Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE MOUNTAIN OF SKULLS, by WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE MOUNTAIN OF SKULLS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: All guns are silent - 'I have won,' he saith
Last Line: Go quietly, all our days.
Subject(s): Skulls; Soldiers; War; World War I; First World War


All guns are silent. ... "I have won," he saith,
And girds his ample cloak. ...
He. ... Who? ... Not Pershing, Haig, or Foch?
"Old Hindenburg?" some jokester whispereth
(For when we win, we joke). ...

He. ... Who? ... The great King, DEATH.

And in the quiet of the armistice
He takes a long, long journey in his mirth
(No Marshal takes a furlough such as this)
Through many lands of earth. ...

Gathering the skulls. ...

To Archangel among the Arctic gulls ...
To Kiao-chow's eagle-dedicated rocks ...
Along the Tigris on to Bagdad gate ...
The Syrian foothills and old temple blocks ...
By palm and date ... and the mud-flats of the Nile ...
Pylons and papyrus reeds ...
And Tanganika's swamps and jungle weeds,
And tropic leaves, green-glazed as tile ...
And back ... gleaning in holes of shells,
Or in mired cartwheels, or in poisoned wells ...
Back ... he goes ... and goes ...
To the red sand-pits of the Dardanelles ...
And gaunt Armenian plateaus. ...

Gathering the skulls. ...

In the Carpathian snows ...
On Alpine crags ... and under each crevasse ...
(He digs and pulls
For, where they fell, straightway they froze) ...
In the Masurian morass
(Battalion by battalion in stark rows) ...
And Serbia's oaken mountain pass ...
And Flanders' poppy fields ... (again ... again) ...
(Loosening from wire, tearing masks away,
Dragging from skeleton airplanes in burnt grass) ...
And Marne and forests of Ardennes ...
And roofless villages, all one Pompeii ...

Gathering the skulls. ...

Down the Atlantic deeps ... and shallows ...
The mid-abyss ... the continental shelf ...
Forgetting child-bed, hospital, and gallows,
To fetch the rest he does betake himself. ...
Although for these
He pries out many a port-hole, many a hatch,
Before he culls
From strangled necks upon the hunchèd knees ...
By Faulkland islands and Antarctic gulls ...
And under seven seas.

Gathering the skulls. ...

Picking off bits of skin in ghostly light
Amid the storm-winds' lulls ...
Black skin ... and bronze ... and yellow ...
But chiefly white, or what had once been white,
Beside white fellow ... and white fellow ...
Skulls ... skulls ... some broad ... some long ...
Some strong ...
Some brittle ...
Some big ... and some so little ...
Little.
He takes them all ... with one same set grimace ...
To his own place. ...

II

Which now becomes the Mountain of the Skulls
At the red river of the Great Mogul's
Red Realms of silence in the sunset waste.
A red-white cone, in no green forest based,
It rises alone into a blood-red sky,
Out of its own bleak talus of gray chalk,
Girt with still clouds of ashen-red on high
(Like smoke that lingers when the last winds die),
Above the twisted slag of vanished fire
And rainless pits of dust that once was mire,
Over eternal fields of alkali. ...

It glares in mute and changeless after-glows
Over a glassy, crimson stream that never flows. ...
Changeless ... as if, between the time
Of stars and setting sun,
Great Death upon that desolated clime
His last great work had done—
Blasting the very laws of day and night,
To gloat forever on that sight.

There is no stir, except the hollow roll
Of some lone skull, down like a bowl ...
At horrible intervals ... when the Mountain quakes
From deep, deep under,
As the still living earth shudders and shakes
With subterranean thunder.

III

Know you who built this Mountain of the Skulls,
Who piled these socket-heads—these husks and hulls?
Death knows who piled, who built. ...
All the long ages of the race of man
For this must share the guilt!
The deep inveteracy of thought and act,
Forging from age to age the new machines
(From chariots scythed, to tanks and submarines),
Becoming tradition in each court and clan
With sanctions from romance and fact,
Had made a habit of a monstrous means,
Until the gesture of gun and sword and lance,
The quick-step, the salute, the bugle-blast,
Grew man's fixed nature by inheritance,
And this Today was born from out the Past.

