Chapter XIV: Part IV: Who Shall Command the Heart (3)

And the red wide throats of my chicks as they catch my black shadow upon them, returning.

BY THE MERSEY

I watched the sunlight on the river Mersey—all glorious with sailing clouds and shadows—and sailing craft and steamers on the tide—a stirring sight!

And heard the clang and clamor of Liverpool behind me;

And saw in front the crowded ferry-boats crossing, and gulls in clusters swooping down for garbage;

[Two steps on the green water with webbed feet—and up again, their full beaks raised in air!]

* * * * *

And the great Atlantic liner lay at the landing-stage, towering up, a mighty wall of iron, full thirty feet, over the little people who rushed to and fro below, completing the last shipments and farewells.

For even now the gong sounded in the ship’s interior; and all was ready—every rope in place;

The shrouds and stays were taut on mast and spar;

Two slender wires, Marconi’s, at the stern, ran sloping down from mizen-truck to wheel-house,

Ready to catch (far out at sea) a faint thrill from the home-land.

The little tug’s towing-cable strained too at the monster; but still four mighty hawsers held her fast;

And still she delayed to move, and still the folk, on ship and shore, with jokes and quips beguiled the hour of parting.

* * * * *

Then sudden rang a bugle from the deck. Down came blue peter; and the foghorn sounded.

The hawsers fell, and she was free. A moment more, magnificent, she glided down the river.

* * * * *

And instantly from all the decks (from some of the portholes too) there burst a flutter of waving hands and scarves—a fringe of white, answered by such another fringe on shore;

And instantly I saw—what I had missed before—

[Stronger, it seemed, than even cable and hawser, more numerous and tense than shrouds and stays, finer and subtler than Marconi wires,]

A thousand invisible threads which bound the ship, and would not be cast off or loosed or snapt,

But tugged and strained at living human hearts—and strained and tugged and tore—

Till hearts were sore and broken:

Threads of some unseen world—that stretched and stretched, and floated like fair gossamers in the evening light—

So fine and strong, so stronger even than steel;

And followed lengthening as the great ship faded—lost in the glory of sunset—

Far out to the Atlantic.

IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY

How lovely!

This vast vast dome—and the suspended sounds within it!

Sounds and echoes of the great city vibrating tirelessly night and day;

Voices and footfalls, of the little creatures that walk about its floor, half-lost in the huge concave;

Suspended whispers, from its walls, of far forgotten centuries.

* * * * *

How lovely!

All the myriad books—well-nigh two millions of volumes—the interminable iron galleries, the forty miles or so of closely-packed shelves;

The immense catalogue—itself a small library—of over a thousand volumes;

The thousands of editions of the Bible and parts of the Bible, with texts, commentaries, translations in every known tongue—these alone occupying sixteen volumes of catalogue;

The thousands of Shakespeare books, or of Aristotle, the hundreds of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Montaigne, Goethe, Voltaire, Byron;

The mountain-peaks of literature, and the myriads of lesser hills and shoulders and points—the mole-hills and grass-blades even;

The interminable discussions of the Schoolmen and Grammarians, the equally interminable discussions of modern Science—the investigations into ghostly geometries of four or five dimensions, or into the values of _c_ and _g_ in the Lunar Theory, or into the alternation of generations in some obscure Annelids;

How bewildering! how impossible to sum up and estimate!

* * * * *

And then to think how slight it all is—

A little remnant of faded thought;

A little dust just crumbled through the fingers, hardly more;

The residue and deposit of ages;

The dead leaves, the skeleton foliage, which generations of trees have cast upon the earth—and which with infinite care we sort and catalogue!

And then to leave the mouldy stuffy vault, and go out, and breathe freely,

How lovely!

One living bud upon a little branch,

One face that looks and passes in the street,

And these contain it all.

* * * * *

How lovely!

To think there are all these books—and one need not read them;

To think of all the patient purblind accumulations, all the dry-as-dust, the fatuous drivel, the maundering vanity, the endless repetitions of vain things,

The endless care and industry and science used to sort out the pearls from the vast heap—

[And we only know they are pearls because we already have the same within ourselves—]

And to think we need not stop to count them.

* * * * *

What is it, such a library?

It is the homage of industrious dulness to the human soul.

[Once there lived a man—he actually thought and felt—he wrote even a single sentence of sense—he uttered a word from his heart.

Then all the nations said, “O if we may but attain to save this divine spark from oblivion, let us erect even such a labyrinthine monument as this.”]

* * * * *

Come, come away!

The single hair of Buddha encased in a dágoba-mountain of brick and mortar grows now, even such a hair, upon thy loved one’s head.

Come, come away! leave books, traditions, all the dross of centuries,

Clean, clean thy wings, and fly through other worlds.

Heaven’s stars shine all around thee;

Deep in thy Heart the ageless celestial Museum

Waits its explorer. All that they said—those wise ones—

They say and repeat it now, where the plough-boy drives his furrow:

Be still, O Soul, and know that thou art God.

EMPIRE

_Blind, fooled, and staggering from her throne, I saw her fall,
Clutching at the gaud of Empire;
And wondering, round her, sons and daughter-nations stood—
What madness had possessed her,
But when they lifted her, the heart was dead,
Withered within the body, and all the veins
Were choked with yellow dirt._

* * * * *

O England, fooled and blind,

Come look, if but a moment, on yourself!

See, through your streets—what should be living sap of your free blood—

These brutish squalid joyless drink-sodden populations flowing;

And in your mills and factories the weary faces, sad monotonous lives,

Or miles of cottage tenements with weakly red-eyed children, worn-out mothers.

