I

After the apples and the drink we had,

When both were far past sleep and doubtless mad,

Then even the early smoky air seemed clear,

And my poor crowded room looked right and dear,

We matched our wildest words and thoughts to see

Who was the crazier mortal, you or me.

I said, "This half-life we have here is wrong.

We have submitted beast-like overlong

To grinding tyranny from noise and dust,

From heat, from every deadly daily 'must'

Laid by the signers of our monthly checks

Upon our bent and unprotesting necks.

Riveters, taxies, letters, telephones

Have jangled nerves and mind, have jarred our bone

As long as I, my master still, allow.

So here before it's daylight, here and now,

I make a most unholy holy vow

By all that's best in me, and not by God,

Not God in churches, but in sky and sod

By all that's quiet, all that's calm and slow,

By all the lovely healthful things I know

Of level rivers and of arching trees,

Of sleep and hills such simplicities,

I swear I'll jump the harness and go out,

Get free, and bring these better things about.

There is a green land far away, you know,

Waiting for men who will arise and go,

Where life is to be lived each careless day

As if it were the first and last highway

To Heaven, except that morning comes again

To make us younger."

"And you're going? When?"

Now. I'm going now, while I can rightly see

My life and I as they were meant to be.

I'm drunk, but not too drunk to know-

It isn't wholly liquor that has made me

For I'd forgotten what was never true:

Nothing has held me here I can't undo,

Nothing I can't break off like paper bands,

The way the shepherds did, with two strong hands,

In Aria da Capo. I forgot

The walls weren't stone, and now I say they're not.

The man I was, the things I used to say,

The music that I heard, not far away,

But in my heart, and words as great and wild

As once I knew when I was half a child

Are coming back, all beautiful and fierce

As sunlight now, to penetrate and pierce

A kind of ugly armor I've let grow

Of habit and acquiescence - yes, you know -

Sick fear, and stupid patience, wheels and walls,

The tick of the clock and when the armor galls

We grin, and take much bad with little good,

And think we're lucky that our livelihood

Is left us, though our very lives are not.

We're different as two nickels in a slot."

"Merely because we've stayed up, that's no reason

To let yourself go this way, utter treason,

Unload confessional hysteria, Turn anti-social to America - "

"But I've remembered things I used to think,

Helped by this more or less illegal drink:

A world of quiet and of dignity,

Where space and form and time would all agree, k

As if life were a cool room, high and wide,

And fresh, sweet air blew in from fields outside

Within that room, that life, a man would be,

Who, speaking, writing, moving, yet spoke free

And wisely, not too much, and all he did

Was honorable, and there was nothing hid,

Not even the secret that he never told,

Which was, he did not fear the growing old

And growing lonely that so many fear.

He gave his heart away, yet had it here."

II

"How's that? I've read, and certain poets say

That never should the heart be given away.

You speak of love, but each man lives alone.

Somewhere inside him is a place of stone

Where no one comes, not anyone. We live

And die so. There are some things one can't give.

Better to keep the soul's integrity,

To give a pledge, but hold one deep place free."

"Nothing is lost by love, love's no exchange

Of this for equal this, and each one strange

And apart. But love does not arrive with drums,

March in, and take all in the hour it comes.

Love is a commonwealth. Two kingdoms strike

The border line between them out, and like

Two peoples mingle peacefully in one.

Years pass, and still the union is not done.

What generations must grow up and die,

What histories of hope and grace go by,

With each the conquered and the conqueror,

Till at the last the kingdoms that they were,

The crowns and flags, the highways and the hymns

Are one wide state, and the last difference dims.

But still they're young, these lovers, and they find

The glory and the growth that lies behind

Only a prelude."

"Still, each one is lost

By this. I say surrender's too great cost."

"Man is a Way through which all life may flow.

You'd partly block it up, but I'd say no

To nothing, I'd make no 'howevers' guard

My soul, or say a cautious 'maybe' barred

Consummation from me. Love is the same,

No sheltered ember, but a steady flame."

