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The cauled man
They thrust it on me. Whether one or more
Rule or recast my life before or now,
Is hidden from me, and what passed before
Is dark, like night with gusty winds that blow
Before them sheets of sleet and drifts of storm-spent snow.
For one, or more, who gave this gift to me,
Laid on me through the length of all my years,
A load of sorrow, trellised fearfully
With twining tendrils of tempestuous fears -
The sense of coming things, the sight that blasts and sears.
In the still quiet of the sleeping veld,
When even the sun seems drowsy with the day,
And the birds' noonday madrigal is quelled
By the enfolding stillness of the vlei,
I cannot close my eyes nor check the thoughts that stray.
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I never asked, with courage overbold,
That favour which the Fates refuse to yield,
And that, when granted, like the touch of gold,
Is greater than the human mind can wield -
The power to scan and read the book of Fate unsealed.
I had no wish to look beyond the veil;
No itch to push the unlocked postern wide;
No wild desire to glance beyond the pale,
And view the unknown things that lurk and glide
In the all-embracing dark wherein all dead things hide.
They laid on me, before I left the dark,
Close-cradled comfort of my primal lair,
Where I had neither sense nor soul to mark
The touch or turmoil of the outer air,
This cursed debt of sight that dooms to think and dare.
Yes, though the hidden memories of the past
Loom up like fitful lights amid the gloom,
Bare scantlings from a secret store so vast
It needs the elastic vault of heaven for room
To tenant all the ghosts that throng its open tomb,
I crave with longing like a little child
That craves a toy so far beyond its reach,
With tearless yearning, like as those defiled
By sin and shame yearn dry-eyed to beseech
Some power beyond all powers for power the stain to bleach;
I long with all that human will can spend
In keen desire to achieve and to obtain
The high ideal and the wished-for end,
All strength of soul, all subtlety of brain,
As much as life can lift or the heart's sinews strain -
For what? For that which to the whetted mind
Seems patent trash, paid with too sharp a pain;
Or that which, seeking vainly, here I find
In sleep abundant, though beyond my gain,
Like to the peace serene for which I strive in vain.
For that which in this blackness is above
All that my finite mind can grasp or know;
That lambent guide-star for the lost soul, Love,
That bids the seed in barren pastures grow,
And blends to harmony the pains of long ago -
That Love that leaps within the plumule's vein,
And sends the green shoot through the arid sand;
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That quickens in the song bird's clear refrain
Flung from the leafy tree-top o'er the land
For all to hear that love, and loving, understand;
That makes the scarlet of the kaffirboom
Spread its gonfalon beauty to the breeze;
And the rich gold of gaudy blossoming broom
Squander its wealth upon the humming bees,
As on the nacred shells the spray of tropic seas;
That, if the patient Lama's creed be right,
And destined Fate ordains man's final day,
May, with the strength of its inherent might,
Warp Fate itself, and wrench its stroke astray,
And set its own design on life's yet plastic clay.
Not Hope, that harlot, hiding under smiles
The knowledge of disasters that endure
A lifetime in the memory, and beguiles
With fond expectancy the paths unsure
Whereon my stumbling feet are led by fancy's lure;
Nor Charity whose carnal-minded thought
Drags him it soothes so near to death astray,
And seeking compensations, which unsought
Bring ease, but struggled for are dashed away,
Fails in the night to win the harvest of the day.
Nor Faith that feels what it can ne'er express,
And feeling fears itself may ebb and fade,
Worn wan and weary through its own excess
Of constant poise and counterfeit parade
Of courage grandly garbed for this sad masquerade;
Nor Pity, for the pride that taught restraint
Through all the travail of my aching years,
Finds not its finite solace in complaint
That asks redress in Pity's secret tears,
Nor in that faint contempt that strokes the soul it sears.
Nor Pity's kin, the maddening sympathy
Of those that think they fathom what I fear;
The kindly fingers' pressure fittingly
In smooth accord with lips whose tones appear
Too much in harmony with that which seems a sneer;
Nor yet the indignant voicing of protest
That like the brash of bitter waters drains
The sweetness from the savour that confest
Lurks in the sin that pleases while it stains,
And robs of half its sting the anguish that remains.
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No, though the thunderous turmoil of my fears
Reverberates in this desert of desire,
When barren hours and days and months and years
Seem merged into one moment's pulsing fire
That eats away all wish as flames consume a pyre.
I shall, while time, that tempers all but this
They laid upon me, drags me to my end,
See past the lintel of To-day what is
To be To-morrow, ere the visions blend
Into that peace that shall all earthly peace transcend.
So here, beneath the mauve syringa tree
That sheds its sweet corollas on the sand,
I sit agaze, and agonising see
Not this expanse of fertile, fallow land,
Nor yet the fretted blue where far-off mountains stand,
But only one long level stretch of grey
That fades into its own horizon's rim,
Uncurving, straight, whereon the thought-forms play
Their weird arrangements, wanly seen and dim,
Like moving shadow-shapes that on calm waters swim.
No strength have I, albeit I have the will,
To banish sight that comes unasked, unsought,
Or revelation's swelling tide to still,
And crush the vagrant poltergeists of thought
That lift the veil of sense off future things untaught.
O, I was born a cauled, careworn thing,
A little less than God and more than man,
And burdened with the burden visions bring
To those that Fate gives dismal power to scan
Some uncompleted part of Fate's appointed plan.
Some petty portion of the whole revealed,
Enough to darken all my days with pain,
And make me shudder with the sights unsealed,
With urgent wish to hide the truth again,
And crave forgetfulness of what I learned in vain.
Such is my lot. The dim phosphoric light
Of countless stars may calm the callow fear
Of those that dream a nightmare in the night,
But neither starshine nor the noonday clear
Brings peace to him who sees the portents drawing near.
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