See, from your offices and shops at closing hours, the morbid stream—as from unhealthy glands within the body—

Crowds issuing of anæmic youths and girls, pale, prematurely sexual,

With flabby minds and bodies (held together chiefly by their clothes) and perky pick-me-up manners;

See, on the land, where at least there should be courage and grit and sinew,

A thin-legged slouching apathetic population, ignorant even of agriculture,

And in the mines and coal-pits, instead of lusty power, poor rickety limbs and ill-built bodies;

And ask yourself the searching question straight,

How out of such roots shall a strong nation grow?

* * * * *

And then look upward, at the surface show and flaunt of society,

Those that are well-fed, and (out of the labor of the others) have plenty of chink in their pockets—

The club and drawing-room life—

Look well, look well, and see the feebleness and insincerity of it:

The scores and scores of thousands of titled and moneyed persons—a vast and ever-growing multitude—living the lives of idiots,

_Faiblesse oblige_ their motto:

Of men scarce fit even to be good officers, much less good administrators; of women hardly worthy to be mothers;

A society wielding enormous wealth and privilege, skilled chiefly in the finesse of personal gain and advancement, and honeycombed by cynicism and unbelief:

And for the rest, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands swarming in commercial dens and exchanges,

The life of the successful business man, the company promoter, the lawyer; the manufacturer, traveller, factor, dealer, merchant, speculator; the bank, the counting-house, the big store, the director’s office; the advertising agent, and the vendor of patent medicines;

Think of all these, and of the ideals beneath and behind them—and ask again the question,

How out of such stuff can a strong nation grow?

* * * * *

Where (and the question must be faced),

Where, anywhere over the surface of England to-day, do the necessary conditions exist for the outcrop of a decent population—if only a body of a few hundreds at a time?

Where are the conditions for the growth of men and women,

Healthy and well-formed of limb, self-reliant, enterprising, alert, skilled in the use of tools, able to cope with Nature in her moods, and with the Earth for their sustenance, loving and trustful of each other, united and invincible in silent faith?

Where is the Statesman who makes it the main item of his programme to produce such a population? Where the Capitalist, where the Landlord?

Where indeed—in a country in which Politics are but a game of party bluff, where Labor is a modified slavery, and where Land (for such purposes as indicated) is simply not to be had?

* * * * *

And the answer comes: The conditions do not exist.

The conditions (says the doctor) of life and vitality are gone—already the process of decay has set in, which only a swift crisis can arrest:

The heart is dying down,

Withering within the body; and the veins

Are choked with yellow dirt.

* * * * *

And this Thing cries for Empire.

* * * * *

This Thing from all her smoky cities and slums, her idiot clubs and drawing-rooms, and her brokers’ dens,

Cries out to give her blessings to the world!

And even while she cries

Stand Ireland and India at her doors

In rags and famine.

* * * * *

These are her blessings of Empire!

Ireland (dear Sister-isle, so near at hand, so fertile, once so prosperous),

Rack-rented, drained, her wealth by absentees in London wasted, her people with deep curses emigrating;

India the same—her life-blood sucked—but worse:

Perhaps in twenty years five hundred millions sterling, from her famished myriads,

Taken to feed the luxury of Britain,

Taken, without return—

While Britain wonders with a pious pretence of innocence

Why famine follows the flag.

* * * * *

Last, but not least, insult is added to injury.

For, while she prates the blessings of her Empire, contempt and studied indifference are her methods of administering it:

An empty House to hear the burden of the sorrows of India,

And Irish questions treated with derision.

* * * * *

O England, thou old hypocrite, thou sham, thou bully of weak nations whom thou wert called to aid,

Thy day of ruin surely is near at hand,

Save for one thing—which scarcely may be hoped for—

Save that a heart of grace within thee rise

And stay the greed of gold—which else must slay thee.

* * * * *

For now I see thee like a great old tree,

A Mother of the forest,

Prone on the ground and hollow to the core, with branches spread and stretched about the world.

And truly these thy seedlings scattered round

May spring and prosper, and even here and there

One of thy great arms elbowed in the earth,

Or severed from the trunk, may live again;

But Thou—thy tale of ancient glory is told—

I fear thou canst but die.

* * * * *

_And better so perhaps; for what is good shall live._

_The brotherhood of nations and of men_

_Comes on apace. New dreams of youth bestir_

_The ancient heart of the earth—fair dreams of love_

_And equal freedom for all folk and races._

_The day is past for idle talk of Empire;_

_And who would glory in dominating others—_

_Be it man or nation—he already has writ_

_His condemnation clear in all men’s hearts._

_’Tis better he should die._

THE BRITISH, A.D. 1901

As the light descends to drown and redeem the world,

And the sea quivers answering to its depths,

And the rocks and trees stand up in the blue air like transparent creatures,

And the wheeling pigeons are a part of it all,

So is Love among the children of men—

Without which they have no being.

* * * * *

For I seemed to see in vision a people that knew not Love,

With cold-mutton faces and cod-fish eyes hurrying around,

Intent on endless quests, and gathering wealth in high and low places, and picking over the scrap-heaps of the world,

And building up carefully their own good names and reputations,

And following up clues of knowledge and philanthropy, and feeding piously and punctually the lusts of their bodies.

And it was like half-blind folk in a dark place hurrying up and down,

Hurting against one another in lost and aimless confusion,

Weary and senseless, stupefied and without originality,

Because indeed the one thing that might make life rational and vital was absent.

