Note: Given the interest in and inaccessibility of William Baylebridge in Australia, I have undertaken to transcribe some of his writing - This Vital Flesh, from which the Proverbs are drawn, was limited to 250 copies.
Other works:
PROVERBS
from The New Life in This Vital Flesh (1939 edition).
Egoism
‘Achieve thy self!’ is being’s first command –
Life plucks its laurel with the separate hand.
That self in thee is vertebral – what bone
To this erected flesh is – scout the prone!
All alien virtue must the self forswear
Would it promote the virtue native there.
No good is there, no evil, not a white,
But self, when all is told, has fashioned it.
What self with its unwrested strength shall do,
Though the world split for it, reports the true.
Each flouting of thy natural self shall be
A blow struck at the truth that uses thee.
Probe altruism – there the unable press
Those separate claims that else were comfortless.
They set, least fit for it, this largest labour –
As self thou shalt affect, affect thy neighbour.
No gift shall life admit, howe’er ’tis tendered,
Save that beyond the reach of whom ’tis rendered.
Hale flesh, when joy it plucks, the undoubting soul,
Find virtue at that self-appointed goal.
Yea, know thyself! How shalt thou know
One other till thou triumph so?
The god hath length of days, the unportioned man –
Let each tell what he’ll pay for it, or can.
The Divine Reference
The lion hath no virtues they decide
Who use the schedule by the fox supplied.
That learning reached in aspiration’s school
Is dark enough to treason and the dull.
Where doubter’s thrive, and overburden being,
Fetters to shackle faith have much decreeing.
The natural to one report of being
Is oft abortion to a different seeing.
The speaker with the words appraise – e’er strung
To different tenor by the different tongue.
Standard
Exalt the standard – and (to match) the strife;
The end envisaged sets the seal on life.
That standard we erect for Man
The god in us avows – or artisan.
One scale for all means what? Abortive strength,
And impotence approved, and spread and length.
This charge shall prompt the approaching birth –
Look upward, but not off the Earth!
The Two Halves
What hinders and what serves, the less and more,
Each other, as they witness, answer for.
Folly is what, in our summation scanned?
What wisdom deals with its left hand.
The discord, well resolved, can potent be –
Its richness raising – in life’s harmony.
Creation
Behold, with Time’s its motion set, Creation,
And, in the shadow of their plumes, negation.
All laws that life enacts imply creation;
Nor God nor man could use them in negation.
The god it dares creation shall inherit
Not through the flesh, explored, but through the chartless spirit.
Impotence
Poor stomachs, to the rule accustomed, would
Reject your principles, too rich a food.
Redundance, as the weevil, will devour
The unspotted fruit and the auspicious flower.
Like sheep the unportioned are – in freedom lost, unnerved,
Or, flattered by their fence, for death reserved.
They cloud the issue, and would our meaning damn,
Who hint that the lion shall lie down with the lamb.
Undaunted lambs! with what a gust they scoff
At those fantastic lions – since their holding off!
Who steps beyond his truth will surely feel,
Where life is active, its instructing heel.
Large and Small
All sovereignty for ampler scope contends,
All smallness for procedures set and ends.
Not, to our shame, the largeness of man’s spirit,
Its lack, doth a confirmed resentment merit.
What, precious so, shall prompt the larger birth?
The sporting chance, and a deflating mirth.
Life’s truth must now achieve what it began –
No shape past our perfected flesh, but Man.
The Dead Absolute
Lo, to its very flesh as knots and nails,
The bigotries that build for blindness jails!
Is what this absolute in concept saves
From licence, chaos, rout, not still the grave’s?
Hast thou thy more and less? thou shalt abhor
These devious heresies of less and more.
Direction
Waste not thy strength – then treason well esteemed –
Where dark the whither, nor from doubt redeemed.
Man’s part in the divine is fixed upon
That vision it compels, the further-on.
What needs ere travails shall its part essay?
The goal, the road, the yea and nay.
The foul, its fungus, line the jail of ease;
Could freedom waive its goal, ’twere soon disease.
Who ties the unshriven past about his loins,
Girt so with death, no march to godward joins.
What most, being man’s affair, reports the god’s?
To achieve the goal with every hap at odds.
Life
Artists we; this world is lent –
How apt, too! – for an instrument.
Life that has no salt in it –
A jest that has no jolt in it.
That route avoid where life ye must forswear:
Asses and camels make their passage there.
Dare largely, and savour thus the wine of life;
With caution plod, and Tedium take to wife.
Life is a giant: rut and seedy rule
Are things for the unfurnished and the dull.
No frost this blood allows: a natural breast
Coerce thus, and thy dotard is confessed.
Let these narcotic nor these withered flowers
Life’s temple taint or salutary bowers.
