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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sister Songs, by Francis Thompson
+#3 in our series by Francis Thompson
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+Sister Songs
+
+by Francis Thompson
+
+May, 1999  [Etext #1731]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sister Songs, by Francis Thompson
+******This file should be named ssngs10.txt or ssngs10.zip******
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+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1908 Burns and Oates edition.
+
+
+
+
+
+Sister Songs
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+This poem, though new in the sense of being now for the first time
+printed, was written some four years ago, about the same date as
+the Hound of Heaven in my former volume.
+
+One image in the Proem was an unconscious plagiarism from the
+beautiful image in Mr. Patmore's St. Valentine's Day:-
+
+
+"O baby Spring,
+That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth,
+A month before the birth!"
+
+
+Finding I could not disengage it without injury to the passage in
+which it is embedded, I have preferred to leave it, with this
+acknowledgment to a Poet rich enough to lend to the poor.
+
+FRANCIS THOMPSON,
+1895
+
+
+
+SISTER SONGS--An Offering to Two Sisters
+
+
+
+THE PROEM
+
+
+
+Shrewd winds and shrill--were these the speech of May?
+A ragged, slag-grey sky--invested so,
+Mary's spoilt nursling! wert thou wont to go?
+Or THOU, Sun-god and song-god, say
+Could singer pipe one tiniest linnet-lay,
+While Song did turn away his face from song?
+Or who could be
+In spirit or in body hale for long, -
+Old AEsculap's best Master!--lacking thee?
+At length, then, thou art here!
+On the earth's lethed ear
+Thy voice of light rings out exultant, strong;
+Through dreams she stirs and murmurs at that summons dear:
+From its red leash my heart strains tamelessly,
+For Spring leaps in the womb of the young year!
+Nay, was it not brought forth before,
+And we waited, to behold it,
+Till the sun's hand should unfold it,
+What the year's young bosom bore?
+Even so; it came, nor knew we that it came,
+In the sun's eclipse.
+Yet the birds have plighted vows,
+And from the branches pipe each other's name;
+Yet the season all the boughs
+Has kindled to the finger-tips, -
+Mark yonder, how the long laburnum drips
+Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame!
+Yea, and myself put on swift quickening,
+And answer to the presence of a sudden Spring.
+From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret spirit
+Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams;
+And, like a mountain-hold when war-shouts stir it,
+The mind's recessed fastness casts to light
+Its gleaming multitudes, that from every height
+Unfurl the flaming of a thousand dreams.
+Now therefore, thou who bring'st the year to birth,
+Who guid'st the bare and dabbled feet of May;
+Sweet stem to that rose Christ, who from the earth
+Suck'st our poor prayers, conveying them to Him;
+Be aidant, tender Lady, to my lay!
+Of thy two maidens somewhat must I say,
+Ere shadowy twilight lashes, drooping, dim
+Day's dreamy eyes from us;
+Ere eve has struck and furled
+The beamy-textured tent transpicuous,
+Of webbed coerule wrought and woven calms,
+Whence has paced forth the lambent-footed sun.
+And Thou disclose my flower of song upcurled,
+Who from Thy fair irradiant palms
+Scatterest all love and loveliness as alms;
+Yea, Holy One,
+Who coin'st Thyself to beauty for the world!
+
+Then, Spring's little children, your lauds do ye upraise
+To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways!
+Your lovesome labours lay away,
+And trick you out in holiday,
+For syllabling to Sylvia;
+And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May,
+To bear with me this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+
+PART THE FIRST
+
+
+The leaves dance, the leaves sing,
+The leaves dance in the breath of the Spring.
+I bid them dance,
+I bid them sing,
+For the limpid glance
+Of my ladyling;
+For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring,
+For God's good grace of this ladyling!
+I know in the lane, by the hedgerow track,
+The long, broad grasses underneath
+Are warted with rain like a toad's knobbed back;
+But here May weareth a rainless wreath.
+In the new-sucked milk of the sun's bosom
+Is dabbled the mouth of the daisy-blossom;
+The smouldering rosebud chars through its sheath;
+The lily stirs her snowy limbs,
+Ere she swims
+Naked up through her cloven green,
+Like the wave-born Lady of Love Hellene;
+And the scattered snowdrop exquisite
+Twinkles and gleams,
+As if the showers of the sunny beams
+Were splashed from the earth in drops of light.
+Everything
+That is child of Spring
+Casts its bud or blossoming
+Upon the stream of my delight.
+
+Their voices, that scents are, now let them upraise
+To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways!
+Their lovely mother them array,
+And prank them out in holiday,
+For syllabling to Sylvia;
+And all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
+To bear with me this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+2.
+
+While thus I stood in mazes bound
+Of vernal sorcery,
+I heard a dainty dubious sound,
+As of goodly melody;
+Which first was faint as if in swound,
+Then burst so suddenly
+In warring concord all around,
+That, whence this thing might be,
+To see
+The very marrow longed in me!
+It seemed of air, it seemed of ground,
+And never any witchery
+Drawn from pipe, or reed, or string,
+Made such dulcet ravishing.
+'Twas like no earthly instrument,
+Yet had something of them all
+In its rise, and in its fall;
+As if in one sweet consort there were blent
+Those archetypes celestial
+Which our endeavouring instruments recall.
+So heavenly flutes made murmurous plain
+To heavenly viols, that again
+- Aching with music--wailed back pain;
+Regals release their notes, which rise
+Welling, like tears from heart to eyes;
+And the harp thrills with thronging sighs.
+Horns in mellow flattering
+Parley with the cithern-string:-
+Hark!--the floating, long-drawn note
+Woos the throbbing cithern-string!
+
+Their pretty, pretty prating those citherns sure upraise
+For homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways:
+Those flutes do flute their vowelled lay,
+Their lovely languid language say,
+For lisping to Sylvia;
+Those viols' lissom bowings break the heart of May,
+And harps harp their burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+3.
