The Marble Faun, Copyright, 1924, by The Four Seas Company, and Renewed 1952, by William Faulkner.

A Green Bough, Copyright, 1933, and Renewed 1960, by William Faulkner.

FIRST RANDOM HOUSE EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada Limited.

eISBN: 978-0-307-87380-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-27492

v3.1

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Faulkner’s two volumes of poetry are here reproduced photographically from copies of the original editions.

The Marble Faun was issued on December 15, 1924, by The Four Seas Company (Boston), with an introduction by Phil Stone.

A Green Bough was published on April 20, 1933, by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas (New York). There was a limited signed edition of 360 copies, as well as the regular trade edition.

THE MARBLE FAUN

Copyright, 1924, by
THE FOUR SEAS COMPANY

THE FOUR SEAS PRESS
BOSTON, MASS., U. S. A.

To My Mother

PREFACE

THESE are primarily the poems of youth and a simple heart. They are the poems of a mind that reacts directly to sunlight and trees and skies and blue hills, reacts without evasion or self-consciousness. They are drenched in sunlight and color as is the land in which they were written, the land which gave birth and sustenance to their author. He has roots in this soil as surely and inevitably as has a tree.

They are the poems of youth. One has to be at a certain age to write poems like these. They belong inevitably to that period of uncertainty and illusion. They are as youthful as cool spring grass.

They also have the defects of youth—youth’s impatience, unsophistication and immaturity. They have youth’s sheer joy at being alive in the sun and youth’s sudden, vague, unreasoned sadness over nothing at all.

It is seldom that much can be truthfully said for a first book beyond that it shows promise. And I think these poems show promise. They have an unusual feeling for words and the music of words, a love of soft vowels, an instinct for color and rhythm, and—at times—a hint of coming muscularity of wrist and eye.

The author of these poems is a man steeped in the soil of his native land, a Southerner by every instinct, and, more than that, a Mississippian. George Moore said that all universal art became great by first being provincial, and the sunlight and mocking-birds and blue hills of North Mississippi are a part of this young man’s very being.

He is a man of varied outdoor experience, of wide reading, of quick humor, of the usual Southern alertness and flexibility of imagination, deeply schooled in the poets and their technical trials and accomplishments, and—above all—of rigid self-honesty. It is inevitable that this book should bear traces of other poets; probably all well-informed people have by this time learned that a poet does not spring full-fledged from the brow of Jove. He does have to be born with the native impulse, but he learns his trade from other poets by apprenticeship, just as a lawyer or a carpenter or a bricklayer learns his. It is inevitable that traces of apprenticeship should appear in a first book but a man who has real talent will grow, will leave these things behind, will finally bring forth a flower that could have grown in no garden but his own. All that is needed—granted the original talent—is work and unflinching honesty.

On one of our long walks through the hills, I remarked that I thought the main trouble with Amy Lowell and her gang of drum-beaters was their eternal damned self-consciousness, that they always had one eye on the ball and the other eye on the grandstand. To which the author of these poems replied that his personal trouble as a poet seemed to be that he had one eye on the ball and the other eye on Babe Ruth. Surely there must be possibilities inherent in a mind so shrewdly and humorously honest.

PHIL STONE

Oxford, Mississippi
September 23, 1924

PROLOGUE

The poplar trees sway to and fro
That through this gray old garden go
Like slender girls with nodding heads,
Whispering above the beds
Of tall tufted hollyhocks,
Of purple asters and of phlox;
Caught in the daisies’ dreaming gold
Recklessly scattered wealth untold
About their slender graceful feet
Like poised dancers, lithe and fleet.
The candled flames of roses here
Gutter gold in this still air,
And clouds glide down the western sky
To watch this sun-drenched revery,
While the poplars’ shining crests
Lightly brush their silvered breasts,
Dreaming not of winter snows
That soon will shake their maiden rows.

The days dream by, golden-white,
About the fountain’s silver light
That lifts and shivers in the breeze
Gracefully slim as are the trees;
Then shakes down its glistered hair
Upon the still pool’s mirrored, fair
Flecked face.
                     Why am I sad? I?
Why am I not content? The sky
Warms me and yet I cannot break
My marble bonds. That quick keen snake
Is free to come and go, while I
Am prisoner to dream and sigh
For things I know, yet cannot know,
’Twixt sky above and earth below.
The spreading earth calls to my feet
Of orchards bright with fruits to eat,
Of hills and streams on either hand;
Of sleep at night on moon-blanched sand:
The whole world breathes and calls to me
Who marble-bound must ever be.

IF I were free, then I would go
Where the first chill spring winds blow,
Wrapping a light shocked mountain’s brow
With shrilling tongues, and swirling now,
And fiery upward flaming, leap
From craggy teeth above each deep
Cold and wet with silence. Here
I fly before the streaming year
Along the fierce cold mountain tops
To which the sky runs down and stops;
And with the old moon watching me
Leaping and shouting joyously
Along each crouching dark abyss
Through which waters rush and hiss,
I whirl the echoes west and east
To hover each copse where lurks the beast,
Silence, till they shatter back
Across the ravine’s smoky crack.

Here Pan’s sharp hoofed feet have pressed
His message on the chilly crest,
Saying—Follow where I lead,
For all the world springs to my reed
Woven up and woven down,
Thrilling all the sky and ground
With shivering heat and quivering cold;
To pierce and burst the swollen mold;
Shrilling in each waiting brake:
Come, ye living, stir and wake!

As the tumbling sunlight falls
Spouting down the craggy walls
To hiss upon the frozen rocks
That dot the hills in crouching flocks,
So I plunge in some deep vale
Where first violets, shy and pale,
Appear, and spring with tear-stained cheeks
Peeps at me from the neighboring brakes,
Gathering her torn draperies up
For flight if I cast my eyes up.
Swallows dart and skimming fly
Like arrows painted on the sky,
And the twanging of the string
Is the faint high quick crying
That they, downward shooting, spin
Through the soundless swelling din.
Dogwood shines through thin trees there
Like jewels in a woman’s hair;
A sudden brook hurries along
Singing its reverted song,
Flashing in white frothèd shocks
About upstanding polished rocks;
Slender shoots draw sharp and clear
And white withes shake as though in fear
Upon the quick stream’s melted snow
That seems to dance rather than flow.

Then on every hand awakes
From the dim and silent brakes
The breathing of the growing things,
The living silence of all springs
To come and that have gone before;
And upon a woodland floor
I watch the sylvans dance till dawn
While the brooding spring looks on.
The spring is quick with child, and sad;
And in her dampened hair sits clad
Watching the immortal dance
To the world’s throbbing dissonance
That Pan’s watchful shrill pipes blow
Of the fiery days that go
Like wine across the world; then high:
His pipes weave magic on the sky
Shrill with joy and pain of birth
Of another spring on earth.

HARK! a sound comes from the brake
And I glide nearer like a snake
To peer into its leafy deeps
Where like a child the spring still sleeps.
Upon a chill rock gray and old
Where the willows’ simple fold
Falls, an unstirred curtain, Pan—
As he sat since the world began—
Stays and broods upon the scene
Beside a hushèd pool where lean
His own face and the bending sky
In shivering soundless amity.

Pan sighs, and raises to his lips
His pipes, down which his finger-tips
Wander lovingly; then low
And clearly simple does he blow
A single thin clear melody
That pauses, spreading liquidly,
While the world stands sharp and mute
Waiting for his magic flute.
A sudden strain, silver and shrill
As narrow water down a hill,
Splashes rippling as though drawn
In shattered quicksilver on
The willow curtain, and through which
It wanders without halt or hitch
Into silent meadows; when
It pauses, breathing, and again
Climbs as though to reach the sky
Like the soaring silver cry
Of some bird. A note picks out,
A silver moth that whirrs about
A single rose, then settles low
On the sorrowful who go
Along a willowed green-stained pool
To lie and sleep within its cool
Virginity.

