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diff --git a/old/1471.txt b/old/1471.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..26b6521 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/1471.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5018 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Poems, by Francis Thompson + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: New Poems + +Author: Francis Thompson + +Posting Date: August 26, 2008 [EBook #1471] +Release Date: September, 1998 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW POEMS *** + + + + +Produced by Les Bowler + + + + + +NEW POEMS, + +By Francis Thompson. + + + Dedication to Coventry Patmore. + + + Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down, + Under the banner of your spread renown! + Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme + Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time, + Yet this one page shall fend oblivious shame, + Armed with your crested and prevailing Name. + + + Note.--This dedication was written while the dear friend and great + Poet to whom it was addressed yet lived. It is left as he saw it-- + the last verses of mine that were ever to pass under his eyes. + + F. T. + + + +Contents. + + + SIGHT AND INSIGHT. + + + The mistress of vision. + Contemplation. + 'By reason of Thy law.' + The dread of height. + Orient ode. + New Year's chimes. + From the night of forebeing. + Any saint. + Assumpta Maria. + The after woman. + Grace of the way. + Retrospect. + + + + A NARROW VESSEL. + + + A girl's sin--in her eyes. + A girl's sin--in his eyes. + Love declared. + The way of a maid. + Beginning of the end. + Penelope. + The end of it. + Epilogue. + + + + MISCELLANEOUS ODES. + + + Ode to the setting sun. + A captain of song. + Against Urania. + An anthem of earth. + + + + MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. + + + 'Ex ore infantium.' + A question. + Field-flower. + The cloud's swan-song. + To the sinking sun. + Grief's harmonics. + Memorat memoria. + July fugitive. + To a snow-flake. + Nocturn. + A May burden. + A dead astronomer. + 'Chose vue.' + 'Whereto art thou come.' + Heaven and hell. + To a child. + Hermes. + House of bondage. + The heart. + A sunset. + Heard on the mountain. + + + + ULTIMA. + + + Love's almsman plaineth his fare. + A holocaust. + Beneath a photograph. + After her going. + My lady the tyranness. + Unto this last. + Ultimum. + Envoy. + + + + +SIGHT AND INSIGHT. + + + + + 'Wisdom is easily seen by them that love her, and is found + by them that seek her. + To think therefore upon her is perfect understanding.' + + WISDOM, vi. + + + + +THE MISTRESS OF VISION. + + I + + Secret was the garden; + Set i' the pathless awe + Where no star its breath can draw. + Life, that is its warden, + Sits behind the fosse of death. Mine eyes saw not, + and I saw. + + II + + It was a mazeful wonder; + Thrice three times it was enwalled + With an emerald-- + Seal-ed so asunder. + All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their + music thralled. + + III + + The Lady of fair weeping, + At the garden's core, + Sang a song of sweet and sore + And the after-sleeping; + In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore. + + IV + + With sweet-panged singing, + Sang she through a dream-night's day; + That the bowers might stay, + Birds bate their winging, + Nor the wall of emerald float in wreath-ed haze away. + + V + + The lily kept its gleaming, + In her tears (divine conservers!) + Wash-ed with sad art; + And the flowers of dreaming + Pal-ed not their fervours, + For her blood flowed through their nervures; + And the roses were most red, for she dipt them in + her heart. + + VI + + There was never moon, + Save the white sufficing woman: + Light most heavenly-human-- + Like the unseen form of sound, + Sensed invisibly in tune,-- + With a sun-deriv-ed stole + Did inaureole + All her lovely body round; + Lovelily her lucid body with that light was inter- + strewn. + + VII + + The sun which lit that garden wholly, + Low and vibrant visible, + Tempered glory woke; + And it seem-ed solely + Like a silver thurible + Solemnly swung, slowly, + Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of incense- + smoke. + + VIII + + But woe's me, and woe's me, + For the secrets of her eyes! + In my visions fearfully + They are ever shown to be + As fring-ed pools, whereof each lies + Pallid-dark beneath the skies + Of a night that is + But one blear necropolis. + And her eyes a little tremble, in the wind of her + own sighs. + + IX + + Many changes rise on + Their phantasmal mysteries. + They grow to an horizon + Where earth and heaven meet; + And like a wing that dies on + The vague twilight-verges, + Many a sinking dream doth fleet + Lessening down their secrecies. + And, as dusk with day converges, + Their orbs are troublously + Over-gloomed and over-glowed with hope and fear + of things to be. + + X + + There is a peak on Himalay, + And on the peak undeluged snow, + And on the snow not eagles stray; + There if your strong feet could go,-- + Looking over tow'rd Cathay + From the never-deluged snow-- + Farthest ken might not survey + Where the peoples underground dwell whom + antique fables know. + + XI + + East, ah, east of Himalay, + Dwell the nations underground; + Hiding from the shock of Day, + For the sun's uprising-sound: + Dare not issue from the ground + At the tumults of the Day, + So fearfully the sun doth sound + Clanging up beyond Cathay; + For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up + beyond Cathay. + + XII + + Lend me, O lend me + The terrors of that sound, + That its music may attend me. + Wrap my chant in thunders round; + While I tell the ancient secrets in that Lady's + singing found. + + XIII + + On Ararat there grew a vine, + When Asia from her bathing rose; + Our first sailor made a twine + Thereof for his prefiguring brows. + Canst divine + Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster + grows? + + XIV + + On Golgotha there grew a thorn + Round the long-prefigured Brows. + Mourn, O mourn! + For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the + Heaven allows? + + XV + + On Calvary was shook a spear; + Press the point into thy heart-- + Joy and fear! + All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils + start. + + XVI + + O, dismay! + I, a wingless mortal, sporting + With the tresses of the sun? + I, that dare my hand to lay + On the thunder in its snorting? + Ere begun, + Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old + Icarian way. + + XVII + + From the fall precipitant + These dim snatches of her chant + Only have remain-ed mine;-- + That from spear and thorn alone + May be grown + For the front of saint or singer any divinizing twine. + + XVIII + + Her song said that no springing + Paradise but evermore + Hangeth on a singing + That has chords of weeping, + And that sings the after-sleeping + To souls which wake too sore. + 'But woe the singer, woe!' she said; 'beyond the + dead his singing-lore, + All its art of sweet and sore, + He learns, in Elenore!' + + XIX + + Where is the land of Luthany, + Where is the tract of Elenore? + I am bound therefor. + + XX + + 'Pierce thy heart to find the key; + With thee take + Only what none else would keep; + Learn to dream when thou dost wake, + Learn to wake when thou dost sleep. + Learn to water joy with tears, + Learn from fears to vanquish fears; + To hope, for thou dar'st not despair, + Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve; + Plough thou the rock until it bear; + Know, for thou else couldst not believe; + Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive; + Die, for none other way canst live. + When earth and heaven lay down their veil, + And that apocalypse turns thee pale; + When thy seeing blindeth thee + To what thy fellow-mortals see; + When their sight to thee is sightless; + Their living, death; their light, most light- + less; + Search no more-- + Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.' + + XXI + + Where is the land of Luthany, + And where the region Elenore? + I do faint therefor. + 'When to the new eyes of thee + All things by immortal power, + Near or far, + Hiddenly + To each other link-ed are, + That thou canst not stir a flower + Without troubling of a star; + When thy song is shield and mirror + To the fair snake-curl-ed Pain, + Where thou dar'st affront her terror + That on her thou may'st attain + Persean conquest; seek no more, + O seek no more! + Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.' + + XXII + + So sang she, so wept she, + Through a dream-night's day; + And with her magic singing kept she-- + Mystical in music-- + That garden of enchanting + In visionary May; + Swayless for my spirit's haunting, + Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mor- + tal mornings grey. + + XXIII + + And as a necromancer + Raises from the rose-ash + The ghost of the rose; + My heart so made answer + To her voice's silver plash,-- + Stirred in reddening flash, + And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal phantom + blows. + + XXIV + + Her tears made dulcet fretting, + Her voice had no word, + More than thunder or the bird. + Yet, unforgetting, + The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears + heard not, and I heard. + + XXV + + When she shall unwind + All those wiles she wound about me, + Tears shall break from out me, + That I cannot find + Music in the holy poets to my wistful want, I doubt + me! + + + + +CONTEMPLATION. + + + This morning saw I, fled the shower, + The earth reclining in a lull of power: + The heavens, pursuing not their path, + Lay stretched out naked after bath, + Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still, + Nor was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill. + + The hill, which sometimes visibly is + Wrought with unresting energies, + Looked idly; from the musing wood, + And every rock, a life renewed + Exhaled like an unconscious thought + When poets, dreaming unperplexed, + Dream that they dream of nought. + Nature one hour appears a thing unsexed, + Or to such serene balance brought + That her twin natures cease their sweet alarms, + And sleep in one another's arms. + The sun with resting pulses seems to brood, + And slacken its command upon my unurged blood. + + The river has not any care + Its passionless water to the sea to bear; + The leaves have brown content; + The wall to me has freshness like a scent, + And takes half animate the air, + Making one life with its green moss and stain; + And life with all things seems too perfect blent + For anything of life to be aware. + The very shades on hill, and tree, and plain, + Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain. + + No hill can idler be than I; + No stone its inter-particled vibration + Investeth with a stiller lie; + No heaven with a more urgent rest betrays + The eyes that on it gaze. + We are too near akin that thou shouldst cheat + Me, Nature, with thy fair deceit. + + In poets floating like a water-flower + Upon the bosom of the glassy hour, + In skies that no man sees to move, + Lurk untumultuous vortices of power, + For joy too native, and for agitation + Too instant, too entire for sense thereof, + Motion like gnats when autumn suns are low, + Perpetual as the prisoned feet of love + On the heart's floors with pain-ed pace that go. + From stones and poets you may know, + Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so. + + For he, that conduit running wine of song, + Then to himself does most belong, + When he his mortal house unbars + To the importunate and thronging feet + That round our corporal walls unheeded beat; + Till, all containing, he exalt + His stature to the stars, or stars + Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault: + When, like a city under ocean, + To human things he grows a desolation, + And is made a habitation + For the fluctuous universe + To lave with unimpeded motion. + He scarcely frets the atmosphere + With breathing, and his body shares + The immobility of rocks; + His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity; + His mind more still is than the limbs of fear, + And yet its unperturbed velocity + The spirit of the simoom mocks. + He round the solemn centre of his soul + Wheels like a dervish, while his being is + Streamed with the set of the world's harmonies, + In the long draft of whatsoever sphere + He lists the sweet and clear + Clangour of his high orbit on to roll, + So gracious is his heavenly grace; + And the bold stars does hear, + Every one in his airy soar, + For evermore + Shout to each other from the peaks of space, + As thwart ravines of azure shouts the mountaineer. + + + + +'BY REASON OF THY LAW'. + + Here I make oath-- + Although the heart that knows its bitterness + Hear loath, + And credit less-- + That he who kens to meet Pain's kisses fierce + Which hiss against his tears, + Dread, loss, nor love frustrate, + Nor all iniquity of the froward years + Shall his inur-ed wing make idly bate, + Nor of the appointed quarry his staunch sight + To lose observance quite; + Seal from half-sad and all-elate + Sagacious eyes + Ultimate Paradise; + Nor shake his certitude of haughty fate. + + Pacing the burning shares of many dooms, + I with stern tread do the clear-witting stars + To judgment cite, + If I have borne aright + The proving of their pure-willed ordeal. + From food of all delight + The heavenly Falconer my heart debars, + And tames with fearful glooms + The haggard to His call; + Yet sometimes comes a hand, sometimes a voice withal, + And she sits meek now, and expects the light. + + In this Avernian sky, + This sultry and incumbent canopy + Of dull and doomed regret; + Where on the unseen verges yet, O yet, + At intervals, + Trembles, and falls, + Faint lightning of remembered transient sweet-- + Ah, far too sweet + But to be sweet a little, a little sweet, and fleet; + Leaving this pallid trace, + This loitering and most fitful light a space, + Still some sad space, + For Grief to see her own poor face:- + + Here where I keep my stand + With all o'er-anguished feet, + And no live comfort near on any hand; + Lo, I proclaim the unavoided term, + When this morass of tears, then drained and firm, + Shall be a land-- + Unshaken I affirm-- + Where seven-quired psalterings meet; + And all the gods move with calm hand in hand, + And eyes that know not trouble and the worm. + + + + +THE DREAD OF HEIGHT. + + If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say: We + see: your sin remaineth. JOHN ix. 41. + + + Not the Circean wine + Most perilous is for pain: + Grapes of the heavens' star-loaden vine, + Whereto the lofty-placed + Thoughts of fair souls attain, + Tempt with a more retributive delight, + And do disrelish all life's sober taste. + 'Tis to have drunk too well + The drink that is divine, + Maketh the kind earth waste, + And breath intolerable. + + Ah me! + How shall my mouth content it with mortality? + Lo, secret music, sweetest music, + From distances of distance drifting its lone flight, + Down the arcane where Night would perish in night, + Like a god's loosened locks slips undulously: + Music that is too grievous of the height + For safe and low delight, + Too infinite, + For bounded hearts which yet would girth the sea! + + So let it be, + Though sweet be great, and though my heart be small: + So let it be, + O music, music, though you wake in me + No joy, no joy at all; + Although you only wake + Uttermost sadness, measure of delight, + Which else I could not credit to the height, + Did I not know, + That ill is statured to its opposite; + Did I not know, + And even of sadness so, + Of utter sadness make, + Of extreme sad a rod to mete + The incredible excess of unsensed sweet, + And mystic wall of strange felicity. + So let it be, + Though sweet be great, and though my heart be small, + And bitter meat + The food of gods for men to eat; + Yea, John ate daintier, and did tread + Less ways of heat, + Than whom to their wind-carpeted + High banquet-hall, + And golden love-feasts, the fair stars entreat. + + But ah withal, + Some hold, some stay, + O difficult Joy, I pray, + Some arms of thine, + Not only, only arms of mine! + Lest like a weary girl I fall + From clasping love so high, + And lacking thus thine arms, then may + Most hapless I + Turn utterly to love of basest rate; + For low they fall whose fall is from the sky. + Yea, who me shall secure + But I of height grown desperate + Surcease my wing, and my lost fate + Be dashed from pure + To broken writhings in the shameful slime: + Lower than man, for I dreamed higher, + Thrust down, by how much I aspire, + And damned with drink of immortality? + For such things be, + Yea, and the lowest reach of reeky Hell + Is but made possible + By forta'en breath of Heaven's austerest clime. + + These tidings from the vast to bring + Needeth not doctor nor divine, + Too well, too well + My flesh doth know the heart-perturbing thing; + That dread theology alone + Is mine, + Most native and my own; + And ever with victorious toil + When I have made + Of the deific peaks dim escalade, + My soul with anguish and recoil + Doth like a city in an earthquake rock, + As at my feet the abyss is cloven then, + With deeper menace than for other men, + Of my potential cousinship with mire; + That all my conquered skies do grow a hollow mock, + My fearful powers retire, + No longer strong, + Reversing the shook banners of their song. + + Ah, for a heart less native to high Heaven, + A hooded eye, for jesses and restraint, + Or for a will accipitrine to pursue! + The veil of tutelar flesh to simple livers given, + Or those brave-fledging fervours of the Saint, + Whose heavenly falcon-craft doth never taint, + Nor they in sickest time their ample virtue mew. + + + + +ORIENT ODE. + + Lo, in the sanctuaried East, + Day, a dedicated priest + In all his robes pontifical exprest, + Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly, + From out its Orient tabernacle drawn, + Yon orb-ed sacrament confest + Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn; + And when the grave procession's ceased, + The earth with due illustrious rite + Blessed,--ere the frail fingers featly + Of twilight, violet-cassocked acolyte, + His sacerdotal stoles unvest-- + Sets, for high close of the mysterious feast, + The sun in august exposition meetly + Within the flaming monstrance of the West. + O salutaris hostia, + Quae coeli pandis ostium! + Through breach-ed darkness' rampart, a + Divine assaulter, art thou come! + God whom none may live and mark! + Borne within thy radiant ark, + While the Earth, a joyous David, + Dances before