Part I

With a long way before him there to Sharon,
And a longer way from Sharon to the sea,
Alone with an invisible companion
That was a valediction and a vengeance,
There were no further leagues or weary hours
Worth reckoning; for after years of hours,
And hours of years, the way ahead of him
Was like a line drawn surely, to be followed
With no great haste and with no hesitation,
Through time to silence. At the end of time
There would be Nightingale, and his last song--
A noxious and inevitable jest
That like a soft-winged insect at his ear
Fluttered and clung, or flew away from him,
Only to come once more. Weary of that,
And of a sun that burned the firmament,
He rested underneath a wayside oak
That he remembered. He was far from home,
Or from a place that once had such a name,
Though not so far now as to be a stranger
To things familiar and so long forgotten
As not to be the same, or quite so large.
The way from here to there was not so long
As in his youth he would have measured it;
The trees and hills and houses that he found
Were not so high; and hours that once had held
So large a rationing of the time of life
Were not so large or long. He might perhaps
Have counted them as longer than they were,
But for a fever in the certainty
Of what he sought. When once he had found that,
And had it, hours might have their way with him,
Or cease. With his work done so righteously,
Dying would not be much to pay for death,
Which was attuned and indispensable
To quivering destiny. No surer part
Was yet assigned to man for a performance
Than one that was for Malory, who must act,
Or leave the stage a failure.
For the present
All his wealth was in a purpose and a weapon,
All his purpose a removal of one being
Whose inception and existence was an error,
By fate repudiated and presented
To Malory for extinction. Nightingale
Had robbed him long ago of all the rest,
And with a smiling insolence not human
Had watched him crawling maimed out of a wreck
That had been life. There was no life since then;
For man, even if divine, is mechanism
While he is here, and so is not himself
If much of him be broken. Nightingale
Had shattered Malory, and as autumn waits
Unfailingly for summer to be done,
There was a story waiting to be told
By Malory, who believed he knew the peak
And issue of it--like so many of us
Whose knowing is belief, and whose belief
Is a determination to believe,
Whether in God, or in deflated friends,
Or in ourselves. If we believe enough
In something--none shall tell another what--
That's ours to do, we are glad to be alive,
As Malory was, to do it. For some years
He had closed his eyes at night infallibly
On the same swift and satisfying picture
That in the morning would awaken him
Like a strong voice, or like a strong hand laid
Heavily on him, or like a bell struck once
To make him leap and think, and ask of life
What soiled and veiled necessity of space
Was there somewhere appointed and permitted
For one who must not live. Somewhere alive
He was; and when time whispered where he was,
Malory's part would be to smile and heed
And listen, and to follow and perform.
The larger doings of mortality
Must honor their importance to be done
Becomingly and right, as a seed grows
To a green shoot and so to a round flower.
The fiery-flying stars are in no haste,
And seen from here are still. So Malory's
Undying and unimpeded inspiration
Might have been watched and read by any of us,
As through the immeasurable distances
That are between the nearest and most known
Of loving and unfathomable strangers,
For patience, calm and kind. Patient it was,
As lightning is, or as volcanoes are
That are already alive with fire and death.
Patience under an oak, there by the road
That wound and climbed a silent way to Sharon,
Would then have been about what a wayfarer,
Passing him, might have said was Malory.
If he had paused, and tarried for a while,
He might have found a man somewhat the worse
For wear within, and not unworn without--
One of the passable and unprosperous
To whom life clings; and might have said of him:
"There was a man I found one afternoon
Under an oak. He was a gracious man,
Who must once have had more to do with life
Than he was doing when I found him there.
He was a man of dreams more than of deeds--
Dreams that had not abundantly come true.
Disaster, manifest all over him,
Covered and held him like another skin
That was itself another nakedness,
To him, I trust, invisible. His eyes
Were kind, and bright enough; they were almost
Too bright for eyes that were so tired of seeing
No ships come in. For there was fire behind
Their light, and it would be there for some time
Before there was defeat. Meanwhile disaster,
Which is another name for something else,
Sat with him while we talked, under that oak,
And talked with me. Disaster was adept
In courtesy, and as I discovered soon,
In learning beyond mine. His history
He kept untold, more than to tell me once
He was a doctor--which was partly why
He sat in the shade. He smiled, saying that to me,
And saying it, smiled no more. And there I left him,
Alone, to ponder on the Lord knows what."
Could Malory then have heard and seen himself
So passively presented, and in words
That were so near to an obituary,
He might have conjured up another smile
To pay a stranger for his penetration.
