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Title: Journeys and Places
Author: Muir, Edwin (1887-1959)
Date of first publication: 1937
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1937
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 27 September 2011
Date last updated: 27 September 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #859

This ebook was produced by:
Barbara Watson, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






JOURNEYS AND PLACES




NEW POETRY


CONRAD AIKEN          _Landscape West of Eden_
GERALD BULLETT        _The Bubble_
NORMAN CAMERON        _Winter House_
RICHARD CHURCH        _Twelve Noon_
HUGH SYKES DAVIES     _Petron_
CLIFFORD DYMENT       _First Day_ and _Straight or Curly_?
LL. WYN GRIFFITH      _Branwen_
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL    _Sebastian_
FRANK KENDON          _Tristram_ and _The Cherry Minder_
SYLVIA LYND           _The Enemies_
EDWIN MUIR            _Variations on a Time Theme_
MARGOT RUDDOCK        _The Lemon Tree_
ERNEST RHYS           _Song of the Sun_
BLANAID SALKELD       _The Fox's Covert_
DYLAN THOMAS          _Twenty-five Poems_
W. J. TURNER          _Jack and Jill_ and _Songs and Incantations_


UNIFORM
WITH THIS
VOLUME




JOURNEYS AND PLACES

EDWIN MUIR


LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.




_All rights reserved
Made in Great Britain
at The Temple Press Letchworth
for
J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd.
Aldine House Bedford St. London
First Published 1937_




TO
FLORA GRIERSON and JOAN SHELMERDINE




AUTHOR'S NOTE


Nineteen of the poems in this volume are new. The others were published
some years ago in a hand-printed edition by the Samson Press under the
title of _Six Poems_. All that remained of this edition was recently
destroyed by fire, and partly for that reason, partly because these
poems fit into the general scheme, I have included them here.

I should like to express the gratitude I have long felt to the Samson
Press for the beautiful volume, now so unfortunately lost, in which they
presented these poems, and my regret that so much of greater value
should have been destroyed along with it. The six poems in question are
_The Stationary Journey_, _Tristram's Journey_, _The Fall_, _Judas_,
_The Enchanted Knight_, and _The Threefold Place_.

The references in one of the new poems may need some explanation, for
Hlderlin is little known in this country except as the name of a German
poet. The journey of which I try to give an imaginary account is one
which he made in the summer of 1805. Hardly anything is known about it.
He was at that time in Bordeaux as a tutor, having been driven from the
house of the woman he loved in Germany by an angry husband. The woman
was Susette Gontard, the wife of a Frankfort business man: she is the
Diotima of the poems. In the midsummer heats of 1805 Hlderlin suddenly
set out on foot from Bordeaux. He arrived in Germany several weeks
later, ragged, emaciated, and out of his mind. It is recorded that he
passed through Arles. Susette was dead when he arrived. He partly
recovered, and during that short period wrote some of his finest poetry;
but he presently relapsed again, and for the last forty years of his
life suffered from a form of insanity.

The Journeys and Places in this collection should be taken as having a
rough-and-ready psychological connotation rather than a strict temporal
or spatial one. The first deal more or less with movements in time, and
the second with places reached and the character of such places; but I
have also included in the latter division imaginary situations which by
a licence of the fancy may perhaps pass as places, that is as pauses in
time. The division, however, is merely one of convenience.

Certain of the new poems have appeared in the _Spectator_, the
_Listener_, the _London Mercury_, the _Criterion_, the _Modern Scot_,
_Outlook_, and _Poetry_ (Chicago), to the editors of which my
acknowledgments are due.




CONTENTS


JOURNEYS

                                   PAGE
The Stationary Journey                3
The Mountains                         6
The Hill                              8
The Road                              9
The Mythical Journey                 11
Tristram's Journey                   13
Hlderlin's Journey                  17


PLACES

The Fall                             23
Troy I                               26
Troy II                              27
Judas                                30
Merlin                               33
The Enchanted Knight                 34
Mary Stuart                          35
Ibsen                                36
The Town Betrayed                    37
The Unfamiliar Place                 39
The Place of Light and Darkness      41
The Solitary Place                   43
The Private Place                    45
The Unattained Place                 47
The Threefold Place                  50
The Original Place                   51
The Sufficient Place                 53
The Dreamt-of Place                  54




JOURNEYS




THE STATIONARY JOURNEY


    Here at my earthly station set,
      The revolutions of the year
    Bear me bound and only let
      This astronomic world appear.

    Yet if I could reverse my course
      Through ever-deepening yesterday,
    Retrace the path that led me here,
      Could I find a different way?

    I would see eld's frosted hair
      Burn black again and passion rage
    On to its source and die away
      At last in childhood's tranquil age.

    Charlemagne's death-palsied hand
      Would move once more and never rest,
    Until by deadlier weakness bound
      It lay against his mother's breast.