               Ah, the world
About which mankind’s dreams are furled
Like a cocoon, thin and cold,
And yet that is never old!
Earth’s heart burns with winter snows
As fond and tremulous Pan blows
For other springs and cold and sad
As this; and sitting garment-clad
In sadness with dry stricken eyes
Bent to the unchanging skies,
Pan sighs and broods upon the scene
Beside this hushèd pool where lean
His own face and the bending sky
In shivering soundless amity.

ALL the air is gray with rain
Above the shaken fields of grain,
Cherry orchards moveless drip
Listening to their blossoms slip
Quietly from wet black boughs.
There a soaking broad-thatched house
Steams contemplatively. I
Sit beneath the weeping sky
Crouched about the mountains’ rim
Drawing her loose hair over them.

My eyes, peace-filled by falling rain,
Brood upon the steamy plain,
Crouched beneath a dripping tree
Where strong and damp rise up to me
The odors of the bursting mold
Upon the earth’s slow-breathing old
Breast; of acorns swelling tight
To thrust green shoots into the light
As shade for me in years to come
When my eyes grow dim and I am dumb
With sun-soaked age and lack of strength
Of things that have lived out the length
Of life; and when the nameless pain
To fuller live and know again

No more will send me over earth
Puzzling about the worth
Of this and that, nor crying “Hence!”
At my unseeking impotence
To have about my eyes close-furled
All the beauty in the world.
But content to watch by day
The dancing light’s unthinking play
Ruffling the pool. Then I’ll be
Beneath the roses. sleepily
Soaking in the sun-drenched air
Without wish or will or care,
With my softened fading eyes
Shackled to the curving skies.

THE poplars look beyond the wall
With bending hair, and to me call,
Curving shivering hands to me
Whispering what they can see:
Of a dim and silent way
Through a valley white with may.
On either hand gossiping beeches
Stir against the lilac reaches
Half of earth and half of sky;
There the aspens quakingly
Gather in excited bands,
The dappled birches’ fluttering hands
Cast their swift and silver light
Through the glade spun greenish white.

So alone I follow on
Where slowly piping Pan has gone
To draw the quiet browsing flocks,
While a blackbird calls and knocks
At noon across the dusty downs
In quivering peace, until Pan sounds
His piping gently to the bird,
And saving this no sound is heard.

Now the blackbirds’ gold wired throats
Spill their long cool mellow notes;
In solemn flocks slowly wheeling
Intricately, without revealing
Their desires, as on blue space
They thread and cross like folds of lace
Woven black; then shrilling go
Like shutters swinging to and fro.

ON the downs beyond the trees
Loved by the thrilling breeze,
While the blackbird calls and knocks
Go the shepherds with their flocks.
It is noon, and the air
Is shimmering still, for nowhere
Is there a sound. The sky, half waked,
Half sleep, is calm; for peace is laked
Between the world rim’s far spread dikes
And the trees, from which there strikes
The flute notes that I, listening, hear
Liquidly falling on my ear:

“Come quietly, Faun, to my call;
Come, come, the noon will cool and pass
That now lies edgelessly in thrall
Upon the ripened sun-stilled grass.

“There is no sound in all the land,
There is no breath in all the skies;
Here Warmth and Peace go hand in hand
’Neath Silence’s inverted eyes.

“My call, spreading endlessly,
My mellow call pulses and knocks;
Come, Faun, and solemnly
Float shoulderward your autumned locks.

“Let your fingers, languorous,
Slightly curl, palm upward rest,
The silent noon waits over us,
The feathers stir not on his breast.

“There is no sound nor shrill of pipe,
Your feet are noiseless on the ground;
The earth is full and stillily ripe,
In all the land there is no sound.

“There is a great God who sees all
And in my throat bestows this boon:
To ripple the silence with my call
When the world sleeps and it is noon.”

When I hear the blackbirds’ song
Piercing cool and mellowly long,
I pause to hear, nor do I breathe
As the dusty gorse and heath
Breathe not, for their magic call
Holds all the pausing earth in thrall
At noon; then I know the skies
Move not, but halt in reveries
Of golden-veiled and misty blue;
Then the blackbirds wheeling through
By Pan guarded in the skies,
Piercing the earth with remorseless eyes
Are burned scraps of paper cast
On a lake quiet, deep, and vast.

UPON a wood’s dim shaded edge
Stands a dusty hawthorn hedge
Beside a road from which I pass
To cool my feet in deep rich grass.
I pause to listen to the song
Of a brook spilling along
Behind a patchy willow screen
Whose lazy evening shadows lean
Their scattered gold upon a glade
Through which the staring daisies wade,
And the resilient poplar trees,
Slowly turning in the breeze,
Flash their facets to the sun,
Swaying in slow unison.
Here quietude folds a spell
Within a stilly shadowed dell
Wherein I rest, and through the leaves
The sun a soundless pattern weaves
Upon the floor. The leafy glade
Is pensive in the dappled shade,
While the startled sunlight drips
From beech and alder fingertips,
And birches springing suddenly
Erect in silence sleepily
Clinging to their slender limbs,
Whitening them as shadow dims.

As I lie here my fancy goes
To where a quiet oak bestows
Its shadow on a dreaming scene
Over which the broad boughs lean
A canopy. The brook’s a stream
On which long still days lie and dream,
And where the lusty summer walks—
Around his head are lilac stalks—
In the shade beneath the trees
To let the cool stream fold his knees;
While I lie in the leafy shade
Until the nymphs troop down the glade.
Their limbs that in the spring were white
Are now burned golden by sunlight.
They near the marge, and there they meet
Inverted selves stretched at their feet;
And they kneel languorously there
To comb and braid their short blown hair
Before they slip into the pool—
Warm gold in silver liquid cool.

Evening turns and sunlight falls
In flecks between the leafèd walls,
Like golden butterflies whose wings
Slowly pulse and beat. Slow sings
The stream in a lower key
Murmuring down quietly
Between its solemn purple stone
With cooling ivy overgrown.

Sunset stains the western sky;
Night comes soon, and now I
Follow toward the evening star.
A sheep bell tinkles faint and far,
Then drips in silence as the sheep
Move like clouds across the deep
Still dusky meadows wet with dew.
I stretch and roll and draw through
The fresh sweet grass, and the air
Is softer than my own soft hair.
I lift up my eyes; the green
West is a lake on which has been
Cast a single lily. —See!
In meadows stretching over me
Are humming stars as thick as bees,
And the reaching inky trees
Sweep the sky. I lie and hear
The voices of the fecund year,
While the dark grows dim and deep,
And I glide into dreamless sleep.

CAWING rooks in tangled flight
Come crowding home against the night.
And all other wings are still
Except rooks tumbling down the hill
Of evening sky. The crimson falls
Upon the solemn ivied walls;
The horns of sunset slowly sound
Between the waiting sky and ground;
The cedars painted on the sky
Hide the sun slow flamingly
Repeated level on the lake,
Smooth and still and without shake,
Until the swans’ inverted grace
Wreathes in thought its placid face
With spreading lines like opening fans
Moved by white and languid hands.

Now the vesper song of bells
Beneath the evening flows and swells,
And the twilight’s silver throat
Slowly repeats each resonant note:
The dying day gives those who sorrow
A boon no king can give: a morrow.

The westering sun has climbed the wall
And silently we watch night fall
While sunset lingers in the trees
Its subtle gold-shot tapestries,
The sky is velvet overhead
Where petalled stars are canopied
Like sequins in a spreading train
Without fold or break or stain.

A cool wind whispers by the heads
Of flowers dreaming in their beds
Like convent girls, filling their sleep
With strange dreams from the outer deep.
On every hill battalioned trees
March skyward on unmoving knees,
And like a spider on a veil
Climbs the moon. A nightingale,
Lost in the trees against the sky,
Loudly repeats its jewelled cry.

I AM sad, nor yet can I,
For all my questing, reason why;
And now as night falls I will go
Where two breezes joining flow
Above a stream whose gleamless deeps
Caressingly sing the while it sleeps
Upon sands powdered by the moon.
And there I’ll lie to hear it croon
In fondling a wayward star
Fallen from the shoreless far
Sky, while winds in misty stream,
Laughing and weeping in a dream,
Whisper of an orchard’s trees
That, shaken by the aimless breeze,
Let their blossoms fade and slip
Soberly, as lip to lip
They touch the misty grasses fanned
To ripples by the breeze.

