[BNP/E3, 31 – 1-83]
THE MAD FIDDLER
Poems
By
FERNANDO PESSOA
It is not claimed for this anthology that it is the best; it is claimed for it that it is not the worst.
[2r]
2
53 poems
CONTENTS
I. THE MAD FIDDLER.
– The Mad Fiddler.................... ✓
– The Island......................... ✓
– Lycanthropy........................ ✓
– Spell.............................. ✓ 7
– Goblin Dance....................... ✓
– Dream.............................. ✓
– “I feel pale and I shiver”......... ✓
II. THE SHINNING POOL.
– Elsewhere........................... ✓
“Go: thou hast nothing to forgive”..
17The Poem............................ ✓
Looking at the Tagus................ ✓ 7
“If I could carve my poems in wood”.
Suspense............................
21”Fierce dreams of something else”...
III. THE WRONG CHOICE.
23The Night-Light.....................
Lullaby.............................
29Summer Moments: I. .................
II. ................. 8
III. .................
Emptiness...........................
Monotony............................
Sister Cecily.......................
IV. FOUR SORROWS.
39Rivers..............................
40(Far Away)[1]......................... ✓
Episode............................. 4
42Nothing.............................
V. FEVER-GARDEN.
Fever-Garden: I. ...................
II. ...................
The Broken Window...................
Isis................................
[3r]
3
Ennui...............................
L’Inconnue..........................
50Horizon: I. ........................ 9
II. ........................
51Her Fingers Played Absently
With Her Rings........
VI. SONGS AFTER SLUMBER.
The Lost Key........................
The Sunflower: I. ..................
II. ..................
The Hours...........................
La Chercheuse.......................
– Song................................ ✓ 8
Anamnesis........................... ✓
59Chalice............................. ✓
VII. THE DROPPED TORCH.
Elevation...........................
64To One Singing......................
The Foreself........................
The Bridge..........................
The King of Gaps.................... 7
The Loophole........................
The Abyss...........................
VIII. THE LABYRINTH
73-74Fiat Lux.........................
A Summer Ecstasy....................
77Mood................................ 7
79Sonnet..............................
78Inversion..........................
Summerland..........................
The End.............................
----------
[4r]
I
THE MAD FIDDLER
[5r]
5
substitute
The Mad Fiddler
Not from the northern road,
Not from the southern way,
First his wild music flowed
Into the village that day.
He suddenly was in the lane,
The people came out to hear,
He suddenly went, and in vain
Their hopes wished him to appear.[2]
His music strange did fret
Each heart to wish 'twas free.
It was not a melody, yet
It was not no melody.
|Somewhere far away,
Somewhere far outside
Being forced to live, they
Felt this tune replied.
Replied to that longing
All have in their breasts,
To lost sense belonging
To forgotten quests.|
The happy wife now knew
That she had married ill,
The glad fond lover grew
Weary of loving still,
|The maid and the boy felt glad
That they had dreaming only,
The lone hearts that were sad
Felt somewhere less lonely.
In each soul woke the flower
Whose touch leaves earthless dust,
The soul's husband's first hour,
The thing completing us,
The shadow that comes to bless
From kissed depths unexpressed,
The luminous restlessness
That is better than rest.|
As he came, he went.
They felt him but half‑be.
Then he was quietly blent
With silence and memory.
[6r]
6
Sleep left again their laughter,
Their tranced hope ceased to last,
And but a small time after
They knew not he had passed.
Yet when the sorrow of living,
Because life is not willed,
Comes back in dreams' hours, giving
A sense of life being chilled,
Suddenly each remembers -
It glows like a coming moon
On where their dream‑life embers -
The mad fiddler's tune.
[7r]
7
stet
Impression
exact
The Island
Weep, violin and viol,
Low flute and fine bassoon.
Lo, an enchanted isle
Moon‑bound beneath the moon!
My dream‑feet rustle through it
Chequered by shade and beam.
Oh, could my soul but woo it
From being but a dream!
Violin, viol and flute.
Lo, the isle hangs in air!
Through it I wander, mute
With too much loss of care.
And the air where't doth float
No air's, but light of moon.
Its paths are known to each note
Of viol and bassoon.
Yet is it real, that isle,
As our clear islands mortal?
Do flute, bassoon and viol
But ope with sound a portal,
And show, somehow, somewhere,
To what looks out from me
That pendulous island rare
In a moon‑woven sea?
Maybe 'tis truer than ours.
How true are these? But lo!
That isle that knows no hours
Nor needeth hours to know,
And that hath truth and root
Somewhere known of the moon,
Fades in the fading of flute,
Violin and bassoon.
[8r]
8
Correct
|Lycanthropy|
Somewhere dreams will be true.
There is a lonely lake
Moonlit for me and you ?
And like none for our sake.
There the dark white sail spread
To a vague wind unfelt
Shall make our sleep‑life led
Towards where the waters melt
Into the black‑tree'd shore,
Where the unknown woods meet
The lake's wish to be more,
And make the dream complete.
There we will hide and fade,
Emptily moon‑bound all,
Feeling that what we are made
Was something[3] musical.
So you be ever a dream
The lake shall[4] never die
|Far window with the lunar gleam (!)
We lose our sorrow by.|
(So nothing of this really is,
A shall for ever be
|Lone corps that was the lunar dress
Become eternity!|
So might here even now thus seem…
[9r]
9
Stet Exact
Spell
From the moonlit brink of dreams
I stretch foiled hands to thee,
O borne down other streams
Than eye can think to see!
O crowned with spirit beams!
O veiled spirituality!
My dreams and thoughts abate
Their pennons at thy feet.
O angel born too late
For fallen man to meet!
In what new sensual state
Could our twined lives feel sweet?
What new emotion must
I dream to think thee mine?
What purity of lust?
O tendrilled as a vine
Around my caressed trust!
O dream‑pressed spirit‑wine!
Publ. Ed. Aguilar, 1965
p. 624-625
[10r]
10
stet
impression
Exact
Goblin[5] Dance
First there was but the moon
And the black‑tramelled trees
In the lunar lagoon
Of the forgotten breeze.
Then some unseen thing stirred
Where the moon‑silence snowed
And a vague whirl unheard
Vacantly tip‑toed.
Slowly, idly, alone,
Beyond the eyes of sight,
Somewhere invisibly shown,
They danced their delight.
Their far vagueness wound
Round the heart a pain,
A phantom fear found
Voluble and vain.
The heart remembered lives
Before loves and homes,
Whose rare memory revives
Only when this dance comes.
A wish for a vague thing soon,
A loosened sense of selves,
A thing in the soul like moon,
Aught in the hopes like elves -
Tip‑toe aerial gliding
Shadow‑lunar blent,
Bending, mingling, hiding,
To and fro they went.
Left and right, belonging
To no place, they swayed.
A low pipe, like longing,
To their dancing played.
There, in the silence dropped
Like a thing on the ground,
Whirled they awhile, then stopped,
Then renewed their round,
[11r]
11
Till with their slowing turns
The cold air grows more bare.
Then the mere moonlight returns
And there had been nothing there.
[12r]
12
Dream
It was somewhere secluded
In silence and moon.
All like a lagoon.
No cares there intruded
Save the vague wind's swoon.
Landscape intermediate
Between dreams and land.
The wind slept, calm‑fanned. !
|The waters were weedy at
Where we plunged our hand.|
We let the hand wander
In the water unseen.
Our eyes were with th' sheen
Of the moonlit meander
Of the forest scene.
There we lost the spirit
Of our still being we.
We were fairy‑free,
Having to inherit
Nothing from to be.
The fairies there and the elves
Damasked their moonlit train.
There we shall awhile gain
All the elusive selves
We never can obtain.
[13r]
13
Correct. stet
|Not Myself|
I feel pale and I shiver.
