Alma

DREAM

It was somewhere secluded
In silence and moon.
All like a lagoon.
No cares there intruded
Save the vague winds swoon.

Landscape intermediate
Between dreams and land.
The wind slept, calm-fanned.
The waters were weedy at
Where we plunged our hand.

We let the hand wander
In the water unseen.
Our eyes were with th' sheen
Of the moonlit meander
Of the forest scene.

There we lost the spirit
Of our still being we.
We were fairy-free,
Having to inherit
Nothing from to be.

The fairies there and the elves
Damasked their moonlit train.
There we shall awhile gain
All the elusive selves
We never can obtain.

I feel pale and I shiver.
What power of the moonlight
Tremulous under the river
Thus pains me with delight?

What spell told by the moon
Unlooses all my soul?
O speak to me! I swoon!
I fade from life's control!

I am a far spirit, e'en
In the felt place of me.
O river too serene
For my tranquillity!

O ache somehow of living!
O sorrow for something!
O moon-pain the sense-giving
That I am vainly king

In some spell-bound realm mute,
In a lunar land lone!
O ache as of a dying flute
When we would have't play on!

FAR AWAY

Far away far away
Far away from here...
There's no running after joy
Or away from fear,
Far away from here.

Her lips were not very red
Nor her hair quite gold.
Her hands played with rings.
She did not let me hold
Her hands playing with gold.

She is somewhere past,
Far away from pain.
Joy can touch her not, nor hope
Enter her domain,
Neither love in vain.

Perhaps at some day beyond
Shadows and light,
She will think of me and make
All me a delight,
Far away from sight.

NOTHING

The angels came and sought her.
They found her by my side.
There where her wings had brought her.
The angels took her away.
She had left their home, their God-bright day
And come by me to abide.

She loved me because love
Loves but imperfect things.
The angels came from above
And bore her away from me.
They bore her away for ever
Between their luminous wings.

'Tis true she was their sister
And near to God as they.
But she loved me because
My heart had not a sister.
They have taken her away
And this is all there was.

THE WRONG CHOICE


THE NIGHT LIGHT

Nurse, I known now
That love is vain.
When I was small
You used to sing
And soothe my brow
Till calm seemed pain.
That song recall
And to me bring.

I wish to feel
Again that child
That you made sleep
Singing so low,
So low that real
Things were beguiled
To make me weep
At seeing them go.

Nurse, by my bed
Sing me again
That song. I love
Hoping for't now.
My heart has bled
Till joy seems pain.
Sing softly above
My caressed brow

O regions lost
In dreams and sleep!
O fairy tales
You did not tell,
But that were tossed
Out of the deep
Of your song's waves
And surge and spell!

Sing as if you
Were listening.
Sing as if I
Had no more world
Than all night through
Hearing you sing,
While my breath sly
On my breast curled.

Why did I live
Beyond those hours
When you sung songs
Perhaps of queens
My dream believes,
Perhaps of flowers,
Whose lost scent throngs
Through my sense-screens?

Why did I lose
What I had not
But was your voice,
My heart and night?
Why did I choose
Life, love and thought,
With a wrong choice
And a false right?

Lullaby nurse,
Again for me.
Sing 'till I find
My heart less lone,
And life, life's hearse,
Leaving dreams free,
Shrink undefined
Into the Unknown.

You are no more
My nurse that sings,
My childhood een
Made me again.
No: you are the hour
Of sleep, that brings
That scene no-scene,
That pain no-pain;

Hallowed and dim,
Brotherly night,
Wherein my soul
Is haunted past
The hollow rim
Of my delight
And the low dole
Of pain and haste;

Merged in the dark,
Sunk past the bed
Into a peace
Of being nought,
Shadowy bark
Abandoned,
Abstract release
From self and thought.

EPITAPH

Here lies who thought himself the best
Of poet’s in the world’s extend;
In life he had not joy nor rest.

He filled with madness many a song,
And at whatever age he died
Thus many days he lived too long.

He lived im powerless egotism,
His soul tumultuous and disordered
By thought and feeling’s endless schism.

In everything he had a foe
And without courage bore his part
In life’s interminable woe.

He was a slave to grief and fear
And incoherent thoughts he had
And wishes unto madness near.

Those whom he loved, by arts of ill
He treated worse than foes; but he
His own worst enemy was still.

He of himself did ever sing,
Incapable of modesty,
Lock’d in his wild imagining.

Useless was all his toiless trouble
Empty of sense his fears and pains
And many of them were ignoble.

