[BNP/E3, 10 – 3]

Desolation

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     Here where the rugged hills

Their gnarled loose bases grip into the earth,

And nothing save the sorrow of our birth

From seeing the seeing spirit fills,

Here where, among the grim, deserted stones,

No hope of green for desertness atones

          Or water’s sound

     Make sweet the solitude around,

            Here may I lay

            This day

            My head

          Upon the ground and say

            No better bed

Can he who has but himself for life have,

          Nor better grave.

          The sterile part

     Of love, feeling, was given me.

From the humanness even of a broken heart

          God set me free.

Out of my destiny no flower was made

            To grow.

All in me fated was not een to fade

Or een a vain and transient glory show.

            The very need

For love or joy or the human part of thought,

            Pride, and the abstract greed

For truth, that lifts the heart and doth allot

A value of self and world to consciousness –

            Even this bliss

     My empty heart has not.

            O weary born,

            Faded begun,

Gone from unseen shores to seen shores forlorn,

Sent out of sun-gone unto unborn sun!

          The singer of this wish

            To sing no song,

          The poor spendthrift rich

     With knowing not for what to long.

          The Hyperion dispossessed

Ere birth

Of that sun-mansion set out for hope’s rest

Above the wide-lit stretches of the earth.

          The uncrowned king

          That never saw the land

          Of which he oft doth sing,

And whose lost path he cannot understand

Nor know how to dream steps him there to bring.

[3v]

          The priest deferred

          From the inner shrine

     The thought but never uttered word,

          The fore-spilt wine,

The anxiousness for the hope, the cold divine

Of anguish that no anguish human is,

          The solitary pine

     On the lone[1] hill of consciousness.

             The hour

             The lord

             Returns

     Back to the polluted bower,

     Home to the intransitable ford,

     Again to the ice-padlocked burns.

             The shadow

          Fixedly thrown

          On the green meadow

          By a tree overgrown

With leaves, but fruitless, flowerless and lone.

             The last

          Sight of a shore

Which the unhalting ship doth pass

And where it never shall pass more;

     But where the heart-dim sailor knows

     Homes are happy because not his,

Lips warm because never his therein grown

          The unfound rose,

Hours soft, fate fresh[2], life a real fairy elf

     Because somewhere outside himself.

16-X-1916.

 
[1] lone /high\ /cold\
[2] fresh /(cool)\