                                     Here stand
The clustered lilacs faint as cries
Against the silken-breasted skies;
They nod and sway, and slow as rain
Their slowly falling petals stain
The grass as through them breezes stray,
Smoothing them in silver play.
And we, the marbles in the glade,
Dreaming in the leafy shade
Are saddened, for we know that all
Things save us must fade and fall,
And the moon that sits there in the skies
Draws her hair across her eyes:
She sees the blossoms blow and die,
Soberly and quietly,
Till spring breaks in the waiting glade
And the first thin branchèd shade
Falls ’thwart them, and the swallows’ cry
Calls down from the stirring sky,
Thin and cold and hot as flame
Where spring is nothing but a name.

The stream flows calmly without sound
In the darkness gathered round;
Trembling to the vagrant breeze
About me stand the inky trees
Peopled by some bird’s loud cries,
Until it seems as if the skies
Had shaken down their blossomed stars
Seeking among the trees’ dim bars,
Crying aloud, each for its mate,
About the old earth, insensate,
Seemingly, to their white woe,
But their sorrow does she know
And her breast, unkempt and dim,
Throbs her sorrow out to them.
The dying day gives all who sorrow
The boon no king may give: a morrow.

THE ringèd moon sits eerily
Like a mad woman in the sky,
Dropping flat hands to caress
The far world’s shaggy flanks and breast,
Plunging white hands in the glade
Elbow deep in leafy shade
Where birds sleep in each silent brake
Silverly, there to wake
The quivering loud nightingales
Whose cries like scattered silver sails
Spread across the azure sea.
Her hands also caress me:
My keen heart also does she dare;
While turning always through the skies
Her white feet mirrored in my eyes
Weave a snare about my brain
Unbreakable by surge or strain,
For the moon is mad, for she is old,
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told;
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass, they pass, and know not whither.

The hushèd earth, so calm, so old,
Dreams beneath its heath and wold—
And heavy scent from thorny hedge
Paused and snowy on the edge
Of some dark ravine, from where
Mists as soft and thick as hair
Float silver in the moon.

Stars sweep down—or are they stars?—
Against the pines’ dark etchèd bars.
Along a brooding moon-wet hill
Dogwood shines so cool and still,
Like hands that, palm up, rigid lie
In invocation to the sky
As they spread there, frozen white,
Upon the velvet of the night.

THE world is still. How still it is!
About my avid stretching ears
The earth is pulseless in the dim
Silence that flows into them
And forms behind my eyes, until
My head is full: I feel it spill
Like water down my breast. The world,
A muted violin where are curled
Pan’s fingers, waits, supine and cold
And bound soundlessly in fold
On fold of blind calm rock
Edgeless in the moonlight’s shock,
Until the hand that grasps the bow
Descends; then grave and strong and low
It rises to his waiting ears.
The music of all passing years
Flows over him and down his breast
Of ice and gold, as in the west
Sunsets flame, and all dawns burn
Eastwardly, and calm skies turn
Always about his frozen head:
Peace for living, peace for dead.

And the hand that draws the bow
Stops not, as grave and strong and low
About his cloudy head it curls
The endless sorrow of all worlds,
The while he bends dry stricken eyes
Above the throngs; perhaps he sighs
For all the full world watching him
As seasons change from bright to dim.

And my eyes too are cool with tears
For the stately marching years,
For old earth dumb and strong and sad
With life so willy-nilly clad,
And mute and impotent like me
Who marble bound must ever be;
And my carven eyes embrace
The dark world’s dumbly dreaming face,
For my crooked limbs have pressed
Her all-wise pain-softened breast
Until my hungry heart is full
Of aching bliss unbearable.

THE hills are resonant with soft humming;
It is a breeze that pauses, strumming
On the golden-wirèd stars
The deep full music to which was
The song of life through ages sung;
And soundlessly there weaves among
The chords a star, a falling rose
That only this high garden grows;
A falling hand with beauty dumb
Stricken by the hands that strum
The sky, is gone: yet still I see
This hand swiftly and soundlessly
Sliding now across my eyes
As it then slid down the skies.

Soft the breeze, a steady flame
Cooled by the forest whence it came,
Slipping across the dappled lea
To climb the dim walls of the sea;
To comb the wave-ponies’ manes back
Where the water shivers black
With quiet depth and solitude
And licks the caverned sky. The wood
Stirs to a faint far mystic tone:

The reed of Pan who, all alone
In some rock-chilled silver dell,
Thins the song of Philomel
Sad in her dark dim echoed bower
Watching the far world bud and flower,
Watching the moon in ether stilled
Who, with her broad face humped and hilled
In sleep, dreams naked in the air
While Philomel dreams naked here.

Clear and sad sounds Pan’s thin strain,
Dims in mystery, grows again;
Mirrors the light limbs falling, dying,
Soothes night voices calling, crying,
Stills the winds’ far seeking tone
Where fallow springs have died and grown;
Hushes the nightbirds’ jewelled cries
And flames the shadows’ subtleties
Through endless labyrinthine walls
Of sounding corridors and halls
Where sound and silence soundless keep
Their slumbrous noon. Sweet be their sleep.

ALL day I run before a wind,
Keen and blue and without end,
Like a fox before the hounds
Across the mellow sun-shot downs
That smell like crispened warm fresh bread;
And the sky stretched overhead
Has drawn across its face a veil
Of gold and purple. My limbs fail
And I plunge panting down to rest
Upon earth’s sharp and burning breast.
I lie flat, and feel its cold
Beating heart that’s never old,
And yet has felt the ages pass
Above its heather, trees, and grass.
The azure veils fall from the sky
And on the world’s rim shimmering lie,
While the bluely flashing sea
Pulses through infinitely.

Up! Away! Now I will go
To some orchard’s golden row
Of bursting mellow pears and sweet
Berries and dusky grapes to eat.
I singing crush them to my lips,
Staining cheek and fingertips,
Then fill my hands, I know not why,
And off again along the sky
Down through the trees, beside the stream
Veiled too, and golden as a dream,
To lie once more in some warm glade
Deep walled by the purple shade
My fruits beside, and so I lie
In thin sun sifting from the sky
Like a cloak to cover me:
I sink in sleep resistlessly
While the sun slides smoothly down
The west, and green dusk closes round
My glade that the sun filled up
As gold wine stands within a cup.

Now silent autumn fires the trees
To slow flame, and calmly sees
The changing days burn down the skies
Reflected in her quiet eyes,
While about her as she kneels
Crouch the heavy-fruited fields
Along whose borders poplars run
Burnished by the waning sun.
Vineyards struggle up the hill
Toward the sky, dusty and still,
Thick with heavy purple grapes
And golden bursting fruits whose shapes
Are full and hot with sun. Here each
Slow exploding oak and beech
Blaze up about her dreaming knees,
Flickering at her draperies.
Each covert, a blaze of light
Upon horizons blueish white
Is a torch, the pines are bronze
And stiffly stretch their sculptured fronds
Over the depthless hushed ravine
Wherein their shadows change to green,
Then to purple in the deeps
Where the waiting winter sleeps.

THE moon is mad, and dimly burns,
And with her prying fingers turns
Inside out thicket and copse
Curiously, and then she stops
Staring about her, and the down
Grows sharp in sadness gathering round,
Powdering each darkling rock
And the hunchèd grain in shock
On shock in solemn rows;
And after each a shadow goes
Staring skyward, listening
Into the silence glistening
With watching stars that, sharp and sad,
Ring the solemn staring mad
Moon; and winds in monotone
Brood where shaken grain had grown
In bloomless fields that raise their bare
Breasts against the dying year.

And yet I do not move, for I
Am sad beneath this autumn sky,
For I am sudden blind and chill
Here beneath my frosty hill,
And I cry moonward in stiff pain
Unheeded, for the moon again
Stares blandly, while beneath her eyes
The silent world blazes and dies,
And leaves slip down and cover me
With sorrow and desire to be—
While the world waits, cold and sere—
Like it, dead with the dying year.