+
+Now at that music and that mirth
+Rose, as 'twere, veils from earth;
+And I spied
+How beside
+Bud, bell, bloom, an elf
+Stood, or was the flower itself
+'Mid radiant air
+All the fair
+Frequence swayed in irised wavers.
+Some against the gleaming rims
+Their bosoms prest
+Of the kingcups, to the brims
+Filled with sun, and their white limbs
+Bathed in those golden lavers;
+Some on the brown, glowing breast
+Of that Indian maid, the pansy,
+(Through its tenuous veils confest
+Of swathing light), in a quaint fancy
+Tied her knot of yellow favours;
+Others dared open draw
+Snapdragon's dreadful jaw:
+Some, just sprung from out the soil,
+Sleeked and shook their rumpled fans
+Dropt with sheen
+Of moony green;
+Others, not yet extricate,
+On their hands leaned their weight,
+And writhed them free with mickle toil,
+Still folded in their veiny vans:
+And all with an unsought accord
+Sang together from the sward;
+Whence had come, and from sprites
+Yet unseen, those delights,
+As of tempered musics blent,
+Which had given me such content.
+For haply our best instrument,
+Pipe or cithern, stopped or strung,
+Mimics but some spirit tongue.
+
+Their amiable voices, I bid them upraise
+To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;
+Their lovesome labours laid away,
+To linger out this holiday
+In syllabling to Sylvia;
+While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
+To bear with me this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+4.
+
+Next I saw, wonder-whist,
+How from the atmosphere a mist,
+So it seemed, slow uprist;
+And, looking from those elfin swarms,
+I was 'ware
+How the air
+Was all populous with forms
+Of the Hours, floating down,
+Like Nereids through a watery town.
+Some, with languors of waved arms,
+Fluctuous oared their flexile way;
+Some were borne half resupine
+On the aerial hyaline,
+Their fluid limbs and rare array
+Flickering on the wind, as quivers
+Trailing weed in running rivers;
+And others, in far prospect seen,
+Newly loosed on this terrene,
+Shot in piercing swiftness came,
+With hair a-stream like pale and goblin flame.
+As crystelline ice in water,
+Lay in air each faint daughter;
+Inseparate (or but separate dim)
+Circumfused wind from wind-like vest,
+Wind-like vest from wind-like limb.
+But outward from each lucid breast,
+When some passion left its haunt,
+Radiate surge of colour came,
+Diffusing blush-wise, palpitant,
+Dying all the filmy frame.
+With some sweet tenderness they would
+Turn to an amber-clear and glossy gold;
+Or a fine sorrow, lovely to behold,
+Would sweep them as the sun and wind's joined flood
+Sweeps a greening-sapphire sea;
+Or they would glow enamouredly
+Illustrious sanguine, like a grape of blood;
+Or with mantling poetry
+Curd to the tincture which the opal hath,
+Like rainbows thawing in a moonbeam bath.
+So paled they, flushed they, swam they, sang melodiously.
+
+Their chanting, soon fading, let them, too, upraise
+For homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;
+Weave with suave float their waved way,
+And colours take of holiday,
+For syllabling to Sylvia;
+And all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
+To bear with me this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+5.
+
+Then, through those translucencies,
+As grew my senses clearer clear,
+Did I see, and did I hear,
+How under an elm's canopy
+Wheeled a flight of Dryades
+Murmuring measured melody.
+Gyre in gyre their treading was,
+Wheeling with an adverse flight,
+In twi-circle o'er the grass,
+These to left, and those to right;
+All the band
+Linked by each other's hand;
+Decked in raiment stained as
+The blue-helmed aconite.
+And they advance with flutter, with grace,
+To the dance
+Moving on with a dainty pace,
+As blossoms mince it on river swells.
+Over their heads their cymbals shine,
+Round each ankle gleams a twine
+Of twinkling bells -
+Tune twirled golden from their cells.
+Every step was a tinkling sound,
+As they glanced in their dancing-ground,
+Clouds in cluster with such a sailing
+Float o'er the light of the wasting moon,
+As the cloud of their gliding veiling
+Swung in the sway of the dancing-tune.
+There was the clash of their cymbals clanging,
+Ringing of swinging bells clinging their feet;
+And the clang on wing it seemed a-hanging,
+Hovering round their dancing so fleet. -
+I stirred, I rustled more than meet;
+Whereat they broke to the left and right,
+With eddying robes like aconite
+Blue of helm;
+And I beheld to the foot o' the elm.
+
+They have not tripped those dances, betrayed to my gaze,
+To glad the heart of Sylvia, beholding of their maze;
+Through barky walls have slid away,
+And tricked them in their holiday,
+For other than for Sylvia;
+While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
+And bear with me this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+6.
+
+Where its umbrage was enrooted,
+Sat white-suited,
+Sat green-amiced, and bare-footed,
+Spring amid her minstrelsy;
+There she sat amid her ladies,
+Where the shade is
+Sheen as Enna mead ere Hades'
+Gloom fell thwart Persephone.
+Dewy buds were interstrown
+Through her tresses hanging down,
+And her feet
+Were most sweet,
+Tinged like sea-stars, rosied brown.
+A throng of children like to flowers were sown
+About the grass beside, or clomb her knee:
+I looked who were that favoured company.
+And one there stood
+Against the beamy flood
+Of sinking day, which, pouring its abundance,
+Sublimed the illuminous and volute redundance
+Of locks that, half dissolving, floated round her face;
+As see I might
+Far off a lily-cluster poised in sun
+Dispread its gracile curls of light
+I knew what chosen child was there in place!
+I knew there might no brows be, save of one,
+With such Hesperian fulgence compassed,
+Which in her moving seemed to wheel about her head.
+
+O Spring's little children, more loud your lauds upraise,
+For this is even Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways!
+Your lovesome labours lay away,
+And prank you out in holiday,
+For syllabling to Sylvia;
+And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May,
+To bear with me this burthen
+For singing to Sylvia!
