I like the old house tolerably well,

Where I must dwell

Like a familiar gnome;

And yet I never shall feel quite at home:

I love to roam.

Day after day I loiter and explore

From door to door;

So many treasures lure

The curious mind. What histories obscure

They must immure!

I hardly know which room I care for best;

This fronting west,

With the strange hills in view,

Where the great sun goes,—where I may go too,

When my lease is through,—

Or this one for the morning and the east,

Where a man may feast

His eyes on looming sails,

And be the first to catch their foreign hails

Or spy their bales.

Then the pale summer twilights towards the pole!

It thrills my soul

With wonder and delight,

When gold-green shadows walk the world at night,

So still, so bright.

There at the window many a time of year,

Strange faces peer,

Solemn though not unkind,

Their wits in search of something left behind

Time out of mind;

As if they once had lived here, and stole back

To the window crack

For a peep which seems to say,

“Good fortune, brother, in your house of clay!”

And then, “Good day!”

I hear their footsteps on the gravel walk,

Their scraps of talk,

And hurrying after, reach

Only the crazy sea-drone of the beach

In endless speech.

And often when the autumn noons are still,

By swale and hill

I see their gipsy signs,

Trespassing somewhere on my border lines;

With what designs?

I forth afoot; but when I reach the place,

Hardly a trace,

Save the soft purple haze

Of smouldering camp-fires, any hint betrays

Who went these ways.

Or tatters of pale aster blue, descried

By the roadside,

Reveal whither they fled;

Or the swamp maples, here and there a shred

Of Indian red.

But most of all, the marvellous tapestry

Engrosses me,

Where such strange things are rife,

Fancies of beasts and flowers, and love and strife,

Woven to the life;

Degraded shapes and splendid seraph forms,

And teeming swarms

Of creatures gauzy dim

That cloud the dusk, and painted fish that swim,

At the weaver’s whim;

And wonderful birds that wheel and hang in the air;

And beings with hair,

And moving eyes in the face,

And white bone teeth and hideous grins, who race

From place to place;

They build great temples to their John-a-nod,

And fume and plod

To deck themselves with gold,

And paint themselves like chattels to be sold,

Then turn to mould.

Sometimes they seem almost as real as I;

I hear them sigh;

I see them bow with grief,

Or dance for joy like an aspen leaf;

But that is brief.

They have mad wars and phantom marriages;

Nor seem to guess

There are dimensions still,

Beyond thought’s reach, though not beyond love’s will,

For soul to fill.

And some I call my friends, and make believe

Their spirits grieve,

Brood, and rejoice with mine;

I talk to them in phrases quaint and fine

Over the wine;

I tell them all my secrets; touch their hands;

One understands

Perhaps. How hard he tries

To speak! And yet those glorious mild eyes,

His best replies!

I even have my cronies, one or two,

My cherished few.

But ah, they do not stay!

For the sun fades them and they pass away,

As I grow gray.

Yet while they last how actual they seem!

Their faces beam;

I give them all their names,

Bertram and Gilbert, Louis, Frank and James,

Each with his aims;

One thinks he is a poet, and writes verse

His friends rehearse;

Another is full of law;

A third sees pictures which his hand can draw

Without a flaw.

Strangest of all, they never rest. Day long

They shift and throng,

Moved by invisible will,

Like a great breath which puffs across my sill,

And then is still;

It shakes my lovely manikins on the wall;

Squall after squall,

Gust upon crowding gust,

It sweeps them willy nilly like blown dust

With glory or lust.

It is the world-ghost, the time-spirit, come

None knows where from,

The viewless draughty tide

And wash of being. I hear it yaw and glide,

And then subside,

Along these ghostly corridors and halls

Like faint footfalls;

The hangings stir in the air;

And when I start and challenge, “Who goes there?”

It answers, “Where?”

The wail and sob and moan of the sea’s dirge,

Its plangor and surge;

The awful biting sough

Of drifted snows along some arctic bluff,

That veer and luff,

And have the vacant boding human cry,

As they go by;—

Is it a banished soul

Dredging the dark like a distracted mole

Under a knoll?

Like some invisible henchman old and gray,

Day after day

I hear it come and go,

With stealthy swift unmeaning to and fro,

Muttering low,

Ceaseless and daft and terrible and blind,

Like a lost mind.

I often chill with fear

When I bethink me, What if it should peer

At my shoulder here!

Perchance he drives the merry-go-round whose track

Is the zodiac;

His name is No-man’s-friend;

And his gabbling parrot-talk has neither trend,

Beginning, nor end.

