Life's Testament: Songs from the Hill of Seven Echoes
William Baylebridge's 1914 private publication of poetry and aphorisms
Note: Given the interest in and inaccessibility of William Baylebridge in Australia, I have undertaken to transcribe some of his writing. The present work was privately printed - there are about 100 copies in total - and distributed when he lived in London. It was written while he was young, and before his experience in the First World War.
I have transcribed some of his other works here:
LIFE’S TESTAMENT
SONGS FROM THE HILL OF THE SEVEN ECHOES
By W.B.
PRIVATELY PRINTED
LIFE’S TESTAMENT
I
Through the world a glorious choir
Took, on flying feet of fire,
A luminous way. The lands of old
Were printed, where it trod, with gold.
Then it seemed, ay, less than well
To pluck the blooms of asphodel
On hollow plains – to haunt the meads
Where the unbroken silence breeds.
Come now, age-begotten elves,
In cycle to your previous selves,
Rise! Awhile put off that mirth!
Rise! O drive the plough in earth!
Long fallowed, it is fat for birth.
II
The common clay of humankind,
Wholly to the floor confined,
May not surpass it, in estate
Personal and immediate.
Man’s Individual there is naught:
The Vital Principle that taught
Translation through volition or seed
Living, by this it must be freed.
Life? It is, of being crux,
This Vital Principle in flux:
Wholly one with transmutation
It is; where then is creation?
III
The Lean One of the Sickle saith:
‘The dexter hand of Life, not Death,
Am I: nay, Death is fantasy,
A fear unskilled, a fiction of me.
‘Dream you Life’s incarnation first was not
Before this present coat it got,
This present coat of vigorous flesh? Then solved
How life from not life was evolved.
‘Hark! if in you there house at all
The Vital Principle, it shall,
Predestinate, transmuted be
To its next term illimitably:
No life had ever won to breath
If life descended unto death;
No part stands or by virtue sole
Of its relation to the Whole;
And this, the Whole, had been acquit
Could death touch any vital part of it –
This pledges me. If there be no
Such vital principle wrought in you,
How could the dead experience death?
There dead is, touching Man – no death:
Death is a fantasy,’ The Lean One saith.
IV
A voice: ‘If Dissolution mars
At last mu being, wrought in flame
On God’s great anvil of the stars!’
And this replied: ‘For life indeed
Be twice yourself: examining in
Untimed succession is no need.’
‘When drop these walls of dust away
Is death not there?’ – ‘Life you conceive
Then through the limitation of men’s clay!
‘Thou’lt make no stay in festal tombs,
Unshuttered for thee ere they close,
If life thou; nor the worm thence comes.’
‘Is folly, then, and not to trust,
The memory, though near and dear,
That keeps duration in my dust?’
‘Lay on! quick resurrection ask
Late sepulchres; immortal is
Extension in the vital task.’
V
Here I step, no Fate at feud,
Behind, before Infinitude -
From the preordinant Chaos flung
Into the mar! I stir among.
I, boundless, through that dateless night
Of my fore-being doomed to fight
Hither, from myself immune,
Ever, without end, must on.
My first is lost; my queried last
Beyond the fence of flesh is cast:
The bridging flame I am that broods
between my twin infinitudes,
Each postulating other.
All terms of me have means to, and must
(Ay, therein is their purport thrust),
Use to renewal. Unto me
There stands nor could stand enemy;
Not earth from me shall gather.
VI
From the sullen fallow, sown
In fire with my enduring bone,
Dancing into the lap of day,
I plough with thence perennial clay.
Though ashes, held, of hollowed urns,
Though portioned, thought, with flame that burns
Along the unending spheres, at last,
I care not, if my stem be cast.
Shall tilling some potential womb
Not pluck my loins from the cheated tomb?
Leaping into livelier breath,
I’ll laugh and lustily spurn at death.
At death? Death is not; do I rather
Not renew me one step farther?
Mutation so secures to me
The crown of Immortality.
VII
Peace, peace! No death has part in me.
My soul, at flood, flows out now free
Through this re-natal agony.
The term, the flower, the consummation
Of my elected transmutation
Into my Utmost Self, I fashion.
The seal of my fulfilment, ay,
Its consecration, this is. By
This only I know not to die.
The husk drops to the worms away –
The pledge this that I yet may stay
When leapt are my four walls of clay.
I drive my dead to the dust; I put
Off whatever yields no fruit:
Thus my duration’s absolute.
Peace! For the sake of these, I say,
The Larger Heart and Mind, there may
Perish no heart or mind for aye.
