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Title: Happy Ending
The Collected Lyrics of Louise Imogen Guiney
Author: Louise Imogen Guiney
Release Date: May 14, 2017 [EBook #54719]
Language: English
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Rower maul'd in the Sea, ah, Rower Limp as Grasses behind the Mower. Pity'd most that thy Woes deny thee Sight of the Spirit Steersman by thee! Tho' more near than a hinted Haven Lie the Port that is coral-paven, All is well: the Unseen Befriending Makes of either the Happy Ending. |
The Collected Lyrics of
Louise Imogen Guiney
TOUT BIEN OU RIEN
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK: 1909
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published December 1909
TO
ANNE WHITNEY
This volume has been garnered from the author's earlier books. Two poems have been chosen from "The White Sail" (1887); nine Oxford Sonnets from a privately printed booklet (1895), since added to, and much altered; and many lyrics, under a revised form, from "A Roadside Harp" (1893), and "The Martyrs' Idyl" (1899), plus some twenty newer titles transferred, with grateful acknowledgments, from McClure's Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, and The Century. The principle of exclusion goes far enough to cover all poems in narrative form, or of any appreciable length, or translated; also, any which seemed out of keeping with the character of the present collection. Such as that is, it comprises the less faulty half of all the author's published verse.
L.I.G.
Boston, October 21, 1909.
A man said unto his Angel:
"My spirits are fallen low,
And I cannot carry this battle:
O brother! where might I go?
"The terrible Kings are on me
With spears that are deadly bright;
Against me so from the cradle
Do fate and my fathers fight."
Then said to the man his Angel:
"Thou wavering witless soul,
Back to the ranks! What matter
To win or to lose the whole,
"As judged by the little judges
Who hearken not well, nor see?
Not thus, by the outer issue,
The Wise shall interpret thee.
"Thy will is the sovereign measure
And only event of things:-4-
The puniest heart, defying,
Were stronger than all these Kings.
"Though out of the past they gather,
Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain,
And pallid Thirst of the Spirit
That is kin to the other twain,
"And Grief, in a cloud of banners,
And ringletted Vain Desires,
And Vice, with the spoils upon him
Of thee and thy beaten sires,—
"While Kings of eternal evil
Yet darken the hills about,
Thy part is with broken sabre
To rise on the last redoubt;
"To fear not sensible failure,
Nor covet the game at all,
But fighting, fighting, fighting,
Die, driven against the wall."
While all was glad,
It seemed our birch-tree had,
That August hour, intelligence of death;
For warningly against the eaves she beat
Her body old, lamenting, prophesying,
And the hot breath
Of ferny hollows nestled at her feet
Spread out in startled sighing.
Across an argent sea,
Distinct unto the farthest reef and isle,
The clouds began to be.
Huge forms 'neath sombre draperies, awhile
Made slow uncertain rally;
But as their ranks conjoined, and from the north
The leader shook his lance, Oh, then how fair
Unvested, they stood forth,
In diverse armour, plumed majestically,
Each with his own esquires, a King in air!
Up moved the dark vanguard,
With insolent colours that o'erdusked the skies,-6-
And trailed from beach to beach:
Massed orange and mould-green; vermilion barred
On bronze or mottled silver; saffron dyes
And purples migratory
Fanned each in each,
As the long column broke, athirst for glory.
Sudden, the thunder!
Upon the roofed verandas how it rolled,
Twice, thrice: a thud and flame of doom that told
New-fallen, nor far away,
Some black destruction on the innocent day.
And little Everard
Deep in the hammock under, eyes alight
With healthful fear and wonder
The brave do ne'er unlearn,
Clenched his soft hand, and breathing hard,
Smiled there against his father, like a knight
Baptized on Cressy field or Bannockburn.
A moment gone,
Into our paradise from Acheron,-7-
With imperceptive sorcery crawled ashore
Odours unnamable: an exhalation
Of men and ships in oozy graves. (Ah, cease,
Derisive nereids! cease:
Be it enough, that even ye can pour,
From crystal flagons of your ancient peace,
So strange obscene libation.)
But with the thunder-peal
Sprang the pure winds, their thurible swung wide,
To chase that tainted tide;
Fresh from the pastures and the cedar-grove,
They rode the copper ridges of the main,
And bared a league of distance to reveal
A sail, aslant, astrain,
Impetuous for the cove;
And tossing after, panic-stricken,
Another, and a third: white spirits, fain to sicken,
Nor out of natural harm salvation gain.
The selfsame hunter winds that drave
The horror down, as faithful-hearted drew
The sad clouds from their carnage, and up-piled-8-
Their rebel gonfalons, or jocund threw
Their cannon in the wave;
And subtly, with a parting whisper, gave
An eve most mild:
A sunset like a prayer, a world all rose and blue:
A good world, as it was,
And as it shall be: clear circumferent space,
Where punctual yet, for worship of their Cause,
The stars came thick in choir.
Sleep had our Everard in her cool embrace,
Else from his cot he hardly need have stooped
To see (and laugh to see!) the headland pine
Embossed on changing fire:
For close behind it, cooped
Within a smallest span,
In fury, to and fro and round and round,
The routed leopards of the lightning ran:
Bright, bright, inside their dungeon-bars, malign
They ran; and ran till dawn, without a sound.
Open, Time, and let him pass
Shortly where his feet would be!
Like a leaf at Michaelmas
Swooning from the tree,
Ere its hour the manly mind
Trembles in a sure decrease,
Nor the body now can find
Any hold on peace.
Take him, weak and overworn;
Fold about his dying dream
Boyhood, and the April morn,
And the rolling stream:
Weather on a sunny ridge,
Showery weather, far from here;
Under some deep-ivied bridge,
Water rushing clear:
Water quick to cross and part
(Golden light on silver sound),-10-
Weather that was next his heart
All the world around!
Soon upon his vision break
These, in their remembered blue;
He shall toil no more, but wake
Young, in air he knew.
He hath done with roofs and men.
Open, Time, and let him pass,
Vague and innocent again,
Into country grass.
(Donatello’s Saint George)
Spirits of old that bore me,
And set me, meek of mind,
Between great dreams before me,
And deeds as great behind,
Knowing humanity my star
As first abroad I ride,
Shall help me wear with every scar
Honour at eventide.
Let claws of lightning clutch me
From summer's groaning cloud,
Or ever malice touch me,
And glory make me proud.
Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword,
Choice of the heart's desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire.
Forethought and recollection
Rivet mine armour gay!-12-
The passion for perfection
Redeem my failing way!
The arrows of the upper slope
From sudden ambush cast,
Rain quick and true, with one to ope
My Paradise at last!
I fear no breathing bowman,
But only, east and west,
The awful other foeman
Impowered in my breast.
The outer fray in the sun shall be,
The inner beneath the moon;
And may Our Lady lend to me
Sight of the Dragon soon!
The gusty morns are here,
When all the reeds ride low with level spear;
And on such nights as lured us far of yore,
Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine,
The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine:
But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine,
Together roam no more.
Soft showers go laden now
With odours of the sappy orchard-bough,
And brooks begin to brawl along the march;
Steams the late frost from hollow sedges high;
The finch is come, the flame-blue dragonfly,
The marsh-born marigold that children spy,
The plume upon the larch.
There is a music fills
The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills
Southward to Dewing's little bubbly stream,—
The heavenly weather's call! Oh, who alive
Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive,-14-
Having free feet that never felt a gyve
Weigh, even in a dream?
But thou, instead, hast found
The sunless April uplands underground,
And still, wherever thou art, I must be.
My beautiful! arise in might and mirth,
(For we were tameless travellers from our birth);
Arise against thy narrow door of earth,
And keep the watch for me.
O day of roses and regret,
Kissing the old graves of our own!
Not to the slain love's lovely debt
Alone.
But jealous hearts that live and ache,
Remember; and while drums are mute,
Beneath your banners' bright outbreak,
Salute:
And say for us to lessening ranks
That keep the memory and the pride,
On whose thinned hair our tears and thanks
Abide,
Who from their saved Republic pass,
Glad with the Prince of Peace to dwell:
Hail, dearest few! and soon, alas,
Farewell.
A.D. MDCCCXCV
A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath
A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.
Sullen quiet below,
But storm in upper air!
A wind from long ago,
In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there,
And singed the triple gloom,
And let through, in a flame,
Crowned faces of old Rome:
Regnant o'er Rome's abandoned ground, processional they came.
Uprisen as any sun
Through vistas hollow grey,
Aloft, and one by one,-17-
In brazen casques the Emperors loomed large, and sank away.
In ovals of wan light
Each warrior eye and mouth:
A pageant brutal bright
As if once over loudly passed Jove's laughter in the south;
And dimmer, these among,
Some cameo'd head aloof,
With ringlets heavy-hung,
Like yellow stonecrop comely grown around a castle roof.
An instant: gusts again,
Then heaven's impacted wall,
The hot insistent rain,
The thunder-shock; and of the Past mirage no more at all,
No more the alien dream
Pursuing, as we went,
With glory's cursèd gleam:
Nor sin of Cæsar's ruined line engulfed us, innocent.-18-
The vision great and dread
Corroded; sole in view
Was empty Egdon spread,
Her crimson summer weeds ashake in tempest: but we knew
What Tacitus had borne
In that wrecked world we saw;
And what, thine heart uptorn,
My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law.
The frost may form apace,
The roses pine away:
Nomæa! if I see thy face,
Then is the summer day.
A word of thine, a breath,
And lo! my joy shall seem
To peer far down where life and death
Stir like a forded stream;
Or else shall misery sound
And travel in that hour
All utmost things in their shut round,
As a bee feels his flower.
Thought lags and cries Alas,
Love ranges quick and free.
Oh, figured clock and sanded glass,
They mark no term for me.