Vile thus and worthless his distress;
His words, though bitterer far than hate,
His bitter soul could not express.
.........

Let not a healthy mind pollute
His grave, but fitly there will pass
The traitor and the prostitute;

The drunkard and the wencher there
May pass, but quick, lest they should ponder,
Perchance, that pleasure is but air.

Each weak and execrable mind
Which plagued man with its rotteness
Its conscious master here will find.

Conscious, for in him he could tell
Madness and ill were what they were,
But neither did he will to quell.

Pass by therefore ye who can weep,
Let rotteness work in neglect,
While the rough winds the dead leaves sweep.

His slumbering brother to the sod
Not even in imagining
Disturb not with the name of God.

But let him lie and peace for ever
Far from the eyes and mouth of men
And from what him from them did sever.

He was a thing that God had wrought
And to the sin of having lived
He joined the crime of having thought.

Alexander Search, Julho de 1907

ELSEWHERE

Let us away my child,
Away to Elsewhere.
There days are ever mild
And fields are ever fair.

The moon that shines on whom
There wanders happy and free
Hath woven its light and gloom
Of immortality.

Seeing things there is young,
Told tales sweet as untold,
There real dream-songs are sung
By lips we may behold.

Time there's a moment's bliss,
Life a being-slaked thirst,
Love like that in a kiss
When that kiss is the first.

We need no boat, my child,
But our hopes while still fair
No rowers but fancies wild.
O let me seek Elsewhere!

THE MAD FIDDLER

I

THE MAD FIDDLER


THE MAD FIDDLER

Not from the northern road,
Not from the southern way
First his wild music flowed
Into the village that day.

He suddenly was in the lane,
The people came out to hear
He suddenly went, and in vain
Their hopes wished him to appear.

His music strange did fret
Each heart to wish 'twas free.
If was not a melody yet
It was not no melody.

Somewhere far away
Somewhere far outside
Being forced to live, they
Felt this tune replied.

Replied to that longing
All have in their breasts,
To lost sense belonging
To forgotten quests.

The happy wife now knew
That she had married ill,
The glad fond lover grew
Weary of loving still,

The maid and the boy felt glad
That they had dreaming only
The lone hearts that were sad
Felt somewhere less lonely.

In each soul woke the flower
Whose touch leaves earthless dust,
The soul's husband's first hour,
The thing completing us,

The shadow that comes to bless
From kissed depths unexpressed,
The luminous restlessness
That is better than rest.

As he came, he went.
They felt him but half-be.
Then he was quietly blent
With silence and memory.

Sleep left again their laughter,
Their tranced hope ceased to last,
And but a small time after
They knew not he had passed.

Yet when the sorrow of living,
Because life is not willed,
Comes back in dreams' hours, giving
A sense of life being chilled,

Suddenly each remembers –
It glows like a coming moon
On where their dream-life embers –
The mad fiddlers tune.

EMPTINESS

The day sickens into the lake
The colour that its pallor wears.
A loss of outline overtakes
The landscape, and the horizon bears
Like a defeated flag the dim
Purposelessness of its dead rim.

Let my heart forsake everything.
I shall be richer by all I.
Every breath, each passing wing
Takes me from myself. The whole sky
Eats into my self-consciousness
And detracts from my true distress.

For my true sorrow is not that
The day is sad as I am sad,
But that no moment can abate
The pain that I but pain have had
To take with me and see and feel
While life goes by like a mere wheel.

No: vaguer things than skies and plains
Are dark and lowered o'er in me;
My sorrows are more empty pains
Than of which plains can symbols be;
And my void weight of life and self
Resembles nothing but itself.

THE SHINNING POOL


Go: thou hast nothing to forgive.
To dream is better than to live.

But he shall see the rising sun
Who leaveth everything undone;
Whose mind from his attention's task
Strays like the shifting of a mask.

He only shall through greener vales
Than even those that shine right through
The window-panes of children's tales
Wander, who thinks the world anew.

Only for him who sits and sings
On the stiles and forgets his road
Does the fairies' bird spread her wings
And the fairies' flowers grow more broad.

He shall not find a hand to feed
The silent sources of his need.
No one shall point the rill where he
May slake the thirst of infancy.

But greener valleys than To-Day
And dearer thoughts than Far Away
Shall tap at his window and wake
His freshness other thirsts to slake.

So, like a seamstress sitting still
At a window in the sunset
Of a village no steps have met,
He shall belong to nothing ill,

But incorporeal, like a wish,
His soul shall like a rainbow cross
The rain-green pastures of his loss
And earth shall blossom into speech.

