# Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/The Vision of the Russian Famine

THE VISION OF THE RUSSIAN FAMINE.
1.
Over vast areas of the night-ringed lists And hiving tracts of life Where death and birth, Moving like storms upon a leafy wilderness, Wage their perennial strife, I see your wraiths drift heavenward like mists That suck from earth When the slant streamers of the sun caress The frosted furrows and the steaming marshes, And phantom phalanxes evolve on stealthy marches.
I see your wraiths drift heavenward like smoke That swirls aloft In ashen whorls And tortuous trunks of vapour like the twisted oak, And writhing torsos of pale flame, As oft When conflagration that no craft can tame And running prairie-fires past control Consume whole provinces and char a countryside; Far and wide The floating scrolls unroll And swaying curtains lazily unfurl, And o'er the blackened belt the drifting palls abide.
I see your wraiths tower up in dizzy rush. So, when the tempests shroud The heavens and the hurricane is loud And ocean shouts Between the silence of the depths and the sidereal hush, The whirling pillars of the water-spouts By harrying currents chased Lift from the rolling waste In traveling vortices that feed the clouds.
​Now as your laggard wraiths are blown Vista on vista of the blasted zone Is momently revealed, Vision on vision of the visitation. The invisible flame of famine, fiercely fanned, Consumes the land. Starvation Feeds on all flesh, a spirit-conflagration, Leaving the human stubble charred on every hand.
Far as the eye can see outside the village bounds The dead lie heaped in mounds Awaiting burial like the slaughtered hordes Upon some vaster battle-field. The refuse wagons make their daily rounds; The bodies rattle on the boards,— Young forms yet apt for living's hurtless strife, Lithe weapons still for eager souls to wield, And children's bodies swift to play, Still unworn vestures strangers to decay; Stiff as curved fish beneath the unregarded sun, Copies of God, obscene as carrion.
The steppes are littered with the unnumbered slain As though great nature by some hideous birth, Some foul abortion, Had piled the earth With countless still-born progeny, By some untoward miscarriage suddenly Heaped dead in life's domain, Blasted with malformation and distortion.
Or as if in the sun Hell had disgorged its bloodless multitude And, dreaming the Millennium begun, The tombs of time cast up their dead too soon, Fleshed but unquickened, Only to swoon, ​As once Protesiläus who reviewed The human scene in more than human mood And breathless in our upper kingdom sickened And the old pilgrimage of death renewed.
Or as if hell-escaping dæmons thickened In countless legions Like locusts darkening these devoted regions, Leaving their desert haunts untenanted, Hungry for habitation, to possess With madness an uncounted populace And hurl them down, and tear, and leave them dead.
As though whole peoples erred and wandered unaware Past the frontiers of Providence,
Beyond the vital air
To alien elements To suffocate beyond God's atmosphere of care; Hordes that in far migrations overpassed The universe's habitable zone Or some entire population gassed By man-devisèd poisons yet unknown, Or foul contagion sown, Or liquid fires from the hostile heavens cast.
Corruption taints the world, plunged in the noisome night Of some ill-starred eclipse, The sun-devouring dragon casts his shade, The isles take fright, The peoples are dismayed, A jaundiced blight Has fallen on the luxuriant globe. The moth of death is in the many-stranded robe That mortals weave against the Apocalypse, Its travailed woof that time transmutes To stuff of gold Crumbles to mould.
​A blight has fallen on the fecund globe, A drop of poison on the human hive, And on the swarming ant-hill where men drive Their myriad pursuits Some god as though to harass Their labour turns his flaming burning-glass. The withering blasts of some Olympian curse The teeming clans disperse, And breeds an ill in nature; a consuming rust Mildews the wholesome grain; a cankerous spot Is in earth's globèd fruit, A leprosy that eats the planet's crust, A gangrene and a rot.
2.