"This talk of love is queer, coming from you."

'That man would know. I'll tell you something true.

I was the boy who meant to be that man,

And maybe you had dreams that you began

As greatly, and have taken something less

As good enough. Yet, why I should confess

All this to you tonight, or even think

It over, I don't know. It's not the drink."

"It's sitting up all night. It's after four."

It's more than that. I know it's something more."

"We said we'd find out who was craziest.

Whatever mine would be, your story's best."

III

"Look there, the sun is coming up, it's red,

And if you think the crazy things I've said

Aren't true; quiet, and love - why then - I guess

I am. There's more. Does music - does that bless

Your damned and nearly deafened ears like mine?

Music that's climbing round me as a vine

Creeps and grows green, and when I will not see,

Puts out a blossom? No one knows but me.

I've heard, I've heard, but the I've shut my ears,

And run to silence now too many years.

It's here again. A golden nightingale

Bursts his throat from a breast-high hedge all pale

With new green leaves. At night the stars brim up

And spill across the sky. God tips the cup.

I hear Time beat like the blood in my wrist,

The great deep rhythm in which we exist,

Opposed by the antiphony of birth

And death, recurring night and day on earth,

And all the livelier accents man can make

For love's, for history's, and boredom's sake

Sunlight across that carpet lights the rose

Just in the center, then andante flows,

After an interlude of words from me,

Moment by moment, creeping steadily

Over the pattern, leaf by leaf, and turns

There where the carpet-rose is hid by ferns,

And meets the wall; allegro; interlude

While the sunlight mounts in a different mood.

A cadence takes the very words I speak,

As if I murmured hymns in sliding Greek,

As if I chanted, swaying toward the sun,

Old hymns to sunrise; rhythms I've begun

Go out to meet the choral city sound.

This room this morning throbs with light's profound

Undeviating music, almost heard,

Now almost gathered in a human word

The movement ends. A line of picture frame

Has cut it off.

This music has no name.

I am no Adam to invent a word

For music no one else has ever heard,

But nothing Adam named was more his own

Than this is mine; each theme, each overtone,

Each voice of each of million instruments

I listen to, preoccupied, intense.

It never passes, but moves off somewhere,

From words in here, to feet upon the stair;

A door slams shut, the light across goes out,

The traffic droning by, a bell a shout,

You speak, and when I answer that's the theme

Come back from infinite variation's stream

Of living music; and the sunlight slants

Along the wall; the numbered hours advance

Toward noon, the light looks more like noon, and hums

Slower and slower; intermission comes.

Suspension. The swing of the whole world held,

Blood's pause, dip of the green bough, till impelled

By it's own weight, by the strong beat that moves

The world to motion and to music, grooves

Everything within a swinging arc,

The sun creeps on again, light lifts the dark,

The bough of leaves swings back in the warm wind,

The wrist and temple feel the softly dinned

Throb of the blood, the round world lunges on

Through space, past stars appointed, now, and gone.

Those are the major rhythms, blood and night,

Wind in the forest, and the sun's slow light.

Man has devised strong rhythms, seeing hills

That beat against the sky, green surf that spills.

Man has remembered waves that march to shore,

And making one to lead, and hundreds more

To march behind him swinging, man has found

A beat that shakes the streets, the solid ground.

Stand here with me and see the uniformed

Battalions marching by. The air is stormed

And pierced by rank and rank of men in lines

That make one line. What awful will defines

Their purpose? By what strict and onward urge

Do they march by like one, and will not surge

Or wander incoherent like a crowd,

And will not break, and will not break, but loud

And steady still keep coming on. Look there.

Far off the column comes and comes - from where

And on ahead goes out of sight. How small

They look to be real men, and yet they all

Are bending to the beat that moves them by.

And here before us they are shoulder-high

And multiple, have different faces, can

Stroll aside and stop and speak like any man.

But all their eyes turn straight ahead. They pass.

