Alma

My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.
Whate'er its sense may mean, its age is twin
To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,
When knowledge was so great that 'twas a sin
And man's mere soul too man for its abode.
But when I ask what means that pageant I
And would look at it suddenly, I lose
The sense I had of seeing it, nor can try
Again to look, nor hath my memory a use
That seems recalling, save that it recalls
An emptiness of having seen those walls.

35 SONETS

I

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.

Even ye, now old, that to this come as to
Your past, your own joy throw
Into the cup, and with the younger drink
That which now makes you think
Of what love was when love was. (For not now
Your winter thoughts allow).
Drink with the hot day, the bride's sad joy and
The bridegroom's haste inreined,
The memory of that day when ye were young
And with great paeans sung
Along the surface of the depths of you,
You paired and the night saw
The day come in and you did still pant close,
And still the half-fallen flesh distending rose.

I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape
Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,
Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light remembered,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?

As the lone, frighted user of a night-road
Suddenly turns round, nothing to detect,
Yet on his fear's sense keepeth still the load
Of that brink-nothing he doth but suspect;
And the cold terror moves to him more near
Of something that from nothing casts a spell,
That, when he moves, to fright more is not there,
And's only visible when invisible:
So I upon the world turn round in thought,
And nothing viewing do no courage take,
But my more terror, from no seen cause got,
To that felt corporate emptiness forsake,
And draw my sense of mystery's horror from
Seeing no mystery's mystery alone.

How yesterday is long ago! The past
Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,
Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is, whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,
Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new use of our careful dates.
This thing Time is, that to the grave will bear
My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.

Look how over her seeing-them-not her maids
Smile at each other their same thought of her!
Already is she deflowered in others' thoughts.
With curious carefulness of inlocked braids,
With hands that in the sun minutely stir,
One works her hair into concerted knots.
Another buttons tight the gown; her hand,
Touching the body's warmth of life, doth band
Her thoughts with the rude bridegroom's hand to be.
The first then, on the veil placed mistily,
Lays on her head, her own head sideways leaning,
The garland soon to have no meaning.
The first then, on the veil placed mistily,
Fit close the trembling feet, and her eyes see
The stockinged leg, road upwards to that boon
Where all this day centres its revelry.

How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing:
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking,
Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.

In a red bacchic surge of thoughts that beat
On the mad temples like an ire's amaze,
In a fury that hurts the eyes, and yet
Doth make all things clear with a blur around,
The whole group's soul like a glad drunkard sways
And bounds up from the ground!
Ay, though all these be common people heaping
To church, from church, the bridal keeping,
Yet all the satyrs and big pagan haunches
That in taut flesh delight and teats and paunches,
And whose course, trailing through the foliage, nears
The crouched nymph that half fears,
In invisible rush, behind, before
This decent group move, and with hot thoughts store
The passive souls round which their mesh they wind,
The while their rout, loud stumbling as if blind,
Makes the hilled earth wake echoing from her sleep
To the lust in their leap.

Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling
From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving,
Who with feared longing half would know, dissembling
With what he'd wish proved what he fears soon proving,
I look with inner eyes afraid to look,
Yet perplexed into looking, at the worth
This verse may have and wonder, of my book,
To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give birth.
But, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes,
Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof,
And in his mind for possible proofs gropes,
Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff,
I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see,
But by my thought of others' thought of me.

Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light
Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;
The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles;
The gulf of silence, empty even of nought;
Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles
Because the string's lost and the plan forgot:
When I think on this and that here I stand,
The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,
Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand
And looking at it with thought-alien eyes,
The prayer of my wonder looketh past
The universal darkness lone and vast.

Oh to be idle loving idleness!
But I am idle all in hate of me;
Ever in action's dream, in the false stress
Of purposed action never act to be.
Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair,
My will to act binds with excess my action,
Not-acting coils the thought with raged despair,
And acting rage doth paint despair distraction.
Like someone sinking in a treacherous sand,
Each gesture to deliver sinks the more;
The struggle avails not, and to raise no hand,
Though but more slowly useless, we've no power.
Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring,
Repurposed for next day's repurposing.