That subtle essence naught shall sever,
Incorporate to be sundered never:
As it was, now is, it shall be ever.
Earth feeds the earth; ashes are thrust
To ashes; dust devours the dust.
I stay not for these things. Have trust!
VIII
FULL CIRCLE
With plume of gold,
With winged feet,
He trod the offal’d market-street,
Where clamour was bold,
Where sight was not;
Till, reached a wall, with harlots hot,
This rune with fiery wand he scrolled:
‘There is no creation, and no death; all that is
left to man is his will.
‘Out of will comes energy, out of energy every-
thing.
‘Thus shalt thou reckon up godhead in thee.’
IX
The brain, the blood, the busy thews
That truffled in the primal ooze
Support me yet; till ice shall grip
The heart of Earth, they shall not lose.
They take my thought, they laugh, they run,
Ere megatherial moons, begun;
And shall, till they shall drop within,
The shattering whirlwinds of the sun.
In subtle and essential ways,
Rich with innumerable days,
To mould, fill, poise, to impel me still,
Each through my broadest being plays.
They built up this hour, this transfuse,
The brain, the blood, the busy thews;
That act of mine the ultimate stars
Shall look on sprang in primal ooze.
X
Raise holy altars! Build
Me shrines beyond the sun!
Thick troops of shimmering stars be willed
Upon my hest to wait or run!
Then I shall couch and quire
Under a cedar tree,
The strings I first stretch on my lyre
Made from the core, O Man, of thee.
‘O Earth! O Mind! O Blood!’
Such is the lay that sings.
All Earth attends; it judges good
The truth of those congenial strings.
Build as my fingers tread
This living warp of song!
Leap, Man, out of your dust! the dead
Are these – the foul, the false, the wrong.
XI
From the ashes of the womb
Leaping to this living tomb,
Wrought in fires of lust, we fall
Burning on a frozen ball.
You, O resolute Heart, have blood
Much hotter than this frigid mud
Fouling on the rind of Earth:
Strike in the fire! How waits the birth!
Thence a flame be driven along
The frost-held solitude – this wrong
No more inveigle Life to lie
Foul, in mud, with frozen thigh!
XII
Into ethereal meads,
Wide azure flowered with stars,
I turned my ravenous soul; it feeds
Where end nor stay the pasture mars.
But, ranging space, how thinned
It came! till, back returned,
It found that diffused pasture wind,
And health upon the earth is spurned.
Wise now, it marks, obeys,
And honours whence it sprung –
The mighty Being that now stays,
That flung it forth, that takes ere long –
The Being that knows not death,
The Being that aye shall be,
In which my soul, flesh threading, hath,
In force, an earth’s destiny.
Ye, Death is dead; and I,
Projected evermore,
On that strong billow of life go by
That shall not ever reach the shore.
XIII
God, to get the clay that stayed me,
Rifled through remotest spheres;
God, to form the breath that bade me
Rise, to thew this heart, arrayed me
From the immense of His,
Portioned so in that profound
Essence, I must travail till
I fling me to its farthest bound –
Till universal clay be crowned
In Godhead by the will.
Through foul mutations I must fight
To larger labours, when I fall
Spur me with godly spright,
And shout defiance when they smite
Me bleeding to the wall.
Growing thus to the Greater Me
In travail, I will hurl despair,
Fret too and tremor, out, and be,
Through battle climbed to battle, free
To grapple God up there.
XIV
Out of Chaos cast, I came
Flying thence a winged flame,
Pregnant too with avatars
Drawn from the eternal stars.
Then I, the mightiest of her moods,
Was suckled in what solitudes
Of ancient Earth! I won my way
To kingdom in her human clay.
‘Fool!’ the gods in buxom fit
Shout me now – their beards are wet
For laughter – ‘Fool!’ – the inflated drones
Rock for mirth on Heaven’s thrones.
‘Fool! apostate from us driven!
Housed on Earth is lieged to Heaven:
World without end we hold it good
To bathe our feet in human blood.’
‘Soft! good masters,’ I replied.
‘Not to less than this I stride –
The attainment of that crown that true
Earth and Heaven will total to.
‘Executors of barren weirds,
Boasting in your infinite beards,
Has not Man, who formed you, found
The brink of your supremist bound?
‘The cloudy surge that running spars
Up the shingle of the stars,
The roaring worlds that lunge and reel
Through the Abyss, you cannot feel.
‘You cannot know the windless streams,
Woods, pastures, where the dreamer dreams,
The dreamer you can know not dreams,
All substance; nor the ecstasies
Of transmutations. Those and these.