+
+7.
+
+Spring, goddess, is it thou, desired long?
+And art thou girded round with this young train? -
+If ever I did do thee ease in song,
+Now of thy grace let me one meed obtain,
+And list thou to one plain.
+Oh, keep still in thy train
+After the years when others therefrom fade,
+This tiny, well-beloved maid!
+To whom the gate of my heart's fortalice,
+With all which in it is,
+And the shy self who doth therein immew him
+'Gainst what loud leagurers battailously woo him,
+I, bribed traitor to him,
+Set open for one kiss.
+
+Then suffer, Spring, thy children, that lauds they should upraise
+To Sylvia, this Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;
+Their lovely labours lay away,
+And trick them out in holiday,
+For syllabling to Sylvia;
+And that all birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
+To bear with me this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia.
+
+8.
+
+A kiss? for a child's kiss?
+Aye, goddess, even for this.
+Once, bright Sylviola! in days not far,
+Once--in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt
+My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant -
+Forlorn, and faint, and stark,
+I had endured through watches of the dark
+The abashless inquisition of each star,
+Yea, was the outcast mark
+Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny;
+Stood bound and helplessly
+For Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me;
+Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
+In night's slow-wheeled car;
+Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
+From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
+I waited the inevitable last.
+Then there came past
+A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
+Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
+And through the city-streets blown withering.
+She passed,--O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing! -
+And of her own scant pittance did she give,
+That I might eat and live:
+Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
+Therefore I kissed in thee
+The heart of Childhood, so divine for me;
+And her, through what sore ways,
+And what unchildish days,
+Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.
+Therefore I kissed in thee
+Her, child! and innocency,
+And spring, and all things that have gone from me,
+And that shall never be;
+All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss,
+Came with thee to my kiss.
+And ah! so long myself had strayed afar
+From child, and woman, and the boon earth's green,
+And all wherewith life's face is fair beseen;
+Journeying its journey bare
+Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun
+Unkissed of one;
+Almost I had forgot
+The healing harms,
+And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that
+Authentic cestus of two girdling arms:
+And I remembered not
+The subtle sanctities which dart
+From childish lips' unvalued precious brush,
+Nor how it makes the sudden lilies push
+Between the loosening fibres of the heart.
+Then, that thy little kiss
+Should be to me all this,
+Let workaday wisdom blink sage lids thereat;
+Which towers a flight three hedgerows high, poor bat!
+And straightway charts me out the empyreal air.
+Its chart I wing not by, its canon of worth
+Scorn not, nor reck though mine should breed it mirth:
+And howso thou and I may be disjoint,
+Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point
+Over the covert where
+Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her!
+
+(Soul, hush these sad numbers, too sad to upraise
+In hymning bright Sylvia, unlearn'd in such ways!
+Our mournful moods lay we away,
+And prank our thoughts in holiday,
+For syllabling to Sylvia;
+When all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
+To bear with us this burthen,
+For singing to Sylvia!)
+
+9.
+
+Then thus Spring, bounteous lady, made reply:
+O lover of me and all my progeny,
+For grace to you
+I take her ever to my retinue.
+Over thy form, dear child, alas! my art
+Cannot prevail; but mine immortalising
+Touch I lay upon thy heart.
+Thy soul's fair shape
+In my unfading mantle's green I drape,
+And thy white mind shall rest by my devising
+A Gideon-fleece amid life's dusty drouth.
+If Even burst yon globed yellow grape
+(Which is the sun to mortals' sealed sight)
+Against her stained mouth;
+Or if white-handed light
+Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools,
+Still lucencies and cools,
+Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams;
+Like to the sign which led the Israelite,
+Thy soul, through day or dark,
+A visible brightness on the chosen ark
+Of thy sweet body and pure,
+Shall it assure,
+With auspice large and tutelary gleams,
+Appointed solemn courts, and covenanted streams."
+
+Cease, Spring's little children, now cease your lauds to raise;
+That dream is past, and Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways.
+Our loved labour, laid away,
+Is smoothly ended; said our say,
+Our syllable to Sylvia.
+Make sweet, you birds on branches! make sweet your mouths with
+May!
+But borne is this burthen,
+Sung unto Sylvia.
+
+
+
+PART THE SECOND
+
+
+
+And now, thou elder nursling of the nest;
+Ere all the intertangled west
+Be one magnificence
+Of multitudinous blossoms that o'errun
+The flaming brazen bowl o' the burnished sun
+Which they do flower from,
+How shall I 'stablish THY memorial?
+Nay, how or with what countenance shall I come
+To plead in my defence
+For loving thee at all?
+I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech,
+Love their love, or mine own love to them teach;
+A bastard barred from their inheritance,
+Who seem, in this dim shape's uneasy nook,
+Some sun-flower's spirit which by luckless chance
+Has mournfully its tenement mistook;
+When it were better in its right abode,
+Heartless and happy lackeying its god.
+How com'st thou, little tender thing of white,
+Whose very touch full scantly me beseems,
+How com'st thou resting on my vaporous dreams,
+Kindling a wraith there of earth's vernal green?
+Even so as I have seen,
+In night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous,
+A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite
+Curve a shored crescent wide;
+And on its slope marge shelving to the night
+The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous
+Medusa newly washed up from the tide,
+Lay in an oozy pool of its own deliquious light.
+
+Yet hear how my excuses may prevail,
+Nor, tender white orb, be thou opposite!
+Life and life's beauty only hold their revels
+In the abysmal ocean's luminous levels.
+There, like the phantasms of a poet pale,
+The exquisite marvels sail:
+Clarified silver; greens and azures frail
+As if the colours sighed themselves away,
+And blent in supersubtile interplay
+As if they swooned into each other's arms;
+Repured vermilion,
+Like ear-tips 'gainst the sun;
+And beings that, under night's swart pinion,
+Make every wave upon the harbour-bars
+A beaten yolk of stars.
