John Masefield

“ That takes from man its power to live a term
Served by live cells of which it is the King.
Can it be blood and brain? It is most great,
Through blood and brain alone it wrestles Fate.
X
Can it be blood and brain, this transient force
Which, by an impulse, seizes flesh and grows
To man, the thing less splendid than the horse,
More blind than owls, less lovely than the rose?
O, by a power unknown it works the cells
Of blood and brain; it has the power to see
Beyond the apparent thing the something else
Which it inspires dust to bring to be. ”

“ As their shadows pass.
Men are burning the gorse on the down's shoulder,
A drift of smoke
Glitters with fire and hangs, and the skies smoulder,
And the lungs choke.
Once the tribe did thus on the downs, on these downs, burning
Men in the frame,
Crying to the gods of the downs till their brains were turning
And the gods came.
And to-day on the downs, in the wind, the hawks, the grasses,
In blood and air,
Something passes me and cries as it passes,
On the chalk downland bare.
XXI
No man takes the farm,
Nothing grows there,
The ivy's arm
Strangles the rose there. ”

“ There is no Sower, nor seed for any tillage;
Nothing but the grey brain's pash, and the tense will
And that poor fool of the Being's little village
Feeling for the truth in the little veins that thrill.
There is no Sowing, but digging, year by year,
In a hill's heart, now one way, now another,
Till the rock breaks and the valley is made clear
And the poor Fool stands, and knows the sun for his brother
And the Soul shakes wings like a bird escaped from cage
And the tribe moves on to camp in its heritage. ”

“ Lies yet the seed, the spirit's quickening corn,
That Time and Sun will change out of the cell
Into green meadows, in the world unborn;
If Beauty be a dream, do but resolve
And fire shall come, that in the stubborn clay
Works to make perfect till the rocks dissolve,
The barriers burst and Beauty takes her way,
Beauty herself, within whose blossoming Spring
Even wretched man shall clap his hands and sing. ”

“ Know the red spirit of the beast,
Be the green grain;
Escape from prison.
IX
What is this life which uses living cells
It knows not how nor why, for no known end,
This soul of man upon whose fragile shells
Of blood and brain his very powers depend?
Pour out its little blood or touch its brain
The thing is helpless, gone, no longer known,
The carrion cells are never man again,
No hand relights the little candle blown. ”

“ Nor how the earth conspires to make the rose;
But from the dust and from the wetted mud
Comes help, given or taken; so with me
Deep in my brain the essence of my blood
Shall give it stature until Beauty be.
It will look down, even as the burning flower
Smiles upon June, long after I am gone.
Dust-footed Time will never tell its hour,
Through dusty Time its rose will draw men on,
Through dusty Time its beauty shall make plain
Man, and, Without, a spirit scattering grain.
XIII
Ah, but Without there is no spirit scattering ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1967, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 55 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”

“ XX Up on the downs the red-eyed kestrels hover XXI No man takes the farm XXII A hundred years ago, they quarried for the stone here XXIII Here the legion halted, here the ranks were broken XXIV We danced away care till the fiddler's eyes blinked
LOLLINGDON DOWNS AND OTHER POEMS
I
So I have known this life,
These beads of coloured days,
This self the string.
What is this thing?
Not beauty; no; not greed,
O, not indeed ”