Know you who reared this grinning pyramid
Of hairless polls with neither lip nor lid?
Death knows ... and this true verse ...
The European gamesters, sleek and fat
(Or wiry, gray, and bowing from the hip),
For this must share the curse!
A hundred years about a board adept
They played for this or that
(A coast, or isle, or stream, or mine, or ship),
An even hundred years, and never slept ...
While gold-laced lackeys brought them wine to sip ...
Beside the bank-book and the tall silk hat ...
And one or two we justly deem the worse
Free not all others from the awful curse.

Know you what built this monument of state,
For the Eternal Potentate?
He knows ... he knows:
The emboweled pest of all-contagious hate,
That in men's entrails did sit ill
The toxin whence their thinking did create
The devil-foemen each set out to kill.

He knows ... he knows:
The tender instincts, fatal as they work,
Of hearth and home and orchard-plot and kirk,
The passion and the pride we name divine,
The dear, dear land and landscape, yours and mine,
One passion where whatever river flows—
The same by Rhone or Rhine.

He knows ... he knows:
That exaltation in transfigured eyes,
That insane dance of love beyond all love,
That fierce infection of self-sacrifice
(All other primal instincts far above),
The god's intoxication,
As seized the Corybantes in old woods,
And maddened the Maenads by the Phrygian floods,—
The supreme ecstasy of immolation ...
Save that the god was not the God of Birth,
Or of the New Wine that gladdeneth—
Not the Great Mother, Earth,
Not Dionysius—but Eternal Death.

What raised Skull Mountain to the sky?—
He knows ... he knows:
That cunning power of self-doomed mankind
Revenge, rage, ruin, greed, to justify
By concepts deftly put, whereby
It gives itself—by self conceived, combined,
Out of the welter of its corporate life,
The intolerable chaos of its stress and strife—
Reasons and rhetoric of how-and-why,
Which seem a light to who before were blind,
And urge a cause and strengthen hosts to die,
As reason summons from around, behind,
The quickened faith, the prayer on high,—
Till Thought and Ethic, vision-eyed
(By the great Ironist's best master-stroke
Since from the ape man first awoke),
End in one suicide.

IV

And yet there are who round that Mount would grope,
Saying, they too, like Death, can count the loss. ...
Saying, no less, it is the Mount of Hope. ...
Saying, "We'll crown it with a golden cross."

V

Know you the Mountain of the Skulls
At the red river of the Great Mogul's
Red Realms of silence in the sunset sands?—
Know you it really—what it is—and WAS?
By all the dead of all the lands,
The loves, the hopes, the death-pangs (day or night),
(Or short or long)
That housed in all these empty shells
(Where now not even the living blow-flies buzz,
Or wild bees build their cells),
By this vast generation, robbed of light,
Of flowers, of children, poesy, and song,—
In name of future good, to right ...
(So we have said) ... to right the present wrong,—
By all the dead of all the lands,
We'll swear this Mountain stands,
In Kingdom of Great Death forever stands,
To speak to Life one word forevermore,
On every sea and shore:
No League of Peace (though that awhile might save,
If one same law upon each capitol,
Upon each arch and architrave,
Were clearly, deeply carved),
No League nor Law will do:
But those despisèd few
In every land who did refuse each call—
The dungeon-chained, the dungeon-starved—
Must be the prophets of the New
Until the few are all.

THE REAPERS

LAUCHLAN MACLEAN WATT

Red are the hands of the Reapers,
And the harvest is so white!
Red are the feet that are treading
The threshing floors by night:
And, on the young brows, dripping
As with the dews of morn,
Deep rose-red are the woundings,
Like scars of a crown of thorn.

Tired, so many, with reaping,—
Tired with treading the grain,
Still they lie, in their sleeping,
Low in the Valley of Pain,—
Never again to be quaffing
The joy of life, like wine;
Never again to be laughing
In Youth's glad hour divine.

Birds shall sing in the branches,
Children dance by the shore;
But they who shared the red reaping
Shall come back never more.
Let whoso can forget them,
Walking life's noisy ways;
We who have looked on the Reapers
Go quietly, all our days.





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