They are unseparate again, a mass

That marches, stepping stiff and steadily,

A thousand-times-recurring foot and knee.

This measured tread, this hammer-beaten bell

Oh, marching should be high processional,

Not uniformed, except for beauty's sake,

When there is ceremonial to make

For seasons, or for weddings, or to sing

A mightier choral than the murmuring

Of sea-cliff pine-trees, with the surf to call

The long refrain, deeper and under all.

Let men and women march, and hand in hand,

Rich-throated, make a chant-parade for land

Abundant in the autumn, celebrate

With song a dynast's legendary date,

Or like the birds that suddenly sweep and soar

For flying's utter sake, this and no more,

Let women march, and men, for pure excess

Of overwhelming rhythm's lustiness.

V

Around us like an orchestra begins

The day, with clean air poured like violins;

Clocks tick for tiny drums, and chime and toll

For cymbals and the two-toned kettle's roll.

Work is the brass quartet, the major theme,

And even meals are more than what they seem.

Man's complex daytime world has overtones

Subtly disjoined like uncut building stones

That yet will lie face close to face. We hear

No meaning more than water dropping near,

Dribbling and drop-dripping all night long.

Lying awake, we try to make a song,

A phrase, a something, anything that's sense,

Out of its formless, mad inconsequence.

Forever just about to deviate

Into a pattern, it will indicate

One moment one real plan, one melody,

Enough coincidence to make you see

Men's lives as intersecting rhythmic lines,

Crossed and re-crossed. One's heart almost divines

A cosmic motive hid behind a veil

Of flesh - a hint then intuitions fail,

The water falls drip drop, di-drap, di-drep, .

The rounded melody trails off, breaks step,

Rhythm is unsignificant again.

There's s some prodigious art in lives of men,

Some master-phrase inevitably near,

Listening and watching, we can almost hear

The diapason closing full in God,

But human incoherence like the odd

Drip-dropping of the water in the well.

Blurs the design. Mathematicians tell,

And those who can will understand, that curves

Flatten away from asymptotic swerves,

Come infinitely near to being solved.

Significance almost to be evolved

From water dripping hollow in a well,

Sequence in human lives that would foretell

Magnificent conclusion, we must miss,

And listening, listening, be content with this,

That for one instant we can comprehend

Music complete, beginning to the end.

Then sense has wandered, jumbled all the parts

As different as ten million beating hearts.

VI

Night has a rhythm, but the mind, asleep,

Sinks to unconscious darkness down so deep

That even dreams remembered leave no clue

In reason's record of what's false, what's true.

Dreams are an echo flashed across the dark.

The unintelligible fragments mark

No measure of the mind's white day. But once

As one who on the shore at ebb-tide hunts

For signs to tell him where the full tide came,

I woke remembering that the negro, lame,

Shambling and grinning at me was a dream

I'd had before, horror and smothered scream,

My dragging feet, the nightmare sob, the same,

The dream of childhood that I could forename

But not forestall. And by what moving tide,

Far on the outer beaches of the mind,

This dream was drifted up for me to find

In daylight, who can say. Except I know

Dreams have recurrence with an ebb and flow

Fixed like the sea's, but in a more than dark

Where light's not moon or stars, but one quick spark

Glimmering in the lantern mind by day,

But not enough to light it all the way.

Night has a rhythm in itself, a noon

That is not midpath of the rolling moon,

But time's and dark's dead center. Night is more

Than absence of the sun outside the door.

Go to a hill and stand beneath the stars,

And learn why night's not on the calendars.

It's dark, and color's gone from tree and bush,

But wait, stand very still. You'll feel the push

Of the earth as it lunges slowly on

Through infinite space, turning and gone,

Past stars and a moan's light faithfully timed,

Revolving like great wheels matched and rhymed.

VII

History counts huge accents on its page

If every new-recurring golden age,

Summing brave lives when all a world awoke

Throbbing upon a strong and urgent stroke

Of the life-beat Rhythms deep converge;

Life, with a single forward-breaking surge

Is one. Prophets and poets, lovers, kings,

Speak with a god-like voice and grace of things

Simple and elemental, and their deeds

Are patterns for ten generation's needs.