+But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps,
+Die out those lovely swarms;
+And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps.
+
+Love and love's beauty only hold their revels
+In life's familiar, penetrable levels:
+What of its ocean-floor?
+I dwell there evermore.
+From almost earliest youth
+I raised the lids o' the truth,
+And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight;
+Ever I knew me Beauty's eremite,
+In antre of this lowly body set.
+Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
+Nathless I not forget
+How I have, even as the anchorite,
+I too, imperishing essences that console.
+Under my ruined passions, fallen and sere,
+The wild dreams stir like little radiant girls,
+Whom in the moulted plumage of the year
+Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls.
+Yet, though their dedicated amorist,
+How often do I bid my visions hist,
+Deaf to them, pleading all their piteous fills;
+Who weep, as weep the maidens of the mist
+Clinging the necks of the unheeding hills:
+And their tears wash them lovelier than before,
+That from grief's self our sad delight grows more,
+Fair are the soul's uncrisped calms, indeed,
+Endiapered with many a spiritual form
+Of blosmy-tinctured weed;
+But scarce itself is conscious of the store
+Suckled by it, and only after storm
+Casts up its loosened thoughts upon the shore.
+To this end my deeps are stirred;
+And I deem well why life unshared
+Was ordained me of yore.
+In pairing-time, we know, the bird
+Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
+And the tender
+Voice is tenderest in its throat;
+Were its love, for ever nigh it,
+Never by it,
+It might keep a vernal note,
+The crocean and amethystine
+In their pristine
+Lustre linger on its coat.
+Therefore must my song-bower lone be,
+That my tone be
+Fresh with dewy pain alway;
+She, who scorns my dearest care ta'en,
+An uncertain
+Shadow of the sprite of May.
+And is my song sweet, as they say?
+Tis sweet for one whose voice has no reply,
+Save silence's sad cry:
+And are its plumes a burning bright array?
+They burn for an unincarnated eye
+A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath
+Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure,
+Urges me glittering to aerial death,
+I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour;
+Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny
+Obeying of my heart's impetuous might.
+The earth and all its planetary kin,
+Starry buds tangled in the whirling hair
+That flames round the Phoebean wassailer,
+Speed no more ignorant, more predestined flight,
+Than I, HER viewless tresses netted in.
+As some most beautiful one, with lovely taunting,
+Her eyes of guileless guile o'ercanopies,
+Does her hid visage bow,
+And miserly your covetous gaze allow,
+By inchmeal, coy degrees,
+Saying--"Can you see me now?"
+Yet from the mouth's reflex you guess the wanting
+Smile of the coming eyes
+In all their upturned grievous witcheries,
+Before that sunbreak rise;
+And each still hidden feature view within
+Your mind, as eager scrutinies detail
+The moon's young rondure through the shamefast veil
+Drawn to her gleaming chin:
+After this wise,
+From the enticing smile of earth and skies
+I dream my unknown Fair's refused gaze;
+And guessingly her love's close traits devise,
+Which she with subtile coquetries
+Through little human glimpses slow displays,
+Cozening my mateless days
+By sick, intolerable delays.
+And so I keep mine uncompanioned ways;
+And so my touch, to golden poesies
+Turning love's bread, is bought at hunger's price.
+So,--in the inextinguishable wars
+Which roll song's Orient on the sullen night
+Whose ragged banners in their own despite
+Take on the tinges of the hated light, -
+So Sultan Phoebus has his Janizars.
+But if mine unappeased cicatrices
+Might get them lawful ease;
+Were any gentle passion hallowed me,
+Who must none other breath of passion feel
+Save such as winnows to the fledged heel
+The tremulous Paradisal plumages;
+The conscious sacramental trees
+Which ever be
+Shaken celestially,
+Consentient with enamoured wings, might know my love for thee.
+Yet is there more, whereat none guesseth, love!
+Upon the ending of my deadly night
+(Whereof thou hast not the surmise, and slight
+Is all that any mortal knows thereof),
+Thou wert to me that earnest of day's light,
+When, like the back of a gold-mailed saurian
+Heaving its slow length from Nilotic slime,
+The first long gleaming fissure runs Aurorian
+Athwart the yet dun firmament of prime.
+Stretched on the margin of the cruel sea
+Whence they had rescued me,
+With faint and painful pulses was I lying;
+Not yet discerning well
+If I had 'scaped, or were an icicle,
+Whose thawing is its dying.
+Like one who sweats before a despot's gate,
+Summoned by some presaging scroll of fate,
+And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait;
+And all so sickened is his countenance,
+The courtiers buzz, "Lo, doomed!" and look at him askance:-
+At Fate's dread portal then
+Even so stood I, I ken,
+Even so stood I, between a joy and fear,
+And said to mine own heart, "Now if the end be here!"
+
+They say, Earth's beauty seems completest
+To them that on their death-beds rest;
+Gentle lady! she smiles sweetest
+Just ere she clasp us to her breast.
+And I,--now MY Earth's countenance grew bright,
+Did she but smile me towards that nuptial-night?
+But whileas on such dubious bed I lay,
+One unforgotten day,
+As a sick child waking sees
+Wide-eyed daisies
+Gazing on it from its hand,
+Slipped there for its dear amazes;
+So between thy father's knees
+I saw THEE stand,
+And through my hazes
+Of pain and fear thine eyes' young wonder shone.
+Then, as flies scatter from a carrion,
+Or rooks in spreading gyres like broken smoke
+Wheel, when some sound their quietude has broke,
+Fled, at thy countenance, all that doubting spawn:
+The heart which I had questioned spoke,
+A cry impetuous from its depths was drawn, -
+"I take the omen of this face of dawn!"
+And with the omen to my heart cam'st thou.
+Even with a spray of tears
+That one light draft was fixed there for the years.
+
+And now? -
+The hours I tread ooze memories of thee, Sweet!