And since I can but rue
The calendar gone wrong,-20-
And dials never telling true
If dreams be short or long,
Dear, from these arts that fail
To thee I will repair.
Till the last eve dance down the gale
With no star in her hair,
Be thou my solar chime,
Be thou my wheel of night,
Be thy bright heart, not ashen Time,
My measure, law, and light.
What would you do for your fairest one,
Wild as the wind and free as the sun,
Born a fugitive, sure to slip
Soon from secular ownership?
Men in search of the heart's desire,
Wearily trampling flood and fire,
Rove betimes into some abyss
Darker far than eternity's.
(Ah, the hazard! it awes one so!)
And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?
Sweet, if you love him, let him go.
Happy the Frontier to have gained
Undetaining and undetained,
Quick and clean, like a solar ray
Shot through spindrift across the bay!
Men would follow a long vain quest,
Feed on ashes and forfeit rest,
Bleed with battle and flag with toil,
Only to stifle in desert soil.
(Ah, the failure! it stings one so!)-22-
And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?
Sweet, if you love him, let him go.
Vats fill up, and the sheaves are in:
Never a blessing is left to win
Save for the myrtle coronal
Round the urn at the end of all.
Men will clutch, as they clutched of old,
Souring honey or dimming gold,
Not the treasure-trove of the land
Here shut fast in a roseleaf hand.
(Ah, the folly! it irks one so!)
And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?
Sweet, if you love him, let him go.
Soon as divine September, flushing from sea to sea,
Peers from the whole wide upland into eternity,
Soft as an exhalation, ghosts of the thistle start:
Never a poet saw them but ached in his baffled heart.
Gossamer armies rising thicker than snowflakes fall,
Waken in blood and marrow, aware of the unheard call.
Oh, what a nameless urging through avenues laid in air,
Hints of escape, unbodied, intricate, everywhere,
Sense of a feared denial, or access hard to be won;
Gleams of a dubious gesture for guesses to feed upon!-24-
Flame goes flying in heaven, the down on the cool hillside:
Earth is a bride-veil glory to show and conceal the Bride.
The Ox he openeth wide the Doore,
And from the Snowe he calls her inne,
And he hath seen her Smile therefor,
Our Ladye without Sinne.
Now soone from Sleep
A Starre shall leap,
And soone arrive both King and Hinde:
Amen, Amen:
But O, the Place co'd I but finde!
The Ox hath hush'd his voyce and bent
Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,
And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,
The Blessed layes her Browe.
Around her feet
Full Warme and Sweete
His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell:
Amen, Amen:
But sore am I with Vaine Travèl!
The Ox is host in Judah stall
And Host of more than onelie one,-26-
For close she gathereth withal
Our Lorde her littel Sonne.
Glad Hinde and King
Their Gyfte may bring,
But wo'd to-night my Teares were there,
Amen, Amen:
Between her Bosom and His hayre!
Vines branching stilly
Shade the open door,
In the house of Zion's Lily,
Cleanly and poor.
Oh, brighter than wild laurel
The Babe bounds in her hand,
The King, who for apparel
Hath but a swaddling-band,
And sees her heavenlier smiling than stars in His command!
Soon, mystic changes
Part Him from her breast,
Yet there awhile He ranges
Gardens of rest:-27-
Yea, she the first to ponder
Our ransom and recall,
Awhile may rock Him under
Her young curls' fall,
Against that only sinless love-loyal heart of all.
What shall inure Him
Unto the deadly dream,
When the Tetrarch shall abjure Him,
The thief blaspheme,
And scribe and soldier jostle
About the shameful tree,
And even an Apostle
Demand to touch and see?—
But she hath kissed her Flower where the Wounds are to be.
Three without slumber ride from afar,
Fain of the roads where palaces are;
All by a shed as they ride in a row,
"Here!" is the cry of their vanishing Star.-28-
First doth a greybeard, glittering fine,
Look on Messiah in slant moonshine:
"This have I bought for Thee!" Vainly: for lo,
Shut like a fern is the young hand divine.
Next doth a magian, mantled and tall,
Bow to the Ruler that reigns from a stall:
"This have I sought for Thee!" Though it be rare,
Loath little fingers are letting it fall.
Last doth a stripling, bare in his pride,
Kneel by the Lover as if to abide:
"This have I wrought for Thee!" Answer him there
Laugh of a Child, and His arms opened wide.
Was a Soule from farre away
Stood wistful in the Hay,
And of the Babe a-sleeping hadde a sight:
Neither reck'd hee any more
Men behind him and before,
Nor a thousand busie Winges, flitting light:-29-
But in middle of the night
This few-worded wight
(Yule! Yule!)
Bespake Our Ladye bright:
"Fill mee, ere my corage faints,
With the lore of all the Saints:
Harte to harte against my Brother let mee be.
By the Fountaines that are His
I wo'd slumber where Hee is:
Prithee, Mother, give the other Brest to mee!"
The Soule that none co'd see
She hath taken on her knee:
(Yule! Yule!)
Sing prayse to Our Ladye.
The Ox and the Ass,
Tell aloud of them:
Sing their pleasure as it was
In Bethlehem.
Still as blowing rose, sudden as a sword,
Maidenly the Maiden bare Jesu Christ the Lord;-30-
Yet for very lowlihood, such a Guest to greet,
Goeth in a little swoon while kissing of His feet.
Mary, drifted snow on the earthen floor,
Joseph, fallen wondrous weak now he would adore,—
(Oh, the surging might of love! Oh, the drowning bliss!)
Both are rapt to Heaven and lose their human Heaven that is.
From the Newly Born trails a lonely cry.
With a mind to heed, the Ox turns a glowing eye;
In the empty byre the Ass thinks her heart to blame:
Up for comforting of God the beasts of burden came,
Softly to inquire, thrusting as for cheer
There between the tender hands, furry faces dear.-31-
Blessing on the honest coats! tawny coat and grey
Friended Our Delight so well when warmth had strayed away.
Crooks are on the sill; sceptres sail the wave;
All the hopes of all the years are thronging to the Cave.
Mother slept not long, nor long Father's sense was dim,
But another twain the while stood parent-wise to Him.
The Ox and the Ass,
Be you glad for them
Such a moment came to pass
In Bethlehem!
Winton, my window with a mossy marge,
My lofty oriel, whence the soul hath sight
Of passionate yesterdays, all gold and large,
Arisen to enrich our narrow night:
Though others bless thee, who so blest before
Hath pastured from the violent time apart,
And laved in supersensual light the heart
Alone with thy magnificent No More?
Sweet court of roses now, sweet camp of bees!
The hills that lean to thy white bed at dawn
Hear, for the clash of raging dynasties,
Laughter of boys about a branchy lawn.
Hast thou a stain, let ivy cover all;
Nor seem of greatness disinhabited
While spirits in their wonted splendour tread
From close to close, by Wolvesey's idle wall.
Bright fins against thy lucid waters leap,
And nigh thy towers the nesting ring-doves dwell;-33-
Be lenient winter, and long moons, and sleep
Upon thee; but on me the sharp Farewell.
Happy art thou, O clad and crowned with rest!
Happy the shepherd (would that I were he!)
Whose early way is step for step with thee,
Whose old brow fades on thine immortal breast.
Who would not praise thee, miracle of Frost?
Some gesture overnight, some breath benign,
And lo! the tree's a fountain all a-shine,
The hedge a throne of unimagined cost;
In wheel and fan along a wall embossed,
The spider's humble handiwork shows fine
With jewels girdling every airy line:
Though the small mason in the cold be lost.
Web after web, a morning snare of bliss
Starring with beauty the whole neighbourhood,
May well beget an envy clean and good.
When man goes too into the earth-abyss,
And God in His altered garden walks, I would
My secret woof might gleam so fair as this.
Since I avail no more, O men! with you,
I will go back unto the gods content;
For they recall me, long with earth inblent,
Lest lack of faith divinity undo.
I served you truly while I dreamed you true,
And golden pains with sovereign pleasure spent:
But now, farewell! I take my sad ascent,
With failure over all I nursed and knew.
Are ye unwise, who would not let me love you?
Or must too bold desires be quieted?
Only to ease you, never to reprove you,
I will go back to heaven with heart unfed:
Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you,
To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead.
As I came homeward
At merry Christmas,
By the old Church tower
Through the Churchyard grass,
And saw there circled
With graves all about,
The Yew-tree paternal,
The Yew-tree devout,
Then this hot life-blood
Was hard to endure,
O Death! so I loved thee,
The sole love sure.
For stars slip in heaven,
They wander, they break;
But under the Yew-tree
Not one heartache.
And ours, what failure
Renewed and avowed!-37-
But ah, the long-buried
Is leal, and is proud.
* * * * * *
At eve, o'erlooking
The smooth chilly tide,
With age-hidden meaning
The Yew-tree sighed,
By the square grey tower,
In the short grey grass,
As I came homeward
At merry Christmas.
"Why dost thou hide from these
Out along the hills halloaing?
Why hast forbade
Thy face, O goddess! to thy votaries?"
"Unasking and unknowing
Is he whom I make glad,
Like Dian grandly going
To the sleeping shepherd-lad.
Men that pursue learn not
To follow is my lot."
"Happiness, secret one,
Heartbeat of the April weather,
Where art thou found?
Tell; lest I err too, yonder in the sun."
"Call in thine eye from ether,
Thy feet from far ground;
Seek Honour in this heather,
With austere purples wound.-39-
Serve her: she will reveal
Me, hound-like at thy heel."
"Good-morrow, Symbol."—"Call me not
The name I neither love nor merit."
—"That grave eternal name inherit,
Thine ever, though all men forgot."
"Mistake me not; secure and free
From rock to rock my falchion passes:
But Symbols trail through grey morasses
The tattered shows of faëry."