    Saint Augustine gives back his soul
      To stumble in the endless maze,
    After Jesus Venus stands
      In the full centre of his gaze,

    While still from death to life to naught
      Gods, dynasties, and nations flit;
    Though for a while among the sand
      Unchanged the changing Pharaohs sit.

    Fast the horizons empty. Now
      Nothing's to see but wastes and rocks,
    And on the thinning Asian plains
      A few wild shepherds with their flocks. . . .

    So, back or forward, still we strike
      Through Time and touch its dreaded goal.
    Eternity's the fatal flaw
      Through which run out world, life and soul.

    And there in transmutation's blank
      No mortal mind has ever read,
    Or told what soul and shape are, there,
      Blue wave, red rose, and Caesar's head.

    For there Immortal Being in
      Solidity more pure than stone
    Sleeps through the circle, pillar, arch,
      Spiral, cone, and pentagon.

    To the mind's eternity I turn,
      With leaf, fruit, blossom on the spray,
    See the dead world grow green within
      Imagination's one long day.

    There while outstretched upon the Tree
      Christ looks across Jerusalem's towers,
    Adam and Eve unfallen yet
      Sleep side by side within their bowers.

    There while fast in the Roman snare
      The Carthaginian thinks of home,
    A boy carefree in Carthage streets,
      Hannibal fights a little Rome,

    David and Homer tune their harps,
      Gaza is up, sprung from its wreck,
    Samson goes free, Delilah's shears
      Join his strong ringlets to his neck.

    A dream! the astronomic years
      Patrolled by stars and planets bring
    Time led in chains from post to post
      Of the all-conquering Zodiac ring.




THE MOUNTAINS


    The days have closed behind my back
      Since I came into these hills.
    Now memory is a single field
      One peasant tills and tills.

    So far away, if I should turn
      I know I could not find
    That place again. These mountains make
      The backward gaze half-blind,

    Yet sharp my sight till it can catch
      The ranges rising clear
    Far in futurity's high-walled land;
      But I am rooted here.

    And do not know where lies my way,
      Backward or forward. If I could
    I'd leap Time's bound or turn and hide
      From Time in my ancestral wood.

    Double delusion! Here I'm held
      By the mystery of the rock,
    Must watch in a perpetual dream
      The horizon's gates unlock and lock,

    See on the harvest fields of Time
      The mountains heaped like sheaves,
    And the valleys opening out
      Like a volume's turning leaves,

    Dreaming of a peak whose height
      Will show me every hill,
    A single mountain on whose side
      Life blooms for ever and is still.




THE HILL


    And turning north around the hill,
    The flat sea like an adder curled,
    And a flat rock amid the sea
    That gazes towards the ugly town,
    And on the sands, flat and brown,
    A thousand naked bodies hurled
    Like an army overthrown.

    And turning south around the hill,
    Fields flowering in the curling waves,
    And shooting from the white sea-walls
    Like a thousand waterfalls,
    Rapturous divers never still.
    Motion and gladness. O this hill
    Was made to show these cliffs and caves.

    So he thought. But he has never
    Stood again upon that hill.
    He lives far inland by a river
    That somewhere else divides these lands,
    But where or how he does not know,
    Or where the countless pathways go
    That turn and turn to reach the sea
    On this or that side of the hill,
    Or if, arriving, he will be
    With the bright divers never still,
    Or on the sad dishonoured sands.




THE ROAD


    There is a road that turning always
      Cuts off the country of Again.
    Archers stand there on every side
      And as it runs Time's deer is slain,
      And lies where it has lain.

    That busy clock shows never an hour.
      All flies and all in flight must tarry.
    The hunter shoots the empty air
      Far on before the quarry,
      Which falls though nothing's there to parry.

    The lion couching in the centre
      With mountain head and sunset brow
    Rolls down the everlasting slope
      Bones picked an age ago,
      And the bones rise up and go.

    There the beginning finds the end
      Before beginning ever can be,
    And the great runner never leaves
      The starting and the finishing tree,
      The budding and the fading tree.

    There the ship sailing safe in harbour
      Long since in many a sea was drowned.
    The treasure burning in her hold
      So near will never be found,
      Sunk past all sound.

    There a man on a summer evening
      Reclines at ease upon his tomb
    And is his mortal effigy.
      And there within the womb,
      The cell of doom,

    The ancestral deed is thought and done,
      And in a million Edens fall
    A million Adams drowned in darkness,
      For small is great and great is small,
      And a blind seed all.




THE MYTHICAL JOURNEY


    First in the North. The black sea-tangle beaches,
    Brine-bitter stillness, tablet strewn morass,
    Tall women against the sky with heads covered,
    The witch's house below the black-toothed mountain,
    Wave-echo in the roofless chapel,
    The twice-dead castle on the swamp-green mound,
    Darkness at noon-day, wheel of fire at midnight,
    The level sun and the wild shooting shadows.

