THE SIRENS

AN ODE

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

THE SIRENS

AN ODE
BY
LAURENCE BINYON

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1925

COPYRIGHT
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

TO
CICELY

NOTE

This poem was printed by hand by Richard and Elinor Lambert at the Stanton Press and issued by them in 1924 in a limited edition. It has been revised for the present edition.

PRELUDE

I remember a night of my youth, I remember a night

Soundless!

The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened

Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height

Boundless

With stars, with stars, with stars.

I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled

Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty

Out of the ends of the air and the unsealed darkness

Poured in a rain, in a river,

Into my marrow,—thro’ all the veins of delight

Poured into me.

O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!

I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;

I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,

Born to be free.

In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,

A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;

For they came to me as lovers,

Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,

I felt more than heard, like a whisper

Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting

Sound

Of waves, of waves, of waves.

And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,

That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:

In the midst of the worlds I trembled,

I in the night a mortal

Found!

What was I? What was I? Nothing

But a Moment, aware

Of the ruins of Time!

Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,

Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,

From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir

In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,

Rose to claim

This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;

To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.

And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,

For I was the word on Earth’s lips

That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,

Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,

Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,

The earth-child?

To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,

To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,

Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling

Earth-exiled?

But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,

In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,

As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind

At its core,

This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,

And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth

Shelter me more.

I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:

I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,

And feel within me, for this mortality’s answer,

Sea without shore.

I. THE VICTORIES

Masters of the known and found

Singers of a world completed,

All to a time and end ordained,

Powers foredestined to their bound

And truth immutably contained,

A dominion mapped and meted,—

Like as in Egyptian noon

Gods of granite throned august

Gaze on old realms round them strewn

Far as the horizon dust,—

All beneath that searching sky

Gathered into wisdom’s eye!

Prophets of the found and known,

Chanters of the Laws unchanging,

Comes not an hour that undoes all

With a whispered homelessness,

With a sudden touch estranging?

Certainties you deemed your own,

Housing with a friendly wall,

Glide into a doubt and guess

Swift as when, the low light going,

Darkness on the wind comes flowing

Out of nothing; and surmise,

Dream, desire, are frontierless;

And the unroofed mind has skies

To breathe of, where a rumour sings

Of other mind and vaster things

Wooed to wilder destinies.

Thought throbs: there a power entices

(Like, on a wonder-night, all June

In a draught of stolen spices)

Not to stay, not to stay,

But to embark for the outer dark.

Only charms the untrodden way,

Only the unspelt secret rune.

Conqueror with foot superb

Planted on the last step won,

Whom the trumpet-mouths proclaim

Destiny’s accepted son,

Robed in a resounding name,

What profounder pangs disturb

Something that’s unquarried yet

In the deep soul? All the gain

Weighs but as an ashy grain

In the world those pangs beget.

Fierce fruitions but betray

And deliver to the hard

Hope of things unhazarded.

Where that world is, who shall say?

Under western evening starred

Black waves tempt to far-away

Visioned walls of a wide shore,

Lands the only-coveted,

Gleaming as they gleamed before

Alexander’s dying eyes

In the tent at Babylon.

Dumb his soldiers streamed beside him,

Dumb’d with grief that only saw

The pillar of the world undone,

Nor guessed what potent visions gnaw

The unsated mind with cruelties,—

Ramparts where Time’s jealous spies,

Sentinelled afar, deride him,

Mocking all that passion willed

With the frustrate and the unfulfilled.

O the inexorable Lure

Spur to the demon hearts of men!

Ravening Genghis, hot Timour,

And the empire-storming Saracen,

Fate’s infuriate charioteers,

Fly from a whisper in their ears

(Earth before them, Time behind)

Whispering, ‘Haste, ere blood be chill,

Storm and scatter, work your will!’

Hunters hunted in the mind,

Hunting what they cannot name,

Thunder over earth, to find

Nothing. Though the harvest black

Be reaped in rue and curse and wrong,

There’s a thing they cannot tame.

Still they keep their torrent-track,

Maddened by a shadowy song

Sung beyond the reach of sense.

What song is this which wastes the worth

Of human things, and distastes earth,

And fevers with magnificence

Of swiftness trampling, ruin-crowned,

Toward a goal that none has found?

Is it the song the Adventurer stole

Body-bound upon the mast

For the enchantment of his soul?

Over farthest foam of waves

That are sailors’ restless graves,

He heard exulting as he passed

Perilous voices challenging

The mortal heart of him, and fear

Became a glory, so to hear

Secure as an immortal, sing

The Sirens.

I. 2

Whither is she gone, wing’d by the evening airs,

Yon sail that draws the last of light afar,

On the sea-verge alone, despising other cares

Than her own errand and her guiding star?

She leaves the safe land, leaves the roofs, and the long roads

Travelling the hills to end for each at his own hearth.

She leaves the silence under slowly-darkening elms,

The friendly human voices, smell of dew and dust,

And generations of men asleep in the old earth.