+Beneath my casual feet.
+With rainfall as the lea,
+The day is drenched with thee;
+In little exquisite surprises
+Bubbling deliciousness of thee arises
+From sudden places,
+Under the common traces
+Of my most lethargied and customed paces.
+
+As an Arab journeyeth
+Through a sand of Ayaman,
+Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue,
+Lagging by his side along;
+And a rusty-winged Death
+Grating its low flight before,
+Casting ribbed shadows o'er
+The blank desert, blank and tan:
+He lifts by hap toward where the morning's roots are
+His weary stare, -
+Sees, although they plashless mutes are,
+Set in a silver air
+Fountains of gelid shoots are,
+Making the daylight fairest fair;
+Sees the palm and tamarind
+Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind; -
+A sight like innocence when one has sinned!
+A green and maiden freshness smiling there,
+While with unblinking glare
+The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her.
+
+'Tis a vision:
+Yet the greeneries Elysian
+He has known in tracts afar;
+Thus the enamouring fountains flow,
+Those the very palms that grow,
+By rare-gummed Sava, or Herbalimar. -
+
+Such a watered dream has tarried
+Trembling on my desert arid;
+Even so
+Its lovely gleamings
+Seemings show
+Of things not seemings;
+And I gaze,
+Knowing that, beyond my ways,
+Verily
+All these ARE, for these are she.
+Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek
+On the burning brow of the sick earth,
+Sick with death, and sick with birth,
+Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,
+Than thy shadow soothes this weak
+And distempered being of mine.
+In all I work, my hand includeth thine;
+Thou rushest down in every stream
+Whose passion frets my spirit's deepening gorge;
+Unhood'st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream;
+Thou swing'st the hammers of my forge;
+As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
+Moves all the labouring surges of the world.
+Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me,
+And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled,
+As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree.
+This poor song that sings of thee,
+This fragile song, is but a curled
+Shell outgathered from thy sea,
+And murmurous still of its nativity.
+Princess of Smiles!
+Sorceress of most unlawful-lawful wiles!
+Cunning pit for gazers' senses,
+Overstrewn with innocences!
+Purities gleam white like statues
+In the fair lakes of thine eyes,
+And I watch the sparkles that use
+There to rise,
+Knowing these
+Are bubbles from the calyces
+Of the lovely thoughts that breathe
+Paving, like water-flowers, thy spirit's floor beneath.
+
+O thou most dear!
+Who art thy sex's complex harmony
+God-set more facilely;
+To thee may love draw near
+Without one blame or fear,
+Unchidden save by his humility:
+Thou Perseus' Shield! wherein I view secure
+The mirrored Woman's fateful-fair allure!
+Whom Heaven still leaves a twofold dignity,
+As girlhood gentle, and as boyhood free;
+With whom no most diaphanous webs enwind
+The bared limbs of the rebukeless mind.
+Wild Dryad! all unconscious of thy tree,
+With which indissolubly
+The tyrannous time shall one day make thee whole;
+Whose frank arms pass unfretted through its bole:
+Who wear'st thy femineity
+Light as entrailed blossoms, that shalt find
+It erelong silver shackles unto thee.
+Thou whose young sex is yet but in thy soul; -
+As hoarded in the vine
+Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine,
+As air sleeps, till it toss its limbs in breeze:-
+In whom the mystery which lures and sunders,
+Grapples and thrusts apart; endears, estranges;
+- The dragon to its own Hesperides -
+Is gated under slow-revolving changes,
+Manifold doors of heavy-hinged years.
+So once, ere Heaven's eyes were filled with wonders
+To see Laughter rise from Tears,
+Lay in beauty not yet mighty,
+Conched in translucencies,
+The antenatal Aphrodite,
+Caved magically under magic seas;
+Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas.
+
+"Whose sex is in thy soul!"
+What think we of thy soul?
+Which has no parts, and cannot grow,
+Unfurled not from an embryo;
+Born of full stature, lineal to control;
+And yet a pigmy's yoke must undergo.
+Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind,
+With its unwilling scholar, the dull, tardy mind;
+Must be obsequious to the body's powers,
+Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways;
+Must do obeisance to the days,
+And wait the little pleasure of the hours;
+Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be
+Captive in statuted minority!
+So is all power fulfilled, as soul in thee.
+So still the ruler by the ruled takes rule,
+And wisdom weaves itself i' the loom o' the fool.
+The splendent sun no splendour can display,
+Till on gross things he dash his broken ray,
+From cloud and tree and flower re-tossed in prismy spray.
+Did not obstruction's vessel hem it in,
+Force were not force, would spill itself in vain
+We know the Titan by his champed chain.
+Stay is heat's cradle, it is rocked therein,
+And by check's hand is burnished into light;
+If hate were none, would love burn lowlier bright?
+God's Fair were guessed scarce but for opposite sin;
+Yea, and His Mercy, I do think it well,
+Is flashed back from the brazen gates of Hell.
+The heavens decree
+All power fulfil itself as soul in thee.
+For supreme Spirit subject was to clay,
+And Law from its own servants learned a law,
+And Light besought a lamp unto its way,
+And Awe was reined in awe,
+At one small house of Nazareth;
+And Golgotha
+Saw Breath to breathlessness resign its breath,
+And Life do homage for its crown to death.
+
+So is all power, as soul in thee increased!
+But, knowing this, in knowledge's despite
+I fret against the law severe that stains
+Thy spirit with eclipse;
+When--as a nymph's carven head sweet water drips,
+For others oozing so the cool delight
+Which cannot steep her stiffened mouth of stone -
+Thy nescient lips repeat maternal strains.
+Memnonian lips!
+Smitten with singing from thy mother's east,
+And murmurous with music not their own:
+Nay, the lips flexile, while the mind alone
+A passionless statue stands.
+Oh, pardon, innocent one!
+Pardon at thine unconscious hands!
+"Murmurous with music not their own," I say?
