Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun And here upon earth’s noonward height To feel the always coming on The always rising of the night: To feel creep up the curving east The earthy chill of dusk and slow Upon those under lands the vast And ever climbing shadow grow And strange at Ecbatan the trees Take leaf by leaf the evening strange The flooding dark about their knees The mountains over Persia change And now at Kermanshah the gate Dark empty and the withered grass And through the twilight now the late Few travelers in the westward pass And Baghdad darken and the bridge Across the silent river gone And through Arabia the edge Of evening widen and steal on And deepen on Palmyra’s street The wheel rut in the ruined stone And Lebanon fade out and Crete High through the clouds and overblown And over Sicily the air Still flashing with the landward gulls And loom and slowly disappear The sails above the shadowy hulls And Spain go under and the shore Of Africa the gilded sand And evening vanish and no more The low pale light across that land Nor now the long light on the sea: And here face downward in the sun To feel how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on ...

The incoherent rushing of the train Dulls like a drugged pain Numbs To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums Unfolds Hush within hush until the night withholds Only its darkness. From the deep Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue. Among The sleeping listeners a sound As leaves stir faintly on the ground When snow falls from a windless sky— A stir    A sigh

for Learned and Augustus Hand You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you, Stand with me a little by the walls Or where the walls once were. The bridge was here, the city further: Now there is neither bridge nor town— A doorway where the roof is down Opens on a foot-worn stair That climbs by three steps into empty air. (What foot went there?) Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples Lives now but these flocks of sheep Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath: Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth. Can none but sheep live where the walls go under? Is man’s day over and the sheep’s begun? And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill Shrilling with melodious tongue— Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair? (What dust is this we sift upon our hair?) Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz Shall we sit weeping for the world that was And curse God and so perish? Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them? Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches? Consider, Oh consider what we are! Consider what it is to be a man— He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle; Who discovers in his mouth, between his teeth, a word; Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars— that burden; Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone— A girl’s shoulder, perfectly harmonious! Even the talk of it would take us days together. Marvels men have made, Oh marvels!—and our breath Brief as it is: our death waiting— Marvels upon marvels! Works of state— The imagination of the shape of order! Works of beauty—the cedar door Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt! Works of grace— The ceremony at the entering of houses, At the entering of lives: the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse! Works of soul— Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder: Through the mid night to the stroke of one! Works of grace! Works of wonder! All this have we done and more— And seen—what have we not seen?— A man beneath the sunlight in his meaning: A man, one man, a man alone. In the sinks of the earth that wanderer has gone down. The shadow of his mind is on the mountains. The word he has said is kept in the place beyond As the seed is kept and the earth ponders it. Stones—even the stones remember him: Even the leaves—his image is in them. And now because the city is a ruin in the waste of air We sit here and despair! Because the sheep graze in the dying grove Our day is over! We must end Because the talk around the table in the dusk has ended, Because the fingers of the goddesses are found Like marble pebbles in the gravelly ground And nothing answers but the jackal in the desert,— Because the cloud proposes, the wind says! Because the sheep are pastured where the staring statues lie We sit upon the sand in silence Watching the sun go and the shadows change! Listen, my friends, and you, all of you, strangers, Listen, the work of man, the work of splendor Never has been ended or will end. Even where the sheep defile the ruined stair And dogs are masters—even there One man’s finger in the dust shall trace the circle. Even among the ruins shall begin the work, Large in the level morning of the light And beautiful with cisterns where the water whitens, Rippling upon the lip of stone, and spills By cedar sluices into pools, and the young builders String their plumb lines, and the well-laid course Blanches its mortar in the sun, and all the morning Smells of wood-smoke, rope-tar, horse-sweat, pitch-pine, Men and the trampled mint leaves in the ditch. One man in the sun alone Walks between the silence and the stone: The city rises from his flesh, his bone.

Think of our blindness where the water burned! Are we so certain that those wings, returned And turning, we had half discerned Before our dazzled eyes had surely seen The bird aloft there, did not mean?— Our hearts so seized upon the sign! Think how we sailed up-wind, the brine Tasting of daphne, the enormous wave Thundering in the water cave— Thunder in stone. And how we beached the skiff And climbed the coral of that iron cliff And found what only in our hearts we’d heard— The silver screaming of that one, white bird: The fabulous wings, the crimson beak That opened, red as blood, to shriek And clamor in that world of stone, No voice to answer but its own. What certainty, hidden in our hearts before, Found in the bird its metaphor?

These alternate nights and days, these seasons Somehow fail to convince me. It seems I have the sense of infinity! (In your dreams, O crew of Columbus, O listeners over the sea For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—) Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden. I thought, What time is it? I thought, Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time? (Tell me your dreams, O sailors: Tell me, in sleep did you climb The tall masts, and before you—) At night the stillness of old trees Is a leaning over and the inertness Of hills is a kind of waiting. (In sleep, in a dream, did you see The world’s end? Did the water Break—and no shore—Did you see?) Strange faces come through the streets to me Like messengers: and I have been warned By the moving slowly of hands at a window. Oh, I have the sense of infinity— But the world, sailors, is round. They say there is no end to it.