"My Symbol thou, of phantom blood,
With starlight from thy temples raying;
Along thy floated body playing
Are withering wings, and wings in bud."
"Alas, thine eye with clay is sealed."
—"Symbol, before the clay's denial,
While yet I had a god's espial,
I saw thee in a solar field!"-40-
"Nay: I am Fact."—"Then lose thy praise;
And lest to-day no song behoove thee,
Lest mine impeach thee, or reprove thee,
Ah, Symbol, Symbol! go thy ways."
"Where shall I find my light?"
"Turn from another's track:
Whether for gain or lack,
Love but thy natal right.
Cease to follow withal,
Though on thine up-led feet
Flakes of the phosphor fall.
Oracles overheard
Are never again for thee,
Nor at a magian's knee
Under the hemlock tree,
Burns the illumining word."
"Whence shall I take my law?"
"Neither from sires nor sons,
Nor the delivered ones,-41-
Holy, invoked with awe.
Rather, dredge the divine
Out of thine own poor dust,
Feebly to speak and shine.
Schools shall be as they are:
Be thou truer, and stray
Alone, intent, and away,
In a savage wild to obey
Some dim primordial star."
"Recall for me, recall
The time more true and ample;
The world whereon I trample,
How tortuous and small!
Behold, I tire of all.
"Once, gods in jewelled mail
Through greenwood ways invited;
There how the moon is blighted,
And mosses long and pale
On lifeless cedars trail."-42-
"Child, keep this good unrest:
But give to thine own story
Simplicity with glory;
To greatness dispossessed,
Dominion of thy breast.
"In abstinence, in pride,
Thou, who from Folly's boldest
Thy sacred eye withholdest,
Another morn shalt ride
At Agamemnon's side."
"See: brood: remember: this thy function only;
Neither to have nor do is meet for thee."
"Ah, earth's a palace where I must go lonely!"
"Nay: earth's a dungeon which thou passest, free."
"I cannot soar beside, but must for ever suffer
Blue air athrill with thee to lap against my breast,-43-
And dream it is thy wing."
—"Dear, sighs about thee hover:
Among the dewy leaves my longing is thy guest.
Yet, lone and far apart, shall we no joy discover
To travel the same sky, and by one sea to rest?
Say, mate in all this world?"
—"Ah, mute forbidden lover,
Ah, song I shall not hear!"
—"Ah, sweet unbuilded nest!"
"If the gods ruin send?"—
"Make that thy bride and friend."
"If the gods cheat?"—"They say
The one true word alway."
"If for some loss I pine?"
"—The past is theirs, yet thine."
"If I sue not?"—"Vain cares!
The morrow's thine, not theirs."
"Is it thou, silly heart,
Not prone on thy pallet, but grieving apart?"
—"Natal Star, even so."
"I miss thee to-night, while thou smoulderest low."
—"Live in beauty! but I
For bloodshed of spirit, here dwindle and die."
"Are we two not the same,
By law everlasting one mystical flame?
Aloft if I burn,
Every ray of my light be thy stair of return:
Up, up! to our lot
Where warfare and time and the body are not."
"Iole is coy with me,
Goddess! for a month I suffer
Knowing not how far I be:
Teach me softer arts, or rougher,
Well to sail that sea."-45-
"Fie: how long could Love divine
Venturing, abstain from answer,
Nor look landward for a sign!
Niggard, take of thine entrancer
Shipwreck in the brine."
"Master of your wounded heart, regent of your pleasure!
We that long defied your art, tamèd Moods at leisure,
All with you, nor now apart, would tread out our measure."
"Welcome, equal powers benign, quit of ancient madness!
Dance with me beneath the vine, not ungentle Sadness;
Link your little hand in mine soberly, my Gladness."
How tender and how slow, in sunset cheer,
Far on the hill, our quiet treetops fade!
A broidery of ebon seaweed, laid
Long in a book, were scarce more fine and clear.
Frost and sad light and windless atmosphere
Have breathed on them, and of their frailties made
Beauty more sweet than summer's builded shade,
Whose green domes fallen, leave this wonder here.
O ye forgetting and outliving boughs,
With not a plume, gay in the joust before,
Left for the Archer! so, in evening's eye,
So stilled, so lifted, let your lover die,
Set in the upper calm no voices rouse,
Stript, meek, withdrawn, against the heavenly door.
A.D. MDCCLXXVIII-MDCCCXXX
Between the wet trees and the sorry steeple,
Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,
Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;
Beauty's a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;
But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,
Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.
Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,
Safe also on our earth, begetting ever
Some one love worth the ages and the nations!
Falleth no thing that was to thee eternal.
Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining,
Titian and Wordsworth live; the People marches.
Keep holy watch with silence, prayer, and fasting
Till morning break, and every bugle play;
Unto the One aware from everlasting
Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.
Forth from this peace on manhood's way thou goest,
Flushed with resolve, and radiant in mail;
Blessing supreme for men unborn thou sowest,
O knight elect! O soul ordained to fail!
The breath of dew and twilight's grace
Be on the lonely battle-place,
And to so young, so kind a face,
The long protecting grasses cling!
(Alas, alas,
That one inexorable thing!)
In rocky hollows cool and deep,
The honey-bees unrifled sleep;
The early moon from Ida steep
Comes to the empty wrestling-ring;
Upon the widowed wind recede
No echoes of the shepherd's reed;
And children without laughter lead
The war-horse to the watering;
With footstep separate and slow
The father and the mother go,
Not now upon an urn they know
To mingle tears for comforting.-50-
Thou stranger Ajax Telamon!
What to the lovely hast thou done,
That nevermore a maid may run
With him across the flowery Spring?
The world to me has nothing dear
Beyond the namesake river here:
Oh, Simois is wild and clear!
And to his brink my heart I bring;
My heart, if only this might be,
Would stay his waters from the sea,
To cover Troy, to cover me,
To haste the hour of perishing.
(Alas, alas,
That one inexorable thing!)
That I have tracked you from afar, my crown I call it and my height:
All hail, O dear and difficult star! All hail, O heart of light!
No pleasure born of time for me,
Who in you touch eternity.
If I have found you where you are, I win my mortal fight.
You flee the plain: I therefore choose summit and solitude for mine,
The high air where I cannot lose our comradeship divine.
More lovely here, to wakened blood,
Sparse leaf and hesitating bud,
Than rosaries in the dewy vales for which the dryads pine.
Spirit austere! lend aid: I walk along inclement ridges too,
Disowning toys of sense, to baulk my soul of ends untrue.-52-
Because man's cry, by night and day,
Cried not for God, I broke away.
On, at your ruthless pace! I'll stalk, a hilltop ghost, with you.
Keep of the Norman, old to flood and cloud!
Thou dost reproach me with thy sunset look,
That in our common menace I forsook
Hope, the last fear, and stood impartial proud:
Almost, almost, while ether spake aloud,
Death from the smoking stones my spirit shook
Into thy hollow as leaves into a brook,
No more than they by heaven's assassins cowed.
But now thy thousand-scarrèd steep is flecked
With the calm kisses of the light delayed,
Breathe on me better valour: to subject
My soul to greed of life, and grow afraid
Lest ere her fight's full term, the Architect
See downfall of the stronghold that He made.
Blessed the Dead in Spirit, our brave dead
Not passed, but perfected:
Who tower up to mystical full bloom
From self, as from a known alchemic tomb;
Who out of wrong
Run forth with laughter and a broken thong;
Who win from pain their strange and flawless grant
Of peace anticipant;
Who cerements lately wore of sin, but now,
Unbound from foot to brow,
Gleam in and out of cities, beautiful
As sun-born colours of a forest pool
Where Autumn sees
The splash of walnuts from her thinning trees.
Though wondered-at of some, yea, feared almost
As any chantry ghost,
How sight of these, in hermitage or mart,
Makes glad a wistful heart!-55-
For life's apologetics read most true
In spirits risen anew,
Like larks in air
To whom flat earth is all a heavenward stair,
And who from yonder parapet
Scorn every mortal fret,
And rain their sweet bewildering staves
Upon our furrow of fresh-delvèd graves.
If thus to have trod and left the wormy way
Makes men so wondrous gay,
So stripped and free and potently alive,
Who would not his infirmity survive,
And bathe in victory, and come to be
As blithe as ye,
Saints of the ended wars? Ah, greeting give;
Turn not away, too fugitive:
But hastening towards us, hallow the foul street,
And sit with us at meat,
And of your courtesy, on us unwise
Fix oft those purer eyes,
Till in ourselves who love them dwell
The same sure light ineffable:-56-
Till they who walk with us in after years
Forgetting time and tears
(As we with you), shall sing all day instead:
"How blessed are the Dead!"
I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while.
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;
Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,
Why from me that's young should the wild tears fall?
The shower-sodden earth, the earth-coloured streams,
They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,
And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,
It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.
The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill,
And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;
But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call,
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!
'Tis the time o' the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,
The green like a breaker rolls steady up the branch,
And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves
In jets of angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;
And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,
And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.
'Tis the time o' the year the marsh is full of sound,
And good and glorious it is to smell the living ground.
The crimson-headed catkin shakes above the pasture-bars,
The daisy takes the middle field and spangles it with stars,-59-
And down the hedgerow to the lane the primroses do crowd,
All coloured like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud!
'Tis the time o' the year, in early light and glad,
The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
The rocks are dripping nightly, the breathèd damps arise,
Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling's golden eyes,
And lying in a row against the chilly north, the sheep
Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.
'Tis the time o' the year I turn upon the height
To watch from my harrow the dance of going light;
And if before the sun be hid, come slowly up the vale-60-
Honora with her dimpled throat, Honora with her pail,
Hey, but there's many a March for me, and many and many a lass!—
I fall to work and song again, and let Honora pass.