What power of the moonlight
Tremulous under[6] the river
Thus pains me with delight?
What spell told by the moon
Unlooses all my |soul|[7]?
O speak to me! I swoon!
|I fade from life's control!|[8]
I am a far spirit, een
In the felt place of me.
O river too serene
For my tranquillity!
O ache somehow of living!
O sorrow for something!
O moon‑pain the sense‑giving
That I am vainly king
In some spell‑bound realm mute,
In a lunar land lone!
O ache as of a dying flute
When we would have't play on!
[14r]
II
THE SHINING POOL
[15r]
15
Correct
Elsewhere[9]
Let us away, my child,
Away to Elsewhere.
There days are ever mild
And fields are ever fair.
The moon that shines on whom
There wanders happy and free
Hath woven its light and gloom
Of immortality.
Seeing things there is young,
Told tales sweet as untold,
There real dream‑songs are sung
By lips we may behold.
Time there's a moment's bliss,
Life a being‑slaked thirst,
Love like that in a kiss
When that kiss is the first.
We need no boat, my child,
But our hopes while still fair,
No rowers but fancies wild.
Oh, let us seek Elsewhere!
[16r]
16
Correct.
The Shining Pool.
Go: thou hast nothing to forgive.
To dream is better than to live.
But he shall see the rising sun
Who leaveth everything undone;
Whose mind from his attention's task
Strays like the shifting of a mask.
He only shall through greener vales
Than even those that shine right through
The window‑panes of children's tales
Wander, who thinks the world anew.
Only for him who sits and sings
On the stiles and forgets his road
Does the fairies' bird spread her wings
And the fairies' flowers grow more broad.
He shall not find a hand to feed
The silent sources of his need.
No one shall point the rill where he
May slake the thirst of infancy.
|But greener valleys than To‑Day
And dearer thoughts than Far Away[10]
Shall tap at his window and wake
His |freshness| other thirsts to slake.
So, like a seamstress sitting still
At a window in the sunset
Of a village no steps have met,
He shall belong to nothing ill,
But incorporeal, like a wish,
His soul shall like a rainbow cross
The rain‑green pastures of his loss
And earth shall blossom into speech.|
[17r]
17
Correct.
Accompainment
|Ode to composing it|
What am I? There sleeps in my mind
A pome all was to express.
I feel it vague as a felt wind
Definite with only indefiniteness.
✓
What am I? Through my soul there sleeps
As though a † of sight
A pome whose current[11] essence keeps
Its meaning shut from my inner sight[12].
The Poem
There sleeps a poem in my mind
That shall my entire soul express.
I feel it vague as sound and wind
Yet sculptured in full definiteness.
It has no stanza, verse or word.
Ev'n as I dream it, it is not.
'Tis a mere feeling of it, blurred,
And but a happy mist round thought.
Day and night in my mystery
I dream and read and[13] spell it over,
And ever round words' brink in me
Its[14] vague completeness seems to hover.
I know it never shall be writ.
I know I know not what it is.
But I am happy dreaming it,
And false bliss, although false, is bliss.
Publ. in “Ocidente”, vol. 74, p. 268
[18r]
18
Correct.
Looking at the Tagus[15]
She led her flocks beyond the hills,
Her voice backs to me in the wind,
And a thirst for her sorrow fills
All that in me is undefined.
Spiritual lakes walled round with crags
Sleep in the hollows of her song.
There her unbathing nudeness lags
And looks on its pooled shadow long.
But what is real in all this is
Only my soul, the eve, the quay
And, shadow of my dream of this,
An ache for a new ache in me.
But what is she that sorrow is?
And where goes she that sorrow lacks?
What last thing of love is this bliss
Born even to miss her {…}?[16]
The lilies lie between heats and hands.
Life is too little for the moon.
Yet let the left trees slightly stir.
|And hope wakes for the will come soon.|[17]
[19r]
19
omit
If I could carve my poems in wood,
By children they would be understood,
So near to the sense things have in God
Are both my poems and children's thought.
For a child knows that logic and meaning
Are only nothing nothing screening,
And a child is one divinely aware
That all things are toys and all things are fair,
That a thimble, a stone and a cotton‑reel
Are things we can quite divinely feel,
And that, if we make men out of those things,
They are really men, not imaginings.
I would therefore I could take my verse
Out of mere ideas and better it worse
To visible carving or drawing or what
My verses could be resembling that.
Then would I be the children's poet,
And, though perhaps I might never know it
With the outer sense that makes life sadder,
In every innocent face made gladder
God would be giving my soul the sense,
Lost back of knowledge, of recompense -
The sense of children more children still
When, acting my poems at their glad will,
They, playing with toys, with legs incurled,
Lightly err the visible world.
[20r]
20
Suspense
I dream, and strange dim powers
My shining sleep assist;
A sound as of coming showers
Creeps towards me, loudly hist;
And lo! all my forgotten hours
Lie round me like a mist.
The ghosts of my dead selves
Weave round me a false mesh;
My undreamed dreams, pale elves,
Are now part of my flesh;
And all I am my unselfing shelves
On dreams, out of my reach.
I touch impalpable things;
I am sunny with past days;
Remote sounds, like near wings,
Flank my blind spirit's ways;
|And from the other side of the big hill rings
A bell that summons to praise.
But I am sick of dreaming,
Weary of being the same
Over desert spaces of seeming,
Unwilling player of a game
With life, far star but gleaming
On dead earths without name.|
Publ. in “Ocidente”, vol. 74, p. 270
[21r]
21
Fierce dreams of something else!
Frenzy[18] to go away
(O wave in me that swells[19]!)
From life, where life must stay -
Life ever at to‑day!
Some other place and thing!
Not a life! not mine so!
O to be a wind, a wing.
A bark me there to bring!
Whither? If I could know,
I would not wish to go.
So long as what we wish
Can but wished be,
So long as the arm we reach
Touches the wished thing with our wish
Thus it should reach it, not in reality;[20]
So long as what we love
Is but loved, not loved for
An end of loving, lest it be not above
[22r]
III
THE WRONG CHOICE
[23r]
23
Correct.
The Night‑Light
|Nurse, I known now
That love is vain.
When I was small
You used to sing.
And soothe my brow
Till calm lost pain.
That song recall
And to me bring.|
I wish to feel
Again that child
That you made sleep
Singing so low,
So low that real
Things were beguiled
To make me weep
At seeing them go.
|Nurse, by my bed
Sing me again
That song. I love
Hoping for’t now.
My heart has bled
Till joy seems pain.
Sing softly above
My caressed brow.
O regions lost
In dreams and sleep!
O fairy tales
You did not tell,
But that were tossed
Out of the deep
Of your song's waves
And surge and spell!
Sing as if you
Were listening.
Sing as if I
Had no more world
Than all night through
Hearing you sing,
While my breath sly
On my breast curled.|
Why did I live
Beyond those hours
When you sung songs
Perhaps of queens
[24r]
24
My dream believes,
Perhaps of flowers,
Whose lost scent[21] throngs
Through my sense‑screens[22]?
|Why did I lose
What I had not
But was your voice,
My heart and night?
Why did I choose
Life, |love| and thought,
With a wrong choice
And a false right?|
Lullaby, nurse,
Again for me.
Sing 'till I find
My heart less lone,
|And life, life's hearse,
Leaving dreams free,
Shrink undefined
Into the Unknown.|[23]
You are no more
My nurse that sings,
My childhood een
Made me again.
No: you are the hour
Of sleep, that brings
That scene no‑scene,
That pain no‑pain;
Hallowed and dim,
Brotherly[24] night,
Wherein my soul
Is haunted past
The hollow rim
Of my delight
And the low dole
Of pain and haste;
Merged in the dark,
Sunk past the bed
Into a peace
Of being nought,
Shadowy bark
Abandoned,
Abstract release
From self and thought.
