Someday, emerging at last from this terrifying vision,
may I burst into jubilant praise to assenting Angels!
May not even one of the clear-struck keys of the heart
fail to respond through alighting on slack or doubtful
or rending strings! May a new-found splendour appear
in my streaming face! May inconspicuous Weeping
flower! How dear you will be to me then, you Nights
of Affliction! Oh, why did I not, inconsolable sisters,
more bendingly kneel to receive you, more loosely surrender
myself to your loosened hair? We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them,
trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one
of the seasons of our interior year,—not only
seasons—they’re also place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.
Strange, though, alas! are the streets of the City of Pain,
where, in the seeming stillness of uproar outroared,
stoutly, a thing cast out from the mould of vacuity,
swaggers that gilded fuss, the bursting memorial.
How an Angel would tread beyond trace their market of comfort,
with the church alongside, bought ready for use: as clean
and disenchanted and shut as the Post on a Sunday!
Outside, though, there is always the billowing edge of the fair.
Swings of Freedom! Divers and Jugglers of Zeal!
And the life-like shooting-ranges of bedizened Happiness: targets
tumbling in tinny contortions whenever some better shot
happens to hit one. Cheer-struck, on he goes reeling
after his luck. For booths that can please
the most curious tastes are drumming and bawling. Especially
worth seeing (for adults only): the breeding of money!
Anatomy made amusing! Money’s organs on view!
Nothing concealed! Instructive, and guaranteed
to increase fertility! …
… Oh, and then just outside,
behind the last hoarding, plastered with placards for “Deathless,”
that bitter beer that tastes quite sweet to its drinkers
so long as they chew with it plenty of fresh distractions,—
just at the back of the hoardings, just behind them, it is real!
Children are playing, and lovers holding each other,—aside,
gravely, in pitiful grass, and dogs are following nature.
The youth is drawn further on; perhaps he is in love with a youthful
Lament … He emerges behind her into the meadows, she says:
A long way. We live out there …
Where? And the youth
follows. He is touched by her manner. Her shoulder, her neck,—perhaps
she comes from a famous stock? But he leaves her, turns back,
looks round, nods … What is the use? She is just a Lament.
Only the youthfully-dead, in their first condition
of timeless serenity, that of being weaned,
follow her lovingly. Girls
she awaits and befriends. Gently, she shows them
what she is wearing. Pearls of Pain and the fine-spun
Veils of Patience.—Youths
she walks with in silence.
But there, where they live, in the valley, one of the elder Laments
takes to the youth when he questions her:—We were once,
she says, a great family, we Lamentations. Our fathers
worked the mines in that mountain-range: among men
you’ll find a lump, now and then, of polished original pain,
or of drossy petrified rage from some old volcano.
Yes, that came from there. We used to be rich.
And lightly she leads him on through the spacious landscape
of Lamentations, shows him the temple columns, the ruins
of towers from which, long ago, Lords of the House of Lament
wisely governed the land. Shows him the tall
Tear trees, shows him the fields of flowering Sadness
(only as tender foliage known to the living);
shows him the pasturing herds of Grief,—and, at times,
a startled bird, flying straight through their field of vision,
scrawls the far-stretching screed of its lonely cry.—
At evening she leads him on to the graves of the longest
lived of the House of Lament, the sibyls and warners.
But, night approaching, they move more gently, and soon
upsurges, bathed in moonlight, the all-
guarding sepulchral stone. Twin-brother to that on the Nile,
the lofty Sphinx, the taciturn chamber’s gaze.
And they start at the regal head that has silently poised,
for ever, the human face
on the scale of the stars.
His sight, still dizzy with early death,
can’t take it in. But her gaze
frightens an owl from behind the pschent. And the bird,
brushing, in slow neat-quitting, along the cheek,
the one with the ripest curve,
faintly inscribes on the new
death-born hearing, as though on the double
page of an opened book, the indescribable outline.
And, higher, the stars. New ones. Stars of the Land of Pain.
Slowly she names them: “There,
look: the Rider, the Staff, and that fuller constellation
they call Fruitgarland. Then, further, towards the Pole:
Cradle, Way, The Burning Book, Doll, Window.
But up in the southern sky, pure as within the palm
of a consecrated hand, the clearly-resplendent M,
standing for Mothers …”
But the dead must go on, and, in silence, the elder Lament
brings him as far as the gorge
where it gleams in the moonlight,—
there, the source of Joy. With awe
she names it, says “Among men
it is a carrying stream.”
They stand at the foot of the range.
And there she embraces him, weeping.
Alone, he climbs to the mountains of Primal Pain.
And never once does his step resound from the soundless fate.
And yet, were they waking a likeness within us, the endlessly dead,
look, they’d be pointing, perhaps, to the catkins, hanging
from empty hazels, or else they’d be meaning the rain
that falls on the dark earth in the early Spring.
And we, who have always thought
of happiness climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.