THE world stands without move or sound
In this white silence gathered round
It like a hood. It is so still
That earth lies without wish or will
To breathe. My garden, stark and white,
Sits soundless in the falling light
Of lifting bush and sudden hedge
Ice bound and ghostly on the edge
Of my world, curtained by the snow
Drifting, sifting; fast, now slow;
Falling endlessly from skies
Calm and gray, some far god’s eyes.

The soundless quiet flakes slide past
Like teardrops on a sheet of glass,
Ah, there is some god above
Whose tears of pity, pain, and love
Slowly freeze and brimming slow
Upon my chilled and marbled woe;
The pool, sealed now by ice and snow,
Is dreaming quietly below,
Within its jewelled eye keeping
The mirrored skies it knew in spring.

How soft the snow upon my face!
And delicate cold! I can find grace
In its endless quiescence
For my enthrallèd impotence:
Solace from a pitying breast
Bringing quietude and rest
To dull my eyes; and sifting slow
Upon the waiting earth below
Fold veil on veil of peacefulness
Like wings to still and keep and bless.

WHY cannot we always be
Left steeped in this immensity
Of softly stirring peaceful gray
That follows on the dying day?
Here I can drug my prisoned woe
In the night wind’s sigh and flow,
But now we, who would dream at night,
Are awakened by the light
Of paper lanterns, in whose glow
Fantastically to and fro
Pass, in a loud extravagance
And reft of grace, yet called a dance,
Dancers in a blatant crowd
To brass horns horrible and loud.

The blaring beats on gustily
From every side. Must I see
Always this unclean heated thing
Debauching the unarmèd spring
While my back I cannot turn,
Nor may not shut these eyes that burn?
The poplars shake and sway with fright
Uncontrollable, the night
Powerless in ruthless grasp
Lifts hidden hands as though to clasp,
In invocation for surcease,
The flying stars.

                         Once there was peace
Calm handed where the roses blow,
And hyacinths, straight row on row;
And hushed among the trees. What!
Has my poor marble heart forgot
This surging noise in dreams of peace
That it once thought could never cease
Nor pale? Still the blaring falls
Crashing between my garden walls
Gustily about my ears
And my eyes, uncooled by tears,
Are drawn as my stone heart is drawn,
Until the east bleeds in the dawn
And the clean face of the day
Drives them slinkingly away.

DAYS and nights into years weave
A net to blind and to deceive
Me, yet my full heart yearns
As the world about me turns
For things I know, yet cannot know,
’Twixt sky above and earth below.
All day I watch the sunlight spill
Inward, driving out the chill
That night has laid here fold on fold
Between these walls, till they would hold
No more. With half closed eyes I see
Peace and quiet liquidly
Steeping the walls and cloaking them
With warmth and silence soaking them;
They do not know, nor care to know,
Why evening waters sigh in flow;
Why about the pole star turn
Stars that flare and freeze and burn;
Nor why the seasons, springward wheeling,
Set the bells of living pealing.
They sorrow not that they are dumb:
For they would not a god become.

 … I am sun-steeped, until I
Am all sun, and liquidly

I leave my pedestal and flow
Quietly along each row,
Breathing in their fragrant breath
And that of the earth beneath.
Time may now unheeded pass:
I am the life that warms the grass—

Or does the earth warm me? I know
Not, nor do I care to know.
I am with the flowers one,
Now that is my bondage done;
And in the earth I shall sleep
To never wake, to never weep
For things I know, yet cannot know,
’Twixt sky above and earth below,
For Pan’s understanding eyes
Quietly bless me from the skies,
Giving me, who knew his sorrow,
The gift of sleep to be my morrow.

EPILOGUE

May walks in this garden, fair
As a girl veiled in her hair
And decked in tender green and gold;
And yet my marble heart is cold
Within these walls where people pass
Across the close-clipped emerald grass
To stare at me with stupid eyes
Or stand in noisy ecstasies
Before my marble, while the breeze
That whispers in the shivering trees
Sings of quiet hill and plain,
Of vales where softly broods the rain,
Of orchards whose pink flaunted trees,
Gold flecked by myriad humming bees,
Enclose a roof-thatch faded gray,
Like a giant hive. Away
To brilliant pines upon the sea
Where waves linger silkenly
Upon the shelving sand, and sedge
Rustling gray along the edge
Of dunes that rise against the sky
Where painted sea-gulls wheel and fly.

Ah, how all this calls to me
Who marble-bound must ever be
While turn unchangingly the years.
My heart is full, yet sheds no tears
To cool my burning carven eyes
Bent to the unchanging skies:
I would be sad with changing year,
Instead, a sad, bound prisoner,
For though about me seasons go
My heart knows only winter snow.

April, May, June, 1919

A GREEN BOUGH

COPYRIGHT, 1933, BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES BY THE
HADDON CRAFTSMEN AND BOUND BY THE
J. F. TAPLEY COMPANY

I

WE SIT drinking tea
Beneath the lilacs on a summer afternoon
Comfortably, at our ease
With fresh linen on our knees,
And we sit, we three
In diffident contentedness
Lest we let each other guess
How happy we are
Together here, watching the young moon
Lying shyly on her back, and the first star.

There are women here:
Smooth-shouldered creatures in sheer scarves, that pass
And eye us strangely as they pass.
One of them, our hostess, pauses near:
—Are you quite all right, sir? she stops to ask.
—You are a bit lonely, I fear.
Will you have more tea? cigarettes? No?—
I thank her, waiting for her to go:
To us they are like figures on a masque.
—Who?—shot down
Last spring—Poor chap, his mind
.… doctors say … hoping rest will bring—
Busy with their tea and cigarettes and books
Their voices come to us like tangled rooks.
We sit in silent amity.

—It was a morning in late May:
A white woman, a white wanton near a brake,
A rising whiteness mirrored in a lake;
And I, old chap, was out before the day
In my little pointed-eared machine,
Stalking her through the shimmering reaches of the sky.
I knew that I could catch her when I liked
For no nymph ever ran as swiftly as she could.
We mounted, up and up
And found her at the border of a wood:
A cloud forest, and pausing at its brink
I felt her arms and her cool breath.
The bullet struck me here, I think
In the left breast
And killed my little pointed-eared machine. I saw it fall
The last wine in the cup.…
I thought that I could find her when I liked,
But now I wonder if I found her, after all.

One should not die like this
On such a day,
From angry bullet or other modern way.
Ah, science is a dangerous mouth to kiss.

One should fall, I think, to some Etruscan dart
In meadows where the Oceanides
Flower the wanton grass with dancing,
And, on such a day as this
Become a tall wreathed column: I should like to be
An ilex on an isle in purple seas.
Instead, I had a bullet through my heart—

—Yes, you are right:
One should not die like this,
And for no cause nor reason in the world.

’Tis well enough for one like you to talk
Of going in the far thin sky to stalk
The mouth of death: you did not know the bliss
Of home and children; the serene
Of living and of work and joy that was our heritage.
And, best of all, of age.
We were too young.
Still—he draws his hand across his eyes
—Still, it could not be otherwise.

We had been
Raiding over Mannheim. You’ve seen
The place? Then you know
How one hangs just beneath the stars and sees
The quiet darkness burst and shatter against them
And, rent by spears of light, rise in shuddering waves
Crested with restless futile flickerings.
The black earth drew us down, that night
Out of the bullet-tortured air:
A great black bowl of fireflies.…
There is an end to this, somewhere:
One should not die like this—

One should not die like this.
His voice has dropped and the wind is mouthing his words
While the lilacs nod their heads on slender stalks,
Agreeing while he talks,
Caring not if he is heard or is not heard.
One should not die like this.
Half audible, half silent words
That hover like gray birds
About our heads.

We sit in silent amity.
I am cold, for now the sun is gone
And the air is cooler where we three
Are sitting. The light has followed the sun
And I no longer see
The pale lilacs stirring against the lilac-pale sky.
They bend their heads toward me as one head.
—Old man—they say—How did you die?

I—I am not dead.