A prince of madness too, I’d cry, “A rat!”

And lunge thereat,—

Let out at one swift thrust

The cunning arch-delusion of the dust

I so mistrust,

But that I fear I should disclose a face

Wearing the trace

Of my own human guise,

Piteous, unharmful, loving, sad, and wise,

With the speaking eyes.

I would the house were rid of his grim pranks,

Moaning from banks

Of pine trees in the moon,

Startling the silence like a demoniac loon

At dead of noon,

Or whispering his fool-talk to the leaves

About my eaves.

And yet how can I know

’T is not a happy Ariel masking so

In mocking woe?

Then with a little broken laugh I say,

Snatching away

The curtain where he grinned

(My feverish sight thought) like a sin unsinned,

“Only the wind!”

Yet often too he steals so softly by,

With half a sigh,

I deem he must be mild,

Fair as a woman, gentle as a child,

And forest wild.

Passing the door where an old wind-harp swings,

With its five strings,

Contrived long years ago

By my first predecessor bent to show

His handcraft so,

He lays his fingers on the æolian wire,

As a core of fire

Is laid upon the blast

To kindle and glow and fill the purple vast

Of dark at last.

Weird wise and low, piercing and keen and glad,

Or dim and sad

As a forgotten strain

Born when the broken legions of the rain

Swept through the plain—

He plays, like some dread veiled mysteriarch,

Lighting the dark,

Bidding the spring grow warm,

The gendering merge and loosing of spirit in form,

Peace out of storm.

For music is the sacrament of love;

He broods above

The virgin silence, till

She yields for rapture shuddering, yearning still

To his sweet will.

I hear him sing, “Your harp is like a mesh,

Woven of flesh

And spread within the shoal

Of life, where runs the tide-race of the soul

In my control.

“Though my wild way may ruin what it bends,

It makes amends

To the frail downy clocks,

Telling their seed a secret that unlocks

The granite rocks.

“The womb of silence to the crave sound

Is heaven unfound,

Till I, to soothe and slake

Being’s most utter and imperious ache,

Bid rhythm awake.

“If with such agonies of bliss, my kin,

I enter in

Your prison house of sense,

With what a joyous freed intelligence

I shall go hence.”

I need no more to guess the weaver’s name,

Nor ask his aim,

Who hung each hall and room

With swarthy-tinged vermilion upon gloom;

I know that loom.

Give me a little space and time enough,

From ravelings rough

I could revive, reweave,

A fabric of beauty art might well believe

Were past retrieve.

O men and women in that rich design,

Sleep-soft, sun-fine,

Dew-tenuous and free,

A tone of the infinite wind-themes of the sea,

Borne in to me,

Reveals how you were woven to the might

Of shadow and light.

You are the dream of One

Who loves to haunt and yet appears to shun

My door in the sun;

As the white roving sea tern fleck and skim

The morning’s rim;

Or the dark thrushes clear

Their flutes of music leisurely and sheer,

Then hush to hear.

I know him when the last red brands of day

Smoulder away,

And when the vernal showers

Bring back the heart to all my valley flowers

In the soft hours.

O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,

While time endures,

To acquiesce and learn!

For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,

Let soul discern.

So, fellows, we shall reach the gusty gate,

Early or late,

And part without remorse,

A cadence dying down unto its source

In music’s course;

You to the perfect rhythms of flowers and birds,

Colors and words,

The heart-beats of the earth,

To be remoulded always of one worth

From birth to birth;

I to the broken rhythm of thought and man,

The sweep and span

Of memory and hope

About the orbit where they still must grope

For wider scope,

To be through thousand springs restored, renewed,

With love imbrued,

With increments of will

Made strong, perceiving unattainment still

From each new skill.

Always the flawless beauty, always the chord

Of the Overword,

Dominant, pleading, sure,

No truth too small to save and make endure.

No good too poor!

And since no mortal can at last disdain

That sweet refrain,

But lets go strife and care,

Borne like a strain of bird notes on the air,

The wind knows where;

Some quiet April evening soft and strange,

When comes the change

No spirit can deplore,

I shall be one with all I was before,

In death once more.

“Cornel, cornel, green and white,

Spreading on the forest floor,

Whither went my lost delight

Through the silent door?”

“Mortal, mortal, overfond,

How come you at all to know

There be any joys beyond

Blisses here and now?”

“Cornel, cornel, white and cool,

Many a mortal, I’ve heard tell,

Who is only Fancy’s fool

Knows that secret well.”

“Mortal, mortal, what would you

With that beauty once was yours?

Perishable is the dew,

And the dust endures.”