    How long ago? Then sailing up to summer
    Over the edge of the world. Black hill of water,
    Rivers of running gold. The sun! The sun!
    Then the free summer isles.
    But the ship hastened on and brought him to
    The towering walls of life and the great kingdom.

    Where long he wandered seeking that which sought him
    Through all the little hills and shallow valleys.
    One whose form and features,
    Race and speech he knew not, shapeless, tongueless,
    Known to him only by the impotent heart,
    And whether at all on earth the place of meeting,
    Beyond all knowledge. Only the little hills,
    Head-high, and the winding valleys,
    Turning, returning, till there grew a pattern,
    And it was held. And there stood each in his station
    With the hills between them. And that was the meaning.

    Though sometimes through the wandering light and shadow
    He thought he saw it a moment as he watched
    The red deer walking by the riverside
    At evening, when the bells were ringing,
    And the bright stream leapt silent from the mountain
    Far in the sunset. But as he looked, nothing
    Was there but lights and shadows.

                                    And then the vision
    Of the conclusion without fulfilment.
    The plain of glass and in the crystal grave
    That which he had sought, that which had sought him,
    Glittering in death. And all the dead scattered
    Like fallen stars, clustered like leaves hanging
    From the sad boughs of the mountainous tree of Adam
    Planted far down in Eden. And on the hills
    The gods reclined and conversed with each other
    From summit to summit.

                                           Conclusion
    Without fulfilment. Thence the dream rose upward,
    The living dream sprung from the dying vision,
    Overarching all. Beneath its branches
    He builds in faith and doubt his shaking house.




TRISTRAM'S JOURNEY


    He strode across the room and flung
      The letter down: 'You need not tell
    Your treachery, harlot!' He was gone
      Ere Iseult fainting fell.

    He rode out from Tintagel gate,
      He heard his charger slowly pace,
    And ever hung a cloud of gnats
      Three feet before his face.

    At a wood's border he turned round
      And saw the distant castle side,
    Iseult looking towards the wood,
      Mark's window gaping wide.

    He turned again and slowly rode
      Into the forest's flickering shade,
    And now as sunk in waters green
      Were armour, helm, and blade.

    First he awoke with night around
      And heard the wind, and woke again
    At noon within a ring of hills,
      At sunset on a plain.

    And hill and plain and wood and tower
      Passed on and on and turning came
    Back to him, tower and wood and hill,
      Now different, now the same.

    There was a castle on a lake.
      The castle doubled in the mere
    Confused him, his uncertain eye
      Wavered from there to here.

    A window in the wall had held
      Iseult upon a summer day,
    While he and Palomide below
      Circled in furious fray.

    But now he searched the towers, the sward,
      And struggled something to recall,
    A stone, a shadow. Blank the lake,
      And empty every wall.

    He left his horse, left sword and mail,
      And went into the woods and tore
    The branches from the clashing trees
      Until his rage was o'er.

    And now he wandered on the hills
      In peace. Among the shepherd's flocks
    Often he lay so long, he seemed
      One of the quiet rocks.

    The shepherds called and made him run
      Like a tame cur to round the sheep.
    At night he lay among the dogs
      Beside a well to sleep.

    And he forgot Iseult and all.
      Dagonet once and two came by
    Like tall escutcheoned animals
      With antlers towering high.

    He snapped their spears, rove off their helms,
      And beat them with his hands and sent
    Them onward with a bitter heart,
      But knew not where they went.

    They came to Mark and told him how
      A madman ruled the hinds and kept
    The wandering sheep. Mark haled him to
      Tintagel while he slept.

    He woke and saw King Mark at chess
      And Iseult with her maids at play,
    The arras where the scarlet knights
      And ladies stood all day.

    None knew him. In the garden once
      Iseult walked in the afternoon,
    Her hound leapt up and licked his face,
      Iseult fell in a swoon.

    There as he leaned the misted grass
      Cleared blade by blade below his face,
    The round walls hardened as he looked,
      And he was in his place.




HLDERLIN'S JOURNEY


    When Hlderlin started from Bordeaux
      He was not mad but lost in mind,
    For time and space had fled away
      With her he had to find.

    'The morning bells rang over France
      From tower to tower. At noon I came
    Into a maze of little hills,
      Head-high and every hill the same.

    'A little world of emerald hills,
      And at their heart a faint bell tolled;
    Wedding or burial, who could say?
      For death, unseen, is bold.

    'Too small to climb, too tall to show
      More than themselves, the hills lay round.
    Nearer to her, or farther? They
      Might have stretched to the world's bound.

    'A shallow candour was their all,
      And the mean riddle, How to tally
    Reality with such appearance,
      When in the nearest valley

    'Perhaps already she I sought,
      She, sought and seeker, had gone by,
    And each of us in turn was trapped
      By simple treachery.