All summer the breath of the roses around
Exhales with a delicate passionate sound;
And when from a trellis, in holiday places,
They croon and cajole, with their slumberous faces,
A lad in the lane must slacken his paces.
Fragrance of these is a voice from a bower:
But low by the wall is my odourless flower,
So pure, so controlled, not a fume is above her,
That poet or bee should delay there and hover;
For she is a silence, and therefore I love her.
And never a mortal by morn or midnight
Is called to her hid little house of delight;
And she keeps from the wind, on his pillages olden,
Upon a true stalk in rough weather upholden,
Her winter-white gourd with the hollow moon-golden.-62-
While ardours of roses contend and increase,
Methinks she has found how noble is peace,
Like a spirit besought from the world to dissever,
Not absent to men, though resumed by the Giver,
And dead long ago, being lovely for ever.
Orange and olive and glossed bay-tree,
And air of the evening out at sea,
And out at sea on the steep warm stone,
A little bare diver poising alone.
Flushed from the cool of Sicilian waves,
Flushed as the coral in clean sea-caves,
"I am!" he cries to his glorying heart,
And unto he knows not what: "Thou art!"
He leaps, he shines, he sinks and is gone:
He will climb to the golden ledge anon.
Perfecter rite can none employ,
When the god of the isle is good to a boy.
Not weak with eld
The stars beheld
Proud Persia coming to her doom;
Not battle-broke, nor tempest-tossed,
The long luxurious galleys lost
Their souls at Actium.
Not outer arts
Of hostile hearts
Seduced the arm of France to be
The wreckage of his wars at last,
The orphan of the kingdoms, cast
Upon the mothering sea.
Man evermore doth work his will,
And evermore the gods are still,
Applauding him alone who stands
Too just for Heaven-accusing groans,
But in his house of havoc owns
The doing of his hands:
Transgressor, yet divinely taught
To suffer all, blaspheming naught,-65-
When fair-begun must foul conclude:
Himself progenitor of death
Who breeds, within, the only breath
Can kill beatitude.
Since first I knew it our divine employ
To beat beyond the reach of soiling care,
As at Philippi, well of doom aware,
The Prætor called and heard the singing-boy;
Since first my soul so jealous was of joy,
That any facile linden-bloom in air,
Or fall of water on a wildwood stair,
Annulled for her all dragging dull annoy;
Though word of thanks I lacked, though, dumb, I smiled
Long, long, at such august amends up-piled,
Let this the debt redeem: that when Ye drop
Death's aloe-leaf within my honeyed cup,
On thoughtful knee your much-beholden child,
Immortals! unto You will drink it up.
Lost love, be never beyond Love's calling!
For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet
As fontal water in Arden falling,
As first-mown hay in the April heat:
To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden,
And bring to bloom in the outer cold,
Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden,
Our son that is like you, and six years old;
And lest his worth be the worth unreal,
To ward him not from the mortal blast,
But suffer your own, through a long ordeal,
Verily like you to be at the last,
And hear men murmur, if so he merit
In your old place with your look to arise:
"The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?—
You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes."
A word of grief to me erewhile:
We have cut the oak down, in our isle.
And I said: "Ye have bereaven
The song-thrush and the bee,
And the fisher-boy at sea
Of his sea-mark in the even;
And gourds of cooling shade, to lie
Within the sickle's sound;
And the old sheep-dog's loyal eye
Of sleep on duty's ground;
And poets of their tent
And quiet tenement.
Ah, impious! who so paid
Such fatherhood, and made
Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade."
For the hewn oak a century fair,
A wound in earth, an ache in air.
And I said: "No pillared height
With a summer daïs over,-69-
Where a dryad fled her lover
Through the long arcade of light;
Nor 'neath Arcturus rolleth more,
Since the loud leaves are gone,
Between the shorn cliff and the shore,
Pan's organ antiphon.
Some nameless envy fed
This blow at grandeur's head:
Some breathed reproach, o'erdue,
Degenerate men, ye drew!
Hence, for his too plain heavenliness, our Socrates ye slew."
In a new poet's and a new friend's honour,
Forth from the scornèd town and her gold-getting,
Come men with lutes and bowls, and find a welcome
Here in my garden,
Find bowers and deep shade and windy grasses,
And by the south wall, wet and forward-jutting,
One early branch fire-tipped with Roman cherries.
Oh, naught is absent,
Oh, naught but you, kind head that far in prison
Sunk on a weary arm, feels no god's pity
Stroking and sighing where the kingly laurels
Were once so plenty;
Nor dreams, from revel and strange faces turning,-71-
How on the strength of my fair tree that knew you
I lean to-day, when most my heart is laden
With your rich verses!
Since, long ago, in other gentler weather,
Ere wrath and exile were, you lay beneath it
(Your symbol then, your innocent wild brother
Glad with your gladness),
What has befallen in the world of wonder,
That still it puts forth bubbles of sweet colour,
And you, and you that fed our eyes with beauty,
Are sapped and rotten?
Alas! When my young guests have done with singing,
I break it, leaf and fruit, my garden's glory,
And hold it high among them, and say after:
"O my poor Ovid,
"Years pass, and loves pass too; and yet remember-72-
For the clear time when we were boys together,
These tears at home are shed; and with you also
Your bough is dying."
I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.
Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle
Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.
The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.
Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,-74-
And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:
Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.
A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,
A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:
We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.
(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)
We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil.
Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers that follow.
Who is good enough to be
Near the never-stainèd sea?
Ah, not I,
Who thereby
Only sigh:
Pray for me.
Standing underneath some free
Innocent magnanimous tree,
To be true,
There anew
Must I sue:
Pray for me.
Ere I pass on hilly lea
Fellow-lives of glad degree,
Without shame,
Name by name
These I claim:
Pray for me.
Fail not, then, thou kingly sea!
Aid the needy, sister tree!-76-
March herds,
Ye have words!
April birds,
Pray for me!
Though sea and mount have beauty and this but what it can,
Thrice fairer than their life the life here battling in the van,
The tragic gleam, the mist and grime,
The dread endearing stain of time,
The sullied heart of man.
Mine is the clotted sunshine, a bubble in the sky,
That where it dare not enter steals in shrouded passion by;
And mine the saffron river-sails,
And every plane-tree that avails
To rest an urban eye;
The bells, the dripping gable, the tavern's corner glare;
The cab in firefly darting; the barrel-organ air,
While one by one, or two by two
The hatless babes are waltzing through
The gutters of the Square.-78-
Not on Thessalian headlands of song and old desire
My spirit chose her pleasure-house, but in the London mire:
Long, long alone she loves to pace,
And find a music in this place
As in a minster choir.
O names of awe and rapture! O deeds of legendry!
Still is it most of joy within your altered pale to be,
Whose very ills I fain would slake
Mine angels are, and help to make
In Hell a Heaven for me.
A.D. MDCCCXC
Heart all full of heavenward haste, too like the bubble bright
On wild little waters floating half of an April night,
Fled from the ear in music, fled from the eye in light,
Dear and stainless heart of a boy! No sweeter thing can be
Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea:
Whither, through troubled valleys, we also follow thee.
Above the wall that's broken,
And from the coppice thinned,
So sacred and so sweet
The lilac in the wind!
For when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.
In tears it long was buried,
And trances wrapt it round;
Oh, how they wake it now,
The fragrance and the sound!
For when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.
Shut fast again in Beauty's sheath
Where ancient forms renew,
The round world seems above, beneath,
One wash of faintest blue,
And air and tide so stilly sweet
In nameless union lie,
The little far-off fishing fleet
Goes drifting up the sky.
Secure of neither misted coast
Nor ocean undefined,
Our flagging sail is like the ghost
Of one that served mankind,
Who in the void, as we upon
This melancholy sea,
Finds labour and allegiance done,
And Self begin to be.
"And now, my clerks who go in fur or feather
Or brighter scales, I bless you all. Be true
To your true Lover and Avenger, whether
By land or sea ye die the death undue.
Then proffer man your pardon; and together
Track him to Heaven, and see his heart made new.
"From long ago one hope hath in me thriven,
Your hope, mysterious as the scented May:
Not to Himself your titles God hath given
In vain, nor only for our mortal day.
O doves! how from The Dove shall ye be driven?
O darling lambs! ye with The Lamb shall play."
Well we know, not ever here is a footing for thy dream:
Thou art sick for horse and spear beside an Asian stream,
For the hearth-smoke in the wild, for the goatherd's stave,
For a beauty far exiled, a belief within its grave.
While another sky and ground orb thy strange remembering,
And no world of mortal bound is the master of thy wing,
Canst thou yet thy fate forgive, that the godhead in thy breast
Has this life at least to live as a force in rhythmic rest,
As a seed that bides the hour of obscureness and decay,
Being troth of flower to flower down the long dynastic day?-84-
Child whom elder airs enfold, who hast greatness to maintain
Where heroic hap of old may return and shine again,
As too oft across thy heart flits the too familiar light,
How alarms of love upstart at the token quick and slight!
Lest captivity be o'er, lest thou glide away, and so
From our tents of Nevermore strike the trail of Long Ago.
We chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend,
Pacing the twilight out beneath an oak,
Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke
Strange things and deep as any poet penned,
Such truth as never truth again can mend,
Whatever art we use, what gods invoke;
It was not wrath, it made nor strife nor smoke:
Be what it may, it had a solemn end.
Farewell, in peace. We of the selfsame throne
Are foeman vassals; pale astrologers,
Each a wise skeptic of the other's star.
Silently, as we went our ways alone,
The steadfast sun, whom no poor prayer deters,
Drew high between us his majestic bar.
