The Flaming Terrapin

- Poem by Roy Campbell

How often have I lost this fervent mood,

And gone down dingy thoroughfares to brood

On evils like my own from day to day:

'Life is a dusty corridor,' I say,

'Shut at both ends.' But far across the plain,

Old Ocean growls and tosses his grey mane,

Pawing the rocks in all his old unrest

Or lifting lazily on some white crest

His pale foam-feathers for the moon to burn -

Then to my veins I feel new sap return,

Strength tightens up my sinews long grown dull,

And in the old charred crater of the skull

Light strikes the slow somnambulistic mind

And sweeps her forth to ride the rushing wind,

And stamping on the hill-tops high in air,

To shake the golden bonfire of her hair.

This sudden strength that catches up men's souls

And rears them up like giants in the sky,

Giving them fins where the dark ocean rolls,

And wings of eagles when the whirlwinds fly,

Stand visible to me in its true self

(No spiritual essence or wing'd elf

Like Ariel on the empty winds to spin).

I see him as a mighty Terrapin,

Rafting whole islands on his stormy back,

Built of strong metals molten from the black

Roots of the inmost earth....

The Ark is launched; cupped by the streaming breeze,

The stiff sails tug the long reluctant keel,

And Noah, spattered by the rising seas,

Stands with his great fist fastened to the wheel.

Like driven clouds, the waves went rustling by,

Feathered and fanned across their liquid sky,

And, like those waves, the clouds in silver bars

Creamed on the scattered shingle of the stars.

All night he watched black water coil and burn,

And the white wake of phosphorus astern

Lit up the sails and made the lanterns dim,

Until it seemed the whole sea burned for him...

The Flaming Terrapin, his labours done,

Humped like a cloud o'er mountain, crag and field

Rose on the skyline. The far-shooting sun

Splintered its arrows on his fiery shield,

From whose bright dome in sudden ricochets

Recoiling flashed the long reflected rays:

While, rolling his red eyes, a double moon

That lit the hillsides with a second noon,

He sank to rest. His golden ridges, tiered

Above the foam, now slowly disappeared:

And as clouds roll immense and globed and still

To burst in thunder round a lonely hill,

The slow foam gathered round him: o'er his wild

Mountainous outline, ponderously piled,

It hung one moment, poised in grim suspense,

And then swamped crashing down, and from its dense

Vortex of thunder, with a gradual sweep

Rolled forth in groaning circles on the deep....

Though the dark sky has gathered stormy numbers

Of vultures to be snowed upon my corpse;

Though the weak arc of Heaven warps

Beneath the darkness that encumbers

The night beyond; though we believe the end

Is but the end, and that the torn flesh crumbles

And the fierce soul, rent from its temple, tumbles

Into the gloom where empty winds contend,

In gnat-like vortex droning - what is this

That makes us stamp upon the mountain-tops,

So fearless at the brink of the abyss,

Where into space the sharp rock-rampart drops

And bleak winds hiss?

It is the silent chanting of the soul:

'Though times shall change and stormy ages roll,

I am that ancient hunter of the plains

That raked the shaggy flitches of the Bison:

Pass world: I am the dreamer that remains,

The Man, clear-cut against the last horizon!'