+And in that saying how do I missay,
+When from the common sands
+Of poorest common speech of common day
+Thine accents sift the golden musics out!
+And ah, we poets, I misdoubt,
+Are little more than thou!
+We speak a lesson taught we know not how,
+And what it is that from us flows
+The hearer better than the utterer knows.
+
+Thou canst foreshape thy word;
+The poet is not lord
+Of the next syllable may come
+With the returning pendulum;
+And what he plans to-day in song,
+To-morrow sings it in another tongue.
+Where the last leaf fell from his bough,
+He knows not if a leaf shall grow,
+Where he sows he doth not reap,
+He reapeth where he did not sow;
+He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep
+To meet him on his waking way.
+Vision will mate him not by law and vow:
+Disguised in life's most hodden-grey,
+By the most beaten road of everyday
+She waits him, unsuspected and unknown.
+The hardest pang whereon
+He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob's stone.
+In the most iron crag his foot can tread
+A Dream may strew her bed,
+And suddenly his limbs entwine,
+And draw him down through rock as sea-nymphs might through brine.
+But, unlike those feigned temptress-ladies who
+In guerdon of a night the lover slew,
+When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,
+Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead!
+And, though he cherisheth
+The babe most strangely born from out her death,
+Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, -
+It is not she!
+
+Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray
+Before the first shafts of the sun's onslaught
+From gloom's black harness splinter,
+And Summer move on Winter
+With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon of the May;
+As gesture outstrips thought;
+So, haply, toyer with ethereal strings!
+Are thy blind repetitions of high things
+The murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings
+Reveal song's summer in the air;
+The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare,
+Yet is thought's harbinger.
+These strains the way for thine own strains prepare;
+We feel the music moist upon this breeze,
+And hope the congregating poesies.
+Sundered yet by thee from us
+Wait, with wild eyes luminous,
+All thy winged things that are to be;
+They flit against thee, Gate of Ivory!
+They clamour on the portress Destiny, -
+"Set her wide, so we may issue through!
+Our vans are quick for that they have to do
+Suffer still your young desire;
+Your plumes but bicker at the tips with fire,
+Tarry their kindling; they will beat the higher.
+And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat
+Idly the music from thy mother caught;
+Not vainly has she wrought,
+Not vainly from the cloudward-jetting turret
+Of her aerial mind, for thy weak feet,
+Let down the silken ladder of her thought.
+She bare thee with a double pain,
+Of the body and the spirit;
+Thou thy fleshly weeds hast ta'en,
+Thy diviner weeds inherit!
+The precious streams which through thy young lips roll
+Shall leave their lovely delta in thy soul:
+Where sprites of so essential kind
+Set their paces,
+Surely they shall leave behind
+The green traces
+Of their sportance in the mind,
+And thou shalt, ere we well may know it,
+Turn that daintiness, a poet, -
+Elfin-ring
+Where sweet fancies foot and sing.
+So it may be, so it SHALL be, -
+Oh, take the prophecy from me!
+What if the old fastidious sculptor, Time,
+This crescent marvel of his hands
+Carveth all too painfully,
+And I who prophesy shall never see?
+What if the niche of its predestined rhyme,
+Its aching niche, too long expectant stands?
+Yet shall he after sore delays
+On some exultant day of days
+The white enshrouding childhood raise
+From thy fair spirit, finished for our gaze;
+While we (but 'mongst that happy "we"
+The prophet cannot be!)
+While we behold with no astonishments,
+With that serene fulfilment of delight
+Wherewith we view the sight
+When the stars pitch the golden tents
+Of their high campment on the plains of night.
+Why should amazement be our satellite?
+What wonder in such things?
+If angels have hereditary wings,
+If not by Salic law is handed down
+The poet's crown,
+To thee, born in the purple of the throne,
+The laurel must belong:
+Thou, in thy mother's right
+Descendant of Castalian-chrismed kings -
+O Princess of the Blood of Song!
+
+Peace; too impetuously have I been winging
+Toward vaporous heights which beckon and beguile
+I sink back, saddened to my inmost mind;
+Even as I list a-dream that mother singing
+The poesy of sweet tone, and sadden, while
+Her voice is cast in troubled wake behind
+The keel of her keen spirit.  Thou art enshrined
+In a too primal innocence for this eye -
+Intent on such untempered radiancy -
+Not to be pained; my clay can scarce endure
+Ungrieved the effluence near of essences so pure.
+Therefore, little, tender maiden,
+Never be thou overshaden
+With a mind whose canopy
+Would shut out the sky from thee;
+Whose tangled branches intercept Heaven's light:
+I will not feed my unpastured heart
+On thee, green pleasaunce as thou art,
+To lessen by one flower thy happy daisies white.
+The water-rat is earth-hued like the runlet
+Whereon he swims; and how in me should lurk
+Thoughts apt to neighbour thine, thou creature sunlit?
+If through long fret and irk
+Thine eyes within their browed recesses were
+Worn caves where thought lay couchant in its lair;
+Wert thou a spark among dank leaves, ah ruth!
+With age in all thy veins, while all thy heart was youth;
+Our contact might run smooth.
+But life's Eoan dews still moist thy ringed hair;
+Dian's chill finger-tips
+Thaw if at night they happen on thy lips;
+The flying fringes of the sun's cloak frush
+The fragile leaves which on those warm lips blush;
+And joy only lurks retired
+In the dim gloaming of thine irid.
+Then since my love drags this poor shadow, me,
+And one without the other may not be,
+From both I guard thee free.
+It still is much, yes, it is much,
+Only--my dream!--to love my love of thee;
+And it is much, yes, it is much,
+In hands which thou hast touched to feel thy touch
+In voices which have mingled with thine own
+To hear a double tone.
+As anguish, for supreme expression prest,
+Borrows its saddest tongue from jest,
+Thou hast of absence so create
+A presence more importunate;
+And thy voice pleads its sweetest suit
+When it is mute.