I hear their voices as from a great distance—Not dead
He’s not dead, poor chap; he didn’t die—

II

LAXLY reclining, he watches the firelight going
Across the ceiling, down the farther wall
In cumulate waves, a golden river flowing
Above them both, down yawning dark to fall
Like music dying down a monstrous brain.
Laxly reclining, he sees her sitting there
With firelight like a hand laid on her hair,
With firelight like a hand upon the keys
Playing a music of lustrous silent gold.
Bathed in gold she sits, upon her knees
Her silent hands, palm upward, lie at ease,
Filling with gold at each flame’s spurting rise,
Spilling gold as each flame sinks and sighs,
Watching her plastic shadow on the wall
In unison with the firelight lift and fall
To the music by the firelight played
Upon the keys from which her hands had strayed
And fallen.

                A pewter bowl of lilies in the room
Seems to him to weigh and change the gloom
Into a palpable substance he can feel
Heavily on his hands, slowing the wheel
The firelight steadily turns upon the ceiling.

The firelight steadily hums, steadily wheeling
Until his brain, stretched and tautened, suddenly cracks.

Play something else.
                              And laxly sees his brain
Whirl to infinite fragments, like brittle sparks,
Vortex together again, and whirl again.

Play something else.
                              He tries to keep his tone
Lightly natural, watching the shadows thrown,
Watching the timid shadows near her throat
Link like hands about her from the dark.
His eyes like hurried fingers fumble and fly
About the narrow bands with which her dress is caught
And lightly trace the line of back and thigh.
He sees his brain disintegrate, spark by spark.

Play something else, he says.
                                            And on the dark
His brain floats like a moon behind his eyes,
Swelling, retreating enormously. He shuts them
As one concealed suppresses two loud cries
And on the troubled lids a vision sees:

It is as though he watched her mount a stair
And rose with her on the suppleness of her knees,
Saw her skirts in swirling line on line,
Saw the changing shadows ripple and rise
After the flexing muscles; subtle thighs,
Rhythm of back and throat and gathered train.
A bursting moon, wheels spin in his brain.
As through a corridor rushing with harsh rain
He walks his life, and reaching the end
He turns it as one turns a wall

She plays, and softly playing, sees the room
Dissolve, and like a dream the still walls fade
And sink, while music softly played
Softly flows through lily-scented gloom.
She is a flower lightly cast
Upon a river flowing, dimly going
Between two silent shores where willows lean,
Watching the moon stare through the willow screen.
The hills are dark and cool, clearly remote,
Within whose shadow she has paused to rest.
Could she but stay here forever, where grave rain slants above them,
Rain as slow as starlight on her breast;
Could she but drift forever along these ways
Clearly shadowed, barred with veils of rain,
Beneath azure fields with stars in choired processional
To chant the silence from her heart again.

Laxly reclining, he feels the firelight beating
A clamor of endless waves upon the dark,
A swiftly thunderous surf swiftly retreating.
His brain falls hissing from him, a spark, a spark,
And his eyes like hurried fingers fumble and fly
Among the timid shadows near her throat,
About the narrow bands with which her dress is caught,
And lightly trace the line of back and thigh.
He sees his brain disintegrate, spark by spark,
And she turns as if she heard two cries.

He stands and watches her mount the stair
Step by step, with her subtle suppleness,
That nervous strength that was ever his surprise;
The lifted throat, the thin crisp swirl of dress
Like a ripple of naked muscles before his eyes.
A bursting moon: wheels spin in his brain,
And whirl in a vortex of sparks together again.

At the turn she stops, and trembles there,
Nor watches him as he steadily mounts the stair.

III

THE cave was ribbed with dark. Then seven lights
Like golden bats windy along the eaves
Awoke and slipped inverted anchorage
In seven echoes of an unheard sound.
The cave is ribbed with music. Rumored far
The gate behind the moonwashed sentinel
Clangs to his lifted mace. Then all the bats
Of light slant whirring down the inclined air.

The cave no more a cave is: ribs of music
Arch and crack the walls, the uncaged bats
From earth’s core break its spun and floating crust.
Hissing seas rage overhead, and he
Staring up through icy twilight, sees
The stars within the water melt and sweep
In silver spears of streaming burning hair.

The seas roar past, shuddering rocks in seas
Mutter away like hoarse and vanquished horns.
Now comes dark again, he thinks, but finds
A wave of gold breaking a jewelled crest
And he is walled with gold. About him snored
Kings and mitred bishops tired of sin
Who dreamed themselves of heaven wearied,
And now may sleep, hear rain, and snore again.

One among them walks, whose citadel
Though stormed by sleep, is still unconquered.
In crimson she is robed, her golden hair,
Her mouth still yet unkissed, once housed her in
The sharp and quenchless sorrows of the world.
Kings in hell, robed in icy flame
Panted to crown them with her dreamless snows;
Glutted bishops, past the sentinel,
Couched in heaven, mewed for paradise.
Amid the dead walks she who, musicfleshed,
Whose mouth, two notes laid one on other for
A honeyed parting on the hived store;
Whose throat a sweetened reed had blown to be;
Whose breast was harped of silver and of two
Grave small singing birds uncaged; the chant
Of limbs to one another tuned and wed
That, as she walked, the air with music filled;
Now she, for whose caress once duke and king
And scarlet cardinal broke cords of fate,
From couch to couch her restless slumber seeks
And strokes indifferent lead with moaning hands.

The citied dead snore past, the hissing seas
Roar overhead again, and bows of coral
Whip gleaming fish in darts of unmouthed colors:
Trees of coral strip their colored leaves
Of fish, and each leaf has two bats of light
Where eyes would be, while other golden bats
Slipping among them, gleam their curving sides.
Thundering rocks crash down; spears of starlight
Shatter and break among them. Water-stallions
Neighing, crest the foaming rush of tides.
Drowning waves, airward rushing, crash
Columned upward, rake the stars and hear
A humming chord within the heavens bowled,
Then plunging back, they lose between the rocks
A dying rumor of the chanting stars.

The cave is ribbed with music; threads of sound
Gleam on the whirring wings of bats of gold,
Loop from the grassroots to the roots of trees
Thrust into sunlight, where the song of birds
Spins silver threads to gleam from bough to bough.
Grass in meadows cools his fancy’s feet:
Dew is on the grass, and birds in hedges
Weave the sunlight with sharp streaks of flight.
Bees break apple bloom, and peach and clover
Sing in the southern air where aimless clouds
Go up the sky-hill, cropping it like sheep,
And startled pigeons, like a wind beginning,
Fill the air with sucking silver sound.

He would leave the cave, before the bats
Of light grow weary, to their eaves return,
While music fills the dark as wind fills sails
And Silence like a priest on thin gray feet
Tells his beads of minutes on beside.
The cave is ribbed with dark, the music flies,
The bats of light are eaved and dark again.
Before him as, the priest of Silence by
And all the whispering nuns of breathing blent
With Silence’s self, he walks, the door beside
Stands the moonwashed sentinel to break
Its lichened sleep. Here halts the retinue.
The priest between his fingers lets his beads
Purr down. The nuns the timeless interval
Fill with all the still despair of breath.

He gateward turns. The sentinel his mace
Lifts in calm indifference. At the stroke
The sleeping gate wakes yawning back upon
Where gaunt Orion, swinging by his knees,
Crashes the arcing moon among the stars.

IV

                                                        and let
within the antiseptic atmosphere
of russel square grown brisk and purified
the ymca (the american express for this sole purpose too)
let lean march teasing the breasts of spring
horned like reluctant snails within
pink intervals
                    a brother there
so many do somanydo
                        from out the weary courtesy of time
fate a lady shopper takes her change
brightly in coppers somanydo
with soaped efficiency english food agrees
even with thos cook
                                                 here is a
tunnel a long one like a black period
with kissing punctuate on our left we see
forty poplars like the breasts of girls
taut with running
                          on our left we see
that blanched plateau wombing cunningly
hushing his brilliant counterattack saying
shhhhhh to general blah in the year mille
neufcentvingtsomethingorother
                                            may five years defunct
in a patient wave of sleep till natures
stomach settles hearing their sucking boots
their brittle sweat harshly evaporating carrying
dung there was no time to drop
                                             the general himself
is now on tour somewhere in the states
telling about the war
                                            and here
battalioned crosses in a pale parade
the german burned his dead (which goes to show
god visited him with proper wrath)
                                                         o spring
above unsapped convolvulae of hills april
a bee sipping perplexed with pleasure o spring
o wanton o cruel
                        o bitter and new as fire
baring to the curved and hungry hand
of march your white unsubtle thighs
grass his feet no longer trouble grows
lush in lanes he
                      sleeps quietly decay
makes death a cuckold yes lady
8 rue diena we take care of that yes
in amiens youll find 3 good hotels

V

THERE is no shortening-breasted nymph to shake
The tickets that stem up the lidless blaze
Of sunlight stiffening the shadowed ways,
Nor does the haunted silence even wake
                             Nor ever stir.