* * * * *

And it seemed to me that the most ignorant unbred girl or boy amongst them, who loved another and worshiped in mortal form a divine creature,

Knew more and possessed more even than them all.

PORTLAND

In the grey North-East of winter the great granite rock, see, overhung with cloud!

And from the top no portion of the mainland visible—only a few war-ships below, and Chesil Bank, its far end rising into fog.

But behind, on the high plateau of the rock, among the quarries,

Where neither the sea nor the ships nor the mainland, but only the dreary piles of stone and drearier prison-walls, can at any time be descried, and the arméd sentinels,

There, behold! the convicts in gangs, ten or twelve to a gang—and to each gang one or two warders, with muskets—

The sullen heavy-faced convicts, and (in that place) every day more sullen growing—hauling at trollies, or quarrying or dressing the stone:

Damned,

Without interest in life.

* * * * *

And so onward, through more warders, some with and some without muskets,

And through huge stone gateways and bastions, and through heavy clamped doors, with endless turning of keys;

Till at last amid all this absurd and lumbering display of brute force, as if for wild beasts—behind bars thick enough to confine an elephant—

Lo! a well-known face!

A gentle unharmful face, making the whole apparatus look foolish and ashamed of itself—

The face of your friend whom you came to see—

So tender and hesitating, thoughtful, and lover of children:

His face, also alas! grown monotone,

And like a caged wild animal’s indeed,

With dull and quavering eyes, that fill with tears,

And lips whose tremulous smile belies the words

They speak so bravely.

* * * * *

And so more clanging of doors and turning of keys, and this one left behind again, clamped down,

And buried in stone and iron.

* * * * *

Damned,

Without interest in life:

Neither to speak nor to hear, to speed nor to welcome, a word of fellowship, a single act of kindness;

[Even a warder for tucking the scanty blanket round an ailing prisoner was fined;]

Never to use nor exercise the sense of helpfulness—the source of all human virtue;

Never to feed but only starve the soul;

Is this the Doom?

To hear no news from the outer world, save at unimaginable intervals a letter;

To read no book—save some goody-goody inhuman rubbish recommended by the Chaplain;

To nauseate, and yet to hunger ravenously for the same scant ever-same food;

To sicken at and hate the same insults and loud imperatives of the jailer, unendingly continued, unendingly borne—the same idiotic vacancy of the cell—

The three-legged stool, the can, the barred little window;

The same long hours of the night with pain at the heart, the sound of silly fingers every hour at the slide of the spyhole, and the flashing of the night-officer’s lantern in one’s face;

The recurring effort of the irritated mind and starved body to compose themselves to sleep;

In vain: the same same thoughts thought over and over and over and over again;

The same little stock of memories and fancies brought with one into this whited sepulchre—getting smaller and slighter daily—now like a wheel with ever rapider motion going round and round,

Till the brain itself is reeling.

* * * * *

[And now a Fear, perhaps for the safety of some loved one outside, leaps into the grinning circle and courses with it; and now another, perhaps for one’s own fate in the years still in front; and now—worst of all phantoms—the Dread that one’s mind is giving way: till, in fact, out of momentary sleep awaking to the same awful nightmare, a chill runs down the back, the body breaks in sweat, forms gibber and voices jabber—and presently the doctor is called.]

* * * * *

Mind starved and body starved, and heart, too, starved—

Is this the Doom of Man to his outcast fellow?

* * * * *

Only for those whose minds and hearts are already stunted—for the merely brutish by nature—the fate reserved is easier.

For them, two thoughts alone dominate—Hunger, the ever-present craving for food, the counting and computing of meals in prospect, sufficiently degrading;

And Sex, the everlasting curiosity and imagination (and act if possible);

But no word, no possibility presented to them, of Manhood; no word, no possibility, of Love.

And so for those who care not that such possibilities should be presented,

Is the easier fate reserved!

CHINA, A.D. 1900

Far in the interior of China,

Along low-lying plains and great river-valleys, and by lake-sides, and far away up into hilly and even mountainous regions,

Behold! an immense population, rooted in the land, rooted in the clan and the family,

The most productive and stable on the whole Earth.

* * * * *

A garden one might say—a land of rich and _recherché_ crops, of rice and tea and silk and sugar and cotton and oranges;

Do you see it?—stretching away endlessly over river-lines and lakes, and the gentle undulations of the lowlands, and up the escarpments of the higher hills;

The innumerable patchwork of cultivation—the poignant verdure of the young rice; the sombre green of orange groves; the lines of tea-shrubs, well-hoed, and showing the bare earth beneath; the pollard mulberries; the plots of cotton and maize and wheat and yam and clover;

The little brown and green-tiled cottages with spreading recurved eaves, the clumps of feathery bamboo, or of sugar-canes;

The endless silver threads of irrigation-canals and ditches, skirting the hills for scores and hundreds of miles, tier above tier, and serpentining down to the lower slopes and plains—

The accumulated result, these, of centuries of ingenious industry, and of innumerable public and private benefactions, continued from age to age;

The grand canal of the Delta-plain extending, a thronged waterway, for six hundred miles, with sails of junks and bankside villages innumerable;

The chain-pumps, worked by buffaloes or men, for throwing the water up slopes and hillsides, from tier to tier, from channel to channel;

The endless rills and cascades flowing down again, into pockets and hollows of verdure, and on fields of steep and plain;

The bits of rock and wild wood left here and there, with the angles of Buddhist temples projecting from among the trees;

The azalea and rhododendron bushes, and the wild deer and pheasants unharmed;

The sounds of music and the gong—the Sin-fa sung at eventide—and the air of contentment and peace pervading;

A garden you might call the land, for its wealth of crops and flowers,

A town almost for its population.

