The Sirens: An Ode by Laurence Binyon [extract]

The Sirens: An Ode

PRELUDE

I REMEMBER a night of my youth, I remember a night

Soundless!

The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened

Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height

Boundless

With stars, with stars, with stars.

I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled

Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty

Out of the ends of the air and the unscaled darkness

Poured in a rain, in a river,

Into my marrow,—thro' all the veins of delight

Poured into me.

O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!

I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;

I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,

Born to be free.

In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,

A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;

For they came to me as lovers,

Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,

I felt more than heard, like a whisper

Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting

Sound

Of waves, of waves, of waves.

And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,

That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:

In the midst of the worlds I trembled,

I in the night a mortal

Found!

What was I?   What was I?   Nothing

But a Moment, aware

Of the ruins of Time!

Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,

Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,

From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir

In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,

Rose to claim

This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;

To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.

And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,

For I was the word on Earth's lips

That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,

Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,

Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,

The earth-child?

To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,

To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,

Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling

Earth-exiled?

But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,

In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,

As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind

At its core,

This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,

And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth

Shelter me more.

I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:

I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,

And feel within me, for this mortality's answer,

Sea without shore.

Laurence Binyon, The Sirens: An Ode (London: Macmillan & Co., 1925), 1-3.