Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE BUILDERS; A NOCTURNE IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, by MARGARET LOUISA WOODS



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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE BUILDERS; A NOCTURNE IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: On what dost thou dream, solitary all the night long
Last Line: Drawing to thee, and the slow feet of fate.
Alternate Author Name(s): Woods, Mrs. Margaret Louisa Bradley
Subject(s): Buildings & Builders; Cemeteries; Death; Graves; Monasteries; Rest; Spirituality; Graveyards; Dead, The; Tombs; Tombstones; Abbeys


I

ON what dost thou dream, solitary all the night long,
Immense, dark, alone, shrine of a world?

Hardly more silent in old long-buried cities
The empty shrines and immemorial tombs
Of extinct gods and kings of perished empires;
For they hear in flood-time, a vast and urgent whisper,
Great rivers flowing, the moon looks on them.
And thou hearest
Sweep around the silent shores for ever
The dim roar of London.

The moon looks on Thebes, looks on the valley
Of buried kings, on enormous ruined Karnak;
She beholds Baalbek, with her wan indifference
Beholds where once Babylon was, nothing.
On thee seldom she looks,
For a cloud hides thee by day, a fiery cloud
Shadows thee by night, the intense atmosphere
Of ardent life.

Yet on thee also the moon will sometimes look,
Her cold fire of heaven, penetrating, pure,
Burn in the South,
Pouring silver light where he sleeps ethereal,
The delicate fervent seer of all thy memories.

Now darkness prevails, unfathomed night
Hath not conceived the moon;
Now over all thy graves the drowning dark
Spaciously flows.

II

And what if darkness be there, over all thy graves?
Thou art never wholly obscure, for the stars and the moon
That illume and darken dead cities are seldom for thee,
But the living light of London, that is thine own.
Flame upon flame
It is strung on the edge of the roaring, hurrying street,
Fevered it shakes in the gust of the whirling city;
Here calm and estranged
It floats and fades, weaving a shadowy woof
In the solemn deep of thy grey ascending arches.

Far in their hollow night the glimmer of London
Is woven with texture of dreams, phantoms are there,
Vaguely drifting, as pale-winged wandering moths
Drift on the summer dark out of the abyss.

Who has beheld them, the feeling tenuous hands,
About the stone clinging, the carven crumbling
Work that they wrought ere they lay in forgotten graveyards?
Poor blind hands!
As wan sea-birds cling on untrodden ledges
And pinnacles of a lone precipitous isle
Or giant cliff, where under them all is mist
And the sullen booming of an unpacified sea,
So do the phantoms cling on thy wind-worn ledges
And aëry heights, thou grey isle of God.

When the stars are muffled and under them all the earth
Is a fiery fog and the sinister roar of London,
They lament for the toil of their hands, their souls' travail—
"Ah, the beautiful work!"
It was set to shine in the sun, to companion the stars
To endure as the hills, the ancient hills, endure,
Lo, like a brand
It lies, a brand consumed and blackened of fire,
In the fierce heart of London.
Wail no more, blind ghosts, be comforted,
Ye who performed your work and silent withdrew
To your grand oblivion; ye who greatly builded,
Beyond the hand's achievement, the soul's presage.

III

Fain would my spirit,
My living soul beat up the wind of death
To the inaccessible shore and with warm voice
Deep-resonant of the earth, salute the dead:
Like him who in corporeal substance climbed
The Mount of Absolution and saw before him
His shadow move, whereon the unbodied souls
Looked marvelling and held far off converse.
But he spake to them of Earth,
Of Italy, the towered familiar cities
And wide shores Italian rivers wash.
I also would bring
To the old unheeded spirits news of Earth;
Of England, their own country, choose to tell them,
And how above St. Edward's bones the Minster
Gloriously stands, how it no more beholds
The silver Thames broadening among green meadows
And gardens green, nor sudden shimmer of streams
And the clear mild blue hills.
Rather so high it stands the whole earth under
Spreads boundless and the illimitable sea.

It beholds the Himalayas and the peopled plains
The five rivers water, alien fields
Of other verdure, old strange-coloured towns
Of the ancient East.
It beholds the flashing web of new-made cities
Shot through with cars and a-throb with humming wires,
The wheel of Life spinning with fierce motion
In adolescent worlds under tyrannous skies:
Unnumbered flocks it sees
Wild shepherds shear, and the blue shimmer of gum-trees
Deep in the bush, immense, parched, snake-haunted.

Beyond our colourless factories and lone farms,
Grey by wan-willowed bournes, far, far away,
It sees exotic fruit and scarlet flowers
In gaudy markets under the groves of palm,
Where a blue wave sleeps on crystalline sand.

It looks on the grim edge of Arctic night
And gold-hunters frozen upon their prey,
Looks upon ice-bound ships,
On billowing plains of wheat and tropic hills,
Hung with great globes of oranges and haunted
All the night long by little wandering moons;
On immortal snow and everlasting summer.

Behind our voyaging prows the constellations
Plunge in the sea, the Bear head-foremost plunges,
The shining-girdled Orion and Cassiopeia
Fall from the zenith, falls the Northern Star:
But, O ye humble spirits,
Ye proud servants of God, ye Builders of old,
How far soever the forging engines drive,
High under heaven's cope
Is uplifted the work of your hands and your souls' travail—
See! not ruined and dark, but illumined, enriched
By solemn Time and the splendour of vast events,
Death and immortal things.