    'The evening brought a field, a wood.
      I left behind the hills of lies,
    And watched beside a mouldering gate
      A deer with its rock-crystal eyes.

    'On either pillar of the gate
      A deer's head watched within the stone.
    The living deer with quiet look
      Seemed to be gazing on

    'Its pictured death--and suddenly
      I knew, Diotima was dead,
    As if a single thought had sprung
      From the cold and the living head.

    'That image held me and I saw
      All moving things so still and sad,
    But till I came into the mountains
      I know I was not mad.

    'What made the change? The hills and towers
      Stood otherwise than they should stand,
    And without fear the lawless roads
      Ran wrong through all the land.

    'Upon the swarming towns of iron
      The bells hailed down their iron peals,
    Above the iron bells the swallows
      Glided on iron wheels.

    'And there I watched in one confounded
      The living and the unliving head.
    Why should it be? For now I know
      Diotima was dead

    'Before I left the starting place;
      Empty the course, the garland gone,
    And all that race as motionless
      As these two heads of stone.'

    So Hlderlin mused for thirty years
      On a green hill by Tbingen,
    Dragging in pain a broken mind
      And giving thanks to God and men.




PLACES




THE FALL


    What shape had I before the Fall?
      What hills and rivers did I seek?
    What were my thoughts then? And of what
      Forgotten histories did I speak

    To my companions? Did our eyes
      From their foredestined watching-place
    See Heaven and Earth one land, and range
      Therein through all of Time and Space?

    Did I see Chaos and the Word,
      The suppliant Dust, the moving Hand,
    Myself, the Many and the One,
      The dead, the living Land?

    That height cannot be scaled again.
      My fall was like the fall that burst
    Old Lear's heart on the summer sward.
      Where I lie now I stood at first.

    The ancient pain returns anew.
      Where was I ere I came to man?
    What shape among the shapes that once
      Agelong through endless Eden ran?

    Did I see there the dragon brood
      By streams their emerald scales unfold,
    While from their amber eyeballs fell
      Soft-rayed the rustling gold?

    It must be that one time I walked
      By rivers where the dragon drinks;
    But this side Eden's wall I meet
      On every twisting road the Sphinx

    Whose head is like a wooden prow
      That forward leaning dizzily
    Over the seas of whitened worlds
      Has passed and nothing found to see,

    Whose breast, a flashing ploughshare, once
      Cut the rich furrows wrinkled in
    Venusberg's sultry underworld
      And busy trampled fields of sin,

    Whose salt-white brow like crusted fire
      Smiles ever, whose cheeks are red as blood,
    Whose dolphin back is flowered yet
      With wrack that swam upon the Flood.

    Since then in antique attitudes
      I swing the bright two-handed sword
    And strike and strike the marble brow,
      Wide-eyed and watchful as a bird,

    Smite hard between the basilisk eyes,
      And carve the snaky dolphin side,
    Until the coils are cloven in two
      And free the glittering pinions glide.

    Like quicksilver the scales slip down,
      Upon the air the spirit flies,
    And so I build me Heaven and Hell
      To buy my bartered Paradise.

    While from a legendary height
      I see a shadowy figure fall,
    And not far off another beats
      With his bare hands on Eden's wall.




TROY I


    He all that time among the sewers of Troy
    Scouring for scraps. A man so venerable
    He might have been Priam's self, but Priam was dead,
    Troy taken. His arms grew meagre as a boy's,
    And all that flourished in that hollow famine
    Was his long, white, round beard. Oh, sturdily
    He swung his staff and sent the bold rats skipping
    Across the scurfy hills and worm-wet valleys,
    Crying: 'Achilles, Ajax, turn and fight!
    Stop, cowards!' Till his cries, dazed and confounded,
    Flew back at him with: 'Coward, turn and fight!'
    And the wild Greeks yelled round him.
    Yet he withstood them, a brave, mad old man,
    And fought the rats for Troy. The light was rat-grey,
    The hills and dells, the common drain, his Simois,
    Rat-grey. Mysterious shadows fell
    Affrighting him whenever a cloud offended
    The sun up in the other world. The rat-hordes,
    Moving, were grey dust shifting in grey dust.
    Proud history has such sackends. He was taken
    At last by some chance robber seeking treasure
    Under Troy's riven roots. Dragged to the surface.
    And there he saw Troy like a burial ground
    With tumbled walls for tombs, the smooth sward wrinkled
    As Time's last wave had long since passed that way,
    The sky, the sea, Mount Ida and the islands,
    No sail from edge to edge, the Greeks clean gone.
    They stretched him on a rock and wrenched his limbs,
    Asking: 'Where is the treasure?' till he died.