thee from the dawn to dark. + The moon, O leave, pale ruined Eve; + Behold her fair and greater daughter {1} + Offers to thee her fruitful water, + Which at thy first white Ave shall conceive! + Thy gazes do on simple her + Desirable allures confer; + What happy comelinesses rise + Beneath thy beautifying eyes! + Who was, indeed, at first a maid + Such as, with sighs, misgives she is not fair, + And secret views herself afraid, + Till flatteries sweet provoke the charms they swear: + Yea, thy gazes, blissful lover, + Make the beauties they discover! + What dainty guiles and treacheries caught + From artful prompting of love's artless thought + Her lowly loveliness teach her to adorn, + When thy plumes shiver against the conscious gates of morn! + + And so the love which is thy dower, + Earth, though her first-frightened breast + Against the exigent boon protest, + (For she, poor maid, of her own power + Has nothing in herself, not even love, + But an unwitting void thereof), + Gives back to thee in sanctities of flower; + And holy odours do her bosom invest, + That sweeter grows for being prest: + Though dear recoil, the tremorous nurse of joy, + From thine embrace still startles coy, + Till Phosphor lead, at thy returning hour, + The laughing captive from the wishing West. + + Nor the majestic heavens less + Thy formidable sweets approve, + Thy dreads and thy delights confess, + That do draw, and that remove. + Thou as a lion roar'st, O Sun, + Upon thy satellites' vex-ed heels; + Before thy terrible hunt thy planets run; + Each in his frighted orbit wheels, + Each flies through inassuageable chase, + Since the hunt o' the world begun, + The puissant approaches of thy face, + And yet thy radiant leash he feels. + Since the hunt o' the world begun, + Lashed with terror, leashed with longing, + The mighty course is ever run; + Pricked with terror, leashed with longing, + Thy rein they love, and thy rebuke they shun. + Since the hunt o' the world began, + With love that trembleth, fear that loveth, + Thou join'st the woman to the man; + And Life with Death + In obscure nuptials moveth, + Commingling alien, yet affin-ed breath. + + Thou art the incarnated Light + Whose Sire is aboriginal, and beyond + Death and resurgence of our day and night; + From him is thy vicegerent wand + With double potence of the black and white. + Giver of Love, and Beauty, and Desire, + The terror, and the loveliness, and purging, + The deathfulness and lifefulness of fire! + Samson's riddling meanings merging + In thy twofold sceptre meet: + Out of thy minatory might, + Burning Lion, burning Lion, + Comes the honey of all sweet, + And out of thee, the eater, comes forth meat. + And though, by thine alternate breath, + Every kiss thou dost inspire + Echoeth + Back from the windy vaultages of death; + Yet thy clear warranty above + Augurs the wings of death too must + Occult reverberations stir of love + Crescent and life incredible; + That even the kisses of the just + Go down not unresurgent to the dust. + Yea, not a kiss which I have given, + But shall tri-umph upon my lips in heaven, + Or cling a shameful fungus there in hell. + Know'st thou me not, O Sun? Yea, well + Thou know'st the ancient miracle, + The children know'st of Zeus and May; + And still thou teachest them, O splendent Brother, + To incarnate, the antique way, + The truth which is their heritage from their Sire + In sweet disguise of flesh from their sweet Mother. + My fingers thou hast taught to con + Thy flame-chorded psalterion, + Till I can translate into mortal wire-- + Till I can translate passing well-- + The heavenly harping harmony, + Melodious, sealed, inaudible, + Which makes the dulcet psalter of the world's desire. + Thou whisperest in the Moon's white ear, + And she does whisper into mine,-- + By night together, I and she-- + With her virgin voice divine, + The things I cannot half so sweetly tell + As she can sweetly speak, I sweetly hear. + + By her, the Woman, does Earth live, O Lord, + Yet she for Earth, and both in thee. + Light out of Light! + Resplendent and prevailing Word + Of the Unheard! + Not unto thee, great Image, not to thee + Did the wise heathen bend an idle knee; + And in an age of faith grown frore + If I too shall adore, + Be it accounted unto me + A bright sciential idolatry! + God has given thee visible thunders + To utter thine apocalypse of wonders; + And what want I of prophecy, + That at the sounding from thy station + Of thy flagrant trumpet, see + The seals that melt, the open revelation? + Or who a God-persuading angel needs, + That only heeds + The rhetoric of thy burning deeds? + Which but to sing, if it may be, + In worship-warranting moiety, + So I would win + In such a song as hath within + A smouldering core of mystery, + Brimm-ed with nimbler meanings up + Than hasty Gideons in their hands may sup;-- + Lo, my suit pleads + That thou, Isaian coal of fire, + Touch from yon altar my poor mouth's desire, + And the relucent song take for thy sacred meeds. + + To thine own shape + Thou round'st the chrysolite of the grape, + Bind'st thy gold lightnings in his veins; + Thou storest the white garners of the rains. + Destroyer and preserver, thou + Who medicinest sickness, and to health + Art the unthank-ed marrow of its wealth; + To those apparent sovereignties we bow + And bright appurtenances of thy brow! + Thy proper blood dost thou not give, + That Earth, the gusty Maenad, drink and dance? + Art thou not life of them that live? + Yea, in glad twinkling advent, thou dost dwell + Within our body as a tabernacle! + Thou bittest with thine ordinance + The jaws of Time, and thou dost mete + The unsustainable treading of his feet. + Thou to thy spousal universe + Art Husband, she thy Wife and Church; + Who in most dusk and vidual curch, + Her Lord being hence, + Keeps her cold sorrows by thy hearse. + The heavens renew their innocence + And morning state + But by thy sacrament communicate: + Their weeping night the symbol of our prayers, + Our darkened search, + And sinful vigil desolate. + Yea, biune in imploring dumb, + Essential Heavens and corporal Earth await, + The Spirit and the Bride say: Come! + Lo, of thy Magians I the least + Haste with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs, + To thy desired epiphany, from the spiced + Regions and odorous of Song's traded East. + Thou, for the life of all that live + The victim daily born and sacrificed; + To whom the pinion of this longing verse + Beats but with fire which first thyself did give, + To thee, O Sun--or is't perchance, to Christ? + + Ay, if men say that on all high heaven's face + The saintly signs I trace + Which round my stol-ed altars hold their solemn place, + Amen, amen! For oh, how could it be,-- + When I with wing-ed feet had run + Through all the windy earth about, + Quested its secret of the sun, + And heard what thing the stars together shout,-- + I should not heed thereout + Consenting counsel won:- + 'By this, O Singer, know we if thou see. + When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is here, + When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is there, + Believe them: yea, and this--then art thou seer, + When all thy crying clear + Is but: Lo here! lo there!--ah me, lo everywhere!' + + {1} The earth. + + + + +NEW YEAR'S CHIMES. + + What is the song the stars sing? + (And a million songs are as song of one.) + This is the song the stars sing: + Sweeter song's none. + + One to set, and many to sing, + (And a million songs are as song of one), + One to stand, and many to cling, + The many things, and the one Thing, + The one that runs not, the many that run. + + The ever new weaveth the ever old + (And a million songs are as song of one). + Ever telling the never told; + The silver saith, and the said is gold, + And done ever the never done. + + The chase that's chased is the Lord o' the chase + (And a million songs are as song of one), + And the pursued cries on the race; + And the hounds in leash are the hounds that run. + + Hidden stars by the shown stars' sheen; + (And a million suns are but as one); + Colours unseen by the colours seen, + And sounds unheard heard sounds between, + And a night is in the light of the sun. + + An ambuscade of light in night, + (And a million secrets are but as one), + And a night is dark in the sun's light, + And a world in the world man looks upon. + + Hidden stars by the shown stars' wings, + (And a million cycles are but as one), + And a world with unapparent strings + Knits the simulant world of things; + Behold, and vision thereof is none. + + The world above in the world below + (And a million worlds are but as one), + And the One in all; as the sun's strength so + Strives in all strength, glows in all glow + Of the earth that wits not, and man thereon. + + Braced in its own fourfold embrace + (And a million strengths are as strength of one), + And round it all God's arms of grace, + The world, so as the Vision says, + Doth with great lightning-tramples run. + + And thunder bruiteth into thunder, + (And a million sounds are as sound of one), + From stellate peak to peak is tossed a voice of wonder, + And the height stoops down to the depths thereunder, + And sun leans forth to his brother-sun. + + And the more ample years unfold + (With a million songs as song of one), + A little new of the ever old, + A little told of the never told, + Added act of the never done. + + Loud the descant, and low the theme, + (A million songs are as song of one); + And the dream of the world is dream in dream, + But the one Is is, or nought could seem; + And the song runs round to the song begun. + + This is the song the stars sing, + (Ton-ed all in time); + Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring + A multitudinous-single thing, + Rung all in rhyme. + + + + +FROM THE NIGHT OF FOREBEING. + An ode after Easter. + + In the chaos of preordination, and night of our forebeings.-- + + SIR THOMAS BROWNE. + + Et lux in tenebris erat, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.-- + + ST. JOHN. + + Cast wide the folding doorways of the East, + For now is light increased! + And the wind-besomed chambers of the air, + See they be garnished fair; + And look the ways exhale some precious odours, + And set ye all about wild-breathing spice, + Most fit for Paradise. + Now is no time for sober gravity, + Season enough has Nature to be wise; + But now distinct, with raiment glittering free, + Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies + With festal footing and bold joyance sweet, + And let the earth be drunken and carouse! + For lo, into her house + Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet, + And all things are made young with young desires; + And all for her is light increased + In yellow stars and yellow daffodils, + And East to West, and West to East, + Fling answering welcome-fires, + By dawn and day-fall, on the jocund hills. + And ye, winged minstrels of her fair meinie, + Being newly coated in glad livery, + Upon her steps attend, + And round her treading dance and without end + Reel your shrill lutany. + What popular breath her coming does out-tell + The garrulous leaves among! + What little noises stir and pass + From blade to blade along the voluble grass! + O Nature, never-done + Ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle, + We hear thee, each man in his proper tongue! + Break, elemental children, break ye loose + From the strict frosty rule + Of grey-beard Winter's school. + Vault, O young winds, vault in your tricksome courses + Upon the snowy steeds that reinless use + In coerule pampas of the heaven to run; + Foaled of the white sea-horses, + Washed in the lambent waters of the sun. + Let even the slug-abed snail upon the thorn + Put forth a conscious horn! + Mine elemental co-mates, joy each one; + And ah, my foster-brethren, seem not sad-- + No, seem not sad, + That my strange heart and I should be so little glad. + Suffer me at your leafy feast + To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest, + And watch your mirth, + Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth; + Yet with a sympathy, + Begot of wholly sad and half-sweet memory-- + The little sweetness making grief complete; + Faint wind of wings from hours that distant beat, + When I, I too, + Was once, O wild companions, as are you, + Ran with such wilful feet. + Wraith of a recent day and dead, + Risen wanly overhead, + Frail, strengthless as a noon-belated moon, + Or as the glazing eyes of watery heaven, + When the sick night sinks into deathly swoon. + + A higher and a solemn voice + I heard through your gay-hearted noise; + A solemn meaning and a stiller voice + Sounds to me from far days when I too shall rejoice, + Nor more be with your jollity at strife. + O prophecy + Of things that are, and are not, and shall be! + The great-vanned Angel March + Hath trumpeted + His clangorous 'Sleep no more' to all the dead-- + Beat his strong vans o'er earth, and air, and sea. + And they have heard; + Hark to the Jubilate of the bird + For them that found the dying way to life! + And they have heard, + And quicken to the great precursive word; + Green spray showers lightly down the cascade of the larch; + The graves are riven, + And the Sun comes with power amid the clouds of heaven! + Before his way + Went forth the trumpet of the March; + Before his way, before his way + Dances the pennon of the May! + O earth, unchilded, widowed Earth, so long + Lifting in patient pine and ivy-tree + Mournful belief and steadfast prophecy, + Behold how all things are made true! + Behold your bridegroom cometh in to you, + Exceeding glad and strong. + Raise up your eyes, O raise your eyes abroad! + No more shall you sit sole and vidual, + Searching, in servile pall, + Upon the hieratic night the star-sealed sense of all: + Rejoice, O barren, and look forth abroad! + Your children gathered back to your embrace + See with a mother's face. + Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed; + In very deed, + Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth, + Reintegrated are the heavens and earth! + From sky to sod, + The world's unfolded blossom smells of God. + + O imagery + Of that which was the first, and is the last! + For as the dark, profound nativity, + God saw the end should be, + When the world's infant horoscope He cast. + Unshackled from the bright Phoebean awe, + In leaf, flower, mould, and tree, + Resolved into dividual liberty, + Most strengthless, unparticipant, inane, + Or suffered the ill peace of lethargy, + Lo, the Earth eased of rule: + Unsummered, granted to her own worst smart + The dear wish of the fool-- + Disintegration, merely which man's heart + For freedom understands, + Amid the frog-like errors from the damp + And quaking swamp + Of the low popular levels spawned in all the lands. + But thou, O Earth, dost much disdain + The bondage of thy waste and futile reign, + And sweetly to the great compulsion draw + Of God's alone true-manumitting law, + And Freedom, only which the wise intend, + To work thine innate end. + Over thy vacant counterfeit of death + Broods with soft urgent breath + Love, that is child of Beauty and of Awe: + To intercleavage of sharp warring pain, + As of contending chaos come again, + Thou wak'st, O Earth, + And work'st from change to change and birth to birth + Creation old as hope, and new as sight; + For meed of toil not vain, + Hearing once more the primal fiat toll:- + 'Let there be light!' + And there is light! + Light flagrant, manifest; + Light to the zenith, light from pole to pole; + Light from the East that waxeth to the West, + And with its puissant goings-forth + Encroaches on the South and on the North; + And with its great approaches does prevail + Upon the sullen fastness of the height, + And summoning its levied power + Crescent and confident through the crescent hour, + Goes down with laughters on the subject vale. + Light flagrant, manifest; + Light to the sentient closeness of the breast, + Light to the secret chambers of the brain! + And thou up-floatest, warm, and newly-bathed, + Earth, through delicious air, + And with thine own apparent beauties swathed, + Wringing the waters from thine arborous hair; + That all men's hearts, which do behold and see, + Grow weak with their exceeding much desire, + And turn to thee on fire, + Enamoured with their utter wish of thee, + Anadyomene! + What vine-outquickening life all creatures sup, + Feel, for the air within its sapphire cup + How it does leap, and twinkle headily! + Feel, for Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; + And round and round in bacchanal rout reel the swift spheres + intemperably! + + My little-worlded self! the shadows pass + In this thy sister-world, as in a glass, + Of all processions that revolve in thee: + Not only of cyclic Man + Thou here discern'st the plan, + Not only of cyclic Man, but of the cyclic Me. + Not solely of Mortality's great years + The reflex just appears, + But thine own bosom's year, still circling round + In ample and in ampler gyre + Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned, + Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire. + How many trampled and deciduous joys + Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still, + Before the distance shall fulfil + Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise! + Happiness is the shadow of things past, + Which fools still take for that which is to be! + And not all foolishly: + For all the past, read true, is prophecy, + And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last, + And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring. + Then leaf, and flower, and falless fruit + Shall hang together on the unyellowing bough; + And silence shall be Music mute + For her surcharg-ed heart. Hush thou! + These things are far too sure that thou should'st dream + Thereof, lest they appear as things that seem. + + Shade within shade! for deeper in the glass + Now other imaged meanings pass; + And as the man, the poet there is read. + Winter with me, alack! + Winter on every hand I find: + Soul, brain, and pulses dead; + The mind no further by the warm sense fed, + The soul weak-stirring in the arid mind, + More tearless-weak to flash itself abroad + Than the earth's life beneath the frost-scorched sod. + My lips have drought, and crack, + By laving music long unvisited. + Beneath the austere and macerating rime + Draws back constricted in its icy urns + The genial flame of Earth, and there + With torment and with tension does prepare + The lush disclosures of the vernal time. + All joys draw inward to their icy urns, + Tormented by constraining rime, + And there + With undelight and throe prepare + The bounteous efflux of the vernal time. + Nor less beneath compulsive Law + Rebuk-ed draw + The numb-ed musics back upon my heart; + Whose yet-triumphant course I know + And prevalent pulses forth shall start, + Like cataracts that with thunderous hoof charge the disbanding snow. + All power is bound + In quickening refusal so; + And silence is the lair of sound; + In act its impulse to deliver, + With fluctuance and quiver + The endeavouring thew grows rigid; + Strong + From its retracted coil strikes the resilient song. + + Giver of spring, + And song, and every young new thing! + Thou only seest in me, so stripped and bare, + The lyric secret waiting to be born, + The patient term allowed + Before it stretch and flutteringly unfold + Its rumpled webs of amethyst-freaked, diaphanous gold. + And what hard task abstracts me from delight, + Filling with hopeless hope and dear despair + The still-born day and parch-ed fields of night, + That my old way of song, no longer fair, + For lack of serene care, + Is grown a stony and a weed-choked plot, + Thou only know'st aright, + Thou only know'st, for I know not. + How many songs must die that this may live! + And shall this most rash hope and fugitive, + Fulfilled with beauty and with might + In days whose feet are rumorous on the air, + Make me forget to grieve + For songs which might have been, nor ever were? + Stern the denial, the travail slow, + The struggling wall will scantly grow: + And though with that dread rite of sacrifice + Ordained for during edifice, + How long, how long ago! + Into that wall which will not thrive + I build myself alive, + Ah, who shall tell me will the wall uprise? + Thou wilt not tell me, who dost only know! + Yet still in mind I keep, + He which observes the wind shall hardly sow, + He which regards the clouds shall hardly reap. + Thine ancient way! I give, + Nor wit if I receive; + Risk all, who all would gain: and blindly. Be it so. + + 'And blindly,' said I?