TRENCH Ode from Italy in time of war. PR 5671 T7 02 ODE FROM ITALY IN TIME ./WAR: NIGHT ON MOTTARONE I HERBERT TRENCH LONDON . METHUEN - MCMXV t: <•>•»••••■•■■■•♦•»«■»•■■»■»••»■>■>• — — 'I 1 \ ODE FROM ITALY IN TIME ./WAR: NIGHT ON MOTTARONE by HERBERT TRENCH \< Copyright 1915 Firenze, by the Author First printed May 1915 ODE FROM ITALY IN TIME OF WAR: NIGHT ON MOTTARONE S [. INCE in their tents together by a sword The nations sleep divided; since the seas Of memory sever; and the cauldrons formed Of old time make wind-craters full of tongues Opposed, and zones of different decrees; Since hatred trembles in the singing chord, And in ourselves still the old savage throngs Lurk on, cave-dwellers in the gentle breast; Since the stone-age man sits as our right-hand guest, And secular coils of Chthonian energies. Dark trains of purpose script will never know, Involve in wrestlings blind the polities And interlock the peoples to their woe; In soul, aim, stature diverse, we are stormed By battle yet, and are the sport of fears Through the rushing of unstable atmospheres; Since thus, thus, thus, and thus we fail, And enmities exhaustless us assail, Is it in vain for innocence we strive? Is it in vain that we became alive? II. Our dearest, our young sons, have gone to slay. But we, too old with them to march and die, Though angry-mooded yet at being disused. Racked by the vast and melancholy fray And the wound in Europe's side from shore to shore To-night have climbed up from the plains confused To the foothills that look forth on Lombardy, To the mountain of the herdsmen, that high prow Of Mergozzblo, flanked by torrents hoar. That ship of granite and of porphyry Which anchored between deep gulfs keeps its bow Toward Ossola's mighty vale's debouching snow Whence the primordial glaciers southward pressed. Stark ship of granite and of porphyry! It clove the invading glaciers on its breast, So that one branch Orta scooped, and one the lake Maggiore. Darkness falls. We have come far By goat-foot path and shrine and ridge far-seen And round the steep flanks dyked with little rills Up from soft chestnut- woods to fell and scar; Scaling the secret forest-dark ravine — Where the mountain's ancient passion yields its tones Dash'd broken, young and pure, against the stones — To see the dawn from the cloud-bearing hills Of shepherds, and with herdsmen to take rest. The herd of glaciers from these brooks has run, Leaving great boulders lone to mark the sway Of their moraines, rude confines of a day. Through the same gates, fore-goers of the Hun, Goth, Carthaginian pierced, and passed away. We now, the riper peoples, rightly sure We must withstand the harsh and immature. The bitter-hearted, toss'd from dream to dream, Fiercely unstable — in ail things extreme — These overlordship-seekers ; we intent That the spirit of every folk shall take its bent Sunward, and wayward in experiment Adventure, — each small nation stand uncurbed — We shall put down the aggressors, unperturbed. . . . For what is life's chief enemy? Not they But the sense of human life's futility. The vainness of ourselves, as of our foes — To that swift passage what can Man oppose; Who, brawler between two lights, God and Death - Sun-marshall'd and moon-tended — journeyeth? What of clear natures and enduring can Enter the hot and childish discord, Man? Flowing or floating — what of worth can be Establish' d? Courage, Awareness, the pois'd Soul. The rooted forest-people's polity Profound; of forest verdure that stands true And rooted in its own slopes' golden bowl Spreads free. Here every happy mead Hath windflowers of a different hue; And sun-born Love, the mountain flower, is bred. And, family by starry family. Spreads chalices, whereof each petal young Is a new life : fresh Awareness — tenderly swung And diffused as moveth a breeze over grasses and trees Of more: all other men's lives, all other men's ease.. Guard we this new Soul against tyrannies. The soul is end enough, if nought else is To come to flower against the precipice. Yonder in Brescia bronze-wing' d Victory Doth still in her subalpine temple stand. Holding a vanish' d shield beneath her hand: Her sons will not to the north's menace yield. Rather than live unworthy of their land Some will forego existences and fames. Theirs will be written with the unknown names Inscribed for ever on the vanish'd shield; The viewless shield itself, their souls shall be. 8 IV. Therefore, O Latin barrier, when day breaks. Far as your sea-repubhcs and faint shapes. Floating islands, divine cities luminous, Defiant nursed under the Rhaetian capes, We, strangers, fast in spirit your allies — Have you not framed, have you not founded us? — Now will take counsel of your heads of white. The snowy conclave of the arena bounded By the Alps, the amphitheatre of peaks; Pelasgian and Ligurian hear, — sea-races Still surging, murmuring, creating, round your bases Since Pytheas joined them to the Orcades ; That, when the silver tubes of Dawn are sounded Over Sesia and the shining tributaries Congiora and the tribes of promontories From Resegone to the Graian wall — Padua to Monte Viso — when outleap The cataracts of wild rays into the lakes And the eyelids of the land Hesperia Uplift, we also may shake off our sleep. Put off the dark and the barbaric spell. Arise, and thinking of the risen glow When Hellas thrilled with rays the vine of night Hesperia, watch her great plains fill with light As an olive holds her wide cup to the sun In the endless battle-furrows of that glebe: And stand, to hearken what the silent say, The tongues of white fire, immarcessible; And grow to calm, if calm may be attained And clear-soul'd Justice from on high be deigned. V. The kine-herd's pipe comes home beneath the hill Along Vergente's upland valleys still. Blocked by the snowcapt mountains; kine and sheep Tawny and dark, in following, graze their fill. Their neck-bells wander round the bastions steep And wandering fingers teach the stops at will Melodies cool as water, soft as sleep Dark heavens, that take no part in all our stir. Dark heavens, that seem in calm to arbiter The fellow vault of fire, the brain of man. Now from that height and depth which is your fastness Confer on the ephemeral your vastness! O stream of time, the sunrise-colour' d flood Alive with tremour of ten thousand stars Dissolved therein like memories in the blood, Arouse us at this dawn to wake indeed ! 