“Cornel, cornel, pierce me not

With your sweet, reserved disdain!

Whisper me of things forgot

That shall be again.”

“Mortal, we are kinsmen, led

By a hope beyond our reach.

Know you not the word unsaid

Is the flower of speech?”

All the snowy blossoms faded,

While the scarlet berries grew;

And all summer they evaded

Anything they knew.

“Cornel, cornel, green and red

Flooring for the forest wide,

Whither down the ways of dread

Went my starry-eyed?”

“Mortal, mortal, is there found

Any fruitage half so fair

In the dim world underground

As there grows in air?”

“Wilding cornel, you can guess

Nothing of eternal pain,

Growing there in quietness

In the sun and rain.”

“Mortal, where your heart would be

Not a wanderer may go,

But he shares the dark with me

Underneath the snow.”

And the scarlet berries scattered

With the coming on of fall;

Not to one of them it mattered

Anything at all.

Iron and granite and rust,

In a crumbling garden old,

Where the roses are paler than dust

And the lilies are green with gold,

Under the racing moon,

Inconscious of war or crime,

In a strange and ghostly noon,

It marks the oblivion of time.

The shadow steals through its arc,

Still as a frosted breath,

Fitful, gleaming, and dark

As the cold frustration of death.

But where the shadow may fall,

Whether to hurry or stay,

It matters little at all

To those who come that way.

For this is the dial of them

That have forgotten the world,

No more through the mad day-dream

Of striving and reason hurled.

Their heart as a little child

Only remembers the worth

Of beauty and love and the wild

Dark peace of the elder earth.

It registers the morrows

Of lovers and winds and streams,

And the face of a thousand sorrows

At the postern gate of dreams.

When the first low laughter smote

Through Lilith, the mother of joy,

And died and revived from the throat

Of Helen, the harpstring of Troy,

And wandering on through the years,

From the sobbing rain and the sea,

Caught sound of the world’s gray tears

Or sense of the sun’s gold glee,

Whenever the wild control

Burned out to a mortal kiss,

And the shuddering storm-swept soul

Climbed to its acme of bliss,

The green-gold light of the dead

Stood still in purple space,

And a record blind and dread

Was graved on the dial’s face.

And once in a thousand years

Some youth who loved so well

The gods had loosed him from fears

In a vision of blameless hell,

Has gone to the dial to read

Those signs in the outland tongue,

Written beyond the need

Of the simple and the young.

For immortal life, they say,

Were his who, loving so,

Could explain the writing away

As a legend written in snow.

But always his innocent eyes

Were frozen into the stone.

From that awful first surprise

His soul must return alone.

In the morning there he lay

Dead in the sun’s warm gold.

And no man knows to this day

What the dim moondial told.

The sunburnt face in the willow shade

To the face in the water-mirror said,

“O deep mysterious face in the stream,

Art thou myself or am I thy dream?”

And the face deep down in the water’s side

To the face in the upper air replied,

“I am thy dream, them poor worn face,

And this is thy heart’s abiding place.

“Too much in the world, come back and be

Once more my dream-fellow with me,

“In the far-off untarnished years

Before thy furrows were washed with tears,

“Or ever thy serious creature eyes

Were aged with a mist of memories.

“Hast thou forgotten the long ago

In the garden where I used to flow,

“Among the hills, with the maple tree

And the roses blowing over me?—

“I who am now but a wraith of this river,

Forsaken of thee forever and ever,

“Who then was thine image fair, forecast

In the heart of the water rimpling past.

“Out in the wide of the summer zone

I lulled and allured thee apart and alone,

“The azure gleam and the golden croon

And the grass with the flaky roses strewn.

“There you would lie and lean above me,

The more you lingered the more to love me,

“Till I became, as the year grew old,

Thy fairest day-dream’s fashion and mould,

“Deep in the water twilight there,

Smiling, elusive, wonderful, fair,

“The beautiful visage of thy clear soul

Set in eternity’s limpid shoal,

“Thy spirit’s countenance, the trace

Of dawning God in the human face.

“And when yellow leaves came down

Through the silent mornings one by one

“To the frosty meadow, as they fell

Thy pondering heart said, ‘All is well;

“‘Aye, all is best, for I stake my life

Beyond the boundaries of strife,’

“And then thy feet returned no more,—

While years went over the garden floor,

“With frost and maple, with rose and dew,

In the world thy river wandered through;—

“Came never again to revive and recall

Thy youth from its water burial.

“But now thy face is battle-dark;

The strife of the world has graven a mark

“About the lips that are no more mine,

Too sweet to forget, too strong to repine.

