Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THERE CAME A TIME, by JOHN FREEMAN


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THERE CAME A TIME, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: There came a time when men no longer / died
Last Line: They seemed to hover on the edge of age. ...
Subject(s): Death; Life; Time; Dead, The


PART ONE

THERE came a time when men no longer died.
Science had overcome the plague called death,
Driving the midget from his ancient haunt
Where he once king'd it over the green stale pond
Of life.
When they were told that he had died,
Men were incredulous, thinking how many
Lovely and beloved and joyous lives
The worm had quenched. They could not soon forget
The fear that woke if ever thought but slumbered
A moment, hounding their high spirit down
To Hell and tears and loneliness of night.
They could not soon forget—yet they forgot,
For life seemed strong, with nothing now to wish,
Nothing to fear: how might they not forget?
Only some petulant old deluding ghouls
Poring upon the crazy map of time,
Here gathered skulls and here a churchyard traced,
Deciphered stones and read to scoffing ears
Hic Jacets and the senseless Pauline text.

Slow was the victory—victory they called it—
Over the invisible armies of disease
And multitudes of pestilence, and those furtive
Maladies from generation to generation
Bequeathed, like diamonds dynastic. Even
War was abandoned, reason now was all,
And passion, hate, lust, greed smoothed into ways
Of passivity and wise indifference.
—Slow was the victory, but death was done
To death, or fettered to man's need, the ills
Of flesh no more than moods on sunny shores
Casting brief shadows. Science had overcome.

Does love need death to purge him of deceit?
Ambition need the salt dark wave to wash
The scurf of self from soiled immortal robes?
Is there, in the insecurity of time,
Deliciousness past the chilling weight of years
For ever tumbling upon years?
There fell
At first a questioning, then mute reproach,
Then murmuring of one to another, vexed
To have what once had been a hell to lose.
For look! The sting of sex perpetual,
Like a devil that will never be exorcised
But laughs when one adjures him to stand forth
And dances agonising in the body
That would, would not! And the undying ache
Of loveless lives that still find nothing to love,
And none to love them, till the dry breasts burn,
Since even death no longer comes with kiss
Masculine, serene, assuaging. And those many
Who never knew what they were living for,
Why born, nor whom they serve, nor for what wage,
Wore rancour in their eyes; for now what hope
That the mirage of life might fade, and leave
The solid citadel of Eastern heights
Gleaming for ever beyond death's broken wicket?
What hope now that delusion might be ended,
And the old pieties of life after death
Seize on their nerveless souls again and wake
The energies that slept in hopeless age?

Not many thought thus, for the thought was madness.
But year by year a general faint fear grew
That children from their fathers should snatch bread.
Many were born, none died; and so it came
None might be born except a licence gave
Carnality its ancient right and joy.
New Herods made new inquisition and
Murdered the privy infants of the poor.
Were mothers anguished and were fathers mad?
The quota gave no heed, but took the child
—Wanted, unwanted, beloved and therefore hated—
And science with a secret art put out
The life that else had gone unending on;
For science still, that's wise and magical,
One secret kept of death, and still could pour
A precious balsam into infant veins
If law permitted or the quota bade.

Who knows how things that happen could have happened
In time's obscurity? But this is known:
In one small Island nation, envied once,
Felicity failed, and the proud Island people
Like other peoples lived a half-blurred life—
Blind appetites, like the seas' populace
A diver scatters as he sinks and rises.
Some few, reverting eyes of prophecy,
Lifted their elegy and denunciation;
Some few plotted rebellion; but most still
Gloated on life made rational and secure,
All of a pattern with the nations lying
Beyond tame, hurtless waves.
One poet spoke
His ancient tongue, telling of desperate pride,
And mythic loves for which old cities burned,
Lighting a glory in the quaggy past.
He sang of strife heroic, dreadful battle,
Armies squandered for a harlot's smile,
Knights riding to redeem a holy Tomb.
—They listened, smiled indulgent, tapped their heads,
Nodded, forbore. But when he sang anon
Of a little nation against Goliath arisen
And smiting the huge bulk of earth to earth;
Or a little nation under a grosser heel
Ground into dust and, dying, fighting yet;
Or some small race—the conscience of the world,
Nerve of the spiritual body—rising up
For liberty, and finding it but in death;—
Those sage men, legislators of the new day,
Cried out: "It is immoral to speak of strife,
To sing of bloody wars, and death so dearly
Purchased by men that, in the dark of the world,
Knew nothing of the undying gift of days.
Silence that dreamer, silence the prophecy
That lurks in the remembrance of things past!"
But he, groaning and laughing by quick turns,
Vanished, and left a silence for his song.

