The Cicadas
SIGHTLESS, I breathe and touch ; this night of pines Is needly, resinous and rough with bark. Through every crevice in the tangible dark The moonlessness above it all but shines.
Limp hangs the leafy sky ; never a breeze Stirs, nor a foot in all this sleeping ground ; And there is silence underneath the trees— The living silence of continuous sound.
For like inveterate remorse, like shrill Delirium throbbing in the fevered brain, An unseen people of cicadas fill Night with their one harsh note, again, again.
Again, again, with what insensate zest ! What fury of persistence, hour by hour ! Filled with what devil that denies them rest, Drunk with what source of pleasure and of power I Life is their madness, life that all night long Bids them to sing and sing, they know not why ; Mad cause and senseless burden of their song ; For life commands and life ! is all their cry.
I hear them sing, who in the double night Of clouds and branches fancied that I went Through my o'wn spirit's dark discouragement, Deprived of inward as of outward sight ; Who, seeking, even as here in the wild wood, A lamp to beckon through my tangled fate, Found only darkness and, disconsolate, Mourned the lost purpose and the vanished good, Now in my empty heart the crickets' shout Re-echoing denies and still denies With stubborn folly all my learned doubt, In madness more than I in reason wise.
Life, life The word is magical. They sing, And in my darkened soul the great sun shines ; My fancy blossoms with remembered spring, And all my autumns ripen on the vines.
Life ! and each knuckle of the fig tree's pale Dead skeleton breaks out with emerald fire. Life ! and the tulips blow, the nightingale Calls back the rose, calls back the old desire.
And old desire that is for ever new, Desire, life's earliest and latest birth, Life's instrument to suffer and to do, Springs with the roses from the teeming earth.
Desire that from the world's bright body strips Deforming time and makes each kiss the first ; That gives to hearts, to satiated lips The endless bounty of to-morrow's thirst.
Time passes and the watery moonrise peers Between the tree-trunks. But no outer light Tempers the chances of our groping years, No moon beyond our labyrinthine night.
Clueless we go ; but I have heard thy voice, Divine unreason ! harping in the leaves, And grieve no more ; for wisdom never grieves, And thou hest taught me wisdom ; I rejoice.
Amous HUXLEY.
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