--No! + That saying I unsay: the wings + Hear I not in praevenient winnowings + Of coming songs, that lift my hair and stir it? + What winds with music wet do the sweet storm foreshow! + Utter stagnation + Is the solstitial slumber of the spirit, + The blear and blank negation of all life: + But these sharp questionings mean strife, and strife + Is the negation of negation. + The thing from which I turn my troubled look + Fearing the gods' rebuke; + That perturbation putting glory on, + As is the golden vortex in the West + Over the foundered sun; + That--but low breathe it, lest the Nemesis + Unchild me, vaunting this-- + Is bliss, the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss! + O youngling Joy carest! + That on my now first-mothered breast + Pliest the strange wonder of thine infant lip, + What this aghast surprise of keenest panging, + Wherefrom I blench, and cry thy soft mouth rest? + Ah hold, withhold, and let the sweet mouth slip! + So, with such pain, recoils the woolly dam, + Unused, affrighted, from her yeanling lamb: + I, one with her in cruel fellowship, + Marvel what unmaternal thing I am. + + Nature, enough! within thy glass + Too many and too stern the shadows pass. + In this delighted season, flaming + For thy resurrection-feast, + Ah, more I think the long ensepulture cold, + Than stony winter rolled + From the unsealed mouth of the holy East; + The snowdrop's saintly stoles less heed + Than the snow-cloistered penance of the seed. + 'Tis the weak flesh reclaiming + Against the ordinance + Which yet for just the accepting spirit scans. + Earth waits, and patient heaven, + Self-bonded God doth wait + Thrice-promulgated bans + Of his fair nuptial-date. + And power is man's, + With that great word of 'wait,' + To still the sea of tears, + And shake the iron heart of Fate. + In that one word is strong + An else, alas, much-mortal song; + With sight to pass the frontier of all spheres, + And voice which does my sight such wrong. + + Not without fortitude I wait + The dark majestical ensuit + Of destiny, nor peevish rate + Calm-knowledged Fate. + I, that no part have in the time's bragged way, + And its loud bruit + I, in this house so rifted, marred, + So ill to live in, hard to leave; + I, so star-weary, over-warred, + That have no joy in this your day-- + Rather foul fume englutting, that of day + Confounds all ray-- + But only stand aside and grieve; + I yet have sight beyond the smoke, + And kiss the gods' feet, though they wreak + Upon me stroke and again stroke; + And this my seeing is not weak. + The Woman I behold, whose vision seek + All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb + The steps o' the world, and beats all wing of rhyme, + And knows not; 'twixt the sun and moon + Her inexpressible front enstarred + Tempers the wrangling spheres to tune; + Their divergent harmonies + Concluded in the concord of her eyes, + And vestal dances of her glad regard. + I see, which fretteth with surmise + Much heads grown unsagacious-grey, + The slow aim of wise-hearted Time, + Which folded cycles within cycles cloak: + We pass, we pass, we pass; this does not pass away, + But holds the furrowing earth still harnessed to its yoke. + The stars still write their golden purposes + On heaven's high palimpsest, and no man sees, + Nor any therein Daniel; I do hear + From the revolving year + A voice which cries: + 'All dies; + Lo, how all dies! O seer, + And all things too arise: + All dies, and all is born; + But each resurgent morn, behold, more near the Perfect Morn.' + + Firm is the man, and set beyond the cast + Of Fortune's game, and the iniquitous hour, + Whose falcon soul sits fast, + And not intends her high sagacious tour + Or ere the quarry sighted; who looks past + To slow much sweet from little instant sour, + And in the first does always see the last. + + + + +ANY SAINT. + + His shoulder did I hold + Too high that I, o'erbold + Weak one, + Should lean thereon. + + But He a little hath + Declined His stately path + And my + Feet set more high; + + That the slack arm may reach + His shoulder, and faint speech + Stir + His unwithering hair. + + And bolder now and bolder + I lean upon that shoulder + So dear + He is and near: + + And with His aureole + The tresses of my soul + Are blent + In wished content. + + Yes, this too gentle Lover + Hath flattering words to move her + To pride + By His sweet side. + + Ah, Love! somewhat let be! + Lest my humility + Grow weak + When thou dost speak! + + Rebate thy tender suit, + Lest to herself impute + Some worth + Thy bride of earth! + + A maid too easily + Conceits herself to be + Those things + Her lover sings; + + And being straitly wooed, + Believes herself the Good + And Fair + He seeks in her. + + Turn something of Thy look, + And fear me with rebuke, + That I + May timorously + + Take tremors in Thy arms, + And with contriv-ed charms + Allure + A love unsure. + + Not to me, not to me, + Builded so flawfully, + O God, + Thy humbling laud! + + Not to this man, but Man,-- + Universe in a span; + Point + Of the spheres conjoint; + + In whom eternally + Thou, Light, dost focus Thee!-- + Didst pave + The way o' the wave; + + Rivet with stars the Heaven, + For causeways to Thy driven + Car + In its coming far + + Unto him, only him; + In Thy deific whim + Didst bound + Thy works' great round + + In this small ring of flesh; + The sky's gold-knotted mesh + Thy wrist + Did only twist + + To take him in that net.-- + Man! swinging-wicket set + Between + The Unseen and Seen; + + Lo, God's two worlds immense, + Of spirit and of sense, + Wed + In this narrow bed; + + Yea, and the midge's hymn + Answers the seraphim + Athwart + Thy body's court! + + Great arm-fellow of God! + To the ancestral clod + Kin, + And to cherubin; + + Bread predilectedly + O' the worm and Deity! + Hark, + O God's clay-sealed Ark, + + To praise that fits thee, clear + To the ear within the ear, + But dense + To clay-sealed sense. + + All the Omnific made + When in a word he said, + (Mystery!) + He uttered THEE; + + Thee His great utterance bore, + O secret metaphor + Of what + Thou dream'st no jot! + + Cosmic metonymy! + Weak world-unshuttering key! + One + Seal of Solomon! + + Trope that itself not scans + Its huge significance, + Which tries + Cherubic eyes. + + Primer where the angels all + God's grammar spell in small, + Nor spell + The highest too well. + + Point for the great descants + Of starry disputants; + Equation + Of creation. + + Thou meaning, couldst thou see, + Of all which dafteth thee; + So plain, + It mocks thy pain; + + Stone of the Law indeed, + Thine own self couldst thou read; + Thy bliss + Within thee is. + + Compost of Heaven and mire, + Slow foot and swift desire! + Lo, + To have Yes, choose No; + + Gird, and thou shalt unbind; + Seek not, and thou shalt find; + To eat, + Deny thy meat; + + And thou shalt be fulfilled + With all sweet things unwilled: + So best + God loves to jest + + With children small--a freak + Of heavenly hide-and-seek + Fit + For thy wayward wit, + + Who art thyself a thing + Of whim and wavering; + Free + When His wings pen thee; + + Sole fully blest, to feel + God whistle thee at heel; + Drunk up + As a dew-drop, + + When He bends down, sun-wise, + Intemperable eyes; + Most proud, + When utterly bowed. + + To feel thyself and be + His dear nonentity-- + Caught + Beyond human thought + + In the thunder-spout of Him, + Until thy being dim, + And be + Dead deathlessly. + + Stoop, stoop; for thou dost fear + The nettle's wrathful spear, + So slight + Art thou of might! + + Rise; for Heaven hath no frown + When thou to thee pluck'st down, + Strong clod! + The neck of God. + + + + +ASSUMPTA MARIA. + + 'Thou needst not sing new songs, but say the old.'--COWLEY. + + + Mortals, that behold a Woman, + Rising 'twixt the Moon and Sun; + Who am I the heavens assume? an + All am I, and I am one. + + Multitudinous ascend I, + Dreadful as a battle arrayed, + For I bear you whither tend I; + Ye are I: be undismayed! + I, the Ark that for the graven + Tables of the Law was made; + Man's own heart was one, one Heaven, + Both within my womb were laid. + For there Anteros with Eros + Heaven with man conjoin-ed was,-- + Twin-stone of the Law, Ischyros, + Agios Athanatos. + + I, the flesh-girt Paradises + Gardenered by the Adam new, + Daintied o'er with sweet devices + Which He loveth, for He grew. + I, the boundless strict savannah + Which God's leaping feet go through; + I, the heaven whence the Manna, + Weary Israel, slid on you! + He the Anteros and Eros, + I the body, He the Cross; + He upbeareth me, Ischyros, + Agios Athanatos! + + I am Daniel's mystic Mountain, + Whence the mighty stone was rolled; + I am the four Rivers' fountain, + Watering Paradise of old; + Cloud down-raining the Just One am, + Danae of the Shower of Gold; + I the Hostel of the Sun am; + He the Lamb, and I the Fold. + He the Anteros and Eros, + I the body, He the Cross; + He is fast to me, Ischyros, + Agios Athanatos! + + I, the presence-hall where Angels + Do enwheel their plac-ed King-- + Even my thoughts which, without change else, + Cyclic burn and cyclic sing. + To the hollow of Heaven transplanted, + I a breathing Eden spring, + Where with venom all outpanted + Lies the slimed Curse shrivelling. + For the brazen Serpent clear on + That old fang-ed knowledge shone; + I to Wisdom rise, Ischyron, + Agion Athanaton! + + See in highest heaven pavilioned + Now the maiden Heaven rest, + The many-breasted sky out-millioned + By the splendours of her vest. + Lo, the Ark this holy tide is + The un-handmade Temple's guest, + And the dark Egyptian bride is + Whitely to the Spouse-Heart prest! + He the Anteros and Eros, + Nail me to Thee, sweetest Cross! + He is fast to me, Ischyros, + Agios Athanatos! + + 'Tell me, tell me, O Belov-ed, + Where Thou dost in mid-day feed! + For my wanderings are reprov-ed, + And my heart is salt with need.' + 'Thine own self not spellest God in, + Nor the lisping papyrus reed? + Follow where the flocks have trodden, + Follow where the shepherds lead.' + He, the Anteros and Eros, + Mounts me in AEgyptic car, + Twin-yoked; leading me, Ischyros, + Trembling to the untempted Far. + + 'Make me chainlets, silvern, golden, + I that sow shall surely reap; + While as yet my Spouse is holden + Like a Lion in mountained sleep.' + 'Make her chainlets, silvern, golden, + She hath sown and she shall reap; + Look up to the mountains olden, + Whence help comes with lioned leap.' + By what gushed the bitter Spear on, + Pain, which sundered, maketh one; + Crucified to Him, Ischyron, + Agion Athanaton! + + Then commanded and spake to me + He who framed all things that be; + And my Maker entered through me, + In my tent His rest took He. + Lo! He standeth, Spouse and Brother; + I to Him, and He to me, + Who upraised me where my mother + Fell, beneath the apple-tree. + Risen 'twixt Anteros and Eros, + Blood and Water, Moon and Sun, + He upbears me, He Ischyros, + I bear Him, the Athanaton! + + Where is laid the Lord arisen? + In the light we walk in gloom; + Though the sun has burst his prison, + We know not his biding-room. + Tell us where the Lord sojourneth, + For we find an empty tomb. + 'Whence He sprung, there He returneth, + Mystic Sun,--the Virgin's Womb.' + Hidden Sun, His beams so near us, + Cloud enpillared as He was + From of old, there He, Ischyros, + Waits our search, Athanatos. + + Who will give Him me for brother, + Counted of my family, + Sucking the sweet breasts of my Mother?-- + I His flesh, and mine is He; + To my Bread myself the bread is, + And my Wine doth drink me: see, + His left hand beneath my head is, + His right hand embraceth me! + Sweetest Anteros and Eros, + Lo, her arms He leans across; + Dead that we die not, stooped to rear us, + Thanatos Athanatos. + + Who is She, in candid vesture, + Rushing up from out the brine? + Treading with resilient gesture + Air, and with that Cup divine? + She in us and we in her are, + Beating Godward: all that pine, + Lo, a wonder and a terror! + The Sun hath blushed the Sea to Wine! + He the Anteros and Eros, + She the Bride and Spirit; for + Now the days of promise near us, + And the Sea shall be no more. + + Open wide thy gates, O Virgin, + That the King may enter thee! + At all gates the clangours gurge in, + God's paludament lightens, see! + Camp of Angels! Well we even + Of this thing may doubtful be,-- + If thou art assumed to Heaven, + Or is Heaven assumed to thee! + Consummatum. Christ the promised, + Thy maiden realm is won, O Strong! + Since to such sweet Kingdom comest, + Remember me, poor Thief of Song! + + Cadent fails the stars along:- + Mortals, that behold a woman + Rising 'twixt the Moon and Sun; + Who am I the heavens assume? an + All am I, and I am one. + + + + +THE AFTER WOMAN. + + Daughter of the ancient Eve, + We know the gifts ye gave--and give. + Who knows the gifts which YOU shall give, + Daughter of the newer Eve? + You, if my soul be augur, you + Shall--O what shall you not, Sweet, do? + The celestial traitress play, + And all mankind to bliss betray; + With sacrosanct cajoleries + And starry treachery of your eyes, + Tempt us back to Paradise! + Make heavenly trespass;--ay, press in + Where faint the fledge-foot seraphin, + Blest Fool! Be ensign of our wars, + And shame us all to warriors! + Unbanner your bright locks,--advance + Girl, their gilded puissance, + I' the mystic vaward, and draw on + After the lovely gonfalon + Us to out-folly the excess + Of your sweet foolhardiness; + To adventure like intense + Assault against Omnipotence! + + Give me song, as She is, new, + Earth should turn in time thereto! + New, and new, and thrice so new, + All old sweets, New Sweet, meant you! + Fair, I had a dream of thee, + When my young heart beat prophecy, + And in apparition elate + Thy little breasts knew wax-ed great, + Sister of the Canticle, + And thee for God grown marriageable. + How my desire desired your day, + That, wheeled in rumour on its way, + Shook me thus with presentience! Then + Eden's lopped tree shall shoot again: + For who Christ's eyes shall miss, with those + Eyes for evident nuncios? + Or who be tardy to His call + In your accents augural? + + Who shall not feel the Heavens hid + Impend, at tremble of your lid, + And divine advent shine avowed + Under that dim and lucid cloud; + Yea, 'fore the silver apocalypse + Fail, at the unsealing of your lips? + When to love YOU is (O Christ's Spouse!) + To love the beauty of His house; + Then come the Isaian days; the old + Shall dream; and our young men behold + Vision--yea, the vision of Thabor mount, + Which none to other shall recount, + Because in all men's hearts shall be + The seeing and the prophecy. + For ended is the Mystery Play, + When Christ is life, and you the way; + When Egypt's spoils are Israel's right, + And Day fulfils the married arms of Night. + But here my lips are still. + Until + You and the hour shall be revealed, + This song is sung and sung not, and its words are sealed. + + + + +GRACE OF THE WAY. + + 'My brother!' spake she to the sun; + The kindred kisses of the stars + Were hers; her feet were set upon + The moon. If slumber solved the bars + + Of sense, or sense transpicuous grown + Fulfill-ed seeing unto sight, + I know not; nor if 'twas my own + Ingathered self that made her night. + + The windy trammel of her dress, + Her blown locks, took my soul in mesh; + God's breath they spake, with visibleness + That stirred the raiment of her flesh: + + And sensible, as her blown were, + Beyond the precincts of her form + I felt the woman flow from her-- + A calm of intempestuous storm. + + I failed against the affluent tide; + Out of this abject earth of me + I was translated and enskied + Into the heavenly-regioned She. + + Now of that vision I bereaven + This knowledge keep, that may not dim:- + Short arm needs man to reach to Heaven, + So ready is Heaven to stoop to him. + + Which sets, to measure of man's feet, + No alien Tree for trysting-place; + And who can read, may read the sweet + Direction in his Lady's face. + + And pass and pass the daily crowd, + Unwares, occulted Paradise; + Love the lost plot cries silver-loud, + Nor any know the tongue he cries. + + The light is in the darkness, and + The darkness doth not comprehend: + God hath no haste; and God's sons stand + Yet a Day, tarrying for the end. + + Dishonoured Rahab still hath hid, + Yea still, within her house of shame, + The messengers by Jesus bid + Forerun the coming of His Name. + + The Word was flesh, and crucified, + From the beginning, and blasphemed: + Its profaned raiment men divide, + Damned by what, reverenced, had redeemed. + + Thy Lady, was thy heart not blind, + One hour gave to thy witless trust + The key thou go'st about to find; + And thou hast dropped it in the dust. + + Of her, the Way's one mortal grace, + Own, save thy seeing be all forgot, + That truly, God was in this place, + And thou, unbless-ed, knew'st it not. + + But some have eyes, and will not see; + And some would see, and have not eyes; + And fail the tryst, yet find the Tree, + And take the lesson for the prize. + + + + +RETROSPECT. + + Alas, and I have sung + Much song of matters vain, + And a heaven-sweetened tongue + Turned to unprofiting strain + Of vacant things, which though + Even so they be, and throughly so, + It is no boot at all for thee to know, + But babble and false pain. + + What profit if the sun + Put forth his radiant thews, + And on his circuit run, + Even after my device, to this and to that use; + And the true Orient, Christ, + Make not His cloud of thee? + I have sung vanity, + And nothing well devised. + + And though the cry of stars + Give tongue before his way + Goldenly as I say, + And each from wide Saturnus to hot Mars + He calleth by its name, + Lest that its bright feet stray; + And thou have lore of all, + But to thine own Sun's call + Thy path disorbed hast never wit to tame; + It profits not withal, + And my rede is but lame. + + Only that, 'mid vain vaunt + Of wisdom ignorant, + A little kiss upon the feet of Love + My hasty verse has stayed + Sometimes a space to plant: + It has not wholly strayed, + Not wholly missed near sweet, fanning proud plumes above. + + Therefore I do repent + That with religion vain, + And misconceiv-ed pain, + I have my music bent + To waste on bootless things its skiey-gendered rain: + Yet shall a wiser day + Fulfil more heavenly way, + And with approv-ed music clear this slip + I trust in God most sweet; + Meantime the silent lip, + Meantime the climbing feet. + + + + + +A NARROW VESSEL. + + + + + +Being a little dramatic sequence on the aspect of primitive girl- + nature + towards a love beyond its capacities. + + + + +A GIRL'S SIN. + + I.