FRAGMENTS OF A PROLOGUE

                                    I

What story I would tell you now, and why,
Has been the secret meditation of my life,
The dream, you might say, the one dream,
Sheltered from the subversions of deliberate thought,
Of which I am still possessed, a vision perhaps,
Which to live must find the words, and soon,
To rise up, out of the darkness of my dreaming,
Take on a being not buried in mortal hope,
And when at last I have done here all I can
Live in life after life, always free.

And of those who’ve thought to tell a story
Some few, the good in whom my hopes revive,
Have also wondered what it should be, and why,
Often choosing to dismiss the best-known tales
Of love and war, of kingdoms lost and won,
Preferring rather to seek a subject not
Of the visible world, speaking, I suppose,
Of the dream they had, of a kingdom here
That we must spend our life in making
Or be content to lose.

And I think first of the man who spoke of
A soul courageous enough to know itself
Lost, descending through the world unmasked,
A witness to our many forms of degradation;
But also learning that should we have it so,
We can leave that life behind; for if, in truth,
We turn away from what is not good in us,
Even at the instant of our dying, there is hope
He said, that we may reach that light,
The source of life.

Who wrote this ordered progress up to God
Had to climb the stairs of other men
For many years; his home barred to him,
He had a life of exile, feuding and subterfuge,
Not the object of his telling, his grave the place
Where unresolved that bitter story stopped.

There was a man in England then of whom
We know almost nothing now, what he was,
How he lived, his human hopes not open to us;
But that he dreamt we know, dream after dream,
An unresolved debate both with himself,
And with his world, on what the right path was
To find again that man whom he once had
Glimpses of, a ploughman, Peter or Piers
He called him, and also Christ, one being
Moving and working somewhere amongst us then,
In all means ordinary, but into whose presence
The dreamer could not find his way, so subject
To corruption this world is, and our conscience too;
So difficult doing well here, that in his vision
Of charity the Samaritan, faith and hope had first
Passed by on the other side. His poem finished,
His dreaming done, he awoke to begin his search;
But it is recorded that soon afterwards he died.

Another man, seeking service to his Queen,
Who wrote of British knights in a faery world
Of moral good ruling undeceived, free
Of the necessity encumbering human life,
And the evil in us confounded at the last,
Played his willing part in the harsh suppression
Of a subject people, who destroyed the house
Where happy he came home, shut him out
From a life he had made his, thinking themselves
As we think now, a nation separate unto God.
Thus he and they all conspired to bequeath
A story that has no ending yet, still imposes
An annual tax on human life.
                                                  I think next
Of that man, who in a story he thought history
And the origin of our being here on earth,
Found the force of God working surely
Through all recorded time, even in his own day
Justifying a new order for the troubled nation,
The execution of a king the cause of God
Creating again a commonwealth divine.

But in the end this man, old and blind,
Had to witness a smiling king restored
His feckless friends dancing in behind him
And following them a nation given up
To wealth and pleasure. What could he do then
But steady his passion, find and focus all
In one great story, of a man imprisoned,
His God-given strength abandoned first
And then revived, his eyes put out
And in chains a slave, refusing all temptations
To an easy and a retired life; led blind
Between the fragile pillars of a mocking state
He found there his final task: his massive arms
Seeming at first only to seek support,
Then rounding them with all his power, he prayed
And pulled down the laughing potentates and princes
Entombed in his own success. And so the poet
Often visited in the darkness of his later days,
Admired by a world he would have ended
Dreamt of a godly state much better, lost.
The call to revolution here was heard again
By two young men I think of much, not heard
As by those who first had struggled to re-new
The nation, not in deed requiring civil war,
But as a call to right many civil wrongs
Complete the work begun a century before,
A clear echo of that first call in which
The hope resounded of a freedom deeper still –
A dangerous freedom, I think now, a freedom
To look behind the forms of life, and find there
Interfused through everything, the one source
Of human power, the light of all our seeing,
Creating a new earth and a new heaven,
Our home, they said, and destination too;
But here, ours to know; and if we will hold fast
By that infinity, a joy no other joy
Can match, where all journeys are complete, all
Stories end.

