VIII—IN GERMANY Goethe

The wreathing mist was quietly breathed away. I stood upon a little hill at night; The tang of pinewoods and the warbling joy Of hidden brooks was round me. The dark hill Sloped to a darker garden. On the crest A wooden cabin rose against the stars. Its open door, a gap of golden light In deep blue gloom, told me that he was there. I saw his darkened house asleep below, And Weimar clustering round it, a still cloud Of shadowy slumbering houses. Like a shadow, Tracking the Sun-god to his midnight lair, I climbed to the lighted cabin on the crest, And I saw Goethe. At his side a lamp On a rude table, out of tumbled waves Of manuscript, like an elfin lighthouse rose. His bed, a forester’s couch for summer nights, Was thrust into a corner. Rows of books Lined the rough walls. A letter was in his hand From Craigenputtock; and while he looked at it, The unuttered thoughts came flowing into the mind Of his invisible listener—Shadow-of-a-Leaf. All true, my friend; but there’s no halfway house. Rid you of Houndsditch, and you’ll not maintain This quite ungodlike severance of mankind From Nature and its laws; though I should lose My Scots apostle, if I called it so. What’s an apostle? Is it one who sees Just so much of his hero, as reflects Himself and his own thoughts? I like him well, And yet he makes me lonelier than before. Houndsditch may go; but Cuvier will go first; With all the rest who isolate mankind From its true place in Nature. Everywhere I saw the one remodulated form. The leaf ascended to mysterious bliss And was assumed, with happy sister-leaves, Into the heavenly glory of a flower. Pistil and stamen, calyx and bright crown Of coloured petals, all were leaves transformed, Transfigured, from one type. I saw in man And his wild kinsfolk of the woods and seas, In fish and serpent, eagle and orang, One knotted spine that curled into a skull. It ran through all their patterns everywhere, Playing a thousand variants on one theme, Branching through all the frame of fins and wings And spreading through their jointed hands and feet. Throughout this infinite universe I heard The music of one law. Is man alone Belied by all the signs of his ascent? Are men even now so far above the beasts? What can the tiger teach them when they kill? Are they so vain that they’d deny the bones An inch beneath their skin—bones that when stripped Of flesh and mixed with those of their dumb kin Themselves could not distinguish? How they clung To that distinction in the skull of man. It lacked the inter-maxillary. They grew angry When I foretold it would be found one day. What’s truth to a poet? Back to your dainty lies! And then—one day—I found it. Did they say Strange work for a poet? Is mankind asleep That it can never feel what then I felt, To find my faith so quietly confirmed? I held it in my hand and stared at it, An eyeless hollow skull that once could think Its own strange thoughts and stare as well as we; A skull that once was rocked upon a breast, And looked its deathless love through dying eyes; And, in that skull, above the incisor teeth, The signs that men denied,—of its ascent Through endless ages, in the savage night Of jungle-worlds, before mankind was born. No thought for poets, and no wonder there? No gateway to the kingdoms of the mind? No miracle in the miracle that I saw, Touched, held. My body tingled. All my veins Froze with the inconceivable mystery, The weirdness and the wonder of it all. No vision? And no dream? Let poets play At bowls with Yorick’s relic then, for ever; Or blow dream-bubbles. I’ve a world to shape; A law to guide me, and a God to find. That night in sleep I saw—it was no dream!— It was too wild, too strange, too darkly true, And all too human in its monstrous pangs To be a dream. I saw it, and I live. I saw, I saw, and closed these eyes to see That terrible birth in darkness, the black night Of naked agony that first woke the soul. Night and the jungle, burning with great stars, Rolled all around me. There were steaming pools Of darkness, and the smell of the wild beast Musky and acrid on the blood-warm air. The night was like a tiger’s hot sweet mouth; I heard a muffled roar, and a wild cry, A shriek, a fall. I saw an uncouth form, Matted with hair, stretched on the blood-stained earth; And, in the darkness, darker than the night, Another form uncouth, with matted hair, Long-armed, like a gorilla, stooping low Above his mate. She did not move or breathe. He felt her body with his long-clawed hands, And called to her—a harsh, quick, startled cry. She did not hear. One arm was tightly wound About her little one. Both were strangely still, Stiller than sleep. He squatted down to wait. They did not move all night. At dawn he stood By that stiff mockery. He stretched up his arms And clutched at the red sun that mocked him, too. Then, out of his blind heart, with one fierce pang, The man-child, Grief, was born. His round dark eyes Pricked with strange brine, and his broad twitching mouth Quivered. He fell on the dark unanswering earth Beside his dead, with inarticulate cries, Great gasping sobs that seemed to