The line ‘twixt Mond and Demi-Mond,

  ‘Twixt Getting On — or Out.

  The Citizen will take his share

  (In every sense) as bull and bear;

  Nor need this oral ditty

  Invoke the philologic pen

  To show you that a Citizen

  Means Something in the City.

  Thus gains he, with the virile gown,

  The fasces and the civic crown,

  The forum of the free;

  Not more to Rome’s high law allied

  Is Devonport in all his pride

  Or Lipton’s self than he.

  For he will learn, if he will try,

  The deep interior truths whereby

  We rule the Commonwealth;

  What is the Food-Controller’s fee

  And whether the Health Ministry

  Are in it for their health.

  SONGS OF EDUCATION:

  V. THE HIGHER MATHEMATICS

  Form 339125, Sub-Section M

  Twice one is two,

  Twice two is four,

  But twice two is ninety-six if you know the way to score.

  Half of two is one,

  Half of four is two,

  But half of four is forty per cent. if your name is Montagu:

  For everything else is on the square

  If done by the best quadratics;

  And nothing is low in High Finance

  Or the Higher Mathematics.

  A straight line is straight

  And a square mile is flat:

  But you learn in trigonometrics a trick worth two of that.

  Two straight lines

  Can’t enclose a Space,

  But they can enclose a Corner to support the Chosen Race:

  For you never know what Dynamics do

  With the lower truths of Statics;

  And half of two is a touring car

  In the Higher Mathematics.

  There is a place apart

  Beyond the solar ray,

  Where parallel straight lines can meet in an unofficial way.

  There is a room that holds

  The examiner or his clerks,

  Where you can square the circle or the man that gives the marks.

  Where you hide in the cellar and then look down

  On the poets that live in the attics;

  For the whole of the house is upside down

  In the Higher Mathematics.

  SONGS OF EDUCATION:

  VI. HYGIENE

  Form 394411102, Sub-Section X

  “All practical Eugenists are agreed on the importance of

  sleep.” — The Eugenic Congress.

  When Science taught mankind to breathe

  A little while ago,

  Only a wise and thoughtful few

  Were really in the know:

  Nor could the Youth his features wreathe,

  Puffing from all the lungs beneath:

  When Duty whispered softly “Breathe!”

  The Youth would answer “Blow!”

  When Science proved with lucid care

  The need of Exercise,

  Our thoughtless Youth was climbing trees

  Or lightly blacking eyes:

  To reckless idlers breaking bounds

  For football or for hare-and-hounds,

  Or fighting hard for fourteen rounds,

  It came as a surprise.

  But when she boldly counsels Sleep

  To persons when in bed,

  Then, then indeed men blush to see

  The daybreak blushing red:

  The early risers whom we term

  Healthy, grow sickly and infirm;

  The Early Bird who caught the Worm

  Will catch the Germ instead.

  For this at least be Science praised

  If all the rest be rot,

  That now she snubs the priggish child

  That quits too soon his cot:

  The pharisaic pachyderm

  Of spiritual pride shall squirm:

  The Early Bird catches the worm,

  The Worm that dieth not.

  GLORIA IN PROFUNDIS

  GLORIA IN PROFUNDIS

  (Chorus from an Unfinished Play)

  There has fallen on earth for a token

  A god too great for the sky.

  He has burst out of all things and broken

  The bounds of eternity:

  Into time and the terminal land

  He has strayed like a thief or a lover,

  For the wine of the world brims over,

  Its splendour is spilt on the sand.

  Who is proud when the heavens are humble,

  Who mounts if the mountains fall,

  If the fixed suns topple and tumble

  And a deluge of love drown all —

  Who rears up his head for a crown,

  Who holds up his will for a warrant,

  Who strives with the starry torrent

  When all that is good goes down?

  For in dread of such falling and failing

  The Fallen Angels fell

  Inverted in insolence, scaling

  The hanging mountain of hell:

  But unmeasured of plummet and rod

  Too deep for their sight to scan,

  Outrushing the fall of man

  Is the height of the fall of God.

  Glory to God in the Lowest

  The spout of the stars in spate —

  Where the thunderbolt thinks to be slowest

  And the lightning fears to be late:

  As men dive for a sunken gem

  Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,

  The fallen star that has found it

  In the cavern of Bethlehem.

  UBI ECCLESIA

  UBI ECCLESIA

  “You must seek a castle east of the sun and west of the moon.”

  “For as the lightning cometh out of the east

  and shineth even unto the west, so shall also the

  coming of the Son of Man be.” — St. Matthew, XXIV. 27.