* * * * *

A population denser, on a large scale, than anywhere else on the earth—

Five or six acre holdings, elbowing each other, with lesser and larger, continuously over immense tracts, and running to plentiful market-centres;

A country of few roads, but of innumerable footpaths and waterways.

* * * * *

Here, rooted in the land, rooted in the family,

Each family clinging to its portion of ancestral earth, each offshoot of the family desiring nothing so much as to secure its own patrimonial field,

Each member of the family answerable primarily to the family-assembly for his misdeeds or defalcations,

All bound together in the common worship of ancestors, and in reverence for the past and its sanctioned beliefs and accumulated prejudices and superstitions;

With many ancient wise simple customs and ordinances, coming down from remote centuries, and the time of Confucius,

This vast population abides—the most stable and the most productive in the world.

* * * * *

And Government touches it but lightly—can touch it but lightly.

With its few officials, its scanty taxation (about half-a-crown per head), and with the extensive administration of justice and affairs by the clan and the family—little scope is left for Government.

The great equalized mass-population pursues its even and accustomed way, nor pays attention to edicts and foreign treaties, unless these commend themselves independently;

Pays readier respect, in such matters, to the edicts and utterances of its literary men, and the deliberations of the Academy.

* * * * *

And religious theorizing touches it but lightly—can touch it but lightly.

Established on the bedrock of actual life, and on the living unity and community of present, past, and future generations,

Each man stands bound already, and by the most powerful ties, to the social body—nor needs the dreams and promises of heaven to reassure him.

And all are bound to the Earth.

Rendering back to it as a sacred duty every atom that the Earth supplies to them (not insensately sending it in sewers to the sea),

By the way of abject common sense they have sought the gates of Paradise—and to found on human soil their City Celestial!

* * * * *

And this is an outline of the nation which the Western nations would fain remodel on their own lines—

The pyramids standing on their own apexes wanting to overturn the pyramid which rests foursquare on its base!

But China remembers too well the time when it too endured the absurdities of monopolized Land and Capital, of private property in water and other necessaries, of glaring wealth and poverty, and the practical enslavement of one man by another;

It remembers even yet the discomfort of standing on its own apex,

And oddly enough has no intention of returning to those times.

_Standing beyond Time,_

_As the Earth to the bodies of all men gives footing and free passage, yet draws them to itself with final overmastering force, and is their bodies—_

_So I their souls._

* * * * *

_I am the ground of thy soul;_

_And I am that which draws thee unbeknown—veiled Eros. Visitor of thy long night-time;_

_And I that give thee form from ancient ages,_

_Thine own—yet in due time to return to Me_

_Standing beyond Time._

WHO BUT THE LOVER SHOULD KNOW

Ah! who but the lover at last should know Death is?

* * * * *

To give one’s body to the earth;

To rise through the roots of the trees and to feel once more the sunshine—floating as a leaf in air;

To star out months together with mosses and bog-plants on the lonely mountain-sides, to lurk under the speckled fungi in the woods, looking up at the traveller as he passes;

To be sucked in, in the mad rush of the sap through the veins of the chestnut in spring, and to burst in its great shining buds;

To catch at, dimly as in dreams, the wonderful thoughts that sweep through—the great rushing prophetic dreams of the life-laden earth;

To feel the call of existence in new and strange fashion;

* * * * *

To arise and ascend;

To mix with the animals roaming over the Earth;

To be and to include them—to put on purposely the mask which they put innocently on;

To be one of two swallows clinging to the southern wall, twittering, discussing sites for a nest; to be a snake basking coiled on a rock in the sun;

To rejoice in my swiftness and strength, my inevitable action and instinct;

To pass into the bodies of men and women, to be arrayed in their hair, and to look forth out of their eyes;

To be the long lines of habit in them, the food that is sweet in their mouths, the poison that is bitter;

To be the thoughts that they think, and the dreams that they dream; to circle very close;

To circle closer than all thought; to touch and startle—like the sound of distant music heard through the rushing of a storm;

To be the presentation of new unsuspected ideals:

* * * * *

To be buried in the ground;

To be buried deep in the ground of all existence;

To lie in the soil whence all human life springs, and whither it returns again;

Listening as in a dream of joy to the sound of innumerable voices,

And to the sound of innumerable footsteps coming nearer through all the ages;

To see and to be unseen; to hear and to be that which no ear hath heard;

To turn an open impartial eye without blame on every creature; to hold up a mirror,

So tallying nature that to it all men and things run to look upon themselves and learn their parts;

To give products and receive materials;

To have the adit, to be the hidden link, the life which does not appear;

To love without sorrow; and to send love forth to bathe the world, healing it from its wounds:

* * * * *

Ah! who at last but the lover should know what Death is?

THE EVERLASTING NOW

When all life has been rich in experience shall not

Death be rich in experience also?

* * * * *

Hold fast to the actual, and do not go outside good sense;

Do not let your mind stray into a world of negations and impossibilities, or try to image some future time when it will be unable to image anything—for there is no sense in that.

Do not wander too far into time at all, lest with the everlasting Now—the centre of all life and experience, and your own true lover—

You fail to keep your first appointment.

