THE RANDAN WOODS

I

When I was young and hardly knew my heart
One April afternoon I walked out alone,
Out of my parents’ house, my familiar home,
And went, a stranger through the waiting lanes,
A mile or more to some unfrequented woods,
Hoping, ’til the evening came, to leave behind
The burden of a life not quite my own.
     Though of what I was then I knew no more
Than what I might become, I sought in the woods
Ease from a world I was not at one with,
To which I thought my attachments dying.
And as I walked along, I remember thinking
That were someone to say, Forget
The accidents of your birth and bringing up
Where you live and whom you know,
Forget that you have mother and father
Sisters, brother, friends—words
Which then had no substance in my heart –
Put off all that you cannot call yourself
And say what principles impel your life,
What manner of man you think you are,
I would have found myself silent, speechless,
Quite at a loss for words, for any word
But those delivered by an irritable dissatisfaction
With the world I knew: not this, not here,
Not now, was all I could think or say
As if the known and given forms of life
Describing who or what I was
Were an imposition, an impenetrable falsification
Of something hidden I had to be, a burden upon
What had no life, no form – was only
A dark and wordless energy, seeking
The sudden destruction of that world
Into the bonds and hopes and habitual feelings of which
I had been cast.


                                                 II

If I sought an unknown freedom then, time since has taught me
That our hope and faith are rarely free, not directing
But directed by whatever path of action the world provides
And we choose or chance upon; not free, nor seeking freedom,
But entailed upon our living, binding us in a common heresy –
The constant temptation of trying to attach our consciousness
To transitory deeds – the iridescence of action forging in us
A false confidence that what we are will not be destroyed.

That we know is not the truth of it. Experience speaks of
A sense of permanence permanently betrayed, and private memories
Deliver no word of how the past is properly retrieved,
Proof only that the future is a photograph taken years ago,
A picture not of hopes realized, but of the insignificant ruins
Where they once lived, empty now of what we imagined we might be:
I see the house demolished where we had a little happiness,
The garden built over where the cheerful gods of childhood
Stood beside our play, and sensations deeper than their source
Sank into our mind. Of the people then part of life to us,
Many are now no more than a name, invoking which recalls
Only a gesture, a smile, a voice from a sunlit afternoon –
All that they ever were shrunk to a few random memories
To be conjured with occasionally by a younger generation
Until they too are only names, and we, they and everyone else
Crowd the darkness after death, the light upon our being lost.

If like an unconscienced king, you wave these thoughts aside –
A peevish complaint against the order of things—thinking rather
That we should compose hearts and minds to this brief flight
From darkness to darkness, and so endure our going hence
As we have enjoyed our coming hither, then still I say
You have yet to see the worst of it: for not only
Do we all go into the dark, leaving behind that world
In which we found ourselves, not only is the self we know
Thus unselved, apparently destroyed – which is bad enough –
But even here, in this patch of light, passing between
One darkness and the next, our life it seems will go wrong


                                                  III

Dancing brightly in on the stage, whirling about
In the wind of their own delights, exquisitely wild
And singing so prettily, we see in our children
A life and energy that long ago we thought ours
Now almost forgotten.
                                      Time draws in the lines
On faces our first knowledge of ourselves,
And around us all our lives, will always be
The key-note from which our consciousness departs,
To which it may return: as in a mirror
We see in these faces unwelcome signs
That we are at odds with life, doubtful
Of the worth of what we do, distracted
From what we fear we should become,
Our frail courage failing at every turn;
And when the dusk falls and we hear again
The confident music of an unseen bird
Singing cheerfully against the night
We know that ours no longer is the power
To realize or reject what have since become
Unutterable hopes; and this not the consequence
Of something we might willingly call sin –
Of our disordered passions uncontained,
Those sad wrongs committed in the light,
Against the light, and to be repented of—
But somehow, in activities apparently innocent,
Even in pursuing a course habitually approved,
We have been traitors to ourselves, and lost
The life we had, the life we longed for.
      Our hopes unrealized, our faith unfocussed,
Then the bitter and treacherous thought
That consciousness may itself be a delusion,
The ghostly shadow thrown from sense,
A brief distraction before we are cast away
Unknown and so forever unknowable, not belonging
To a person, or a place, or a time, nothing
If not here now.
                           And into these difficulties
Temptations which in time we struggle with
And are alone powerless to defeat
There will always be the unconquerable irruption
Of death itself, our death, in exile,
The effort closed without conclusion;
Or what takes from this task the heart of it,
That death not in the course of things,
The death of someone who all our lives
Stood by us and beside us, our loyal hope,
Someone who always looked to our coming home,
And would have welcomed us to that heaven
Ever present in their heart.