Something in me was born before the stars
And saw the sun begin from far away.
Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,
For it hath communed with an absolute day.
Through my Thought's night, as a worn robe's heard trail
That I have never seen, I drag this past
That saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale
On the lost night before it, mute and vast.
It dates remoter than God's birth can reach,
That had no birth but the world's coming after.
So the world's to me as, after whispered speech,
The cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter.
That 't has a meaning my conjecture knows,
But that 't has meaning's all its meaning shows.

The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,
And the whole darkness of the world we know,
How can we guess its truth, to darkness born,
The obscure consequence of absent glow?
Only the stars do teach us light. We grasp
Their scattered smallnesses with thoughts that stray,
And, though their eyes look through night's complete mask,
Yet they speak not the features of the day.
Why should these small denials of the whole
More than the black whole the pleased eyes attract?
Why what it calls «worth» does the captive soul
Add to the small and from the large detract?
So, out of light's love wishing it night's stretch,
A nightly thought of day we darkly reach.

My weary life, that lives unsatisfied
On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been denied
And the will to renounce doth also miss;
My sated life, with having nothing sated,
In the motion of moving poised aye,
Within its dreams from its own dreams abated –
This life let the Gods change or take away.
For this endless succession of empty hours,
Like deserts after deserts, voidly one,
Doth undermine the very dreaming powers
And dull even thought's active inaction,
Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act
Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact.

No more, no more of church or feast, for these
Are outward to the day, like the green trees
That flank the road to church and the same road
Back from the church, under a higher sun trod.
These have no more part than a floor or wall
In the great day's true ceremonial.
The guests themselves, no less than they that wed,
Hold these as nought but corridors to bed.
So are all things, that between this and dark
Will be passed, a dim work
Of minutes, hours seen in a sleep, and dreamed
Untimed and wrongly deemed.
The bridal and the walk back and the feast
Are all for each a mist
Where he sees others through a blurred hot notion
Of drunk and veined emotion,
And a red race runs through his seeing and hearing,
A great carouse of dreams seen each on each,
Till their importunate careering
A stopped, half-hurting point of mad joy reach.

The work is done. The hammer is laid down.
The artisans, that built the slow-grown town,
Have been succeeded by those who still built.
All this is something lack-of-something screening.
The thought whole has no meaning
But lies by Time's wall like a pitcher spilt.

Sing at her window, ye heard early wings
In whose song joy's self sings!
Buzz in her room along her loss of sleep,
O small flies, tumble and creep
Along the counterpane and on her fingers
In mating pairs. She lingers.
Along her joined-felt legs a prophecy
Creeps like an inward hand.
Look bow she tarries! Tell her: fear not glee!
Come up! Awake! Dress for undressing! Stand!
Look how the sun is altogether all!
Life hums around her senses petalled close.
Come up! Come up! Pleasure must thee befall!
Joy to be plucked, O yet ungathered rose!

Life lived us, not we life. We, as bees sip,
Looked, talked and had. Trees grow as we did last.
We loved the gods but as we see a ship.
Never aware of being aware, we passed.

As a bad orator, badly o'er-book-skilled,
Doth overflow his purpose with made heat,
And, like a clock, winds with withoutness willed
What should have been an inner instinct's feat;
Or as a prose-wit, harshly poet turned,
Lacking the subtler music in his measure,
With useless are labours but to be spurned,
Courting in alien speech the Muse's pleasure;
I study how to love or how to hate,
Estranged by consciousness from sentiment,
With a thought feeling forced to be sedate
Even when the feeling's nature is violent;
As who would learn to swim without the river,
When nearest to the trick, as far as ever.

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie –
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words sense from words – knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

When I should be asleep to mine own voice
In telling thee how much thy love's my dream,
I find me listening to myself, the noise
Of my words othered in my hearing them.
Yet wonder not: this is the poet's soul.
I could not tell thee well of how I love,
Loved I not less by knowing it, were all
My self my love and no thought love to prove.
What consciousness makes more by consciousness,
It makes less, for it makes it less itself.
My sense of love could not my love rich-dress
Did it not for it spend love's own love-pelf.
Poet's love's this (as in these words I prove thee):
I love my love for thee more than I love thee.

How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue?
The coin I'd heap for marrying my Muse
And build our home i'th' greater Time-to-be
Becomes dissolved by needs of each day's use
And I feel beggared of infinity,
Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven
By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven.