Selected Poems (Aiken)/Samadhi
SAMADHI
Take then the music; plunge in the thickest of it,—Thickest, darkest, richest; call it a forest,A million boles of trees, with leaves, leaves,Golden and green, flashing like scales in the sun,Tossed and torn in the tempest, whirling and streaming,With the terrible sound, beneath, of boughs that crack.. . . Again, a hush comes; and the wind's a whisper.One leaf goes pirouetting. You stand in the duskIn the misty shaft of light the sun flings faintlyThrough planes of green; and suddenly, out of the darkestAnd deepest and farthest of the forest, waversThat golden horn, cor anglais, husky-timbred,Sending through all this gloom of trees and silenceIts faint half-mute nostalgia. . . . How the soulFlies from the dungeon of you to the very portalsTo meet that sound! There, there, is the secretSinging out of the darkness,—shining, too,For all we know, if we could only see!But if we steal by footpaths, warily,—Snap not a twig, nor crush a single leaf;Or if, in a kind of panic, like wild beasts,We rend our violent way through vines and briars,Crash through a coppice, tear our flesh, come bleedingTo a still pool, encircled, brooded overBy ancient trees—all's one! We reach but silence,We find no horn, no hornsman. . . . There the beechesOut of the lower dark of ferns and mossesLift, far above, their tremulous tops to the light.Only an echo hear we of that horn,Cor anglais, golden, husky-timbred, cryingHalf-mute nostalgia from the dark of things. . . .Then, as we stand bewildered in that wood,With leaves above us in sibilant confusion,And the ancient ghosts of leaves about our feet—Listen!—the horn once more, but farther now,Sings in the evening for a wing-beat space;Makes the leaves murmur, as it makes the blood Burn in the heart and all its radiant veins;And we turn inward, to seek it once again.
Or, it's a morning in the blue portal of summer.White shoals of little clouds, like heavenly fish,Swim softly off the sun, who rains his lightOn the vast hurrying earth. The giant poplarSings in the light with a thousand sensitive leaves,Root-tip to leaf-tip he is all delight:And, at the golden core of all that joy,One sinister grackle with a thievish eyeScrapes a harsh cynic comment. How he laughs,Flaunting amid that green his coffin-colour!We, in the garden a million miles below him,At paltry tasks of pruning, spading, watchingBlack-striped bees crawl into foxglove bellsHalf-filled with dew—I look! we are lightly startledBy sense or sound; are moved; lose touch with earth;And, in the twinkling of the grackle's eye,Swing in the infinite on a spider's cable.What is our world? It is a poplar treeImmense and solitary, with leaves a thousand,Or million, countless, flashing in a lightFor them alone intended. He is great,His trunk is solid, and his roots deceive us.We shade our eyes with hands and upward lookTo see if all those leaves indeed be leaves,So rich they are in a choiring down of joy,Or stars. And as we stand so, small and dumb,We hear again that harsh derisive comment,The grackle's laughter; and again we seeHis thievish eye, aware amid green boughs.Touch earth again: take up your shovel: digIn the wormy ground. That tree magnificentSways like a giant dancer in a garmentWhose gold and green are naught but tricks of light.And at the heart of all that drunken beautyIs a small lively cynic bird who laughs.
Who sees the vision coming? Who can tellWhat moment out of time will be the seed To root itself, as swift as lightning rootsInto a cloud, and grow, swifter than thought,And flower gigantic in the infinite?Walk softly through your forest, and be readyTo hear the horn of horns. Or in your gardenStoop, but upon your back be ever consciousOf sunlight, and a shadow that may grow.