How can we walk the same earth, undisturbed, Breathe the identical air, indifferent, And gaze on the same stars with alien thought? How, unperturbed, Gather the fruits the impartial seasons pour Nor share impartially the general store? Will Strangers from another planet sent Succour the Kin that we ignore? Will other worlds supply the need that we neglect? Shall we expect Some heavenly Samaritan to do aught If we of the terrestrial clan And holy Nation, Man, Avert our eyes With sophistries And flee the scene nor call it into mind?
Lo, these co-heritors with us of life! Than which all else is surmise, these who share This one indubitable fact, to be aware! To drink the light, to feel, to breathe the air, This one indubitable fact outlined Upon the enveloping dark. ​With us back untold periods they trace The issuing of the common race, And one with us to-day they too embark With each new moment as upon the crest Of time's great tidal wave Down the amazing venture of the next Invisible moment, even as we, perplexed, With us still humanly brave To affront the unimagined, self-possessed.
The fellowship of mystery is ours, The confraternity of nakedness, Huddling together in the cosmic cold No bond we hold Like that of earth's duress And common awe before the blank that lowers, The mute Before and the unanswering After, The fiendish laughter Of all the mindless powers And wild insensate storms that with their lulls and swellings Rave round our human dwellings. Illiterate or scholar, Celt or Slav, No tie we have As when we stand before the enigmatic grave.
Their ill is ours; Life in all creatures suffers violence, Existence is attainted in the scourge, Night gains upon the light-redeemèd hours. Our lives so merge With all who share the dower of sentience Their pain reverberates through the universal sense And wakes far-prompted spasms Of unaccountable pain, Even as their distant triumphs move obscure enthusiasms, The swift contagion of their spiritual plague Breeds in us nostalgias vague That give intelligence ​Of far calamities, and wars, and myriads slain. Our life is one with theirs, We may not fling them down the blood-stained stairs And grades of being brutally And break away and all unhindered mount. They cling about our hems tenaciously; Their cries unnerve our ardour. We needs must take account That to earth's farthest cape man is his brother's warder. Man has one soul and where aught human's ill Its far contagion blasts each member still; Yet he will die Who his own self with all will not identify, Scorning to know life else than at its worst, With the disdained, disdained, with the accursed, accursed; Dreading the most in his full misery The accusing eyes of those who suffered more than he:
Therefore that One Who most was man, shrank from the shame Of any lot less shameful than another's, Fearing the ignominy of a name Less ignominious than some human brother's, That none Might claim before Him to know well The trancèd tortures of some deeper hell, Or cast reproachful glances from a fiercer cross, Asking in vain for faith in some more hopeless loss, And hope for some more desperate enterprise, And love for some more utter sacrifice. Therefore rejecting the cerulean bliss He sought the corrupt abyss; Revolted by the wrongs Of those whose loathed immunities He shared, Dreading the direr fate of isolation And gradual alienation From man and his millennial exultation, ​Driven by a divine bitterness, Impatiently He bared His body to the thongs As if a lover of his kind could not agree In such a world as this To any form of death save by the abhorrèd tree, And by deliberate will United Love to man's extremest ill.
3.
O Thou Whom men call Father, Who dost taste An infinite pain in infinite ways, and share Each pang we bear, Pierced through with sorrow at the abysmal waste Wherewith the creature Gropes his way on in age-long strife with nature, How shall these know of Thee Whose years were circled with malignancy? How shall they know Thee father save Thou prove To the uttermost Thy love?
They heard no tale of Thee. Earth's frozen landscapes, unrelenting storms Let no sign through of that great hearth that warms Eternity. Cast from the void upon the atrocious years A lifeless world they trod, As some dark out-worn earth forgotten even by God, Ruled by the powers of darkness and a brood Of Terrors and gaunt Fears. Born to make hope their spiritual food They found no trace of good, Born to breathe God they found no God to breathe; And they are gone With no report of mercy to pass on, No record of compassion to bequeath, Nor token of Thy grace to testify.
