Archibald MacLeish

“ What can I do? Can I put roots into the earth?
Can leaves grow out of me? Can I bear leaves
Like the thorn, the lilac—
Why did you not come?
Why did you let me go then if you knew?
They seemed to be waiting,
The willow-trees by the wall,
Fidgeting with the sea wind in their branches,
Unquiet in the warm air.
She stood between them. She said,
You who have set your candles toward the sea
Two nights already and no sound
Only the water,
Tell me, do the dead come out of the sea?
Does the spring come from the sea?
Does the dead god
Come again from the water? ”

“ It is time. I wait.
[The storm drops suddenly. In the hush the fire grows brighter, and the figure of Helen suddenly becomes a glow of light.]
Fritz
Look! Lo! She moves—her hands are raised—she speaks.
Helen
Yea, I am she whom men call Helen, maid
Of Troy. Long years the beauty Paris loved
Has been a stir of corn-flowers by that sea
Where memory is a tide and summers fade
Into the past like shadows.
Faustus
⁠'Tis a trick!
A dream! A phantasy! The dead are dead.
These are no words! A shadow—
Helen
⁠I am she
Whose flesh is dust, whose flesh can never die ”

“ As like, he said, as what we see of it
Is like and wider than the unseen sea—
Wider because the sea's not infinite
But banked and shored from possibility,
While what we see, because we cannot know
From maps or charts how far it should extend,
Is greater than the ocean and may flow
Over horizons till horizons end.
You have no bounds to me but my defect
Of eyes to see if there is more beyond,
And if I watch as they do who expect
Some sign, some drift of green, some lily frond
Borne out of unknown Indies in the west,
I watch your sea for shores you've not confessed. ”

“ From the sea, from the salt pools, from the stale water?
I have heard the summer drip into the sea.
I have heard rain-rotted summer in the sluices
Foaming. I have seen the yellow spill
Of last year’s summer—
The sound of the sea breaking beyond the wall
Was surd, flat, stopped as the voice of a deaf woman.
Dead leaves tiptoed in the path.
The trees listened—
And she saw the blind moon climb through the colorless air,
Through the willow branches. She could feel the moon
Lifting the numb water, and the sea fill.
She thought, The spring will come now overflowing
The clean earth. ”

“ To holding lands and livings in its trusts—
Is beauty such a value as we know?
Shall we weigh symmetry in sterling's worth?
Shall equity protect a woman's throat
Against the painter's interest in his paint?
The bill should be dismissed.
⁠Ah, that's well done,
⁠That's very well. I see them nod and bow
⁠And echo what I've said; I see—I see—
⁠Nay, nothing but a beauty such as time
⁠In all its ebb and flow against this earth
⁠Has never yet tossed, like a tinted shell,
⁠High on the echoing beaches that look out
⁠Toward the faint lights of the voyaging stars. ”

“ How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,—
All shall be shard of broken memories.
And there shall linger other, magic things,—
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotten harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,
The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings
About the college yard, where endlessly
The dead go up and down. These things shall be
Enchantment of our hearts' rememberings. ”

“ Beyond the farthest echo of to-day,
And all our hearts immortalized is dead,
And all our love dreamed amaranth is grey—
Think you a broken net of silver thread
Could mark the world how joyous was life's May? ”

“ As though he stood upon the farthest shore
Of wonder and awaited there the bloom
Of moonrise on the sea. O, surely here,
Here in this heart of silence he should find
That something sought which now as he came near
Was like moonrise and music in his mind.
Here, surely here, his very flesh should know
Beauty that has no knowledge in the flesh,
And beauty known within that mortal mesh
Should be immortal and true beauty show. ”

“ Of scarf and leaf and laughter—ay, it was
The scene for her; she sat, self-mimicking,
The center of her central-whirling world,
And tuned her mood to mockery, and skirled
A showman's lilting flourish on the string. ”

“ I loved her for her laugh that could but die,
I loved her face that death should overcast,
I loved her but a day and it was past,—
And so I love her till all loves are by:
Moments and moonlight doth the heart hold fast. ”

“ What will they do—
We are having a late spring, we are having
The snow in April, the grass heaving
Under the wet snow, the grass
Burdened and nothing blossoms, grows
In the fields nothing and the garden fallow,
And now the wild birds follow
The wild birds and the thrush is tame.
Well, there is time still, there is time.
To-morrow there will be to-morrow
And summer swelling through the marrow
Of the cold trees.
Wait! Let us wait!
Let us wait until to-morrow. The wet
Snow wrinkles, it will rot,
It will moulder at the root
Of the oak-tree. Wait! ”

“ I heard the fairies keening on the uplands all night long,
A-weeping soft and sadly for their queen;
"She's vanished like the echo of her own forlorn sweet song,
She's turned our twilight dance to twilight teen.
"Oh, dreams are only dim desires, and songs are only tunes,
The flowers deck the graves of other years,
The Springs are fleeting children of a thousand fleeting Junes,
And only old and endless are our tears." ”

“ So mirrored in thy heart are all desires,
Eternal longings, Youth's inheritance,
All hopes that token immortality,
All griefs whereto immortal grief aspires.
Aweary of a world's reality,
I dream above the imaged pool, Romance. ”

“ At this; called Death's reflection to Love's glass,
And blurred the image with a laugh, afraid.
Now Death is come and gone, the solemn mass
Low sung, the mirror shattered; fancies pass,
And heart in heart we weep Love's body laid. ”

