Bohemond's tomb

I

FROM the east I came, from a far country

not one of three, but alone:

not as one having wisdom

but a simple man seeking:

not bringing the rare gifts

but empty-handed:

not voyaging after a strange star

but to a known sea:

not looking for a birth nor for a death

yet finding a tomb.

Flying westward along the salt edges of deserts,
over Oman with its burnt red mountainous wastelands
seeing like Tennyson's eagle the wrinkled tropical sea
evil and polished like the blue morocco binding
of the French engravings on the aesthete's scented bookshelf,
across the black desert barred with fulvous stripes like a tiger,
to the first limestone steeps, the hill towns and the terraced fields
and beyond them the shores of the Mediterranean,
the ancient sea of the lands of corn and wine and the olive
and of my spirit's ancestry, my inborn allegiance.

I had come home to the shores of the Midland Sea,
to the little fields with the silver-white stone walls,
olives grey-leaved with the thin pale dust of crumbled years,
vines rooting joyously in the richness of red-brown soil:
the harvest-heavy plain with the creaking carts
piled and festooned and hung with bales of straw
or filled with black-frocked giggling unhandsome girls
dustily bumping homeward down the sunset.

I had found again the little ancient towns
with their ageing stone and faded salmon-pink plaster,
provincial baroque with a rustic market-day swagger
and a narrow street ending in the dazzling sheer cliff
of the great arcaded romanesque west front,
and then at last the tomb I had not sought to find
where Bohemond, first Prince of Antioch, lay.

II

Two narrow doors of age-green bronze
green as the leaves on the trees after winter
(life after death, Thammuz arising)
narrow as the rock-cleft, the difficult doorway
leading to the ghostland and the wavering waters—
mors ianua vitae.

The equivocal entry, the dubious departure—
what should I find beyond this portal:
death in its terror, life in its majesty,
the uncommunicable wonders of apocalypse,
or the leering skull with the mocking whisper—
et in Arcadia ego?

Pause at these doors made by Roger of Melfi,
see the stiffly chased hieratic figures
posed in the gestures of the Comnenine court
between the mysterious misunderstood kufic
patterning the edges of the saracenic roundels
and now enter.

III

So still within the door,
lucent the dome
unencumbered the floor—
the wild bee's home.

Shrill the winged atomy
flies to the sun:
now is cramped life set free,
ended, begun.

Here is the empty tomb,
risen the lord:
vacant this small strange room
save for one word:

lone on the grey paving
Bohemond's name—
no memory craving,
exacting no claim.

IV

Here then I thought was life, and here was death,
being so much for being so very little,
so empty and yet so large in nothingness
and all in a secret elusive loneliness
escaping edgeways from the intolerable crowd,
where were no comrades either in death or life.
For are you then my comrades, fellow soldiers,
familiar yet strangers, known but not beloved,
strangers in a land where I had found a home-coming
though never here before!
You, the young major with the corpse-white face
and cold blue eyes of implacable northern seas
met by Virgilian oaks at Trasimene
where hung the nets hieroglyphed green and brown
in caricature of the kufic on The Doors—
(Death’s signature on all!)—
are you my comrade?
Or you, the slouching Americans in overalls,
drab young mechanics of the times to come
happy in hopes of a prefabricated future
(God’s at his soda fountain, all’s right with the world)—
what do we share?
And all of you for whom the war is life
and not the nightmare where in sleep the soul
paces the unending unlit corridor, opening a door
each morning on another empty room—
how can I turn to you?

My comrades are all dead, and I with them;
lead-lapped with old King Pandion we lie:
we found a death in these last murdering years.
I cannot hold for comrades
those who have not been stricken with the frost
whose souls have not been laid within the grave
waiting a sign.
There are those who are dead, being alive,
and the dead are sometimes the only living.

V

And so I turn again to Bohemond's tomb,
there where the little city crowns the hill
Beyond the Roman arch in the wide cornfield
sturdy and russet, like the Apulian farmer
watching his ripening crop—
the crop that must die and be gathered before the spring
brings a fresh sowing and a green resurrection.

We whom the war has brought to a time of death,
a parching of the spirit and a shrivelling up of the soul,
so that we stand like sere unharvested straw
stirred by the wind at dusk to a withered whispering,
hoping some grains of seed-corn may survive
for a new spring-time:
we are of the tombs and the ancient desert places
where many have hoped for life, and some perhaps found it,
and a skull grins companionably among the stones.

VI

So dwells my spirit in its lonely cave—
an anchorite
dead to the dark fear-shrouded world without,
aching for the intense and tremulous coming
of dawn's light.

War's poor thin harvest, spent and chill,
yet knowing
that after winter comes again the sun
and out of hopeful earth the new crops rise
from sowing.

One of the shadowy living dead
but sharing
the secret knowledge with my fellow ghosts
that nothing now can be too great a load
for bearing.

We who have died will have the surer strength
when we arise:
the tomb behind us, through the opening doors
we shall see dearly as the long night fades
before our eyes.

26 September 1944