Now in a western island lying outflung
Among the surf the kingdom island shook
From rocky shoulders—small forgotten island
With sister islands smaller yet, men lived.
Thither, like a hound hunted by yelling curs,
That runs disdainful, angry so to run,
He vanished and, caught in a coracle,
Passed the hoarse seas less raucous than the herd
That hunted, and was drawn by new friends over
The seamed cliff up to a hollow of the rock,
Where smoky cressets from peat-litten hearths
Burned their thin fires away. There silence was
Blessed, and yet less blissful than the speech
Of an ancient tongue recorded by men's lips
Speaking of stories old, and women telling
To children. There he retuned his ears
To syllables half forgotten since his youth;
And like a chicken following the hen
While the proud cock crows negligently nigh,
He fumbled, and from tokens misunderstood
Recovered music. And he recovered so
Lost simplicities of toil and thought
And bodily habit; and at night would swing
Out with the creeping craft that gleaned the poor
Sea-fields after the alien fleets had drawn
Electric nets through the exhausted acres
Of ocean, and then whirred far-dazzling back
To the luxurious appetites east and west.
And daylong in the idleness of rough weather,
Couched under turf walls round the spiral smoke,
Lying and listening to his thoughts and silence,
Or calling slowly back forgotten meanings
In things told one to another, he could see
Unfolding in the smoke the life all lost
To all the world, save in such islands rocked
Upon obscure seas:—custom of king and people,
Laborious hierarchy serving more than served,
Sea-festival, pagan and Christian blending
As tree and soil are mingled in one trunk;
Poverty's blessing and indifference,
Carousal rare and deep and unrepented,
And all the people—like rock, herb and sheep—
Ruled by the sole and natural law of the sea.
How easily here might he forget that horror
Of the perpetual artifice of the hive,
Where all was summer for the body, and all
Winter for the spirit torpid as a toad!
It seemed now but a shaking drop-scene, lowered
A moment, then rolled up and hidden away,
While in a dance, now grave, now smiling-bright,
Time, death, chance and eternity trod together
Making a pattern with the silent notes
Played somewhere by all-heavenly fiddles that matched
The wild cries of his island fisher-friends,
Thinning from the seas up to the inland hollows.
What did that hoary figure of death do here,
Moving between the other three? Death looked
No longer fearful, no longer blind, but like
The last priest of an antique faith, who still
Serves the Altar, while lewd foreign eyes stare on
And careless palms cast a contemptuous coin.
Why seemed death kinder now?
The thought returned
When, one night, by a wailing roused, he went
Into a neighbour hut. An old man there
Had suddenly breathed his last of mortality,
Age falling willingly on the bosom of death.
There were such dissonant, sad, dog-like cries
As for a moment hurt the ear.
But then
How happy it seemed that age should sink on death!
No more the ache without end, the callousness
Endless, the perpetual artifice;
But here the quiet laying down of life,
And mild, mysterious solicitude of death.
—Listening, he remembered anew the past,
Looking fondly on flowers that live not for ever,
That neither toil nor spin, yet sink in shrouds
Themselves have spread: how often had they teased
His mind with envy! and the birds that hide
To die, while other birds take up their song,
And shake their shadow-petals on the fields.
It came to him like a new consciousness,
That in the trackless bog and wandering mist
With but a sad bird wheeling hither and thither,
A half-hidden causeway had been found between
The mire this side and that, and snakes uncurling.
It was as when, entering a lampless room,
He heard a pendulum, slowly, clearly rocking,
That gave a rule and term to night and sleep,
And stilled the batlike fears that swept and smothered.
Here was the pendulum of mortal being,
Death, that gave rule and term to anarchy;
By whose low stroke, miraculously heard,
His spirit was steadied.
The while the wailing hung
Unintermitted, for still the mourners saddened
At parting, being ignorant in their grief
Of blissful liberty from the bond of living,
And age grown joyless. Happy again, he smiled,
That natural death kept here his sovereign right.
They buried the dead fisherman, then forgot
Their grief, no self-pity marring their talk.
Or if by chance they named him, it was as happy—
Happy now in his body under the turf
And in his spirit moving with holy Angels,
Telling the Apostles of a catch of fish
Better than any in Galilee, ages past.
Hearing the dead man's friends, it was here, he said,
In such rude ways, in half-lost lands as these,
Life was no burden, time no disease, nor age
A ghost; nor was it pain to lay them down.
And thinking of his native land, once envied,
That still shook in his bosom like a tree
Shaking her branches in the wind, he knew
He could not stay on this sea-nurtured rock;
He must return to ease a renewing ache
With sight of hills remembered, the river treading
Delicately between limp birches and the white farm
(His home once), and leaping deer-like down,
Then flowing, swan-like, through the idle flats.
A thin sheep nibbled near his hand, the smoke
Of peat drifted on the wind; sounds came up
Of indolent voices. Looking into the sky—
Not birds, those, but a steel-bright navy deploying
Into a minuet played silently,
Far off, by a mechanic orchestra
That wakes no joy but skeleton-like motions
Among those monstrous midges of the skies.
Between the sheep and peat and idle talk
Round the torn nets, and that steel navy ruled
By remote beams—what commonalty might be?
—Only the human, lying here exposed,
Simple, instinctive, and there indued with steel,
Sophisticated, wrenched from natural liberty,
But human still if science might be mastered
And men no longer servants to their creature.

