Children of the Night

     Here there is death.  But even here, they say, —
     Here where the dull sun shines this afternoon
     As desolate as ever the dead moon
     Did glimmer on dead Sardis, — men were gay;
     And there were little children here to play,
     With small soft hands that once did keep in tune
     The strings that stretch from heaven, till too soon
     The change came, and the music passed away.

     Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things, —
     No life, no love, no children, and no men;
     And over the forgotten place there clings
     The strange and unrememberable light
     That is in dreams.  The music failed, and then
     God frowned, and shut the village from His sight.

     My northern pines are good enough for me,
     But there's a town my memory uprears —
     A town that always like a friend appears,
     And always in the sunrise by the sea.
     And over it, somehow, there seems to be
     A downward flash of something new and fierce,
     That ever strives to clear, but never clears
     The dimness of a charmed antiquity.

       I

     Just as I wonder at the twofold screen
     Of twisted innocence that you would plait
     For eyes that uncourageously await
     The coming of a kingdom that has been,
     So do I wonder what God's love can mean
     To you that all so strangely estimate
     The purpose and the consequent estate
     Of one short shuddering step to the Unseen.

     No, I have not your backward faith to shrink
     Lone-faring from the doorway of God's home
     To find Him in the names of buried men;
     Nor your ingenious recreance to think
     We cherish, in the life that is to come,
     The scattered features of dead friends again.

       II

     Never until our souls are strong enough
     To plunge into the crater of the Scheme —
     Triumphant in the flash there to redeem
     Love's handsel and forevermore to slough,
     Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough
     And reptile skins of us whereon we set
     The stigma of scared years — are we to get
     Where atoms and the ages are one stuff.

     Nor ever shall we know the cursed waste
     Of life in the beneficence divine
     Of starlight and of sunlight and soul-shine
     That we have squandered in sin's frail distress,
     Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste,
     The mead of Thought's prophetic endlessness.

     I did not think that I should find them there
     When I came back again; but there they stood,
     As in the days they dreamed of when young blood
     Was in their cheeks and women called them fair.
     Be sure, they met me with an ancient air, —
     And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
     About them; but the men were just as good,
     And just as human as they ever were.

     And you that ache so much to be sublime,
     And you that feed yourselves with your descent,
     What comes of all your visions and your fears?
     Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,
     Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,
     Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.

     At first I thought there was a superfine
     Persuasion in his face; but the free glow
     That filled it when he stopped and cried, "Hollo!"
     Shone joyously, and so I let it shine.
     He said his name was Fleming Helphenstine,
     But be that as it may; — I only know
     He talked of this and that and So-and-So,
     And laughed and chaffed like any friend of mine.

     But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,
     And I looked hard at him; and there we gazed
     With a strained shame that made us cringe and wince:
     Then, with a wordless clogged apology
     That sounded half confused and half amazed,
     He dodged, — and I have never seen him since.

     With searching feet, through dark circuitous ways,
     I plunged and stumbled; round me, far and near,
     Quaint hordes of eyeless phantoms did appear,
     Twisting and turning in a bootless chase, —
     When, like an exile given by God's grace
     To feel once more a human atmosphere,
     I caught the world's first murmur, large and clear,
     Flung from a singing river's endless race.

     Then, through a magic twilight from below,
     I heard its grand sad song as in a dream:
     Life's wild infinity of mirth and woe
     It sang me; and, with many a changing gleam,
     Across the music of its onward flow
     I saw the cottage lights of Wessex beam.

     The man who cloaked his bitterness within
     This winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,
     God never gave to look with common eyes
     Upon a world of anguish and of sin:
     His brother was the branded man of Lynn;
     And there are woven with his jollities
     The nameless and eternal tragedies
     That render hope and hopelessness akin.

     We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feel
     A still chord sorrow-swept, — a weird unrest;
     And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,
     As if the very ghost of mirth were dead —
     As if the joys of time to dreams had fled,
     Or sailed away with Ines to the West.

     "Dear brother, dearest friend, when I am dead,
     And you shall see no more this face of mine,
     Let nothing but red roses be the sign
     Of the white life I lost for him," she said;
     "No, do not curse him, — pity him instead;
     Forgive him! — forgive me! . . God's anodyne
     For human hate is pity; and the wine
     That makes men wise, forgiveness.  I have read
     Love's message in love's murder, and I die."
     And so they laid her just where she would lie, —
     Under red roses.  Red they bloomed and fell;
     But when flushed autumn and the snows went by,
     And spring came, — lo, from every bud's green shell
     Burst a white blossom.  — Can love reason why?

     I pray you not, Leuconoe, to pore
     With unpermitted eyes on what may be
     Appointed by the gods for you and me,
     Nor on Chaldean figures any more.
     'T were infinitely better to implore
     The present only: — whether Jove decree
     More winters yet to come, or whether he
     Make even this, whose hard, wave-eaten shore
     Shatters the Tuscan seas to-day, the last —
     Be wise withal, and rack your wine, nor fill
     Your bosom with large hopes; for while I sing,
     The envious close of time is narrowing; —
     So seize the day, — or ever it be past, —
     And let the morrow come for what it will.

