I.
No place at all for bravery in that war
Nor mark where one might make a stand,
Nor use for eye or hand
To discover and reach the enemy
Hidden in boundless air.
No way to attempt, to save
By our own death the young that they might die
Sometime a different death. The thought Again
That made a promise to mortality—
Gave pathos and distance, reason and rhyme—
Will walk a little before us to the grave
While we are still in time for a little tame.
II.
Or shall we think only of night and day
Vacantly visiting the vacant earth
And stare in hatred at the turncoat sun
That shines on glittering oes where thought of birth
Will never be—tll birth will be a dream
Of a quaint custom in another place,
And we shall gaze in wonder face to face?
Or shall we picture bird and tree
Silently falling, and think of all the words
By which we forged earth, night and day
And ruled with such strange ease our work and play?
Now only the lexicon of a dream.
And we see our bodies buried in falling birds.
III.
Shall we all die together?
Perhaps nothing at all will be but pain,
A choking and floundering, or gigantic stupor
Of a world-wide deserted hospital ward.
There will be strange good-byes, more strange than those
That once were spoken by terrified refugees,
Our harbingers: some of them lost in shipwreck,
Spilling salt angry tears in the salt waves,
Their lives waste-water sucked through a gaping hole,
Yet all the world around them; hope and fear.
We thought too idly of them, not knowing we
Might founder on common earth and choke in air,
Without one witness. Will great visions come,
And life lie clear at last as it says, Good-bye,
Good-bye, I have borne with you a little while?
Or shall we remember shameful things concealed,
Mean coldnesses and wounds too eagerly given?
IV.
A tree thin.sick and pale by a north wall,
A smile splintering a face—
I saw them today, suddenly made aware
That ordinary sights appal,
So that a tree mistreated wounds the heart,
A twisted smile twists ward through the mind
Ingeniously to find
Its place and claim a lifelong tenancy there.
That is not strange but the most ancient art,
I thought, consummate, still and blind.
I wondered if some pure ancestral head
Kept vigil there, but thought, Our eyes are led
Through endless circles of impure reflection,
Pilfering, pillaging what is not their own
In idle greed. Face mirrors face,
Mixing to generate an image sown
By casual desire or disaffection,
Assembles a common face
Aped from the crowd-face and the festive room,
And waiting lost and still
In the empty glass where it presents a will
That is not ours. Imagined, then, by whom!
I thought, our help is in all that is full-grown
In nature, and all that is with hands well-made,
Carved in verse or stone’
Or a harvest yield. There is the harmony
By which we know our own and the world’s health,
The simply good, great counterpoise
To blind nonentity,
Ever renewed and squandered wealth.
Yet not enough. Because we could not wait
To untwist the twisted smile and make it straight
Or render restitution to the tree.
We who were wrapped so warm in foolish joys
Did not have time to call on pity
For all that is sick, and heal and remake our city.
V.
About the well of life where we are made
Spirits of earth and heaven together lie.
They do not turn their bright heads at our coming,
So deep their dream of pure commingled being,
So still the air and the level beam that flows
Along the ground, shed by the flowers and waters:
All above and beneath them a deep darkness.
Their bodies lie in shadow or buried in earth,
Their heads shine in the light of the underworld.
Loaded with fear and crowned with every hope
The born stream past them to the longed for place.