10 But for the instant a street-door unbars And lets be heard the tread of multitude Maice us alive to those whom we succeed, Make us alive to our inheritors: We must not fail the hour for which they bleed. But hear, within, the pure and the outlasting Summoners blow their summons through the soul. To be, in our turn, paean and forecasting. Now on our ears, through gates of Death and Pain, Let the rhythms incommensurable roll And change. When we too must take up the strain We join, above these tempests and expanses That blindly move in ecstasies and trances, Into an inner rite, which is not blind, Where equanimity may reign. The grave and the fraternal rite of Mind. 11 VI. We cast off blankets, we who have not slept, And grope forth up the cold dews of the hill. The fever-charged, numb, watchful Night has crept, Uneasy dying, towards tremendous Day. Dawn is not yet: and all's enswathed in chill, Cloud on the grass, clouds washing round the fells, Forth over battlements and deeps to sway A curdled sea of fugitive cloud — a spate Of filmy panic-pale hordes, all, all in flight One way — the ice-floes of an arctic strait ; But, through clear fissures, darknesses below. Of the cordon of main Alps — as yet, no sign. . . . But here and there a threatening tor outswells; From far abyss one glimpsed outlier Couchant, of vassal buttresses ; and lo ! White Horn, or Tagliaferro's rigid spine Slanted, intense, along his ledges sheer Ah, brothers, brothers, who could have believed It cost so much that this wall should be heaved? But written in these fulgural archives Of conflicts settled, of denuded hate, Folded together are the hostile lives. How they are twinned, who strove to dominate! How they are twinned, the writhings of the ridges ! Behold, the horror of the upturned edges — Together the torn strata seek the sky! 12 VII. And yet perhaps not all in vain ye die Whose veins of blazing granite forge the lime To marble, and the mean to the sublime. Perhaps, embraced, each fierce antagonist Took in the other's virtue, and so locked Became they fountain-heads, on hard foundations, That might not, but for your ambitions blocked — Your gorges with the muddied glacier choked — Your beautiful strengths, wasted on death — subsist, To slake the thirsts of the divided nations. . . . A sudden breeze lifts, rending off the pall, And darkling Italy's white coronal Appears, the crest of all the barrier, Wrathborn, unearthly in his fixed mood, Detached from weakness and from multitude, Monte Rosa, in the lightless atmosphere. VIII. Alone it dreameth, ghostly sovranty, A tenuous presence, rime-cold, pale as rime, Above the band of European cloud Submerging like a slumber Italy, The seven lakes, the cobweb cities proud. The shadow Lombardy, the silt of time, The march and countermarch of history. 13 Strahlhorn, Alphiibel, Dom, and Allelin, Phantom Alps to the northward, shrink withdrawn Away from orisons none dare disturb. Southward his wilderness, tossed line beyond line - Darkly surmised through heavy veil on veil — Of toothed basalts, bare of snow and pine. Out over Orta's gorges giddily Wings waver forth. No insect chirp sounds here. . , What clash of cymbal armies now again Noised upward from their golden burial plain On wings of victory released, could fill Time with an exultation like that hill While unto space the hill lifts up no voice? While its desolation puts no vesture on Of light, the memory of fire, nor emerges The faintest brilliance from beyond the verges, It keeps night-measure with the vanished sun, And answers, to a yet immenser poise. Now shall our virgin mother Liberty — The rock-bred daughter of the lightnings — she Cradled in welter of these peaks at war — Conceive, at the arising of a star? But it waiteth, that grey shape, far up, aloof: As the night-watchman, ten years on the roof Of Agamemnon, till the beacons' joy Declared from sea to sea the fall of Troy. 14 IX. And then, upon that presence in the air, Outpost Promethean, Earth's protagonist, That nothing saw beyond our realms of mist, Slow from the zenith is downbreathed the rose (Hush, the world's candle!— every star grows pale) Until the nine-peak' d ocean-mantling mass Lit — every cleft and cranny of its snows And sea-curved crystals, into which arose The groaning precipices — with peace superb, Becomes the altar of the soul of Dawn Prostrate night-vapours travel down each vale In darkness, the obscurers and the frail — But the ancient iron summit in his shroud Of radiance, every pike and bastion dour Belted with awe of glacier and crevasse. Floats up, transfigured, at this limpid hour, A new acropolis of morning rosed, A walled and heavenly city, clear as glass — Aerial, lighter than a branch in flower — An absolute, but of our strifes composed. 15 By the Same Author Deirdre Wedded and N'ineteen other poems - Methuen & Co. London - (Second impres- sion). 8/—. New Poems, including Apollo and the Seaman, Stanzas toTolstoy, and the Queen of Goth- land - Methuen 4 Co. - (Second impres- sion). »/— . Lyrics and Narrative Poems including fifteen other poems - London, 1912. 8/—. All the above, including the pre- sent work, are copyrighted in the United States of America. "L'ARTE DELLA STAMPA' TlPOGRAFTA SUCC. LANDI FlRENZE ( / THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. Series 9482 3 1205 01166 6680 r UCSOUTHFRNRfGIONAl IIRH4BV firii iTV DD 000 006 804 /