--In her eyes. + + Cross child! red, and frowning so? + 'I, the day just over, + Gave a lock of hair to--no! + How DARE you say, my lover?' + + He asked you?--Let me understand; + Come, child, let me sound it! + 'Of course, he WOULD have asked it, and-- + And so--somehow--he--found it. + + 'He told it out with great loud eyes-- + Men have such little wit! + His sin I ever will chastise + Because I gave him it. + + 'Shameless in me the gift, alas! + In him his open bliss: + But for the privilege he has + A thousand he shall miss! + + 'His eyes, where once I dreadless laughed, + Call up a burning blot: + I hate him, for his shameful craft + That asked by asking not!' + + Luckless boy! and all for hair + He never asked, you said? + 'Not just--but then he gazed--I swear + He gazed it from my head! + + 'His silence on my cheek like breath + I felt in subtle way; + More sweet than aught another saith + Was what he did not say. + + 'He'll think me vanquished, for this lapse, + Who should be above him; + Perhaps he'll think me light; perhaps-- + Perhaps he'll think I--love him! + + 'Are his eyes conscious and elate, + I hate him that I blush; + Or are they innocent, still I hate-- + They mean a thing's to hush. + + 'Before he nought amiss could do, + Now all things show amiss; + 'Twas all my fault, I know that true, + But all my fault was his. + + 'I hate him for his mute distress, + 'Tis insult he should care! + Because my heart's all humbleness, + All pride is in my air. + + 'With him, each favour that I do + Is bold suit's hallowing text; + Each gift a bastion levelled, to + The next one and the next. + + 'Each wish whose grant may him befall + Is clogged by those withstood; + He trembles, hoping one means all, + And I, lest perhaps it should. + + 'Behind me piecemeal gifts I cast, + My fleeing self to save; + And that's the thing must go at last, + For that's the thing he'd have. + + 'My lock the enforc-ed steel did grate + To cut; its root-thrills came + Down to my bosom. It might sate + His lust for my poor shame! + + 'His sifted dainty this should be + For a score ambrosial years! + But his too much humility + Alarums me with fears. + + 'My gracious grace a breach he counts + For graceless escalade; + And, though he's silent ere he mounts, + My watch is not betrayed. + + 'My heart hides from my soul he's sweet: + Ah dread, if he divine! + One touch, I might fall at his feet, + And he might rise from mine. + + 'To hear him praise my eyes' brown gleams + Was native, safe delight; + But now it usurpation seems, + Because I've given him right. + + 'Before I'd have him not remove, + Now would not have him near; + With sacrifice I called on Love, + And the apparition's Fear.' + + Foolish to give it!--'Twas my whim, + When he might parted be, + To think that I should stay by him + In a little piece of me. + + 'He always said my hair was soft-- + What touches he will steal! + Each touch and look (and he'll look oft) + I almost thought I'd feel. + + 'And then, when first he saw the hair, + To think his dear amazement! + As if he wished from skies a star, + And found it in his casement. + + 'He's kiss the lock--and I had toyed + With dreamed delight of this: + But ah, in proof, delight was void-- + I could not SEE his kiss!' + + So, fond one, half this agony + Were spared, which my hand hushes, + Could you have played, Sweet, the sweet spy, + And blushed not for your blushes! + + + + +A GIRL'S SIN. + + II.--In his eyes. + + Can I forget her cruelty + Who, brown miracle, gave you me? + Or with unmoisted eyes think on + The proud surrender overgone, + (Lowlihead in haughty dress), + Of the tender tyranness? + And ere thou for my joy was given, + How rough the road to that blest heaven! + With what pangs I fore-expiated + Thy cold outlawry from her head; + How was I trampled and brought low, + Because her virgin neck was so; + How thralled beneath the jealous state + She stood at point to abdicate; + How sacrificed, before to me + She sacrificed her pride and thee; + How did she, struggling to abase + Herself to do me strange, sweet grace, + Enforce unwitting me to share + Her throes and abjectness with her; + Thence heightening that hour when her lover + Her grace, with trembling, should discover, + And in adoring trouble be + Humbled at her humility! + And with what pitilessness was I + After slain, to pacify + The uneasy manes of her shame, + Her haunting blushes!--Mine the blame: + What fair injustice did I rue + For what I--did not tempt her to? + Nor aught the judging maid might win + Me to assoil from HER sweet sin. + But nought were extreme punishment + For that beyond-divine content, + When my with-thee-first-giddied eyes + Stooped ere their due on Paradise! + O hour of consternating bliss + When I heavened me in thy kiss; + Thy softness (daring overmuch!) + Profan-ed with my licensed touch; + Worshipped, with tears, on happy knee, + Her doubt, her trust, her shyness free, + Her timorous audacity! + + + + +LOVE DECLARED. + + I looked, she drooped, and neither spake, and cold, + We stood, how unlike all forecasted thought + Of that desir-ed minute! Then I leaned + Doubting; whereat she lifted--oh, brave eyes + Unfrighted:--forward like a wind-blown flame + Came bosom and mouth to mine! + That falling kiss + Touching long-laid expectance, all went up + Suddenly into passion; yea, the night + Caught, blazed, and wrapt us round in vibrant fire. + + + Time's beating wing subsided, and the winds + Caught up their breathing, and the world's great pulse + Stayed in mid-throb, and the wild train of life + Reeled by, and left us stranded on a hush. + This moment is a statue unto Love + Carved from a fair white silence. + Lo, he stands + Within us--are we not one now, one, one roof, + His roof, and the partition of weak flesh + Gone down before him, and no more, for ever?-- + Stands like a bird new-lit, and as he lit, + Poised in our quiet being; only, only + Within our shaken hearts the air of passion, + Cleft by his sudden coming, eddies still + And whirs round his enchanted movelessness. + + + A film of trance between two stirrings! Lo, + It bursts; yet dream's snapped links cling round the limbs + Of waking: like a running evening stream + Which no man hears, or sees, or knows to run, + (Glazed with dim quiet), save that there the moon + Is shattered to a creamy flicker of flame, + Our eyes' sweet trouble were hid, save that the love + Trembles a little on their impassioned calms. + + + + +THE WAY OF A MAID. + + The lover whose soul shaken is + In some decuman billow of bliss, + Who feels his gradual-wading feet + Sink in some sudden hollow of sweet, + And 'mid love's us-ed converse comes + Sharp on a mood which all joy sums-- + An instant's fine compendium of + The liberal-leav-ed writ of love; + His abashed pulses beating thick + At the exigent joy and quick, + Is dumbed, by aiming utterance great + Up to the miracle of his fate. + The wise girl, such Icarian fall + Saved by her confidence that she's small,-- + As what no kindred word will fit + Is uttered best by opposite, + Love in the tongue of hate exprest, + And deepest anguish in a jest,-- + Feeling the infinite must be + Best said by triviality, + Speaks, where expression bates its wings, + Just happy, alien, little things; + What of all words is in excess + Implies in a sweet nothingness, + With dailiest babble shows her sense + That full speech were full impotence; + And while she feels the heavens lie bare, + She only talks about her hair. + + + BEGINNING OF END. + + + She was aweary of the hovering + Of Love's incessant tumultuous wing; + Her lover's tokens she would answer not-- + 'Twere well she should be strange with him somewhat: + A pretty babe, this Love,--but fie on it, + That would not suffer her lay it down a whit! + Appointed tryst defiantly she balked, + And with her lightest comrade lightly walked, + Who scared the chidden Love to hide apart, + And peep from some unnoticed corner of her heart. + She thought not of her lover, deem it not + (There yonder, in the hollow, that's HIS cot), + But she forgot not that he was forgot. + She saw him at his gate, yet stilled her tongue-- + So weak she felt her, that she would feel strong, + And she must punish him for doing him wrong: + Passed, unoblivious of oblivion still; + And if she turned upon the brow o' the hill, + It was so openly, so lightly done, + You saw she thought he was not thought upon. + He through the gate went back in bitterness; + She that night woke and stirred, with no distress, + Glad of her doing,--sedulous to be glad, + Lest perhaps her foolish heart suspect that it was sad. + + + PENELOPE. + + + Love, like a wind, shook wide your blosmy eyes, + You trembled, and your breath came sobbing-wise + For that you loved me. + + You were so kind, so sweet, none could withhold + To adore, but that you were so strange, so cold; + For that you loved me. + + Like to a box of spikenard did you break + Your heart about my feet. What words you spake! + For that you loved me. + + Life fell to dust without me; so you tried + All carefullest ways to drive me from your side, + For that you loved me. + + You gave yourself as children give, that weep + And snatch back, with--'I meant you not to keep!' + For that you loved me. + + I am no woman, girl, nor ever knew + That love could teach all ways that hate could do + To her that loved me. + + Have less of love, or less of woman in + Your love, or loss may even from this begin-- + That you so love me. + + For, wild Penelope, the web you wove + You still unweave, unloving all your love; + Is this to love me, + + Or what rights have I that scorn could deny? + Even of your love, alas, poor Love must die, + If so you love me! + + + THE END OF IT. + + + She did not love to love; but hated him + For making her to love, and so her whim + From passion taught misprision to begin; + And all this sin + Was because love to cast out had no skill + Self, which was regent still. + Her own self-will made void her own self's will + + + EPILOGUE. + + + If I have studied here in part + A tale as old as maiden's heart, + 'Tis that I do see herein + Shadow of more piteous sin. + + She, that but giving part, not whole, + Took even the part back, is the Soul: + And that so disdain-ed Lover-- + Best unthought, since Love is over. + + Love to invite, desire, and fear, + And Love's exactions cost too dear + Count for Love's possession,--ah, + Thy way, misera Anima! + + To give the pledge, and yet be pined + That a pledge should have force to bind, + This, O Soul, too often still + Is the recreance of thy will! + + Out of Love's arms to make fond chain, + And, because struggle bringeth pain, + Hate Love for Love's sweet constraint, + Is the way of Souls that faint. + + Such a Soul, for saddest end, + Finds Love the foe in Love the friend; + And--ah, grief incredible!-- + Treads the way of Heaven, to Hell. + + + + + +MISCELLANEOUS ODES. + + + + + +ODE TO THE SETTING SUN. + + PRELUDE. + + The wailful sweetness of the violin + Floats down the hush-ed waters of the wind, + The heart-strings of the throbbing harp begin + To long in aching music. Spirit-pined, + + In wafts that poignant sweetness drifts, until + The wounded soul ooze sadness. The red sun, + A bubble of fire, drops slowly toward the hill, + While one bird prattles that the day is done. + + O setting Sun, that as in reverent days + Sinkest in music to thy smooth-ed sleep, + Discrowned of homage, though yet crowned with rays, + Hymned not at harvest more, though reapers reap: + + For thee this music wakes not. O deceived, + If thou hear in these thoughtless harmonies + A pious phantom of adorings reaved, + And echo of fair ancient flatteries! + + Yet, in this field where the Cross planted reigns, + I know not what strange passion bows my head + To thee, whose great command upon my veins + Proves thee a god for me not dead, not dead! + + For worship it is too incredulous, + For doubt--oh, too believing-passionate! + What wild divinity makes my heart thus + A fount of most baptismal tears?--Thy straight + + Long beam lies steady on the Cross. Ah me! + What secret would thy radiant finger show? + Of thy bright mastership is this the key? + Is THIS thy secret, then? And is it woe? + + Fling from thine ear the burning curls, and hark + A song thou hast not heard in Northern day; + For Rome too daring, and for Greece too dark, + Sweet with wild wings that pass, that pass away! + + + ODE. + + Alpha and Omega, sadness and mirth, + The springing music, and its wasting breath-- + The fairest things in life are Death and Birth, + And of these two the fairer thing is Death. + Mystical twins of Time inseparable, + The younger hath the holier array, + And hath the awfuller sway: + It is the falling star that trails the light, + It is the breaking wave that hath the might, + The passing shower that rainbows maniple. + Is it not so, O thou down-stricken Day, + That draw'st thy splendours round thee in thy fall? + High was thine Eastern pomp inaugural; + But thou dost set in statelier pageantry, + Lauded with tumults of a firmament: + Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky, + Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident, + Thou dost thy dying so triumphally: + I SEE the crimson blaring of thy shawms! + Why do those lucent palms + Strew thy feet's failing thicklier than their might, + Who dost but hood thy glorious eyes with night, + And vex the heels of all the yesterdays? + Lo! this loud, lackeying praise + Will stay behind to greet the usurping moon, + When they have cloud-barred over thee the West. + Oh, shake the bright dust from thy parting shoon! + The earth not paeans thee, nor serves thy hest, + Be godded not by Heaven! avert thy face, + And leave to blank disgrace + The oblivious world! unsceptre thee of state and place! + + Ha! but bethink thee what thou gazedst on, + Ere yet the snake Decay had venomed tooth; + The name thou bar'st in those vast seasons gone-- + Candid Hyperion, + Clad in the light of thine immortal youth! + Ere Dionysus bled thy vines, + Or Artemis drave her clamours through the wood, + Thou saw'st how once against Olympus' height + The brawny Titans stood, + And shook the gods' world 'bout their ears, and how + Enceladus (whom Etna cumbers now) + Shouldered me Pelion with its swinging pines, + The river unrecked, that did its broken flood + Spurt on his back: before the mountainous shock + The rank-ed gods dislock, + Scared to their skies; wide o'er rout-trampled night + Flew spurned the pebbled stars: those splendours then + Had tempested on earth, star upon star + Mounded in ruin, if a longer war + Had quaked Olympus and cold-fearing men. + Then did the ample marge + And circuit of thy targe + Sullenly redden all the vaward fight, + Above the blusterous clash + Wheeled thy swung falchion's flash + And hewed their forces into splintered flight. + + Yet ere Olympus thou wast, and a god! + Though we deny thy nod, + We cannot spoil thee of thy divinity. + What know we elder than thee? + When thou didst, bursting from the great void's husk, + Leap like a lion on the throat o' the dusk; + When the angels rose-chapleted + Sang each to other, + The vaulted blaze overhead + Of their vast pinions spread, + Hailing thee brother; + How chaos rolled back from the wonder, + And the First Morn knelt down to thy visage of thunder! + Thou didst draw to thy side + Thy young Auroral bride, + And lift her veil of night and mystery; + Tellus with baby hands + Shook off her swaddling-bands, + And from the unswath-ed vapours laughed to thee. + + Thou twi-form deity, nurse at once and sire! + Thou genitor that all things nourishest! + The earth was suckled at thy shining breast, + And in her veins is quick thy milky fire. + Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set + Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet? + Who queened her front with the enrondured moon? + Who dug night's jewels from their vaulty mine + To dower her, past an eastern wizard's dreams, + When hovering on him through his haschish-swoon, + All the rained gems of the old Tartarian line + Shiver in lustrous throbbings of tinged flame? + Whereof a moiety in the Paolis' seams + Statelily builded their Venetian name. + Thou hast enwoof-ed her + An empress of the air, + And all her births are propertied by thee: + Her teeming centuries + Drew being from thine eyes: + Thou fatt'st the marrow of all quality. + + Who lit the furnace of the mammoth's heart? + Who shagged him like Pilatus' ribb-ed flanks? + Who raised the columned ranks + Of that old pre-diluvian forestry, + Which like a continent torn oppressed the sea, + When the ancient