POETRY
The Senses
Lo, as a garden-wandering bee,
The soul seeks out her immortality
From all the growths and blossoms manifold
Which in this life men hold
As things material: plying busy rounds,
From the world's odours, sights, and sounds
To fill her honied stores.
From the perfume acrid-sweet of dead leaves burning
When autumn sunsets into dusk are turning:
From the breath of damp stone floors
And paraffin, pervading the cool porches
And aisles of village churches:
From the tepid, flat, mechanic exhalations
Of desolate tube-stations:
From woody savours stirred when children wrench
Tufts out of deep moss-beds: from the subtle stench
Of bad cigars and household slops, begetting
Delighted memory
Of sunny towns in France and Italy:
From the stronger, tawnier stink of dust and sweat
And camel-dung which haunts the glaring East;
And the heavy, sweet, heart-piercing odours breathed
From pale large lilies and narcissus wreathed
Round some dear head deceased.
Such smells as these, and of the sights,
The gleam on blue May nights
Of the young moon in high ancestral boughs
Among the scant young leaves:
And in the wake of the moving ploughs
The shining earth that, as the straight share cleaves,
Turns flowingly over: and the half-seen sweep
Of the high circles and the looming hollow
Of the dark opera-house, where through the leap
And lapse of the music unseen hundreds follow
The curtain's slow ascent:
And the rosy apple-blossom on the bent
And knotted bough, against the blue of heaven:
And the sudden rainbows riven
By the salt breeze from the billows many-leaping
In the sunny Mediterranean.
And of things heard,
The cooling whisper of summer breezes sweeping
The grey-green barley-fields: and the echoes stirred
By music interwoven in some dim-lighted
Cavernous cathedral: and the eighteen-pounders'
Buoyant drum-beats and hisses and whoops united
In a hurricane-barrage: and the clear laughter and shouting
Of girls in old green gardens playing rounders:
And the ripple of fountains spouting
Over marble nymphs and dolphins drenched and cool
To the sun-splashed fountain-pool,
Where golden in the Tuscan sun
The age-worn palace sleeps.
But deep in all the immortal Spirit leaps
Unquenchably, the Imperishable One
To whom through all this multiplicity
Of scattered universes longingly
The Soul, world-wandering mendicant, upreaches
Imploring hands, and as an alms beseeches
The humble coin which buys that one small treasure
Beyond all worldly measure.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG