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Poem by Robert Laurence Binyon Koya San High on the mountain, shrouded in vast trees, The stillness had the chastity of frost. I trod the fallen pallors of the moon. The path was paven stone: I was not lost, But followed whither it should lead me soon Into the mountain’s midmost secrecies. Wandering into the mind, sweet, luminous, warm Remembrances of the body,— Smell of the woods in the irradiated noonday, Flushes of foliage, The ridged horizon opening far and blue,— Came with a breathing of colour, and then sank Remote as flames gleam in a dark pane glassed. Earth had rolled onward into regions new, And all the darkness at my senses drank, Aware now, subtly, as of a frontier passed. On either side the trees unending rose. No shadowy sound stirred amid all their plumes. Each seemed a separate and a soaring night, Black canopies of cold uncounted tombs. Pilgrims had here fallen on their repose: Graven with names, their tablets gleamed upright. And softly as the fallen lightness of a willow-leaf On the liquid stealing Of water unrippled, profound, my spirit was stolen By the crystal silence. And with me it seemed invisible others went, Spirits unhistoried, of such dim surmise As in the dark the tremble of a leaf. With them I went, and Night was eloquent Of things that are not in the day’s belief, And made me of those things, like a blind man, wise. Obscurity at last relented round A glimmering space: the inmost Shrine appeared. Before it, motionless as any tree, Praying, a pilgrim stood. There was a sound Of water in the distance hardly heard: But most that living man astonished me. Many stone lanterns made a clustered shining As if in a wondrous Cavern of lost and intricate shadows, enclosing The light’s clear vigil; But the air behind that solitary form Was trembling like a veil of trembling light, Where from an urn rose endless incense-fume That left a ghostly fragrance on the night. It seemed a spirit sighing to resume The touch of what was breathing, human, warm. Bare-headed, sandalled, still that pilgrim prayed, Unconscious of all else but his heart’s prayer. Out of his breast a broken murmur deep Came with his frosted breathing on the air Before the shrine in its tree-guarded shade Where that great Saint continued in his sleep. It seemed that from Time’s beginning he had stood there In a hushed vastness, Solitary, erect, amid the unimagined motion Of worlds unnumbered, Absorbed, secure in his small star of light. And now that ceaseless, fugitive frail smoke Appeared to me like shadowy souls in flight Woven together into a veil of breath That wavered as their little life awoke And passed for ever into birth or death. What prayer was his that mingled with the mist Of the forgotten sighings of the dead? I knew not; yet in him I seemed to share Longings that still were patient to persist Through Time and Death from lips that once were red. In that one image all my kind stood there. Lover of the body, lover of the divine sun, Of earth’s replenished Fullness and change and savour of life rejoicing Careless of all care, Me now the Silence for its vessel chose And filled from wells unsounded by the mind. No other need I had, and could not less Than to be wholly to this spell resigned And dark communion with the spirit that knows Vigil and frost and solitariness. Fragments we are, and none has seen the whole. Only some moment wins us to restore The touch of infinite companionship. I that had journeyed from so far a shore Found at the world’s end the same pilgrim soul, And the old sorrow, no flight can outstrip. Now in the midst of the irradiated noonday Suddenly absent, While in my ear is the sound of familiar voices, Light talk and laughter, My thought has in an instant flown the seas; A great remoteness occupies my heart; And there arises on my inward sight The shadowy apparition of vast trees. A pathway opens; I am stolen apart, And I ascend a mountain in the night. Robert Laurence Binyon Robert Laurence Binyon's other poems: ![]() 1201 Views |
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