[BNP/E3, 78 – 1-7]
Delirium.
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 think 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 sneers
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 of my soul's deep life,
[2r]
To a Hand – 2.
And I knew thy hand ere the birth of time,
And in ages past it led me to crime,
In dim praying |ages| of [dark it] |costed| strife
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
But 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 missèd.
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.
[3r]
To a Hand – 3.
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 an 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 thy hand in itself could see all –
[4r]
To a Hand – 4.
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 and o'er me there steals
A sense of dread like a murderer's[1] clutch;
I know not how, my hand in thine feels
An eternal thing and 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 elision 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 and bliss
Are plunged in conscious unconsciousness
For that is no hand that my dreams detect.
[5r]
To a Hand – 5.
And I gaze yet more and 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 gain
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,
[6r]
To a Hand – 6.
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.
|And troops of hands all in sight scent and sound[2]|
|In their touch but felt to[3] the visual mind|
Dance and howl and mix interwound
In mere visual wise
Yet never shut, always stiff, defined
Howe’er fast they move in their tragic round.
[7r]
To a Hand – 7.
Then, on 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.
January, 1906.
Alexander Search.
[1] a murderer's /an unseen\
[2] sound /― no sound―\
[3] to /in\