Death dear to life is, whence its need is won;
But life hates ever what by halves is done.
Who quits it with decorum furthers breath:
Life’s warrant is endorsed by Death.
Keep open mind, or measure
The fool thereof at leisure.
Choose a high casement for thy looking out:
The low, to vision shut, is pledged to doubt.
These codes that fence coercion’s absolute
Break, and to life thou givest room and root.
The New Life will unravel, charter too –
This chaos quelled – the senses each anew.
O Life, again is thy assault begun –
To crown the myriad goals insatiate Man hath won!
The Open Mind
The face of a coward will pledge thee; but his heart is gall.
Dost hear another’s command? in thyself thou hast none.
Who swallows poison forgets the purge.
Shalt thou, too, waste they ineffable hour – strut in a trivial farce that distorts life?
Must the god in it for ever be a paradox to the human?
Shall the smallness of the small limit the stature of the great?
Shall life be measured first by the bondsmen of death and oblivion?
Who climbs the peak climbs mostly beyond vision – is as a speck, or nothing, to whoso shuns it.
To those who would, the plaudit of the would-nots is another grave filled.
Strength comes on the wings of fit desire.
Success, thou’rt what? The discerning of new tasks, of new abysses, new cliffs, that make the goal still further off and higher.
Life is creation – whence thou’lt know death.
Love creates; pity is a sword with two edges.
Look to thyself, and thou shalt look to thy fellow; give greatly to thyself, and thou shalt have more for thy fellow.
On another’s track, see the stars; on your own, hail them.
Art thou at war with thyself? with God thou art at war.
Truth
Earth’s largest lie, ’mong grave and shallow both,
Is what? This prate eternal touching truth.
Truth, unbetrayed, in the appointed plan,
Shall tend the further-on we plot for Man.
Earth’s harvests to their doomed oblivion rot
That the new season’s may be given and got.
Is honesty by false devotion bent?
Not iron, know, admits less sentiment.
Look with thy sharpest eye – and hardly see
That rare thing, intellectual honesty.
Be honest with that fact in thee, or die
In those perversions it shall perish by.
Who least avail? Who most the fiction urge
That truth is fixed, and theirs, all else a lie and scourge.
That sage not Earth or Heaven shall refute
Whose wisdom vows that truth is absolute.
Who, damned, the chains of a perversion wear,
To speed, would force all others to that snare!
The bigot whole, made perfect, wouldst thou tell?
Mark then ‘the just,’ ‘the good,’ inexorable.
Addressed abroad, a lie thou thinkest dull;
But who devours his own is twice a fool.
Fence truth against thy false, lest thou prefer
The half-truth, than the lie more sinister.
No truth, whate’er its mien, shalt thou confess
So odious as these baits in truthlessness.
What prospect, O ye prescient, from a grave?
Who truth sees must a fit perspective have.
Will
The all-shaping Will, that brought the stars to birth,
Forced Man from the abyss, and gave him Earth.
Man takes his meaning first from that evoking Will –
As must the unsighted gods – that forged, and shall fulfill.
This spirit, blood, for that promoting Will
Joint offices perform, its vassals still.
Man’s will, to flout the used sophistry, affirms
That truth for us and strength are equal terms.
Through instinct man his primal dust forswore –
Through instinct, prompting will. Its place restore,
That it, to its much achieved, shall add the essential more.
In joy, by man’s deductions least undone,
Are will and instinct not confessed as one?
What frenzy is this – shall thy deluded will
Spend all its force to check itself and kill?
Art thou another’s? – or by will redeemed,
And thus what life in thy projection schemed?
When will shall consecrate the goal and way,
A god begins, and night is charged with day.
Good and Bad
See good in what thy truth in action earns –
And promptly, for the good that’s better, spurns.
The good that girds us is that greater half
That taught, not Heaven to grieve, but Hell to laugh.
The bad are these – the last our creeds impeach –
The apostates from that greater self in each.
The good and bad let none assess
Who lards his tongue with righteousness.
The Unfellowed Best
Life’s richest flower is how revealed and sent?
In the individual accident.
Man’s one, unqualified, in virtue strong,
Doth make a wilderness of doubters wrong.
One finished man a thousand blunders yield,
Then stifle straight – so growth is still repealed:
Exceptions that would flout the rule
Are sacrificed to keep its dullness whole.
Resolve it! is the single best to be
In exile placed or in supremacy?
Action
In Nature, nothing in suspension see:
‘Back to the dust, or on!’ is her decree.
Only in action shall redemption learn;
Great deeds, with deeds as great, have what concern?
The field is not till its oblation springs;
The hand is not till tribute fit it brings.