heavens did in rains depart, + While the high-danc-ed whirls + Of the tossed scud made hiss thy drench-ed curls? + Thou rear'dst the enormous brood; + Who hast with life imbued + The lion maned in tawny majesty, + The tiger velvet-barred, + The stealthy-stepping pard, + And the lithe panther's flexuous symmetry. + + How came the entomb-ed tree a light-bearer, + Though sunk in lightless lair? + Friend of the forgers of earth, + Mate of the earthquake and thunders volcanic, + Clasped in the arms of the forces Titanic + Which rock like a cradle the girth + Of the ether-hung world; + Swart son of the swarthy mine, + When flame on the breath of his nostrils feeds + How is his countenance half-divine, + Like thee in thy sanguine weeds? + Thou gavest him his light, + Though sepultured in night + Beneath the dead bones of a perished world; + Over his prostrate form + Though cold, and heat, and storm, + The mountainous wrack of a creation hurled. + Who made the splendid rose + Saturate with purple glows; + Cupped to the marge with beauty; a perfume-press + Whence the wind vintages + Gushes of warm-ed fragrance richer far + Than all the flavorous ooze of Cyprus' vats? + Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar, + With dusky cheeks burnt red + She sways her heavy head, + Drunk with the must of her own odorousness; + While in a moted trouble the vexed gnats + Maze, and vibrate, and tease the noontide hush. + Who girt dissolv-ed lightnings in the grape? + Summered the opal with an Irised flush? + Is it not thou that dost the tulip drape, + And huest the daffodilly, + Yet who hast snowed the lily, + And her frail sister, whom the waters name, + Dost vestal-vesture 'mid the blaze of June, + Cold as the new-sprung girlhood of the moon + Ere Autumn's kiss sultry her cheek with flame? + Thou sway'st thy sceptred beam + O'er all delight and dream, + Beauty is beautiful but in thy glance: + And like a jocund maid + In garland-flowers arrayed, + Before thy ark Earth keeps her sacred dance. + + And now, O shaken from thine antique throne, + And sunken from thy coerule empery, + Now that the red glare of thy fall is blown + In smoke and flame about the windy sky, + Where are the wailing voices that should meet + From hill, stream, grove, and all of mortal shape + Who tread thy gifts, in vineyards as stray feet + Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape? + Where is the threne o' the sea? + And why not dirges thee + The wind, that sings to himself as he makes stride + Lonely and terrible on the Andean height? + Where is the Naiad 'mid her sworded sedge? + The Nymph wan-glimmering by her wan fount's verge? + The Dryad at timid gaze by the wood-side? + The Oread jutting light + On one up-strain-ed sole from the rock-ledge? + The Nereid tip-toe on the scud o' the surge, + With whistling tresses dank athwart her face, + And all her figure poised in lithe Circean grace? + Why withers their lament? + Their tresses tear-besprent, + Have they sighed hence with trailing garment-gem? + O sweet, O sad, O fair! + I catch your flying hair, + Draw your eyes down to me, and dream on them! + + A space, and they fleet from me. Must ye fade-- + O old, essential candours, ye who made + The earth a living and a radiant thing-- + And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated arms? + Lo ever thus, when Song with chorded charms + Draws from dull death his lost Eurydice, + Lo ever thus, even at consummating, + Even in the swooning minute that claims her his, + Even as he trembles to the impassioned kiss + Of reincarnate Beauty, his control + Clasps the cold body, and foregoes the soul! + Whatso looks lovelily + Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain. + Why have we longings of immortal pain, + And all we long for mortal? Woe is me, + And all our chants but chaplet some decay, + As mine this vanishing--nay, vanished Day. + The low sky-line dusks to a leaden hue, + No rift disturbs the heavy shade and chill, + Save one, where the charred firmament lets through + The scorching dazzle of Heaven; 'gainst which the hill, + Out-flattened sombrely, + Stands black as life against eternity. + Against eternity? + A rifting light in me + Burns through the leaden broodings of the mind: + O bless-ed Sun, thy state + Uprisen or derogate + Dafts me no more with doubt; I seek and find. + + If with exultant tread + Thou foot the Eastern sea, + Or like a golden bee + Sting the West to angry red, + Thou dost image, thou dost follow + That King-Maker of Creation, + Who, ere Hellas hailed Apollo, + Gave thee, angel-god, thy station; + Thou art of Him a type memorial. + Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood + Upon thy Western rood; + And His stained brow did veil like thine to night, + Yet lift once more Its light, + And, risen, again departed from our ball, + But when It set on earth arose in Heaven. + Thus hath He unto death His beauty given: + And so of all which form inheriteth + The fall doth pass the rise in worth; + For birth hath in itself the germ of death, + But death hath in itself the germ of birth. + It is the falling acorn buds the tree, + The falling rain that bears the greenery, + The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise. + For there is nothing lives but something dies, + And there is nothing dies but something lives. + Till skies be fugitives, + Till Time, the hidden root of change, updries, + Are Birth and Death inseparable on earth; + For they are twain yet one, and Death is Birth. + + AFTER-STRAIN. + + Now with wan ray that other sun of Song + Sets in the bleakening waters of my soul: + One step, and lo! the Cross stands gaunt and long + 'Twixt me and yet bright skies, a presaged dole. + + Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory. + Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields; + Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee, + Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields. + + Of reap-ed joys thou art the heavy sheaf + Which must be lifted, though the reaper groan; + Yea, we may cry till Heaven's great ear be deaf, + But we must bear thee, and must bear alone. + + Vain were a Simon; of the Antipodes + Our night not borrows the superfluous day. + Yet woe to him that from his burden flees! + Crushed in the fall of what he cast away. + + Therefore, O tender Lady, Queen Mary, + Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape + The Cross's rigorous austerity, + Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape. + + 'Lo, though suns rise and set, but crosses stay, + I leave thee ever,' saith she, 'light of cheer.' + 'Tis so: yon sky still thinks upon the Day, + And showers aerial blossoms on his bier. + + Yon cloud with wrinkled fire is edg-ed sharp; + And once more welling through the air, ah me! + How the sweet viol plains him to the harp, + Whose pang-ed sobbings throng tumultuously. + + Oh, this Medusa-pleasure with her stings! + This essence of all suffering, which is joy! + I am not thankless for the spell it brings, + Though tears must be told down for the charmed toy. + + No; while soul, sky, and music bleed together, + Let me give thanks even for those griefs in me, + The restless windward stirrings of whose feather + Prove them the brood of immortality. + + My soul is quitted of death-neighbouring swoon, + Who shall not slake her immitigable scars + Until she hear 'My sister!' from the moon, + And take the kindred kisses of the stars. + + + + +A CAPTAIN OF SONG. + + (On a portrait of Coventry Patmore by J. S. Sargent, R.A.) + + Look on him. This is he whose works ye know; + Ye have adored, thanked, loved him,--no, not him! + But that of him which proud portentous woe + To its own grim + Presentment was not potent to subdue, + Nor all the reek of Erebus to dim. + This, and not him, ye knew. + Look on him now. Love, worship if ye can, + The very man. + Ye may not. He has trod the ways afar, + The fatal ways of parting and farewell, + Where all the paths of pain-ed greatness are; + Where round and always round + The abhorr-ed words resound, + The words accursed of comfortable men,-- + 'For ever'; and infinite glooms intolerable + With spacious replication give again, + And hollow jar, + The words abhorred of comfortable men. + You the stern pities of the gods debar + To drink where he has drunk + The moonless mere of sighs, + And pace the places infamous to tell, + Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes, + Where-through the ways of dreadful greatness are + He knows the perilous rout + That all those ways about + Sink into doom, and sinking, still are sunk. + And if his sole and solemn term thereout + He has attained, to love ye shall not dare + One who has journeyed there; + Ye shall mark well + The mighty cruelties which arm and mar + That countenance of control, + With minatory warnings of a soul + That hath to its own selfhood been most fell, + And is not weak to spare: + And lo, that hair + Is blanch-ed with the travel-heats of hell. + + If any be + That shall with rites of reverent piety + Approach this strong + Sad soul of sovereign Song, + Nor fail and falter with the intimidate throng; + If such there be, + These, these are only they + Have trod the self-same way; + The never-twice-revolving portals heard + Behind them clang infernal, and that word + Abhorr-ed sighed of kind mortality, + As he-- + Ah, even as he! + + + + +AGAINST URANIA. + + Lo I, Song's most true lover, plain me sore + That worse than other women she can deceive, + For she being goddess, I have given her more + Than mortal ladies from their loves receive; + And first of her embrace + She was not coy, and gracious were her ways, + That I forgot all virgins to adore; + Nor did I greatly grieve + To bear through arid days + The pretty foil of her divine delays; + And one by one to cast + Life, love, and health, + Content, and wealth, + Before her, thinking ever on her praise, + Until at last + Nought had I left she would be gracious for. + Now of her cozening I complain me sore, + Seeing her uses, + That still, more constantly she is pursued, + And straitlier wooed, + Her only-ador-ed favour more refuses, + And leaves me to implore + Remembered boon in bitterness of blood. + + From mortal woman thou may'st know full well, + O poet, that dost deem the fair and tall + Urania of her ways not mutable, + When things shall thee befall + What thou art toil-ed in her sweet, wild spell. + Do they strow for thy feet + A little tender favour and deceit + Over the sudden mouth of hidden hell?-- + As more intolerable + Her pit, as her first kiss is heavenlier-sweet. + Are they, the more thou sigh, + Still the more watchful-cruel to deny?-- + Know this, that in her service thou shalt learn + How harder than the heart of woman is + The immortal cruelty + Of the high goddesses. + True is his witness who doth witness this, + Whose gaze too early fell-- + Nor thence shall turn, + Nor in those fires shall cease to weep and burn-- + Upon her ruinous eyes and ineludible. + + + + +AN ANTHEM OF EARTH. + + Proemion. + + Immeasurable Earth! + Through the loud vast and populacy of Heaven, + Tempested with gold schools of ponderous orbs, + That cleav'st with deep-revolting harmonies + Passage perpetual, and behind thee draw'st + A furrow sweet, a cometary wake + Of trailing music! What large effluence, + Not sole the cloudy sighing of thy seas, + Nor thy blue-coifing air, encases thee + From prying of the stars, and the broad shafts + Of thrusting sunlight tempers? For, dropped near + From my remov-ed tour in the serene + Of utmost contemplation, I scent lives. + This is the efflux of thy rocks and fields, + And wind-cuffed forestage, and the souls of men, + And aura of all treaders over thee; + A sentient exhalation, wherein close + The odorous lives of many-throated flowers, + And each thing's mettle effused; that so thou wear'st, + Even like a breather on a frosty morn, + Thy proper suspiration. For I know, + Albeit, with custom-dulled perceivingness, + Nestled against thy breast, my sense not take + The breathings of thy nostrils, there's no tree, + No grain of dust, nor no cold-seeming stone, + But wears a fume of its circumfluous self. + Thine own life and the lives of all that live, + The issue of thy loins, + Is this thy gaberdine, + Wherein thou walkest through thy large demesne + And sphery pleasances,-- + Amazing the unstal-ed eyes of Heaven, + And us that still a precious seeing have + Behind this dim and mortal jelly. + Ah! + If not in all too late and frozen a day + I come in rearward of the throats of song, + Unto the deaf sense of the ag-ed year + Singing with doom upon me; yet give heed! + One poet with sick pinion, that still feels + Breath through the Orient gateways closing fast, + Fast closing t'ward the undelighted night! + + + Anthem. + + + In nescientness, in nescientness, + Mother, we put these fleshly lendings on + Thou yield'st to thy poor children; took thy gift + Of life, which must, in all the after-days, + Be craved again with tears,-- + With fresh and still-petitionary tears. + Being once bound thine almsmen for that gift, + We are bound to beggary, nor our own can call + The journal dole of customary life, + But after suit obsequious for't to thee. + Indeed this flesh, O Mother, + A beggar's gown, a client's badging, + We find, which from thy hands we simply took, + Nought dreaming of the after penury, + In nescientness. + + In a little joy, in a little joy, + We wear awhile thy sore insignia, + Nor know thy heel o' the neck. O Mother! Mother! + Then what use knew I of thy solemn robes, + But as a child, to play with them? I bade thee + Leave thy great husbandries, thy grave designs, + Thy tedious state which irked my ignorant years, + Thy winter-watches, suckling of the grain, + Severe premeditation taciturn + Upon the brooded Summer, thy chill cares, + And all thy ministries majestical, + To sport with me, thy darling. Thought I not + Thou set'st thy seasons forth processional + To pamper me with pageant,--thou thyself + My fellow-gamester, appanage of mine arms? + Then what wild Dionysia I, young Bacchanal, + Danced in thy lap! Ah for thy gravity! + Then, O Earth, thou rang'st beneath me, + Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward, + Even with the shifted + Poise and footing of my thought! + I brake through thy doors of sunset, + Ran before the hooves of sunrise, + Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies + Wild and wilful + As a poet's hand could twine them; + Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice + The Bow, as its cataract of colours + Plashed to thee downward; + Then when thy circuit swung to nightward, + Night the abhorr-ed, night was a new dawning, + Celestial dawning + Over the ultimate marges of the soul; + Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me, + And like a windy arras waved with dreams. + Sleep I took not for my bedfellow, + Who could waken + To a revel, an inexhaustible + Wassail of orgiac imageries; + Then while I wore thy sore insignia + In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy; + Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee, + Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman; + Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot, + But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe + New from their mother's morning bosom. So I, + Risen from thee, restless winnower of the heaven, + Most Hermes-like, did keep + My vital and resilient path, and felt + The play of wings about my fledg-ed heel-- + Sure on the verges of precipitous dream, + Swift in its springing + From jut to jut of inaccessible fancies, + In a little joy. + + In a little thought, in a little thought, + We stand and eye thee in a grave dismay, + With sad and doubtful questioning, when first + Thou speak'st to us as men: like sons who hear + Newly their mother's history, unthought + Before, and say--'She is not as we dreamed: + Ah me! we are beguiled!' What art thou, then, + That art not our conceiving? Art thou not + Too old for thy young children? Or perchance, + Keep'st thou a youth perpetual-burnishable + Beyond thy sons decrepit? It is long + Since Time was first a fledgling; + Yet thou may'st be but as a pendant bulla + Against his stripling bosom swung. Alack! + For that we seem indeed + To have slipped the world's great leaping-time, and come + Upon thy pinched and dozing days: these weeds, + These corporal leavings, thou not cast'st us new, + Fresh from thy craftship, like the lilies' coats, + But foist'st us off + With hasty tarnished piecings negligent, + Snippets and waste + From old ancestral wearings, + That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-flesh + After our father's surfeits; nay with chinks, + Some of us, that if speech may have free leave + Our souls go out at elbows. We are sad + With more than our sires' heaviness, and with + More than their weakness weak; we shall not be + Mighty with all their mightiness, nor shall not + Rejoice with all their joy. Ay, Mother! Mother! + What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed, + Thou lustingly engender'st, + To sweat, and make his brag, and rot, + Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness? + From nightly towers + He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens, + Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust, + And yet is he successive unto nothing + But patrimony of a little mould, + And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth + Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, + All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, + All beauty, and all starry majesties, + And dim transtellar things;--even that it may, + Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, + Confess--'It is enough.' The world left empty + What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded + For pride, for potency, infinity, + All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, + Arrased with purple like the house of kings,-- + To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm + Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries! + Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, + Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark + As we ourselves, thy darkest! We the young, + In a little thought, in a little thought, + At last confront thee, and ourselves in thee, + And wake disgarmented of glory: as one + On a mount standing, and against him stands, + On the mount adverse, crowned with westering rays, + The golden sun, and they two brotherly + Gaze each on each; + He faring down + To the dull vale, his Godhead peels from him + Till he can scarcely spurn the pebble-- + For nothingness