He must return, native to native land,
Though like the figure of his vision—priest
Of an antique faith, last servant of the Altar;
While some scoff and some persecute and some pity,
And some lewd foreign tongues still croak upon
Man's insignificance, and would bind anew
His spirit, so corruption never more
Rise and put on incorruptibility.

PART TWO

THE same dark shallow coracle bore him back
Between the steely edges of short waves.
Upon a green land stepping, showery-shining,
He found a path by lonely valleys and lakes
Under gray hills where once a nation died
And bloody swords drooped in triumphant hands.
Now scarce more populous the low horizon rose
Upon horizon as he plodded east,
Until the city spread its snare and noise
Each side a river inching to the sea;
—Then on, questioned and badged, towards that home
Whose order made disorder a blessed dream.
After those years of self-ruled liberty,
With no more bondage than sweet clover knows
Shaking out life upon the careless wind
That mixes birth with death, it seemed now like
A toy built by a lunatic who still
Is three years old, with graying hair but eyes
Trembling with wonder at his wooden bricks
Mounting and mounting upwards from the floor.
The crazy orders toppled into clouds
That seemed more stable: palaces confused,
Theatres and memorials and galleries
Ranked in a formal splendour, granite-chill,
Architecture of Babylonish minds,
And human bees still buzzing at the pane
Stretched between their long day and liberty;
A pane so clear they knew not it was stretched
So wide and high.
The shaking toy might fall
Suddenly, it seemed, at any honest breath
Of someone outside sick with indignation
Seeing the stony-hearted in a stone city
All shaped of lost desires and needs frustrated.

Licensed and badged, contemptuously he passed
Among the familiar that now was strange,
As a sane man moving amid bedlamites
Whom once he knew for sane, and now behind
Barred windows pass contentedly their day,
Pitying those without and cunningly rubbing
Bellies grown round with idleness and ease.
One spoke, remembering, "You false fond prophet,
Have you come back to this safe, questionless
Metropolis, secure as meat and drink?"
And one, "See how philosophy is fallen!"
And one, "No, see how madness marks her prey,
Still dancing in his eyes!" And one, "Let be:
The crazy brain may topple at recollection
Of things long past. Take pity on his head."
Others avoided him like a flaking leprosy,
Fearful of the contagion of his presence,
Saying, "It is a folly if he go loose."
While others, "Folly amuses us, let us laugh
The maggot from his mind until he hide."
Contempt and lethargy at last prevailed,
And no more they remarked him, while he laboured
In humblest service, happy betimes forgetting
And half forgot, as one content with dreams
Never to be realised.
And yet to live by dreams is but half life
In a world of all dreamless men; one only,
One, seeing clearly in a chaos of blind,
One only hearing of all deaf.
The senses
Fail not so soon as the dull, stall-fed soul.
These lived on in the body to die in spirit.
Men once, in faith's old days, gladly laid down
The load of clay to clothe the immortal spirit
With another body of all heavenly likeness.
But these, citizens of a meaner city,
Forgot the spirit, to clothe the body in
Age's unending chill paralysis.

