[BNP/E3, 49A4 – 33]

 

a passar

 

The horizon comes in through the window

And my heart goes to meet it in the pane,

Let us kiss despair till sin do,

And walk out into the rain…

 

Send out the ships to the window will

-----

 

The hot small room and my dream of the sea

Are in my mind a dual unity.

 

The sea horizon comes in through

The window and the pane becomes blue.

 

My wish for seas and waves again

Meets the coming ships in the window pane.

 

Not on this side of it, not in that

But inside the pane, in a way made flat.

 

The whole mind-picture I bring to light

Floats in the centre of the pane’s breadth, right

 

Through the transparency of the glass transparency

In an abstract way which ‘tis strange to see.

 

Then the whole dream fades, the pane comes nearer

Or further is it? I am a strange fearer

 

Of what space’s dream utters out to Mind,

Sight is a manner of being blind.

 

Sight is but touch to a higher sight

Of which ‘tis the very blindness. O night

 

Come into, the room and make again

A visible thing of the window-pane,

 

A thing thrust in like a shadowy plane

A plane whose shadowiness is brightness

Between night’s darkness and night’s strange lightness.

 

Then does the vision fade off and shiver

And all seems coming down a large river

Floating towards me and away from me

At a strange Same Time that can hardly be.

 

[33v]

 

For our sensations are things absurd.

Though they are Truth, yet there is no word

 

That can describe with visible sense

Reality and its intersense…

 

The window now skips into the curtains

And to some new real obsession pertains…

 

The curtain suddenly seems to be

Coming round to me from round a tree

 

And the tree is mysteriously the window pane,

Then everything comes back again

 

To where it was, but where was that?

Night falls everywhere technical and flat

 

And only the window pane makes dim

Night falls everywhere technical and flat

 

And only the window pane makes dim

Night and night’s shadowy-light-rim,

 

The window pane suddenly seems

Glasses I wear in some absurd dreams.

 

A vision comes into the room

From the transect side of the window pane

And the pane’s existence scatters the glow

In a diagonal of tremulous darkness

Like the empty fall of horizontal rain

Glassy in a cubic starkness.

 

12-6-1915.