Mine was the mood that shows the dearest face
Through a long avenue, and voices kind
Idle, and indeterminate, and blind
As rumours from a very distant place;
Yet, even so, it gathered the first chase
Of the first swallows where the lane's inclined,
An ebb of wavy wings to serve my mind
For round Spring's vision. Ah, some equal grace
(The calm sense of seen beauty without sight)
Befell thee, honourable heart! no less
In patient stupor walking from the dawn;
Albeit thou too wert loser of life's light,
Like fallen Adam in the wilderness,
Aware of naught but of the thing withdrawn.
Take Temperance to thy breast,
While yet is the hour of choosing,
As arbitress exquisite
Of all that shall thee betide;
For better than fortune's best
Is mastery in the using,
And sweeter than any thing sweet
The art to lay it aside!
No round boy-satyr, racing from the mere,
Shakes on the mountain lawn his dripping head
This many a May, your sister being dead,
Ye Christian folk! your sister great and dear.
To breathe her name, to think how sad-sincere
Was all her searching, straying, dreaming, dread,
How of her natural night was Plato bred
(A star to keep the ways of honour clear),
Who will not sigh for her? who can forget
Not only unto campèd Israel,
Nor martyr-maids that as a bridegroom met
The Roman lion's roar, salvation fell?
To Him be most of praise that He is yet
Your God through gods not inaccessible.
Can trout allure the rod of yore
In Itchen stream to dip?
Or lover of her banks restore
That sweet Socratic lip?
Old fishing and wishing
Are over many a year.
Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.
Again the foamy shallows fill,
The quiet clouds amass,
And soft as bees by Catherine Hill
At dawn the anglers pass,
And follow the hollow,
In boughs to disappear.
Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.
Nay, rise not now, nor with them take
One amber-freckled fool!
Thy sons to-day bring each an ache
For ancient arts to cool.-90-
But, father, lie rather
Unhurt and idle near;
Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.
While thought of thee to men is yet
A sylvan playfellow,
Ne'er by thy marble they forget
In pious cheer to go.
As air falls, the prayer falls
O'er kingly Winchester:
Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.
I laid the strewings, darling, on thine urn;
I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.
Now hushaby, my little child, and learn
Long sleep how good it is.
In vain thy mother prays, wayfaring hence,
Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell;
But thou more blest, O mild intelligence!
Forget her, and Farewell.
Gentle Grecian passing by,
Father of thy peace am I:
Wouldst thou now, in memory,
Give a soldier's flower to me,
Choose the standard named of yore
Beautiful Worth-dying-for,
That shall wither not, but wave
All the year above my grave.
Light thou hast of the moon,
Shade of the dammar-pine,
Here on thy hillside bed;
Fair befall thee, O fair
Lily of womanhood,
Patient long, and at last
Here on thy hillside bed,
Happier: ah, Blæsilla!
Me, deep-tressèd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,
Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,
Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!
Upon thy level tomb, till windy winter morn,
The fallen leaves delay;-93-
But plain and pure their trace is, when themselves are torn
From delicate frost away.
As here to transient frost the absent leaf is, such
Thou wert and art to me:
So on my passing life is thy long-passèd touch,
O dear Alcithoë!
Hail, and be of comfort, thou pious Xeno,
Late the urn of many a kinsman wreathing;
On thine own shall even the stranger offer
Plentiful myrtle.
Here lies one in the earth who scarce of the earth was moulded,
Wise Æthalides' son, himself no lover of study,
Cnopus, asleep, indoors: the young invincible runner.
They from the cliff footpath that see on the grave we made him,-94-
Tameless, slant in the wind, the bare and beautiful iris,
Stop short, full of delight, and cry out: "See, it is Cnopus
Runs, with white throat forward, over the sands to Chalcis!"
Ere the Ferryman from the coast of spirits
Turn the diligent oar that brought thee thither,
Soul, remember: and leave a kiss upon it
For thy desolate father, for thy sister,
Whichsoever be first to cross hereafter.
Jaffa ended, Cos begun
Thee, Aristeus. Thou wert one
Fit to trample out the sun:
Who shall think thine ardours are
But a cinder in a jar?
Two white heads the grasses cover:
Dorcas, and her lifelong lover.-95-
While they graced their country closes
Simply as the brooks and roses,
Where was lot so poor, so trodden,
But they cheered it of a sudden?
Fifty years at home together,
Hand in hand, they went elsewhither,
Then first leaving hearts behind
Comfortless. Be thou as kind.
As wind that wasteth the unmarried rose,
And mars the golden breakers in the bay,
Hurtful and sweet from heaven for ever blows
Sad thought that roughens all our quiet day;
And elder poets envy, while they weep,
Ion, whom first the gods to covert brought,
Here under inland olives laid asleep,
Most wise, most happy, having done with thought.
Cows in the narrowing August marshes,
Cows in a stretch of water-96-
Motionless,
Neck on neck overlapped and drooping;
These in their troubled and dumb communion,
Thou on the steep bank yonder,
Pastora!
No more ever to lead and love them,
No more ever. Thine innocent mourners
Pass thy tree in the evening
Heavily,
Hearing another herd-girl calling.
Go you by with gentle tread.
This was Paula, who is dead:
Dear grey eyes that had a look
Like some rock-o'ershadowed brook,
Voice upon the ear to cling
Sweeter than the cithern string.
With that spirit shy and fair
Quietly and unaware
Climbing past the starry van
Went, for triple talisman,-97-
They to whom the heavens must ope:
Candour, Chastity, and Hope.
Take from an urn my vow and salutation
Unto the land I never now shall see:
Laid here exiled, my heart in desolation
Frets like a child against her breast to be.
Far from the sky, a rose that opes at even
(One liquid star for dewdrop on the rose),
Far from the shower that nesting low in heaven
Thrice in an hour light-wingèd comes and goes,
Far from my lost and blessèd and belovèd
Nightfall of June beside the Rhodian wave,
Mine is the pain another isle to covet,
Though all in vain, for gardener of my grave.
Praise thou the Mighty Mother for what is wrought, not me,
A nameless nothing-caring head asleep against her knee.
All else for use, One only for desire;
Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:
Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,
Impel Thou me.
Delight is menace if Thou brood not by,
Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.
Oft as the morn (though none of earth deny
These three are dear),
Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,
And wander free amid my freeborn joys:
Oh, close my hand upon Beatitude!
Not on her toys.
Moveless, on the marge of a sunny cornfield,
Rapt in sudden revery while thou standest,
Like the sheaves, in beautiful Doric yellow
Clad to the ankle,
Oft to thee with delicate hasty footstep
So I steal, and suffer because I find thee
Inly flown, and only a fallen feather
Left of my darling.
Give me back thy wakening breath, thy ringlets
Fragrant as the vine of the bean in blossom,
And those eyes of violet dusk and daylight
Under sea-water,
Eyes too far away, and too full of longing!
Yes: and go not heavenward where I lose thee,
Go not, go not whither I cannot follow,
Being but earthly.
Willing swallow poisèd upon my finger,
Little wild-wing ever from me escaping,
For the care thou art to me, I thy lover
Love thee, and fear thee.
Up from the willow-root
Subduing agonies leap;
The field-mouse and the purple moth
Turn over amid their sleep;
The icicled rocks aloft
Burn amber and blue alway,
And trickling and tinkling
The snows of the drift decay.
Oh, mine is the head must hang
And share the immortal pang!
Winter or spring is fair;
Thaw's hard to bear.
Heigho! my heart's sick.
Sweet is cherry-time, sweet
A shower, a bobolink,
And trillium, fain far under
Her cloistering leaf to shrink;
But here in the vast, unborn,
Is the bitterest place to be,
Till striving and longing
Shall quicken the earth and me.-101-
What change inscrutable
Is nigh us, we know not well;
Gone is the strength to sigh
Either to live or die.
Heigho! my heart's sick.
True love's own talisman, which here
Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,
A steel-and-velvet Cavalier
Gave to our Saxon speech:
Chief miracle of theme and touch
That all must envy and adore:
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
No critic born since Charles was King
But sighed in smiling, as he read:
"Here's theft supreme of everything
A poet might have said!"
Young knight and wit and beau, who won
Mid war's upheaval, ladies' praise,
Was't well of you, ere you had done,
To blight our modern bays?
Oh, yet to you, whose random hand
Struck from the dark whole gems like these-103-
(Archaic beauty, never planned
Nor reared by wan degrees,
Which leaves an artist poor, and Art
An earldom richer all her years);
To you, dead on your shield apart,
Be "Ave!" passed in tears.
'Twas virtue's breath inflamed your lyre:
Heroic from the heart it ran;
Nor for the shedding of such fire
Lived, since, a manlier man.
And till your strophe sweet and bold
So lovely aye, so lonely long,
Love's self outdo, dear Lovelace! hold
The parapets of Song.
A.D. MDCCCXIX-MDCCCXCII
Friend who hast gone, and dost enrich to-day
New England brightly building far away,
And crown her liberal walk
With company more choice, and sweeter talk,
Look not on Fame, but Peace; and in a bower
Receive at last her fulness and her power:
Nor wholly, pure of heart!
Forget thy few, who would be where thou art.
Waiting on Him who knows us and our need,
Most need have we to dare not, nor desire,
But as He giveth, softly to suspire
Against His gift with no inglorious greed,
For this is joy, though still our joys recede;
And, as in octaves of a noble lyre,
To move our minds with His, and clearer, higher,
Sound forth our fate: for this is strength indeed.
Thanks to His love let earth and man dispense
In smoke of worship when the heart is stillest,
A praying more than prayer: "Great good have I,
Till it be greater good to lay it by;
Nor can I lose peace, power, permanence,
For these smile on me from the thing Thou willest!"
When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,
And winds of dreamy odour are loosened from afar,
Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken,
On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning's dying star,
I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!),
Whose greater noonday splendours the many share and see,
While sacred and for ever, some perfect law is keeping
The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.
