LIFE

I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind,

Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn

There came a groping shape of mystery

Moving among us, that with random stroke

Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe,

Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice,

Laughing on Lethe-bank — and in my throat

I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes,

The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.

Such little songs she sang,

Pursing her lips to fit the tiny pipe,

They trickled from me like a slender spring

That strings frail wood-growths on its crystal thread,

Nor dreams of glassing cities, bearing ships.

She sang, and bore me through the April world

Matching the birds, doubling the insect-hum

In the meadows, under the low-moving airs,

And breathings of the scarce-articulate air

When it makes mouths of grasses — but when the sky

Burst into storm, and took great trees for pipes,

She thrust me in her breast, and warm beneath

Her cloudy vesture, on her terrible heart,

I shook, and heard the battle.

But more oft,

Those early days, we moved in charmed woods,

Where once, at dusk, she piped against a faun,

And one warm dawn a tree became a nymph

Listening; and trembled; and Life laughed and passed.

And once we came to a great stream that bore

The stars upon its bosom like a sea,

And ships like stars; so to the sea we came.

And there she raised me to her lips, and sent

One swift pang through me; then refrained her hand,

And whispered: “Hear —” and into my frail flanks,

Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured

Its spaces and its thunder; and I feared.

We came to cities, and Life piped on me

Low calls to dreaming girls,

In counting-house windows, through the chink of gold,

Flung cries that fired the captive brain of youth,

And made the heavy merchant at his desk

Curse us for a cracked hurdy-gurdy; Life

Mimicked the hurdy-gurdy, and we passed.

We climbed the slopes of solitude, and there

Life met a god, who challenged her and said:

“Thy pipe against my lyre!” But “Wait!” she laughed,

And in my live flank dug a finger-hole,

And wrung new music from it. Ah, the pain!

We climbed and climbed, and left the god behind.

We saw the earth spread vaster than the sea,

With infinite surge of mountains surfed with snow,

And a silence that was louder than the deep;

But on the utmost pinnacle Life again

Hid me, and I heard the terror in her hair.

Safe in new vales, I ached for the old pang,

And clamoured “Play me against a god again!”

“Poor Marsyas-mortal — he shall bleed thee yet,”

She breathed and kissed me, stilling the dim need.

But evermore it woke, and stabbed my flank

With yearnings for new music and new pain.

“Another note against another god!”

I clamoured; and she answered: “Bide my time.

Of every heart-wound I will make a stop,

And drink thy life in music, pang by pang,

But first thou must yield the notes I stored in thee

At dawn beside the river. Take my lips.”

She kissed me like a lover, but I wept,

Remembering that high song against the god,

And the old songs slept in me, and I was dumb.

We came to cavernous foul places, blind

With harpy-wings, and sulphurous with the glare

Of sinful furnaces — where hunger toiled,

And pleasure gathered in a starveling prey,

And death fed delicately on young bones.

“Now sing!” cried Life, and set her lips to me.

“Here are gods also. Wilt thou pipe for Dis?”

My cry was drowned beneath the furnace roar,

Choked by the sulphur-fumes; and beast-lipped gods

Laughed down on me, and mouthed the flutes of hell.

“Now sing!” said Life, reissuing to the stars;

And wrung a new note from my wounded side.

So came we to clear spaces, and the sea.

And now I felt its volume in my heart,

And my heart waxed with it, and Life played on me

The song of the Infinite. “Now the stars,” she said.

Then from the utmost pinnacle again

She poured me on the wild sidereal stream,

And I grew with her great breathings, till we swept

The interstellar spaces like new worlds

Loosed from the fiery ruin of a star.

Cold, cold we rested on black peaks again,

Under black skies, under a groping wind;

And Life, grown old, hugged me to a numb breast,

Pressing numb lips against me. Suddenly

A blade of silver severed the black peaks

From the black sky, and earth was born again,

Breathing and various, under a god's feet.

A god! A god! I felt the heart of Life

Leap under me, and my cold flanks shook again.

He bore no lyre, he rang no challenge out,

But Life warmed to him, warming me with her,

And as he neared I felt beneath her hands

The stab of a new wound that sucked my soul

Forth in a new song from my throbbing throat.

“His name — his name?” I whispered, but she shed

The music faster, and I grew with it,

Became a part of it, while Life and I

Clung lip to lip, and I from her wrung song

As she from me, one song, one ecstasy,

In indistinguishable union blent,

Till she became the flute and I the player.