NOW IS THE ACCEPTED TIME

Amid all the turmoil and the care—the worry, the fever, the anxiety,

The gloomy outlook, fears, forebodings,

The effort to keep up with the rush of supposed necessities, supposed duties,

The effort to catch the flying point of light, to reach the haven of Peace—always in the future—

Amid all, glides in the little word Now.

* * * * *

As when the winds of March with their long brooms sweep the dead leaves from the surface of the ground, and the Earth in virgin beauty with the growing grass once more appears;

So when all this debris of thought from the Past, of anxiety about the Morrow, is at last swept away,

Does the vast ever-Present beneath reveal its perfect rondure.

A SUMMER DAY

Seeing once again the ethereal blue of the sky—the limpid air—the all-enfolding sunlight,

Here in the great tumultuous abounding city, or again in the far woods among the fallen oak-boles and the fox-gloves,

The far floating ever haunting shimmer of uncaught beauty:

I recognise that in all and everywhere it is the same:

Somehow to hold and have this in oneself—

This light and everlasting space,

This real eternal, whence the sensible light and space are born—

Somehow to hold from all things still a little aloof for this;

No rock that stands above the river’s edge—but that which illumines the rock;

No brown sail in the bay—but the sweet undirected air that wafts it;

No pleasure, but the greater which lets the pleasure go or come;

Not anything, but that which brings to all things grace and light.

* * * * *

Still the far clouds just rim the Western sky—domed masses clear above, below lost in the summer haze:

So vast the orb of heaven enfolds the earth—the rocks and seas and rivers—and the dream-walking millions of the earth;

So vast the soul of every man enfolds his mortal deeds and thoughts,

Deeds, thoughts, desires, confused and contrary, vexing each other and vexed, in myriads, every shade and color, form and tongue, strange wanderers,

Dream-walking, till at length the real day may dawn.

THE CENTRAL CALM

Drawing back for a moment from Time, and its superficial claims and conclusions,

Realising for a moment the artistic nature of the utterance of the Universe:

That all is for expression, and that for this end commencement and finale, first evolved and latest evolved, are equally important;

That Progress is a word which may be applied to any world-movement or individual career in the same sense as it may be applied to the performance of a musical work,

Which progresses indeed to its final chord, yet the conclusion of the whole is not in the final chord, but in that which runs beneath and inspires the entire web—in that which from first to last the whole complex succession of chords and phrases indicates:

Realising this,

Realising—thus for a moment withdrawn—that there is no need to hurry, no need to dash against the bars;

But that Time itself rushing on with amazing swiftness in its vast and endless round, with suns and systems, ages and geologic epochs, races and tribes of beings, mineral, vegetable, animal, and ethereal, circle beyond circle, infallibly fulfils and gives utterance to the glorious whole:

Like one in the calm that is the centre of a cyclone—guarded by the very tornado around—

Undisturbed, yet having access equally to every side,

I drink of the deep well of rest and joy,

And sit with all the gods in Paradise.

WIDENING CIRCLES

There is no gap nor any flaw.

I establish my base of operations here, you establish yours in distant grounds, a million years back or a million years forward:

It makes no difference,

Our widening circles inevitably meet and interfuse some time.

WHEN I LOOK UPON YOUR FACES

Children, dear children, when I look upon your faces,

Lo! all the hidden griefs, the sorrows and the vain imaginings,

The longings, and the desperate struggles and hatreds,

The jealousies, angers—and the sudden joys, breaking the heart’s doors open—

Pass in dumb show before me.

Like figures in a dream I see them there gesticulating—behind a veil, in silence.

* * * * *

And still you move to your daily ways and works, seeming so unconcerned—as I to mine—

And still the waves of Time wash down between us,

And soon shall wash even you and all your dreams

Into the void—and mine.

* * * * *

But even so, dear children, I forebode

Deliverance;

Some better thing than all our dreams and longings:

One Life—and all these images in their strange procession,

Its mystic intimation.

LIFE BEHIND LIFE

What joys, what strange joys, lurk behind the actual!

See how great the pleasures of the body, of eating, drinking, resting; or of the mind, of knowledge, ambition, power;

And yet behind these what strange pleasures:

Pleasures of fierce pain endured, pleasures of the body exposed to bullet-wounds, scourges, fire—shattered and cast away;

Pleasures of pleasure refused, of simple withdrawnness and indifference, or of mastery and ascendancy.

Ever breaking out behind the actual some unknown force or being,

Throwing the whilom body off like a husk, with its former capacities and needs,

Creating new joys, fiercer wilder than those of old.

THE STUPID OLD BODY

Do not pay too much attention to the stupid old Body.

* * * * *

When you have trained it, made it healthy, beautiful, and your willing servant,

Why, do not then reverse the order and become its slave and attendant.

[The dog must follow its master—not the master the dog.]

Remember that if you walk away from it and leave it behind, it will have to follow you—it will grow by following, by continually reaching up to you.

Incredibly beautiful it will become, and suffused by a kind of intelligence.

But if you turn and wait upon it—and its mouth and its belly and its sex-wants and all its little ape-tricks—preparing and dishing up pleasures and satisfactions for these,

Why, then instead of the body becoming like you, you will become like the body,

Incredibly stupid and unformed—going back in the path of evolution—you too with fish-mouth and toad-belly, and imprisoned in your own members, as it were an Ariel in a blundering Caliban.

* * * * *

Therefore quite lightly and decisively at each turning point in the path leave your body a little behind—

With its hungers and sleeps, and funny little needs and vanities—paying no attention to them;

Slipping out at least a few steps in advance, till it catch you up again,

Absolutely determined not to be finally bound or weighted down by it,

Or fossilized into one set form—

Which alone after all is Death.