(There's a thrush on the under bough
Fluting evermore and now:
"Keep—young!" but who knows how?)
Jar in arm, they bade him rove
Through the alder's long alcove,
Where the hid spring musically
Gushes to the ample valley.
Down the woodland corridor,
Odours deepened more and more;
Blossomed dogwood in the briars
Struck her faint delicious fires;
Miles of April passed between
Crevices of closing green,
And the moth, the violet-lover,
By the wellside saw him hover.
Ah, the slippery sylvan dark!
Never after shall he mark
(On his drownèd cheek down-sinking),
Noisy ploughman drinking, drinking.-108-
Quit of serving is that wild
Absent and bewitchèd child,
Unto action, age, and danger
Thrice a thousand years a stranger.
Fathoms low, the naiads sing,
In a birthday welcoming;
Water-white their breasts, and o'er him,
Water-grey, their eyes adore him.
(There's a thrush on the under bough
Fluting evermore and now:
"Keep—young!" but who knows how?)
The sun that hurt his lovers from on high
Is fallen; she more merciful is nigh,
The blessèd one whose beauty's even glow
Gave never wound to any shepherd's eye.
Above our lonely boat in shallows drifting,
Alone her plaintive form ascends the sky.
Oh, sing! the water-golds are deepening now,
Almost a hush is on the aspen bough;
Her light caresseth thine, as saint to saint
Sweet interchanged adorings may allow:
Sing, Eunoë, that lily throat uplifting:
They are so like, the holy Moon and thou!
Young father-poet! much in you I praise
Adventure high, romantic, vehement,
All with inviolate honour sealed and blent
To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays;
Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays;
And most, that verse of strict imperious bent
Heard sweetly as from some old harper's tent,
And clanging in the listener's brain for days.
At Framlingham to-night if there should be
No guest beyond a sea-born wind that sighs,
No guard save moonlight's crossed and trailing spears,
And I, your pilgrim, call you, Oh, let me
In at the gate! and smile into the eyes
That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.
Because thou'rt not an oak
To breast the thunder-stroke,
Or flamy-fruited yew
Darker than Time, how few
Of birds or men or kine
Will love this throne of thine,
Scant Poplar, without shade
Inhospitably made!
Yet, branches never parted
From their straight secret bole,
Yet, sap too single-hearted!
Prosper as my soul.
In loneliness, in quaint
Perpetual constraint,
In gallant poverty,
A girt and hooded tree,
See if against the gale
Our leafage can avail:
Lithe, equal, naked, true,
Rise up as spirits do,-112-
And be a spirit crying
Before the folk that dream!
My slender early-dying
Poplar, by the stream.
A censer playing from a heart all fire,
A flushing, racing, singing mountain stream
Thou art; and dear to us of dull desire
In thy far-going dream.
Full to the grave be thy too fleeting way,
And full thereafter: few that know thee best
Will grudge it so, for neither thou nor they
Can mate thy soul with rest.
God put thee from the laws of Time adrift.
Lo, He who moves without delay or haste,
Far less may love the sheaves of ghostly thrift,
Than some diviner waste.
Be mine to ride in joy, ere thou art gone,
The flame, the torrent, which is one with thee!
Saint, from this pool of dying sweep us on
Where Life must long to be.
April seemed a restless pain,
June a phantom in the rain;
Weary Autumn without grain
Turned her home, full of tears.
O my year, the most in vain
Of the years!
While the furrowed field was red,
While the roses rioted,
While a leaf was left to shed,
There was storm in the air.
Now that troubled heart is dead,
All is fair.
'Neath a glow of copper-grey
Spreads the stubble far away,
And the hilltop cedars play
Interludes in accord,
And the sun adorns the day
Like a sword.
Even, usual, and slow,
Blue enchanted breakers go-115-
Over carmine reefs in snow,
With a sail in the lee:
There's the godhead that we know
On the sea.
Ah, let be a promise vast
So mysteriously downcast!
I will love this year that passed
To her grave in the wild,
And is clear of stain at last
As a child.
O glorious tide, O hospitable tide
On whose mysterious breast my head hath lain,
Lest I, all eased of wounds and washed of stain
Through holy hours, be yet unsatisfied,
Loose me betimes: for in my soul abide
Urgings of memory, and exile's pain
Weighs on me, as the spirit of one slain
May throb for the old strife wherein he died.
Often and evermore, across the sea
Of dark and dreams, to fatherlands of Day,
Oh, speed me: as that outworn King erewhile
By kind Phæacians borne ashore, so me,
Thy loving healèd ward, fail not to lay
Beneath the olive boughs of mine own isle.
How life hath cheapen'd, and how blank
The Worlde is! like a fen
Where long ago unstainèd sank
The starrie gentlemen:
Since Marston Moor and Newbury drank
King Charles his gentlemen.
If Fate in any air accords
What Fate deny'd, Oh, then
I ask to be among your Swordes,
My joyous gentlemen;
Towards Honour's heaven to goe, and towards
King Charles his gentlemen!
One rose till after snowtime
O'erlooked the sodden grass;
Now crocuses are twenty
With spear and torch a plenty,
To keep our Candlemas.
So thin that winter greyness,
So light that sleep forlorn,
No seventh week uncloses
Between the martyr roses
And crocus newly born.
All doubt is hushed for ever,
Confuted without sound,
All ruin featly ended,
When bulbs begin their splendid
Gay muster overground;
And mid the golden heralds
That ride the icy breeze,
Man, too, divinely vernal,
Storms into life eternal
Victoriously with these.-119-
O Beauty, O Persistence
Ineffable and strong!
Would we had borne with Sorrow
In her unlasting morrow:
And Death was not for long.
R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV
When from the vista of the Book I shrink,
From lauded pens that earn ignoble wage
Begetting nothing joyous, nothing sage,
Nor keep with Shakespeare's use one golden link;
When heavily my sanguine spirits sink
To read too plain on each impostor page
Only of kings the broken lineage,—
Well for my peace if then on thee I think,
Louis, our priest of letters, and our knight
With whose familiar baldric Hope is girt,
From whose young hands she bears the Grail away.
All glad, all great! Truer because thou wert,
I am and must be; and in thy known light
Go down to dust, content with this my day.
Along the Hills, height unto height
Tosses the dappled light,
Rills in a torrent flow,
And cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow.
Young winds nothing can quell
Scale the wild-chestnut citadel,
Again to make
Its thousand faëry white pagodas shake.
Up many a lane
The blue vervain
A coverlid hath featly spread
For the bees' bed,
That those tired sylvan thieves
May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves.
And by to-morrow morn
Bright agrimony, in the thickets born,
Will high uphold
Each cinquefoil of plain gold;
Dogwood in white will hood herself apace,
And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace,-122-
And copper pimpernel, true as a clock,
On some waste common, by a rock
Her small dark-centred wheel draw in
Long, long ere dusk begin.
This day
Of infinite May
Is far more fitly yours than ours,
O spirit-bodied flowers!
What heart disordered sore
Comes through the greenwood door,
Shall for your sake
Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break;
And hearts beneath no ban
Will in your sight some penance do for man,
Poor lagging man, content to be
Sick with the impact of eternity,
Who might keep step with you in the low grass,
Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass!
Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown
To flourish fair and fall fair, and be strewn
Deep in that Will of God, where blend
The origin of beauty and the end.
Beyond the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live;
You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive;
You linger on the stair: Love's lonely pulses leap!
The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep.
Here, after all the years, you keep the heirdom still;
The youth and joy in you achieve their olden will,
Unbidden, undeterred, with waking sense adored;
And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord.
To every inmate heart, confirmed in cheer you brought,
Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought,-124-
And to a wonted guest (not awestruck heretofore),
The sunshine that was you floods all the open door.
Donec misereatur nostri.
The spur is red upon the briar,
The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;
The wind shakes out the coloured fire
From lamps a-row on the sycamore;
The bluebird with his flitting note
Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;
The mink is busy; herds again
Go hillward in the honeyed rain;
The midges meet. I cry to Thee
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me!
Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
The lined gulls in the offing ride;
Along an edge of marshy ground
The shad-bush enters like a bride.
Yon little clouds are washed of care
That climb the blue New England air,
And almost merrily withal
The hyla tunes at evenfall-126-
His oboe in a mossy tree.
So too,
Am I not Thine? Arise, undo
This fear Thou hast forgotten me.
Happy the vernal rout that come
To their due offices to-day,
And strange, if in Thy mercy's sum,
Excluded man alone decay.
I ask no triumph, ask no joy,
Save leave to live, in law's employ.
As to a weed, to me but give
Thy sap! lest aye inoperative
Here in the Pit my strength shall be:
And still
Help me endure the Pit, until
Thou wilt not have forgotten me.
I would unto my fair restore
A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more,
On our sad shore,
The carmine grape, the moth's auroral wing.
Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose:
For so, alas,
With Love, alas,
With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.
Patulis ubi vallibus errans
Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater.
H.V. Ad Posteros.
I followed thee, wild stream of Paradise,
White Usk, for ever showering the sunned bee
In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree;
And all along had magical surmise
Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies,
As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea,
Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly
The giant breakers form, and fall, and rise.
Above thy poet's dust, by yonder yew,
Ere distance perished, ere a star began,
His clear monastic measure, heard of few,
Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran;
And thou to me wert dear, because I knew
The God who made thee gracious, and the man.
If, by that second lover's power controlled,
In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o'erfills
Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils,
From distance unto distance trailing gold;
If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold,
Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills
Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills
Diviner run thy shallows than of old;—
If intellectual these, Oh! name my Vaughan
Creator too: and close his memory keep
Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn
Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep;
A play of thought more mystic than the dawn,
And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.
