Classic Poem

In Western Norway in the Jotunheim,
above Turtagro is a fjell called Faneraaki.
There is a hut, I recollect, on the highest rock at the glacier's head,
at 2,000 metres, a Weather Observatory manned by a team of two;
for I met one
in the local bus, we fell talking; he was returning, he said from
summer sea service in the South Atlantic.
He invited me up the mountain as a companion for his climb.
We set off up Stendal, it was early September,
all was rain and raincloud, and nightfall ere we arrived.
There we fried eggs and ate them with goat's cheese and coffee.
I found in the hut among various books a volume of Whitman,
a reverberant salvo, rather, aimed at the young people of Europe
and I read in him earnestly, ere I fell asleep.

And lo! beside my bunk the Bard of Democracy talking:
" Young poet, do not despair if the public is inattentive.
Behold, I will show you the public. " And I saw in my vision.
a waste of vast waters; across it continually
vented a mighty wind. Waves rose,
in long rhythmic succession; the sunshine ridged the white furrows.
Vividly sky and water vibrated and undulated
a blue endless expansion of the Symbol of Eternity, the Soul.
And the waters said, " Give us rest from the wind of God
which persecutes us; let be, to become warm in the sun. "
Then I understood that the wind was the voice of the prophets since the world began
whipping the multitudes with the word of God,
all the poets whoever sang
driving common people and Kings in the wave of a mighty pattern,
(but for Jesus in Christendom I have not words worthy).

Then the ghost smiled and the air fell wind-still, and the waters
became calm, and complacently puffed hot gusts upward.
There were mares' tails in heaven, the high ice crystals,
then a haze on the horizon; lofty cloud roses
climbed the trellises of heaven, blossomed
hugely around the haloed sun, who fled with veiled head and was gone.
And in our lofty look-out now the sea was lost to sight
and through swirling mists, lo and behold!
showers spouted upwards, only to fall as ice;
hail was thrown heavenward then, heralding thunder: blue tongues
flickered down the fluted pillars; our platform, so nigh
to the point of origin of blast, yawed, bucked and trembled.
I cried out aloud because of the vision.
Then I awoke in the white light of snow, rain still falling,
and yet seemed to hear a voice saying, " High must the air rise
ere it lose all vapour, the sucked-in miasma of ideology;
the public will listen only to its own propaganda pattering down upon it.
There comes a terrible storm over all the earth
ere the pure word of God can blow true again
across the ocean of the multitudinous minds of men. "

That was the autumn of disastrous rain,
heavily gashed were the green hillslopes, the feet of the fjells beneath the cloud,
where torrents had gushed down; the new roads of Norway
were broken blocked and flooded, as if Nature would forstall
an invader. And I went through with the first
from Roysheim to Lillehammer.