Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MINOR TO MAJOR (EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599), by FRANK WILMOT


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MINOR TO MAJOR (EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599), by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: What am I doing here
Last Line: Breaks flooding through me and I say my say.
Alternate Author Name(s): Maurice, Furnley
Subject(s): Poetry & Poets; Spenser, Edmund (1552-1599)


WHAT am I doing here,
All muddy-footed, vulgar-tongued and blind,
Roving through anxious days and nights to find
The rapturous things your magic made so dear?
What am I doing here?
Lifted aloft on lonely ecstasy,
You go beyond vexation, past all fear,
Past time and close affairs that harass me.

Your hands have touched the golden Heaven bars,
Your eyes have seen the blinding face of God;
Roped like Mazeppa to the flying stars,
Your soul outsoared the children of the sod,
Left us a-wondering at what sublime,
Clear wells of thought you drank from in His house,
Where winds from the pooled dreaming of all time
Went cool across your brows.

Cross winds, incessant rains,
Have cut their memory on hearts and brains.
And yet you never once forgot us -- nay,
Star-diademed, your kindly glance turned where
The jaded toiler piles his day on day
That followed along to one grey, hopeless year.

You knew full well life's insolence and pain,
Man's rich delights and man's uncertain faiths,
The gullies rocked and verdurous where frail
Mite birds on their invisible flutterings sail,
Cool lusciousness of peaches washed in rain,
And the dejection of the lonely hours.
But you stood calmly sceptred in the storm
And drew from chaos form.
You took intangible and flexuous wraiths
To weave from them your Dream that fires and flowers
The budding spirit's challenge with the Death's
Weaponed defeat. What am I doing here,
So frailly mortal, I, a puny-brained
Weakling of effort! Treader of the sun,
You have sung sweetly, towered and dreamed and done
But far, eventual fear
Has all the things of my demanding stained.

With my heart tuned to cosmic melodies,
I've fathomed shafts, I've dreamed in swagman-fires,
But what you gathered with consummate ease
Comes not to labour nor to deep desires.
For you had strength and you had dreams, and you
Felt all our humble aspiration; still
Swift to your calling, beautiful and new,
Came fairies from all ages to fulfil
Your periods. Red shame should hold me dumb;
Yet human, helpless gods of Greece would come
And slave for you as I,
When down huge slopes of sky,
Past white cloud-ranges, sweep your words to chime
O'er paddocks at noon-time;
To sob beside our mothers where they stay
Anxious and wan for some slow home-coming;
And blessedly from hearth and home to sing
For wanderers who stray
In the lone bush away.

My banished gods of wonder and great peace,
Farewell! I hurry to the hurrying town,
Where men desire cash profit and increase,
And all-forgetting lose your old renown.
The world is calling me; the chains are frail
That fasten on the soul's eternal deeps,
And commerce spurns the mortal who will trail
In dreams and miss Time's forelock where he sweeps.
Oh, if we should in silence muse awhile
Of crowns with rose and laurel woven in,
'Tis that we know the faint, eternal smile
Of God's own poets breaking in the din.
Your hands that grip upon the chariot rein
Of the fast stars grip our numb hearts also --
I turn from you toward what men call gain,
And burn in speechless anguish as I go.

What am I doing here,
Dusty with roads of traffic and fell ways
Of bargaining? Often the hurt soul prays
For power to tell its joys that tack and veer
Across these times of hurry and low fear
Like summer yachts that sweep the midnight bays

I have known joy and pain, and man and maid;
Uplifting comrades, and deep dreams and calm
Wells of bush silence; a bark-crackling glade
Where towers immovable one alien palm.
I've heard the rocks roll downward to the creek,
Seen scarlet lories sail across the green;
Yet, when delight pounds at my heart to speak,
I fear the things I say had best not been.

Yet I who have such joys retain my right
Of utterance; no discouragement nor curb
Puts your supremity on my poor might,
Nor this dumb singing in me can disturb.
Why dare to fail? Do your perfections cloy?
Does shame ne'er come to steal my voice away?
It does. But oft the dammed and hoarded joy
Breaks flooding through me and I say my say.





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