Few would have seen so much as that of him,
And fewer, seeing it, would have guessed how little
It was they saw. We should not all sleep well,
If night revealed to us our ignorance
Of others whose intents and evidences,
Errors and excellences, we have assayed
And tabulated. How many a one we meet
Would somewhat rather see us in a coffin.
Is not a thought for any far pursuit
On our part; and of all men, Nightingale
Would have disowned it and forgotten it
As an ingenious waste of meditation
In his impressive mansion by the sea--
A mausoleum that had been his dream
Until he had it. Now he had sea and mansion,
And having them had nothing. He had lost,
Like many in winning, more than he had won;
And he was lonelier there than one man left
On a well-furnished island. Nightingale
Had broken Malory, and was now alone
With his advantages and was believing,
Or saying so to himself, that he had acted
As a man must who is too strong to choose--
A pearl of his invention, therefore lustred
Not like a real one. He had always carried
More of a thwarted vision, and more wisdom,
Lost in himself, than an alluring world
Would let him use; and all being so adjusted,
It was ingratitude for Malory
To meddle with fate in any such thankless way
As his had been; for with his dream of healing,
And his foreshadowed confirmation of it,
He should have recognized, with no romance
Misleading him, his way that was appointed.
A man by nature dedicated only
To nature's hard submission, should have paid
The price of higher service--failing which,
Now there was nothing of him but a name
Of one forgotten. Where he was not forgotten,
He was among the most of all unenvied
Who have survived their dreams. It was a story
Of a worm boring in a noble tree,
And one there was no need of saying over:
Nature, that made the tree, had made the worm,
And Nightingale was not responsible.
Though his name, as a name treasured, was forgotten,
And his neighborhood was now not anywhere,
Malory felt that home was mocking him
In scenes and silences. He walked along,
Seeing everywhere familiar sights and landmarks,
And everywhere an insolence of change
That almost angered him, until he thought
How far change was from caring what he thought,
Or what he was, or whether he was alive
Or not alive. If there were a few left
To meet with more constraint than interest
An unimportant prodigal returning
In his adversity to the wrong town,
They would ask how he was, and having passed him,
They would look back at him and shake their heads;
They would remember how he had betrayed them,
And hurt their faith. Where friends have sown their faith,
And waited amiably for a late harvest,
Only success deceives; and one man gone
From Sharon would be tragedy as lasting
As one bee missing from a hive, perhaps.
But Malory sought neither faith nor welcome
From one alive, and he had none to give,
Or to inflict, in Sharon, on the living.
He had not come to parley with the living,
And he would not be long there with the dead--
Though she must hear him. She must know at last
That he was doing well, and hear him say so,
And she must give him thanks. Omnipotence
Had erred enough already in fashioning
His best friend as the devil, and would surely
Grant him a word with one the devil had slain
As venomously as any snake in darkness.
There was only Nightingale who came alive
Out of that darkness; therefore she must know
That fate was on its way to Nightingale.
Malory was too patient and sustained
In his malevolence to be mistaken.
He had not come so far to come for nothing,
He had been told the way for him to take.
Assurance, hovering like a benediction,
Had been his one companion. He was right,
Or nothing was right--in which complexity,
All might as well have the same end together.
It was almost a pity that in his arm
There was not power enough to dislocate
Creation. He felt and heard from silent places
A murmur as of all things mocking him
And his assurance as he moved along,
Which may have been a remnant left in him
Of an ancestral fear. He would not ask
Of silence what it was, for while his work
Was there ahead of him, it was not done.
When that was done, there would be nothing left
Worth asking, for the answer would be there;
The seed of a rich purpose would have grown
To the round flower of its accomplishment.
Agatha would be glad when all was over;
For even in that last hillside house of hers,
She must be troubled and humiliated
That he should wait so long, who had not known
At what precarious and intense a temper
The metal of his machinery was made.
Passion for what he sought had worn the face
Of patience, and had fooled him to endure
The wingless crawl of time in his pursuit
And conquest of invisible destroyers;
And when the mask had crumbled, and was gone,
Pursuit had gone mysteriously with it,
So that henceforward there was nothing left
Of Malory but some primitive wheels and springs,
Wound still to go till he was tired of them,
And of their ticking. Now there was no need
Of more oblivion, or excess, or nonsense--
Now that he saw, now that he was awake,
Now that he was alive. He was a king,
Whose word was life or death; and it was death.