Many a time some drowsy oar from the nearer bank invited,
Crossed a narrow stream, and bore in among the reeds moon-lighted,
There to leave me on a shore no ferryman hath sighted.
Many a time a mountain stile, dark and bright with sudden wetting,
Lured my vagrant foot the while 'twixt uplifting and down-setting,—
Whither? Thousand mile on mile, beyond the last forgetting.
Long by hidden ways I wend (past occasion grown a ranger);
Yet enchantment, like a friend, takes from death the tang of danger:
Hardly river or road can end where I need step a stranger.
With a difference.—Hamlet.
Again the bloom, the northward flight,
The fount freed at its silver height,
And down the deep woods to the lowest
The fragrant shadows scarred with light.
O inescapeable joy of Spring!
For thee the world shall leap and sing;
But by her darkened door thou goest
Henceforward as a spectral thing.
Thy charge was: "Hold My banner
Against our hidden foe;
To war where sounds no manner
Of glorious music, go!"
And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."
Ah, not to brave Thy censure
But win Thy smile of light,
My heart of misadventure
Will end in the losing fight,
And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.
The day will pass of torment,
The evenfall be sweet
When I shall wear for garment
The nakedness of defeat.
But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet
That eagle of the wartime,
That oriflamme, outrolled-133-
With strength of staff aforetime,
With cleanly and costly fold,—
Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,
And take from me (turned donor
That night on blood-soaked sand),
The stick and rag of Honour
There safe in a stiffened hand,
Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.
High above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay's footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.
Hither Felicity
Doth climb to me,
And bank me in with turf and marjoram
Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
With golden barberry-wreath,
And bluets thick beneath;
One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
With bud-red breast,
Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
Float less than April fog below our hermitage.
What sacramental hurt that brings
The terror of the truth of things
Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
'Twas thine, upon a headland set,
To view no isles of man's delight,
With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.
Thou lovedst life, but not to brand it thine
(O rich in all forborne felicities!),
Nor use it with marauding power, to seize
And stain the sweet earth's blue horizon-line.
Virgin the grape might in the trellis twine
Where thou hadst long ago an hour of ease,
And foot of thine across the unpressed leas
Went light as some Idæan foot divine.
Spirit so abstinent, in thy deeps lay
What passion of possession? Day by day
Was there no thirst upon thee, sharp and pure,
In forward sea-like surges unforgot?
Yes: and in life and death those joys endure
More blessedly, that men can name them not.
Through all the evening,
All the virginal long evening,
Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;
For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;
And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,
Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?
Yet in the valley,
At a turn of the orchard alley,
When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!
There in his room, whene'er the moon looks in,
To silver now a shell, and now a fin,
And o'er his chart glide like an argosy,
Quiet and old sits he.
Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast,
Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?
Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold
Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,
The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss
Their veering weight across.
On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled,
To lands where stunted cedars throw
A lace-like shadow over snow,
Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.-139-
Again play up and down the briny spar
Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar,
Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,
The Labradorian blue;
All homeless hurricanes about him break;
The purples of spent day he sees
From Samos to the Hebrides,
And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.
Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,
Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,
Away, and far away, his barque is borne
Riding the noisy morn,
Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know
The helm and tightening halyards still
Follow the urging of his will,
And scoff at sullen earth a league below.
Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high,
And shackles him with many an inland tie,
And of his only wisdom makes a jibe
Amid an alien tribe:-140-
No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.
The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!
Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?
Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?
Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,
Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him!
Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole
Unto his subject soul,
Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,
Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,
But she may know that voice again,
And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.
And give him back, before his passion fail,
The singing cordage and the hollow sail,
And level with those ageing eyes let be
The bright unsteady sea;
And like a film remove from sense and brain
This pasture wall, these boughs that run
Their evening arches to the sun,
Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;-141-
And on the shut space and the shallow hour,
Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,
With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,
Him whom thou lovedst, bring:
That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,
Not having, at the last, less grace
Of thee than had his roving race,
Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.
XXVI SONNETS
Furrow to furrow, oar to oar succeeds,
Each length away, more bright, more exquisite;
The sister shells that hither, thither, flit
Strew the long stream like scattered maple-seeds.
A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads,
Who with short calls his pace doth intermit:
An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sits,
Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.
West of the glowing hayricks, tawny black
Where waters by their warm escarpments run,
Two lovers, newly crossed from Kennington,
Print in the early dew a married track,
And drain the aroma'd eve, and spend the sun,
Ere in laborious health the crews come back.
My gentle Aubrey, who in everything
Hadst of thy city's youth so lovely lust,
Yet never lineal to her towers august
Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring,
Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering,
Thy comely manuscript, and interthrust
Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust,
Two centuries unkissed of any Spring.
Filling a homesick page beneath a lime,
Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor's now,
The endless terraces of ended Time
Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release
Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou,
Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.
Such natural debts of love our Oxford knows,
So many ancient dues undesecrate,
I marvel how the landmark of a hate
For witness unto future time she chose;
How 'gainst her own corroborate ranks arose
The Three, in great denial only great,
For Art's enshrining! Thus, averted straight,
My soul to seek a holier captain goes:
That sweet adventurer whom Truth befell
Whenas the synagogues were watching not;
Whose crystal name on royal Oriel
Hangs like a shield; who to an outland spot
Led hence, beholds his Star, and counts it well
To live of all his dear domain forgot.
Viewed yesterday, in sad elusive light,
These everlasting heptarchs, tree by tree,
Seemed filing off to exile, lingeringly,
Each with his giant falchion, kinless quite.
All the wild winter day and flooded night
They feigned to march far as the eye could see,
Through transient oceans plunging to the knee
Their centuried greaves, ebon and malachite.
To-day, accustomed bole and branch all bare
Stand with old gems inlaid. Like coloured snow
Or vista'd flame along the drowsy air,
Their gold-green lichens stir and cling and glow.
What secret craftsmen painted them so fair?
Angels of Moisture and the Long Ago.
Hark! the king bell, loud in his vesper choir.
As in between each golden roar doth come
That solemn, plangent, unregarded hum
Chiding the truant with archaic ire,
On Worcester mere far off, in elfin gyre
The wavelets laugh, and laughter showereth from
May's chestnut like a lampadarium
By Brasenose, with every point afire.
Yet over all roofs to the uttermost,
Call, Shepherd dear, from thy dream-haunted ground:
For some there be, on whatsoever coast,
In midst of any morrow's ordered round,
Hear as of old (in earth and heaven an host!)
And like young lambs, leap homeward at the sound.
Imperial Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green,
And Templar Sandford in the boatman's call,
And sweet-belled Appleton, and Elsfield wall
That dost upon adoring ivies lean;
Meek Binsey; Dorchester, where streams convene
Bidding on graves thy solemn shadow fall;
Clear Cassington, soaring perpetual,
Holton, and Hampton Poyle, and fanes between:
If one of all in your sad courts that come
Belovèd and disparted! be your own,
Kin to the souls ye had, while yet endures
Some memory of a great communion known
At home in quarries of old Christendom,—
Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours.
Is this the end? Is this the pilgrim's day
For dread, for dereliction, and for tears?
Rather, from grass and air and many spheres
In prophecy his heart is called away;
And under English eaves, more still than they,
Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears
The long-arrested, the believing years
Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say:
"Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best
Who had such beauty"? or, with spirit fain
To watch beside her darkened doors, go by
With a new psalm: "O banished Light so nigh!
Of them was I, who bore thee and who blest:
Even here remember me when thou shalt reign."
Whithersoever cold and fair ye flow,
Take me, O gentle moon and gentler wind,
Past Wyatt's cumbering portal, frost-entwined,
And Merton 'neath that huge tiara's glow,
And groves in bridal gossamer below
Saint Mary's armoured spire; and whence aligned
In altered eminence for dawn to find
Sleep the droll Cæsars, hooded with the snow.
White sacraments of weather, shine on me!
Upbear my footfall and my fancy sift,
Lest either blemish an ensainted ground
Spread so with childhood. Bid with me, outbound,
On recollected wing mine angel drift
Across new spheres of immortality.
Warden of hours and ages, here I dwell,
Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook
For good unborn; and towards a willow nook,
Pole, princely in the senate and the cell;
And doubting the near boom of Osney bell,
Turning on me that sweetly subtile look,
Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book:
Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.
Naught steadfast may I image nor attain
Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope
After my god, like him, inconstant bright:
But sun and shade will unto you remain
Alternately a symbol and a hope,
Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.
Through rosy cloud and over thorny towers,
Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled,
From Isis' valley border, many-hilled,
The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers:
Not for men only, and their musing hours
By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build
These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,
These dearest inland melancholy bowers.
Blest birds! A book held open on the knee
Below, is all they guess of Adam's blight:
With surer art the while, and simpler rite,
They gather power in some monastic tree
Where breathe against their docile breasts by night
The scholar's star, the star of sanctity.
The plain gives freedom. Hither from the town
How oft a dreamer and a book of yore
Escaped the lamplit Square, and heard no more
Inroll from Cowley turf the game's renown,
But bade the vernal sky with spices drown
His head by Plato's in the grass, before
Yon oar that's never old, the sunset oar,
At Medley Lock was laid reluctant down!
So seeming far the confines and the crowd,
The gross routine, the cares that vex and tire,
From this large light, sad thoughts in it, high-driven,
Go happier than the inly-moving cloud
Who lets her vesture fall, a floss of fire,
Abstracted, on the ivory hills of heaven.
Fair are the finer creature-sounds; of these
Is Magdalen full: her bees, the while they drop
Susurrant to the garth from weeds atop;
And round the priestless Pulpit, auguries
Of wrens in council from an hundred leas;
And merry fish of Cherwell, fain to stop
The water-plantain's way; and deer that crop
Delicious herbage under choral trees.