                                                   IV

Therefore I have been thinking lately of what we are,
Of what might be rescued from the charge of death – as if
In fifteen years, not only have I not discovered what it is
That with any confidence I can call myself, but equally
With whomsoever we spend our lives, whatever skill we have,
All the modes of action that mark our passage into adulthood,
(Which commonly we propose as the means to our becoming
And which I had hoped, as others had hoped on my behalf
Would resolve what I was persuaded a private difficulty)
I felt then and see now as transient, riddled with death,
Useless as a permanent home for that tacit faith or hope
Which as human beings we all carry with us in our hearts.
     I have said my consciousness lives apart from those I know,
Cannot find itself complete in what is given to us in time:
Must I not think the same of those now dead? Shall I believe
Their faith and hope fulfilled by transient interests,
Shall I really believe that they died without a longing
For something hardly heard of, perhaps beyond conception,
Often wrongly conceived, a stronger certainty, a deeper love,
For an experience we might call final, a perfect consummation
Consecrating their present being, freeing them from time?
Shall I believe that seeming to bind their faith to the present,
All their seeking was not really a seeking of something else?
     Yet I go on now as I did then, wandering into the woods,
Path after path petering out, the old ways lost,
And where good riders went, steadily cantering through,
The lacerating undergrowth snatching at my attention,
Tangled trees closing in above, the sun obscured,
And settling everywhere a darkness to end in night.
So, moment by moment, which is year after year,
I push on, making no progress that I can measure,
Searching for nothing I know of, all distinct purpose
Given up, still fancying that glancing aside I shall see
A cottage in a clearing, the marvellous castle rising
Before a benighted errant, where free of this venture
Past and future forgotten, mystery and beauty my companions,
I shall live for ever in the bliss of present sense.
    But in the drone of a distant motorway, the returning smack
Of petty branches held carelessly aside, shaken rain-drops
Falling like chill memories on my face and hands, in this,
The condition of my passage, that old, foolish dream fades
And I am here again, which is nowhere, neither of the world
For ever condemned to do its turn in the fading light
Nor of another to rescue that world from servitude,
Not giving up only because I still trudge onwards
Making little more of it all than a futile test
Of submission to our mortality, an inconsequential
Godless business.
                              But no, stop there. No further,
Though there is no further to go. That is not all
Nor the end of it.
                              Now is the time,
Remember now a gift of glory then
The weary wood behind, an open glade ahead,
Where through the changing seasons stood
A single beech with branches freely spread,
And underneath, there where man could not
Or has forgotten to reach with spade or plough
Bright against the brown of earth, bluebells,
A patch, no more, a thin carpet for the wood,
A blue lawn so lightening my soiled feet
That I trod no more on earth, but air –
Fears, regrets, desires, all emptied out,
Past and future at one with that self
Then present, not my self, for a moment
Walking in the glory that I beheld
Within me and about me, not in my possession
But for that moment possessing me entirely.

O remember, you who once were there,
What gladness then was yours,
What life you had where life was never looked for,
Your self not self, a power given
Yet ever what you were or would be,
Bluebells springing from the seedless earth
A music playing, a light dancing
Here there is no room for death
Life now life the all in all
Not the shadow but the light.

Remember how quickly then you turned about
And through the waste of wood
Went lightly home exulting,
Bringing that self back to your place of being,
The weariness of one self cast off
And whom you returned to your own again—

Until day succeeded day, and nothing changed.
Wanting still to preserve the experience
An effusion of unseemly, worn-out words,
Though appearing adequate then, missed
Whatever meaning might have been there.


