Release in October

SO right to choose this waning season—
this late delusive summer, a cloak thrown
to us the doubtful vagrants—
fitting, to end a life autumnally
for us who are always beginning, ending lives.

So timely this for a releasing:
the brief sun warms our disillusionment
and bright against the tarmac road drift down
the guinea-yellow leaves
so soon to fade, so soon to rot away,
bright as the promises of politicians,
the Charters, and the Freedoms, and the Conferences—
the devil's coins that in the witches' hands
turned quick to merds and horse-muck.
Leaves that will drift in rottenness in the rain,
the dark decaying streams;
autumnal brooks beside whose banks we weep
remembering Sions of impossible pasts:
recall all forlorn waters
the long-drowned Phlebas and unquiet Palinure.

Oh look again to the past beyond my own
yet to those dead who too were my beginning.
This journeying across the English shires
brings me by known ways—
a morning of smoky mist over wet fields
and heavy silhouettes of blue-grey elms
on cold clay lands stretched westwards from the Chilterns
with lonely churches set in long-grassed graveyards
where carved in marble, graved in dulling latten,
the calm dead faces of you whose name I bear
have watched the centuries—
you (once like me feeling the autumn's ache
come to the land and your uneasy heart,
seeking for anodynes in work and love
to quiet your spirit's agony) are now
an antiquarian entry in the guide-book:
church furniture, unseen in familiarity
by the indifferent Sunday congregations.

The yellowed parchments of your lifetimes rustle,
the dusty lumber of lost libraries:
now we have added a manuscript to the shelves
bound in a dragon's skin—
we who have written a new Red Book in blood
and have relived the tale of Peredur;
gone from our homes to follow the strange armed riders:
wandered the waste long years, long centuries—
sick lands, sick kings with whom we too have feasted
and seen the terrible uncomprehended mysteries—
the Bleeding Spear, the Head—
but our dry lips could never frame the question
so came no healing, nor end to our searching.

So sharp the pain of a life ending;
sharp as the tang of smoke from the evening bonfire
now spiring up in the liquid chill of sunset.
Glad as we are for the long-wished releasing
yet it is not easy
this birth and death. This coming and going in lives
too often shakes the spirit.
Look! nailed to a tree in tiny crucifixion
white in the deepening dusk
the paper tells of a fête in Dancers' Meadow—
if you do not come too close
if they have not all gone under the hill
you may see a dance of the end and the beginning,
and find some marginalia for your Jest Book.

Dusk into night:
the world is in the shadows of its autumn.
How little now to hope for but oneself
within the intimate bounds of private life,
a microcosm of friends walled in from foes—
against the world, not of it.
So longed for this release, this curious end,
but in the new beginning
we must still vigilantly guard our secret
we are still walking in the ruined landscape.

11-20 October 1945