+I thank the once accursed star
+Which did me teach
+To make of Silence my familiar,
+Who hath the rich reversion of thy speech,
+Since the most charming sounds thy thought can wear,
+Cast off, fall to that pale attendant's share;
+And thank the gift which made my mind
+A shadow-world, wherethrough the shadows wind
+Of all the loved and lovely of my kind.
+
+Like a maiden Saxon, folden,
+As she flits, in moon-drenched mist;
+Whose curls streaming flaxen-golden,
+By the misted moonbeams kist,
+Dispread their filmy floating silk
+Like honey steeped in milk:
+So, vague goldenness remote,
+Through my thoughts I watch thee float.
+When the snake summer casts her blazoned skin
+We find it at the turn of autumn's path,
+And think it summer that rewinded hath,
+Joying therein;
+And this enamouring slough of thee, mine elf,
+I take it for thyself;
+Content.  Content?  Yea, title it content.
+The very loves that belt thee must prevent
+My love, I know, with their legitimacy:
+As the metallic vapours, that are swept
+Athwart the sun, in his light intercept
+The very hues
+Which THEIR conflagrant elements effuse.
+But, my love, my heart, my fair,
+That only I should see thee rare,
+Or tent to the hid core thy rarity, -
+This were a mournfulness more piercing far
+Than that those other loves my own must bar,
+Or thine for others leave thee none for me.
+
+But on a day whereof I think,
+One shall dip his hand to drink
+In that still water of thy soul,
+And its imaged tremors race
+Over thy joy-troubled face,
+As the intervolved reflections roll
+From a shaken fountain's brink,
+With swift light wrinkling its alcove.
+From the hovering wing of Love
+The warm stain shall flit roseal on thy cheek,
+Then, sweet blushet! whenas he,
+The destined paramount of thy universe,
+Who has no worlds to sigh for, ruling thee,
+Ascends his vermeil throne of empery,
+One grace alone I seek.
+Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse,
+Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,
+Set with a towering press of fantasies,
+Drop safely down the time,
+Leaving mine isled self behind it far
+Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas,
+(As down the years the splendour voyages
+From some long ruined and night-submerged star),
+And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart
+Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore;
+Adding its wasteful more
+To his own overflowing treasury.
+So through his river mine shall reach thy sea,
+Bearing its confluent part;
+In his pulse mine shall thrill;
+And the quick heart shall quicken from the heart that's still.
+
+Ah! help, my Daemon that hast served me well!
+Not at this last, oh, do not me disgrace!
+I faint, I sicken, darkens all my sight,
+As, poised upon this unprevisioned height,
+I lift into its place
+The utmost aery traceried pinnacle.
+So; it is builded, the high tenement,
+- God grant--to mine intent!
+Most like a palace of the Occident,
+Up-thrusting, toppling maze on maze,
+Its mounded blaze,
+And washed by the sunset's rosy waves,
+Whose sea drinks rarer hue from those rare walls it laves.
+Yet wail, my spirits, wail!
+So few therein to enter shall prevail!
+Scarce fewer could win way, if their desire
+A dragon baulked, with involuted spire,
+And writhen snout spattered with yeasty fire.
+For at the elfin portal hangs a horn
+Which none can wind aright
+Save the appointed knight
+Whose lids the fay-wings brushed when he was born.
+All others stray forlorn,
+Or glimpsing, through the blazoned windows scrolled
+Receding labyrinths lessening tortuously
+In half obscurity;
+With mystic images, inhuman, cold,
+That flameless torches hold.
+But who can wind that horn of might
+(The horn of dead Heliades) aright, -
+Straight
+Open for him shall roll the conscious gate;
+And light leap up from all the torches there,
+And life leap up in every torchbearer,
+And the stone faces kindle in the glow,
+And into the blank eyes the irids grow,
+And through the dawning irids ambushed meanings show.
+Illumined this wise on,
+He threads securely the far intricacies,
+With brede from Heaven's wrought vesture overstrewn;
+Swift Tellus' purfled tunic, girt upon
+With the blown chlamys of her fluttering seas;
+And the freaked kirtle of the pearled moon:
+Until he gain the structure's core, where stands -
+A toil of magic hands -
+The unbodied spirit of the sorcerer,
+Most strangely rare,
+As is a vision remembered in the noon;
+Unbodied, yet to mortal seeing clear,
+Like sighs exhaled in eager atmosphere.
+From human haps and mutabilities
+It rests exempt, beneath the edifice
+To which itself gave rise;
+Sustaining centre to the bubble of stone
+Which, breathed from it, exists by it alone.
+Yea, ere Saturnian earth her child consumes,
+And I lie down with outworn ossuaries,
+Ere death's grim tongue anticipates the tomb's
+Siste viator, in this storied urn
+My living heart is laid to throb and burn,
+Till end be ended, and till ceasing cease.
+
+And thou by whom this strain hath parentage;
+Wantoner between the yet untreacherous claws
+Of newly-whelped existence! ere he pause,
+What gift to thee can yield the archimage?
+For coming seasons' frets
+What aids, what amulets,
+What softenings, or what brightenings?
+As Thunder writhes the lash of his long lightnings
+About the growling heads of the brute main
+Foaming at mouth, until it wallow again
+In the scooped oozes of its bed of pain;
+So all the gnashing jaws, the leaping heads
+Of hungry menaces, and of ravening dreads,
+Of pangs
+Twitch-lipped, with quivering nostrils and immitigate fangs,
+I scourge beneath the torment of my charms
+That their repentless nature fear to work thee harms.
+And as yon Apollonian harp-player,
+Yon wandering psalterist of the sky,
+With flickering strings which scatter melody,
+The silver-stoled damsels of the sea,
+Or lake, or fount, or stream,
+Enchants from their ancestral heaven of waters
+To Naiad it through the unfrothing air;
+My song enchants so out of undulous dream
+The glimmering shapes of its dim-tressed daughters,
+And missions each to be thy minister.
