BOTANICAL GARDENS

He follows me no more, I said, nor stands

Beside me. And I wake these later days

In an April mood, a wonder light and free.

The vision is gone, but gone the constant pain

Of constant thought. I see dawn from my hill,

And watch the lights which fingers from the waters

Twine from the sun or moon. Or look across

The waste of bays and marshes to the woods,

Under the prism colors of the air,

Held in a vacuum silence, where the clouds,

Like cyclop hoods are tossed against the sky

In terrible glory.

And earth charmed I lie

Before the staring sphinx whose musing face

Is this Egyptian heaven, and whose eyes

Are separate clouds of gold, whose pedestal

Is earth, whose silken sheathed claws

No longer toy with me, even while I stroke them:

Since I have ceased to tease her.

Then behold

A breeze is blown out of a world becalmed,

And as I see the multitudinous leaves

Fluttered against the water and the light,

And see this light unveil itself, reveal

An inner light, a Presence, Secret splendor,

I clap hands over eyes, for the earth reels;

And I have fears of dieties shown or spun

From nothingness. But when I look again

The earth has stayed itself, I see the lake,

The leaves, the light of the sun, the cyclop hoods

Of thunder heads, yet feel upon my arm

A hand I know, and hear a voice I know —

He has returned and brought with him the thought

And the old pain.

The voice says: “Leave the sphinx.

The garden waits your study fully grown.”

And I arise and follow down a slope

To a lawn by the lake and an ancient seat of stone,

And near it a fountain's shattered rim enclosing

An Eros of light mood, whose sculptured smile

Consciously dimples for the unveiled pistil of love,

As he strokes with baby hand the slender arching

Neck of a swan. And here is a peristyle

Whose carven columns are pink as the long updrawn

Stalks of tulips bedded in April snow.

And sunk amid tiger lillies is the face

Of an Asian Aphrodite close to the seat

With feet of a Babylonian lion amid

This ruined garden of yellow daisies, poppies

And ruddy asphodel from Crete, it seems,

Though here is our western moon as white and thin

As an abalone shell hung under the boughs

Of an oak, that is mocked by the vastness of sky between

His boughs and the moon in this sky of afternoon....

We walk to the water's edge and here he shows me

Green scum, or stalks, or sedges, grasses, shrubs,

That yield to trees beyond the levels, where

The beech and oak have triumph; for along

This gradual growth from algae, reeds and grasses,

That builds the soil against the water's hands,

All things are fierce for place and garner life

From weaker things.

And then he shows me root stocks,

And Alpine willow, growths that sneak and crawl

Beneath the soil. Or as we leave the lake

And walk the forest I behold lianas,

Smilax or woodbine climbing round the trunks

Of giant trees that live and out of earth,

And out of air make strength and food and ask

No other help. And in this place I see

Spiral bryony, python of the vines

That coils and crushes; and that banyan tree

Whose spreading branches drop new roots to earth,

And lives afar from where the parent trunk

Has sunk its roots, so that the healthful sun

Is darkened: as a people might be darkened

By ignorance or want or tyranny,

Or dogma of a jungle hidden faith.

Why is it, think I, though I dare not speak,

That this should be to forests or to men;

That water fails, and light decreases, heat

Of God's air lessens, and the soil goes spent,

Till plants change leaves and stalks and seeds as well,

Or migrate from the olden places, go

In search of life, or if they cannot move

Die in the ruthless marches.

That is life, he said.

For even these, the giants scatter life

Into the maws of death. That towering tree

That for these hundred years has leafed itself,

And through its leaves out of the magic air

Drawn nutriment for annual girths, took root

Out of an acorn which good chance preserved,

While all its brother acorns cast to earth,

To make trees, by a parent tree now gone,

Were crushed, devoured, or strangled as they sprouted

Amid thick jealous growth wherein they fell.

All acorns but this one were lost.

Then he reads

My questioning thought and shows me yuccas, cactus

Whose thick leaves in the rainless places thrive.

And shows me leaves that must have rain, and roots

That must have water where the river flows.

And how the spirit of life, though turned or driven

This way or that beyond a course begun,

Cannot be stayed or quenched, but moves, conforms

To soil and sun, makes roots, or thickens leaves,

Or thins or re-adjusts them on the stem

To fashion forth itself, produce its kind.

Nor dies not, rests not, nor surrenders not,

Is only changed or buried, re-appears

As other forms of life.

We had walked through

A forest of sequoias, beeches, pines,

And ancient oaks where I could see the trace

Of willows, alders, ruined or devoured

By the great Titans.

At last

We reached my hill and sat and overlooked

The garden at our feet, even to the place

Of tiger lilies and of asphodel,

By now beneath the self-same moon, grown denser:

As where the wounded surface of the shell

Thickens its shimmering stuff in spiral coigns

Of the shell, so was the moon above the seat

Beside the Eros and the Aphrodite

Sunk amid yellow daisies and deep grass.

And here we sat and looked. And here my vision

Was over all we saw, but not a part

Of what we saw, for all we saw stood forth

As foreign to myself as something touched

To learn the thing it is.

I might have asked

Who owns this garden, for the thought arose

With my surprise, who owns this garden, who

Planted this garden, why and to what end,

And why this fight for place, for soil and sun

Water and air, and why this enmity

Between the things here planted, and between

Flying or crawling life and plants, and whence

The power that falls in one place but arises

Some other place; and why the unceasing growth

Of all these forms that only come to seed,

Then disappear to enrich the insatiate soil

Where the new seed falls? But silence kept me there

For wonder of the beauty which I saw,

Even while the faculty of external vision

Kept clear the garden separate from me,

Envisioned, seen as grasses, sedges, alders,

As forestry, as fields of wheat and corn,

As the vast theatre of unceasing life,

Moving to life and blind to all but life;

As places used, tried out, as if the gardener,

For his delight or use, or for an end

Of good or beauty made experiments

With seed or soils or crossings of the seed.

Even as peoples, epochs, did the garden

Lie to my vision, or as races crowding,

Absorbing, dispossessing, killing races,

Not only for a place to grow, but under

A stimulus of doctrine: as Mahomet,

Or Jesus, like a vital change of air,

Or artifice of culture, made the garden,

Which mortals call the world, grow in a way,

And overgrow the world as neither dreamed.

Who is the Gardener then? Or is there one

Beside the life within the plant, within

The python climbers, wandering sedges, root stalks,

Thorn bushes, night-shade, deadly saprophytes,

Goths, Vandals, Tartars, striving for more life,

And praying to the urge within as God,

The Gardener who lays out the garden, sprays

For insects which devour, keeps rich the soil

For those who pray and know the Gardener

As One who is without and over-sees?...

But while in contemplation of the garden,

Whether from failing day or from departure

Of my own vision in the things it saw,

Bereft of penetrating thought I sank,

Became a part of what I saw and lost

The great solution.

As we sat in silence,

And coming night, what seemed the sinking moon,

Amid the yellow sedges by the lake

Began to twinkle, as a fire were blown —

And it was fire, the garden was afire,

As it were all the world had flamed with war.

And a wind came out of the bright heaven

And blew the flames, first through the ruined garden,

Then through the wood, the fields of wheat, at last

Nothing was left but waste and wreaths of smoke

Twisting toward the stars. And there he sat

Nor uttered aught, save when I sighed he said

“If it be comforting I promise you

Another spring shall come.”

“And after that?”

“Another spring — that's all I know myself,

There shall be springs and springs!”