TROY II


    I've often wandered in the fields of Troy
    Beneath the walls, seen Paris as a boy
    Before youth made him vicious. Hector's smile
    And untried lion-look can still beguile
    My heart of peace. That was before the fall,
    When high still stood Troy's many-tunnelled wall.
    Now I am shackled to a Grecian dolt,
    Pragmatic, race-proud as a pampered colt.
    All here is strange to me, the country kings,
    This cold aspiring race, the mountain-rings
    On every side. They are like toppling snow-wreaths
    Heaped on Troy's hearth. Yet still an ember breathes
    Below to breed its crop of yearly ills,
    The flowering trees on the unreal hills.
    These bring Troy back. And when along the stone
    The lizard flickers, thirty years I'm thrown
    At odds and stand again where once I stood,
    And see Troy's towers burn like a winter wood.
    For then into their country all in flame,
    From their uncounted caves the lizards came
    And looked and melted in a glaze of fire,
    While all the wall rustled and sang with ire
    As heat ate all. I saw calamity
    In action there, and it will always be
    Before me in the lizard on the stone.
      But in my heart a deeper spite has grown,
    This, that they would not arm us, and preferred
    Troy's ruin lest a slave should snatch a sword
    And fight even at their side. Yet in that fall
    They lost no more than we who lost our all.
    Troy was our breath, our soul, and all our wit,
    Who did not own it but were owned by it.
    We must have fought for Troy. We were its hands,
    And not like them mere houses, flocks, and lands.
    We were the Trojans; they at best could swell
    A pompous or a bloody spectacle.
    And so we watched with dogs outside the ring
    Heroes fall cheap as meat, king slaughtering king
    Like fatted cattle. Yet they did not guess
    How our thoughts wantoned with their wantonness.
    They were too high for that; they guessed too late,
    When full had grown our knowledge and our hate.
    And then they thought, with arms as strong as theirs,
    We too might make a din with swords and spears,
    And while they feared the Greeks they feared us most,
    And ancient Troy was lost and we were lost.

    Now an old man--why should that one regret,
    When all else has grown tranquil, shake me yet?
    Of all my life I know one thing, I know,
    Before I was a slave, long, long ago,
    I lost a sword in a forgotten fight,
    And ever since my arm has been too light
    For this dense world, and shall grow lighter still.
    Yet through that rage shines Troy's untroubled hill,
    And many a tumbled wall and vanished tree
    Remains, as if in spite, a happy memory.




JUDAS


    Judas Iscariot drearily
    Wheeling round the deadly tree:
    Adders sleep
    Awake and keep
    Their watch, encircling scale to scale
    The tree of bale.
    From whose cleft fastnesses glare out
    Basilisks furnace-eyed,
    Within whose shade like matted hair,
    About, about,
    Pronged hornets cruise and glide,
    Sting, sting the glassy air.

    And all around the labouring ground is torn;
    Hoof and horn
    Thrice-deep their hieroglyphs have lined,
    Lead in and in his mind,
    And wind him in a maze forlorn.
    Judas, awake and pass
    Dryfoot the charmed morass,
    Break the bright fence of glass,
    Lift up your eyes!
    Asleep in light great-limbed Judaea lies;
    Dark wood and sunny hill
    Will let you where you will,
    And by some road perhaps young Judas waits,
    Not found yet by his twelve doom-bearing mates.

    _O that all time had stopped then, had rolled back
    A little way, let Judas out again!
    I saw Him stand in the Garden, by the snare
    The dove-eyed Decoy. Had I taken my life
    Just then it would have been in time. O that
    I had stumbled and fallen then, died suddenly!
    I stumbled and did not fall; the vast earth turned,
    Then stopped awry, half-way, all mad and strange,
    The ponderous heavens heeled over, stars, rocks, soldiers,
    The very roots run wrong, locked wrong forever!
    Now Time beats on, all changed, and yet the same._

    Judas Iscariot wearily,
    Wheeling round the darkening tree:
    Now winds the sting
    Deeper,
    Now the faint fairy death-bells ring,
    Now the mind's surly keeper
    Makes the thirty death-coins spin,
    Winding Judas in:
    _With such thin-edged unearthly sound
    As ours the stones cry from the ground:
    The little stones that cut the feet
    Of travellers going up the hill,
    Of sad and merry, lame and fleet,
    And cannot show
    Compassion though
    Their little arrows striking make
    With such mean war some heart to break
    That thought to die undaunted on the hill._

    Now all the air is still.

    _He chose, and I was chosen. No one knew Him._

    Judas Iscariot by the tree.




MERLIN


    O Merlin in your crystal cave
    Deep in the diamond of the day,
    Will there ever be a singer
    Whose music will smooth away
    The furrow drawn by Adam's finger
    Across the meadow and the wave?
    Or a runner who'll outrun
    Man's long shadow driving on,
    Break through the gate of memory
    And hang the apple on the tree?
    Will your magic ever show
    The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
    The day wreathed in its mound of snow
    And Time locked in his tower?




