Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 39

He watched, and they were drowning in the river;

faces like sodden flowers in the river -

faces of children moving in the river;

and all the while, he knew there was no river.

The final line is mysterious. Does it mean that the stream of life itself is an

illusion, especially if it drags people into fear and sin and guilt? Or is it simply

that the dying man knows, in spite of the phantom images that pass before him,

that this vision of the destructive river is an illusion coming from unbearable

pain?  The question remains because what flows out of the uncontrolled

unconscious may be closer to truth than "rational" thinking. What is certain is

that "no one but themselves could save them". The final agony of the dying

Christ-figure seems to be that there is no hope, no likelihood of the soldiers,

elders, women, children, reaching out in love or having any faith in an

incarnate, bleeding, dying god.

It could be that the refusal of the people to accept the love and faith held out to

them implies, in the poem, a rejection of humanness. The faith and the love

offered by the Christ-figure are not invisible virtues. They are incarnate in the

plain flesh and blood of "ordinary" life-and-death experience.  Traditional

spirituality is sometimes interpreted as "real" or "true" only if it moves away

from what appears to be "ordinary", away -from "dailiness", into the

extraordinary. But "living is dailiness" ("Grace" C.P. p.331) and so is dying.

Eastern spiritualities seem to more readily accept the implications of humanness

and its ordinary consequences.