IS it knowledge, is it knowledge only and fear Lest one chance of many should bring this body at last To burning or drowning? or exile from its dear Companions and instruments, locked in a prison cell? Fear or more than fear? O Earth's body, what pain Tightens the whole fine nervous web? what ache In the torn bloody past twitches our brain? Is it in the mind alone that memory lives? Now when at morning the house turns round to the sun, All the dead life that lay through the dark at the back of our minds Stirs, and ghosts in the visible world have begun Anew to occupy eyes left vacant by sleep. Without and within sleep parts from the world in a moan Of universal memory, presences dwelling alive In the wrathful elements, victims whose hurt we condone Using the means whereby they were brought to doom. Naiads and pretty gnomes, where are you, and brave Salamanders? when did our perishing fancy leave Its early delight in hearth and spring and cave? Or were you in truth no more than an antique dream? No, no, you were; but races die: you died When another people thronged the streams and groves, Gay with no dances; you ceased before the tide Of mortal sorrow; now you are seen no more. Our colonies reached your lands; you too mankind Seized for his vengeance first, and then by his pain; You, to the hate which his gloomy heart designed, Involuntarily, injuriously compelled. One and indivisible, man, man whose whole power Is drawn to the smallest act of his smallest child, Man haunted by himself for ever, man lords you this hour. Seek you some other country! gentles, farewell. His purpose, his past, my doleful body shares, Morning by morning accepting the terrible sun, Bathing or lighting a fire or going downstairs What old companions crowd us, see, in our first need! Unseen, ineluctable, those whom Morgan's blades Pricked from the ship's side, Margaret Wilson, or they Of France and Couthon, the stripped and bound noyades, Floating for ever wherever water flows. Water's cool refreshment refreshed not them: Cleansed we arise,—cleansed and the more defiled By obscene currents of death no oblivion can stem Or distil from the general river, clogged and unclean. And when we set match to the fire, the small flames scorch Something other than wood: what inaudible cry Rends my dumb spirit! 'twas thus they put the torch To Joan's fire or Du Moulay's,—thus? no, with this. This has lit Ridley's candle, here Smithfield pours A red glare outward: my silent lips shout with the mob Where to-day in the West a screaming negro endures The last pains of death, and my food is cooked at his fire. You at least, my walls, are kind; in this recess Where the laden bookshelves from floor to ceiling rise, Comforting evasions, here need I fear no distress,— Though the depth is enough to hold a man bound to the wall; And my book weighs heavy as a stone, and the cornice expands Into curves of Babylon or Oudh, and eyes glimmer there Through the last gap left unfilled by the eunuchs' hands, And I thrust the stone hastily in and turn and go. Where? for the very wallpaper stares straight ahead, Seeming neither to whisper nor wink but to speak all the time How beneath it the mortar is bloodily streaked, and what dead It hides. To the nurseries or to the cellars? where? Bars of cots and nurseries only renew In the tender care of love a most bitter care To hold Bajazet safe, Buchan, or La Balue; Soft the bars rustle together and thus they say: 'Hold fast, brother, fast: though little fingers Seem to clasp us a ghostly hand is there, Clutching us over them, and between us lingers A ragged shape and shuffling feet of despair.' And beyond the steps to our cellars, when down we steal, A door opens on darkness,—we almost tread On the dying prisoners, lice-eaten, whom the Bastille Held or the Tower or the Tullianum: one turn— And lo through a secret chink between time and space We shall come out afar in the Cocytëan South, Lost for ever, turning a haggard face On Tasman's rocks or the gunboat-guarded Bay. Immortal foundations! unopened dungeons! here still Hate steams like a pestilence upward, though far above They build the millennium in storied peace and goodwill, And men walk civilly,—but there they shall not forget; They shall not forget the slain; they shall not awake Or lie down in joy, but all their delicate lives They, unforgiven, shall loathe for these others' sake, Having no house to inhabit but this of our dead. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...TO TIME by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE PICTURE (VENUS RECLINING) by EZRA POUND NIGHT PIECE (2) by EDITH SITWELL TWO OF A TRADE by SAMUEL WILLOUGHBY DUFFIELD DOUGLASS by PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR MISSIONARY HYMN by REGINALD HEBER SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: PETIT THE POET by EDGAR LEE MASTERS |