Between two solitudes she glides and fades,

And round us falls the darkness she invades.

Waters empty and outcast, O barren waters!

What have your wastes to do

With the earth-treader, the earth-tiller; this frail

Body of man; the sower, whom the green shoot gladdens;

Hewer of trees; the builder, who houses him from the bleak winds,

And whom awaits at last long peace beneath the grass

In soil his fathers knew?

What shall he hope for from your careless desolation,

Lion-indolence, or cold roar of your risen wrath?

What sows he in your furrows, or what fruit gathers

But hazard, loss, and his own hard courage?...

Yon sail goes like a spirit seeking you.

I heard a trumpet from beyond the moon,

Piercing ice-blue gulfs of air,

Cry down the secret waters of the world,

Under the far sea-streams, to summon there

The foundered ships, the splendid ships, the lost ships.

In their ribb’d ruin and age-long sleep they heard,

Where each had found her shadowy burial-bed,

Clutched in blind reef, shoal-choked or shingle-bound;

Heard from betraying isles and capes of dread

In corners of all oceans, where the light

Gropes faltering over their spilt merchandize:

And shapes at last were stirred

On glimmerless abysses’ oozy floors

Known to the dark fins only and drowned eyes;—

Sunk out of memory, they that glided forth

Bound from cold rivers to the tropic shores,

Or questing up the white gloom of the North,

Or shattered in the glory of old wars,

The laden ships, the gallant ships, the lost ships!

I saw them clouding up over the verge,

Ghosts that arose out of an unknown grave,

Strange to the buoyant seas that young they rode upon

And strange to the idle glitter of the wave.

Magically re-builded, rigged and manned,

They stole in their slow beauty toward the land.

Mariners, O mariners!

I heard a voice cry; Home, come home!

Here is the rain-fresh earth; leaf-changing seasons; here

Spring the flowers; and here, older than memory, peace

Tastes on the air sweet as honey in the honey-comb.

Smells not the hearth-smoke better than spices of India?

Are not children’s kisses dearer than ivory and pearls?

And sleep in the hill kinder than nameless water

And the cold, wandering foam?

Dear are the names of home, I heard a far voice answer,

Pleasant the tilled valley, the flocks and farms; and sweet

The hum in cities of men, and words of our own kin.

But we have tasted wild fruit, listened to strange music;

And all shores of the earth are but as doors of an inn;

We knocked at the doors, and slept; to arise at dawn and go.

We spilt blood for gold, trafficked in costly cargoes,

But knew in the end it was not these we sailed to win;

Only a wider sea; room for the winds to blow,

And a world to wander in.

I. 3

O divine summits and O unascended solitudes!

O alone soaring over care and stain!

Who without wing shall set foot upon your pinnacles?

Or who your spaciousness of light attain?

Flames in the dawn-cold, towering incredible,

When else the earth is shadow-drowned and prone,

Veiled and unveiled by the misty-footed winds that guard

Bright chasm and black gulf round a thunder-throne,

Realmed with a vision beyond reaches of mortality,—

Thither some splendour in the mind aspires,

Sharing the terror of your dark, tumultuous sisterhood,

Silent in glory as of chanting quires.

Changing and changeless, O far-illumined Presences

In apparition from some world august,

Up from this flesh have you drawn us, as in ecstasy

That thirsts to elude this forfeiture of dust.

Even on your last heights man has set his perilous foot,

And mid the void as on some dazzling shore

Stands in the vast air, stricken and insatiate,

Wingless, a spirit craving wings to soar.

Now at last voyaging a fabulous dominion

Surpassing all the measures of his kind,

He, a free rider of the undulating silences,

Has in himself begotten a new mind;

Made him a companion of the winds of Heaven, travelling

Unpaven streets of cloudy golden snows,

Piercing forlorn mist, cold though it encompass him

Like a dead mind that nothing sees or knows,

Vacant, a cavern fleecy and immaterial,

A soundless vapour that he pulses through,

Suddenly emerging, and swims into the sun again

And steers his path up toward the topless blue;—

Towers in the frosty flame-apparelled mystery

Of brain-intoxicating sharp sapphire

Round him and above him, throbbing in the midst of it,

A daring, a defiance, a desire!

Mote in the hollow vast, drowned amid the vivid light,

Invading far and far the virgin sky,

Charioting with beats of fire the fiery-beating heart of man

(O heart of flesh, O force of dread!) on high!

Careless of death is he, riding in the eagle’s ways

Above the peak and storm, so dear a sting

Drives him unresting to strive beyond the boundaries

Of his condition, being so brief a thing,

Being a creature perishable and passionate,

To drink the bright wine, danger, and to woo

Life on the invisible edge of airy precipices,

A lover, else to his own faith untrue,

Giving the glory of youth for flower of sacrifice

Upon the untried way that he must tread,

So that he savour the breath of life to the uttermost,

Breath only sweet when all is hazarded.

Is it that, moving in a rapture of deliverance

From chains of time and paths of dust and stone,