Form: a quarterly of the arts (1.1916/1917)

ofODIN

CAVERNS mouthed with blackness more

than night!

Feverous jungle, deep in strangling briar,
Venom-breeding slime that loathest light!

Who has plumbed your secret? Who the blind

desire

Hissing from the viper’s lifted jaws,

Maddening the beast with scent of prey
Tracked through savage glooms on robber paws
Tillthe slaughtergluts himredand reeking? Nay,
Man, this breathing mystery, this intense
Body beautiful with thinking eyes,

Master of a spirit outsoaring sense,

Spirit of tears and laughter, who has measured all

Is he also the lair [the skies,

Of a lust, of a sting

That hides from the air

Yet is lurking to spring

From the nescient core

Of his fibre, alert

At the trumpet of war

And hungry to hurt,

When he hears from abysses of time
Aboriginal mutters replying
From something he knew not within him
To the Demon of Earth crying:

I am the will of the Fire
That bursts into boundless fury;

I am my own implacable desire.

I am the will of the Sea

That shoulders the ships and breaks them;

There is none other but me!

The dream insatiate still
Nursed its fierceness old
And violent will

Haunted by twilight where the Gods drink full
Ere they renew their revelry of slaying.

And warriors leap like the lion on the bull

And harsh horns in thenorthern mist are braying.

Tenebrous in them lay the dream

Like a fire that under ashes

Smoulders heavy-heaped and dim

Yet with spurts and stealthy flashes

Sends a goblin shadow floating

Crooked on the rafters—then

Sudden from its den

Springs in splendour: so should burst

Destiny from dream, from thirst

Rapture gloating

On a vision of earth afar

Stretched for a prize and a prey,

And the secular might of the Gods re-arisen
Savage and glorious, awaiting its day,

Should shatter its ancient prison
And leap like the panther to slay
Magnificent! Storm, then, and thunder
The haughty to crush with the tame,

For the world is the strong man’s plunder
Whose coming is swifter than flame;

And the nations unready, decayed,

Unworthy of fate and afraid

Shall be stricken and ploughed asunder

Or yield in shame.

I HE Dream is fulfilled.

I Is it this that you willed,

1 O patient ones?

For this that you gave
Young to the grave
Your valiant sons?

For this that you wore

Brave faces, and bore

The burden heart-breaking—

Sublimely deceived, .

You that bled and believed,—

For the Dream, or the Waking?

^EAVY forests bred them,

JL / The race that dreamed.

In the bones of savage earth
Their dreams had birth:

Darkness fed them.

And the full brain grossly teemed
With thoughts compressed, with rages
Obstinate, stark, obscure,

Thirsts that no time assuages
And centuries immure.

As the sap of trees, behind
Crumpled bark of bossy boles,

Presses up its juices blind,

Buried within their souls

LAURGNCe BINYON

H