[25r]
25
Correct
Lullaby*
My heart is full of lazy pain
And an old English lullaby
Comes out of that mist of my brain.
Upon my lap my sovereign sits
And sucks upon my breast;
Meantime his love maintains my life
And gives my sense her rest.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
(insert the whole Lullaby here)
I would give all my singing trade
To be the distant English child
For whom this happy song was made.
When thou hast taken thy repast,
Repose, my babe, on me;
So may thy mother and thy nurse
Thy cradle also be.
Sing lullaby, my little boy.) Between all the tercets repeat only
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!)
There must have been true happiness
Near where this song was sung to small
White hands clutching a mother's dress.
I grieve that duty doth not work
All that my wishing would,
Because I would not be to thee
But in the best I should.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
Oh, what a sorrow comes to me
Knowing the bitterness I have
While that child had this lullaby!
Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine,
Sing lullaby, my little boy
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
My heart aches to be able to weep.
Oh, to think of this song being sung
And the child smiling in its sleep!
Upon my lap my sovereign sits
And sucks upon my breast;
[26r]
26
Meantime his love maintains my life
And gives my sense her rest.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
I was a child too, but would now
Be the child, and no other, hearing
This song low‑breathed upon its brow.
When thou hast taken thy repast,
Repose, my babe, on me;
So may thy mother and thy nurse
Thy cradle also be.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
Oh, that I could return to that
Happy time that was never mine
And which I live but to regret!
I grieve that duty doth not work
All that my wishing would,
Because I would not be to thee
But in the best I should.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
Ay, sing on in my soul, old voice,
So motherfully laying to sleep
The babe that quietly doth rejoice.
Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
Sing on and let my heart not weep
Because sometime a child could have
This song to lull him into sleep!
Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
Somehow, somewhere I heard this song,
I was part of the happiness
That lived its idle lines along.
[27r]
27
Yet as I am, and as I may,
I must and will be thine,
Though all too little for thy self
Vouchsafing to be mine.
Sing lullaby, my little boy,
Sing lullaby, mine only joy!
Ay, somehow, somewhere I was that
Child, and my heart lay happy asleep.
Now - oh my sad and unknown fate!
_____________________________________________________
*The “Lullaby” quoted is the 134th. poem in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. It was taken by him from Martin Peerson’s Private Music, a Song-Book of 1620. The “Lullaby” is here given twice over, and the last stanza twice again.
[28r]
28
Prayer
Our lady of Useless Tears,
Thine is my heart's best shrine.
I am sick with the gorging years,
I am drunk with the bitter wine
Of having but cares and fears,
Of knowing but how to pine.
It is useless to pray to thee,
But my heart is full of pain.
Thy glance would be charity,
Even if the look were disdain.
Give me that I may be
A child like thine again.
My sense of me is all tears.
I pity my heart too much.
Oh, a cradle for my fears
And the hem of thy garment to clutch!
Oh, wert thou alive and near us,
And thy hand a hand that could touch!
I do not know how to pray.
My heart is a torn pall.
See how my hair grows gray.
Oh, teach my lips to call
On thy name night and day
As if that name were all.
My fathers' faith doth rise
To my lips this sick hour.
I pray to thee with mine eyes
Rosaries of anguish. O dower
My soul with a least sweet lies
Of thy suffering son's power!
I have forgotten the taste
Of faith, and ache for prayer.
My heart is a garden laid waste.
Oh, thy hand on my hair
Like a mother's hand let rest
And let me die with it there!
[29r]
29
Omit or correct much
Summer Moments
I
The sky is blue,
The glad grass green.
My sad eyes woo – woo?
The alien scene.
Oh, could my heart
Partake of it
And feel no smart
Feeling life flit!
I have no home,
No hours save pain.
Sweet breezes, come
Into my brain!
Great river so
Quiet and true,
Teach me to go
Through life like you!
I have no rest.
My flowers have faded.
What was that quest
My will evaded?
✓ Even what I wish
I care not for.
My heart is rich
And my love poor.
Oh, golden day,
Come into me
And my soul ray
With sunlit glee!
Let me be merely
A window‑pane
You pass through, clearly
A warmed no‑pain.
I faint and shiver
Hearing life come.
O passing river,
Where is my home?
O happy hours
That the fields wear,
Fresh summer showers!
O my despair!
[30r]
30
O glad horizons!
O happy hills!
What pain imprisons
My struggling wills?
What is between
Myself and me?
What should have been
Lest this should be?
My life no more
x Ever to be
Than a lone shore
Struck by the sea!
What fate, what power
x Of dark despair
Makes each fair hour
Taste as not fair?
Oh, for some rest!
x Give me a home,
A hope, a nest
Not to stray from!
Somewhere in life
Sure there must be
Something not strife
Waiting for me.
Lead me to it,
O happy day!
Make my heart fit
Thy going away!
Wake me hopes
At least, though false,
My spirit gropes
Round prison‑walls.
✓ Low voice of streams,
Sweet summer's wife -
Why made I dreams
My only life?
[31r]
31
II
The sun shines.
Birds pass.
The path lines
The grass.
I go through
The meads,
Far from woe
And deeds.
There is no hope
Now here,
Nothing to grope
For or fear.
✓ Nothing: the sky
And the green earth;
A vague wonder why
There was birth.
✓ This and no more,
This and my soul
And the sky o'er
This nothing's all.
I am again
The child I was,
Having no pain
More than the grass.
I live a life
Freed from the morrow
And forget strife
And sorrow.
What were the shapes
Of fear and hope?
Vines show their grapes
Down the hill‑slope.
This real hour
Shall not survive,
Yet shall't endure
Because I live.
So let the glades
And the sky's blue
In vague soul‑shades
My heart come through,
Till I become
An outward thing,
Having no home;
A breath, a wing,
[32r]
32
A portionless
Part of the hour,
Outside the stress
Of being more.
Low voices coming
Out of the day,
Chirping and humming
Near and away,
Make me a part
Of what you are,
Spill out my heart,
Shake it afar!
Let my soul be
A dust thrown up
To the winds' glee,
In the sea's cup!
There lost and mixed,
There selfless made,
No longer fixed
And casting shade.
This hour must pass
Like all I know;
Yet, while it was,
Fresh was my brow,
My eyelids drooped
With final ease,
I was not cooped
In thought's disease.
So let me rest
This while and deem
That life the best
That's most like dream.
✓ This hot hour is
Of that vague size,
For I see this
Through no clear eyes,
✓ But in a dim
Abandonment
Live in the rim
Of my thought's bent,
✓ And this thought now's
A blade of grass
That not even knows
Hours pass.
[33r]
33
III
A gentle wind hath risen
Out of the heated day.
May my soul be forgiven
Its dreams! O let me pray
That this freshening hour
May cling to memory
And have years after power
To live again in me!
'Tis very little, I know,
But it is happiness,
And the hours are but few
That we can really bless.
They are hours like this, freed
From belonging to thought,
When we have nought to heed
Save a breeze that is nought.
Let me therefore breathe in
Into my memory
This hour, and may it begin
Again whenever I see
My heart grow heavy and hot,
My thoughts grow close and late
O soft breeze, fan my thought!
O calmness, brush my fate!
[34r]
34
Emptiness
The day sickens into the lakes
The colour that its pallor wears.
A loss of outline overtakes
The landscape, and the horizon bears
Like a defeated flag the dim
Purposelessness of its dead rim.
Let my heart forsake everything.
I shall be richer by all I.
Every breath, each passing wing
Takes me from myself. The whole sky
Eats into my self‑consciousness
And detracts from my true distress.
For my true sorrow is not that
The day is sad as I am sad,
But that no moment can abate
The pain that I but pain have had
To take with me and see and feel
While life goes by like a mere wheel.
