Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE WINDOW, by CHARLES WILLIAMS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE WINDOW, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Put out the candles, friend, while I unclose
Last Line: They are playing grieg; come in, let us attend.
Subject(s): Love; Relationships


PUT out the candles, friend, while I unclose
The window of our thought upon the night,
Time, and the world, where London, light by light,
Twinkles away into an unknown end
And darkness at the edge of Being flows;
Upon the slope, which at this sill begins
But there is lost in what black origins!
Put out the lights, put out the candles, friend:
No gleam upon the guessed horizon throws
Any small flaming wick of faith or hope,
For studies meet, nor on the ragged slope,
Which here the intent Imagination knows.

Out of the black and vacant heaven looks down
An everlasting silence, here touched white
With borrowed flame to the fantastic site
Of mirrored cities and reflected streets.
Turn, turn your eyes! this is man's topmost town,
Close-set beneath us: there is Thames, and here,
Where the glow gathers deepest, Westminster;
District on district thrust, while each repeats
Some huge word man's devising mind hath known,
Some station upon his long toil, which we
Here dimly from his first beginning see,
But not his end, nor whereby helped or thrown.

The window of our nature opens: see,
In the vast vision of our conscious mind,
A living mud bubbles into mankind
Momently, and each moment from the mud
Shapes yet another surge of anarchy.
Life wakes and heaves and in a babble of cries
Swarms out of earth a little, and so dies
And is swallowed under life; what streaks of blood
Gleam under us here! But soon an end shall be,
For now the fires of other labourers flare
Along sides till now unseen, and all men share
A final sorrow and sad certainty.

Now all draws inward; now where once was night,
Shaken with fabulous and impalpable wings
Of phoenix, roc, or bird-like angel, springs
The fiery line of knowledge; see, the last
Far corner flickers into doubtful light;
All nears to all! short space remains to span
Of the unknown leagues that for so long were man,—
Leagues of the vast unsearchable world, the vast
Unsearchable soul, now narrow into sight,
In one last thunder of confusion send
Their joined adventure to its fatal end,
Achieve their work, and perish on its height.

But we ere then shall perish; lo, this Year,
This rising Hour which, level with our sill,
Pantingly busy at Time's secular will,
Builds up the huge waste-circled pyramid,
His single praise, memorial, and mere
Monstrosity of Being, whose wide base
Rests on the everlasting square of Space,
In ancient and neglected darkness hid.
Upward the generations swarm, and here
Their latest palpitations, thick and close,
Beat where Time's self directs, raucous and gross,
Their sweat to lift it by this present tier.

Beneath them, lo the farther builders! they
Who fashioned the huge side whereon we stand,
City on city, land on shifting land,
Beneath our busy thought sounding yet mute,
Whose reputable tasks did but obey
One mastery with ours; dead fingers touch
The foot that juts from our year's ledge, and clutch
About our ankles; they no more dispute
Betwixt themselves for honour, to no fray
Man's trumpet of Possession calls them now,
But in our generation each can grow,
Preying on us who made them first our prey.

Under what overseers did they move!
Who with new knowledge mortising the stair,
Smoothing the level, seeking how and where
The next great surge of Being should arise,
Were their chief governors, whether they rove
Outer or inner worlds,—the Genoan
Once, and once he who first made isled Japan
Part of the world's mind, they who brought the skies
Into its range; Plato and who else hove
Some mass of meditation up, long time
Beyond the climbing level, or whose rhyme
Uttered the songs and secrets of man's love.

What songs? What chants from shelf or coign of rest
Largely inform with meaning our turmoil,
Catching the note and rhythm of our toil?
Some sweetly praising, marvellously elate,
The stretched arm-muscles or the naked breast
Of a near fellow; others' wider song
Makes credible purpose of our trial age-long,
The unfinished apex, and all-ruling fate.
One only left the pyramid's peak unguessed,
Our English greatest; a few others see
Dark truth,—the Roman wildly dead, and he
Of Wessex, wrack'd futility confessed.

For now we hear what long the loud slope hid,—
So high this window opens on the past
In all its broad decline,—we hear at last
Song melting with its thousand epic tales
And heroes, Rama, Siegfried, Al Raschid,—
Foam on a sea of sound,—into the whole
Potent, impetuous, and upward roll.
Into one roar the separate music fails;
Which in its day so wonderfully amid
The separate clamours rose, all hearers swung
In mightier strain after each golden tongue,
Faster and fuller working as Time bid.

O what else wrought they whom our deep minds con?
Rumours which through our wisest spirit ran,
Fabled and felt; in whom content began;
Shapes where man to himself once named and knew
The loveliest lures in which Time ever shone;
And the bright mist about the peak was fair
With mighty apparition shadowed there
Of the Lord Buddha and such holy few:
For whose blest folk Time's self hath undergone
Transfiguration, and to saintlihood
Cheated with heavenly dreams, else by no rude
Earth's lust enticed nor the world's vision wan.

Through us their great but dying names are blown,
Smothered with voices; where long since they sank,
Still boiling in an ever-restless bank,
Our clay remembers them, so strong they were;
But now their liveliest words are overgrown,
Now since so near we climb unto the peak
All that they prophesied we no more seek;
Their vanity of expectation here
Dissolves into oblivion; the world's moan
Shall mournfully remember them no more;
Far off those banks their heaving shall give o'er,
And the whole dead past harden into stone.

It is not past, it is not dead! it moves,
It stirs with life; all that men were they are,
Vastly and dimly visioned from afar
Down the wide slope of Being; tribes and hordes
Mingling and whelmed in their own herds and droves
Pulse rhythmically through creation; there,
At our sight's end, beyond the lights, all share
One common welter, cattle and their lords.
Among the horned, pointed, or flat heads moves
The earliest rounded; all one hunger sweeps
Upward, each strives and falls and climbs and leaps
For his day's portion and his yearly loves.

Around and over them the great night flows;
The night of genesis, the fount of all
Our life and height. What god, what animal,
Therein was our first father, when the pit
Of space first held, running with melted snows,
Perception? What divine or bestial head
Remembers us? what hands or paws are spread
Upon the mighty stair to clamber it?
Feel we not how on our interior throes,
Shaking the ladder of spaces and of times,
This living and forgotten monster climbs,
Dragging the night behind him as he goes?

Before whose coming what fear shakes the air,
What portent? Feel'st thou 'neath our topmost tread,
Noisome and too much laden with its dead,
The whole mound tremble? Life that builded it
Faints in her task, and all the marvellous stair
Time shall see crash; the works begin to slide
And cracks of chaos open on each side;
Thought, living, looks into the bottomless pit,
Shudders o'er precipices of despair,
Shafts of destruction; Being is torn apart,
Feel'st thou the terror leaping in thy heart?
All's rent, all breaks, and Nothing is laid bare.

Shut down the window, light the candles, friend;
This way we lean o'er madness, this way lies
Void where man's dying soul that never dies,
Wholly forsaken, wholly unpursued,
Wholly unlured to any conscious end,
Drops in a sick and everlasting fall
Through ceaseless depth, by powers anarchical
Blown but not stayed. O let our flames renewed,
Our toil, our hope, our tenderness, befriend
The encompassed mind against the encompassing gloom!
Here lies my Herrick, in the farther room
They are playing Grieg; come in, let us attend.





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