Divinely Superfluous Beauty

The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,
Over and under the ocean ...
Divinely superfluous beauty
Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
And hills tower, waves fall.
The incredible beauty of joy
Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too
Be joined, there is not a maiden
Burns and thirsts for love
More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings
Weave like a web in the air
Divinely superfluous beauty.


The Bloody Sire

It is not bad.  Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

Who would remember Helen’s face
Lacking the terrible halo of spears?
Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,
The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?
Violence, the bloody sire of all the world’s values.

Never weep, let them play,
Old violence is not too old to beget new values.



The House Dog’s Grave

I've changed my ways a little; I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream; and you,
If you dream a moment,
You see me there.

So leave awhile the paw-marks on the front door
Where I used to scratch to go out or in,
And you'd soon open; leave on the kitchen floor
The marks of my drinking-pan.

I cannot lie by your fire as I used to do
On the warm stone,
Nor at the foot of your bed; no,
All the nights through
I lie alone.

But your kind thought has laid me less than six feet
Outside your window where firelight so often plays,
And where you sit to read—and I fear often grieving for me—
Every night your lamplight lies on my place.

You, man and woman, live so long it is hard
To think of you ever dying.
A little dog would get tired living so long.
I hope that when you are lying

Under the ground like me your lives will appear
As good and joyful as mine.
 No, dears, that's too much hope:
You are not so well cared for
As I have been.
And never have known the passionate undivided
Fidelities that I knew.
Your minds are perhaps too active, too many-sided...
But to me you were true.

You were never masters, but friends. I was your friend.
I loved you well, and was loved. Deep love endures
To the end and far past the end. If this is my end,
I am not lonely. I am not afraid. I am still yours.



Return

A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.



Natural Music

The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child's; or like some girl's breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.



Love the Wild Swan

"I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
--This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.



The Eye

The Atlantic is a stormy moat; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific--
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of
faiths--
Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea--look west at the hill of water: it is half the
planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never
close;
his is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.



Advice to Pilgrims
That our senses lie and our minds trick us is true, but in general
They are honest rustics; trust them a little;
The senses more than the mind, and your own mind more than another man's.
As to the mind's pilot, intuition, ---
Catch him clean and stark naked, he is first of truth-tellers; dream-clothed,
or dirty
With fears and wishes, he is prince of liars.
The first fear is of death: trust no immortalist. The first desire
Is to be loved: trust no mother's son.
Finally I say let demagogues and world-redeemers babble their emptiness}
To empty ears; twice duped is too much.
Walk on gaunt shores and avoid the people; rock and wave are good
prophets;
Wise are the wing's of the gull, pleasant her song.



Doors To Peace

Sphere beyond sphere
Of blazing crystal . . . .
I see the half moon rise at midday
Over the rocks in the air’s clearness.
The spirit of the moon with blazing wings,
The arms uplifted, the eyes in ecstasy,
Stands on that crystal round, as the others
On the pale hills . . . and the ocean
Rounds like a dew-drop, the huge dome
Hangs inconceivably above,
The spirit spiring from it,
The arms uplifted, the eyes in ecstasy,
And though the sun’s not to be borne
I see the spirit of the sun standing
On the unendurable dome of crystal,
Not looking down at his adorers,
The arms uplifted, the eyes in ecstasy
. . . Toward whom?  Sphere beyond sphere,
Dome above dome the stars
Tower with winged figures
And the eyes of ecstasy . . .

I think they admire the silence
Outside the stars, what should light love
But that which having in itself
Enough, needs not to shine or move?
Love, motion, light, and change, imply
Inward insufficiency;

God’s other shore knows none; they die
And all the suns will die to see.

I think . . . I think says the brain . . .
But little spire with the eyes of ecstasy
On the brain’s dome is the life,
Not thinking anything,
But flaming . . . little fool you will cease
Flaming when you flame up to peace.



Night

The ebb slips from the rock, the sunken 

Tide-rocks lift streaming shoulders
Out of the slack, the slow west
Sombering its torch; a ship's light 

Shows faintly, far out,

Over the weight of the prone ocean
On the low cloud. 



Over the dark mountain, over the dark pinewood, 

Down the long dark valley along the shrunken river, 

Returns the splendor without rays, the shining of shadow, 

Peace-bnnger, the matrix of all shining and quieter of shining. 

Where the shore widens on the bay she opens dark wings 

And the ocean accepts her glory. O soul worshipful of her 

You like the ocean have grave depths where she dwells always, 

And the film of waves above that takes the sun takes also 

Her, with more love. The sun-lovers have a blond favorite, 

A father of lights and noises, wars, weeping and laughter, 

Hot labor, lust and delight and the other blemishes. Quietness 

Flows from her deeper fountain, and he will die, and she is 
immortal. 



Far off from here the slender 


Flocks of the mountain forest


Move among stems like towers 


Of the old redwoods to the stream, 


No twig crackling; dip shy 


Wild muzzles into the mountain water 


Among the dark ferns. 




O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon 


The blasphemies of glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the 

fretfulness 


Of cities, the cressets of the planets, the pride of the stars.
This August night in a rift of cloud Antares reddens, 

The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children, 

The earth's orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire
Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you O Night 

What? Not a spark? What flicker of a spark in the faint far 

glimmer
Of a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sand-pit the 

Bedouins 

Wandered from at dawn . . . Ah singing prayer to what gulfs 

tempted 


Suddenly are you more lost? To us the near-hand mountain 

Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a 

measure of
continuance.



The tide, moving the night's 

Vastness with lonely voices,


Turns, the deep dark-shining 


Pacific leans on the land, 


Feeling his cold strength 


To the outmost margins: you Night will resume 


The stars in your time. 



O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward? 

Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus, 

Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think silence.
The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness. 

And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately 

Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward 

The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg, 

The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory 

Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.


And I and my people, we are willing to love the four-score years 

Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor. 



Have men's minds changed, 


Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul 


Broken the surface. A few centuries 


Gone by, was none dared not to people 


The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier, 


And death is no evil.



Diagram

Look, there are two curves in the air: the air
That man’s fate breathes: there is the rise and fall of the Christian
culture-complex, that broke its dawn-cloud
Fifteen centuries ago, and now past noon
Drifts to decline; and there’s the yet vaster curve, but mostly in the future,
of the age that began at Kittyhawk
Within one’s lifetime.—The fire of these curves passing its noon and the
second orient
All in one’s little lifetime make it seem pivotal.
Truly the time is marked by insane splendors and agonies.  But watch when
The two curves cross: you children
Not far away down the hawk’s-nightmare future: you will see monsters.



Credo

My, friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from
the young blue-gum

And gazing upon it gathering and quieting

The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt,
the actual

Appalling presence, the power of the waters.

He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found
in my blood

Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.

Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is
only

The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of
reality. The mind

Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-
breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.