No footfall trembles in the smoky brush
Where bright leaves flicker down the dappled shade:
A tapestry that cloaks this empty glade
And shudders up to still the pulsing thrush
                          And frighten her

With the contact of its unboned hands
Until she falls and melts into the night
Where inky shadows splash upon the light
Crowding the folded darkness as it stands
                        About each grave

Whose headstone glimmers dimly in the gloom
Threaded by the doves’ unquiet calls,
Like memories that swim between the walls
And dim the peopled stillness of a room
                               Into a nave

Where no light breaks the thin cool panes of glass
To falling butterflies upon the floor;
While the shadows crowd within the door
And whisper in the dead leaves as they pass
                         Along the ground.

Here the sunset paints its wheeling gold
Where there is no breast to still in strife
Of joy or sadness, nor does any life
Flame these hills and vales grown sharp and cold
                         And bare of sound.

VI

MAN comes, man goes, and leaves behind
The bleaching bones that bore his lust;
The palfrey of his loves and hates
Is stabled at the last in dust.

He cozened it and it did bear
Him to wishing’s utmost rim;
But now, when wishing’s gained, he finds
It was the steed that cozened him.

VII

TRUMPETS of sun to silence fall
On house and barn and stack and wall.
Within the cottage, slowly wheeling,
The lamplight’s gold turns on the ceiling.
Beneath the stark and windless vane
Cattle stamp and munch their grain;
Below the starry apple bough
Leans the warped and clotted plow.
The moon rolls up, while far away
And thin with sorrow, the sheepdog’s bay
Fills the valley with lonely sound.
Slow leaves of darkness steal around.
The watch the watchman, Death, will keep
And man in amnesty may sleep.

The world is still, for she is old
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told.
Her gossip there, the watching moon
Views hill and stream and wave and dune
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass and pass, she cares not whither;—
Lovers’ vows by her made bright,
The outcast cursing at her light;
Mazed within her lambence lies
All the strife of flesh that dies.
Then through the darkened room with whispers speaking
There comes to man the sleep that all are seeking.

The lurking thief, in sharp regret
Watches the far world, waking yet,
But which in sleep will soon be still;
While he upon his misty hill
Hears a dark bird briefly cry
From its thicket on the sky,
And curses the moon because her light
Marks every outcast under night.

Still swings the murderer, bent of knees
In a slightly strained repose,
Nor feels the faint hand of the breeze:
He now with Solomon all things knows:
That, lastly, breath is to a man
But to want and fret a span.

VIII

HE FURROWS the brown earth, doubly sweet
To a hushed great passage of wind
Dragging its shadow. Beneath his feet
The furrow breaks, and at its end

He turns. With peace about his head
Traverses he again the earth: his own,
Still with enormous promises of bread
And the clean smell of its strength upon him blown.

Against the shimmering azure of the wood
A blackbird whistles, cool and mellow;
And there, where for a space he stood
To fill his lungs, a spurting yellow

Rabbit bursts, its flashing scut
Muscled in erratic lines
Of fright from furrow hill to rut.
He shouts: the darkly liquid pines

Mirror his falling voice, as leaf
Raises clear brown depths to meet its falling self;
Then again the blackbird, thief
Of silence in a burnished pelf.

Inscribes the answer to all life
Upon the white page of the sky:
The furious emptiness of strife
For him to read who passes by.

Beneath the marbled sky go sheep
Slow as clouds on hills of green;
Somewhere waking waters sleep
Beyond a faintleaved willow screen.

Wind and sun and air: he can
Furrow the brown earth, doubly sweet
With his own sweat, since here a man
May bread him with his hands and feet.

IX

THE sun lies long upon the hills,
The plowman slowly homeward wends;
Cattle low, uneased of milk,
The lush grass to their passing bends.

Mockingbirds in the ancient oak
In golden madness swing and shake;
Sheep like surf against a cliff
Of green hills, slowly flow and break.

Then sun sank down, and with him went
A pageantry whose swords are sheathed
At last, as warriors long ago
Let fall their storied arms and breathed

This air and found this peace as he
Who across this sunset moves to rest,
Finds but simple scents and sounds;
And this is all, and this is best.

X

BeYOND the hill the sun swam downward
And he was lapped in azure seas;
The dream that hurt him, the blood that whipped him
Dustward, slowed and gave him ease.

Behind him day lay stark with labor
Of him who strives with earth for bread;
Before him sleep, tomorrow his circling
Sinister shadow about his head.

But now, with night, this was forgotten:
Phantoms of breath round man swim fast;
Forgotten his father, Death; Derision
His mother, forgotten by her at last.

Nymph and faun in this dusk might riot
Beyond all oceaned Time’s cold greenish bar
To shrilling pipes, to cymbals’ hissing
Beneath a single icy star

Where he, to his own compulsion
—A terrific figure on an urn—
Is caught between his two horizons,
Forgetting that he cant return.

XI

WHEN evening shadows grew around
And a thin moon filled the lane,
Their slowing breath made scarce a sound
Where Richard lay with Jane.

The world was empty of all save they
And Spring itself was snared,
And well’s the fare of any day
When none has lesser fared:

Young breasts hollowed out with fire,
A singing fire that spun
The gusty tree of his desire
Till tree and gale were one;

And a small white belly yielded up
That they might try to make
Of youth and dark and spring a cup
That cannot fail nor slake.

XII

YOUNG Richard, striding toward town,
Felt life within him grown
Taut as a silver wire on which
Desire’s sharp winds were blown

To a monstrous sound that lapped him close
With a rain of earth and fire,
Flaying him exquisitely
With whips of living wire.

Under the arch where Mary dwelt
And nights were brief and sharp,
Her ancient music fell with his
As cythern falls with harp

And Richard’s fire within her fire
Swirled up into the air,
And polarised was all breath when
A girl let down her hair.

XIII

WHEN I was young and proud and gay
And flowers in fields were thicking,
There was Tad and Ralph and Ray
All waiting for my picking.

And who, with such a page to spell
And the hand of Spring to spread it,
Could like the tale told just as well
By another who had read it?

Ah, not I! and if I had
—When I was young and pretty—
Not learned to spell, then there was Tad
And Ralph and Ray to pity.

There was Tad and Ray and Ralph,
And field and lane were sunny;
And ah! I spelled my page myself
Long ere I married Johnny.

XIV

HIS mother said: I’ll make him
A lad has never been
(And rocked him closely, stroking
His soft hair’s yellow sheen)
His bright youth will be metal
No alchemist has seen.

His mother said: I’ll give him
A brave and high desire,
’Till all the dross of living
Burns clean within his fire.
He’ll be strong and merry
And he’ll be clean and brave,
And all the world will rue it
When he is dark in grave.

But dark will treat him kinder
Than man would anywhere
(With barren winds to rock him
—Though now he doesn’t care—
And hushed and haughty starlight
To stroke his golden hair)

Mankind called him felon
And hanged him stark and high
Where four winds could watch him
Troubled on the sky.

Once he was quick and golden,
Once he was clean and brave.
Earth, you dreamed and shaped him:
Will you deny him grave?

Being dead he will forgive you
And all that you have done,
But he’ll curse you if you leave him
Grinning at the sun.

XV

BONNY earth and bonny sky
And bonny was the sweep
Of sun and rain in apple trees
While I was yet asleep.