+Saying; "O ye,
+The organ-stops of being's harmony;
+The blushes on existence's pale face,
+Lending it sudden grace;
+Without whom we should but guess Heaven's worth
+By blank negations of this sordid earth,
+(So haply to the blind may light
+Be but gloom's undetermined opposite);
+Ye who are thus as the refracting air
+Whereby we see Heaven's sun before it rise
+Above the dull line of our mortal skies;
+As breathing on the strained ear that sighs
+From comrades viewless unto strained eyes,
+Soothing our terrors in the lampless night;
+Ye who can make this world where all is deeming
+What world ye list, being arbiters of seeming;
+Attend upon her ways, benignant powers!
+Unroll ye life a carpet for her feet,
+And cast ye down before them blossomy hours,
+Until her going shall be clogged with sweet!
+All dear emotions whose new-bathed hair,
+Still streaming from the soul, in love's warm air
+Smokes with a mist of tender fantasies;
+All these,
+And all the heart's wild growths which, swiftly bright,
+Spring up the crimson agarics of a night,
+No pain in withering, yet a joy arisen;
+And all thin shapes more exquisitely rare,
+More subtly fair,
+Than these weak ministering words have spell to prison
+Within the magic circle of this rhyme;
+And all the fays who in our creedless clime
+Have sadly ceased
+Bearing to other children childhood's proper feast;
+Whose robes are fluent crystal, crocus-hued,
+Whose wings are wind a-fire, whose mantles wrought
+From spray that falling rainbows shake
+These, ye familiars to my wizard thought,
+Make things of journal custom unto her;
+With lucent feet imbrued,
+If young Day tread, a glorious vintager,
+The wine-press of the purple-foamed east;
+Or round the nodding sun, flush-faced and sunken,
+His wild bacchantes drunken
+Reel, with rent woofs a-flaunt, their westering rout.
+- But lo! at length the day is lingered out,
+At length my Ariel lays his viol by;
+We sing no more to thee, child, he and I;
+The day is lingered out:
+In slow wreaths folden
+Around yon censer, sphered, golden,
+Vague Vesper's fumes aspire;
+And glimmering to eclipse
+The long laburnum drips
+Its honey of wild flame, its jocund spilth of fire.
+
+Now pass your ways, fair bird, and pass your ways,
+If you will;
+I have you through the days!
+A flit or hold you still,
+And perch you where you list
+On what wrist, -
+You are mine through the times!
+I have caught you fast for ever in a tangle of sweet rhymes.
+And in your young maiden morn,
+You may scorn,
+But you must be
+Bound and sociate to me;
+With this thread from out the tomb my dead hand shall tether thee!
+
+Go, sister-songs, to that sweet sister-pair
+For whom I have your frail limbs fashioned,
+And framed feateously; -
+For whom I have your frail limbs fashioned
+With how great shamefastness and how great dread,
+Knowing you frail, but not if you be fair,
+Though framed feateously;
+Go unto them from me.
+Go from my shadow to their sunshine sight,
+Made for all sights' delight;
+Go like twin swans that oar the surgy storms
+To bate with pennoned snows in candent air:
+Nigh with abased head,
+Yourselves linked sisterly, that sister-pair,
+And go in presence there;
+Saying--"Your young eyes cannot see our forms,
+Nor read the yearning of our looks aright;
+But time shall trail the veilings from our hair,
+And cleanse your seeing with his euphrasy,
+(Yea, even your bright seeing make more bright,
+Which is all sights' delight),
+And ye shall know us for what things we be.
+
+"Whilom, within a poet's calyxed heart,
+A dewy love we trembled all apart;
+Whence it took rise
+Beneath your radiant eyes,
+Which misted it to music.  We must long,
+A floating haze of silver subtile song,
+Await love-laden
+Above each maiden
+The appointed hour that o'er the hearts of you -
+As vapours into dew
+Unweave, whence they were wove, -
+Shall turn our loosening musics back to love."
+
+
+
+INSCRIPTION
+
+
+
+When the last stir of bubbling melodies
+Broke as my chants sank underneath the wave
+Of dulcitude, but sank again to rise
+Where man's embaying mind those waters lave,
+(For music hath its Oceanides
+Flexuously floating through their parent seas,
+And such are these),
+I saw a vision--or may it be
+The effluence of a dear desired reality?
+I saw two spirits high, -
+Two spirits, dim within the silver smoke
+Which is for ever woke
+By snowing lights of fountained Poesy.
+Two shapes they were familiar as love;
+They were those souls, whereof
+One twines from finest gracious daily things,
+Strong, constant, noticeless, as are heart-strings
+The golden cage wherein this song-bird sings;
+And the other's sun gives hue to all my flowers,
+Which else pale flowers of Tartarus would grow,
+Where ghosts watch ghosts of blooms in ghostly bowers; -
+For we do know
+The hidden player by his harmonies,
+And by my thoughts I know what still hands thrill the keys.
+
+And to these twain--as from the mind's abysses
+All thoughts draw toward the awakening heart's sweet kisses,
+With proffer of their wreathen fantasies, -
+Even so to these
+I saw how many brought their garlands fair,
+Whether of song, or simple love, they were, -
+Of simple love, that makes best garlands fair.
+But one I marked who lingered still behind,
+As for such souls no seemly gift had he:
+He was not of their strain,
+Nor worthy of so bright beings to entertain,
+Nor fit compeer for such high company.
+Yet was he, surely, born to them in mind,
+Their youngest nursling of the spirit's kind.
+Last stole this one,
+With timid glance, of watching eyes adread,
+And dropped his frightened flower when all were gone;
+And where the frail flower fell, it withered.
+But yet methought those high souls smiled thereon;
+As when a child, upstraining at your knees
+Some fond and fancied nothings, says, "I give you these!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Sister Songs, by Francis Thompson
+
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