TO A HAND

Give me thy hand. With my wounded eyes
I would see what this hand contains:
Ah, what a world of hopes here lies!
What a world of feelings and doubts and pains!
Oh to thing that this hand in itself contains
The mystery of mysteries.

This hand has a meaning thou dost not know,
A meaning deeper than human fears;
This hand perchance in times long ago
Wiped off strange and unnatural tears;
Perhaps its gesture was full of snears
Perchance its clenching was full of woe.

There is that in thy hand my soul doth dream
And the shades that haunt my mind;
The howl of the wind and the flow of the stream,
The flow of the stream and the howl of the wind,
All that is horrible and undefined
Of the things that are in the things that seem.

As I look at thy hand my mind is rife
Of thoughts and memories deeper than rhyme;
Thy hand is a part af my soul's deep life,
And I knew thy hand ere the birth of time,
And in ages past it led me to crime,
(...)

A world of woes and of fears and sighs
And love that better had been hate,
And crimes and wars and victories,
And the painful fall of many a state –
All these and more that the heart abate
My raving soul in thy hand descries.

No painter mad, not a fetichist
O'er thy hand would be thus held blind.
At mere blank thought of its being kissed
By my lips I thrill with a fear none find
In the waking thoughts-of a human mind
Save when reason by its own self is missed.

Thy hand has a meaning thou dost not know,
A meaning deeper than human fears;
It has aught of the sea and of the sun's glow
And the seasons too and the months and years,
And the colour hidden in human tears
And the form and number in human woe.

Thy hand was a lofty and empty home,
A collar of pearls and a castle keep;
Thy hand knows well all the thoughts that roam,
Thy hand is the music eternal and deep
That long ere birth held my soul asleep
In a palace quaint with a curious dome.

How finely made is this hand of thine
With its fingers tapering and white,
Soft and palely warm and fine;
There is something in it of day and night.
Ah, dearest child, could I read aright
The text before me deep and divine.

There's a kind of Fact that persists and hangs
O'er thy hand, as on a scratched scroll:
Tis as if some thought had buried its fangs
In a unknown part of my soul.
In a land far in me a bell doth toll,
And my heart aches wild as it shrinks or clangs.

There is aught of new and wild and unreal
In thy hand where my look is pained:
Tis as if hand in itself could see all
Horrible thought, where fear is gained
By a drollness mad and dimly sustained
As of some wide hint out of the Ideal.

There is aught of Personal, of It, of Such
In thy hand o'er me there steals
A sense of dread like a murder's clutch;
I know not how, my hand in thine feels
An eternal thing hand my mad brain reels
As if eternity we could touch.

I see that hand not a hand, but whence
This horrible Fact that creeps in me!
Ah, I have of thy hand the seeing intense
But aught more than hand in that place I see
That abrupt elusion did make to be
Between thought of things and what we call sense.

My thought doth look at thy hand direct
Without eyes or sense or aught of this,
And my reason at such a thing is wrecked
Into such a fear that both pain hand bliss
Are plunged in conscious unconsciousness
For that is no hand that my dreams detect.

And I gaze yet more hand I shake from me
The dream of time and the dream of space,
And as a drowner who sinks in the sea
I dream of the wonders of all we trace
In everything and I plunge full-face
In the sense of what more than seems to be.

There is aught of lovely, wild and unbrute
In thy hand, and I love it well;

In fearing more than pain thoughts of hell
By a sudden portal in the Visible
I have a glimpse of the Absolute.

The sight of thy hand of a horrible heaven
The portals mute throws open again

Thy hand is like music, in it I again
Passing a wild fear and a bitter pain
Weird things more weird than the sense of Seven.

All things stare mystery at my mind,
But thy hand most, to oblivion conn'd
Thrilled with a mute life not all defined,
What is thy hand in itself beyond
The scope of sense where the heart is fond,
The realm of thought where the soul is blind?

Where is the soul that thy hand reveals
In its own there-self till its thought affrights?
What bells are those that say HAND in peals
That traverse impossible infinites?
What fills with lightnings of hands the nights
Where the sense of dread into thoughts congeals?

Take thy hand away; for I now shall dream
Of strange and grotesque and unnatural lands
Watered by many a painful stream
Whose waves are hands, whose banks of hands
Of gardens with trees whose leaves are hands
And a white stiff hand covering the sun's gleam.

(...)

