Spirits in Bondage | Page 4

Sailing over seas uncharted to a
port that none has seen.
Part I The Prison House
I. Satan Speaks

I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,
I am the law: ye have none other.
I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh,
I am the lust in your itching flesh.
I am the battle's filth and strain,
I am the widow's empty pain.
I am the sea to smother your breath,
I am the bomb, the falling death.
I am the fact and the crushing reason
To thwart your fantasy's new-born treason.
I am the spider making her net,
I am the beast with jaws blood-wet.
I am a wolf that follows the sun
And I will catch him ere day be done.
II. French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux)
Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread
And all is still; now even this gross
line
Drinks in the frosty silences divine
The pale, green moon is riding overhead.
The jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim;
Out on the ridge have swallowed up the
sun,
And in one angry streak his blood has run
To left and right along the horizon
dim.
There comes a buzzing plane: and now, it seems
Flies straight into the moon. Lo! where
he steers
Across the pallid globe and surely nears
In that white land some harbour of
dear dreams!
False mocking fancy! Once I too could dream,
Who now can only see with vulgar eye

That he's no nearer to the moon than I
And she's a stone that catches the sun's beam.
What call have I to dream of anything?
I am a wolf. Back to the world again,
And
speech of fellow-brutes that once were men
Our throats can bark for slaughter: cannot
sing.
III. The Satyr
When the flowery hands of spring
Forth their woodland riches fling,
Through the
meadows, through the valleys
Goes the satyr carolling.
From the mountain and the moor,
Forest green and ocean shore
All the faerie kin he
rallies
Making music evermore.
See! the shaggy pelt doth grow
On his twisted shanks below,
And his dreadful feet
are cloven
Though his brow be white as snow-
Though his brow be clear and white
And beneath it fancies bright,
Wisdom and high

thoughts are woven
And the musics of delight,
Though his temples too be fair
Yet two horns are growing there
Bursting forth to part
asunder
All the riches of his hair.
Faerie maidens he may meet
Fly the horns and cloven feet,
But, his sad brown eyes
with wonder
Seeing-stay from their retreat.
IV. Victory
Roland is dead, Cuchulain's crest is low,
The battered war-rear wastes and turns to rust,

And Helen's eyes and Iseult's lips are dust
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of
snow.
The faerie people from our woods are gone,
No Dryads have I found in all our trees,

No Triton blows his horn about our seas
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon.
The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,

All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.
For these decay: but not for that decays
The yearning, high, rebellious spirit of man

That never rested yet since life began
From striving with red Nature and her ways.
Now in the filth of war, the baresark shout
Of battle, it is vexed. And yet so oft
Out of
the deeps, of old, it rose aloft
That they who watch the ages may not doubt.
Though often bruised, oft broken by the rod,
Yet, like the phoenix, from each fiery bed

Higher the stricken spirit lifts its head
And higher-till the beast become a god.
V. Irish Nocturne
Now the grey mist comes creeping up
From the waste ocean's weedy strand
And fills
the valley, as a cup
If filled of evil drink in a wizard's hand;
And the trees fade out of
sight,
Like dreary ghosts unhealthily,
Into the damp, pale night,
Till you almost
think that a clearer eye could see
Some shape come up of a demon seeking apart
His
meat, as Grendel sought in Harte
The thanes that sat by the wintry logGrendel
or the
shadowy mass
Of Balor, or the man with the face of clay,
The grey, grey walker who
used to pass

Over the rock-arch nightly to his prey.
But here at the dumb, slow stream
where the willows hang,
With never a wind to blow the mists apart,
Bitter and bitter it
is for thee. O my heart,
Looking upon this land, where poets sang,
Thus with the
dreary shroud
Unwholesome, over it spread,
And knowing the fog and the cloud
In
her people's heart and head
Even as it lies for ever upon her coasts
Making them dim
and dreamy lest her sons should ever arise
And remember all their boasts;
For I know
that the colourless skies
And the blurred horizons breed
Lonely desire and many

words and brooding and never a deed.
VI. Spooks
Last night I dreamed that I was come again
Unto the house where my beloved dwells

After long years of wandering and pain.
And I stood out beneath the drenching rain
And all the street was bare, and black with
night,
But in my true love's house was warmth and light.
Yet