of new-found mortality-- + That mutinies against his gall-ed foot. + Littly he sets him to the daily way, + With all around the valleys growing grave, + And known things changed and strange; but he holds on, + Though all the land of light be widow-ed, + In a little thought. + + In a little strength, in a little strength, + We affront thy unveiled face intolerable, + Which yet we do sustain. + Though I the Orient never more shall feel + Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart + Clang through my shaken body like a gong; + Nor ever more with spurted feet shall tread + I' the winepresses of song; nought's truly lost + That moulds to sprout forth gain: now I have on me + The high Phoebean priesthood, and that craves + An unrash utterance; not with flaunted hem + May the Muse enter in behind the veil, + Nor, though we hold the sacred dances good, + Shall the holy Virgins maenadize: ruled lips + Befit a votaress Muse. + Thence with no mutable, nor no gelid love, + I keep, O Earth, thy worship, + Though life slow, and the sobering Genius change + To a lamp his gusty torch. What though no more + Athwart its roseal glow + Thy face look forth triumphal? Thou put'st on + Strange sanctities of pathos; like this knoll + Made derelict of day, + Couchant and shadow-ed + Under dim Vesper's overloosened hair: + This, where emboss-ed with the half-blown seed + The solemn purple thistle stands in grass + Grey as an exhalation, when the bank + Holds mist for water in the nights of Fall. + Not to the boy, although his eyes be pure + As the prime snowdrop is, + Ere the rash Phoebus break her cloister + Of sanctimonious snow; + Or Winter fasting sole on Himalay + Since those dove-nuncioed days + When Asia rose from bathing; + Not to such eyes, + Uneuphrasied with tears, the hierarchical + Vision lies unoccult, rank under rank + Through all create down-wheeling, from the Throne + Even to the bases of the pregnant ooze. + This is the enchantment, this the exaltation, + The all-compensating wonder, + Giving to common things wild kindred + With the gold-tesserate floors of Jove; + Linking such heights and such humilities + Hand in hand in ordinal dances, + That I do think my tread, + Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass, + Flickers the unwithering stars. + This to the shunless fardel of the world + Nerves my uncurb-ed back; that I endure, + The monstrous Temple's moveless caryatid, + With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things, + In a little strength. + + In a little sight, in a little sight, + We learn from what in thee is credible + The incredible, with bloody clutch and feet + Clinging the painful juts of jagg-ed faith. + Science, old noser in its prideful straw, + That with anatomising scalpel tents + Its three-inch of thy skin, and brags--'All's bare,' + The eyeless worm, that boring works the soil, + Making it capable for the crops of God; + Against its own dull will + Ministers poppies to our troublous thought, + A Balaam come to prophecy,--parables, + Nor of its parable itself is ware, + Grossly unwotting; all things has expounded + Reflux and influx, counts the sepulchre + The seminary of being, and extinction + The Ceres of existence: it discovers + Life in putridity, vigour in decay; + Dissolution even, and disintegration, + Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder, + Finds in God's thoughts irrefragable order, + And admirable the manner of our corruption + As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress + The tree of Life--Death dies on his own dart + Promising to our ashes perpetuity, + And to our perishable elements + Their proper imperishability; extracting + Medicaments from out mortality + Against too mortal cogitation; till + Even of the caput mortuum we do thus + Make a memento vivere. To such uses + I put the blinding knowledge of the fool, + Who in no order seeth ordinance; + Nor thrust my arm in nature shoulder-high, + And cry--'There's nought beyond!' How should I so, + That cannot with these arms of mine engirdle + All which I am; that am a foreigner + In mine own region? Who the chart shall draw + Of the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths, + The spacious tenements and wide pleasances, + Innumerable corridors far-withdrawn, + Where I wander darkling, of myself? + Darkling I wander, nor I dare explore + The long arcane of those dim catacombs, + Where the rat memory does its burrows make, + Close-seal them as I may, and my stolen tread + Starts populace, a gens lucifuga; + That too strait seems my mind my mind to hold, + And I myself incontinent of me. + Then go I, my foul-venting ignorance + With scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth! + Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls o' the world, + And vow--A goodly house, but something ancient, + And I can find no Master? Rather, nay, + By baffled seeing, something I divine + Which baffles, and a seeing set beyond; + And so with strenuous gazes sounding down, + Like to the day-long porer on a stream, + Whose last look is his deepest, I beside + This slow perpetual Time stand patiently, + In a little sight. + + In a little dust, in a little dust, + Earth, thou reclaim'st us, who do all our lives + Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage. + Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm, + Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; + Descended passions sway it; it is distraught + With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted + With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement, + Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries. + Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly + As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st + The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard, + The lion maned with curl-ed puissance, + The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin, + Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin; + And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat'st. + Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon, + And many a floating bank of fangs, + The scaly scourges of thy primal brine, + And the tower-crested plesiosaure. + Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow + On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers + Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun + Disglutt'st their splintered bones. + Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidae + Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down + How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi, + And perished cities whose great phantasmata + O'erbrow the silent citizens of Dis:- + Hast not thy fill? + Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink, + Even till thy dull throat sicken, + The draught thou grow'st most fat on; hear'st thou not + The world's knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience! + Much offal of a foul world comes thy way, + And man's superfluous cloud shall soon be laid + In a little blood. + + In a little peace, in a little peace, + Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes + Of imposed being, and relenting, mend'st + Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus' horse + Paws i' the lucent dust as when he shocked + The East with rising; O how may I trace + In this decline that morning when we did + Sport 'twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence, + Which had not yet learned rending? we did then + Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us + Sentence had passed of life, nor commutation + Petitioning into death. What's he that of + The Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop, + Even where the low hic jacet answers him; + Thus low, O Man! there's freedom's seignory, + Tellus' most reverend sole free commonweal, + And model deeply-policied: there none + Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously + Woos the impartial worm, whose favours kiss + With liberal largesse all; there each is free + To be e'en what he must, which here did strive + So much to be he could not; there all do + Their uses just, with no flown questioning. + To be took by the hand of equal earth + They doff her livery, slip to the worm, + Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance, + And that soiled workaday apparel cast, + Put on condition: Death's ungentle buffet + Alone makes ceremonial manumission; + So are the heavenly statutes set, and those + Uranian tables of the primal Law. + In a little peace, in a little peace, + Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers, + We draw together to one hid dark lake; + In a little peace, in a little peace, + We drain with all our burthens of dishonour + Into the cleansing sands o' the thirsty grave. + The fiery pomps, brave exhalations, + And all the glistering shows o' the seeming world, + Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see + Through the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith's fined + The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge + Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush + The cumbered gutters of humanity; + Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned, + Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o' the strong; + Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws + Of the high-tided man; skull-hous-ed asp + That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, + Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe; + Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars, + And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun; + Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge + To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth + That broker is of immortality. + Under this dreadful brother uterine, + This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come, + Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike, + To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st + Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike, + I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last + Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, + Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing, + And break the tomb of life; here I shake off + The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun, + And to the antique order of the dead + I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set + Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended + In a little peace. + + + + + +MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. + + + + + +'EX ORE INFANTIUM'. + + + Little Jesus, wast Thou shy + Once, and just so small as I? + And what did it feel like to be + Out of Heaven, and just like me? + Didst Thou sometimes think of THERE, + And ask where all the angels were? + I should think that I would cry + For my house all made of sky; + I would look about the air, + And wonder where my angels were; + And at waking 'twould distress me-- + Not an angel there to dress me! + Hadst Thou ever any toys, + Like us little girls and boys? + And didst Thou play in Heaven with all + The angels that were not too tall, + With stars for marbles? Did the things + Play Can you see me? through their wings? + And did Thy Mother let Thee spoil + Thy robes, with playing on OUR soil? + How nice to have them always new + In Heaven, because 'twas quite clean blue! + + Didst Thou kneel at night to pray, + And didst Thou join Thy hands, this way? + And did they tire sometimes, being young, + And make the prayer seem very long? + And dost Thou like it best, that we + Should join our hands to pray to Thee? + I used to think, before I knew, + The prayer not said unless we do. + And did Thy Mother at the night + Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right? + And didst Thou feel quite good in bed, + Kissed, and sweet, and thy prayers said? + + Thou canst not have forgotten all + That it feels like to be small: + And Thou know'st I cannot pray + To Thee in my father's way-- + When Thou wast so little, say, + Couldst Thou talk Thy Father's way?-- + So, a little Child, come down + And hear a child's tongue like Thy own; + Take me by the hand and walk, + And listen to my baby-talk. + To Thy Father show my prayer + (He will look, Thou art so fair), + And say: 'O Father, I, Thy Son, + Bring the prayer of a little one.' + + And He will smile, that children's tongue + Has not changed since Thou wast young! + + + + +A QUESTION. + + O bird with heart of wassail, + That toss the Bacchic branch, + And slip your shaken music, + An elfin avalanche; + + Come tell me, O tell me, + My poet of the blue! + What's YOUR thought of me, Sweet?-- + Here's MY thought of you. + + A small thing, a wee thing, + A brown fleck of nought; + With winging and singing + That who could have thought? + + A small thing, a wee thing, + A brown amaze withal, + That fly a pitch more azure + Because you're so small. + + Bird, I'm a small thing-- + My angel descries; + With winging and singing + That who could surmise? + + Ah, small things, ah, wee things, + Are the poets all, + Whose tour's the more azure + Because they're so small. + + The angels hang watching + The tiny men-things:- + 'The dear speck of flesh, see, + With such daring wings! + + 'Come, tell us, O tell us, + Thou strange mortality! + What's THY thought of us, Dear?-- + Here's OUR thought of thee.' + + 'Alack! you tall angels, + I can't think so high! + I can't think what it feels like + Not to be I.' + + Come tell me, O tell me, + My poet of the blue! + What's YOUR thought of me, Sweet?-- + Here's MY thought of you. + + + + +FIELD-FLOWER. + + A Phantasy. + + God took a fit of Paradise-wind, + A slip of coerule weather, + A thought as simple as Himself, + And ravelled them together. + Unto His eyes He held it there, + To teach it gazing debonair + With memory of what, perdie, + A God's young innocences were. + His fingers pushed it through the sod-- + It came up redolent of God, + Garrulous of the eyes of God + To all the breezes near it; + Musical of the mouth of God + To all had eyes to hear it; + Mystical with the mirth of God, + That glow-like did ensphere it. + And--'Babble! babble! babble!' said; + 'I'll tell the whole world one day!' + There was no blossom half so glad, + Since sun of Christ's first Sunday. + + A poet took a flaw of pain, + A hap of skiey pleasure, + A thought had in his cradle lain, + And mingled them in measure. + That chrism he laid upon his eyes, + And lips, and heart, for euphrasies, + That he might see, feel, sing, perdie, + The simple things that are the wise. + Beside the flower he held his ways, + And leaned him to it gaze for gaze-- + He took its meaning, gaze for gaze, + As baby looks on baby; + Its meaning passed into his gaze, + Native as meaning may be; + He rose with all his shining gaze + As children's eyes at play be. + And--'Babble! babble! babble!' said; + 'I'll tell the whole world one day!' + There was no poet half so glad, + Since man grew God that Sunday. + + + + +THE CLOUD'S SWAN-SONG. + + There is a parable in the pathless cloud, + There's prophecy in heaven,--they did not lie, + The Chaldee shepherds; seal-ed from the proud, + To cheer the weighted heart that mates the seeing eye. + + A lonely man, oppressed with lonely ills, + And all the glory fallen from my song, + Here do I walk among the windy hills, + The wind and I keep both one monotoning tongue. + + Like grey clouds one by one my songs upsoar + Over my soul's cold peaks; and one by one + They loose their little rain, and are no more; + And whether well or ill, to tell me there is none. + + For 'tis an alien tongue, of alien things, + From all men's care, how miserably apart! + Even my friends say: 'Of what is this he sings?' + And barren is my song, and barren is my heart. + + For who can work, unwitting his work's worth? + Better, meseems, to know the work for naught, + Turn my sick course back to the kindly earth, + And leave to ampler plumes the jetting tops of thought. + + And visitations, that do often use, + Remote, unhappy, inauspicious sense + Of doom, and poets widowed of their muse, + And what dark 'gan, dark ended, in me did commence. + + I thought of spirit wronged by mortal ills, + And my flesh rotting on my fate's dull stake; + And how self-scorn-ed they the bounty fills + Of others, and the bread, even of their dearest, take. + + I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, + In predecease of his just-sickening song; + Of him that set, wrapt in his radiant rhyme, + Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long. + + But I, exanimate of quick Poesy,-- + O then, no more but even a soulless corse! + Nay, my Delight dies not; 'tis I should be + Her dead, a stringless harp on which she had no force. + + Of my wild lot I thought; from place to place, + Apollo's song-bowed Scythian, I go on; + Making in all my home, with pliant ways, + But, provident of change, putting forth root in none. + + Now, with starved brain, sick body, patience galled + With fardels even to wincing; from fair sky + Fell sudden little rain, scarce to be called + A shower, which of the instant was gone wholly by. + + What cloud thus died I saw not; heaven was fair. + Methinks my angel plucked my locks: I bowed + My spirit, shamed; and looking in the air:- + 'Even so,' I said, 'even so, my brother the good Cloud?' + + It was a pilgrim of the fields of air, + Its home was allwheres the wind left it rest, + And in a little forth again did fare, + And in all places was a stranger and a guest. + + It harked all breaths of heaven, and did obey + With sweet peace their uncomprehended wills; + It knew the eyes of stars which made no stay, + And with the thunder walked upon the lonely hills. + + And from the subject earth it seemed to scorn, + It drew the sustenance whereby it grew + Perfect in bosom for the married Morn, + And of his life and light full as a maid kissed new. + + Its also darkness of the face withdrawn, + And the long waiting for the little light, + So long in life so little. Like a fawn + It fled with tempest breathing hard at heel of flight; + + And having known full East, did not disdain + To sit in shadow and oblivious cold, + Save what all loss doth of its loss retain, + And who hath held hath somewhat that he still must hold. + + Right poet! who thy rightness to approve, + Having all liberty, didst keep all measure, + And with a firmament for ranging, move + But at the heavens' uncomprehended pleasure. + + With amplitude unchecked, how sweetly thou + Didst wear the ancient custom of the skies, + And yoke of used prescription; and thence how + Find gay variety no license could