Then, oh horror worst, they begin to live
With a vital life, and to grasp and clutch,
And to twitch and squirm till my thoughts unweave,
And like worms and snails that my throat should touch
My soul qualms and retches at horror such
At fear's transcendent superlative.

And what more doth follow I cannot say,
But it seems that madly I traverse, lone,
Tracts of hells where a hand doth stay
In such a manner that if a groan
Of a madman could in its soul be known
It would be to it as to night is day.

And my thoughts drag on in their weary strain;
Wild and grotesque, or quick or slow,
Uncouth and unseemly they reel in my brain,
Startingly mad as they go,
As a sudden laugh in the midst of woe
Or a clown in a funeral train.


Alexander Search

January, 1906

Wake with the Sun, wake with the morn
Wake with the coming day,
Be with the dew and the flush new born,
But, unlike them, stay.

Mists fall of from what thou art
They are what we see.
Come and enter into our heart
And let life be.

The morn belongs to the empty world
Men are later here.
Come and let life be slowly unfurled
Off thee like fear.

And in thy terrible being but thou
Sans body nor soul
Pour all thy balm on my saddened brow,
And make my hope whole!


04/07/1917

THE POEM

There sleeps a poem in my mind
That shall my entire soul express.
I feel it vague as sound and wind
Yet sculptured in full definiteness.

It has no stanza, verse or word.
Ev'n as I dream it, it is not.
'Tis a mere feeling of it, blurred,
And but a happy mist round thought.

Day and night in my mystery
I dream and read and spell it over,
And ever round words' brink in me
Its vague completeness seems to hover.

I know it never shall be writ.
I know I know not what it is.
But I am happy dreaming it,
And false bliss, although false, is bliss.

MANIA OF DOUBT

All things unto me are queries
That from normalness depart,
And their ceaseless asking wearies
My heart.
Things are and seem, and nothing bears
The secret of the life it wears.
All thing’s presence e’er is asking
Questions of disturbing pain
With dreadful hesitation tasking
My brain
How false is truth? How much doth seem
Since dreams are all and all’s a dream.
Before mystery my will faileth
Torn with war within the mind,
.............

Alexander Search

POEMAS VÁRIOS EM INGLÊS


SEPARATED FROM THEE...

Separated from thee, treasure of my heart,
By earth despised, from sympathy free,
Yet winds may quaver and hearts may waver,
I'll never forget thee.

Soft seem the chimes of boyhood sweet
To one who is no more free,
But let winds quaver and men's hearts waver,
I'll never forget thee.

In a dim vision, from school hailing
Myself a boyish form, I see,
And winds have quavered and men's hearts wavered,
But I'll not forgotten thee.

Since first thy form divine I saw,
While from school I came with glee,
Winds have quavered and men's hearts wavered,
But I've forgotten thee.

Since a simple boyish passion
I entertained for thee
Though winds have quavered and men's hearts wavered,
I've forgotten thee.

The stars shine bright, the moon looks love,
From over the moonlit sea.
Winds have quavered and men's hearts wavered
And thou hast forgotten me.

Separated from thee, treasure of my heart,
By earth despised, from sympathy free,
Yet may quaver and hearts may waver,
But I'll never forget thee.


May 12, 1901

Sob uma luz trêmula e baça,
Se agita, brinca e dança ao léu
A Vida, ululante e devassa.
Assim também, quando no céu

A noite voluptuosa sonha,
Tudo acalmando, mesmo a fome,
Tudo apagando, até a vergonha,
Diz o Poeta que a dor consome:

"Afinal, minha alma e meus ossos
Finalmente imploram por sossego;
O coração feito em destroços,

Procuro em meu leito aconchego
E às vossas cortinas me apego,
Ó treva oferta aos corpos nossos.

APPROACHING

With dragging steps severe, like creeping hate,
Through the black silence of my conscious brain
I hear madness advance, and feel with pain
The ground it treads on writhe and palpitate.
How to avoid its coming soon or late
How not to feel the mind’s grand vainly strain,
But rooted lie awaiting its dread reign
That cometh inopposable as fate?

If only madness came as lightning doth –
Suddenly – that were the least greatest ill...
But oh! to feel with consciousness’ clear sight
Reason’s day go to twilight in swift growth,
And the twilight of reason, pale and chill,
Darken towards impenetrable night.