THE WANDERING LUNATIC MIND

Do not pay too much attention to the wandering lunatic Mind.

* * * * *

When you have trained it, informed it, made it clear, decisive, and your flexible instrument and tool,

Why, do not then reverse the order and become the mere fatuous attendant and exhibitor of its acrobatic feats (like a keeper who shows off a monkey).

Remember that if you walk away from it, leaving it as dead, paying it no attention whatever—it will have to follow you—it will grow by following, by reaching up to you, from the known to the unknown, continually;

It will become at last the rainbow-tinted garment and shining interpreter of Yourself, and incredibly beautiful.

But if you turn and wait always upon it, and its idiotic cares and anxieties, and endless dream-chains of argument and imagination—

Feeding them and the microbe-swarms of thought continually, wasting upon them your life-force;

Why, then, instead of your Mind becoming your true companion and interpreter, it will develop antics and a St. Vitus’ dance of its own, and the form of a wandering lunatic,

Incredibly tangle-haired and diseased and unclean,

In whose features you, in sadness and in vain, will search for your own image—terrified lest you find it not, and terrified too lest you find it.

* * * * *

Therefore quite decisively, day by day and at every juncture, leave your Mind for a time in silence and abeyance;

With its tyrannous thoughts and demands, and funny little fears and fancies—the long legacy of ages of animal evolution;

Slipping out and going your own way into the Unseen—feeling with your feet if necessary through the darkness—till some day it may follow you;

Absolutely determined not to be bound by any of its conclusions; or fossilized in any pattern that it may invent;

For this were to give up your kingdom, and bow down your neck to Death.

AS A MOULD FOR SOME FAIR FORM

As a mould for some fair form is made of plaster, and then when it is made and the form is cast therein, the plaster is broken and flung aside—

So, and for a form fairer than aught thou canst imagine, thy body, thy intellect, thy pursuits and accomplishments, and all that thou dost now call thyself,

Are the mould which in time will have to be broken and flung aside.

Their outlines are the inverse of thy true form: looking on them thou beholdest—what thou art not.

NOTHING LESS THAN ALL

All, all—and nothing less than all.

* * * * *

Ever men say: Here lies the truth, There lies the truth—Take this, cast that aside—Throw in thy lot with us—We are the wise, the rest are fools.

But I am as one dumb—I try to speak, to say what is in my mind, but words fail me.

I go with these wise folk a little way, and then I draw back again; I throw in my lot with them, and then alas! I throw in with the fools.

I stultify myself, and am like a thing of no shape.

* * * * *

The fault is mine, that I cannot say what I want to say—I cannot for the life of me answer the questions that are continually being asked.

Is it for pleasure and the world and the present, or for death and translation and spirituality, that we must live? Is it for asceticism and control, or for ingenuity and sweet enjoyment?

Does the truth lie with the East or with the West—with Buddhists and the followers of Lao Tsze, or with those who span seas and rivers by bridges and wing aerial flights by machinery?

Is it best to be an idler or a worker, an accepted person or a criminal?

Shall the town be my home, with its rush of interests and sympathies, its fascinations and magnetisms of the crowded pavements?

Or the country, with its gracious solitude and the pure breath and beauty of the air and the fields?

Shall I give my life (how gladly!) to my one, my only lover—absorbed, we two, our days, in single devotion to each other—

Or shall I pour it out upon a hundred and a thousand beautiful forms (so beautiful) to spread from them as in an ever-widening ring to others?

Which is the most desirable or useful trade—to be a musician, or a geologist, or a navvy? to work laughing and joking with one’s mates in a big workshop, or to walk at the plough-tail all day in the quiet landscape under the slow changes of the weather and the clouds?

To be a mathematician tracking in one’s study the hidden properties of curves and closed figures, or an astronomer noting the star-transits on which a nation’s time-reckoning depends?

To be a file-forger with hooved palm sweating before one’s fire in summer, or a cobbler cursing the brittleness of his wax in winter?

Or a potter or a moulder or a parson or a prostitute or a town-councillor?

Is it better to be surly and rude, or sympathetic and suave, to be quick-tempered or patient, hot-blooded or cold-blooded, ’cute or simple, moral or immoral?

To join the society for the suppression of Vice, or to be one of the persons to be supprest? to be partial to drink, or to be a teetotaler?

* * * * *

For the life of me I cannot answer all these questions—I acknowledge that I am a fool.

Sometimes with this inability to take sides comes a strange terror of losing all outline, of losing my identity, my proper consciousness, everything;

Till I think of the Present and the work I have actually to do—and then comes relief;

Then instantly everything is decided—one’s place, and the part one has to play—nor is there any doubt whatever about the next move.

For the moment I am pledged to this or that;

Yet I feel that in the end I must accept all,

And shall be content with nothing less than all.

BELIEVE YOURSELF A WHOLE

Believe yourself a Whole.

These needs, these desires, these faculties—

This of eating and drinking, the great pleasure of food, the need of sex-converse and of renewal in and from the bodies of others;

The faculty of sight, the wonderful panorama of the visible, and of hearing;

The inquisitive roaming brain, the love of society and good fellowship;

The joy of contest, the yearnings of Religion, the mystic impulses of night, of Nature, of solitude;

All these and a thousand other impulses, capacities, determinations, are indeed Yourself—the output and evidence and delineation of Yourself.

They cannot (in any permanent sense) be peeled off and thrown away;

They spring inevitably deep down out of yourself—and will recur again wherever you are.