The cry for silver and gold in Christendom
Without, threads not her silence and her dark.
Only against the isolate Tower there break
Low rhythmic murmurs of good men to come:
Invasive seas of hushed approach that make
Memorial music, would the ear but hark.
Where down the hill, across the hidden ford
Stretches the open aisle from scene to scene,
By halted horses silently we lean,
Gazing enchanted from our steeper sward.
How yon low loving skies of April hoard
A plot of pinnacles! and how with sheen
Of spike and ball her languid clouds between
Grey Oxford grandly rises riverward!
Sweet on those dim long-dedicated walls
Silver as rain the frugal sunshine falls;
Slowly sad eyes resign them, bound afar.
Dear Beauty, dear Tradition, fare you well,
And powers that aye aglow in you, impel
Our quickening spirits from the slime we are.
Stars in the bosom of thy braided tide,
Soft air and ivy on thy gracile stone,
O Glory of the West, as thou wert sown,
Stand perfect: O miraculous, abide!
And still, for greatness flickering from thy side,
Eternal alchemist, evoke, enthrone
True heirs in true succession, later blown
From that same seed of fire which never died.
Nor Love shall lack her solace, to behold
Ranged to the morrow's melancholy verge,
Thy lights uprisen in Thought's disclosing spaces;
And round some beacon-spirit, stable, old,
In radiant broad tumultuary surge
For ever, the young voices, the young faces.
Holy of England! since my light is short
And faint, Oh, rather by the sun anew
Of timeless passion set my dial true,
That with thy saints and thee I may consort;
And wafted in the cool enshadowed port
Of poets, seem a little sail long due,
And be as one the call of memory drew
Unto the saddle void since Agincourt.
Not now for secular love's unquiet lease
Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile
Hath broken tryst with transitory things;
But seal with her a marriage and a peace
Eternal, on thine Edward's altar isle,
Above the storm-spent sea of ended Kings.
Like bodiless water passing in a sigh,
Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
The towery vista sinks upon the eye,
As if it heard the horns of Jericho,
Black and dissolved; nor could the founder, know
How what was built so bright should daily die.
Thy mood with man's is broken and blent in,
City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown
The natural light in which thy life began;
Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, though the dark visor's down.
Too well I know, pacing the place of awe,
Three Queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;
More in his halo, Monmouth's mocking eye,
The eagle Essex in a harpy's claw;
Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw
Sundown of Scotland; how with treasons lie
White martyrdoms: rank in a company
Breaker and builder of the eternal Law.
Oft as I come, the piteous garden-row
Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,
Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,
Infects me: suddenly must I depart,
Ere thought of man's injustice then and now
Add to these aisles one other broken heart.
A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave,
How slow! but never once they slip the thread.
Hither, upon the Georgian idlers' tread,
Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,
Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,
Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,
Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,
Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.
What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange
Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so
The clear Republic waits the general throe,
Along her noonday mountains' open range.
God be with both! for one is young to know
The other's rote of evil and of change.
The cry is at thy gates, long-lovèd ground,
Again: for oft ere now thy children went
Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent
Some old red alley with a dial crowned;
Some house of honour, in a glory bound
With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;
Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent
Hard by a little fountain's friendly sound.
Oh, for Virginius' hand, if only that
Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!
Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,
Her walled oasis, and where once it was
All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat
Echo and ivy, and the loitering moon.
The evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot
Far down into the valley's cold extreme,
Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream
Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.
The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot
Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,
From chaos climb with many a hasty gleam,
London, one moment fallen and forgot.
Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright
Prick door and window; every street obscure
Sparkles and swarms with nothing true nor sure,
Full as a marsh of mist and winking light:
Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure
Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.
Ah, if man's boast and man's advance be vain,
And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,
And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome,
That monstrous island of the middle main;
If each inheritor must sink again
Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb
Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?—
I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.
What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!
Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,
Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's
Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,
And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.
"God keeps," I said, "our little flock of years."
Praised be the moon of books! that doth above
A world of men, the sunken Past behold,
And colour spaces else too void and cold
To make a very heaven again thereof;
As when the sun is set behind a grove,
And faintly unto nether ether rolled,
All night his whiter image and his mould
Grows beautiful with looking on her love.
Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray,
Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!
Feebly along a venerable way
They climb the infinite, or perish quite:
Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,
While in this liberal house thy face is bright.
Across the bridge, where in the morning blow
The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain
Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain,
And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;
Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,
Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:
From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain,
Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.
Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower
A subtle beauty on the empty hour,
From all their dark throats aching and outblown;
Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,
Like the last gull that up some naked coast
Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.
When, after dawn, the lordly houses hide
Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest
(Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast,
Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide,
Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied
Camped round, and dreams how, seaward and southwest,
Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest,
And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside),
Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft,
Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still,
Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft
Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore
Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable,
Which cannot but have been, for evermore.
Many a musing eye returns to thee,
Against the formal street disconsolate,
Who kept in green domains thy bridal state,
With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee;
And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity,
Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight
Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate;
Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.
Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus
Till the next fury; teach the time and us
Leisure and will to draw a serious breath:
Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed,
Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud
Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.
Where the bales thunder till the day is done,
And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope;
Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,
Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;
Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,
A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;
Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,
I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!
O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm,
To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound,
Away, away from this too thoughtful ground,
Sodden with human trespass and despair,
Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,
A sick mind follows into Eden air.
II Kings, VI, 15, 16, 17.
His Angel to his Mother: P. 21.
One line of the refrain is taken from an old love song, "Sweet, if you Love me, Let me Go," set to a charming melody in D major, and to be found in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time.
Beside Hazlitt’s Grave: P. 47.
St. Anne's, Soho, boasts the "sorry steeple," one of London's architectural absurdities. Hazlitt's grave is grassed over and unmarked, but the epitaph which has now for some years stood in place of the interesting original one, may be read on the headstone set against the outer west wall of the church.
The Vigil-at-Arms: P. 48.
Suggested by the very simple but soldierly melody in Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte in A, Book I, Opus 19, No. 4, the last two lines coming in for repetitions.
A Friend’s Song for Simoisius: P. 49.
Having to do with Iliad IV, 473-489.
The Inner Fate: P. 64.
It is perhaps too daring to force into Greek forms any sentiment so dead against the Greek spirit of determinism.
The Acknowledgment: P. 66.
"The Prætor." Brutus in Shakespeare, if not the historical Brutus.
The Cherry Bough: P. 70.
"Si quis adhuc isthic meminit Nasonis adempti,
Et superest sine me nomen in urbe meum."
Tristia, Lib. III, El. X.
"Atque aliquis vestrum, Nasonis nomine dicto,
Deponat lacrymis pocula mista suis."
Idem, Lib. V, El. IV.
A Talisman: P. 87.
Many years after these lines were in print, it was pointed out to the author by a friend, a student of St. Bernard, how they have managed to echo in part a saying of that great Doctor, in his De Consideratione, Lib. I, Cap. VIII, Sec. 9:
"Prudentia item est quae inter voluptates et necessitates media, quasi quaedam arbitra sedens ... disterminat fines ... ex alterutris tertiam formans virtutem quam dicunt Temperantiam."
Fifteen Epitaphs: P. 91.
It may be well to state (as these have often been taken for translations), that they are only pseudo-Alexandrian.
A Footpath Morality: P. 121.
A sort of floral log-book of a walk from Oxford to Appleton in Berkshire, May, 1908.
Ad Antiquarium: P. 146.
This is Wood's disinterested helper, John Aubrey, F.R.S., 1626-1697. Never was a truer lover of what he calls "that most ingeniose Place!"
Martyrs’ Memorial: P. 147.
The only monument in the streets of Oxford was put up by the local Low Church party in 1841, not really so much to commemorate Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all Cambridge men, as to register a protest against Hurrell Froude (then dead), Newman, and Keble, who all showed frank disrespect to the heroes of the Reformation in England. The reference in the sestet is of course to Cardinal Newman, and was written barely a month before his rather sudden death on August 11, 1890.
The College is a century and a half older than the upper part of its chief entrance gate, and the once monastic bell is much older than either. "The Tom Tower [was] finished in November, 1682. In this was hung the bell called Great Tom of Christ Church, which had originally belonged to Osney Abbey.... From that time to this, it has rung its one hundred and one strokes every night at nine, as a signal that all students should be within their College walls. It need hardly be said that the signal is not obeyed!"
J. Wells, M.A., 1901. Oxford and its Colleges: Christ Church, pp. 205-206.
The Old Dial of Corpus: P. 153.
The great Dial in the quadrangle of Corpus Christi College was not put up until 1605,—too late to have been contemporary with either Erasmus or Pole. The author discovered the error several years ago, but has never known how to correct it except by this caution. "Osney Bell" is Great Tom (see just above): Christ Church being next neighbour to Corpus; but Tom may or may not have been in place and condition to ring for curfew in the second year of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The closing line is-177- meant to refer to the motto of the University, Dominus illuminatio mea, taken from the opening of Psalm XXVII.
Undertones at Magdalen: P. 156.
"The priestless Pulpit" was an accurate description when this sonnet was written (1895), though it is so no longer. From the open-air Pulpit of Magdalen, disused since the Reformation, a Sermon is once again delivered annually on St. John Baptist's Day.
St. Peter-ad-Vincula: P. 161.
St. Peter-ad-Vincula is the ancient and sadly appropriate dedication of the Church near the Beauchamp Tower and the site of the scaffold. The vaults are under the chancel.
York Stairs: P. 169.
Inigo Jones' Water Gate, standing on the Embankment at the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, now a long way from the river, is still called York Stairs. It is the sole surviving appanage of the great town-house of the seventeenth-century Dukes of Buckingham.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
Transcriber's Note
In the Table of Contents, the entry for "Wood-Pigeons" is erroneously listed as "Wood-Doves." This has been corrected.
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