‘Are Man’s, unshackled to the space
Of realms illimitable, the face
Of all Immensity, nor choked
With time that may not be revoked
‘For ever. This your fatal pride
Forgot – that known is qualified,
That infinite and finite would
Such other mutually exclude,
That no time is, out of time,
No life, to transmutation could not climb.
‘Well these scrupulous ones then may
Know you, praters, less than they
Of Earth, sequestered thus to the
Unbeing of that eternity.
‘One here, than all in Heaven’s attire,
For limitation learnt is higher;
Climbing through remotest spheres,
My lieges pluck the days and years.’
XV
Across the universal dome,
Stepping wide upon the stars,
God, whose great foot reading jars
Their axles, to the Earth is come.
‘A human, gladdening to behold,
Of stubborn neck and mighty-souled,
Here I’ll raise. O, he shall be
For my approved a sanctuary.
‘He, gathered out of wheeling suns,
Wayward stars, and worlds remote,
At last, invested too by thought
With deity, shall ascend my thrones.’
XVI
‘The ages sleeping in my hand
Are thicker than the stars that stand
About me, wide or near –
More populous than grainéd sand
Of all the waters everywhere.
‘This I learnt when, three score years
Forsaking my perpetual spheres,
I fare on Earth, and travail did
That breath and transmutation need.
‘So broad my realm not suns that sit
Ten thousands wide could girdle it;
Ride on my rathest universal wind –
Not all Eternity should skill to find
The rims of it.
‘This, in sojourn close-devised
On Man’s Earth, I realised,
Roaming the meads, the mountains bare,
And the minute woods and waters there.
‘Worlds I can, if Will achieves,
Tear up, hurl immemorial leagues;
I can fling the stars
Into the farthest astral theatres.
‘But first my arm to sinew won
In less performance, Earth upon.
‘My prevalent mind doth co-extend
With thought through space, space without end;
But my first though aspire could too:
I took it as those humans do.’ –
Thus spake God, out of the sky –
Who is greater, He or I?
XVII
A choir of spirits on a cloud
Lifted up their carol loud:
‘They crawl on interdicted clay
Who take the rabble-trodden way;
Spirits of ethereal plume
Go in liberty and come.
‘The wingéd mind that cuts with ease
The ultimate starred immensities,
As wide as they, will not be lost:
The traversing mind no check may thrust
Out of the broadest sun-begirt abodes
There thinking in a thought of God’s.
‘That world of frontier undefined,
The field of azure-leaping mind,
Is less than we.
There Time shall be
Marshall to Eternity.’
XVIII
I flung me on the wash that whirled
The spume of ages, sapped and curled
In rings immense; till reckless up
The writhing shores of Chaos hurled.
With gaze unblenched, with mind that swung
Not from its centre, next I hung
Over the sheering steep of Time,
And watched the waking years up-flung.
The beetling ages then I heaped
Into the gulfs of Oblivion kept;
Her brooding and eternal tides
Thus bridged, from end to end I leapt.
On level wing I hung, to sheer
The mazing circles, wide and near,
Of whole Infinity, the vast
Ethereal whirlpools, without fear.
Thus all, or when or where I list,
My limitless power, of all possessed,
Concedes me, come to godhead, who
With its Eternal co-exist.
XIX
From universal throes, immense
Past the accompt of reeling sense,
By primal forces nulling space
In their ungripped velocities,
Through cataclysmic gurge and heave
Across whole Chaos, through the vast seas
Of fire, through transformations blind,
Abysmal, to amaze the mind,
The Earth was hurled, its charge begun,
Into the harness of the sun.
Through dizzying epochs it did hold
Its way, with hot convulsed or cold:
Great eddying cataracts of fire
Across its slag whirl and retire;
Or frost binds up its rind in ice.
Lava and rock in ridges rise
Stupendous; sucked within, they roar
In blazing rings, till ooze explore
Those wildering whirlpools. Thus and thus
Prepared for me my dwelling was;
Till, lastly, in the waste of time,
It shook of spasm, and fire, and slime;
And I, through further aeons vast,
Was worked whole into flesh at last.
Now, later come, do I not climb
Upon the shoulders of all time?
I, mastering its ideas, do
Inherit and transcend it too.
XX
Tally, beam, and gauge need at famine; imagination is a feast.
Let thy word serve in the sure, the unmeasured harmony of the self-transcending!
The true philosopher thinks with his imagination.
‘I throw the seed beside me;
I hurry, while I fling,
My two feet on – beside me
A heavy harvesting!’