And bonny earth and bonny sky
And bonny’ll be the rain
And sun among the apple trees
When I’ve long slept again.

XVI

BEHOLD me, in my feathered cap and doublet,
strutting across this stage that men call living:
the mirror of all youth and hope and striving.
Even you, in me, become a grimace.”

“Ay, in that belief you too are but a mortal,
thinking that peace and quietude and silence
are but the shadows of your little gestures
upon the wall of breathing that surrounds you.”

“Ho, old spectre, solemnly ribbed with wisdom!
D’ye think that I must feel your dark compulsions
and flee with kings and queens in whistling darkness?
I am star, and sun, and moon, and laughter.”

“What star is there that falls, with none to watch it?
What sun is there more permanent than darkness?
What moon is there that cracks not? ay, what laughter,
what purse is there that empties not with spending?”

“Ho.… One grows weary, posturing and grinning,
aping a dream to a house of peopled shadows!
Ah, ’twas you who stripped me bare and set me
gibbering at mine own face in a mirror.”

“Yes, it is I who, in the world’s clear evening
with a silver star like a rose in a bowl of lacquer,
when you have played your play and at last are quiet,
will wait for you with sleep, and you can drown.”

XVII

o atthis
for a moment an aeon i pause plunging
above the narrow precipice of thy breast

what before thy white precipice the eagle
sharp in the sunlight and cleaving
his long blue ecstasy and what
wind on hilltops blond with the wings of the morning
what wind o atthis sweeping the april to lesbos
whitening the seas

XVIII

ONCE upon an adolescent hill
There lay a lad who watched amid the piled
And silver shapes of aircarved cumulae
A lone uncleaving eagle, and the still
Serenely blue dissolving of desire.

Easeful valleys of the earth had been: he looked not back,
Not down, he had not seen
Lush lanes of vernal peace, and green
Unebbing windless tides of trees; no wheeling gold
Upon the lamplit wall where is no speed
Save that which peaceful tongue ’twixt bed and supper wrought.

Here still the blue, the headlands; here still he
Who did not waken and was not awaked.
The eagle sped its lonely course and tall;
Was gone. Yet still upon his lonely hill the lad
Winged on past changing headlands where was laked
The constant blue

And saw the fleeing canyons of the sky
Tilt to banshee wire and slanted aileron,
And his own lonely shape on scudding walls
Where harp the ceaseless thunders of the sun.

XIX

GREEN is the water, green
The grave voluptuous music of the sun;
The pale and boneless fingers of a queen
Upon his body stoop and run.

Within these slow cathedralled corridors
Where ribs of sunlight drown
He joins in green caressing wars
With seamaids red and brown

And chooses one to bed upon
And lapped and lulled is he
By dimdissolving music of the sun
Requiemed down through the sea.

XX

HERE he stands, while eternal evening falls
And it is like a dream between gray walls
Slowly falling, slowly falling
Between two walls of gray and topless stone,
Between two walls with silence on them grown.
The twilight is severed with waters always falling
And heavy with budded flowers that never die,
And a voice that is forever calling
Sweetly and soberly.

Spring wakes the walls of a cold street,
Sows silver remembered seed in frozen places:
Upon meadows like still and simply smiling faces,
and wrinkled streams, and grass that knew her feet.

Here he stands, without the gate of stone
Between two walls with silence on them grown,
And littered leaves of silence on the floor;
Here, in a solemn silver of ruined springs
Among the smooth green buds, before the door
He stands and sings.

XXI

WHAT sorrow, knights and gentles? scroll and
Harp will prop the shaken sky
With the bronzehard fame of Roland
Who was not bronze, and so did die.

And ladies fair, why tears? why sighs?
There’s still many a champion that’ll
Feel the sharp goads of your eyes
As Roland did, in love and battle.

And be of cheer, ye valiant foemen.
Woman bore you: though amain
Life’s gale may blow, there’s born of woman
One who’ll give you sleep again.

Weep not for Roland: envy him
Whose fame is fast in song and story,
While he, with myriad cherubim
Is lapped in ease, asleep in glory.

XXII

I SEE your face through the twilight of my mind,
A dusk of forgotten things, remembered things;
It is a corridor dark and cool with music
And too dim for sight,
That leads me to a door which brings
You, clothed in quiet sound for my delight.

XXIII

SOMEWHERE a moon will bloom and find me not,
Then wane the windless gardens of the blue;
Somewhere a lost green hurt (but better this
Than in rich desolation long forgot)
Somewhere a sweet remembered mouth to kiss—
Still, you fool; lie still: that’s not for you.

XXIV

HOW canst thou be chaste, when lonely nights
And nights I lay beside in intimate loveliness
Thy grave beauty, girdle-slacked; and grief
So long my own was gone, and there was peace
Like azure wings my body along to lie
Wherein thy name like muted silver bells
Breathed over me, and found
Less joy, but less of grief than waking thou didst stir?
Then I did need but turn to thee, and then
My hand dreamed on thy little breast. Then flowed
Beneath my hand thy body’s curve, and turned
To me within the famished lonely dark
Thy sleeping kiss.

XXV

WAS this the dream?
                          Thus: It seemed I lay
Upon a beach where sand and water kiss
With endless kissing in a dying fall. The moon
Walked in the water, trod with silver shoon
The quavering sands: naught else but this.

And then and soon, O soon
                                            What wind
Shaped thee in Cnydos? shaped
Thy graven music? whence such guise
Doth starlight take nor beauty never taken
Yet hand so hungry for?
                                      O I have seen
The ultimate hawk unprop the ultimate skies,
And with the curving image of his fall
Locked beak to beak. And waked

And waked. And then the moon
And quavering sands where kissing crept and slaked
And that was all.
                        (Or had I slept
And in the huddle of its fading, wept
That long waking ere I should sleep again?)

XXVI

STILL, and look down, look down:
Thy curious withdrawn hand
Unprobes, now spirit and sense unblend, undrown,
Knit by a word and sundered by a tense
Like this: Is: Was: and Not. Nor caught between
Spent beaches and the annealed insatiate sea
Dost myriad lie, cold and intact Selene,
On secret strand or old disastrous lee
Behind the fading mistral of the sense.

XXVII

THE Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell

Upon the red erupted rose,
Upon the broken branch of peach
Blurred with scented mouths, that each
To another sing, and close.

’Mid all the passionate choristers
Of time and tide and love and death,
Philomel with jewelled breath
Dreams of flight, but never stirs.

On rose and peach their droppings bled;
Love a sacrifice has lain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead.

Then the Raven, bleak and blent
With all the slow despair of time,
Lets Philomel about him chime
Until her quiring voice is spent.

Philomel, on pain’s red root
Bloomed and sang, and pain was not;
When she has sung and is forgot,
The Raven speaks, no longer mute.

The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed,
On rose and peach their droppings fell.

XXVIII

OVER the world’s rim, drawing bland November
Reluctant behind them, drawing the moons of cold:
What do their lonely voices wake to remember
In this dust ere ’twas flesh? what restless old

Dream a thousand years was safely sleeping
Wakes my blood to sharp unease? what horn
Rings out to them? Was I free once, sweeping
Their wild and lonely skies ere I was born?

The hand that shaped my body, that gave me vision,
Made me a slave to clay for a fee of breath.
Sweep on, O wild and lonely: mine the derision,
Then the splendor and speed, the cleanness of death.

Over the world’s rim, out of some splendid noon,
Seeking some high desire, and not in vain,
They fill and empty the red and dying moon
And, crying, cross the rim of the world again.

XXIX

AS to an ancient music’s hidden fall
Her seed in the huddled dark was warm and wet
And three cold stars were riven in the wall:
Rain and fire and death above her door were set.

Her hands moaned on her breast in blind and supple fire,
Made light within her cave: she saw her harried
Body wrung to a strange and bitter lyre
Whose music once was pure strings simply married.

One to another in sleepy difference
Her thin and happy sorrows once were wed,
And what tomorrow’s chords are recompense
For yesterday’s single song unravished?