There is no creature in the whole range of Being from the highest to the lowest which does not exhibit these and similar capacities, or the germs of them, in itself.

You are that Whole which Nature also is—and yet you are that Whole in your own peculiar way.

* * * * *

Were your eyes destroyed, still the faculty of sight were not destroyed:

Out of the same roots again as before would the optic apparatus spring.

Should you die of starvation you would only begin immediately after death to take food in another way; and the impulse of union which is at the base of sex lies so deep down that the first reawakening of consciousness would restore it.

* * * * *

Believe yourself a Whole, indivisible, indefeasible,

Reawakening ever under these, under those, conditions,

Expanding thus far, expanding less far, expanding farther;

Expanding this side, expanding that side, expanding all sides;

Ever diverse yet the same, the same yet diverse—inexhaustibly continuous with the rest;

And made for love—to embrace all, to be united ultimately with all.

THE BODY WITHIN THE BODY

When life like a ghastly panorama stretches before the eye of the spirit—

A festal procession, as it were, continually gulfing itself in a quicksand;

When—waking as in a nightmare at dead of night—

One thinks of all the disease, the weariness, the suffering of the world as it is:

Of the cancer eating slowly onward with its roots entwined in the vitals—the vista of agony and defeat by the curséd thing;

Of the incurable filth, the venom in the lungs, breeding slime and death within one through the interminable months;

And these but samples of what waits, more or less, for almost all;

When one thinks of the sudden senseless accidents which are for ever occurring—the ship returning home, full, with brimming hearts, from the Antipodes, ripped on a rock and gone in a moment to the bottom;

A lurch, somewhere, of the shrinking earth-strata, and a whole city tumbled in shrieks and ruin;

The ‘weight’ coming on in the coal-pit, the ominous fall of small stones from the roof, the awful cracking of the great oak-props, the hurried rush of the miners and their swifter still entombment;

The breaking of a cable, or of a driving band in machinery, a flaw in a wheel, a random step on a stairway—and husband torn from wife, and mother from child, or child from mother;

Death and destruction and the messengers of death and destruction in myriad forms still waiting to fulfil the inevitable doom;

When, I say, the necessity arises to face all this—and face it out

* * * * *

Then somehow, underneath it all,

I seem to see that the strands of affection and love, auroral, shooting from one to another—so tender, so true, and life-long,

And longer than life—holding together the present and past generations;

The currents of love and thought streaming in the watches of the night from far and near, from one to another,

(Streaming all the more powerfully for the very hindrances and disasters which arrive or threaten,)

And building in the bustle of the day such likeness of their dreams as may be—

That these inner are after all more real in some sense than the outer things—that they surpass in actual vitality and significance even all this artillery of horrors.

* * * * *

I dream that these are the fibres and nerves of a body that lies within the outer body of society,

A network, an innumerable vast interlocked ramification, slowly being built up—all dear lovers and friends, all families, groups, all peoples, nations, all times, all worlds perhaps—

Of which the outer similitudes and shells, like the minute cells of an organism, are shed and die in endless multitudes with continual decay and corruption;

But the real individuals persist and are members of a Body, archetypal, eterne,

Glorious, the centre and perfection of life and organisation,

And the source of all the Light in the universe.

IN AN OLD QUARRY

Once in an old quarry,

In a heathery nook among the rocks, unclothed as I reclined in the sun, facing only the great hills and the sky;

Millions of years floating softly down through the aerial blue,

Thy words—millions millions of human forms—

I saw descending.

* * * * *

Tiny, into the tissue of grass and tree and herb passing—into the mouths and bodies of men and animals—and here and there a fitting home in the sex-cells finding,

At length, clothed mortal men and women,

Out on the actual world I saw them step:

Thy words—thy wandering words—each one alone, so lost, so meaningless,

Each seeking his true mates, if so to spell

One sentence of thy great world-wisdom out.

THE SOUL TO THE BODY

Now at last after thousands of years, dear Body, from thy prison emerging,

Thy agelong tomb and sepulchre,

[Where, with what swathing-bands, like Lazarus, what mummy-cloths, what cerements of fashion custom ignorance, thou wast bound,]

Strange chrysalis, thy dead sheath bursting!

Strange glorious Lover!

To feel again thy arms enfolding, to breathe the fragrance of thy sun-kist skin, how sweet!

* * * * *

What long estrangement, dear, what nightmare has it been, divided us?

From far away what long slow exodus?

Why to the tomb in ages past didst thou descend—of Death and dread Corruption?—

While I, poor ghost, went wandering belated, and homeless and forlorn about the world?

For, as the delicate vein-winged gnat from its watery case, as Eve from Adam’s side, as Psyche from the dark embrace of Eros,

So from thee gliding, far-back, long ago—dimly I mind me now—

Slow-differenced, this wondering wandering Self was I.

* * * * *

[Dimly I mind the agelong alienation:

Thou body, of thy mate bereft, and falling unclean, diseased, by devils possest, in mire and filth—

Blind Maenad by thy own senses led astray!

While I, poor soul, half formed and maimed of half,

Abstract, absurd, amazed, and crucified,

To arid and unending toils was doomed, and loneliness.]

* * * * *

After it all to thee, dear, to return,

To feel again thy close-enfolding arms—how sweet!

