The Bird-Catcher Read Free Page B

moments’ span
    Shall man outlive the thousand centuries
    Of the blind life of man.
    Therefore when I am sunk
    To earth again
    And thirsty earth has drunk
    My joy and pain,
    I shall not know or need
    Pity or praise
    Or thanks or love from you, the human seed
    Sprung out of later days:
    For on the burning crest
    Of great extremes
    Where the soul meets breast to breast
    Its highest dreams,
    Safe from stern Fate’s decrees
    Irrevocably
    I have possessed and savoured to the lees
    My own eternity.

To Hate
    Come, holy Spirit, pentecostal flame.
    Out of the deep we cry to thee. The shame
    Of feeble virtues, mild complacencies
    Consumes our bodies like a foul disease.
    Eat us as acid eats, burn us with fire,
    Till every timid hope and pale desire,
    All fond ideals, misty hopes that fly
    Beyond the frontiers of reality,
    Crumble to ash and leave us clean as light,
    Essential strength, pure shapes of granite bright
    Set up for no man’s worship, no man’s pleasure,
    But fashioned by the slow, aeonian leisure
    Of storms and blowing sands. Of thee is born
    All power, all bravery, and the sharp-eyed scorn
    That sees beneath bright gawds to the bare bone
    Of naked Truth’s relentless skeleton.
    Save, lest we perish unrepentent, sped
    To our last count without thy lance and shield,
    Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled,
    With all our small perfections on our head.

To Messaline
    Â Â Â Â When you in death shall lie
    And coldly across the low, deep-windowed room,
    Where table, chair, and bed emerge from gloom,
    Â Â Â Â Light from a pallid sky
    Shall fall on the quiet hair and large white brow
    And gleam along the sharp edge of the nose
    Â Â Â Â Austere, ascetic now;
    And night’s dim water, as it backward flows,
    Â Â Â Â Shall leave small pools of gloom
    In the waxen hollow of each sunken eye,
    Round the drawn mouth where the cheeks have fallen in,
    And where the throat drops from the jutting chin;
    Â Â Â Â Â Â And under the cold sheet
    The trunk shall stiffen and the stretched limbs pine,
    Lapsing in one continuous hollow line
    From the peaked face down to the long gaunt feet;
    Then, Messaline, O most unhappy one,
    That longing for the unattainable
    That shakes your body like a vibrant bell,
    Consumes it on the sacrificial pyre
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Of unassuaged desire,
    Shall lose its hold. And you, poor wandered nun,
    Thwarted idealist, at last shall know
    Repose; pure, cold repose. For you shall go
    Through death, corruption, to nonentity
    Of small, clean dust; and parching winds shall blow
    That senselesss dust far out upon the sea,
    And all of you be drowned most utterly
    In each small mote descending through profound
    Blind gulfs of cold green water, far from sound
    And touch and every sense that wove the mesh
    That held your struggling spirit in the flesh.

Puppets
    We are the bloodless echoes of the past,
    Â Â Â Â Blown between vast and vast:
    Miserable automata, we check
    Â Â Â Â Each impulse at the beck
    Of dead, forbidding hands. Dancing, we tread
    Â Â Â Â The footsteps of the dead,
    And by their laws make love; and when we sing,
    Â Â Â Â Dead fingers pluck the string
    And twist our music to a stale old song;
    Â Â Â Â And when we walk along
    Green valleys and wide fields of reddening wheat,
    Â Â Â Â Grey phantoms dog our feet
    And their sere joys, voiced in a tongue outworn,
    Â Â Â Â Turn all our joy to scorn.
    An unsubstantial shadow dulls our light,
    Â Â Â Â And when we sit to write
    A ghost stands by the chair to guide the pen
    Â Â Â Â Lest we should write for men
    Some vivid truth, some song with potency
    Â Â Â Â To set the whole world free.
    And when we think, ghosts in our spirits cast
    Â Â Â Â Dust of a ruined past,
    Lest we should see and feel and, knowing our strength,
    Â Â Â Â Rise in revolt at length
    Against the iniquitous tyranny of the