“With the ends of the earth for thy garden now,

What solace and what reward hast thou?”

Then he of the earth’s sun-traversed side

To him of the under-world replied,

“O glad mysterious face in the stream,

My lost illusion, my summer dream,

“Thou fairer self of a fonder time,

A far imperishable clime,

“For thy dear sake I have fared alone

And fronted failure and housed with none.

“What youth was that, when the world was green,

In the lovely mythus Greek and clean,

“Was doomed with his flowery kin to bide,

A blown white star by the river side,

“And no more follow the sun, foot free,

Too long enamoured of one like thee?

“Shall God who abides in the patient flower,

The painted dust sustained by his power,

“Refuse to the wing of the dragonfly

His sanction over the open sky,—

“A frail detached and wandering thing

Torn loose from the blossomy life of spring?

“And this is man, the myriad one,

Dust’s flower and time’s ephemeron.

“And I who have followed the wander-list

For a glimpse of beauty, a wraith in the mist,

“Shall be spilt at last and return to peace,

As dust which the hands of the wind release.

“This is my solace and my reward,

Who have drained life’s dregs from a broken shard.”

Wise and grave was the water face,

A youth grown man in a little space;

While the wayworn face by the river side

Grew gentler-lipped and shadowy-eyed;

For he heard like a sea-horn summoning him

That sound from the world’s end vast and dim,

Where the river went wandering out so far

Through a gate in the mountain left ajar,

The sea birds love and the land birds flee,

The large bleak voice of the burly sea.

This laboring vast, Tellurian Galleon,

Riding at anchor off the orient sun,

Had broken its cable, and stood out to space.

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Galleon, ahoy, ahoy!

Old earth riding off the sun,

And straining at your cable as you ride

On the tide,

Battered laboring and vast,

In the blast

Of the hurricane that blows between the worlds,

Ahoy!

’Morning, shipmates! ’Drift and chartless?

Laded deep and rolling hard?

Never guessed, outworn and heartless,

There was land so close aboard?

Ice on every shroud and eyelet,

Rocking in the windy trough?

No more panic; Man’s your pilot;

Turns the flood, and we are off!

At the story of disaster,

From the continents of sleep,

I am come to be your master

And put out into the deep.

What tide current struck you hither,

Beating up the storm of years?

Where are those who stood to weather

These uncharted gulfs of tears?

Did your fellows all drive under

In the maelstrom of the sun,

While you only, for a wonder,

Rode the wash you could not shun?

We’ll crowd sail across the sea-line,—

Clear this harbor, reef and buoy,

Bowling down an open bee-line

For the latitudes of joy;

Till beyond the zones of sorrow,

Past griefs haven in the night,

Some large simpler world shall morrow

This pale region’s northern light.

Not a fear but all the sea-room,

Wherein time is but a bay,

Yet shall sparkle for our lee-room

In the vast Altrurian day.

And the dauntless seaworn spirit

Shall awake to know there are

What dominions to inherit,

Anchored off another star!

“Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.”

Wind of the dead men’s feet,

Blow down the empty street

Of this old city by the sea

With news for me!

Blow me beyond the grime

And pestilence of time!

I am too sick at heart to war

With failure any more.

Thy chill is in my bones;

The moonlight on the stones

Is pale, and palpable, and cold;

I am as one grown old.

I call from room to room

Through the deserted gloom;

The echoes are all words I know,

Lost in some long ago.

I prowl from door to door,

And find no comrade more.

The wolfish fear that children feel

Is snuffing at my heel.

I hear the hollow sound

Of a great ship coming round,

The thunder of tackle and the tread

Of sailors overhead.

That stormy-blown hulloo

Has orders for me, too.

I see thee, hand at mouth, and hark,

My captain of the dark.

O wind of the great East,

By whom we are released

From this strange dusty port to sail

Beyond our fellows’ hail,

Under the stars that keep

The entry of the deep,

Thy somber voice brings up the sea’s

Forgotten melodies;

And I have no more need

Of bread, or wine, or creed,

Bound for the colonies of time

Beyond the farthest prime.

Wind of the dead men’s feet,

Blow through the empty street!

The last adventurer am I,

Then, world, good-by!

The play is Life; and this round earth,

The narrow stage whereon

We act before an audience

Of actors dead and gone.

There is a figure in the wings

That never goes away,

And though I cannot see his face,

I shudder while I play.

His shadow looms behind me here,

Or capers at my side;

And when I mouth my lines in dread,

Those scornful lips deride.

Sometimes a hooting laugh breaks out,

And startles me alone;

While all my fellows, wondering

At my stage-fright, play on.