                                                       V

Today with a friend whom I have known twenty years and more
From the house in which he with two older brothers grew up
His mother and father at work in their garden as usual,
We’ll be ready, this Saturday morning after breakfast,
When my wife and his have finished putting their boots on,
To walk out to the woods close by and look at the bluebells.
    And as I open the door, and the four of us go out,
My heart is heavy, knowing that what we soon shall see
Though more splendid than the sight I was given years ago
Will not today be attended by that vision or power
Which then to me was life. Thinking of this apparent loss
Through almost all the intervening time unrecognized
As if that life were not required for our rightful living,
I also think of those dearer lives no longer present:
His brother, not seen nor heard now for twenty years;
My sister, so new among those we cannot touch or talk to
That I still search for her in every unknown face;
And the motive of this morning’s walk – to gladden sense –
Suddenly seems ridiculous, futile, a form of treachery –
For here we are, set upon an action which has no business
With that life I once knew, nor with those hidden from us,
Whom even as the life we hope ours, we long to know again.

But what our hearts are doing behind the purpose given
Who can tell? So I say nothing, and on we go, up the lane
Through the gate, glad to be together this sun-dappled day;
From the brow of the hollow field we look deep into the woods
And with unexpected pleasure I see what we have come for:
Floating just above the earth, not appearing part of it,
Flowing round the brown trunks, surely, softly following
The rise and fall of the ground far between the trees,
Settling right up to the edge where wood and field meet,
A dense blue mist, too brilliant to belong to nature
Wakes in us a sudden wonder, and makes us search for words –
We find none quite right, and after a simple phrase or two
Walk on towards the wood in a silence we are glad of.

As we approach I see the two strands of barbed wire
Which several years ago we strung tight from tree to tree
Fencing out the foraging cattle, creating the conditions
For what his mother and father had hoped possible –
Used to seeing here a few of these flowers every spring,
Trampled on as they appeared, never in their full glory.
And remembering this, I wonder if I need regret
What might seem such a waste of time, those unmeaning years
When that moment went unthought of, as if to flourish
It had to be fenced off from commerce with the world;
And I also wonder if suffering season after season
Implacable memories of a lost son and brother
Breaking painfully through the dry soil of daily routine,
Life not life without him, and he not here in life,
This act of enclosure from the clumsy incursions of time
Is not in some way a cherishing of what has always been,
Wanting to resolve at last the pain and regret of his passing
In the timeless and flourishing knowledge that what he was
A son and brother, he is still, and will not cease to be.

So drawn onwards, unable to turn away, we cross a stile
Into the wood, seeking the path that was there in winter,
Now overflowing with flowers – which we must step on sadly,
Our soil-clogged feet crushing what the cattle are kept from.
‘A sweet scent,’ my wife says, ‘but far away.’ And at our feet
The bluebells only bluebells, but always in the distance
Glimpsed between the trees, there they are the pavement of heaven:
And our thoughts turn homeward, looking to a world not this world
Where what we yearn for is at one with what we are.
Suddenly, heaven seems the one word left to think about,
Knowing that what the heart takes naturally to itself –
The life of husband wife or child, sister brother or friend –
Will be stripped away, our hope and faith made homeless again,
Until only those turning aside from the hardest task we have,
Retreating into a round of habits they call themselves
Will find in this world a home and refuge for their hearts.


