The Tortoise

I THOUGHT I had not seen a thing so old:
I, so accustomed in my hands to hold
the sum of centuries prisoned in a sherd,
some broken fragment, warped and stained and blurred
from the too-jealous embrace of the soil,
so long its guardian: I, whose daily toil
was to explore the past, to put the clock
back a millennium with a spade-stroke, mock
my life’s short tale by puzzling out mankind’s,
seeking the link that age to past age binds.
I was, I thought, familiar with time,
knew his old hour-glass tricks, and every chime
and quarter-chime that marked the eras gone,
had seen decay and change and death come on,
whether in Sumer or in Seistan
by Indus or by Nile, where favoured man
built those proud towns when time as yet was young
and then irrevocably saw them flung
back to the sands that bore them—a lost name
for lonely lizard-haunted mounds to claim.
And yet I gazed at this incredible beast
in the hot Indian evening: black and creased
as an old boot his great domed carapace
looked like a Tartar’s winter tent, its base
lost in the grass.
    And then he raised his head
slowly, as one awaking from the dead,
and looked at me. And in those dull cold eyes
showed the contempt of all the centuries—
no bitterness, but the wearied tolerance
of one outliving all was in that glance
before he looked away with quiet disdain
to contemplate his timeless past again.
But yet I had disturbed him, for he shifted
with almost imperceptible motion, lifted
himself a little up: his scaly, parched,
wrinkled and twisted legs beneath him arched.
But with what slowness! Time was made a fool,
the metronome of hours had ceased to rule,
and as he moved those inches Rome was founded,
the Caesars lived and died, until, surrounded
by the barbarians Rome herself had passed:
an empire’s life was lived out till at last
he had stood up.
    So immemorially old
his very movements spoke the ages, told
of half eternity. I wondered then
where he was born, in what archaic fen
he and his brothers crept out of their eggs,
little half-walnuts on unsteady legs
when the last ice was drawn up to the poles
and shy leaves showed on frozen birch-tree boles
and man had still to learn to sow and reap,
making his first hard marches up the steep
foothills of his fulfilment. Centuries then
our tortoise lived among deciduous men:
he had been well advanced in middle age
when Agamemnon died, and when the rage
of Troy still burned in the air—all this he knew
had seen with his detached reptilian view
the loves and hates and follies of the world
from under that great shell where he had curled
through countless winters with their numbing cold.
I thought I had not seen a thing so old.

17 May 1942

NOTES

• published in Jones, PM Modern Verse 1900-1950 (1955) 221-2