Three stars in her heart when she awakes
As winter’s sleep breaks greening in soft rain,
And in the caverned earth spring’s rumor shakes
As in her loins, the tilled and quickened grain.

XXX

GRAY the day, and all the year is cold,
Across the empty land the swallows’ cry
Marks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled
Save winter, in the sky.

O sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep
Stirs and turns and time once more is green,
In empty path and lane grass will creep
With none to tread it clean.

April and May and June, and all the dearth
Of heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;
What good is budding, gray November earth?
No need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.

The hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees
Shivers the grass in path and lane
And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—
Hush, hush! He’s home again.

XXXI

HE WINNOWED it with bayonets
And planted it with guns,
And now the final cannonade
Is healed with rains and suns

He looks about—and leaps to stamp
The stubborn grinning seeds
Of olden plantings back beneath
His field of colored weeds.

XXXII

look, cynthia,
how abelard evaporates
the brow of time, and paris
tastes his bitter thumbs—

the worm grows fat, eviscerate,
but not on love, o cynthia.

XXXIII

DID I know love once? Was it love or grief,
This grave body by where I had lain,
And my heart, a single stubborn leaf
That will not die, though root and branch be slain?

Though warm in dark between the breasts of Death,
That other breast forgot where I did lie,
And from the tree are stripped the leaves of breath,
There’s still one stubborn leaf that will not die

But restless in the sad and bitter earth,
Gains with each dawn a death, with dusk a birth.

XXXIV

THE ship of night, with twilightcolored sails,
Dreamed down the golden river of the west,
And Jesus’ mother mused the sighing gales
While Jesus’ mouth shot drinking on her breast.

Her soft doveslippered eyes strayed in the dusk
Creaming backward from the fallen day,
And a haughty star broke yellow musk
Where dead kings slept the long cold years away.

The hushed voices on the stair of heaven
Upward mounting, wake each drowsing king;
The dawn is milk to swell her breast, her seven
Sorrows crown her with a choiring ring;
A star to fleck young Jesus’ eyes is given,
And white winds in the duskfilled sails to sing.

XXXV

THE courtesan is dead, for all her subtle ways,
Her bonds are loosed in brittle and bitter leaves;
Her last long backward look’s to see who grieves
The imminent night of her reverted gaze.
Another will reign supreme, now she is dead
And winter’s lean clean rain sweeps out her room,
For man’s delight and anguish: with old new bloom
Crowning his desire, garlanding his head.

Thus the world, turning to cold and death
When swallows empty the blue and drowsy days
And lean rain scatters the ghost of summer’s breath—
The courtesan that’s dead, for all her subtle ways—
Spring will come! rejoice! But still is there
An old sorrow sharp as woodsmoke on the air.

XXXVI

GUSTY trees windily lean on green
eviscerated skies, the stallion, Wind,
against the sun’s gold collar stamps, to lean
his weight. And once the furrowed day behind,
the golden steed browses the field he breaks
and full of flashing teeth where he has been
trees, the waiting mare his neighing shakes,
hold his heaving shape a moment seen.

Upon the hills, clashing the stars together,
stripping the tree of heaven of its blaze,
stabled, richly grained with golden weather—

within the trees that he has reft and raped
his fierce embrace by riven boughs in shaped,
while on the shaggy hills he stamps and neighs.

XXXVII

The race’s splendor lifts her lip, exposes
Amid her scarlet smile her little teeth;
The years are sand the wind plays with; beneath,
The prisoned music of her deathless roses.

Within frostbitten rock she’s fixed and glassed;
Now man may look upon her without fear.
But her contemptuous eyes back through him stare
And shear his fatuous sheep when he has passed.

Lilith she is dead and safely tombed
And man may plant and prune with naught to bruit
His heired and ancient lot to which he’s doomed,
For quiet drowse the flocks when wolf is mute—
Ay, Lilith she is dead, and she is wombed,
And breaks his vine, and slowly eats the fruit.

XXXVIII

LIPS that of thy weary all seem weariest,
And wearier for the curled and pallid sly
Still riddle of thy secret face, and thy
Sick despair of its own ill obsessed;
Lay no hand to heart, do not protest
That smiling leaves thy tired mouth reconciled,
For swearing so keeps thee but ill beguiled
With secret joy of thine own flank and breast.

Weary thy mouth with smiling: canst thou bride
Thyself with thee, or thine own kissing slake?
Thy belly’s waking doth itself deride
With sleep’s sharp absence, coming so awake;
And near thy mouth thy twinned heart’s grief doth hide
For there’s no breast between: it cannot break.

XXXIX

LIKE to the tree that, young, reluctant yet
While sap’s but troubled rumor of green spring;
Like to the leaf that in warm bud does cling
In maidened sleep unreft though passionate;
Or like the cloud that, quicked and shaped for rain
But flees it in a silver hot despair;
The bird that dreams of flight and does not dare,
The sower who fears to sow and reaps no grain.

Beauty or gold or scarlet, then long sleep:
All this does buy brave trafficking with breath,
That though gray cuckold Time be horned by Death,
Then Death in turn is cuckold, unawake.
But sown cold years the stolen bread you reap
By all the Eves unsistered since the Snake.

XL

LADY, unawares still bride of sleep,
To thine own self sweet prisoner and fell
Thrall to the vassalled garrison that keep
Thy soft unguarded breast’s white citadel;

Alas, oft-cozened maid, who’d not be twain
Yet self-confounded, while importunates
The foe repulsed, and single, dost remain
The frequent darling of the gods and fates.

Thou chaste? Why, I’ve lain lonely nights that fled
No swifter than thou came and brided me
Who held thee as the fabric of thy bed
Where, turning on thy pillow’s cheek, thy kiss
Took in thy citadel an enemy
Against whose mouth thy mouth sleeps on—like this.

XLI

HER unripe shallow breast is green among
The windy bloom of drunken apple trees,
And seven fauns importunate as bees
To sip the thin young honey of her tongue.
The old satyr, leafed and hidden, dreams her kiss
His beard amid, leaving his mouth in sight;
Dreams her body in a moony night
Shortening and shuddering into his;

Then sees a faun, bolder than the rest,
Slide his hand upon her sudden breast,
And feels the life in him go cold, and pass
Until the fire that kiss had brought to be
Gutters and faints away; ’tis night, and he
Laughing wrings the bitter wanton grass.

XLII

BENEATH the apple tree Eve’s tortured shape
Glittered in the Snake’s, her riven breast
Sloped his coils and took the sun’s escape
To augur black her sin from east to west.
In winter’s night man may keep him warm
Regretting olden sins he did omit;
With fetiches the whip of blood to charm,
Forgetting that with breath he’s heir to it.

But old gods fall away, the ancient Snake
Is throned and crowned instead, and has for minion
That golden apple which will never slake
But ever feeds man’s crumb of fire, when plover
And swallow and shrill northing birds whip over
Nazarene and Roman and Virginian.

XLIII

lets see I’ll say—between two brief balloons
of skirts I saw grave chalices of knees
and momently the cloyed and cloudy bees
where hive her honeyed thighs those little moons

these slender moons’ unsunder I would break
so soft I’d break that hushed virginity
of sleep that in her narrow house would she
find me drowsing when she came awake—

no—madam I love your daughter—I will say

from out some leafed dilemma of desire
the wind hales yawning spring still half undressed
the hand that once did short to sighs her breast
now slaps her white behind to rosy fire

—sir your health your money how are they—

XLIV

IF THERE be grief, then let it be but rain,
And this but silver grief for grieving’s sake,
If these green woods be dreaming here to wake
Within my heart, if I should rouse again.

But I shall sleep, for where is any death
While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead
I’m rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,
This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.

Books by
WILLIAM FAULKNER

Soldiers’ Pay
Mosquitoes
Sartoris
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
Sanctuary
These Thirteen
Light in August
Doctor Martino
Pylon
Absalom, Absalom!
The Unvanquished
The Wild Palms
The Hamlet
Go Down, Moses
Intruder in the Dust
Knight’s Gambit
Collected Stories
Requiem for a Nun
A Fable
Big Woods
The Town
The Mansion
The Reivers

POETRY
The Marble Faun
A Green Bough