To know Thee now at last—(long veiled and hidden)—

Through Nature moving, as the Sun and Moon

Move through the crystal heaven, self-sent, divine,

Transparent, tameless, more than spirit or matter;

Dear body, brushing with thy feet the grasses, or resting outlined by the rocks and sea—

To rest with thee, content, in perfect union,

O in such deep and fathomless joy to rest beside thee,

Thy mate and friend, stricken with doubts no more.

* * * * *

Now once more in thy lungs the winds of heaven—as out there in the forest-branches—nestle;

The waters flowing in the brooks flow on in crimson tide through artery and vein; and lift the little valve-doors and pass by with whispered secrets from the clouds and hills.

Sweet now the food-fruits pass without corruption inward and outward of the body’s frame;

Clean is the ark and holy chamber of the woman, the seed-vessel of the man;

And clean the body all suffused with passion

Till the right mate arrives.

* * * * *

O Love, with fragrance of whose wine the world is vanquished!

Great Ocean swaying far from atom to atom! sweet aromatic transpiration of the clods!

Diffused vast Life, now here, now there, in definite lightning-flash thy visible work fulfilling!

For this, even for thy habitation, hast thou prepared these bodies.

* * * * *

And thou, little one, so soon to dissolve into earth and air and sea,

Thy form, my love, I accept—and am no more divided from thee.

TO BECOME A CREATOR

I heard a Voice saying:

See now in the end you shall stand Lord of the World.

* * * * *

When those desires which are injurious to others have departed from you—when all desires born of hate;

When you have become strong to conquer the world, strong to endure and conquer so the hatred and the injuriousness of others;

When what you will, you will with the whole force of your nature, undivided,

Undivided by fear, conscience, conventions, and the distinctions of self and not-self;

Then, lo! all that you wish—all that your heart forms for an image of its longings—shall take shape before you;

You shall create the things which are the fulfilment of your needs;

There is nothing that shall not be yours.

* * * * *

For this world you see around—these trees, mountains, these high city streets and the myriad faces that pass among them—are not all these but images?

Images, to the Heart of which with restless longing you have indeed so often sought to penetrate.

Say then, if you attain to be ruler of your own thoughts, and of the images which spring from your heart, is it so much that you should be arbiter also of these others, and touch to the Heart they spring from?

* * * * *

For deep down there is, may-be, no difference—

And when the desires that are born of Hate and Fear and Distrust are gone, there is no difference.

* * * * *

And I said: Am I not my own thoughts, and when these die, shall I not also die?

And the Voice said: Look again—

These thoughts, these images, that pass before you—they pass before You.

Then how can they be Yourself?

Nevertheless it is true that they proceed from you.

They proceed from the Heart, and the mind perceives them.

And so it shall be eternally.

* * * * *

And all This, and all that you see, and all that you think, and all that you experience, is the evidence of Yourself,

Yourself coming to you over the ages.

Therefore go forth—and be in truth thine own Creator—

No longer in fear and trembling but in kingship and power meeting the mystery of the world;

By the pure and beautiful desires which spring within thee, like fountain-waters from a hillside welling (which flow and grow into an endless stream running ever towards the centre of the Earth)—by these guided,

Take with unerring choice, and make and mould, and carve and cut and force thy way,

To the centre of all creation—to the Heart indeed of all lovers.

AFTER FIFTY YEARS

Looking back now, after fifty years and more, when the main work of life is done,

When its acquisitions, its results, its alliances, are before me, and but few new elements remain to be added,

I ask myself: What is the gist, what the end, what the gain of it all?

What shall I take with me now when Death comes—as one coming homeward takes a flower in his hand for a token that he has strayed in gracious fields?

* * * * *

Is it applause and fame? But this, if it came to me, were only as a little stir of wind might be, to one seeking his lover in the night: a pleasant breeze—that yet might blow his lamp out!

Is it all the pleasure of life that I have had—in the beautiful woods and on the mountains, in the sun and in the waters, in social life and jollity, in my actual work?

Yea, these things were beautiful, but I have passed and left them and can return no more. The fields remain, but the flowers I plucked there are fading already on my bosom.

Is it all my acquisitions—of goods, of skill, of knowledge, of character—but what are they for myself but weariness, save I can yield them to the hands of one I love?

* * * * *

O little heart, where my friends my dear ones live, thou alone remainest!

While I live thou livest, and while thou livest they live, whose home is within thy walls.

Methinks that when I die I still shall hold Thee;

Methinks that when the world fades my little heart shall grow,

And grow and grow into another World,

And be my Paradise where I shall find

My lovers, and they me, for evermore.

OUT OF THE HOUSE OF CHILDHOOD

To take by leaving, to hold by letting go.

* * * * *

Now, when out of the house of your childhood you are departing,

Where you suffered, where you joyed, in the old confused childish way, not certainly distinguishing things,

Now suddenly, as you leave, how it all becomes clear, as in a kind of new and incomparable light!

This is the corner where your little bed stood against the wall, this the window where the moon peeped, and the white and ghostly dawn came;

These are the closed rooms and chests into which you were so seldom permitted to look; this was the daily routine of life which for some inscrutable reason was so rigidly adhered to;

These are the stairs where up and down moved such queer processions—funerals and weddings, and bustling visitors and elderly aunts and uncles, and the parson and the doctor in their turn;

And you were bade stand aside since you could not understand—

But now you understand it all.

* * * * *

Now, leaving it all,

The window truly for you will never stand open again, nor the sweet night-air through it blow—never again for you on the little coverlet of your bed will the moonlight fall;

And yet mayhap for the first time will the wind really blow and the moonlight fall,

For the first time shall you really see the face of your father whom you used to meet so often on the stairs.