                       And this hope once heard of
How could they have sought another source of power?
Yet when a grace not given, and occasionally renewed,
They had to stay on in a weary, unintelligible world,
Shifting about in the light winds of their lives,
Subject to sufferings they could not make sense of
As in the stories of Margaret and the shepherd Michael,
Whose natural, human hopes were never answered,
Even relentlessly destroyed, and patient or impatient
Bore their fixed unhappiness through many years
Unredeemed by joy, dying at last and leaving
Each their human legacy, a pile of stones.
No revolution could have cured what this man
Found in human life observed, and found
Also in his own when he knew were closed
The hiding places of his power, uttering then
A still sad music.
                               An eagle of a man
Circling over the old world, looking down
Upon the earth with some disdain, looked up
And gazing into the heart of light, knew again
That lost joy, a sudden unattended moment,
The still centre of our universe, which he then
Sought to recover, depending not on chance –
The revival of certain memories of childhood,
Or the sudden gift when the vacillating mind
Is surprized by joy, an inconsequential blaze
For twenty minutes in a London coffee-shop;
But keeping faith through years of discipline
And self-surrender, the faith he understood
Forced him to forego almost all human hopes;
And in each hope denied, a story not told
A passion not explored, abandoning human life
Until in all our being he saw death, despair
Attending the absence of that unusual joy,
Men and women lost in time, by all we are
Distracted always from a fierce reality
We cannot cope with.


                                    II

That story of our self first was told by those
Who sought in themselves, and in what they saw,
The marks of a mind mightier than their own,
Seeking not self at all, but the self transformed;
Given up to a grandeur not theirs, they knew
A joy that justified their being, glimpsed
Only in moments of inexplicable splendour,
Telling of another life in theirs discovered,
A revelation not articulate through stories known,
Yet at the heart of things.
                                           What ways
Those beings went in their might and glory
Few followed then and far fewer now.
The unattended moments that come to us
Do not come to minds made up, lucid in their faith,
Confident of a tacit goodness in their hearts.
And they do not come at all, I have noticed,
To those now at ease in the world, comfortable
At last with what they have become, content
With the discretion of their days, a conscience
Quiet, complacent, assuming all is well.

Cold in us the blaze of another world,
And all believing that we are, each
A being distinct, it often suits us better
To invoke the story of our lives disturbed
(Ours the one story we can be certain of)
Looking back on the inevitable traumas
Of good and ill that have made up our lot,
Bearing with us the burdens of youth and childhood,
Finding there cause and definition of our being,
The justification of what we are: done away with
That deep unrest, the sublime propensity of our souls
To ask for the timeless at work in time, a life
In life we can make ours; but powerless though we are
We have not lost the hope of having again,
And again, that ecstasy once a rare gift
Given to souls dedicate and free, spirits
Not mastered by their senses, not always kind
To their own selves, who did not expect to be
Happy, so happy, until this life they knew
No longer theirs.
                              That purpose lost
Its discipline discarded, but wanting still
An intense rapture to comprehend our being,
We find our freedom in the hope of satisfying
Those desires we pretend innocuous, sense
Exalted the stairway to this heaven, not aware
Of an order not ourselves, nothing alive in us
Not dying as we die; and wanting to be at one with
What is urgent in us, we meet people as need
Meets need, making a market of ourselves
And others, not finding in them a future
For our being, not mastered by a truth in which
The self might be subsumed; comfortable here,
Careless of heaven, and whatever that word
Would ask of us, we live apart, toying now
With powers which were they consecrated
Could make our gauzy lives substantial,
Dreaming, perhaps, of someone significant
To wake in us the truth we have lost hope of
Someone who would take us just as we are,
And in that moment of utter longing
Belonging to each other, face to face, intent
On light (so light the being he found in her)
Free of the story of our encircling lives,
No before, no after, under the auspices of desire
A brief forgetting of what we are
An ecstasy not dressed in life or time
Bliss for a moment burning in us
Hours not ours.


                                    III

That the sad end to our tale of joy
For three hundred years or more a certain hope,
The God-made moment thus made derelict,
Appetite becomes the single energy we have,
Feeding our senses wherever our craving is,
To want and have our experience of being,
Lust and rage the attendants of our old age.

And in this decay I say there is no story,
Nothing to be said not said before,
A degeneration always ending in the cry
Of our poor self for a rich life now.

But perhaps I shouldn’t say, This is what we are,
For no-one could think that a proper picture
Coloured in, of how we live from day to day,
Of our individual being, never ours again.
Yet if no other, I know myself enthralled,
Not free, and many kinds of mistaken hope
Live in me – not quiescent – hopes
That have proved hopeless, having reached
No end in their having: ashes the bitten apple
From the same tree we take another and another,
And sad hopes unresolved forever prevent us
Finding the presence of someone not ourself.

