To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

I WHO am dead a thousand years,

And wrote this sweet archaic song,

Send you my words for messengers

The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,

Or ride secure in the cruel sky,

Or build consummate palaces

Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,

And statues and a bright-eyed love,

And foolish thoughts of good and ill,

And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind

That falls at eve our fancies blow,

And old Maeonides the blind

Said it three thousand years ago,

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,

Student of our sweet Engligh tongue,

Read out my words at night, alone:

I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,

And never shake you by the hand,

I send my soul through time and space

To greet you. You will understand.

James Elroy Flecker

Gates of Damascus

    FOUR great gates has the city of Damascus
       And four Great Wardens, on their spears reclining,
    All day long stand like tall stone men
       And sleep on the towers when the moon is shining.

This is the song of the East Gate Warden

When he locks the great gate and smokes in his garden.

Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster's Cavern, Fort of Fear,

The Portal of Bagdad am I, and Doorway of Diarbekir.

The Persian Dawn with new desires may net the flushing mountain spires:

But my gaunt buttress still rejects the suppliance of those mellow fires.

Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing. Have you heard

That silence where the birds are dead yet something pipeth like a bird?

Pass not beneath! Men say there blows in stony deserts still a rose

But with no scarlet to her leaf--and from whose heart no perfume flows.

Wilt thou bloom red where she buds pale, thy sister rose? Wilt thou not fail

When noonday flashes like a flail? Leave nightingale the caravan!

Pass then, pass all! "Bagdad!" ye cry, and down the billows of blue sky

Ye beat the bell that beats to hell, and who shall thrust you back? Not I.

The Sun who flashes through the head and paints the shadows green and red,--

The Sun shall eat thy fleshless dead, O Caravan, O Caravan!

And one who licks his lips for thirst with fevered eyes shall face in fear

The palms that wave, the streams that burst, his last mirage, O Caravan!

And one--the bird-voiced Singing-man--shall fall behind thee, Caravan!

And God shall meet him in the night, and he shall sing as best he can.

And one the Bedouin shall slay, and one, sand-stricken on the way

Go dark and blind; and one shall say--"How lonely is the Caravan!"

Pass out beneath, O Caravan, Doom's Caravan, Death's Caravan!

I had not told ye, fools, so much, save that I heard your Singing-man.

This was sung by the West Gate's keeper

When heaven's hollow dome grew deeper.

I am the gate toward the sea: O sailor men, pass out from me!

I hear you high in Lebanon, singing the marvels of the sea.

The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea,

The snow-besprinkled wine of earth, the white-and-blue-flower foaming sea.

Beyond the sea are towns with towers, carved with lions and lily flowers,

And not a soul in all those lonely streets to while away the hours.

Beyond the towns, an isle where, bound, a naked giant bites the ground:

The shadow of a monstrous wing looms on his back: and still no sound.

Beyond the isle a rock that screams like madmen shouting in their dreams,

From whose dark issues night and day blood crashes in a thousand streams.

Beyond the rock is Restful Bay, where no wind breathes or ripple stirs,

And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Beyond the bay in utmost West old Solomon the Jewish King

Sits with his beard upon his breast, and grips and guards his magic ring:

And when that ring is stolen, he will rise in outraged majesty,

And take the World upon his back, and fling the World beyond the sea.

This is the song of the North Gate's master,

Who singeth fast, but drinketh faster.

I am the gay Aleppo Gate: a dawn, a dawn and thou art there:

Eat not thy heart with fear and care, O brother of the beast we hate!

Thou hast not many miles to tread, nor other foes than fleas to dread;

Homs shall behold thy morning meal and Hama see thee safe in bed.

Take to Aleppo filigrane, and take them paste of apricots,

And coffee tables botched with pearl, and little beaten brassware pots:

And thou shalt sell thy wares for thrice the Damascene retailers' price,

And buy a fat Armenian slave who smelleth odorous and nice.

Some men of noble stock were made: some glory in the murder-blade;

Some praise a Science or an Art, but I like honorable Trade!

Sell them the rotten, buy the ripe! Their heads are weak; their pockets burn.

Aleppo men are mighty fools. Salaam Aleikum! Safe return!

This is the song of the South Gate Holder,

A silver man, but his song is older.

I am the Gate that fears no fall: the Mihrab of Damascus wall,

The bridge of booming Sinai: the Arch of Allah all in all.

O spiritual pilgrim rise: the night has grown her single horn:

The voices of the souls unborn are half adream with Paradise.

To Meccah thou hast turned in prayer with aching heart and eyes that burn:

Ah Hajji, wither wilt thou turn when thou art there, when thou art there?