‘Thus went the song. The season
No gold at full ear saves;
The singer set his knees on
The barren grass of graves.
LIFE’S TESTAMENT
I
Perpetuity makes but a folly of death and sepulchres to be
a fable; six foot of earth holds nothing. Earth unto earth;
but the Immortal smells not the sepulchre.
Not above the spires of the sun sits Incorruption: nay, the
inoblivion of humans asks no house beyond the seven
stars. Immortality seeks no witness of the stars. The
glory of human Incorruption laughs at the stars.
II
When the harp is shattered, O flesh too vain, then passes the
harmony. But the Player, out of whom the harmony
sprung, for practice upon that rent instrument is he not
more skilled in harp-playing?
Soul knows not dissimilitude in kind, but in degree.
As for the heavens’ heat the body takes virtue,
So the Soul warms her at the sun of her Greater Self. In
that sun harbours no fear, no despair, no sorrow, neither
any exhalation of the flesh besides; the light of it sets
the true bound and tropic of our being.
The Soul, though she keep foot in the flesh, is ever busy,
as a bird caught in a net, to free it; the Soul would
run abroad to wider being. Thou, my Soul, though thy
feet be snared in the net of the senses, through the
windows of the mind lookest though not into Infinity?
The essence that began not with your flesh, at its dropping
away may not yoke with it; the dead, though they go in
flesh, may never leave their dust.
We live by the living, though their separate memorials stand or
be razed.
The migration of souls into their Larger Self seals their tenure
in perpetuity; yea, each, immortal in that Whole, shall
gather lustre till the last suns.
Let the guest of the flesh be greatly entertained, that she return
home with no slight report of thee!
III
The concrete memorial of the flesh and aspect is lost; the rest
remains. No record of the living, no deed, no worth
whatever, is struck out: nay, all is displayed in the
everlasting register of Humanity.
The diuturnity of our days on earth is beyond our hairs.
Oblivion, that throws down the battlements of the flesh,
corrupts not that essence which, communicated into all
time, is our clear selves.
To quit flesh, is that to quit being? For thee, O Life,
discontinuance in the flesh is a new nativity in the spirit.
Who makes good his faculties may spurn his flesh and yet
laugh at sepulchres. Stay not, if you would build a
temple in your ashes! Wait not, if you would have a
Pomp busy at your sepulchre!
Who makes little of to-day, to-morrow will make little of him.
The season of the great reaches summer on that side of the
flesh.
The resurrected have no need of a trumpet to play before their
tomb; eclipsed in the glory of their Greater Selves, what
is lamentation upon their earth but vanity, a futility of
the breath, and folly?
To put off these rags of flesh and rise in Incorruption – this,
though its particular term stand or perish, is assured
unto Life. Murmur not, O mourners, wind-feeders, vain
sons of your fathers: their semblances we lay away in
urns; but themselves, or much, or less, or nothing, their
flesh cast off as a frayed garment, have already gone
forth into Immortality.
Each is at most but a footmark that discovers the way to the
goal.
The finite personality is in yoke for the infinite personality; the
finite personality is nothing except in relation to the
infinite personality.
Such only of the personal and individual as is expressed in
terms of the spiritual and universal may pass the grave;
once past the grave is immortal.
The anticipation of the small is a folly in greatness, of the great
a folly in smallness.
Immortality takes root in the mutations of the Individual. Our
deathless part flowers with the generations, in effect
known, if not in name.
Lay on, O ye living, that the immortal in you bring the seed of
life to its greatest fruition!
IV
The prescription of the flesh, standing apart, is confirmed by
itself.
To wake in the flesh is not truly to live.
Divinity needed not to tarry for this flesh.
V
Not from the living comes the dead, nay, nor from the dead
the living: creation and death are fables.
The living exceed the dead; the dead never depart their earth.
Man’s very body moves in unbroken flux through a sequence
of quit selves; the mind, marshal to that realm of earth,
goes forward to its next succession for ever.
The dead are persistent; Life is eternal.
Yea, though itself threaten, Godhead alone knows not
destruction; the rest is grass. Sepulchres are an affront
merely to the vanities of the non-immortal.
VI
Men’s bodies are the stepping-stones of the Soul, passing
thereon to her Ultimate.
But how many are above the flood?
Most are less than their presented selves – most are grass
sprung in the rain to drop before the sickle of the next
drought.
VII
Who sleeps till his resurrection has none.
Sacrifice, O ye living, to the resurrection!
Get up, ye living, out of your dust!
Lay up resurrections against the dropping in of dust!