THE ENCHANTED KNIGHT


    Lulled by La Belle Dame Sans Merci he lies
      In the bare wood below the blackening hill.
    The plough drives nearer now, the shadow flies
      Past him across the plain, but he lies still.

    Long since the rust its gardens here has planned,
      Flowering his armour like an autumn field.
    From his sharp breast-plate to his iron hand
      A spider's web is stretched, a phantom shield.

    When footsteps pound the turf beside his ear
      Armies pass through his dream in endless line,
    And one by one his ancient friends appear;
      They pass all day, but he can make no sign.

    When a bird cries within the silent grove
      The long-lost voice goes by, he makes to rise
    And follow, but his cold limbs never move,
      And on the turf unstirred his shadow lies.

    But if a withered leaf should drift
      Across his face and rest, the dread drops start
    Chill on his forehead. Now he tries to lift
      The insulting weight that stays and breaks his heart.




MARY STUART


    My brother Jamie lost me all,
    Fell cleverly to make me fall,
    And with a sure reluctant hand
    Stole my life and took my land.

    It was jealousy of the womb
    That let me in and shut him out,
    Honesty, kingship, all shut out,
    While I enjoyed the royal room.

    My father was his, but not my mother,
    We were, yet were not, sister, brother,
    To reach my mother he had to strike
    Me down and leap that deadly dyke.

    Over the wall I watched him move
    At ease through all the guarded grove,
    Then hack, and hack, and hack it down,
    Until that ruin was his own.




IBSEN


    Sollness climbs the dwindling tower
      And all the hills fall flat.
    Hilda Wandel down below
      Now is no bigger than her hat.

    Sollness steps into the air.
      All Norway lies below him, Brand
    Frowning on the rusty heath,
      Peer's half-witted fairyland,

    Nora stumbling from a door,
      Hedda burning a book,
    Doctor Stockman fishing up
      Bacilli from the brook,

    Rebecca circling in the weir,
      The Rat Wife whipping round a wall;
    The Pillars of Society
      Fall thundering with his fall.

    And flashing by his house he sees it
      Split from earth to sky,
    And his wife and children sitting
      Naked to every passer-by.




THE TOWN BETRAYED


    Our homes are eaten out by Time,
      Our lawns strewn with our listless sons,
    Our harlot daughters lean and watch
      The ships crammed down with shells and guns.

    Like painted prows far out they lean:
      A world behind, a world before.
    The leaves are covering up our hills,
      Neptune has locked the shore.

    Our yellow harvests lie forlorn
      And there we wander like the blind,
    Returning from the golden field
      With famine in our mind.

    Far inland now the glittering swords
      In order rise, in order fall,
    In order on the dubious field
      The dubious trumpets call.

    Yet here there is no word, no sign
      But quiet murder in the street.
    Our leaf-light lives are spared or taken
      By men obsessed and neat.

    We stand beside our windows, see
      In order dark disorder come,
    And prentice killers duped by Death
      Bring and not know our doom.

    Our cattle wander at their will.
      To-day a horse pranced proudly by.
    The dogs run wild. Vultures and kites
      Wait in the towers for us to die.

    At evening on the parapet
      We sit and watch the sun go down,
    Reading the landscape of the dead,
      The sea, the hills, the town.

    There our ancestral ghosts are gathered.
      Fierce Agamemnon's form I see,
    Watching as if his tents were Time
      And Troy Eternity.

    We must take order, bar our gates,
      Fight off these phantoms. Inland now
    Achilles, Siegfried, Lancelot
      Have sworn to bring us low.




THE UNFAMILIAR PLACE


    I do not know this place,
    Though here for long I have run
    My changing race
    In the moon and the sun,
    Within this wooded glade
    Far up the mountainside
    Where Christ and Caesar died
    And the first man was made.

    I have seen this turning light
    For many a day.
    I have not been away
    Even in dreams of the night.
    In the unnumbered names
    My fathers gave these things
    I seek a kingdom lost,
    Sleeping with folded wings.
    I have questioned many a ghost
    Far inland in my dreams,
    Enquired of fears and shames
    The dark and winding way
    To the day within my day.

    And aloft I have stood
    And given my eyes their fill,
    Have watched the bad and the good
    Go up and down the hill,
    The peasants on the plain
    Ploughing the fields red,
    The roads running alone,
    The ambush in the wood,
    The victim walking on,
    The misery-blackened door
    That never will open again,
    The tumblers at the fair,
    The watchers on the stair,
    Cradle and bridal-bed,
    The living and the dead
    Scattered on every shore.

    All this I have seen
    Twice over, there and here,
    Knocking at dead men's gates
    To ask the living way,
    And viewing this upper scene.
    But I am balked by fear
    And what my lips say
    To drown the voice of fear.
    The earthly day waits.




