The Bird-Catcher (5 page)

From the soft, slow swell of the Channel, sinking, lifting,

Out between France and Kent.

Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses

Come not again this spring, for all our sighing.

The days of Lilac and days of Roses

Are past, and all the scented Pinks are dying.

The wind has changed. A sullen vapour closes

The weeping skies. We may not gather now

The Lilac-blossoms and early Roses.

Sad is the spring and bloomless hangs the bough.

O sweet and happy springtime that invaded

Our fields last year to gladden loved and lover.

So utterly our flower has faded

That even your kiss, alas, can wake it never.

And what of you, my love? No flower uncloses

Nor sunlight blooms through the shadowy leaves above.

Days of the Lilac and the days of Roses

Lie dead for evermore with our dead love.

Huge as a precipice in the summer night

The black porch yawned above him like a wave

And swallowed him. Shrunk to a grain of sand

He paused inside, bewildered at the sense

Of so much height and darkness, till his eyes

Gained strength, and in the emptiness dark shapes,

Pinnacled rocks and towering trunks of stone,

Loomed round him and, high hung like long pale banners,

Tall windows showed. And it seemed the whole void cavern

Vibrated sensitive as a strung harp,

For his shy footfall woke a spreading trouble

That echoed from furthest galleries and vaults

Awareness of his presence. He crossed the transept,

Climbed to the loft hung like a falcon's nest

On the sheer face of the triforium,

From which the towering shafts of organ-pipes

Shot up like tropic growths. There, round about him,

The music books, the rows of stops, the close

Familiar walls of oak glowed as a core

Of radiance in the darkness; and he sought

Books of old music, chose his stops, began.

Vague tremors shook the stillness, voices woke,

And the emptiness was peopled with the life

Of crowding notes. Down the wide nave, along

Cold aisles, through secret chapels, hanging vaults,

Flowed the warm circulation of sweet sounds

Like health into a body long diseased,

While the august and ancient music-makers

Woke from long sleep and their immortal voices

Flooded the dark shrine with a golden beauty.

And he, the player, with cunning fingers piling

Sound upon sound, harmony on harmony,

Launched out his spirit upon those tides of music

Until it grew and filled the shadowy place,

Swung with the arches, soared to the topmost vault,

Put on the whole great structure as a garment,

Sang with those ancient voices as with his own,

And on the summit of the last pure chord

Found unity and peace. He raised his hands:

The music stopped, and his full-statured spirit

Shrivelled. The horror of sheer height hung above him,

The cavern of sheer depth was scooped below,

And silence fell like doom. Out in the dark,

Blind windows hung, dumb columns rose, vast trunks

Upheaved the heavy foliage of the night,

And darkness, emptiness, like birds of prey

Swooped back and perched about him, grimly still,

While he, as in the bright cup of a flower,

Rigid, with sharpened senses, hung besieged.

Dark is the mind's deep dwelling,

    Roofed and walled and floored

With ancient rock. There water, slowly welling

    Or slowly dripped, is stored

    In a dim, deep, dreaming pool

Unvexed by rain or sunlight or the cool

Wings of the wind, untroubled by joy or grieving

Or the bitterness and the ecstasy of living.

Till the white young bathers come, warily treading,

Lovely, desired, with rosy flesh

Like the apple-bloom on grey boughs spreading

    In April, and their feet refresh

Like April the grey desert place.

    For when with a sudden freakish grace

They break the pool's long sleep in an airy flight

Of diving, the dim pool takes light,

Blooms to soft fire in a thousand tongues unfurling

That shed a shimmering beauty on roof and walls

    And rouse in those stern halls

Laughing music of water, till the death

    Of that dark underworld

Thrills harp-like with new ecstasy and the breath

    Of a thousand buds uncurling.

Under high boughs I lay in sunny grass.

    My mind a mirror was

Reflecting leaves and sunshine; but no Past

    Nor fancied Future cast

Their shadows there. For I was grass and trees,

    No less, no more than these;

Lay in the sunlight, felt the warmth, and grew;

    And sunlight, air, and dew

And earth were all my knowledge. But a breeze,

    Winnowing the laden trees,

Drowned me in perfume of the Lime in flower,

    And by that perfume's power

My sense woke on a pale transtellar coast,

    Half recognized, half lost,

As an old dream. I lingered there expecting,

    My mind a pool reflecting

Unfathomed shapes by dim weeds blurred and webbed,

    While waves of memory ebbed

And climbed again up, up the gleaming shoal,

    But never reached the pool.

Then expectation shaped. I was aware

    Of one with sea-smoothed hair

Leaning above me, in whose eyes I caught

The urgence of the message that she brought.

    But, even as her lips stirred,

There fell the clear call of a hidden bird

    Out of the Lime's green leaves,

Waking me to warm grass and the sunny leaves

    Of roofing boughs: unheard

The utterance of that still-escaping word

Whose solving fire, revealing light, shall set

All realms of being aflame. So am I yet,

Bewildered and uneasy traveller, blown

Between two kingdoms, neither wholly known.

I hear the flowing of great rivers

And the long slow breathing of the wind,

And solemnly, incessantly,

Like gleaming fish

In weeds beneath dim water,

Stars on their universal way

Glide among woven boughs.

All is one,

Surely, indivisibly.

A falling pebble

Ruffles the pool's clear face,

And in those wavering circles waken

Powers that shall change the motion of Orion

And vex the dreaming of a million stars.

Deeds are immortal. Once the rose is gathered,

Nothing can ever be the same again.

Man, afraid to be alive,

Shut his soul in senses five,

From fields of uncreated light

Into the crystal tower of sight,

And from the roaring songs of space

Into the small flesh-carven place

Of the ear whose cave impounds

Only small and broken sounds;

And to this narrow sense of touch

From strength that held the stars in clutch;

And from the warm ambrosial spice

Of flowers and fruits of Paradise

To the frail and fitful power

Of tongue's and nostril's sweet and sour.

And toiling for a sordid wage

There in his self-created cage,

Ah, how safely barred is he

From menace of eternity.

Martin Armstrong (1882–1974) was an English writer and poet. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He served in World War I in the British Army in France as a Private in the Artist's Rifles. He was commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment in 1915 and promoted Lieutenant in 1916. He was included in the final Georgian Poetry anthology.

In 1929 he married writer Jessie McDonald, after she had divorced Conrad Aiken, making Armstrong the stepfather of the young Joan Aiken. He appears in disguised form as a character in Conrad Aiken's
Ushant
.

Discoverbooks by Martin Armstrong published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/MartinArmstrong

Sir Pompey and Madame Juno
The Bird Catcher
The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife
The Sleeping Fury
The Stepson
Venus over Lannery

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, LondonWC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain 1929, Martin Secker

Copyright © Martin Armstrong

All rights reserved
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make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
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printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The moral right of the author is asserted.

eISBN: 9781448210336

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