No: vaguer things than skies and plains
Are dark and lowered o'er in me;
My sorrows are more empty pains
Than of which plains can symbols be;
And my void weight of life and self
Resembles nothing but itself.
[35r]
35
Correct
Monotony
Each hot and shaded ember
Includes the outer wet.
Let us, my life, dismember
Our thoughts into regret.
The meaning wind blows colder
Upon the wetted pane.
Our hearts, alas!, feel older
In seeking to live again.
The night hurts[25]. Each red ember
To hotter redness fret!
Alas! When I remember
I wish I could forget.
What vague and cold gusts enter
My soul as by a door!
My soul is the living centre
Of dreams[26] that are no more.
Startle yet more each ember!
Make the fire nearer yet!
How easy it is to remember
When memory means regret!
The wetting wind is higher
All round my senses lone.
My eyes leave not the fire,
My lips a vague name moan.
Shift uselessly each ember!
All our soul is regret.
We regret what we remember
And regret what we forget.
Oh, colder and wilder blowing
The wind through the wet gloom!
|On the grave of my past is glowing
A red rose in full bloom.|
A darkness takes each ember.
I stir them not, yet fret.
Our life is to remember
And our wish to forget.
[36r]
36
My mystery comes to touch
My shoulder till I dread.
The red rose is dead. Such
As I was is now dead.
Could I wish to forget, pale ember,
Without pining or regret!
Or could I wish to remember
Without wishing to forget!
[37r]
37
Sister Cecily[27]
Exact
Alas for Sister Cecily!
To whom prayeth she,
Till feet are numb and pained knees torn[28]
And pale lips inward driven,
X Far-gazing[29] orisons at morn,
Low‑lidded prayers at even?
She prayeth to Mary, Mother and Queen,
Who still hath been
Who keepeth child and maid from harm,
Our Lady with eyes of dole,
With a lily along her conscious[30] arm
And a |virgin's|[31] aureole.
For of the Virgin it is said
That she hath bled
At seven pains for her sad son
And therefore for us all,
Whose souls by heavenly hands are spun
Out of the same white wool.
So to her prayeth Cecily,
That all may be
Washed pure in the perennial fount
Where the saints meet,
And given to reach the Shining Mount
Though with torn feet.
And though she know me not, nor pray
For me, oh! may
Her prayer for man's woe make me part
Of what she says,
So a vague rest fall on my heart
Because she prays.
[38r]
IV
FOUR SORROWS
[39r]
39
omit
Rivers
Many rivers run
Down to many seas.
All my cares are one:
On what river of these
Could my heart have peace?
Two banks to each river.
None where I may stray
Hearing the rushes shiver
And seeing the river ever
Pass, yet seem to stay.
Maybe there is another
River, but far in Me.
There I may meet the Brother
Of my eternity.
In what God will this be?
|Nothing: all the leaves
Fallen from the tree.
Many a river cleaves
Its way past what grieves
To what grieves for[32] me.
date
28/2/13
1/3/13
[40r]
40
Correct
impression
exact
Meantime
Far away, far away,
Far away from here...
X There's no running[33] after joy
Or away from fear,
Far away from here.
Her lips were not very red
Nor her hair quite gold.
Her hands played with rings.
She did not let me hold.
Her hands playing with gold.
She is somewhere past,
Far away from pain.
Joy can touch her not, nor hope
Enter her domain,
Neither love in vain.
Perhaps at some day beyond
Shadows and light,
She will think of me and make
All me a delight,
Far away from sight.
Publ. ed. Aguilar, 1965
p. 624
[41r]
41
Correct.
Episode
No matter what we dream,
What we dream is true.
No matter what doth seem,
God doth it view
And therefore it is
Real as all this.
No matter what we wish,
We have it elsewhere
|Now, e'er now, and rich
Are we here of there.| ✓
|Inside our felt I
God we self‑descry.|
Sometimes I think hope
May make this come true,
But I stop, I grope,
And life, fear and woe
Is all that remains.
Wherefore then these pains,
This unrest that thrills
With a possible joy
All the pain that fills
Our hope till it cloy?
Wherefore this, wherefore
If all is unsure?
Oh, give me a breeze
On a meadow land,
And let that breeze please
Nor I understand.
For all anguish is
A vague wish for bliss.
[42r]
42
impression
exact
Nothing
The angels came and sought her.
They found her by my side,
There where her wings had brought her.
The angels took her away.
|She had left their home, their God‑bright[34] day|
|And come by me to abide.|
She loved me because love
Loves but imperfect things.
The angels came from above
And bore her away from me.
They bore her away for ever
Between their luminous wings.
'Tis true she was their sister
And near to God[35] as they.
But she loved me because
My heart had not a sister.
They have taken her away,
And this is all there was.
[43r]
V
FEVER-GARDEN
[44r]
44
insert, with few, if any, corrections
_____________________________________
impression (is it unique?)
______________________________________
Fever‑Garden
I
Red living flakes of demon snow
Poison‑relate the sinning air
To atom‑clear red sick flowers who
Rootless jut out of Night and There[36]
Relation being itself a clutch
Upon the throbbing veins in seeing
So the surviving over‑much
Is not contiguous to being
Yet[37] philter‑aureole or lay
Sung round the rites of altared vice
The poppies of o'er‑memory may[38]
Spin[39] cobweb‑circles lusting thrice
Around the phallic selfness stood
Midway from intellect to sense
Round whose void a tongued mist thrust‑dense
To the cut lips gives conscious blood
II
She the despised communion owes
To vice of tainting holy things
And making eucharists of throes
When lust tickles with pin‑soft wings
For her mouth red till purple is black
Supplies a space in the lost rites
|And intermits our heart‑beats' track
Senseward to demon infinites|
Till on the point of the spasm cast
Like a mantle on consciousness
The veil is rent in temple waste
And the tongue‑flowers remouth from Space
And out of a sequestering lack
The last dove in void oaks alights
[45r]
45
insert, perhaps with corrections
_________________________________
impression
The Broken Window
My heart is silent as a look.
There is a home beyond the hills.
My heart is silent as a look.
My home is there, beyond the hills.
I bear my heart like an old curse.
There is no reason for regret.
I bear my heart like an old curse.
Why should we reason or regret?
My heart dwells in me like a ghost.
Beyond the hills my hope lies dead.
My heart dwells in me like a ghost.
Beyond my hope the hills lie dead.
They took away my heart like weeds.
It was not true that I should live.
They took away my heart like weeds.
I could not think it true to live.
Now there are great stains in my heart.
They are like blood‑stains on a floor.
Now there are great stains in my heart.
And my heart lies upon the floor.
The room is closed for ever now.
My heart is now buried alive.
My heart is closed for ever now.
The whole room is buried alive.
Publ. in “Ocidente”, vol. 74, p. 272-273
[46r]
46
omit
Isis
In the cool pillared portico
That gives white entrance to her moods
Start‑lovely stand in a mute row
The statues of her pulchritudes.
Twelve are they and the mind doth gather
Their separate seen lives to one sense;
The thirteenth, which is all together,
Means her soul and its confluence.
Five statues mean the senses five,
Seven are her mysteries of Thought.
The thirteenth seems somehow to live
Beside her life and know it not.
The summer lies outside her shades,
The breezes creep into her halls,
And from her windowed loss the glades
Are something that the soul recalls.
She built her house with heavenly types
Of building in her inner seeing.
The Sun makes the long pillars stripes
On the cold, hard floors of her being.
Yet she is absent and despairing,
Her statues await her New Hour,
And from the shadows of her hearing
The whisper of the drones doth flower.
This was not anyhow nor when.
All was as cool as dreams are cool
When breezes creep up to our pain
And we are laid beside a pool,
And a far larger pool arises
In our restored imagining,
And all our body's sense despises
Our innate lack of fin and wing.