Alexander Search, 23/03/1909

Ai se eu disser que as tremuras
Me dão nas pernas, e as loucuras
Fazem esquecer-me dos prantos
Pensar em juras

Ai se eu disser que foi feitiço
Que fez na saia dar ventania
Mostrar-me coisas tão belas
Ter fantasia
E sonhar com aquele encontro
Sonhar que não diz que não

Tem um jeito de senhora
E um olhar desmascarado
De céu negro ou céu estrelado, ou Sol
Daquele que a gente sabe.
O seu balanço gingado
Tem os mistérios do mar
E a certeza do caminho certo
que tem a estrela polar.

Não sei se faça convite
E se quebre a tradição
Ou se lhe mande uma carta
Como ouvi numa canção
Só sei que o calor aperta
E ainda não estamos no verão.

Quanto mais o tempo passa
Mais me afasto da razão
E ela insiste no passeio à tarde
Em tom de provocação
Até que num dia feriado
Pra curtir a solidão
Fui consumir as tristezas
Pró baile do Sr. João

Não sei se foi por magia
Ou seria maldição
Dei por mim rodopiando
Bem no meio do salão
Acabei no tal convite
Em jeito de confissão
E a resposta foi tão doce
Que a beijei com emoção
Só que a malta não gritou
Como ouvi numa canção

Like to a ship that storms urge on its course,
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid.
And, as the storm drives from the storm, our heart
Within the peril disimperilled grows;
A port is near the more from port we part –
The port where to our driven direction goes.
If we reap knowledge to cross-profit, this
From storms we learn, when the storm's height doth drive –
That the black presence of its violence is
The pushing promise of near far blue skies.
Learn we but how to have the pilot-skill,
And the storm's very might shall mate our will.

Beauty and love let no one separate,
Whom exact Nature did to each other fit,
Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate
And to Love beauty as true colour of it.
Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair,
But let none love outside the body's thought,
So the seen couple's togetherness shall bear
Truth to the beauty each in the other sought.
I could but love thee out of mockery
Of love and thee and mine own ugliness;
Therefore thy beauty I sing and wish not thee,
Thanking the Gods I long not out of place,
Lest, like a slave that for kings' robes doth long,
Obtained, shall with mere wearing do them wrong.

Let the wide light come through the whole house now
Like a herald with brow
Garlanded round with roses and those leaves
That love for its love weaves!
Between her and the ceiling this day's ending
A man's weight will be bending.
Lo! with the thought her legs she twines, well knowing
A hand will part them then;
Fearing that entering in her, that allowing
That will make softness begin rude at pain.
If ye, glad sunbeams, are inhabited
By sprites or gnomes that dally with the day,
Whisper her, if she shrink that she'll be bled,
That love's large bower is doored in this small way.

When I have sense of what to sense appears,
Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is.
When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.
When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees.
I am part Soul part I in all I touch –
Soul by that part I hold in common with all,
And I the spoiled part, that doth make sense such
As I can err by it and my sense mine call.
The rest is wondering what these thoughts may mean,
That come to explain and suddenly are gone,
Like messengers that mock the message' mien,
Explaining all but the explanation;
As if we a ciphered letter's cipher hit
And find it in an unknown language writ.

Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee –
That entire death shall null my entire thought;
And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.
Shall that of me that now contains the stars
Be by the very contained stars survived?
Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars
An all unjust Fate's truth from being believed?
Conjecture cannot fit to the seen world
A garment of its thought untorn or covering,
Or with its stuffed garb forge an otherworld
Without itself its dead deceit discovering;
So, all being possible, an idle thought may
Less idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay.

We are in Fate and Fate's and do but lack
Outness from soul to know ourselves its dwelling,
And do but compel Fate aside or back
By Fate's own immanence in the compelling.
We are too far in us from outward truth
To know how much we are not what we are,
And live but in the heat of error's youth,
Yet young enough its acting youth to ignore.
The doubleness of mind fails us, to glance
At our exterior presence amid things,
Sizing from otherness our countenance
And seeing our puppet will's act-acting strings.
An unknown language speaks in us, which we
Are at the words of, fronted from reality.

This is the month and this the day.
Ye must not stay.
Sally ye out and in warm clusters move
To where beyond the trees the belfry's height
Does in the blue wide heaven a message prove,
Somewhat calm, of delight.
Now flushed and whispering loud sally ye out
To church! The sun pours on the ordered rout,
And all their following eyes clasp round the bride:
They feel like hands her bosom and her side;
Like the inside of the vestment next her skin,
They round her round and fold each crevice in;
They lift her skirts up, as to tease or woo
The cleft hid thing below;
And this they think at her peeps in their ways
And in their glances plays.