The voyagers

THIS is the last eternal western shore,

all islands and one island,
end of all journeys and

though never charted, yet the secret goal,
more real than reality for being less on earth

than in my soul.

Once again I go to find
in these calm Western islands of my mind
the peace of time long gone, and the still quiet

where time is not,

and all dead years are this day’s blossoming.
Here my Hesperides, my Fortunate Isles,
sure refuge from the storm. Save me, old gods,
for here’s a voyager who loves you well.

Stone-walled and terraced are the little fields
clutching the thin soil in between the outcrops:
rough goat-pasture, sounding of bees and steeped in thyme
tumbles down to the sea by the rock-edged bay
sickled with sand like a young moon

or the bright curved blade

carried with honour in the oakwood glade.

Here beached the questing prows of voyagers
five thousand years ago, or yesterday:

(all time is one
under this warm westering sun

that yet has never set, nor ever risen
but has been so through all eternity
or for no time at all).
They the devisers of these stone-roomed tombs
here on the hill-slope. They reckoned no time,
building for the dead who are not dead
but tenant ghosts

of these enchanted coasts,

carving on stones the spiralled intricacies
of their dark labyrinthine thoughts.
Chilled now the ash of the last funeral fire,

a wavering lamp

to light a frightened soul to the nether world:
crushed now the embers deep under damp

rain silt and worm casts
peat and cotton-grass.

Gone the heady libation-draughts
with only the feeble strewn sherds for witness;

the banded snail

lives snug in the hollow vaulting of a skull,
and in thin automatic trail
ants scurry down the narrow corridors

of cracked thigh-bones
and in creviced stones.

But more than men are buried in this land,
Saturn, and all the gods before the gods—
Kronos or Chronos—is it Time locked up?

clausus chronos et serato,
carcere ver exit—

these are the coasts of everlasting spring

where still there sing

the birds upon that ancient flowering tree
as for St. Brandan at that Easter-time

upon his quest
to this far land of Behest

lying tofore the gates of Paradise

so now for me.

Time, the old gods, and an inward-visioned land
healing and giving strength in sanctuary.

20 August 1943