devise! + + As we the quested beauties better wit + Of the one grove our own than forests great, + Restraint, by the delighted search of it, + Turns to right scope. For lovely moving intricate + + Is put to fair devising in the curb + Of ordered limit; and all-changeful Hermes + Is Terminus as well. Yet we perturb + Our souls for latitude, whose strength in bound and term is. + + How far am I from heavenly liberty, + That play at policy with change and fate, + Who should my soul from foreign broils keep free, + In the fast-guarded frontiers of its single state! + + Could I face firm the Is, and with To-be + Trust Heaven; to Heaven commit the deed, and do; + In power contained, calm in infirmity, + And fit myself to change with virtue ever new; + + Thou hadst not shamed me, cousin of the sky, + Thou wandering kinsman, that didst sweetly live + Unnoted, and unnoted sweetly die, + Weeping more gracious song than any I can weave; + + Which these gross-tissued words do sorely wrong. + Thou hast taught me on powerlessness a power; + To make song wait on life, not life on song; + To hold sweet not too sweet, and bread for bread though sour; + + By law to wander, to be strictly free. + With tears ascended from the heart's sad sea, + Ah, such a silver song to Death could I + Sing, Pain would list, forgetting Pain to be, + And Death would tarry marvelling, and forget to die! + + + + +TO THE SINKING SUN. + + How graciously thou wear'st the yoke + Of use that does not fail! + The grasses, like an anchored smoke, + Ride in the bending gale; + This knoll is snowed with blosmy manna, + And fire-dropt as a seraph's mail. + + Here every eve thou stretchest out + Untarnishable wing, + And marvellously bring'st about + Newly an olden thing; + Nor ever through like-ordered heaven + Moves largely thy grave progressing. + + Here every eve thou goest down + Behind the self-same hill, + Nor ever twice alike go'st down + Behind the self-same hill; + Nor like-ways is one flame-sopped flower + Possessed with glory past its will. + + Not twice alike! I am not blind, + My sight is live to see; + And yet I do complain of thy + Weary variety. + O Sun! I ask thee less or more, + Change not at all, or utterly! + + O give me unprevisioned new, + Or give to change reprieve! + For new in me is olden too, + That I for sameness grieve. + O flowers! O grasses! be but once + The grass and flower of yester-eve! + + Wonder and sadness are the lot + Of change: thou yield'st mine eyes + Grief of vicissitude, but not + Its penetrant surprise. + Immutability mutable + Burthens my spirit and the skies. + + O altered joy, all joyed of yore, + Plodding in unconned ways! + O grief grieved out, and yet once more + A dull, new, staled amaze! + I dream, and all was dreamed before, + Or dream I so? the dreamer says. + + + + +GRIEF'S HARMONICS. + + At evening, when the lank and rigid trees, + To the mere forms of their sweet day-selves drying, + On heaven's blank leaf seem pressed and flatten-ed; + Or rather, to my sombre thoughts replying, + Of plumes funereal the thin effigies; + That hour when all old dead things seem most dead, + And their death instant most and most undying, + That the flesh aches at them; there stirred in me + The babe of an unborn calamity, + Ere its due time to be deliver-ed. + Dead sorrow and sorrow unborn so blent their pain, + That which more present was were hardly said, + But both more NOW than any Now can be. + My soul like sackcloth did her body rend, + And thus with Heaven contend:- + 'Let pass the chalice of this coming dread, + Or that fore-drained O bid me not re-drain!' + So have I asked, who know my asking vain, + Woe against woe in antiphon set over, + That grief's soul transmigrates, and lives again, + And in new pang old pang's incarnated. + + + + +MEMORAT MEMORIA. + + Come you living or dead to me, out of the silt of the Past, + With the sweet of the piteous first, and the shame of the shameful + last? + Come with your dear and dreadful face through the passes of Sleep, + The terrible mask, and the face it masked--the face you did not + keep? + You are neither two nor one--I would you were one or two, + For your awful self is embalmed in the fragrant self I knew: + And Above may ken, and Beneath may ken, what I mean by these words + of whirl, + But by my sleep that sleepeth not,--O Shadow of a Girl!-- + Nought here but I and my dreams shall know the secret of this + thing:- + For ever the songs I sing are sad with the songs I never sing, + Sad are sung songs, but how more sad the songs we dare not sing! + + Ah, the ill that we do in tenderness, and the hateful horror of + love! + It has sent more souls to the unslaked Pit than it ever will draw + above. + I damned you, girl, with my pity, who had better by far been thwart, + And drave you hard on the track to hell, because I was gentle of + heart. + I shall have no comfort now in scent, no ease in dew, for this; + I shall be afraid of daffodils, and rose-buds are amiss; + You have made a thing of innocence as shameful as a sin, + I shall never feel a girl's soft arms without horror of the skin. + My child! what was it that I sowed, that I so ill should reap? + You have done this to me. And I, what I to you?--It lies with + Sleep. + + + + +JULY FUGITIVE. + + Can you tell me where has hid her + Pretty Maid July? + I would swear one day ago + She passed by, + I would swear that I do know + The blue bliss of her eye: + 'Tarry, maid, maid,' I bid her; + But she hastened by. + Do you know where she has hid her, + Maid July? + + Yet in truth it needs must be + The flight of her is old; + Yet in truth it needs must be, + For her nest, the earth, is cold. + No more in the pool-ed Even + Wade her rosy feet, + Dawn-flakes no more plash from them + To poppies 'mid the wheat. + She has muddied the day's oozes + With her petulant feet; + Scared the clouds that floated, + As sea-birds they were, + Slow on the coerule + Lulls of the air, + Lulled on the luminous + Levels of air: + She has chidden in a pet + All her stars from her; + Now they wander loose and sigh + Through the turbid blue, + Now they wander, weep, and cry-- + Yea, and I too-- + 'Where are you, sweet July, + Where are you?' + + Who hath beheld her footprints, + Or the pathway she goes? + Tell me, wind, tell me, wheat, + Which of you knows? + Sleeps she swathed in the flushed Arctic + Night of the rose? + Or lie her limbs like Alp-glow + On the lily's snows? + Gales, that are all-visitant, + Find the runaway; + And for him who findeth her + (I do charge you say) + I will throw largesse of broom + Of this summer's mintage, + I will broach a honey-bag + Of the bee's best vintage. + Breezes, wheat, flowers sweet, + None of them knows! + How then shall we lure her back + From the way she goes? + For it were a shameful thing, + Saw we not this comer + Ere Autumn camp upon the fields + Red with rout of Summer. + + When the bird quits the cage, + We set the cage outside, + With seed and with water, + And the door wide, + Haply we may win it so + Back to abide. + Hang her cage of earth out + O'er Heaven's sunward wall, + Its four gates open, winds in watch + By rein-ed cars at all; + Relume in hanging hedgerows + The rain-quenched blossom, + And roses sob their tears out + On the gale's warm heaving bosom; + Shake the lilies till their scent + Over-drip their rims; + That our runaway may see + We do know her whims: + Sleek the tumbled waters out + For her travelled limbs; + Strew and smoothe blue night thereon, + There will--O not doubt her!-- + The lovely sleepy lady lie, + With all her stars about her! + + + + +TO A SNOW-FLAKE. + + What heart could have thought you?-- + Past our devisal + (O filigree petal!) + Fashioned so purely, + Fragilely, surely, + From what Paradisal + Imagineless metal, + Too costly for cost? + Who hammered you, wrought you, + From argentine vapour?-- + 'God was my shaper. + Passing surmisal, + He hammered, He wrought me, + From curled silver vapour, + To lust of His mind:- + Thou could'st not have thought me! + So purely, so palely, + Tinily, surely, + Mightily, frailly, + Insculped and embossed, + With His hammer of wind, + And His graver of frost.' + + + + +NOCTURN. + + I walk, I only, + Not I only wake; + Nothing is, this sweet night, + But doth couch and wake + For its love's sake; + Everything, this sweet night, + Couches with its mate. + For whom but for the stealthy-visitant sun + Is the naked moon + Tremulous and elate? + The heaven hath the earth + Its own and all apart; + The hush-ed pool holdeth + A star to its heart. + You may think the rose sleepeth, + But though she folded is, + The wind doubts her sleeping; + Not all the rose sleeps, + But smiles in her sweet heart + For crafty bliss. + The wind lieth with the rose, + And when he stirs, she stirs in her repose: + The wind hath the rose, + And the rose her kiss. + Ah, mouth of me! + Is it then that this + Seemeth much to thee?-- + I wander only. + The rose hath her kiss. + + + + +A MAY BURDEN. + + Through meadow-ways as I did tread, + The corn grew in great lustihead, + And hey! the beeches burgeon-ed. + By Godd-es fay, by Godd-es fay! + It is the month, the jolly month, + It is the jolly month of May. + + God ripe the wines and corn, I say + And wenches for the marriage-day, + And boys to teach love's comely play. + By Godd-es fay, by Godd-es fay! + It is the month, the jolly month, + It is the jolly month of May. + + As I went down by lane and lea, + The daisies reddened so, pardie! + 'Blushets!' I said, 'I well do see, + By Godd-es fay, by Godd-es fay! + The thing ye think of in this month, + Heigho! this jolly month of May.' + + As down I went by rye and oats, + The blossoms smelt of kisses; throats + Of birds turned kisses into notes; + By Godd-es fay, by Godd-es fay! + The kiss it is a growing flower, + I trow, this jolly month of May! + + God send a mouth to every kiss, + Seeing the blossom of this bliss + By gathering doth grow, certes! + By Godd-es fay, by Godd-es fay! + Thy brow-garland pushed all aslant + Tells--but I tell not, wanton May! + + NOTE. The first two stanzas are from a French original--I have + forgotten what. + + + + +A DEAD ASTRONOMER. + + (Father Perry, S.J.) + + Starry amorist, starward gone, + Thou art--what thou didst gaze upon! + Passed through thy golden garden's bars, + Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars. + + She, about whose moon-ed brows + Seven stars make seven glows, + Seven lights for seven woes; + She, like thine own Galaxy, + All lustres in one purity:- + What said'st thou, Astronomer, + When thou did'st discover HER? + When thy hand its tube let fall, + Thou found'st the fairest Star of all! + + + + +'CHOSE VUE'. + + A metrical caprice. + + Up she rose, fair daughter--well she was graced + As a cloud her going, stept from her chair, + As a summer-soft cloud, in her going paced, + Down dropped her riband-band, and all her waving hair + Shook like loosened music cadent to her waist;-- + Lapsing like music, wavery as water, + Slid to her waist. + + + + +'WHERETO ART THOU COME?' + + 'Friend, whereto art thou come?' Thus Verity; + Of each that to the world's sad Olivet + Comes with no multitude, but alone by night, + Lit with the one torch of his lifted soul, + Seeking her that he may lay hands on her; + Thus: and waits answer from the mouth of deed. + Truth is a maid, whom men woo diversely; + This, as a spouse; that, as a light-o'-love, + To know, and having known, to make his brag. + But woe to him that takes the immortal kiss, + And not estates her in his housing life, + Mother of all his seed! So he betrays, + Not Truth, the unbetrayable, but himself: + And with his kiss's rated traitor-craft, + The Haceldama of a plot of days + He buys, to consummate his Judasry + Therein with Judas' guerdon of despair. + + + + +HEAVEN AND HELL. + + 'Tis said there were no thought of hell, + Save hell were taught; that there should be + A Heaven for all's self-credible. + Not so the thing appears to me. + 'Tis Heaven that lies beyond our sights, + And hell too possible that proves; + For all can feel the God that smites, + But ah, how few the God that loves! + + + + +TO A CHILD. + + Whenas my life shall time with funeral tread + The heavy death-drum of the beaten hours, + Following, sole mourner, mine own manhood dead, + Poor forgot corse, where not a maid strows flowers; + When I you love am no more I you love, + But go with unsubservient feet, behold + Your dear face through changed eyes, all grim change prove;-- + A new man, mock-ed with misname of old; + When shamed Love keep his ruined lodging, elf! + When, ceremented in mouldering memory, + Myself is hears-ed underneath myself, + And I am but the monument of me:- + O to that tomb be tender then, which bears + Only the name of him it sepulchres! + + + + +HERMES. + + Soothsay. Behold, with rod twy-serpented, + Hermes the prophet, twining in one power + The woman with the man. Upon his head + The cloudy cap, wherewith he hath in dower + The cloud's own virtue--change and counterchange, + To show in light, and to withdraw in pall, + As mortal eyes best bear. His lineage strange + From Zeus, Truth's sire, and maiden May--the all- + Illusive Nature. His fledged feet declare + That 'tis the nether self transdeified, + And the thrice-furnaced passions, which do bear + The poet Olympusward. In him allied + Both parents clasp; and from the womb of Nature + Stern Truth takes flesh in shows of lovely feature. + + + + +HOUSE OF BONDAGE. + + I + + When I perceive Love's heavenly reaping still + Regard perforce the clouds' vicissitude, + That the fixed spirit loves not when it will, + But craves its seasons of the flawful blood; + When I perceive that the high poet doth + Oft voiceless stray beneath the uninfluent stars, + That even Urania of her kiss is loath, + And Song's brave wings fret on their sensual bars; + When I perceived the fullest-sail-ed sprite + Lag at most need upon the leth-ed seas, + The provident captainship oft voided quite, + And lam-ed lie deep-draughted argosies; + I scorn myself, that put for such strange toys + The wit of man to purposes of boys. + + II + + The spirit's ark sealed with a little clay, + Was old ere Memphis grew a memory; {2} + The hand pontifical to break away + That seal what shall surrender? Not the sea + Which did englut great Egypt and his war, + Nor all the desert-drown-ed sepulchres. + Love's feet are stained with clay and travel-sore, + And dusty are Song's lucent wing and hairs. + O Love, that must do courtesy to decay, + Eat hasty bread standing with loins up-girt, + How shall this stead thy feet for their sore way? + Ah, Song, what brief embraces balm thy hurt! + Had Jacob's toil full guerdon, casting his + Twice-seven heaped years to burn in Rachel's kiss? + + {2} The Ark of the Egyptian temple was sealed with clay, which the + Pontiff-king broke when he entered the inner shrine to offer + worship. + + + + +THE HEART. + + Two Sonnets. + + (To my Critic, who had objected to the phrase--'The heart's burning + floors.') + + I + + The heart you hold too small and local thing, + Such spacious terms of edifice to bear. + And yet, since Poesy first shook out her wing, + The mighty Love has been impalaced there; + That has she given him as his wide demesne, + And for his sceptre ample empery; + Against its door to knock has Beauty been + Content; it has its purple canopy + A dais for the sovereign lady spread + Of many a lover, who the heaven would think + Too low an awning for her sacred head. + The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink-- + Yet shall that chasm, till He Who these did build + An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled. + + II + + O nothing, in this corporal earth of man, + That to the imminent heaven of his high soul + Responds with colour and with shadow, can + Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll + Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph + Be mighty through its mighty habitants; + If God be in His Name; grave potence if + The sounds unbind of hieratic chants; + All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm + Nature is whole in her least things exprest, + Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm. + Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; + And all man's Babylons strive but to impart + The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart. + + + + +A SUNSET. + + From Hugo's 'Feuilles d'Automne'. + + I love the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens, + Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens, + In numerous leafage bosomed close; + Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, + Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere + On cloudy archipelagos. + + Oh gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion, + Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion, + Their unimagined shapes accord: + Under their waves at intervals flames a pale levin through, + As if some giant of the air amid the vapours drew + A sudden elemental sword. + + The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold; + And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold, + The thatched roof of a cot a-glance; + Or on the blurred horizons joins his battle with the haze; + Or pools the glooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze + Great moveless meres of radiance. + + Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track + Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back, + A triple row of pointed teeth? + Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide, + The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds its tenebrous side + With scales of golden mail ensheathe. + + Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees. + Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice + Ruins immense in mounded wrack: + Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone + Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown + When the earthquake heaves its hugy back. + + These vapours with their leaden, golden, iron, bronz-ed glows, + Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose, + Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms, + 'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep, + As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep + His dreadful and resounding arms! + + All vanishes! The sun, from topmost heaven precipitated, + Like to a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red + Into the furnace stirred to fume, + Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire, + Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire + The vaporous and inflam-ed spume. + + O contemplate the