Forgive, he breathed: They know not what they do!
And who knows how that worm, the ambitious brain,
Bores through the husk into the bulb-like soul.
Men's subjects are their Tyrants, servants steal
Office and authority of great Lords:—
Thence sorrow, thence betrayal, and spirit's death.
They know not!—But, in a half glimpse of fear,
Men turned bemused this way and that, still blind.
Rose once again the ancient superstitions,
Unfaith seeking a faith in faith's despite,
Minds long self-starved now aching for the spirit
To lift even upon wings of indignation.
The sole prolific births of shrivelling time,
Sects multiplied, married, wrangled, divorced;
Rites were like fetters upon too willing limbs,
Fetishes, bans, taboos, charms, amulets—
Faith's trumpery pawned to pay new vows to chance.
Just as an engine puffing poisonous fumes
Into the helpless lungs, so science was,
And men lay stupefied, all but contented.
—Strange, strange, he thought, that thirsty knowledge should
Puff the soul's life away with ignorant breath!
Such puny or such monstrous notions spread
As must have made him laugh, but for the grief;
And aching so with sense of darkened wits
All round, he felt their darkness as his own.
Yes, these knew all the flesh's secrets and
Had cunning to outwit the cunning of death,
World-old disease, miasmic fevers, worms
Hidden in worms less mortal, the chemistry
Of the infinite-fashioned engine of the body.
Only they knew not—knew not—
What, he scarce
Might frame, except whatever they knew was like
A bottle tossing on a lone vast ocean,
Bearing a plea unheeded of distress
And spiritual darkness.
And he had seen
The message, and had understood. And now
By what device to win them, and restore
A hunger for the infinite, liberty
From the unending satisfaction of flesh?
Flesh was the ancient Enemy, and Time
No longer leagued against her constant lusts.
Of old, age mitigated the tyranny,
Loosened the body's bondage, and declined
Gently the waning appetite for life
Into a dark adventure of the spirit.
Age once, grown fretful or strangely content,
Slipped from earth's shore and ploughed the dark of death,
Divinely beckoned, divinely discontented
With anchorage to mood and circumstance,
Self-weary, giving place to another self
In whose new eyes a purer hope might shine.
But death was dead, his very sea damm'd up,
His tides asleep.
There was recorded still
Story of the old agony of death,
Pain's mocking persecution: these the chief
Devils that soured the senses' Paradise.
Now death and pain expunged, left Paradise
A dust-strewn prison, airless, shadowless,
Soundless. Was it these Evils, then,
Were Death and Pain needed to salt the earth,
Sweeten it with renewing hopes and fears?
Was parting needed to make meeting dear,
Was life the richer for death's crescent knife?
Was pain the strait, sole door to life, and death
The only door beyond?
The story told
How even centurion Patriarchs had died
At length, summing their heavy centuries up
In the slow ease of late and long decay.
Adam and his scions, Enoch, Methuselah,
Noah and his children, fathers of many nations,
Lived not an earth-bound, tedious "for ever";
They lapsed like rain, God took them, they slept.
Now Noahs multiplied, but God was dead.
Appetite waxed, but sex was thwarted; life
Was lived but in itself, not in another;
Sacrifice was but a forgotten joy
Of times barbaric—"O dead security!"
He cried, "And O, how song has died, and art,
And music's proud or grieving tone that lifts
Like the wind under the sands of desert zones!"
Now seemed those ancient agonies, pain and death,
Anti-narcotics, healing the sick spirit
Else drugged by ease into long death-in-life.
Nor these alone were lost, but natural living:
Instinct, the eyes of the soul, was bound and blind,
And those intuitive native powers that once
Leapt in the veins and hands of builder and poet,
Were now decayed, or lashed like slaves to the oar
Of sick mechanic exercise.
Prayer lingered
Long on his lips, mingling with rebellion,
Then broke, in a sudden passion of tears.
"Let joy return, though linked with poverty,
Bring laughter back to men, O God of mirth,
Bring simpleness again, though security
Be lost; bring fear and apprehension back,
Bring clouds back to this infidel, iron-blue heaven,
Bring sins and pain back to this starveling world
That men have made in the folly of the wise.
Bring death again!"
Hearts, turned towards him then,
Sharing his passion, faltering in his prayer:
"Arise, God, from Thy death within our hearts!
What must we do to escape this deathless death
And life unfruitful?" They crept together then,
Few here, few there, quickening misery
With anger, and bewildered still with fear,
God! on their lips but no God in their eyes.
