The Indian Dancers

 

I watched the quiet, age-old Indian art;

They danced the harvest-dance, in which a boy,

Filled by an evil spirit, falls and dies.

There was an end of all the simple joy

Attending on the reaping of the rice.

For no child dies but leaves a broken heart.

 

Then from the wings a wizard figure crept,

Strange, bent, forbidding, with a muffled head,

A crone more like to murder than to heal.

She bent above the body of the dead;

I watched her crooked doctor-fingers feel.

This I had seen from childhood; my heart leapt.

 

For this was but the Christmas Mummers’ play.

This was but Mrs. Vinney at the corpse

Dealing the famous pill that routed Death;

And I remembered nights in English thorpes,

The lantern-light, the snow upon the way,

Crunching to hob-nailed boots, the frosted breath,

 

The six good men and true in paper-strips.

All blue and pink and dripping as they went

Wielding their wooden swords to act again

The Turk and great St. George in tournament;

And battering the passers in the lane

With bladders on the lashes of their whips.

 

Most strange it was to see the ancient root

From which the Mummers sprang; oh, by what ways,

Over the mountains and the burning sands

And thrustings back and century delays,

And wanderings in green or snowy lands,

Had come the seeds or graftings of such fruit?

 

There was the stock, inscrutable and strange,

Of men, remote from life, who keep apart

In the clear light to meditate on Man.

Undying are the impulses of art,

In living thought it dwells as it began,

Hope, the Almighty, overcoming Change.

 

John Masefield