THE PLACE OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS


    Walking on the harvest hills of Night
    Time's elder brother, the great husbandman,
    Goes on his ancient round. His massive lantern,
    Simpler than the first fashion, lights the rows
    Of stooks that lean like little golden graves
    Or tasselled barges foundering low
    In the black stream.
                                He sees that all is ready,
    The trees all stripped, the orchards bare, the nests
    Empty. All things grown
    Homeless and whole. He sees the hills of grain,
    A day all yellow and red, flowers, fruit, and corn.
    The soft hair harvest-golden in darkness.
    Children playing
    In the late night-black day of Time. He sees
    The lover standing by the trysting-tree
    Who'll never find his love till all are gathered
    In light or darkness. The unnumbered living
    Numbered and bound and sheaved.

                                      O could that day
    Break on this side of Time!

                                        A wind shakes
    The loaded sheaves, the feathery tomb bursts open,
    And yellow hair is poured along the ground
    From the bent neck of Time. The woods cry:
    _This is the resurrection._

    O little judgment days lost in the dark,
    Seen by the bat and screech-owl!
                                        He goes on,
    Bearing within his ocean-heart the jewel,
    The day all yellow and red wherein a sun
    Shines on the endless harvest lands of Time.




THE SOLITARY PLACE


I

    O I shall miss
    With one small breath these centuries
    Of harvest-home uncounted!
    I have known
    The mead, the bread,
    And the mounds of grain
    As half my riches. But the fields will change,
    And their harvest would be strange
    If I could return. I should know again
    Only the lint-white stubble plain
    From which the summer-painted birds have flown
    A year's life on.

    But I can never
    See with these eyes the double-threaded river
    That runs through life and death and death and life,
    Weaving one scene. Which I and not I
    Blindfold have crossed, I and not I
    Will cross again, my face, my feet, my hands
    Gleaned from lost lands
    To be sown again.

    O certain prophecy,
    And faithful tragedy,
    Furnished with scenery of sorrow and strife,
    The Cross and the Flood
    And Babel's towers
    And Abel's blood
    And Eden's bowers,
    Where I and not I
    Lived and questioned and made reply:
    None else to ask or make reply.


II

    If there is none else to ask or reply
    But I and not I,
    And when I stretch out my hand my hand comes towards me
    To pull me across to me and back to me,
    If my own mind, questioning, answers me
    And there is no other answer to me,
    If all that I see,
    Woman and man and beast and rock and sky,
    Is a flat image shut behind an eye,
    And only my thoughts can meet me or pass me or follow me,
    O then I am alone,
    I, many and many in one,
    A lost player upon a hill
    On a sad evening when the world is still,
    The house empty, brother and sister gone
    Beyond the reach of sight, or sound of any cry,
    Into the bastion of the mind, behind the shutter of the eye.




THE PRIVATE PLACE


    This stranger holding me from head to toe,
    This deaf usurper I shall never know,
    Who lives in household quiet in my unrest,
    And of my troubles weaves his tranquil nest,
    Who never smiles or frowns or bows his head,
    And while I rage is insolent as the dead,
    Composed, indifferent, thankless, faithful, he
    Is my firm ally and sole enemy.

    Come then, take up the cleansing blade once more
    That drives all difference out. The fabled shore
    Sees us again. Now the predestined fight,
    The ancestral stroke, the opening gash of light:
    Side by side myself by myself slain,
    The wakening stir, the eyes loaded with gain
    Of ocean darkness, the rising hand in hand,
    I with myself at one, the changed land,
    My home, my country! But this precious seal
    Will slowly crumble, the thief Time will steal
    Soft-footed bit by bit this boundless treasure
    Held in four hands. I shall regain my measure,
    My old measure again, shrink to a room, a shelf
    Where decently I lay away myself,
    Become the anxious warder, groan and fret
    My thankless service to this martinet
    Who sleeps and sleeps and rules. I hold this life
    Only in strife and the aftertaste of strife
    With this dull champion and thick-witted king.
    But at one word he'll jump into the ring.




THE UNATTAINED PLACE


    We have seen the world of good deeds spread
    With its own sky above it
    A length away
    Our whole day,
    Yet have not crossed from our false kindred.
    We could have leapt straight from the womb to bliss
    And never lost it after,
    Been cradled, baptized, bred in that which is
    And never known this frontier laughter,
    But that we hate this place so much,
    And hating love it,
    And that our weakness is such
    That it must clutch
    All weakness to it and can never release
    The bound and battling hands,
    The one hand bound, the other fighting
    The fellow-foe it's tied to, righting
    Weakness with weakness, rending, reuniting
    The torn and incorruptible bands
    That bind all these united and disunited lands,--
    While there lies our predestined power and ease,
    There, in those natural fields, life-fostering seas.