  Our Castle is East of the Sun

  Aiid our Castle is West of the Moon

  So wisely hidden from all the wise

  In a twist of the air, in a fold of the skies,

  They go East, they go West, of the land where it lies

  And a fool finds it soon.

  Our Castle is East of the Sun

  And abides not the law of the sunlight

  The last long shot of Apollo

  Falls spent ere i t strikes the tower

  Far East of the steep, of the strong.

  Going up of the golden horses.

  Strange suns have governed our going.

  Strange dials the day and the hour.

  With hearts not fed of Demeter

  With thoughts unappeased of Athene

  We have groped through the earth’s dead daylight

  To a night that is more, not less:

  We have seen his star in the East

  That is dark as a cloud from the westward

  To the Roman a reek out of Asia

  To the Greeks foolishness.

  For the sun is not lord but a servant

  Of the secret sun we have seen

  The sun of the crypt and the cavern

  The crown of a secret queen

  Where things are not what they seem

  But what they mean.

  But our Castle is West of the Moon

  Nor the Moon hath lordship upon it

  The Horns and the horsemen crying

  On their great ungraven God:

  And West of the moons of magic

  And the sleep of the moon-faced idols

  And the great moon-colored crystal

  Where the Mages mutter and nod:

  The black and the purple poppies

  That grow in Gautama’s garden

  Have waved not ever upon us

  The smell of their sweet despair

  And the yellow masks of the Ancients

  Looking west from their tinkling temples

  See Hope on our hill Mountjoy,

  And the dawn and the dancers there.

  For the moon is not lord but a servant

  Of the Smile more bright than the sun

  And all they desire and despair of

  And weary of winning is won

  In our Castle of Joyous Garde

  Desired and done.

  So abides it dim in the midmost

  The Bridge called Both-and-Neither,

  To the East a wind from the westward

  To the West a light from the East;

  But the map is not made of man

  That can plot out its place under heaven.

  That is counted and lost and left over

  The largest thing and the least.

  For our Castle is East of the Sun

  And our Castle is West of the Moon

  And the dark labyrinthine charts of the wise

  Point East and point West of the land where it lies

  And a Pool walks blind on the highway

  And finds it soon.

  THE GRAVE OF ARTHUR

  THE GRAVE OF ARTHUR

  Down through the rocks where the dark roots dry,

  The last long roots of the Glaston Thorn,

  Dead is the King that never was born,

  Dead is the King that never shall die.

  They found him between the pyramids

  In the subterranean land, men say,

  And there was not rending nor rolling

  Of linen nor lifting of coffin-lids,

  But the giant bones like the columns lie,

  The far-flung towers of a flattened city

  That is dead with a doom too old for pity

  (Dead is the King who does not die).

  Coiled on his left from neck to knee,

  Huge and hollow the horn is curled,

  White as the worm that devours the world,

  Carved with the cold white snakes of the sea.

  Flat on his right, in the dust grown grey,

  Is patterned the vast cross-hilted sword

  Graven with the Coming of Christ the Lord,

  Gold with the trumpets of Judgment Day.

  Between the first and the last he lies

  And between the false and the true dreams he:

  Born without birth of a fabled sea

  Amoured in death till the dead shall rise.

  And back and forth as a tolling bell

  And forth and backward the Roman rhyme

  Rolls in a ring that mocks at time

  Tolling the truth that none can tell.

  In the high still hollow where Time is not

  Or all times turn and exchange and borrow

  In the glass wherein God remembers tomorrow

  And truth looks forward to times forgot.

  Where God looks back on the days to be

  And heaven is yet hoping for yesterday;

  The light in which time shall be taken away

  And the soul that faces all ways is free,

  The rune shall be read though it twist and turn,

  And the riddle be learnt that is past all learning,

  Of the Man unborn who is ever returning

  And ever delaying, till God return.

  And for ever and ever till death discover

  Why truth speaks double in dreams and day;

  And the Myth and the Man that wandered away

  Make tryst together as lover to lover,

  A dream shall wail through the worm-shaped horn

  “Dead is a King that never was born”

  And a trumpet of truth from the Cross reply

  “Dead is the King who shall not die.”