​Eternal Vindicator, grant, O grant Thy love remain not unto these a lie! So at their coming move the nether realm That from beyond the grave The vast disorder And far commotion in the unseen order Shall overwhelm Even death's dim sea-walls of adamant (Whose ramparts looming since the primæval Act Immure our days from Life's assaulting ocean tracts And blot the stars from those wide-ranging cataracts) And raise a wave Shall roll back on the hearts of those that live And rouse reverberations on the oceans of the day And wake responding passions in the living far away. Give, O give To these whose futile cry Found no reply, Starving beneath a mocking sky, To speak in trumpet tones by those who live, Deep answering deep, and soul to distant soul, As gong wakes gong, and when long echoes roll From ocean, far abandoned belfries toll.
There is no ebb in nature without answering flow. When summer's tide of green Retreats to depths unseen And earth is bare beneath the usurping snow, None doubt that from its unplumbed levels deep The tides of spring will creep To submerge the world again in emerald seas. So shall life's flood retire from its estuaries. The satellites that from the unseen preside Over the flux and reflux of the spirit's tide May now withdraw Its floods to depths beyond our curious awe, Then by majestic and unfailing law ​To cast them on earth's coasts in varied play Of colour and of movement and display. Ay, and the life that ebbed from these uncounted slain Shall from its hidden cisterns flow again. The light that faded from their eyes, The strength that left their limbs, Gathers somewhere again to pour Upon earth's conscious shore. The oil whose flame now dims Comes flooding back from reservoirs beyond our awed surmise.
There shall be resurrection for the crucified! And these who died Clutching with bony fingers the cadaverous earth Shall wake the eternal bounty past the gates of death And rise again upborne on some insurgent breath, Some outburst of celestial mirth Commensurate to this dearth. Their passion groping at the doors of life And feeling up the ways of day Shall find its utterance once again in clay; And we who still conduct earth's play and strife Under the sun Shall be upborne on tempests from their oblivion And through us they shall speak In tones stentorian now where they before were weak:
Saying, Let no soul stand aloof; But cords of love bind human heart to heart Across all barriers, lest the warp and woof Of mortal life in time Disjoin, and the woven fabric fall apart, Marring the pattern of the timeless art, The hieroglyph sublime. Yet all its strands Even those that run out to the great unknown Are gathered in His hands ​To Whom all depths and distances are known; And in the latter day The tissue of the centuries that we In part survey But lose there where it falls Beyond the world's horizons and the walls And parapets of sense, That panorama'd tapestry in all magnificence One day all souls shall see Perfected, from their stand in immortality.
4.
Inscrutable Love, how Thy millennial plan Escapes the momentary glimpse of man That in the span Of Thy o'erarching care such havoc finds a place! 'Tis past believing That Thy beneficent ends So great a holocaust can yet embrace. Surely Thy thought transcends All our aghast conceiving If it have guerdons that can make amends For such terrestrial cataclysm; Indifferent to the wrack of worlds, and schism In the set frame of things, The extinction of the suns, and systems' vanishings.
What unimagined solace waits the sons of men Flung from the wheel of time to fall on sleep In green oblivious coverts past our ken Far from the roar of suns and heaven's azure steep.
What realms of colour, what demesnes of rainbow-light, What vista'd slopes purpureal and shimmering to their gaze, What gauze-like prospects rare, what irised cloud-lands bright, Shall make atonement for the outrageous days.
​What sudden sloughing of the universe, Blissful annihilation of the stars, In what restoring depths will death immerse These sons of God that bear creation's scars.
Buoyant with what new grace of wingèd feet, Moving with what new ecstasy of sense, Will they explore in heady courses fleet, Untrammeled, these aerial continents.
How shall they cry aloud in poignant joy, And how aspire unweighted by despair, And intercede in love without alloy, And plead with God in crystalline, sweet prayer.
O dear and pitiable multitude So travailing on the very brink of Life, Expect the chrysalis-change whereof the prophetic mood Speaks with appalling sweetness here amid the ephemeral strife.
Oxford, February 1922.