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Antinomies On A Railway Station
By John Collings Squire, Sir
As I stand waiting in the rain
For the foggy hoot of the London train,
Gazing at silent wall and lamp
And post and rail and platform damp,
What is this power that comes to my sight
That I see a night without the night,
That I see them clear, yet look them through,
The silvery things and the darkly blue,
That the solid wall seems soft as death,
A wavering and unanchored wraith,
And rails that shine and stones that stream
Unsubstantial as a dream?
What sudden door has opened so,
What hand has passed, that I should know
This moving vision not a trance
That melts the globe of circumstance,
This sight that marks not least or most
And makes a stone a passing ghost?
Is it that a year ago
I stood upon this self-same spot;
Is it that since a year ago
The place and I have altered not;
Is it that I half forgot,
A year ago, and all despised
For a space the things that I had prized:
The race of life, the glittering show?
Is it that now a year has passed
In vain pursuit of glittering things,
In fruitless searching, shouting, running,
And greedy lies and candour cunning,
Here as I stand the year above
Sudden the heats and the strivings fail
And fall away, a fluctuant veil,
And the fixed familiar stones restore
The old appearance-buried core,
The unmoving and essential me,
The eternal personality
Alone enduring first and last?
No, this I have known in other ways,
In other places, other days.
Not only here, on this one peak,
Do fixity and beauty speak
Of the delusiveness of change,
Of the transparency of form,
The bootless stress of minds that range,
The awful calm behind the storm.
In many places, many days,
The invaded soul receives the rays
Of countries she was nurtured in,
Speaks in her silent language strange
To that beyond which is her kin.
Even in peopled streets at times
A metaphysic arm is thrust
Through the partitioning fabric thin,
And tears away the darkening pall
Cast by the bright phenomenal,
And clears the obscurèd spirit's mirror
From shadows of deceptive error,
And shows the bells and all their ringing,
And all the crowds and all their singing,
Carillons that are nothing's chimes
And dust that is not even dust....
But rarely hold I converse thus
Where shapes are bright and clamorous,
More often comes the word divine
In places motionless and far;
Beneath the white peculiar shine
Of sunless summer afternoons;
At eventide on pale lagoons
Where hangs reflected one pale star;
Or deep in the green solitudes
Of still erect entrancèd woods.
O, in the woods alone lying,
Scarce a bough in the wind sighing,
Gaze I long with fervid power
At leaf and branch and grass and flower,
Breathe I breaths of trembling sight
Shed from great urns of green delight,
Take I draughts and drink them up
Poured from many a stalk and cup.
Now do I burn for nothing more
Than thus to gaze, thus to adore
This exquisiteness of nature ever
In silence....
But with instant light
Rends the film; with joy I quiver
To see with new celestial sight
Flower and leaf and grass and tree,
Doomed barks on an eternal sea,
Flit phantom-like as transient smoke.
Beauty herself her spell has broke,
Beauty, the herald and the lure,
Her message told, may not endure;
Her portal opened, she has died,
Supreme immortal suicide.
Yes, sleepless nature soundless flings
Invisible grapples round the soul,
Drawing her through the web of things
To the primal end of her journeyings,
Her ultimate and constant pole.
For Beauty with her hands that beckon
Is but the Prophet of a Higher,
A flaming and ephemeral beacon,
A Phoenix perishing by fire.
Herself from us herself estranges,
Herself her mighty tale doth kill,
That all things change yet nothing changes.
That all things move yet all are still.
I cannot sink, I cannot climb,
Now that I see my ancient dwelling,
The central orb untouched of time,
And taste a peace all bliss excelling.
Now I have broken Beauty's wall,
Now that my kindred world I hold,
I care not though the cities fall
And the green earth go cold.
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