  NEW POEMS

  CONTENTS

  The Judgment of England

  The Monster

  The Modern Manichee

  The Port of London Authority

  By a Reactionary

  A Broad Minded Bishop Rebukes

  The Battle of the Stories (1915)

  To the Unknown Warrior

  To a Lady

  The World State

  The Old Gentleman in the Park

  The Buried City

  Namesake

  Outline of History

  On a Prohibitionist Poem

  The Modern Magic

  Lines to an Old Pro-Boer Who Asked for

  The Apology of Bottom the Weaver

  The New Omar

  Américanisation

  Alliterativism (1914)

  Race-Memory

  A Patriotic Song

  Some Wishes at Xmas

  Commercial Candour

  Human Nature: or Marconi Memories

  The Peace of Petrol

  To a Holy Roller

  The New Fiction

  Answers to the Poets

  Variations on an Air: Composed on Having to

  A Ballad of Abbreviations

  A Song of Self-Esteem

  A Song of Moderation

  The Judgment of England

  ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening woes a prey

  Where Wealth accumulates and Men decay.’

  So rang of old the noble voice in vain

  O’er the Last Peasants wandering on the plain,

  Doom has reversed the riddle and the rhyme,

  While sinks the commerce reared upon that crime,

  The thriftless towns litter with lives undone,

  To whom our madness left no joy but one;

  And irony that glares like Judgment Day

  Sees Men accumulate and Wealth decay.

  The Monster

  ‘The degenerate Greek intellect wasted itself in

  futile debates about the dual nature of Christ.’

  MAGAZINE ARTICLE

  One with the golden eagle of the morning,

  Flat and flung wide above the spinning plains,

  It seemed my spirit sprang and wheeled and flew.

  The world went under us like a river of light,

  An ecstasy of order, where each life,

  Rejoicing in its law, rushed to its end:

  To break itself and breed; the embattled vines,

  Grassland and grainland waved their thousand spears

  In one wild rhythm as they swept along,

  A map of marching armies, all one way;

  And ploughmen on their uplands ribbed with gold,

  Went forward happy, with their backs to heaven.

  Only the sacred eagle up the stream

  Strove back to his beginnings; left behind

  The white archaic dawns on herb less hills,

  The first cold hues of chaos; like a stair

  Mounted the soundless cataracts of the sun,

  Seeking the sun of suns; till suddenly

  The last heavens opened; for one flash 1 saw

  Something too large and calm for sight or reason,

  The Urns of Evil and Good, vast as two worlds,

  And over them a larger face than Fate’s

  Of that first Will that is when all was not.

  But that unblinded burning eagle soared

  And perched upon His thunderous right hand.

  I cowered, and heard a cry torn out of me

  In an unknown tongue older than all my race,

  ‘O Father of Gods and Men’; and saw no more.

  The vulture from his dark and hairy nest

  Far down the low-browed cliffs of the abyss

  Stood black against the sun; a shape of shame:

  A plumed eclipse; and all the ways of men

  Were paved with upturned faces; masks of hate:

  For that hooked head was like a horrible tool,

  An instrument of torture made alive

  With creaking pinions; for what end they knew:

  The vulture of the vengeance of the gods.

  For a red under-light on all that land,

  A hell that is the underside of heaven,

  Glowed from men’s struggling fires; and as I followed

  That evil bird over lost battle-fields,

  Where panoplied and like fallen palaces

  The great and foolish kings who warred with doom

  Lay sunken with their star; I saw far off,

  Misshapen, against the dark red dome of sky,

  A mountain on a mountain. As I gazed

  The shape seemed changed: the upper mountain moved.

  It heaved vast flanks ribbed like the red-ribbed hills,

  Thrust down an uprooted forest with one heel

  And stretched a Titan’s arm to touch the sky.

  ‘You slay for ever, but you slay too late;

  A stolen secret turns not home again.

  While I lie lifted high against your wrath.

  Hanged on this gibbet of rock, far down below

  The fire is spreading on the earth’s dark plains

  And my red stars come forth like flowers of night

  And my red sun bums when your white sun dies.

  See where man’s watchfire dances and derides,

  The sickly servile sunset crawling away:

  Lo; my red banner thrashes through the air,

  Nor dare your vulture peck it if he pass.’

  The vulture passed, a shadow on the fire,

  And the dark hills were loud with dreadful cries.

  I woke; the skies were empty of the eagle,

  And empty of the vulture all the abyss:

  And something in the yawning silence cried

  Giants and gods were dying in new dawns:

  Daylight itself had deepened; there opened in it

  New depths or new dimensions; stone and tree

  In that strange light grew solid; as does a statue

  Or many-sided monument set beside

  The flattened fables on a bas-relief.

  Only in dark thin lines against the dawn

  The last and lingering monsters limped away,

  The boys with crooked legs and cries of goats

  Ran as from one pursuing; amid the weeds

  Wailed the strange women, neither fish nor flesh,

  And from the hoary splendours of the sea

  Rose Triton with the limbs that curled like whirlpools,

  Stonily staring at some sign afar.

  For a new light in a new silence shone

  From some new nameless quarter of the sky