself has buried there,
And all its tongues in silence overflow
That movement only should be melody.
This is the other road, not that we know.
This is the place of peace, content to be.
All we have seen it; while we look we are
There truly, and even now in memory,
Here on this road, following a falling star.
7.
Yet in this journey back
If I should reach the end, if end there was
Before the ever-running roads began
And race and track and runner all were there
Suddenly, always, the great revolving way
Deep in its trance;—if there was*ever a place
Where one might say, “Here is the starting-point,”
And yet not say it, or say it as in a dream,
In idle speculation, imagination,
Reclined at ease, dreaming a life, a way,
And then awaken in the hurtling track,
The great race in full swing far from the start,
No memory of beginning, sign of the end,
And I the dreamer there, a frenzied runner;—
If I should reach that place, how could I come
To where I am but by that deafening road,
Life-wide, world-wide, by which all come to all,
The strong with the weak, the swift with the stationary,
For mountain and man, hunter and quarry there
In tarrying do not tarry, nor hastening hasten,
But all with no division,strongly come
For ever to their steady mark, the moment,
And the tumultuous world ships softly home
To its perpetual end and flawless bourne.
How could we be if all were not in all?
Borne hither on all and carried hence with all,
We and the world and that unending thought
Which has elsewhere its end and is for us
Begotten in a dream deep in this dream
Beyond the place of getting and of spending.
There’s no prize in this race; the prize is elsewhere,
Here only to be run for. There’s no harvest,
Though all around the fields are white with harvest.
There is our journey’s ground; we pass unseeing.
But we have watched against the evening sky,
Tranquil and bright, the golden harvester.