Still by her portico I stopped.
The shadows there were clear and fast.
Slightly, as with a kiss, I hoped,
And Having, like a swallow, passed.
[47r]
47
impression
Ennui
Under a low and sullen sky,
Frowned on by lone winds that moan by
And palely sick for light from high
Till the landscape's soul doth sigh forever(,)
Forever sigh,
A black and calmness‑haunted river,
That doth a town from itself sever,
Runs with an inner fear and shiver
Like a dim fate forever nigh(,)
Nigher forever.
Ay, through that landscape lapsed from dream
Into a horrid truth doth gleam
That self‑absorbed, self‑empty stream
That bears a dream of dreams' emotion
To emotion's dream –
Runs from a land whence is no motion
Towards a possible far ocean;
And they, whose eyes anguished sans motion
Bathe in it, take emotion's dream
For dreams' emotion.
[48r]
48
correct
L'Inconnue
Let thy hand set
My hair back. Look
Into mine eyes.
There runs a brook
Right through the heat
Of my hushed cries.
Let thy hand rest
Upon my brow.
Let thine eyes smile
Into the unrest
Of mine eyes now
Thine for a while.
Ay, forget not
To let that touch
Be felt by me,
Light like a thought
Of it, and such
As hope can be.
Let thy hand sweep
Over my hair
One little while.
I seem asleep
But cannot bear
To feel me smile.
All things have failed.
All hopes are dead.
All joys are brief.
Ah, let thy hand,
As if it quailed
From feeling sad,
Give me relief!
No matter if
None understand.
Ay, on my brow
Let thy hand be.
What life is now
Is worth so little
That pain seems brittle
And thought a slough.
[49r]
49
Put my hair back
From my brow's pain.
There runs a track
Of lightness through
My heavy brain.
What does this mean?
These are words set
To an idle tune.
What I regret
Hath never been.
Lest my rest fret,
True rest, come soon!
[50r]
50
omit
Horizon
I
Unheard‑of fathoms in the deep sea,
In cool caves deep
(The spoils of battle are not for thee)
For ever sleep.
No upward vision or shining mount
Rewards thy pain.
The secret angel keepeth no count
Of thy lost gain.
On the sphynx's mouth the tale is dead,
The path grass grown.
Our sorrow shall follow where thou hast led,
Through the Unknown.
Waitest thou hidden, or quiet rest
What silence forbids?
Give us at least thy unobtained quest
And the flowered[40] meads.
II
Already the sea is a whitening line
Along my wish,
And the wind is coming shadowy and fine
With its eerie reach
To touch my common despair and pain,
My wonder and night,
The subtle sense of the coming rain
And my lost delight.
The missing reason for having love
Is quiet with these,
The secret vision, the shining grove
And the final trees.
[51r]
51
impression
Her fingers toyed absently with her rings
There are fallen angels in the way you look
And great bridges over silent streams |at| your smile. yes
Your gestures are a lonely princess dreaming over a book
At a window over[41] a lake, on some distant isle.
If I were to stretch my hand and touch yours that would be
Dawn behind the turrets of a city in some East.
|The words hidden in my gesture would be moonlight on the sea
Of your being something in my soul like gaiety in a feast.|
|Let your silence tell me of the numberless dreams that are you.
Let the drooping of your eyelids prolong landscapes far away.
The jets of water return on the listening of being untrue
And this is the flower I pluck, with a sound, from what you unsay.|
Blossoms, blossoms, blossoms along the road of your going to speak.
Eighteenth century gardens, so sad in the middle of our dreaming them now,
Are the way you are conscious of yourself on your eyelids, by your lips, through your cheek.
A sick child sees the rain blur through the window of what you allow.
Do not |footfall| the silence that is the palace where our consciousness
Is living at seeing gardens our duplicate lives of one soul.
What are we, in our dream of each other, but a picture which is
The masterpiece of a painter that never painted at all?
Publ. in “Ocidente”, vol. 74, p. 275
[52r]
VI
SONGS AFTER SLUMBER
[53r]
53
X
The Lost Key
Set out from sight of shore!
Grow tired of every sea!
All things are ever more
Than most they seem to be.
What steps are those that pass outside my door?
Fail out from shape and thought!
Let sense and feeling fade!
O sadness overwrought
With joy till bliss is strayed!
What birds are those that my swift window shade?
But be those steps no steps,
And be those birds dreamed wings,
Still one ache oversteps
The life to which it clings,
Though to know what ache no step in me helps
And what this pang is no bird in me sings.
[54r]
54
The Sunflower[42]
I
All things that shine are God's eyes.
All things that move are God's speech.
Every thing has all to teach
To our awakening surmise.
Green are God's thoughts when they are leaves,
Yellow when sunflowers they are.
Yet they shine separate and far
|From the hands wherewith God weaves.
Light are my steps on the ground|
Yet they do echo through space,
Through terrible abysses that face
God at the side never found.
II
My dreams are angels' kisses.
Lightly they touch my heart,
Tip‑toe shadow caresses.
They are my Godder part.
There is a flower in my hand.
It is not found in fields.
God looks and can understand,
For He is the dreamer who builds.
He knows how dreams are set up,
He knows how flowers are made glad.
Look: I hold up my cup
And God gives me wine to be mad.
add a third part.
Publ. in “Fontes Impressas da
Obra de Fernando Pessoa”, José Galvão, Lx, s.d.
p. 112-113
[55r]
55
The Hours
The hours are weary of being hours.
Oh, to be aught else! they say.
Their task's to age children, hopes and flowers,
Paint lips cold and hairs gray.
They sicken and sadden and deaden beauty.
When they pass and look behind,
Lining the path of their ended duty
They only weeping find.
So, Oh, to be something else! they say,
For they think they know
That the things and thoughts they take away
Really fade and go.
But they do not know, blind misers screening
A robber‑changed false pelf,
That everything has Another Meaning -
Ay, even God Himself.
[56r]
56
|La Chercheuse| cf. with the title “L’Inconnue”
Pale with the sense of being mortal,
Now dost thou, passing yearning's glades,
Knock with cold hands at the hushed portal
Of the closed palace of the shades.
Thy hands fall and thy wide eyes grope.
Oh, let me kiss thy feet and hope!
Let us not wish to understand,
Bravely despair even of despair;
Cold unfelt hand in cold dead hand,
|Let us set out for mere Somewhere,|
With bodies by the cold made none,
By night to invisibleness done.
Perhaps, thus losing earthly goal,
Our sense of us numbed to innerness,
Sudden we shall find ourselves all Soul,
Hand in hand spirits, waked to bliss,
Having, through some Gate not in space,
Lo! lapsed to everlasting grace.
[57r]
correct
Song
Lilies cast and roses throw
In the way that she must go
Whom the singing planets hymn,
Sister of the seraphim!
Shifting motes of early sun
In the morning freshness spun
To light dresses for the breeze -
Clothe her coming such as these!
Shadows purple, fountain breaths,
Low mists such as dawning wreathes
Round the tree‑tops - these be made
Hers, for whom spring's feast is laid!
She to us from heaven descended
That dreams might with earth seem blended,
And unquietness more blest
Mingle with our life's unrest.
These the chosen offerings
From what earthly deep joy sings -
These to her we daily bear
Lest she pine for heaven here.
[58r]
58
Correct
impression
Anamnesis[43]
Somewhere where I shall never live
A palace garden bowers
Such beauty that dreams of it grieve.
There, lining walks immemorial,
Great antenatal flowers
My lost life before God[44], recall.
There I was happy and the child
That had cool shadows
Wherein to feel |sweetly|[45] exiled.
They took all these true things away.
O my lost meadows!
My childhood before Night and Day!