Wrecked were the entry, and the consequence,
O’erburdened with an intermediate sense.
Shall genius values its convertless breath?
By that transmuted, it has done with death.
Power
The true, the good, are where? In that subornless power
That makes the pride in man’s defection cower.
‘Ought’ would impose at every turn on ‘can’;
But this must counsel that in questing man.
As likes them, let the effete their drouths employ;
Who can shall clasp the appointed joy.
The vital shall account this just and fit –
To yield its place to what surpasses it.
Tender the profit touched, or in my power –
Yea, lie thou dost, and me thou’lt nothing dower.
Could the all-citing lion of the lamb
One jot accept, it would their meanings damn.
Freedom
In self must he attest, whose soul is freed,
An absolution equal to his need.
Freedom, if they could touch, would rend the weak;
The able it espouses ere they seek.
Freedom no interdiction hath in shame:
It was not till the base it overcame.
Freedom has no relation to the death,
Or wholly such or half; on futures it is fed.
A bondsman, yielding all, is freedom still,
To this – the essential and promoting will.
For freedom who shall clamour write thou thrall;
Kingdoms, to grace it, on its chosen call.
The Open Mind
Delight seeks to empty itself into eternity.
What hath no joy in it is sin.
Sin – so accounted – is not seldom virtue overreaching itself.
Punishment, if it effect nothing, is crime added to itself.
Virtue is fitness to the end proposed.
There are ten thousand perfections and their relevant laws – yea, even upon Earth.
The morality of man asks no confirmation of the stars.
Desire for the true good cannot keep step with is possession.
Knowledge, though it vest in many or few, begins only.
Praise, blame, if thou must; but not till half-sight and prejudice assist thee not.
A thing’s past, why impugnest thou that? Let its future fly thee – or serve thee.
The fools and the too-wise have like issue.
The mind with no fit digression therein lacks the spur of genius.
Two perspectives, two truths.
If the received meanness were truth, liars were overdue.
Digest now a paradox: nothing that is, is true; nothing that is, is unlawful.
A liar’s arch-lie is himself.
All partisans are liars.
Man is possessed by his possessions.
Nobility
Nobility is strength that knows
The steeps in godward – and thither, trustful, goes.
This nobility would do –
Conquer new virtues, naked-new.
Wouldst curb nobility? Its fact decrees,
To crown its past, divine apostasies.
Nobility would bring our utmost on:
Its vision, its supporting will, at one,
How thirst to achieve the god in man begun!
Love and Hate
Love, pure there, flowers in our unbiassed blood;
Love’s service is creation – whence its signal good.
Love, in its sureness, shames dissension’s devil –
Nor wastes a thought upon his good and evil.
Shalt bless thine execrator? Think to give
The lie to Nature’s truth and rightly live?
Dismiss below thee; keep thy valued hate
For what affronts in those of like estate.
Thine enemies, ere worth that name, shall rise
To thy report: usurpers so, despise.
Hate only as endowed thou art in love;
Hate more, and to abortion’s pit thou’lt move.
Wouldst know his love and hate – how man’s election moves?
Mark what the god of his regard approves.
Pity
Pity not least is what? To look with fear upon
Some shape, too like the self, by life undone.
Our flagging selves we tax to seal the cause;
Nor for our neighbour may reverse the laws.
The blow for truth shalt thou with pity tame?
Thus were the false assured – to take a deadlier aim.
Morality
Wouldst thou exalt morality? then lean
Less on the far, more on the god within.
These lesser morals quit, and their contraction,
Coercing brain in thee and blinding action.
Aspire and stay not: these all-smutching morals
Blast, against nature, the large virtue’s laurels.
Remorse, in the sloughs of these slack morals sinking,
To minds in motion is but slovenly thinking.
Yea, come, high-prompted immoralities –
To morals base, as health is to disease!
The quack, the moral nostrum in his mouth,
Thrive in the dust of the insentient drouth.
Sin
Chafe not for sin, a thing beneath its name:
For virtue strike, and sin, unheeded, tame.
Or strength, or sin, that room in thee must hold –
A truth by feigned redemptions uncontrolled.
The fit, for some perversion, why forgo?
Hail it as innocent, and use it so.
Evict the old beast thou in some cleansing lust,
Or, though denial choke, remain it must.
Nature hath still her exigence in man:
Its motion flout in some unsensing ban –
O blind, thou’lt see it oft revolting thus
In terms that shame her wholesome truth and us!
Deity
This, of divinity, believe –
No concept can its other-world achieve.
That godhead in the man we shadow limned
The unguessed, the abysmal, deity hath dimmed.
How shalt thou Man, his truth completed, call?
God, by his proxy on this destined ball:
God, written tersely in this animal.