“ Has stirred the cypress-leaves at eventide,
When night has stilled forever Life's white throat,
And his gold lute lies shattered by his side,
We two shall follow through a world remote
The silence whereinto Love's music died. ”

“ Has lifted back the heavy stone and stands
Aflame with morning; what then if it be
Death, not the lily, shining in his hands?
Already, ere the first reveilles roll,
Our death is swallowed up in victory. ”

“ Reliance on the beautiful, blind trust
In love's eternity of life, dost screen
My heart from my own heart's most bitter thrust,
Making my love, late stained with this world's dust,
Thy happiness, thy glory, and thy teen. ”

“ To seal upon the brain, who in the blood
Are so intense a pulse, so swift a flood
Of beauty, such unceasing instancy.
Dear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,
All beauty has become your dwelling place. ”

“ Why should I think of spring in France
When each new April's new mischance
Of gypsy magic and green change
Leaves earth familiarly strange?
Were there not springs before that spring?
Was there not whist and whispering
Of wind in willow until then? ”

“ Into to-morrow;
⁠There go
The seed of God
Toward the furrow;
⁠I know
Where shines the sun
On windy spaces,
⁠Where low
The shadows run,
The swallow races;
⁠But Oh!
When youth is gone
The glory passes. ”

“ And weary of man's seeking, and the mage
Of subtle-changing earth and that vast sky
Where wonder walks, shall we sail curious
To do the last adventure. Oh, not thus,
Not satisfied with living, shall we die. ”

“ But you, for you old magics yet remain
Of restless whispering winds that press along
Dim casements of the sense-enshuttered brain.
Beauty has called you, and the worlds that wane
From crescent into crescent of thin song. ”

“ Goes out leaving an afterward
Of trees no more
nor even
The whole sun
No
Within
The buried staring eyes of one
A long time dead, long drowned, there stands
Still fixed upon impenetrable skies
The small black circle of the sun. ”

“ She was so young, so swift to love, so slow—
Waiting the lover perfect every way—
To guess the thing was love and would not stay.
She never thought to die. She did not know
Her spring, put off, forestalled, would never blow. ”

“ They say, Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them.
They say, Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say: it is you who must say this.
They say, We leave you our deaths: give them their meaning: give them an end to the war and a true peace: give them a victory that ends the war and a peace afterwards: give them their meaning.
We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.
One or more copyright licenses apply to this work. ”

“ Her breath came so much faster than the sea—
And walking home from school, that Syrian woman,
That—"Mrs. what did they call her"—the Syrian
Up at the corner, she gave her a blood-root flower
With white petals and the scarlet ooze
Where the stem was broken. She said, In my country
The feet of spring are stained with the red blood,
The women go into the hills with flowers
Dark like blood, they have a song of one
Dead and the spring blossoming from his blood—
And he comes again, they say, when the spring comes. ”

“ Shall mind fear death that knows within itself
All life and all begetting and all end?
[There is a sound of thunder and the rain beats heavily at door and window. Faustus goes to the hearth. The candles have guttered down and are now dead. The students lean over the table watching him. Suddenly he stands erect, flinging a handful of ashes on the fire. The flames sink, then rise in a great flare. Helen of Troy stands on the hearth. She is naked and her limbs shine like silver in the light. Her hands are at her breast. Faustus steps back.] ”

“ With hot undoubting—where the swallow darts
Find an enduring grace,
And in a face
Unchanging beauty there—
Only our hearts, when beauty has impair,
And lovely strangeness is in death more strange,
Imagine change. ”

“ That withdrawing leaves thereunder
Vanishing, dim legends where it clomb.
Unforgotten, unremembered
Shall thy beauty haunt the brain
Like old magic cities embered
Where the golden sunsets wane;—
Ah, my love let be to-morrow! ”

“ From thigh to throat was still the Egg's design
To propagate leviathan and serve
The toad's eternity,—and only fine
Because he chose, and chose to misdivine.
(3)
Man is immortal, for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever—why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth. ”

“ Clean washed in anger and the fighter's pride,
Unearthed of ease,
And down those burning skies
Fell like a shattered star.
O Rosa Mundi—in the rose that dies
Something there is, not mystical and far,
But dear, familiar, sure,
As in a dream the hazy voices are,
Something that lives, that lives, that lives, that does endure. ”

“ What fool desires a woman that no arms
May crush the wine of, and no lips find sweet?
All
Helen of Troy, Call Helen up, Call Helen!
Matthiolus
Show us that mind can fashion out of air
The beauty that the flesh surrendered up. ”

“ Is there no cup but this wherefrom have sipped
Sad men and earthy since the morning's sun?
Must we then taste their sorrow where they lipped
The edge of lust and take our passion up
Bitter already from the common cup? ”

“ The blood-root stem—and on the Baalbec road
Young men with garlands of anemones
And naked girls in girdles of wild rose
Splashed the thick dust from their thudding feet
And the sunlight jingled into grains of gold
And away off, away off, far away
The singing on the mountain—
Shall we go
Up through the Gorge or round by Ryan’s place? ”

“ Never stop the piping of the Pan god's tune:—
⁠"Life's a music hath no word,
⁠Death's a lute no hand has stirred,
Eternity's a rondeau in an old, old rune."
⁠Never stop their piping there,
⁠Never yield them—never spare,
⁠Lest thou dream Christ's lily fair—
⁠More fair than thou. ”