Publ. Ed. Aguilar, 1965
p. 621-622
[59r]
59
Chalice[46]
Chalice of my communion
With the lost thing that gleams!
Communion‑bond of union
Between me and my dreams!
O chalice of love's most!
In thy wine, earth's wine's ghost
To lips that are God's flowers,
My soul has dipped the host
Of my diviner hours.
My lips are as lips kissed.
My sad soul happy sings.
O shining through the mist
Of tremulous angels' wings!
I feel me God's moon's node,
A child again, outside life's road,
Remembering how I found me
When I awoke from God
And felt the world around me.
[60r]
VII
THE DROPPED TORCH
[61r]
61
______________
Omit or alter
altogether.
______________
Elevation
I
Before light was, light's bright idea lit
God's thought of it,
And, because through God's thought light's thought did pass,
Light ever was,
And from beyond eternity became
The living flame
That trembles into life and reddens with
Our life's soul‑width.
Before light was, when yet the night was queen
O'er what had been,
In God's realized prescience it could be
Light from eternity,
|For no time enters into God's thoughts or
Their spaceless Hour.|
Take thou therefore, my Song, from light the mood
Of being, and brood,
Like the Dove unbegot, over the abyss
Of consciousness,
Taking as thy true part that thought of God
Whence light issued.
Let my words burst into that divine flame
That lights its name
Of each thing from within with ultimate meaning.
Though earth be screening
With fixed appearance the Sun in each Thing,
Bear, on thy wing
High‑lifted, rays from the unrisen Sun
Whence life is spun.
Soar out, my Song, out of despair and night
And catch that light
Ere it appear, from neath the horizon
Of action,
Borne out of dreams by intuition bright
Of endless light.
Though none believe nor any understand,
Yet feel thee fanned
With those breeze‑breaths that come up with the morn
From the Unborn.
Soar like a lark into the coming day
And bear thy way
Into the possibility of noon
[62r]
62
Hid in the dawn.
No matter that none know what thy words speak.
A day shall break
Out of eternity as each day bright
Out of each night.
Thy wings shall touch the slanting light of dawn
And, upwards drawn
By being light‑struck, shall to light be near
When light's yet far.
Hope is thy ready and high‑soaring flight
Out of the night,
Joy is thy touching of the first high rays
That day betrays,
Life is the course thy flight sequesters from
Earth and its nightly doom,
And these three things are one in thy belief
That pain is brief.
II
Thou, unseen Bird, essence of spiritual light,
That yet art bright
With the epitome of the outer shine,
Thou that art mine
And yet not mine but general to the earth,
Wings of rebirth,
Whose song, though in me heard, participates
Of all that all elates,
Thou point of meeting of me with the wings
Hidden in all things,
Thou breath, thou vapour, seen and not seen, of
Some abstract love,
Thou exhalation of the prisoned flight
Of all things' weight,
Thou that in me art fear, mad splendour, all
To ache and enthral,
Attract me, take me, o pure flight, and rise
With me in thine eyes,
Lost, cast, unpetalled and divine, up to
What thou dost woo!
O Spirit‑Lark that wakest ere the morn
And art reborn
At each recoming of the sun, and art
The wiser part
Of all that message is to our low eyes
Of what shall rise!
Life‑weightless Bird that no meads can attract,
But that must act
[63r]
63
Its fate in air, above our marshes sad
And meads low‑laid,
In free heights communing with the Great Morn
As yet unborn!
O sterile Bird that hast no nest nor home
But what shall come,
That hast no song save in the heights above
Nests, homes and love,
Nor any thought save for the coming day,
Though far away
It seem to those who measure yet thy flight
But by its height
And not by its intention, that is carried
From life and married
To those diviner hours that winged things
Find with their wings!
O Bird of ruthless song and untold wishes,
Whose high flight reaches
Heights not of earth, but of pure air, encumbered
With no joys weighed and numbered!
Take all my heart in thy purpose of going
And make the flowing
Down to earth of my song be like thy song,
Something strange, strong
With distance, eerily half‑perishing
From farness! Sing,
And let my heart be what thou meanst with singings,
My life with winging,
My hopes and fears with th’tone wherewith thy note
To me doth float
And the great purpose hidden in my fate
With thy mere height!
My heart shall thus be happy even if pained,
Free even if strained
To keep that height of joy whence tremble down
Thy songs to our own.
My soul may thus be happy, full and free.
Oh, happily
Raise me from me and lift my life unto
That thou dost woo -
The light, the sky, the distance and the morn,
Till I be unborn
Again to pure dispersion in the seas
Of the high breeze
That speaks to thee, ere light be born, of light,
Till the delight
Of without being being shall make me
Song and sky be!
[64r]
64
To One Singing
O voice the angels kissed when unbreathed yet!
O lips made spiritual with uttering it!
O eyes wild with the lust of the divine
In thy felt presence, making thee its shrine!
O that this moment of thee were Thyself!
That thou ne’er fell'st from this Thou, and the pelf
Of gathered days with avarice of living,
Touched thee not from this moment of God's giving!
O eternal actuality of thee!
O by thy voice sculptured immutably
In some stone‑flesh of spirit! O set free
From being all contained in being seen!
O firmament of joy purely serene
With spaciousness of soul and stars of song
Above thyself, God's human heights among!
Sing on, and let thy singing be a couch
To that of me which to my soul doth vouch
Of God as of a self and of a home!
Dissolve me to thy notes! Make me become
An outside of myself, and have in me
Nought but a selfless sense of hearing thee!
Let me pertain to the sounds thou dost voice!
Let me be other than I and rejoice
Hearing time like a breeze pass by the place
Thy song imprisons in its halcyon grace!
Thy voice compels to parapets from heaven
Dim winged happinesses whence is woven
To our souls such a glamour, spirit‑fair,
That, feeling it, all life becomes despair
And all the sense of life to wish to die.
Sing on! Between the music's human cry
And thy song's meaning there is interposed
Some third reality, less life‑enclosed,
Some subtler tenderness than music makes
Or words sung, and its moonless moonlight takes
Our visionary moods by their child‑hand
And our tired steps begin to understand.
Sing, nor stop singing till bliss ache too much!
O that I could, without moving my hand,
Stretch forth some hand imaginary and touch
That body of thine thy singing giveth thee!
That kiss‑like touch would wake eternity
[65r]
65
In me again, and, as by a great morn,
The night my body makes of me were torn
Away from being, and my unbodied shape
Would, like a ship doubling the final cape,
Come to that sight of port and shiver of coming
That God allows to those whose bliss of roaming
Is no more than the wish to find His peace
And mingle with it as a scent with the breeze.
[66r]
66
Correct
The Foreself
I had a self and life
Before this life and self.
When the moon makes woods rife
With possible fay or elf,
There comes in me a dreaming
That is like a light gleaming
Somewhere in me away,
On seas that I have known
And placeless lands that own
Another kind of day.
I dream, and as a blast
Fans into fire an ember,
My heart gleams with a past
That I cannot remember.
And as the ember's glowing
Is not fire but fire's showing,
I waste the empty pelf
Of my mute sense of me.
As rain within the sea
I fade within myself.
There are mazes of I.
I am my unknown being.
I have, I know not why,
Another kind of seeing
(Other than this vain vision
That is my soul's division
From what girds sight about)
Where to see is to know,
Whose life is faith, and woe
Fled by the hand of Doubt.
My life has happy hours:
'Tis when I feel not living;
And, as the scent of flowers
Round flowers a flower‑soul weaving
That is a corporate spirit,
From myself I inherit,
My soul's blood's spirit‑air,
A foreself and inself
Which is the being‑pelf
That with God's loss I share.
[67r]
67
The Bridge
Kisses on me like dew
Pour, and it shall be morn
My wakèd spirit through.