God be thy guide from camp to camp: God be thy shade from well to well;

God grant beneath the desert stars thou hear the Prophet's camel bell.

And God shall make thy body pure, and give thee knowlede to endure

This ghost-life's piercing phantom-pain, and bring thee out to Life again.

And God shall make thy soul a Glass where eighteen thousand Æons pass.

And thou shalt see the gleaming Worlds as men see dew upon the grass.

And sons of Islam, it may be that thou shalt learn at journey's end

Who walks thy garden eve on eve, and bows his head, and calls thee Friend.

James Elroy Flecker

Oak and Olive

              I

THOUGH I was born a Londoner,

And bred in Gloucestershire,

I walked in Hellas years ago

With friends in white attire:

And I remember how my soul

Drank wine as pure as fire.

And when I stand by Charing Cross

I can forget to hear

The crash of all those smoking wheels,

When those cold flutes and clear

Pipes with such fury down the street,

My hands grow moist with fear.

And there's a hall in Bloomsbury

No more I dare to tread,

For all the stone men shout at me

And swear they are not dead;

And once I touched a broken girl

And knew that marble bled.

              II

But when I walk in Athens town

That swims in dust and sun

Perverse, I think of London then

Where massive work is done,

And with what sweep at Westminster

The rayless waters run.

I ponder how from Attic seed

There grew an English tree,

How Byron like her heroes fell,

Fighting a country free,

And Swinburne took from Shelley's lips

The kiss of Poetry.

And while our poets chanted Pan

Back to his pipes and power,

Great Verral, bending at his desk,

And searching hour on hour

Found out old gardens, where the wise

May pluck a Spartan flower.

             III

When I go down the Gloucester lanes

My friends are dumb and blind:

Fast as they turn their foolish eyes

The Maelig;nads leap behind,

And when I hear the fire-winged feet,

They only hear the wind.

Have I not chased the fluting Pan

Through Cranham's sober trees?

Have I not sat on Painswick Hill

With a nymph upon my knees,

And she as rosy as the dawn,

And naked as the breeze?

              IV

But when I lie in Grecian fields,

Smothered in asphodel,

Or climb the blue and barren hills,

Or sing in woods that smell

With such hot spices of the South

As mariners might sell--

Then my heart turns where no sun burns,

To lands of glittering rain,

To fields beneath low-clouded skies

New-widowed of their grain,

And Autumn leaves like blood and gold

That strew a Gloucester lane.

              V

Oh well I know sweet Hellas now,

And well I knew it then,

When I with starry lads walked out--

But ah, for home again!

Was I not bred in Gloucestershire,

One of the Englishmen!

James Elroy Flecker

The Dying Patriot

DAY breaks on England down the Kentish hills,

Singing in the silence of the meadow-footing rills,

Day of my dreams, O day!

I saw them march from Dover, long ago,

With a silver cross before them, singing low,

Monks of Rome from their home where the blue seas break in foam,

Augustine with his feet of snow.

Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town,

--Beauty she was statue cold--there's blood upon her gown:

Noon of my dreams, O noon!

Proud and godly kings had built her, long ago,

With her towers and tombs and statues all arow,

With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there,

And the streets where the great men go.

Evening on the olden, the golden sea of Wales,

When the first star shivers and the last wave pales:

O evening dreams!

There's a house that Britons walked in, long ago,

Where now the springs of ocean fall and flow,

And the dead robed in red and sea-lilies overhead

Sway when the long winds blow.

Sleep not, my country: though night is here, afar

Your children of the morning are clamorous for war:

Fire in the night, O dreams!

Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,

South to the desert, east to ocean, north to snow,

West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides I must go

Where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.

James Elroy Flecker

Rioupéroux

HIGH and solemn mountains guard Rioupéroux

--Small untidy village where the river drives a mill--

Frail as wood anemones, white and frail were you,

And drooping a little, like the slender daffodil.

O I will go to France again, and tramp the valley through,

And I will change these gentle clothes for clog and corduroy,

And work with the mill-hands of black Rioupéroux,

And walk with you, and talk with you, like any other boy.

James Elroy Flecker

Stillness

WHEN the words rustle no more,

And the last work's done,

When the bolt lies deep in the door,

And Fire, our Sun,

Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor;

When from the clock's last time to the next chime

Silence beats his drum,

And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time

Wheeling and whispering come,

She with the mould of form and he with the loom of rhyme,

Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee,

I am emptied of all my dreams:

I only hear Earth turning, only see

Ether's long bankless streams,

And only know I should drown if you

Laid not your hand on me.

James Elroy Flecker