The great are friends, call casually names

Now beautiful, now such immortal fames

We feel they cannot once have lived, but shine

Impossible symbols in a sought-for shrine.

Marlowe and Shakespeare in a London street

Say what with reverence we now repeat.

The cup of time brims full and all men drink,

All men go mad divinely to the brink

Of absolute last truth unutterable,

And die, and so fail greatly, chronicle

The failure that is more than most success,

Take immortality they could not guess,

And sleep, and let the world go dark and numb

Until once more the golden age shall come.

VIII

"Well. it's noon and long past noon, of any kind,

By the clock, or moon or your too sharpened mind.

I've heard, and have not understood, such words

As storm around me like a flight of birds.

History, dreams, and water-music, night

And marching men and love - yes, and the light

Of the sun, and much more madness. What's become

Of last night, and the easy, humorsome

Man you were who said, 'Between us two

Which is the crazier mortal?' What I'll do

To match your wanderings, I cannot see.

You win. You're craziest, or else it's me

For listening, for sitting up all night

And half to-day."

"Yes, and I'm not through, quite.:

"Make sense of all this business, then, get back

To where you started, try a new attack,

And make it shorter. If you can, don't stray

From the road to the green land far away.

"I haven't wandered quite so far aside

As you may think; these searchings coincide

In the green land, though I've shouted on the way

That has obscured what I have tried to say,

As much enthusiasm always does."

"Too much chanting, is what the trouble was."

IX

Have it so, then. First, I started out

To tell myself what yearnings play about

Under my good disguise of citizen.

I've said before, I said 'Escape' again,

Break out, run off, find quiet and some peace,

Illegally break the life-term lease

We've rented out our souls for. I was wrong.

Geography's not peace. Where I belong

Is where I'll stay. I'd take my troubles, too,

As baggage on that journey. That's not new.

Simplicity is not the final cure

For this complexity. It won't endure.

For too much civilization nothing's right

But more of the same."

"You mean that in this plight

You'd sicken a sick man more. What if he dies?"

"He won't. Civilization always tries

To fine and refine further what is good.

It takes at first what any human would

The nearest thing. The time's here, I believe,

When most near things are done, and we perceive

Ills further off, like war, like human waste,

Like noise in our machines, like too much haste.

The man's not sick, but he is taking heed

Of what his needs have made another need."

"You talk nearer to sense. The thing's concrete,

Not cloudy like the rest, but I repeat,

What will you do yourself about the vow

You swore me, and the man you meant to be?"

"I'll keep the vow as strictly as you'll see

If you believe me where the green land lies."

"There is a green land far away, you know-

You said it where strong men will rise and go."

"There is a green land very near at hand,

Within the heart, where I shall understand

Better than I had ever known I would,

What is my own and possible highest good.

Somehow I said, talking the night away,

The things I hoped that someone else would say.

Who ever does, who can? For no one knows

Another' secret center of repose.

The green land where I meant to go and learn

What peace is, I had but to stay and turn

And find within myself an what I thought.

It was that simple answer that I fought

And would not hear, and was unhappy by.

Nothing can hurt me now. I have a Word.

Rhythms that beat around me I have heard,

I've found again where on the utter shore

The tides flood in, and when they ebb, and why;

I've said the steady column marching by,

And said the sunlight, and the beat of hours.

I've said the words that will unlock the powers

Of all that moves behind the sun. The thing

Troubled my mind, I needed less to fling

Myself in escape, than I had need to name

The trouble, try its strength, and make it tame.

I've given a word to night, my kind of night,

I've made a name to call time by, and light,

Light of the day upon my very floor.

I've found a word for feet outside my door,

For the tide of dreams and the music of the world.

No longer shall I be beset and whirled

Weather-vane

wise, for I have seen and heard.

Nothing can hurt me now. I have a Word."