Gordon Bottonley

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The End of the World

The snow had fallen many nights and days;

The sky was come upon the earth at last,

Sifting thinly down as endlessly

As though within the system of blind planets

Something had been forgot or overdriven.

The dawn now seemed neglected in the grey

Where mountains were unbuilt and shadowless trees

Rootlessly paused or hung upon the air.

There was no wind, but now and then a sigh

Crossed that dry falling dust and rifted it

Through crevices of slate and door and casement.

Perhaps the new moon's time was even past.

Outside, the first white twilights were too void

Until a sheep called once, as to a lamb,

And tenderness crept everywhere from it;

But now the flock must have strayed far away,

The lights across the valley must be veiled,

The smoke lost in the greyness or the dusk.

For more than three days now the snow had thatched

That cow-house roof where it had ever melted

With yellow stains from the beasts' breath inside;

But yet a dog howled there, though not quite lately.

Someone passed down the valley swift and singing,

Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning;

But if he seemed too tall to be a man

It was that men had been so long unseen,

Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow.

And he was gone and food had not been given him.

When snow slid from an overweighted leaf,

Shaking the tree, it might have been a bird

Slipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings;

Yet never did bird fall out, save once a dead one --

And in two days the snow had covered it.

The dog had howled again -- or thus it seemed

Until a lean fox passed and cried no more.

All was so safe indoors where life went on

Glad of the close enfolding snow -- O glad

To be so safe and secret at its heart,

Watching the strangeness of familiar things.

They knew not what dim hours went on, went by,

For while they slept the clock stopt newly wound

As the cold hardened. Once they watched the road,

Thinking to be remembered. Once they doubted

If they had kept the sequence of the days,

Because they heard not any sound of bells.

A butterfly, that hid until the Spring

Under a ceiling's shadow, dropt, was dead.

The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepened

As a sound deepens into silences;

It was of earth and came not by the air;

The earth was cooling and drew down the sky.

The air was crumbling. There was no more sky.

Rails of a broken bed charred in the grate,

And when he touched the bars he thought the sting

Came from their heat -- he could not feel such cold . . .

She said, 'O, do not sleep,

Heart, heart of mine, keep near me. No, no; sleep.

I will not lift his fallen, quiet eyelids,

Although I know he would awaken then --

He closed them thus but now of his own will.

He can stay with me while I do not lift them.'

Babel: The Gate of the God

Lost towers impend, copeless primeval props

Of the new threatening sky, and first rude digits

Of awe remonstrance and uneasy power

Thrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat:

Then had the last rocks ended bubbling up

And rhythms of change within the heart begun

By a blind need that would make Springs and Winters;

Pylons and monoliths went on by ages,

Mycenæ and Great Zimbabwe came about;

Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramid

That leaned to hold itself upright, a thing

Foredoomed to limits, death and an easy apex;

Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdom

Standing on Carthage must get nearer still;

While in Chaldea an altitude of god

Being mooted, and a saurian unearthed

Upon a mounain stirring a surmise

Of floods and alterations of the sea,

A round-walled tower must rise upon Senaar

Temple and escape to god the ascertained.

These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth,

Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkened

By their deep-sunken and unfounded shadows

And memories of man's earliest theme of towers.

Space -- the old source of time -- should be undone,

Eternity defined, by men who trusted

Another tier would equal them with god.

A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations,

Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circles

Of low packed smoke, assemblages of thunder

That glowed upon their under sides by night

And lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil.

Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remained

In fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves;

While, if a horse died hauling, plasterers

Knelt on a flank to clip its sweaty coat.

A builder leans across the last wide courses;

His unadjustable unreaching eyes

Fail under him before his glances sink

On the clouds' upper layers of sooty curls

Where some long lightning goes like swallows downward,

But at the wider gallery next below

Recognize master-masons with pricked parchments:

That builder then, as one who condescends

Unto the sea and all that is beneath him,

His hairy breast on the wet mortar calls

'How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!'

On the next eminence the orgulous king

Nimroud stands up conceiving he shall live

To conquer god, now that he knows where god is:

His eager hands push up the tower in thought.

Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides down

Among the carpenters because he has seen

One shape an eagle-woman on a door-post:

He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted day.

Little men hurrying, running here and there,

Within the dark and stifling walls, dissent

From every sound, and shoulder empty hods:

'The god's great altar should stand in the crypt

Among our earth's foundations ' -- ' The god's great altar

Must be the last far coping of our work' --

'It should inaugurate the broad main stair ' --

' Or end it ' -- ' It must stand toward the East!'

But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out

'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altar

Ere we divine its forordained true shape?'

Then one ' It is a pedestal for deeds ' --

''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow ' --

' It has the nature of a woman's bosom ' --

' The tortoise, first created, signifies it ' --

' A blind and rudimentary navel shows

The source of worship better than horned moons.'

Then a lean giant ' Is not a calyx needful? ' --

' Because round grapes on statues well expressed

Become the nadir of incense, nodal lamps,

Yet apes have hands thad but and carved red crystal ' --

' Birds molden, touchly talc veins bronze buds crumble

Ablid ublai ghan isz rad eighar ghaurl . . .'

Words said too often seemed such ancient sounds

That men forget them or were lost in them;

The gutteral glottis-chasms of language reached

A rhythm, a gasp, were curves of immortal thought.

Man with his bricks was building, building yet,

Where dawn and midnight mingled and woke no birds,

In the last courses, building past his knowledge

A wall that swung -- for towers can have no tops,

No chord can mete the universal segment,

Earth has not basis. Yet the yielding sky,

Invincible vacancy was there discovered --

Though piled-up bricks should pulp the sappy balks,

Weight generate a secrecy of heat,

Cankerous charring, crevices' fronds of flame.