heavens! whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale, + In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil, + With love that has not speech for need; + Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite: + If winter hue them like a pall; or if the summer night + Fantasy them with starry brede. + + + + +HEARD ON THE MOUNTAIN. + + From Hugo's 'Feuilles d'Automne'. + + Have you sometimes, calm, silent, let your tread aspirant rise + Up to the mountain's summit, in the presence of the skies? + Was't on the borders of the South? or on the Bretagne coast? + And at the basis of the mount had you the Ocean tossed? + And there, leaned o'er the wave and o'er the immeasurableness, + Calm, silent, have you harkened what it says? Lo, what it says! + One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicens-ed to muse, + Had drooped its wing above the beach-ed margent of the ooze, + And, plunging from the mountain height into the immensity, + Beheld upon one side the land, on the other side the sea. + I harkened, comprehended,--never, as from those abysses, + No, never issued from a mouth, nor moved an ear, such voice as this + is! + + A sound it was, at outset, vast, immeasurable, confused, + Vaguer than is the wind among the tufted trees effused, + Full of magnificent accords, suave murmurs, sweet as is + The evensong, and mighty as the shock of panoplies + When the hoarse melee in its arms the closing squadrons grips, + And pants, in furious breathings, from the clarions' brazen lips. + Unutterable the harmony, unsearchable its deep, + Whose fluid undulations round the world a girdle keep, + And through the vasty heavens, which by its surges are washed young, + Its infinite volutions roll, enlarging as they throng, + Even to the profound arcane, whose ultimate chasms sombre + Its shattered flood englut with time, with space and form and + number. + Like to another atmosphere with thin o'erflowing robe, + The hymn eternal covers all the inundated globe: + And the world, swathed about with this investuring symphony, + Even as it trepidates in the air, so trepidates in the harmony. + + And pensive, I attended the ethereal lutany, + Lost within this containing voice as if within the sea. + + Soon I distinguished, yet as tone which veils confuse and smother, + Amid this voice two voices, one commingled with the other, + Which did from off the land and seas even to the heavens aspire; + Chanting the universal chant in simultaneous quire. + And I distinguished them amid that deep and rumorous sound, + As who beholds two currents thwart amid the fluctuous profound. + + The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal speech! + That was the voice o' the surges, as they parleyed each with each. + The other, which arose from our abode terranean, + Was sorrowful; and that, alack! the murmur was of man; + And in this mighty quire, whose chantings day and night resound, + Every wave had its utterance, and every man his sound. + + Now, the magnificent Ocean, as I said, unbannering + A voice of joy, a voice of peace, did never stint to sing, + Most like in Sion's temples to a psaltery psaltering, + And to creation's beauty reared the great lauds of his song. + Upon the gale, upon the squall, his clamour borne along + Unpausingly arose to God in more triumphal swell; + And every one among his waves, that God alone can quell, + When the other of its song made end, into the singing pressed. + Like that majestic lion whereof Daniel was the guest, + At intervals the Ocean his tremendous murmur awed; + And I, t'ward where the sunset fires fell shaggily and broad, + Under his golden mane, methought, that I saw pass the hand of God. + + Meanwhile, and side by side with that august fan-faronnade, + The other voice, like the sudden scream of a destrier affrayed, + Like an infernal door that grates ajar its rusty throat, + Like to a bow of iron that gnarls upon an iron rote, + Grinded; and tears, and shriekings, the anathema, the lewd taunt, + Refusal of viaticum, refusal of the font, + And clamour, and malediction, and dread blasphemy, among + That hurtling crowd of rumour from the diverse human tongue, + Went by as who beholdeth, when the valleys thick t'ward night, + The long drifts of the birds of dusk pass, blackening flight on + flight. + What was this sound whose thousand echoes vibrated unsleeping? + Alas! the sound was earth's and man's, for earth and man were + weeping. + + Brothers! of these two voices, strange most unimaginably, + Unceasingly regenerated, dying unceasingly, + Harken-ed of the Eternal throughout His Eternity, + The one voice uttereth: NATURE! and the other voice: HUMANITY! + + Then I alit in reverie; for my ministering sprite + Alack! had never yet deployed a pinion of an ampler flight, + Nor ever had my shadow endured so large a day to burn: + And long I rested dreaming, contemplating turn by turn + Now that abyss obscure which lurked beneath the water's roll, + And now that other untemptable abyss which opened in my soul. + And I made question of me, to what issues are we here, + Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled gear; + What doth the soul; to be or live if better worth it is; + And why the Lord, Who, only, reads within that book of His, + In fatal hymeneals hath eternally entwined + The vintage-chant of nature with the dirging cry of humankind? + + (The metre of the second of these two translations is an experiment. + The splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman I have treated after + the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics; with the occasional + triplet, and even the occasional Alexandrine, represented by a line + of eight accents--a treatment which can well extend, I believe, the + majestic resources of the metre.) + + + + + +ULTIMA. + + + + + +LOVE'S ALMSMAN PLAINETH HIS FARE. + + O you, love's mendicancy who never tried, + How little of your almsman me you know! + Your little languid hand in mine you slide, + Like to a child says--'Kiss me and let me go!' + And night for this is fretted with my tears, + While I:-'How soon this heavenly neck doth tire + Bending to me from its transtellar spheres!' + Ah, heart all kneaded out of honey and fire! + Who bound thee to a body nothing worth, + And shamed thee much with an unlovely soul, + That the most strainedest charity of earth + Distasteth soon to render back the whole + Of thine inflam-ed sweets and gentilesse! + Whereat, like an unpastured Titan, thou + Gnaw'st on thyself for famine's bitterness, + And leap'st against thy chain. Sweet Lady, how + Little a linking of the hand to you! + Though I should touch yours careless for a year, + Not one blue vein would lie divinelier blue + Upon your fragile temple, to unsphere + The seraphim for kisses! Not one curve + Of your sad mouth would droop more sad and sweet. + But little food love's beggars needs must serve, + That eye your plenteous graces from the street. + A hand-clasp I must feed on for a night, + A noon, although the untasted feast you lay, + To mock me, of your beauty. That you might + Be lover for one space, and make essay + What 'tis to pass unsuppered to your couch, + Keep fast from love all day; and so be taught + The famine which these craving lines avouch! + Ah! miser of good things that cost thee naught, + How know'st thou poor men's hunger?--Misery! + When I go doleless and unfed by thee! + + + + +A HOLOCAUST. + + 'No man ever attained supreme knowledge, unless his heart had been + torn up by the roots.' + + + When I presage the time shall come--yea, now + Perchance is come, when you shall fail from me, + Because the mighty spirit, to whom you vow + Faith of kin genius unrebukably, + Scourges my sloth, and from your side dismissed + Henceforth this sad and most, most lonely soul + Must, marching fatally through pain and mist, + The God-bid levy of its powers enrol; + When I presage that none shall hear the voice + From the great Mount that clangs my ordained advance, + That sullen envy bade the churlish choice + Yourself shall say, and turn your altered glance; + O God! Thou knowest if this heart of flesh + Quivers like broken entrails, when the wheel + Rolleth some dog in middle street, or fresh + Fruit when ye tear it bleeding from the peel; + If my soul cries the uncomprehended cry + When the red agony oozed on Olivet! + Yet not for this, a caitiff, falter I, + Beloved whom I must lose, nor thence regret + The doubly-vouched and twin allegiance owed + To you in Heaven, and Heaven in you, Lady. + How could you hope, loose dealer with my God, + That I should keep for you my fealty? + For still 'tis thus:-because I am so true, + My Fair, to Heaven, I am so true to you! + + + + +BENEATH A PHOTOGRAPH. + + Phoebus, who taught me art divine, + Here tried his hand where I did mine; + And his white fingers in this face + Set my Fair's sigh-suggesting grace. + O sweetness past profaning guess, + Grievous with its own exquisiteness! + Vesper-like face, its shadows bright + With meanings of sequestered light; + Drooped with shamefast sanctities + She purely fears eyes cannot miss, + Yet would blush to know she IS. + Ah, who can view with passionless glance + This tear-compelling countenance! + He has cozened it to tell + Almost its own miracle. + Yet I, all-viewing though he be, + Methinks saw further here than he; + And, Master gay! I swear I drew + Something the better of the two! + + + + +AFTER HER GOING. + + The after-even! Ah, did I walk, + Indeed, in her or even? + For nothing of me or around + But absent She did leaven, + Felt in my body as its soul, + And in my soul its heaven. + + 'Ah me! my very flesh turns soul, + Essenced,' I sighed, 'with bliss!' + And the blackbird held his lutany, + All fragrant-through with bliss; + And all things stilled were as a maid + Sweet with a single kiss. + + For grief of perfect fairness, eve + Could nothing do but smile; + The time was far too perfect fair, + Being but for a while; + And ah, in me, too happy grief + Blinded herself with smile! + + The sunset at its radiant heart + Had somewhat unconfest: + The bird was loath of speech, its song + Half-refluent on its breast, + And made melodious toyings with + A note or two at best. + + And she was gone, my sole, my Fair, + Ah, sole my Fair, was gone! + Methinks, throughout the world 'twere right + I had been sad alone; + And yet, such sweet in all things' heart, + And such sweet in my own! + + + + +MY LADY THE TYRANNESS. + + Me since your fair ambition bows + Feodary to those gracious brows, + Is nothing mine will not confess + Your sovran sweet rapaciousness? + Though use to the white yoke inures, + Half-petulant is + Your loving rebel for somewhat his, + Not yours, my love, not yours! + + Behold my skies, which make with me + One passionate tranquillity! + Wrap thyself in them as a robe, + She shares them not; their azures probe, + No countering wings thy flight endures. + Nay, they do stole + Me like an aura of her soul. + I yield them, love, for yours! + + But mine these hills and fields, which put + Not on the sanctity of her foot. + Far off, my dear, far off the sweet + Grave pianissimo of your feet! + My earth, perchance, your sway abjures?-- + Your absence broods + O'er all, a subtler presence. Woods, + Fields, hills, all yours, all yours! + + Nay then, I said, I have my thought, + Which never woman's reaching raught; + Being strong beyond a woman's might, + And high beyond a woman's height, + Shaped to my shape in all contours.-- + I looked, and knew + No thought but you were garden to. + All yours, my love, all yours! + + Meseemeth still, I have my life; + All-clement Her its resolute strife + Evades; contained, relinquishing + Her mitigating eyes; a thing + Which the whole girth of God secures. + Ah, fool, pause! pause! + I had no life, until it was + All yours, my love, all yours! + + Yet, stern possession! I have my death, + Sole yielding up of my sole breath; + Which all within myself I die, + All in myself must cry the cry + Which the deaf body's wall immures.-- + Thought fashioneth + My death without her.--Ah, even death + All yours, my love, all yours! + + Death, then, be hers. I have my heaven, + For which no arm of hers has striven; + Which solitary I must choose, + And solitary win or lose.-- + Ah, but not heaven my own endures! + I must perforce + Taste you, my stream, in God your source,-- + So steep my heaven in yours. + + At last I said--I have my God, + Who doth desire me, though a clod, + And from His liberal Heaven shall He + Bar in mine arms His privacy. + Himself for mine Himself assures.-- + None shall deny + God to be mine, but He and I + All yours, my love, all yours! + + I have no fear at all lest I + Without her draw felicity. + God for His Heaven will not forego + Her whom I found such heaven below, + And she will train Him to her lures. + Nought, lady, I love + In you but more is loved above; + What made me, makes Him yours. + + 'I, thy sought own, am I forgot?' + Ha, thou?--thou liest, I seek thee not. + Why what, thou painted parrot, Fame, + What have I taught thee but her name? + Hear, thou slave Fame, while Time endures, + I give her thee; + Page her triumphal name!--Lady, + Take her, the thrall is yours. + + + + +UNTO THIS LAST. + + A boy's young fancy taketh love + Most simply, with the rind thereof; + A boy's young fancy tasteth more + The rind, than the deific core. + Ah, Sweet! to cast away the slips + Of unessential rind, and lips + Fix on the immortal core, is well; + But heard'st thou ever any tell + Of such a fool would take for food + Aspect and scent, however good, + Of sweetest core Love's orchards grow? + Should such a phantast please him so, + Love where Love's reverent self denies + Love to feed, but with his eyes, + All the savour, all the touch, + Another's--was there ever such? + Such were fool, if fool there be; + Such fool was I, and was for thee! + But if the touch and savour too + Of this fruit--say, Sweet, of you-- + You unto another give + For sacrosanct prerogative, + Yet even scent and aspect were + Some elected Second's share; + And one, gone mad, should rest content + With memory of show and scent; + Would not thyself vow, if there sigh + Such a fool--say, Sweet, as I-- + Treble frenzy it must be + Still to love, and to love thee? + + Yet had I torn (man knoweth not, + Nor scarce the unweeping angels wot + Of such dread task the lightest part) + Her fingers from about my heart. + Heart, did we not think that she + Had surceased her tyranny? + Heart, we bounded, and were free! + O sacrilegious freedom!--Till + She came, and taught my apostate will + The winnowed sweet mirth cannot guess + And tear-fined peace of hopefulness; + Looked, spake, simply touched, and went. + Now old pain is fresh content, + Proved content is unproved pain. + Pangs fore-tempted, which in vain + I, faithless, have denied, now bud + To untempted fragrance and the mood + Of contrite heavenliness; all days + Joy affrights me in my ways; + Extremities of old delight + Afflict me with new exquisite + Virgin piercings of surprise,-- + Stung by those wild brown bees, her eyes! + + + + +ULTIMUM. + + Now in these last spent drops, slow, slower shed, + Love dies, Love dies, Love dies--ah, Love is dead! + Sad Love in life, sore Love in agony, + Pale Love in death; while all his offspring songs, + Like children, versed not in death's chilly wrongs, + About him flit, frighted to see him lie + So still, who did not know that Love could die. + One lifts his wing, where dulls the vermeil all + Like clotting blood, and shrinks to find it cold, + And when she sees its lapse and nerveless fall + Clasps her fans, while her sobs ooze through the webb-ed gold. + Thereat all weep together, and their tears + Make lights like shivered moonlight on long waters. + Have peace, O piteous daughters! + He shall not wake more through the mortal years, + Nor comfort come to my soul widow-ed, + Nor breath to your wild wings; for Love is dead! + + I slew, that moan for him: he lifted me + Above myself, and that I might not be + Less than myself, need was that he should die; + Since Love that first did wing, now clogged me from the sky. + Yet lofty Love being dead thus passeth base-- + There is a soul of nobleness which stays, + The spectre of the rose: be comforted, + Songs, for the dust that dims his sacred head! + The days draw on too dark for Song or Love; + O peace, my songs, nor stir ye any wing! + For lo, the thunder hushing all the grove, + And did Love live, not even Love could sing. + + And, Lady, thus I dare to say, + Not all with you is passed away! + For your love taught me this:-'tis Love's true praise + To be, not staff, but writ of worthy days; + And that high worth in love unfortunate + Should still remain it learned in love elate. + Beyond your star, still, still the stars are bright; + Beyond your highness, still I follow height; + Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view, + Beyond your trueness, Lady, Truth stands true. + This wisdom sings my song with last firm breath, + Caught from the twisted lore of Love and Death, + The strange inwoven harmony that wakes + From Pallas' straying locks twined with her aegis-snakes. + 'On him the unpetitioned heavens descend, + Who heaven on earth proposes not for end; + The perilous and celestial excess + Taking with peace, lacking with thankfulness. + Bliss in extreme befits thee not, until + Thou'rt not extreme in bliss; be equal still: + Sweets to be granted think thy self unmeet + Till thou have learned to hold sweet not too sweet.' + This thing not far is he from wise in art + Who teacheth; nor who doth, from wise in heart. + + + + +ENVOY. + + Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play; + Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow: + And some are sung, and that was yesterday, + And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow. + + Go forth; and if it be o'er stony way, + Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow: + And it was sweet, and that was yesterday, + And sweet is sweet, though purchas-ed with sorrow. + + Go, songs, and come not back from your far way: + And if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow, + Tell them ye grieve, for your hearts know To-day, + Tell them ye smile, for your eyes know To-morrow. + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of New Poems, by Francis Thompson + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW POEMS *** + +***** This file should be named 1471.txt or 1471.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/7/1471/ + +Produced by Les Bowler + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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