When liberty is headlong girl And runs her roads and wends her ways Liberty will shriek and whirl Her showery torch to see it blaze. When liberty is wedded wife And keeps the barn and counts the byre Liberty amends her life. She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

Señora, it is true the Greeks are dead. It is true also that we here are Americans: That we use the machines: that a sight of the god is unusual: That more people have more thoughts: that there are Progress and science and tractors and revolutions and Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous And music in every home: there is also Hoover. Does the lady suggest we should write it out in The Word? Does Madame recall our responsibilities? We are Whores, Fräulein: poets, Fräulein, are persons of Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with Stragglers from either prince and of both views. The rules permit them to further the business of neither. It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers. Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas— Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers. Preferring life with the sons to death with the fathers, We also doubt on the record whether the sons Will still be shouting around with the same huzzas— For we hope Lady to live to lie with the youngest. There are only a handful of things a man likes, Generation to generation, hungry or Well fed: the earth’s one: life’s One: Mister Morgan is not one. There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. He that goes naked goes further at last than another. Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they’ll jimmy his Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month: (Who recalls the address now of the Imagists?) But the naked man has always his own nakedness. People remember forever his live limbs. They may drive him out of the camps but one will take him. They may stop his tongue on his teeth with a rope’s argument— He will lie in a house and be warm when they are shaking. Besides, Tovarishch, how to embrace an army? How to take to one’s chamber a million souls? How to conceive in the name of a column of marchers? The things of the poet are done to a man alone As the things of love are done—or of death when he hears the Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick only. Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him There where he lies on his left arm and will die, Nor his class nor his kind nor his trade when the blood is jeering And his knee’s in the soft of the bed where his love lies. I remind you, Barinya, the life of the poet is hard— A hardy life with a boot as quick as a fiver: Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms?

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall. I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise. I praise the fall: it is the human season. Now No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth, Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth, Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough, But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone: There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes. Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves. It is the human season. On this sterile air Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on. I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone. I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

mon semblable, mon frère (1) Our epoch takes a voluptuous satisfaction In that perspective of the action Which pictures us inhabiting the end Of everything with death for only friend. Not that we love death, Not truly, not the fluttering breath, The obscene shudder of the finished act— What the doe feels when the ultimate fact Tears at her bowels with its jaws. Our taste is for the opulent pause Before the end comes. If the end is certain All of us are players at the final curtain: All of us, silence for a time deferred, Find time before us for one sad last word. Victim, rebel, convert, stoic— Every role but the heroic— We turn our tragic faces to the stalls To wince our moment till the curtain falls. (2) A world ends when its metaphor has died. An age becomes an age, all else beside, When sensuous poets in their pride invent Emblems for the soul’s consent That speak the meanings men will never know But man-imagined images can show: It perishes when those images, though seen, No longer mean. (3) A world was ended when the womb Where girl held God became the tomb Where God lies buried in a man: Botticelli’s image neither speaks nor can To our kind. His star-guided stranger Teaches no longer, by the child, the manger, The meaning of the beckoning skies. Sophocles, when his reverent actors rise To play the king with bleeding eyes, No longer shows us on the stage advance God’s purpose in the terrible fatality of chance. No woman living, when the girl and swan Embrace in verses, feels upon Her breast the awful thunder of that breast Where God, made beast, is by the blood confessed. Empty as conch shell by the waters cast The metaphor still sounds but cannot tell, And we, like parasite crabs, put on the shell And drag it at the sea’s edge up and down. This is the destiny we say we own. (4) But are we sure The age that dies upon its metaphor Among these Roman heads, these mediaeval towers, Is ours?— Or ours the ending of that story? The meanings in a man that quarry Images from blinded eyes And white birds and the turning skies To make a world of were not spent with these Abandoned presences. The journey of our history has not ceased: Earth turns us still toward the rising east, The metaphor still struggles in the stone, The allegory of the flesh and bone Still stares into the summer grass That is its glass, The ignorant blood Still knocks at silence to be understood. Poets, deserted by the world before, Turn round into the actual air: Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!

First there is the wind but not like the familiar wind but long and without lapses or falling away or surges of air as is usual but rather like the persistent pressure of a river or a running tide. This wind is from the other side and has an odor unlike the odor of the winds with us but like time if time had odor and were cold and carried a bitter and sharp taste like rust on the taste of snow or the fragrance of thunder. When the air has this taste of time the frontiers are not far from us. Then too there are the animals. There are always animals under the small trees. They belong neither to our side nor to theirs but are wild and because they are animals of such kind that wildness is unfamiliar in them as the horse for example or the goat and often sheep and dogs and like creatures their wandering there is strange and even terrifying signaling as it does the violation of custom and the subversion of order. There are also the unnatural lovers the distortion of images the penetration of mirrors and the inarticulate meanings of the dreams. The dreams are in turmoil like a squall of birds. Finally there is the evasion of those with whom we have come. It is at the frontiers that the companions desert us—that the girl returns to the old country that we are alone.