The Good Place has not been; our star has warmed to birth
A race of promise that has never proved its worth;
The quick new West is false; and prodigious, but wrong This passive flower-like people who for so long In the Eighteen Provinces have constructed the earth.
XIV
Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real; The groping searchlights suddenly reveal The little natures that will make us cry,
Who never quite believed they could exist, Not where we were. They take us by surprise Like ugly long-forgotten memories, And like a conscience all the guns resist.
Behind each sociable home-loving eye The private massacres are taking place; All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.
The mountains cannot judge us when we lie: We dwell upon the earth; the earth obeys The intelligent and evil till they die.
•1 s
Engines bear them through the sky: they're free And isolated like the very rich; Remote like savants, they can only see The breathing city as a target which
Requires their skill; will never see how flying Is the creation of ideas they hate, Nor how their own machines are always trying To push through into life. They chose a fate
The islands where they live did not compel. Though earth may teach our proper discipline, At any time it will be possible
To turn away from freedom and become Bound like the heiress in her mother's womb, And helpless as the poor have always been.
XVI
Here war is simple like a monument: A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent; j
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
[
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon, i
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives, i
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon. l
But ideas can be true although men die, And we can watch a thousand faces Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now: t
Nanking; Dachau.
They are and suffer; that is all they do: A bandage hides the place where each is living, His knowledge of the world restricted to The treatment that the instruments are giving.
And lie apart like epochs from each other —Truth in their sense is how much they can bear; It is not talk like ours, but groans they smother— And are remote as plants; we stand elsewhere.
For who when healthy can become a foot? Even a scratch we can't recall when cured, But are boisterous in a moment and believe
In the common world of the uninjured, and cannot Imagine isolation. Only happiness is shared, And anger, and the idea of love.
XVIII
Far from the heart of culture he was used: Abandoned by his general and his lice, Under a padded quilt he closed his eyes And vanished. He will not be introduced
When this campaign is tidied into books: No vital knowledge perished in his skull; His jokes were stale; like wartime, he was dull; His name is lost for ever like his looks.
He neither knew nor chose the Good, but taught us, And added meaning like a comma, when He turned to dust in China that our daughters
Be fit to love the earth, and not again Disgraced before the dogs; that, where are waters, Mountains and houses, may be also men.
But in the evening the oppression lifted; The peaks came into focus; it had rained: Across the lawns and cultured flowers drifted The conversation of the highly trained.
The gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;
A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,
For them to finish their exchange of views; |
It seemed a picture of the private life. I
.I.
Far off, no matter what good they intended, The armies waited for a verbal error With all the instruments for causing pain:
And on the issue of their charm depended A land laid waste, with all its young men slain, The women weeping, and the towns in terror.
They carry terror with them like a purse,
And flinch from the horizon like a gun; |
And all the rivers and the railways run
Away from Neighbourhood as from a curse.
They cling and huddle in the new disaster
Like children sent to school, and cry in turn;
For Space has rules they cannot hope to learn, |
Time speaks a language they will never master.
We live here. We lie in the Present's unopened i
Sorrow; its limits are what we are. '
The prisoner ought never to pardon his cell.
Can future ages ever escape so far,
Yet feel derived from everything that happened,
Even from us, that even this was well?
The life of man is never quite completed;
The daring and the chatter will go on:
But, as an artist feels his power gone,
These walk the earth and know themselves defeated.
Some could not bear nor break the young and mourn for The wounded myths that once made nations good, Some lost a world they never understood, Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.
Loss is their shadow-wife, Anxiety Receives them like a grand hotel; but where They may regret they must; their life, to hear.
The call of the forbidden cities, see
The stranger watch them with a happy stare,
And Freedom hostile in each home and tree.
XXII
Simple like all dream wishes, they employ The elementary language of the heart, And speak to muscles of the need for joy: The dying and the lovers soon to part
Hear them and have to whistle. Always new, They mirror every change in our position; They are our evidence of what we do; They speak directly to our lost condition.
Think in this year what pleased the dancers best: When Austria died and China was forsaken, Shanghai in flames and Teruel re-taken,
France put her case before the world: "Partout
II y a de la joie." America addressed
The earth: "Do you love me as I love you?"
When all the apparatus of report Confirms the triumph of our enemies; Our bastion pierced, our army in retreat, Violence sucGessful like a new disease,
And Wrong a charmer everywhere invited; When we regret that we were ever born: Let us remember all who seemed deserted.
To-night in China let me think of one, I
'I
Who through ten years of silence worked and waited, '
Until in Muzot all his powers spoke, And everything was given once for alclass="underline"
And with the gratitude of the Completed He went out in the winter night to stroke That little tower like a great animal.
I
No, not their names. It was the others who built |
Each great coercive avenue and square, j
Where men can only recollect and stare, The really lonely with the sense of guilt
Who wanted to persist like that for ever; The unloved had to leave material traces: But these need nothing but our better faces, And dwell in them, and know that we shall never
Remember who we are nor why we're needed. Earth grew them as a bay grows fishermen Or hills a shepherd; they grew ripe and seeded;
And the seeds clung to us ; even our blood Was able to revive them; and they grew again; Happy their wish and mild to flower and flood.
Nothing is given: we must find our law. Great buildings jostle in the sun for domination; Behind them stretch like sorry vegetation The low recessive houses of the poor.
We have no destiny assigned us: Nothing is certain but the body; we plan To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us Of the equality of man.
Children are really loved here, even by police: They speak of years before the big were lonely, And will be lost.
And only
The brass bands throbbing in the parks foretell Some future reign of happiness and peace.
We learn to pity and rebel.
XXVI