Classic Poem

I

A lighthouse and a graveyard and gaunt pines
Not old, no tree lives long here, where the northwind
Has forgot mercy. All night the light blinks north,
The Santa Cruz mountain redwoods hate its flashing,
The night of the huge western water takes it,
The long rays drown a little off shore, hopelessly
Attempting distance, hardly entering the ocean.
The lighthouse, and the gaunt boughs of the pines,
The carved gray stones, and the people of the graves.

They came following the sun, here even the sun is bitter,
A scant gray heartless light down wind, glitter and sorrow,
The northwind fog much kindlier. When shall these dead arise,
What day stand up from the earth among the broken pines?
A God rearisen will raise them up, this walking shadow?
Which tortured trunk will you choose, Lord, to be hewn to a cross?
I am not among the mockers Master, I am one of your lovers,
Ah weariest spirit in all the world, we all have rest
Being dead but you still strive, nearly two thousand years
You have wrestled for us against God, were you not conquered
At the first close, when the long horrible nails went home
Between the slender bones of the hands and feet, you frightfully
Heightened above man's stature saw the hateful crowd
Shift and sicken below, the sunburnt legionaries
Draw back out of the blood-drops ... Far off the city
Slid on its hill, the eyes fainting. The earth was shaken
And the sun hid, you were not quieted. Men may never
Have seen you as they said in the inner room of the house,
Nor met you on the dusty suburb road toward Emmaus,
But nine years back you stood in the Alps and wept for Europe,
To-day pale ghost you walk among the tortured pines
Between the graves here and the sea.

Ah but look seaward,
For here where the land's charm dies love's chain falls loose, and the freedom of the eyes and the fervor of the spirit
Sea-hawks wander the huge gray water, alone in a nihilist simplicity, cleaner than the primal
Wings of the brooding of the dove on the waste of the waters beginning, perplexed with creation; but ours
Turned from creation, returned from the beauty of things to the beauty of nothing, to a nihilist simplicity,
Content with two elements, the wave and the cloud, and if one were not there then the other were lovelier to turn to,
And if neither ... O shining of night, O eloquence of silence, the mother of the stars, the beauty beyond beauty,
The sea that the stars and the sea and the mountain bones of the earth and men's souls are the foam on, the opening
Of the womb of that ocean.

You have known this, you have known peace, and forsaken
Peace for pity, you have known the beauty beyond beauty
And the other shore of God. You will never again know them,
Except he slay you, the spirit at last, as more than once
The body, and root out love. Is it for this you wander
Tempting him through the thickets of the wolvish world?
O a last time in the last wrench of man made godlike
Shall God not rise, bitterly, the power behind power, the last star
That the stars hide, rise and reveal himself in anger —
Christ, in that moment when the hard loins of your ancient
Love and unconquerable will crack to lift up humanity
The last step heavenward — rise and slay, and you and our children
Suddenly stumble on peace? The oceans we shall have tamed then
Will dream between old rocks having no master, the earth
Forget corn, dreaming her own precious weeds and free
Forests, from the rivers upward; our tributary planets
Tamed like the earth, the morning star and the many-mooned
Three-belted giant, and those red sands of Mars between them,
Rust off the metal links of human conquest, the engines
Rust in the fields, and under that old sun's red waning
Nothing forever remember us.

And you at peace then
Not walk by a lighthouse on a wild north foreland
Choosing which trunk of the poor wind-warped pines
Will hew to a cross, and your eye's envy searching
The happiness of these bleak burials. Unhappy brother
That high imagination mating mine
Has gazed deeper than graves: is it unendurable
To know that the huge season and wheel of things
Turns on itself forever, the new stars pass
And the old return and find out their old places,
And these gray dead infallibly shall arise
In the very flesh ... But first the camel bells
Tinkle into Bethlehem, the men from the east
Gift you sweet-bedded between Mary's breasts,
And no one in the world has thought of Golgotha.