                                                   VI

What then of heaven, where at last we might put on
The immortality that fuels our consciousness, and feeds
Almost unknown to us, our every action here? Not for us
Who have seen behind the moon, beyond the fading stars
And think all matter once no larger than a poppy seed,
Not for us the notion of another and a better place
Where we shall know and love again those we loved on earth –
As if the powers of sense went undisturbed through death;
Not ours that delicate vision of heaven, the jewelled wood,
In which an eternal spring enamels every living thing,
Paths of precious stones, leaves of burnished silver,
Where, beyond a deep brook that mortal he could not cross
The dreamer saw his lost pearl, set in a city of praise.
     No, once out of nature, and where, if anywhere, heaven is,
Free of the mire and blood of human veins, not then for us
The time to work at hammered gold and gold enamelling
Forging an artifice of eternity for emperor and clown,
Not there a place to set the soul upon a golden bough,
Singing of what was, and is, and ever will be the same;
No, for out of nature is out of time and out of place
And then we shall have no hands that make, no ears that hear
No eyes that see, time, space, and the time and place for work
Quite done with, all gone out into that blank night,
Our bodies dust.
                              And while we have words, we still think, do we
That we shall have life?
                                          If the old ideas of heaven
Have been unhoused for us, if in our immanent death we see
All matter done for, say then what life it is that lives
Free of time and sense, that takes no heed of here or there,
That has no fear of the raging sun, or the arctic cold,
Of mountain fall, tomb of broken mine or sunken ship,
That will not cease when sun and moon and all the stars
At last go out.
                        Well, all I can is say again
What by most unheard some few men have at all times said
That we are human just by cause of the God-like in us,
A burning, untaught gift of fire, the reason of our being
And a light in all men born – of which our recognition
Is not forced, free in our given time to make or unmake
What remains apart, itself immutable. And I say too
That not only in brief, isolated moments of our own
Do we find this power, but that word after word reveals
Our common genius, what we hope of our best selves,
And would believe the awe and majesty of every person –
When power speaks with goodness, and justice makes for peace,
When mercy sets another free, and beauty leads to truth,
When love is truly found in the person of a neighbour,
Then we begin to don the human dress – and who dare say
These qualities are not absolute, unquenched in any fire
Free of any place and quite unchanged by the end of time?
      But I know, that is not the question. Why care for these
Though eternal, if when all the gifts of sense are cold
And the world fades behind us like a dream, we then find
No-one there, reach no home in a heart, no place in a face
And no smile of welcome greets us, meets us in the life
We longed for? O if these timeless qualities then rejoice
Only in the soundless voice of reason, and if that life
Is life, and our god-like attributes have no human face,
If I cannot find my sister there, nor he his brother,
If my parents cannot find their daughter, nor his their son
If these terms reveal no more than the accidents of nature,
Then now they have no individual form that love may know
And they are forever lost to us, and we to them,
And there can be no communion, even among ourselves,
For there is no-one to know.
                                                In this unpeopled darkness,
Where I cannot say I but to mean all that I am not
And will in time cease to be, in a world disgraced,
Tempted still to bury myself deep in sense, to let
The appetites of unreasoned nature eat out my time,
What can I do, O what can I do
But put my heart to prayer
Set hope and faith upon a face
Human absolute and divine
Where goodness power and justice are,
All mercy truth and beauty shine;
Beg again the gift of grace
To see invisible in purest light
That person in whom love may find
Those gone through our mortal night
And those not yet transfigured to our sight.
Therefore give me courage to unwind
My self from all my selfest hopes,
To turn my will from pleasures here
Taking off the tattered clothes
Of wealth and fame, the tramp desire,
Shirts that burn afresh with age:
Then make in me that proper rage
To set ablaze all temporal trash –
Ancient chaos to residual ash –
From which shall rise one perfect flame,
Consuming all, but of all the life;
O when I have consecrated all I can
And my heart is turned no other way,
Then I pray, make in me the man
My immortality: one life, one name
One face, one smile, which will contain
Husband daughter son and wife,
Sister brother and that good friend
Whom the will is rightly set with
In the end.


                                                     VII

Old words, the mask of faith which heartless we put on
To await that life returning – only known to us diffused
Through the gifts of time and sense – this wood we walk in
And those we walk the earth with now. And as I look again
Towards the bright, heavenly mist of bluebells, I see
Where all our walking cannot bring us, and where arriving
We could not walk. And so we know, as we always knew
That we are strangers here, trespassers on a territory
Not given to us in time, a place no place at all
Which we must leave now, making our way out of the wood,
Back to where our losses remain losses, love too often
A dark echo of what no longer is; few, and year by year
Fewer still remaining with whom to share that joy,
Our communion and what we are. Yet I shall remember
That my sister dearly loved these Easter flowers,
And in what they mean to some of us, I would put my hope.