I fear that when my Exit comes,

I shall encounter there,

Stronger than fate, or time, or love,

And sterner than despair,

The Final Critic of the craft,

As stage tradition tells;

And yet—perhaps ’twill only be

The jester with his bells.

With the fall of the leaf comes the wolf, wolf, wolf,

The old red wolf at my door.

And my hateful yellow dwarf, with his hideous crooked laugh,

Cries “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at my door.

With the still of the frost comes the wolf, wolf, wolf,

The gaunt red wolf at my door.

He’s as tall as a Great Dane, with his grizzly russet mane;

And he haunts the silent woods at my door.

The scarlet maple leaves and the sweet ripe nuts,

May strew the forest glade at my door,

But my cringing cunning dwarf, with his slavered kacking laugh,

Cries “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at my door.

The violets may come, the pale wind-flowers blow,

And tremble by the stream at my door;

But my dwarf will never cease, until his last release,

From his “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at the door.

The long sweet April wind may woo the world from grief,

And tell the old tales at my door;

The rainbirds in the rain may plead their far refrain,

In the glad young year at my door;

And in the quiet sun, the silly partridge brood

In the red pine dust by my door;

Yet my squinting runty dwarf, with his lewd ungodly laugh,

Cries “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at my door.

I’m his master (and his slave, with his “Wolf, wolf, wolf!”)

As he squats in the sun at my door.

There morn and noon and night, with his cuddled low delight,

He watches for the wolf at my door.

The wind may parch his hide, or freeze him to the bone,

While the wolf walks far from the door;

Still year on year he sits, with his five unholy wits,

And watches for the wolf at the door.

But the fall of the leaf and the starting of the bud

Are the seasons he loves by the door;

Then his blood begins to rouse, this Caliban I house,

And it’s “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at the door.

In the dread lone of the night I can hear him snuff the sill;

Then it’s “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at the door;

His damned persistent bark, like a husky’s in the dark,

His “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at the door.

I have tried to rid the house of the misbegotten spawn;

But he skulks like a shadow at my door,

With the same uncanny glee as when he came to me

With his first cry of wolf at my door.

I curse him, and he leers; I kick him, and he whines;

But he never leaves the stone at my door.

Peep of day or set of sun, his croaking’s never done

Of the Red Wolf of Despair at my door.

But when the night is old, and the stars begin to fade,

And silence walks the path by my door,

Then is his dearest hour, his most unbridled power,

And low comes his “Wolf!” at the door.

I turn me in my sleep between the night and day,

While dreams throng the yard at my door.

In my strong soul aware of a grewsome terror there

Soon to knock with command at my door.

Is it the hollow voice of the census-taker Time

In his old idle round from door to door?

Or only the north wind, when all the leaves are thinned,

Come at last with his moan to my door?

I cannot guess nor tell; only it comes and comes,

As from a vaster world beyond my door,

From centuries of eld, the death of freedom knelled,

A host of mortal fears at my door.

Then I wake; and joy and youth and fame and love and bliss,

And all the good that ever passed my door,

Grow dim, and faint and fade, with the whole world unmade,

To perish as the summer at my door.

The crouching heart within me quails like a shuddering thing,

As I turn on my pillow to the door;

Then in the chill white dawn, when life is half withdrawn,

Comes the dream-curdling “Wolf!” at my door.

Only my yellow dwarf; (my servitor and lord!)

I hear him lift the latch of my door;

I see his wobbling chin and his unrepentant grin,

As he lets his oafship in at the door.

He is low and humped and foul, and shambles like an ape;

And stealthily he barricades the door,

Then lays his goblin head against my lonely bed,

With a “Wolf, wolf, wolf,” at the door!

I loathe him, but I feed him; I’ll tell you how it was

(Hear him now with his “Wolf!” at the door!)

That I ever took him in; he is—he is my kin,

And kin to the wolf at the door!

I loathe him, yet he lives; as God lets Satan live,

I suffer him to slumber at my door,

Till that long-looked-for time, that splendid sudden prime,

When Spring shall go in scarlet by my door.

That day I will arise, put my heel upon his throat,

And squirt his yellow blood upon the door;

Then watch him dying there, like a spider in his lair,

With a “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at my door.

The great white morning sun shall walk the earth again,

And the children return to my door,

I shall hear their merry laugh, and forget my buried dwarf,

As a tale that is told at the door.

Far from the quiet woods the gaunt red wolf shall flee,

As a cur that is stoned from the door;

And God’s great peace come back along the lonely track,

To fill the golden year at my door.