And lo! the song I played on her was more

Than any she had drawn from me; it held

The stars, the peaks, the cities, and the sea,

The faun's catch, the nymph's tremor, and the heart

Of dreaming girls, of toilers at the desk,

Apollo's challenge on the sunrise slope,

And the hiss of the night-gods mouthing flutes of hell —

All, to the dawn-wind's whisper in the reeds,

When Life first came, a shape of mystery,

Moving among us, and with random stroke

Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe.

All this I wrung from her in that deep hour,

While Love stood murmuring: “Play the god, poor grass!”

Now, by that hour, I am a mate to thee

Forever, Life, however spent and clogged,

And tossed back useless to my native mud!

Yea, groping for new reeds to fashion thee

New instruments of anguish and delight,

Thy hand shall leap to me, thy broken reed,

Thine ear remember me, thy bosom thrill

With the old subjection, then when Love and I

Held thee, and fashioned thee, and made thee dance

Like a slave-girl to her pipers — yea, thou yet

Shalt hear my call, and dropping all thy toys

Thou'lt lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more

Pour the wild music through me —

SET wide the window. Let me drink the day.

I loved light ever, light in eye and brain —

No tapers mirrored in long palace floors,

Nor dedicated depths of silent aisles,

But just the common dusty wind-blown day

That roofs earth's millions.

O, too long I walked

In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe,

Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds

And all the ancient outlawry of earth!

Now let me breathe and see.

This pilgrimage

They call a penance — let them call it that!

I set my face to the East to shrive my soul

Of mortal sin? So be it. If my blade

Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore

The pages of the Book in opening it,

See what the torn page yielded ere the light

Had paled its buried characters — and judge!

The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot

In catalepsy — say I should have known

That trance had not yet darkened into death,

And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew?

Sum up the facts — her life against her death.

Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure

Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance

The obolus to appease the ferrying Shade,

And waft her into immortality.

Think what she purchased with that one heart-flutter

That whispered its deep secret to my blade!

For, just because her bosom fluttered still,

It told me more than many rifled graves;

Because I spoke too soon, she answered me,

Her vain life ripened to this bud of death

As the whole plant is forced into one flower,

All her blank past a scroll on which God wrote

His word of healing — so that the poor flesh,

Which spread death living, died to purchase life!

Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs.

Not that they sent me forth to wash away —

None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed

So far beyond their grasp of good or ill

That, set to weigh it in the Church's balance,

Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in.

But I, I know. I sinned against my will,

Myself, my soul — the God within the breast:

Can any penance wash such sacrilege?

When I was young in Venice, years ago,

I walked the hospice with a Spanish monk,

A solitary cloistered in high thoughts,

The great Loyola, whom I reckoned then

A mere refurbisher of faded creeds,

Expert to edge anew the arms of faith,

As who should say, a Galenist, resolved

To hold the walls of dogma against fact,

Experience, insight, his own self, if need be!

Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes set

Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped

In error's old deserted catacombs

And lit his tapers upon empty graves!

Ay, but he held his own, the monk — more man

Than any laurelled cripple of the wars,

Charles's spent shafts; for what he willed he willed,

As those do that forerun the wheels of fate,

Not take their dust — that force the virgin hours,

Hew life into the likeness of themselves

And wrest the stars from their concurrences.

So firm his mould; but mine the ductile soul

That wears the livery of circumstance

And hangs obsequious on its suzerain's eye.

For who rules now? The twilight-flitting monk,

Or I, that took the morning like an Alp?

He held his own, I let mine slip from me,

The birthright that no sovereign can restore;

And so ironic Time beholds us now

Master and slave — he lord of half the earth,

I ousted from my narrow heritage.

For there's the sting! My kingdom knows me not.

Reach me that folio — my usurper's title!

Fallopius reigning, vice — nay, not so:

Successor, not usurper. I am dead.

My throne stood empty; he was heir to it.

Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste,

Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing,

Won back for man that ancient fief o’ the Church,

His body? Who flung Galen from his seat,

And founded the great dynasty of truth

In error's central kingdom?

Ask men that,

And see their answer: just a wondering stare

To learn things were not always as they are —

The very fight forgotten with the fighter;

Already grows the moss upon my grave!

Ay, and so meet — hold fast to that, Vesalius.

They only, who re-conquer day by day

The inch of ground they camped on over-night,

Have right of foothold on this crowded earth.

I left mine own; he seized it; with it went

My name, my fame, my very self, it seems,

Till I am but the symbol of a man,

The sign-board creaking o'er an empty inn.

He names me — true! Oh, give the door its due

I entered by. Only, I pray you, note,

Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine

Had breached the crazy wall” — he seems to say.

