postpostochlophobist

The Human Fold

Here penned within the human fold

No longer now we shake the bars,

Although the ever-moving stars

Night after night in order rolled

Rebuke this stationary farce.

There’s no alternative here but love,

So far as genuine love can be

Where there’s no genuine liberty

To give or take, to lose or have,

And having rots with wrong, and loss

Itself has no security

Except in the well-managed grave,

And all we do is done to prove

Content and discontent both are gross.

Yet sometimes here we still can see

The dragon with his tears of gold,

The bat-browed sphinx

Shake loose her wings

That have no hold and fan no air,

All struck dead by her stare.

Hell shoots its avalanche at our feet,

In heaven the souls go up and down,

And we can see from this our seat

The heavenly and hellish town,

The green cross growing in a wood

Close by old Eden’s crumbling wall,

And God Himself in full manhood

Riding against the Fall.

All this; but here our sight is bound

By ten dull faces in a round,

Each with a made-to-measure glance

That is in misery till it’s found.

Yet looking at each countenance

I read this burden in them all:

‘I lean my cheek from eternity

For time to slap, for time to slap.

I gather my bones from the bottomless clay

To lay my head in the light’s lap.’

By what long way, by what dark way,

From what unpredetermined place,

Did we creep severally to this hole

And bring no memory and no grace

To furnish evidence of the soul,

Though come of an ancient race?

All gone, where now we cannot say,

Altar and shrine and boundary stone,

And of the legends of our day

This one remains alone:

‘They loved and might have loved for ever,

But public trouble and private care

Faith and hope and love can sever

And strip the bed and the altar bare’.

Forward our towering shadows fall

Upon the naked nicheless wall,

And all we see is that shadow-dance.

Yet looking at each countenance

I read this burden in them all:

“I lean my cheek from eternity

For time to slap, for time to slap.

I gather my bones from the bottomless clay

To lay my head in the light’s lap’.

-Edwin Muir, from his Collected Poems.