    If we could be more weak
    Than weakness' self, if we could break
    This static hold with a mere blank, with nothing,
    If we could take
    Memory and thought and longing
    Up by the roots and cast them behind our back,
    If we could stop this ceaseless ringing and singing
    That keeps our fingers flying in hate and love,
    If we could cut off,
    If we could unmake
    What we were made to make:

    But that we then should lose
    Our loss,
    Our kingdom's crown,
    And to great Nothing toss
    Our last left jewel down,
    The light that long before us was,
    The land we did not own,
    The choice we could not choose.
    For once we played upon that other hill,
    And from that house we come.
    There is a line around it still
    And all inside is home.
    Once there we pored on every stone and tree
    In a long dream through the unsetting day,
    And looking up could nothing see
    But the right way on every way.
    And lost it after,
    No foot knows where,
    To find this mourning air,
    Commemorative laughter,
    The mask, the doom
    Written backwards,
    The illegible tomb
    Pointing backwards,
    The reverse side
    Where strength is weakness,
    The body, pride,
    The soul, a sickness.

    Yet from that missing heaven outspread
    Here all we read.




THE THREEFOLD PLACE


    This is the place. The autumn field is bare,
      The row lies half-cut all the afternoon,
    The birds are hiding in the woods, the air
      Dreams fitfully outworn with waiting.
                                             Soon

    Out of the russet woods in amber mail
      Heroes come walking through the yellow sheaves,
    Walk on and meet. And then a silent gale
      Scatters them on the field like autumn leaves.

    Yet not a feathered stalk has stirred, and all
      Is still again, but for the birds that call
    On every warrior's head and breast and shield.
      Sweet cries and horror on the field.

    One field. I look again and there are three:
      One where the heroes fell to rest,
    One where birds make of iron limbs a tree,
      Helms for a nest,
      And one where grain stands up like armies drest.




THE ORIGINAL PLACE


    _This is your native land.
    By ancient inheritance
    Your lives are free, though a hand
    Strange to you set you here,
    Ordained this liberty
    And gave you hope and fear
    And the turning maze of chance._

    To weave our tale of Time
    Rhyme is knit to rhyme
    So close, it's like a proof
    That nothing else can be
    But this one tapestry
    Where gleams under the woof
    A giant Fate half-grown,
    Imprisoned and its own.

    _To your unquestioned rule
    No bound is set. You were
    Made for this work alone.
    This is your native air.
    You could not leave these fields.
    And when Time is grown
    Beneath your countless hands
    They say this kingdom shall
    Be stable and beautiful._

    But at its centre stands
    A stronghold never taken,
    Stormed at hourly in vain,
    Held by a force unknown
    That neither answers nor yields.
    There our arms are shaken,
    There the hero was slain
    That bleeds upon our shields.




THE SUFFICIENT PLACE


    See, all the silver roads wind in, lead in
    To this still place like evening. See, they come
    Like messengers bearing gifts to this little house,
    And this great hill worn down to a patient mound,
    And these tall trees whose motionless branches bear
    An aeon's summer foliage, leaves so thick
    They seem to have robbed a world of shade, and kept
    No room for all these birds that line the boughs
    With heavier riches, leaf and bird and leaf.
    Within the doorway stand
    Two figures, Man and Woman, simple and clear
    As a child's first images. Their manners are
    Such as were known before the earliest fashion
    Taught the Heavens guile. The room inside is like
    A thought that needed thus much space to write on,
    Thus much, no more. Here all's sufficient. None
    That comes complains, and all the world comes here,
    Comes, and goes out again, and comes again.
    This is the Pattern, these the Prototypes,
    Sufficient, strong, and peaceful. All outside
    From end to end of the world is tumult. Yet
    These roads do not turn in here but writhe on
    Round the wild earth for ever. If a man
    Should chance to find this place three times in Time
    His eyes are changed and make a summer silence
    Amid the tumult, seeing the roads wind in
    To their still home, the house and the leaves and birds.




THE DREAMT-OF PLACE


    I saw two towering birds cleaving the air
    And thought they were Paolo and Francesca
    Leading the lost, whose wings like silver billows
    Rippled the azure sky from shore to shore,
    They were so many. The nightmare god was gone
    Who roofed their pain, the ghastly glen lay open,
    The hissing lake was still, the fiends were fled,
    And only some few headless, footless mists
    Crawled out and in the iron-hearted caves.
    Like light's unearthly eyes the lost looked down,
    And heaven was filled and moving. Every height
    On earth was thronged and all that was stared upward.
    I thought, This is the reconciliation,
    This is the day after the Last Day,
    The lost world lies dreaming within its coils,
    Grass grows upon the surly sides of Hell,
    Time has caught Time and holds it fast for ever.
    And then I thought, Where is the knife, the butcher,
    The victim? Are they all here in their places?
    Hid in this harmony? But there was no answer.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Minor variations in spelling and punctuation have been preserved.




[Journeys and Places, by Edwin Muir]