So meet — and yet a word of thanks, of praise,

Of recognition that the clue was found,

Seized, followed, clung to, by some hand now dust —

Had this obscured his quartering of my shield?

How the one weakness stirs again! I thought

I had done with that old thirst for gratitude

That lured me to the desert years ago.

I did my work — and was not that enough?

No; but because the idlers sneered and shrugged,

The envious whispered, the traducers lied,

And friendship doubted where it should have cheered

I flung aside the unfinished task, sought praise

Outside my soul's esteem, and learned too late

That victory, like God's kingdom, is within.

( Nay, let the folio rest upon my knee.

I do not feel its weight. ) Ingratitude?

The hurrying traveller does not ask the name

Of him who points him on his way; and this

Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me,

Because he keeps his eye upon the goal,

Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view,

Cares not who oped the fountain by the way,

But drinks to draw fresh courage for his journey.

That was the lesson that Ignatius taught —

The one I might have learned from him, but would not —

That we are but stray atoms on the wind,

A dancing transiency of summer eves,

Till we become one with our purpose, merged

In that vast effort of the race which makes

Mortality immortal.

“He that loseth

His life shall find it ": so the Scripture runs.

But I so hugged the fleeting self in me,

So loved the lovely perishable hours,

So kissed myself to death upon their lips,

That on one pyre we perished in the end —

A grimmer bonfire than the Church e'er lit!

Yet all was well — or seemed so — till I heard

That younger voice, an echo of my own,

And, like a wanderer turning to his home,

Who finds another on the hearth, and learns,

Half-dazed, that other is his actual self

In name and claim, as the whole parish swears,

So strangely, suddenly, stood dispossessed

Of that same self I had sold all to keep,

A baffled ghost that none would see or hear!

“Vesalius? Who's Vesalius? This Fallopius

It is who dragged the Galen-idol down,

Who rent the veil of flesh and forced a way

Into the secret fortalice of life” —

Yet it was I that bore the brunt of it!

Well, better so! Better awake and live

My last brief moment as the man I was,

Than lapse from life's long lethargy to death

Without one conscious interval. At least

I repossess my past, am once again

No courtier med'cining the whims of kings

In muffled palace-chambers, but the free

Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall

And all the world against him. O, for that

Best gift of all, Fallopius, take my thanks —

That, and much more. At first, when Padua wrote:

“Master, Fallopius dead, resume again

The chair even he could not completely fill,

And see what usury age shall take of youth

In honours forfeited” — why, just at first,

I was quite simply credulously glad

To think the old life stood ajar for me,

Like a fond woman's unforgetting heart.

But now that death waylays me — now I know

This isle is the circumference of my days,

And I shall die here in a little while —

So also best, Fallopius!

For I see

The gods may give anew, but not restore;

And though I think that, in my chair again,

I might have argued my supplanters wrong

In this or that — this Cesalpinus, say,

With all his hot-foot blundering in the dark,

Fabricius, with his over-cautious clutch

On Galen ( systole and diastole

Of Truth's mysterious heart! ) — yet, other ways,

It may be that this dying serves the cause.

For Truth stays not to build her monument

For this or that co-operating hand,

But props it with her servants’ failures — nay,

Cements its courses with their blood and brains,

A living substance that shall clinch her walls

Against the assaults of time. Already, see,

Her scaffold rises on my hidden toil,

I but the accepted premiss whence must spring

The airy structure of her argument;

Nor could the bricks it rests on serve to build

The crowning finials. I abide her law:

A different substance for a different end —

Content to know I hold the building up;

Though men, agape at dome and pinnacles,

Guess not, the whole must crumble like a dream

But for that buried labour underneath.

Yet, Padua, I had still my word to say!

Let others say it!— Ah, but will they guess

Just the one word —? Nay, Truth is many-tongued.

What one man failed to speak, another finds

Another word for. May not all converge

In some vast utterance, of which you and I,

Fallopius, were but halting syllables?

So knowledge come, no matter how it comes!

No matter whence the light falls, so it fall!

Truth's way, not mine — that I, whose service failed

In action, yet may make amends in praise.

Fabricius, Cesalpinus, say your word,

Not yours, or mine, but Truth's, as you receive it!

You miss a point I saw? See others, then!

Misread my meaning? Yet expound your own!

Obscure one space I cleared? The sky is wide,

And you may yet uncover other stars.

For thus I read the meaning of this end:

There are two ways of spreading light: to be

The candle or the mirror that reflects it.

I let my wick burn out — there yet remains

To spread an answering surface to the flame

That others kindle.

Turn me in my bed.

The window darkens as the hours swing round;

But yonder, look, the other casement glows!

Let me face westward as my sun goes down.