And if I can find no certain goodness in me,
Conscious only of the graceless hopes with which
I am too much at ease, almost call myself,
Fearing the void these hopes removed would leave,
If this is what I am, something of what we are,
Then I take what comfort I can that I assumed,
Much younger, the work of those now dead,
(Words which bring me back to my beginning)
Drew from them a kind of goodness, a form of
Concentration, seeking something not myself,
Finding in their words a powerful source of feeling
Not fully understood, a world about them
The life and laws of which were still mysterious,
An instinct, their enduring mark, to find
One life, our life, in every living form;
And rising from their longing to know
One life all, a goodness not deliberate rectitude,
A refusal to be distracted from the one vision
They knew significant. But their words
No longer work in me.
                                       The recovery
Of that joy, I’m told, requires the discipline
Of a saint, a willingness to give up
All human hope, and I live, at last,
Too much in this life, glad of my being here,
Happily attached to the world in which I am,
Glad of a simple life at home, dreaming
Of how our being may be cast into words,
Glad of those friends who come and visit us
Working a little or wandering in our forest garden
Sitting at supper with us, our talk candlelit,
Touching sometimes the turbulence or tedium
That beset us all, learning quietly then
That we are not alone, not quite, can always
If we will, reach out to find each other,
Believing that we can attend another being.

Yet when I think of powers we used to have
No longer living, how easily we held
Beliefs discarded some would still believe,
How perfectly this world, not expecting
Any life to come, speaks of what we are–
Cast out from the company of dreamers,
Bereft of vision, incapable of prayer–
Then I would not be what I have become.

That journey down, into the necessary business
Of this world, has realized a disorder deeper
Than the distress it resolved, abandoned
The light the heart of life, locked behind me
The gates some few, turning from the world,
Had found their way to.

So what resolution there is to what we are,
Have in time become, and seem always sure
To go on struggling with, I don’t know—
Unless it is that unattended moment few of us
Now believe in, the unexpected happiness—
Which not prepared for by any scheme of faith
Or discipline, comes and goes, if it comes at all
A gift of grace not changing the lives
It lights upon and leaving us, like better men
All disappointed in their human hopes,
To bear this burden willingly as we tell
Some other story.


                              IV

                                  Where to begin
Is all my thought now; and if that power
Will live again in me, one thing I presume,
Which people in all times and every place
Have always struggled with – that finding ourselves
Awake here on earth, a whispering within us
Seems to say that our life, our human life,
Is founded elsewhere; not, as those words suggest,
In a secluded garden long ago, not in a world
Beyond this world, and founded not just
In that one beginning common to creation,
Not originating in time nor place at all
This music whispering seems to say
That the one life in each of us be found
In the very being of the power we call God;
In that word alive we are, and separated
We cease to be, somehow cease our human life,
Though quite as pleasant our passing days.

And were I not alive to this difficult belief,
Often unsaid in the heart of all our saying,
I’d think no tale worth the telling, preferring
To find myself in tasks achieved, knowing
Life all light today, and dark tomorrow.
We are created, but in us the uncreated
Lives, and all our lives are broken sometime
By the conflict these command; and I would think,
Having nothing else to think, such conflict
Perfectly composed in Christ, he our model
Of human life, the centre still of our story.
But that I know, before you tell me, is where
I would be, not where I am; and if not alone
In this, and we are to go from here to there
We must begin with what we are and where.


                              V

Here at home I have pottered about
Far too long, done no more than help reclaim
The tattered fabric of an old house, lost
The life these rooms once had, where
Pretending to preparations I’ve not made,
Disclaiming the real achievements of other men
As distractions from a task or truth
I can hardly define, I have grown old
Asking little of myself, avoiding always
That rigorous inquisition into what I am
Refusing to meet the cold eye that might gaze
Into my being, troubled only, if at all,
By those idle hopes you will tell me
Trouble everyone; but which I think betray
A disorder deeper than I would recognize,
Struck through and through by a sense
Not of sin, that not the word, but rather
Of having not become what, in other times,
I know men and women, here in Britain,
Have become—
                            and yes, perhaps that is it,
That the dream, travelling not through this world
Where we mould ourselves, more or less,
Out of the conditions into which we are cast,
Claiming the pitiable consolation of power
For a life we haven’t had or have misused,
Not through this world, but through the world
Unmasked, where learning of lives not ours
We find who it is we should at last become.

How can I stay here now, and watch
Intellectual and dispassionate, the little left
Of life in me decay? I must accept
That hope here is largely done with, leave
Behind a city fallen, a body broken, begin
Again where others once began, knowing
That what I have avoided, decisions long deferred
Or never made, I’ll have to make meeting
Those whom I have never seen, people
In whom all the powers of good and evil
Compete, who know the dark triumphant
If the despair of wanting things or persons
Burns to the last in them; and the good
Not defeated if they know that in their own
They find another’s being.
I know, if I am not to lose the life
I cannot save, that I must leave this house,
Its wild garden in the wind-rustled woods,
A world my own,
Where with my wife I’ve watched
Our children play and grow
And unfitted though I am
And still without a story
Set out upon this journey now
Or not at all.