My bowed, greyed head adorn
With bays, that I may view
My shadow crowned and smile even as I mourn.
Although my head is bent,
Thy feet, sandalled with hope,
Pass and are eloquent
I' th' way they do not stop.
Somewhere i'th' grass they are blent
With that of me that does for meanings grope.
Let us be lovers aye,
Out of all flesh agreeing,
Lovers in some new way
That needs not words nor seeing.
Thus abstract, our love may
Not ours, be but a vague breath of Pure Being.
[68r]
68
correct
The King of Gaps
There lived, I know not when, never perhaps -
But the fact is he lived - an unknown king
Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps.
He was lord of what is twixt thing and thing,
Of interbeings, of that part of us
That lies between our waking and our sleep,
Between our silence and our speech, between
Us and the consciousness of us; and thus
A strange mute kingdom did that weird king keep
Sequestered from our thought of time and scene.
Those supreme purposes that never reach
The deed - between them and the deed undone
He rules uncrowned. He is the mystery which
Is between eyes and sight, nor blind nor seeing.
Himself is never ended nor begun,
Above his own void presence empty shelf.
All He is but a chasm in his own being,
The lidless box holding not‑being's no‑pelf.
All think that he is God, except himself.
[69r]
69
Correct
The Loophole
I shall not come when thou wilt call,
For when thou call'st I am with thee.
When I think of thee, within me
Thyself art, and thy thought self’s all.
Thy presence is thy absence drest
In thy body that hides thy soul.
‘Tis in me that thou art possessed,
'Tis in my thoughts that thou art whole.
|Outside thee, given to time and space,
Thy body, thy mere loss to me,
Partakes of change and age and place?
Belongs to other laws than thee.|
In my dream of thee nothing changes
Thyself to other than thou art.
Thy corporal presence is that part
Of thee that thee from thee estranges.
Therefore call me, but await not.
Thy voice, summed to my dreaming thee,
Shall put new beauty on that thought
Of thy body that dwells in me.
Thy voice heard from afar shall bring
Nearer to me thy presence dreamed.
Brighter and clearer than it seemed
It grow'th in my imagining.
Then call no more. Thy voice twice heard
Along the real space would be
Too near now to reality.
Thy second voice were thy first blurred.
Call me but once. I close mine eyes
And let the second call be dreamed,
Thy body's vision lightly gleamed
On my seeing memory of thy cries.
The rest, eyes shut lest thou appear.
Shall be thy clear continuance
In my dream's constancy askance.
Keep far, keep silent, come not here,
[70r]
70
For thou wouldst come too near for sight
And out of my thoughts step to thee,
Putting on thy dreamed body in me
(Thy body's form‑dream infinite)
Thy limit, visibility.
Putting on thy body dreamed sight
Thy limit, visibility
[71r]
71
Correct
The Abyss
Between me and my consciousness
Is an abyss
At whose invisible bottom runs
The noise of a stream far from suns,
Whose very sound is dark and cold -
Ay, on some skin of our soul's deeming,
Cold and dark and terribly old,
Itself, and not in its told seeming.
My hearing has become my seeing
Of that placelessly sunken stream.
Its noiseless noise is ever freeing
My thought from my thought's power to dream.
Some dread reality belongs
To that stream of mute, abstract songs
That speak of no reality
But of its going to no sea.
Lo! with the eyes of my dreamed hearing
I hear the unseen river bearing
Along to where it goes not to
All things my thought is made of - Thought
Itself, and the World, and God, who
On that impossible stream float.
Ay, the ideas of God, of World,
Of Myself and of Mystery,
As from some unknown rampart hurled,
Go down with that stream to that sea
It has not and shall never reach
And belong to its night‑bound motion.
Yet oh for that sun on the beach
Of that unattainable ocean!
Publ. Ed. Aguilar, 1965
p.623
[72r]
VIII
THE LABYRINTH
[73r]
73
Fiat Lux[47]
Into a vision before me the world
Flowered, and it as when a flag, unfurled,
Suddenly shows unknown colours and signs.
Into an unknown meaning, evident
And unknown ever, it outspread its lines
Of meaning to my passive wonderment.
The outward and the inward became one.
Feelings and thoughts were visible in shapes,
And flowers and trees as feelings, thoughts. Great capes
Stood out of Soul, thrust into conscious seas,
And on all this a man‑sky spoke its breeze.
Each thing was linked into each other thing
By links of being past imagining,
But visible, as if the skeleton
Were visible and the flesh round it, each one
As if a separate thing visibly alone.
There was no difference between a tree
And an idea. Seeing a river be
And the exterior river were one thing.
The bird's soul and the motion of its wing
Were an inextricable oneness made.
And all this I saw, seeing not, dismayed
With the New God this vision told me of;
For this was aught I could not speak nor love,
But a new sentiment not like all others,
Nought like the human feelings, men are brothers
In feeling, woke on my astonished spirit.
With a great suddenness did this disinherit
That thought that looks through mine eyes of the pelf
Of ordered seeing that maketh it itself.
O horror set with mad joy to appal!
O self‑transcendency of all!
O inner infinity of each thing, that now
Suddenly was made visible and local, though
No manner of speech to speak these things in words
Followed that vision! Sight whose sense absurds
Likeness of like, and makes disparity
Contiguous innerly to unity!
How to express what, seen, is not expressed
To the struck sight that sees it? How to know
What comes to senses' threshold to bestow
A visible ignorance upon the knowing?
How to obey the analogy‑behest,
Community in unity to prove
[74r]
74
The intellectual meaning of to love,
Shipwrecking difference upon the sight
Renewed from God to Inwards infinite?
Nothing: the exterior world inner expressed,
The flower of the whole vision of the world
Into its colour of absolutely meaning
In the night unfurled,
And therefore nought unfurling, abstract, that,
Vision self‑screening,
Patent invisible fact.
Nothing: all,
And I centre of to recall,
As if Seeing were a god.
The rest the presence of to see,
Hollow self‑sensed infinity,
And all my being‑not‑souled‑to‑oneness trod
To fragments in my sight‑dishevelled sight.
This Night is Light.
[75r]
75
_______
exact
correct
_______
A Summer Ecstasy
Beside a summer's day
I lay me down and dreamed.
The light from far away
In my withinned self gleamed,
An unreal true glow,
Spiritually somehow.
I saw the inner side
Of summer, earth and morn.
I heard the rivers glide
From Within. I was borne
To see, through mysteries,
How God everything is.
The motes of sun that dance
Are audibly whispered.
All is an utterance.
The sight may hear. I shed
Vision of things as things.
My thoughts are angels' wings.
The corpses of known hours
In barks unsteered and left
Float, covered with mute flowers,
Down my dream that is cleft
In banks of mystery -
This summer day and I.
And something like a greed
And yet unlike a wish,
The power to have a need
Which doth not needing reach,
But is dissolved again
Ere its sad joy reach pain,
A shadowy lightness woven
Of the day and of me,
Like sparkling water driven
Never but where we see,[48]
A gap, a pause, a dim
Looking over things' rim,
Starts like a sudden flute
Pastoral with tuneless notes
Out of the unseen root
Of all my being denotes,
Spreads, till I feel it not,
O'er my lost sense of thought.
[76r]
76
And lo! I am another.
My senses taste not‑mine.
A hand my sight doth smother
To a blind sight divine.
I am a lost tune, a mood
Of the finger‑tips of God.
So, like a child‑king crowned,
I feel new with fear‑pride.
I am robed with sky and ground.
My inmost soul's outside
Is sunlit seas and lands.
My dreams are seraphs' hands.
[77r]
77
correct
Mood
My thoughts are something my soul fears.
I tremble at my very glee.
Sometimes I feel arrive in me
A dim, a cold, a sad, a fierce
A lust‑like spirituality.