And then, because they were so few, and all
Bravely afraid, from city and city withdrawing,
They met and scattered and met again where hills
Yet kept the silence of their lonely nature
Secure as the tarn locked between their knees.
Fear and perplexity had urged them hither,
But now fear failed and men learn not by fear;
Now Whither? What? and How? remained and need
Of courage instinct-born.
Their leader came,
Pondering, and gathered them within the shadow
Of a forsaken lime-pit, long green-grown
And vast, with saplings thickened, congregation
Of whispering heads untroubled by despairs,—
Birches and firs listening to wind and rain.
A few score-score of fugitives, they waited
Anxiously while he told them of his thoughts,
Darkening their own, and then of desperate hope
To break the evil charm of the spirit's slumber;
For desperation, said he, at the last
Is wiser than mere tameness of despair,
They nodded, and when he said they needs must flee
Utterly, without repining, without regretting,
And almost without hope, again they nodded.
But when he said they could not flee from themselves,
Nor wife nor family forsake, some murmured,
Thinking to find a selfish liberty
From their Accomplice, named the Past; and some,
Ready to risk themselves but not another,
Wavered between a brave and timorous mind.
"Men weigh not nicely when a fire is raging,"
He said, "whither cool reason bids them flee,
Nor why the fire affrights them. Instinct breaks
Through the sere bonds and shocks them.
Let not reason
Stay those whose blood quickens yet in the air
And sun of a lifting heaven."
One answered, "Wisdom
Is only prudence: few steps need they retrace
Who move with few." Another, "Fate, the snare
Of man's small life, the cage in which he turns,
Permits no rebellion. Let us appease
With prayer and ancient sacrifice of blood."
The leader cried: "Prudence—have we not fled
From blanching prudence? Fate—shall we bow to Fate
Still, having bowed these vain vexed years to Fate?—
Leave us who will: who is not with us is against."
Some shamefast parted then, and took their fears,
While those who stayed renewed a firmer hope,
Joining their wills to live like men again,
To breed like men for love and future love,
And maybe, in themselves or in their children,
To die like men again if means might be
To propitiate the harsh black sleeve of Death,
That hooded Monk, who visited of old
The happier populations of our earth.
—"To live, to love, to breed, to die like men,"
Rose like a cavern-murmur from their hearts,
Answering the solemn words.
Where, then, to make
A fastness for their new-yeaned hope to grow in?
There was, in all that land, wide desert stretch
Of pasture now unprofitable, half a county
Relapsed into a wildness of decay,
Forsaken, almost herdless, a poor soil.
Here and there old village sites protruded
Like a stag's skeleton after the hunt
That spends a savage triumph in inhuman
Shoutings and yelpings over the disgraced corpse.
Like sad bones half uncoffined or half burned.
Family by family had left them for cities
Of light and ease and regimented labours;
Now owls and conies, moles, and carrion fowl
Were only natives, tilth and kine scarce known;
Only the wild bee murmured at noon to wild bee
And night long wild dogs yelped to the hooting owl.
One sole recordless ruin was yet remembered,
Mid the high broken land, where twin waters
Neighbours at birth, sucking the same green breast,
Turned thence apart, falling far asunder
One east, one west, seeking distant seas.
Stone walls yet leaned among the trees, the shingles
Were like stone boughs sinking between the walls;
And right round was a writhen earthen rampart
Reared by forgotten hordes of barbarous times.
A single track still clove the crouching earth
That snake-like curled its green length round the stones.
Towards this they turned, (brave pious pilgrimage),
Anxious to remove where they might be forgotten,
And none pursue with grudging iron laws.
It was a sight most strange to see, when they
Stepped back through Time,
Shaking off whatever the centuries had won
From matter by the conquest of proud mind.
Like cattle weary from the market, rejected,
Spared from the shambles, they turned their backs on Time;
Footsore and spirit-sore, a broken procession
Tracing their way across the broken spine
Of the green earthen snake girdling the stones;—
Ageing-ageless men, and unfruitful women
Yet elder-seeming, life's long-weary fanatics
Such as the Gods might laugh at but for pity;
And some few children, like the uncertain migrants
Stayed on our eastern shores ere passing south:
So few and so unchildlike and so uncertain
They seemed to hover on the edge of age. ...





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