The Road to Thebes: To Humphrey and Gillen Searle

BESIDE the yellow foam, that sings of Lydian airs and of the lyre —
And vines taut as the lyre, the earth seems of sardonyx
Where the hot juices fall like yellow planets — earth striped like the lynx.

Along the road to Thebes
All polished speeds,
Men, horses, seeds,
Are blown by the bright wind, the young flute-player
Who kindles every vine-bough, sharp
As shrill spring lightnings.
But what golden speed
Now lies beneath the earth, like the soul maimed.
By the rough centaur-husk? For in the Pleiocene
Strata, lies the Horse,
The Pleiohippus and Hipparion
Whose skin shone like the Pleiades — once fleet as the spring rain,

Or young desire, were they — as quickly gone,
Yet still the sound of waves and the long-dying
Airs and the great veils and veins and voices
Of vines are theirs,

The thunders of the bull-voiced mimes, unseen, unknown,
The thunders of saps rising and of all things sown

In far-off gardens.
Ghosts rise from gold seeds
In the mist from vine-branches. “And were you Agamemnon
Or the shrill ghost of a vine-tendril?” “Should I know ?

I only know my form
Is the great logic of the winter, the geometry
Of Death . . . the world began with these:
The numbers of Pythagoras,
The seeds of Anaxagoras;
And the winter at my heart, whose Zero is
An infinite intensity, yet holds
The seeds and beginnings of the fires of spring.

Now for the sound of wars I hear bees among vine-blooms
Singing of growth — they, yellow as the planets,
Like Capricorn us, Lynx and Taurus swarming.

The Dead Man, thin as water.
Or as a vine-tendril, and shod with gold,
As for a journey — (but upon what road ?) — Answered the thunders of the saps rising
Under the dust that shines like the glittering skin
Of centaurs in horse-bearing Thessaly.

“Is your gold-sinewed body still a vine-branch
In the vineyards of great Venus?” “Shrunk to this
Poor span, I have returned to the likeness of the first and final Worm that
is my brother:
For were we not born of the same holy mother —

Alike in holiness? . . . Now black as earth.
Yet great queens found my mouth
As a dark leaf of nardus brought from Syria —
Or the gold door of the South.
Ah, who
Would kiss it now ?

And those queens’ dust is but as frost that shines like fire
Or the gilded dust of Venus in the spring,
Fertilising the crocus.

As I went on my long road
From Birth to Death, 1 learned that Birth and Death,
The road to Thebes from Athens, and the road
From Thebes to Athens, coming and going, praise and blame,
Are like the angry kings, the ghosts of Gold
That hide from Man his sun: they are the same.

Upon my road from Birth to Death, to Thebes from Athens,
I heaped gold dust in hills.
With the blind mole,
On my returning way, I heaped another mound
Of dust. And as I came,

On my Night-Road, the four gigantic thunders sounded:
And the four worlds were gone: Earth, Water, Fire and Air.¹
With Death, in nakedness, I was alone:
But then heard the great thunders of saps rising and of all things sown.

The four worlds came: Love, Hate, Belief and Unbelief:
(The raging human dust, dull dust of brutes,
The groping dust of plants, the earth’s blind dust.)
On my Day Road, the four gigantic thunders sounded:
Those worlds fell from the living heart, were gone,
And I was alone with Life — the Naked Man.

The worlds went: I was a clod of earth
Blown by the wind along the road from Death to Birth
The worlds came: I was clothed with a little dust,
And blown along the road from Birth to Death.

I cried at the light, as I had cried at the dark.
I found a little rest upon my way, a small child growing
Deep in the tomb, or in my mother’s womb —
But still unknowing.

In my canicular days, I, the companion
Of the high Sun, could never dream of setting,
Or that I should not find the answer to the Question.”

There was no sign of the lion-bodied one
Between the vineyards and the heroic sea —
There was no glitter of her mane strong as the wave,
Bright as the treasure on the ocean floor,
And the glittering orange-tree. There was no sound

Where the lion-coloured dusts are numerous as Time’s sands,
Under the heavens masked with gold like Agamemnon,

And bordered with great vines whose solar system of the grapes
Shine like the centaurs’ skin, hard as cornelian grains,
The hue of honey sareophagising or of sard —
Holding small stars for seeds
And planets of noon dew and the long rains
And the cool sea-winds from the far horizons.

As I went my way from the cities of the living
Dead to cities of the dead Living, airs and prayers
Arose from the fertility of vines —
From cornucopias and corruptions, continents
Of growth — from where those seeds, the Dead, are sown
To be reborn, and germs of evil that exist in Matter
Are changed by holy earth, to the common good,

To usefulness, fertility, the breath
Of the Ardent Belief, of the cultivated earth

Drift through the city streets — to kings turned dust-worms,
To beggars and bugbears, dusty thunders, Cerberus
Changed to a dog, and Niobe to a stone lest she should weep, —

To palaces of Commerce, the machine, the revolutions
Rushing toward the vortices (gyrations
Of empty Light) and Man, like Ixion, bound
Upon that wheel, all in the conquering dust,—
To palaces of Justice — a projection of the Darkness:
(Domitian, the mad Emperor, catching flies, and Harcateus.
The King of Parthia, a blind mole-catcher.)

To Afternoon-Men, Giddy-heads, the chrysalides,
The Golden Outsides,² drones, flies, and philosophers,
A world of busy sleep
Where the horse drives the man, the palace builds
The slave, the judge the criminal, and the sun gilds

Laughing and weeping, hatred, fear, and love, and lust,
With royal robes, soon to be changed to dust.

Then comes the hour of consolation, and the evening
Sighing all sighs and knowing all ambitions, walks like the wave
To cities whose names are like the sound of waves, Aomoto,
Quetzaltenango, Wawasee, Tandora,
London and Haris.

A sound drifts through the streets to the homeward-going —
A golden dust — from the evening? from the hives of Midas? from the Lion-gate
Or the sands of time whence the Lion-bodied asks the Question.

On roads sacred to Man who is great as a planet moving
On its gold tendril, — small as a grain of dust.