II

Gray granite ridges over swinging pits of sea, pink stone-crop spangles
Stick in the stone, the stiff plates of the cypress boughs divide the sea's breath,
Hard green cutting soft gray ... I know the uplands
And windy pastures where the great globes of the oaks are like green planets
Each in his place; I know the scents and resonances of desolate hills,
The wide-winged shadows of the vultures wandering across them; and I have visited
Deserts and many-colored rocks ... mountains I know
From the Dent d'Oche in Savoy and that peak of the south past St. Gingolphe
To Grayback and Tahoma ... as for sea-borderers
The caverned Norman cliffs north of the Seme's mouth, the Breton sea-heads, the Cornish
Horns of their west had known me as a child before I knew Point Dume or Pinos
Or Sur, the sea-light in his forehead: also I heard my masters
Speak of Pelorum head and the Attic rocks of Sunium, or that Nymphaean
Promontory under the holy mountain Athos, a warren of monks
Walls in with prayer-cells of old stone, perpetual incense and religion
Smoke from it up to him who is greater than they guess, through what huge emptiness
And chasms above the stars seeking out one who is here already, and neither
A hunting nor asleep nor in love; and Actium and the Acroceraunian
And Chersonese abutments of Greek ridges on the tideless wave
They named, my spirit has visited ... there is no place
Taken like this out of deep Asia for a marriage token, this planted
Asiaward over the west water. Our race nor the great springs we draw from,
Not any race of Europe, nor the Syrian blood from south of Lebanon
Our fathers drank and mixed with ours, has known this place nor its like nor suffered
The air of its religion. The elder shapes and shows in extreme Asia,
Like remote mountains over immeasurable water, half seen, thought clouds,
Of God in the huge world from the Altar eagle-peaks and Mongol pastures
To the home of snow no wing inhabits, temples of height on earth, Gosainthan
And Gaurisankar north of Ganges, Nanda Devi a mast of the ship
We voyage upon among the stars; and the earth-sprung multitudes of India,
Where human bodies grow like weeds out of the earth, and life is nothing,
There is so much life, and like the people the divinities of the people
Swarm, and the vulgar worship; thence far east to the islands of this ocean
Our sun is buried in, theirs born of, to the noble slope of the lone peak
Over Suruga Bay, and the headlands of Hai-nan: God without name,
God without form, the Lord of Asia, is here as there.

Serenely smiling
Face of the godlike man made God, who tore the web of human passions
As a yellow lion the antelope-hunter's net, and freeing himself made free
All who could follow, the tissue of new births and deaths dissolved away from him,
He reunited with the passionless light sky, not again to suffer
The shame of the low female gate, freed, never to be born again,
Whom Maha Maya bore in the river garden, the Himalayan barrier northward
Bounding the world: is it freedom, smile of the Buddha, surely freedom? For someone
Whispered into my ear when I was very young, some serpent whispered
That what has gone returns; what has been, is; what will be, was; the future
Is a farther past; our times he said fractions of arcs of the great circle;
And the wheel turns, nothing shall stop it nor destroy it, we are bound on the wheel,
We and the stars and seas, the mountains and the Buddha. Weary tidings
To cross the weary, bitter to bitter men: life's conqueror will not fear
Life; and to meditate again under the sacred tree, and again
Vanquish desire will be no evil.

The evening opens
Enormous wings out of the west, the sad red splendid light beats upward
These granite gorges, the wind-battered cypress trees blacken above them,
The divine image of my dream smiles his immortal peace, commanding
This old sea-garden, crumble of granite and old buttressed cypress trunks,
And the burnt place where that wild girl whose soul was fire died with her house.

III

I have spoken on sea-forelands with the lords of life, the men wisdom made Gods had nothing
So wise to tell me nor so sweet as the alternation of white sunlight and brown night,
The beautiful succession of the breeding springs, the enormous rhythm of the stars deaths
And fierce renewals: O why were you rebellious, teachers of men, against the instinctive God,
One striving to overthrow his ordinances through love and the other crafty-eyed to escape them
Through patient wisdom: though you are wiser than all men you are foolisher than the running grass,
That fades in season and springs up in season, praising whom you blame.

For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty, for goodness and evil are two things and still variant, but the quality of life as of death and of light
As of darkness is one, one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel, and who can behold it is happy and will praise it to the people.