IV

A point of light! Listen—a human voice!
The sentry pacing his round in the camp of the dead.
Half imperceptible falls the footstep yonder,
Silence engulfs it, a thing as passing and frail
As an insect's flight under the caverned arches.

Over what dust the atom footfall passes!
Out of what distant lands, by what adventures
Superbly gathered
To lie so still in the unquiet heart of London!
Is not the balm of Africa yet clinging
About the bones of Livingstone? Consider
The long life-wandering, the strange last journey
Of this, the heroic lion-branded corpse,
Still urging to the sea!
And here the eventual far-off deep repose.

It passes over the rude majestic head
And blue eyes of Lawrence—
Hark! Over Clyde and Outram's knightly heart.
Ay, what fierce Oriental suns, what swords,
What whirling of mad Jeha¯ds, what plagues of God
Have scarred and seared these bodies and brains beneath
Marked with the brand of empire!

That footfall passes
Over the old grim conquering Admiral's body,
That once ran on the swift Atlantic surges
Hither and thither, tossing rudderless,
To reach the inhospitable Scillian shore.
And many another keen, indomitable,
That swept in thunderous battle long ago
Round England's ocean marches;
Men that have loved the salt spray's buffeting game
Better than sport and better than the dance,
To ride with the slant deck and mark the measure
Of the sluicing scupper's wash and the clap of the sail.
And they lie shrouded here, for ever hidden
From dews of night and the low-breathing air.

Here even Dundonald rests. What dost thou, footfall,
Pacing monotonous over him? For he
Surely far out on a gaunt wind-ravaged headland,
A Viking corpse, should be buried sitting upright
In the black ship with his battle-comrades about him.
Nay, he sleeps well.
Nightly that footfall tells him tho' the grave is dark,
It is always dark, yet a still light is floating
Yonder among the banners, and all are there.

V

But the grave is always dark, it is hushed for ever,
There shall no sound triumphal, or consolation
Enter therein, or remembrance or any grief.

Wise compassionate death!
I accept the silence, the calm, neither with weeping
Nor the odour of new crowns come now to thy sleepers;
I who once in the solemn empty Abbey,
In the winter evening alone, when all had departed,
Came with tears, came with the rose and the laurel,
—Ah, how fain to arouse him
In the fresh grave!—left him there with his laurels
For the poet head, for his dear heart the roses.

They are loosed from the wheel of Life, they roll no more
With a clash of engines under rolling skies,
They are set free
From the arduous mind, the incessant body free,
From all their labours rest.

VI

Yet in a vision
Of old St. Edward saw the Seven Sleepers
At Ephesus, and lo! they turned in their sleep.
Not for a crying of names, their forgotten names,
Hollow sounds in an empty gulf of Time,
Or any mourner's tears:
But they turned in the King's dream as they heard in their slumber
The shout of a wedding made by the hosts of the Lord.
For with noise of war and garments rolled in blood,
The foam of the North in his hair and a song of the South
On his male lips, the bridegroom came to the bride.
There went a torch before him in heaven, behind
The earth was a shudder of fire,
And wrapped in a veil blood-red was brought to the bridal,
That bride long ago: England was born.

VII

And I in a vision beheld how mightier sleepers,
The famous English dead, stirred in their sleep,
The Makers of old, the men who greatly builded,
Who made things to be, who builded empire.

They for no footfall of individual life
In my dream awoke or the foolish roar of the crowd
—Such could not violate the grand repose—
But methought they heard the feet of the Sons of Fate.
Whence came the rumour of feet?
Whence came the pilgrim feet?
From the ends of the earth, from the four winds of heaven.
Over salt seas, through fire and the shadow of death.

VIII

Loosely marching, brown in their battle-worn dress,
The pilgrims passed through the languid August town
Came with new vows, with offerings unforeknown
Of young eventful Time, by roads how new
Drawn to the ancient doors, the ancestral shrine.
The splendid Future is theirs, but they are not content,
They have said to the glorious Past, "Thou, too, shalt be ours."
Wherefore the tongues of stone that centuries long
Have echoed our fathers' voice of prayer and praise,
Moaned to the dirge of England's dead and rung
To the proud acclaim of her kings, answered again
These tongues attuned to unheard cadences,
Echoing the ancient prayer and solemn praise.

Then through the vaults of night an Echo ran,
Crying to the dead, "Behold the inheritors
And harvest of your lives!"—bidding resound
Once more a hushed lyre.
"Awake thou lover of England, laureate son!
Time, the dumb earth, and the inarticulate soul
Of a Titan race conceive great images
And epic thoughts, far-looming secular pomps
And dædal pageantries demand thee. Rise,
Thou deep voice of England!"

IX

But the dead are sleeping.
They have fought the good fight, they have finished their course.
To us the inheritance, to us the labour,
To us the heroic, perilous, hard essay,
New thoughts, new regions, unattempted things.
Not in the footsteps of old generations
Our feet may tread; but high compelling spirits,
Ineluctable laws point the untrodden way
Precipitous, urge to the uncharted sea.

X

On what dost thou dream, solitary all the night long,
Immense, dark, alone, shrine of a world?

Thou, in the one communion of thy bosom
Gatherest the centuries, their brooding silence
Informs thy dark, a live incessant voice,
London about thee clamours ephemeral things.
And thou listenest to hear
Its hidden undertone, thou art ever listening
To the deep tides of the world under all the seas
Drawing to thee, and the slow feet of fate.





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