It makes me one with all the grass.
My life takes colour at all flowers.
The breeze that seemeth loth to pass
Shakes off red petals from my hours
And my heart sulters without showers.
Then God becomes a vice of mine
And divine feelings an embrace
That sinks my senses in its wine
And leaves no outline in my ways
Of seeing God flower, grow and shine.
My thoughts and feelings mingle and form
A vague and hot soul‑unity.
Like a sea that expects a storm,
A lazy ache and fret make me
A murmur like a coming swarm.
My parched thoughts mix and occupy
Their interpresences and swell
To each others' places. I descry
Nought in me save impossible
Mixtures of many things all I.
I am a drunkard of my thoughts.
My feelings' juice o'erruns my soul.
My will becomes soaked in them all.
|Then life stagnates a dream and rots
To beauty in my verses' dole.|
[78r]
78
Inversion
Here in this wilderness
Each tree and stone fills me
With the sadness of a great glee.
God in His altogetherness
Is whole‑part of each stone and tree.
An inner outward seeingness
Makes my clear self unknown.
(O Godfully alone!)
God in His overbeingness
Survives His death each tree and every stone
Ay, in the barkness and clodfulness
Of tree and sand and stone
God is only His Own,
God in all His godfulness,
Whose concrete soul's each thing's abstraction.
[79r]
79
Sonnet
God made my shivering nerves His human lyre,
A lyre whose curves in angels' faces end.
When God doth sing, the song’s invisible fire
And half‑visible wings over it bend.
Fountain of incorruptible desire!
Gold‑misted green isle where my bark doth tend!
My soul, rich with electedness, doth tire
My sense of me with aches with God to blend.
But lo! to live is to be blent with God
Already. We need nought but life, all life.
Pain, evil, hate, lust, treachery, the rod
Of custom, the bypath of dreams, the knife
Grief hideth till it cut her, the delight
Of death – all these are God’s willed spite.
Publ. in “Ocidente”, vol. 74, p. 280
[80r]
80
Summerland
One day, Time having ceased,
Our lives shall meet again,
From Place and Name released.
Only that shall remain
Of each of us that may
Seem natural to that Day.
There we will newly love,
Wondering at the old mood
With which love did us move,
When pain and solitude
Were what each soul had got
For its contingent lot.
There, heaven being between us
And touch a real thing,
The texture luminous
Of our true lives will bring
God into our love like breath.
Nowhere will there be death.
The need to suffer and sigh,
The inevitable cares,
The awaiting and the cry
That goes from joy to tears -
These have no need to be
In love's eternity.
The hours shall make our love
Grow younger, not more old.
Some trick of time shall move
Wont even to truer gold,
Regret shall not be aught
Possible there to thought.
That region light‑suspended
Under truer blue skies
Shall let our souls feel blended,
Yet be true unities.
Nought shall have power to fret
Our hearts to tire of it.
A golden land where God
Stayed a Day of His Time,
Not as the world, where not
A moment did he abide,
And where His passing left
The sense of aught bereft.
My heart, that thinks of this,
Pines, for it is nowhere,
[81r]
81
And she that meets my bliss
With her new old love there -
She is unreal as all
That to this verse I call.
Yet who knows? Perhaps this
Is not wishing, but seeing.
Perhaps this love, this bliss,
This conscious glad not‑being
Is some reality
Through fancy seen by me.
Perhaps it casts a spell
From where it can be found.
What is impossible?
Where is God's bourne and bound?
Why, if I dream this, may
Not this be mine one day?
Who knows what our dreams are?
Who knows all that God makes?
Perhaps life doth but mar
The immediate truth that takes
Its beauty from being dreamed.
Nothing e’er merely seemed.
Somewhere where God is nearer
These things are een now true.
Oh, let me be no fearer
That this may not be so!
All is more strange than that
Small glimpse of it we get.
Mine eyes are wild with joy
Because I have these thoughts.
They cannot tire nor cloy
Because God ever allots
To each high thing the power
To weigh not on its hour.
My flower garden is
Full of new flowers now.
My lips are kissed by bliss
Because I know not how.
My heart fails and I swim
Within a luminous rim.
A halo of hope comes round
My soul. I am that child
That cries: Lo! I have found
This flower strange and wild.
The unknown flower I have
Grew on my dead dreams' grave.
[82r]
82
A trembling sense of being
More than my sense can hold,
A bird of feeling seeing
The great, earth‑hidden gold
Of the approaching dawn,
A breath, a light, a swoon,
A presence interwoven
With rays of other light,
A spell, a power untroven
Of my more clear delight,
I faint, I fade, I seem
Myself to be my dream.
And if this be not so,
Oh, God, make it now be!
Let me not find more woe
Because I so dreamed Thee!
Let aught for which I pine
Merit being divine.
Let this resemble heaven
And be my home for e'er,
Even if for e'er mean living
But this hour really fair.
An hour in God shall be
Enough eternity.
[83r]
83
The End
God knows. Lie we to sleep
Contentedly somehow,
Smiling that we did weep,
As at an overthrow
Of kingdoms the stars, deep
In silence, smile nor[49] know.
God knows. And an He knew not
And were not, what of it?
No matter that we do not
Our life with living fit.
Glad to have sleep and tears,
Lullaby to our fears!
Publ. Ed. Aguilar, 1965
p. 623-624
[1] (Far Away)/Meantime\
[2] First his wild music flowed /The middle of that music flowed\
Into the village that day. /Into the night {…}\
He suddenly was in the lane,/They felt him pane in the lane\
The people came out to hear, /And went out in {…} to hear;
He suddenly went, and in vain /But all that they heard was pain\
Their hopes wished him to appear. /And a scarry burring fear.\
[3] Was something /Is somehow/way\\
[4] shall /will\
[5] Goblin /Elf\
[6] Tremulous /Shaking\ under /or “within” stet\
[7] |soul| /heart\
[8] |I fade from life's control!| /Speak not to me! I smart!\
[9] Elsewhere /Inset\ /(Sunset)?!\
[10] Far Away /being gay\
[11] current /’s\/shut\
[12] my inner sight /sense from my inner sight\.
[13] in my mystery /I feel it to be,\
I dream and read and /its passing making\
[14] Its /That\
[15] Looking at the Tagus /Moonside\
[16] Born even to miss her {…}?
/That follows in her missèd tracks?\
[17] |And hope wakes for the will come soon.|
/And what means in her shall □\
/And what remains she will come soon.\
[18] Frenzy /Splendour\
[19] O wave in me that swells/Frenzy that in me swells\
[20] not in reality; /with hands’ reality\
[21] scent/colour\
[22] Through/Round\ my sense‑screens/lost sensuousness\
[23] |And life, life's hearse, /Till cares disperse\
Leaving dreams free, /|Like leaves set free|\
Shrink undefined /Where the quick wind\
Into the Unknown.| /Freshens its moan.\
[24] Br/M\otherly
[25] hurts /aches\
[26] dreams /lives\
[27] Sister Cecily /The Ruined Cloister\
[28] torn /worn\
[29] Far-gazing/looking\
[30] conscious /lowly\
[31] |virgin's| /smaller\
[32] for /in\
[33] running /worry stet\ /true course\ /rain\
[34] God‑bright /brighter\
[35] God /joy\
[36] There /there\
[37] Yet /For\
[38] may /stray\
[39] Spin /Twice\
[40] flowered /human\
[41] over /through which\
[42] The Sunflower /Song after Slumber\ - then?!
[43] Anamnesis /[or Awak/(en)\ing]\
[44] God /soul\
[45] |sweetly| /idly\ /vaguely\
[46] Chalice /The Butterfly. (?)\
[47] Fiat Lux /The Labyrinth\
[48] Never but where we see, /When through trees we halfsee,\
[49] smile nor /smiling\