rend his flesh And shook him through and through. The night returned and, with the night, a hope, Because he could not see their staring eyes. He rushed into the jungle and returned With fruits and berries, ripe and soft and red. He rubbed the dark wet plums against their lips. He smeared the juices on their locked white teeth; Pleading with little murmurs, while the stars Wheeled overhead, and velvet-footed beasts Approached and stared with eyes of gold and green; And even the little leaves were all alive; And tree-toads chirruped; but those dark forms lay still. Day followed night. He did not know them now. All that had been so swift to answer him Was gone. But whither? Every day he saw A ball of light arising in the East And moving overhead the self-same way Into the West.... The strange new hunger eating at his heart Urged him to follow it, stumbling blindly on Through endless forests; but it moved so swiftly He could not overtake it, could not reach The place where it went down, ere darkness came. Then—in the dark—a shadow sometimes moved Before him, like the shadow he had lost, And with a cry, Yoo! Yoo! he would awake And, crashing through the forests to the West, Would try to steal a march upon the sun, And see it rise inexorably behind him, And sail above, inexorably, at noon, And sink beyond, inexorably, at night. Then, after many suns had risen and set, He saw at dusk a blaze of crimson light Between the thinning tree-trunks and emerged Out of the forest into a place of rocks, Washed by a water greater than the world. He stood, an uncouth image carved in stone, Staring into the West. He saw the sun Staining the clouds and sinking into the flood. His lips were parched with thirst, a deeper thirst Than any spring on earth could quench again; And when he laid him down upon the shore To drink of that deep water, he knew well That he was nearer now to what he sought, Because it tasted salt as his lost tears. He drank. He waded out, and drank again. Then a big wave of darkness rushed upon him, And rolled him under. He rose, and with great arms Swam out into that boundless flood of brine Towards the last glimmer of light; a dark, blind brute, Sobbing and panting, till the merciful waves, Salt in his eyes and salt upon his lips, Had drawn the agony out of his labouring limbs And gently as the cradling boughs that once Rocked him to sleep, embraced and drew him down Into oblivion, the first life that caught With eyes bewildered by the light they knew, A glimpse of the unknown light beyond the world.

Before the first wild matins of the thrush Had ended, or the sun sucked up the dew, I saw him wrestling with his thoughts. He rose, Laid down that eagle’s feather in his hand, And looked at his own dawn. He did not speak. Only the secret music of his mind In an enchanted silence flowed to meet The listener, as his own great morning flowed Through those Æolian pinewoods at his feet. Colours and forms of earth and heaven you flow Like clouds around a star—the streaming robe Of an Eternal Glory. Let the law Of Beauty, in your rhythmic folds, by night And day, through all the universe, reveal The way of the unseen Mover to these eyes. Last night I groped into the dark abyss Under the feet of man, and saw Thee there Ascending, from that depth below all depth. O, now, at dawn, as I look up to heaven Descend to meet me, on my upward way. How shall they grasp Thy glory who despise The law that is Thy kingdom here on earth, Our way of freedom and our path to Thee? How shall they grasp that law, or rightly know One truth in Nature, who deny Thy Power, Unresting and unhasting, everywhere? How shall the seekers, bound to their own tasks, Each following his own quest, each spying out His fragment of a truth, reintegrate Their universe and behold all things in one? Be this the task of Song, then, to renew That universal vision in the soul. Rise, poet, to thy universal height, Then stoop, as eagles do from their wide heaven On their particular prey. Between the clouds They see more widely and truly than the mole At work in his dark tunnel, though he cast His earth upon the fields they watch afar. Work on, inductive mole; but there’s a use In that too lightly abandoned way of thought, The way of Plato, and the way of Christ, That man must find again, ere he can build The temple of true knowledge. Those who trust To Verulam’s Novum Organum alone, Never can build it. Quarriers of the truth, They cut the stones, but cannot truly lay them; For only he whose deep remembering mind Holds the white archetype, can to music build His towers, from the pure pattern imprinted there. He, and he only, in one timeless flash Through all this moving universe discerns The inexorable sequences of law, And, in the self-same flash, transfiguring all, Uniting and transcending all, beholds With my Spinoza’s own ecstatic eyes God in the hidden law that fools call “chance,” God in the star, the flower, the moondrawn wave, God in the snake, the bird, and the wild beast, God in that long ascension from the dark, God in the body and in the soul of man, God uttering life, and God receiving death.