     Because he was a butcher and thereby
     Did earn an honest living (and did right),
     I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
     Was any more a brute than you or I;
     For when they told him that his wife must die,
     He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
     And cried like a great baby half that night,
     And made the women cry to see him cry.

     And after she was dead, and he had paid
     The singers and the sexton and the rest,
     He packed a lot of things that she had made
     Most mournfully away in an old chest
     Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
     In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

     Alone, remote, nor witting where I went,
     I found an altar builded in a dream —
     A fiery place, whereof there was a gleam
     So swift, so searching, and so eloquent
     Of upward promise, that love's murmur, blent
     With sorrow's warning, gave but a supreme
     Unending impulse to that human stream
     Whose flood was all for the flame's fury bent.

     Alas! I said, — the world is in the wrong.
     But the same quenchless fever of unrest
     That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng
     Thrilled me, and I awoke . . . and was the same
     Bewildered insect plunging for the flame
     That burns, and must burn somehow for the best.

     Whenever I go by there nowadays
     And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass,
     The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,
     I seem to be afraid of the old place;
     And something stiffens up and down my face,
     For all the world as if I saw the ghost
     Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host,
     With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.

     The Tavern has a story, but no man
     Can tell us what it is.  We only know
     That once long after midnight, years ago,
     A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town,
     Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran
     That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.

     Oh for a poet — for a beacon bright
     To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray;
     To spirit back the Muses, long astray,
     And flush Parnassus with a newer light;
     To put these little sonnet-men to flight
     Who fashion, in a shrewd, mechanic way,
     Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,
     To vanish in irrevocable night.

     What does it mean, this barren age of ours?
     Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,
     The seasons, and the sunset, as before.
     What does it mean?  Shall not one bard arise
     To wrench one banner from the western skies,
     And mark it with his name forevermore?

     Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
     Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, —
     But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
     With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
     In spite of all fine science disavows,
     Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
     There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
     Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

     Whether or not we read him, we can feel
     From time to time the vigor of his name
     Against us like a finger for the shame
     And emptiness of what our souls reveal
     In books that are as altars where we kneel
     To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

     I cannot find my way:  there is no star
     In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
     And there is not a whisper in the air
     Of any living voice but one so far
     That I can hear it only as a bar
     Of lost, imperial music, played when fair
     And angel fingers wove, and unaware,
     Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.

     No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,
     For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,
     The black and awful chaos of the night;
     For through it all, — above, beyond it all, —
     I know the far-sent message of the years,
     I feel the coming glory of the Light!

     If ever I am old, and all alone,
     I shall have killed one grief, at any rate;
     For then, thank God, I shall not have to wait
     Much longer for the sheaves that I have sown.
     The devil only knows what I have done,
     But here I am, and here are six or eight
     Good friends, who most ingenuously prate
     About my songs to such and such a one.

     But everything is all askew to-night, —
     As if the time were come, or almost come,
     For their untenanted mirage of me
     To lose itself and crumble out of sight,
     Like a tall ship that floats above the foam
     A little while, and then breaks utterly.

     The master and the slave go hand in hand,
     Though touch be lost.  The poet is a slave,
     And there be kings do sorrowfully crave
     The joyance that a scullion may command.
     But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understand
     The mission of his bondage, or the grave
     May clasp his bones, or ever he shall save
     The perfect word that is the poet's wand!

     The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes
     Are for Thought's purest gold the jewel-stones;
     But shapes and echoes that are never done
     Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes
     Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones
     The crash of battles that are never won.

     Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
     To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
     The uplands for the fens, and rioted
     Like a sick satyr with doom's worshippers?
     Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse
     To tell the story of the life he led.
     Let the man go:  let the dead flesh be dead,
     And let the worms be its biographers.

     Song sloughs away the sin to find redress
     In art's complete remembrance:  nothing clings
     For long but laurel to the stricken brow
     That felt the Muse's finger; nothing less
     Than hell's fulfilment of the end of things
     Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.

     When we can all so excellently give
     The measure of love's wisdom with a blow, —
     Why can we not in turn receive it so,
     And end this murmur for the life we live?
     And when we do so frantically strive
     To win strange faith, why do we shun to know
     That in love's elemental over-glow
     God's wholeness gleams with light superlative?

     Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,
     Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, —
     Or anything God ever made that grows, —
     Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,
     Till you can read, as on Belshazzar's wall,
     The glory of eternal partnership!

     There is a drear and lonely tract of hell
     From all the common gloom removed afar:
     A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,
     Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.
     I walked among them and I knew them well:
     Men I had slandered on life's little star
     For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar
     Upon their brows of woe ineffable.

     But as I went majestic on my way,
     Into the dark they vanished, one by one,
     Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day,
     The dream of all my glory was undone, —
     And, with a fool's importunate dismay,
     I heard the dead men singing in the sun.

     Look you, Dominie; look you, and listen!
     Look in my face, first; search every line there;
     Mark every feature, — chin, lip, and forehead!
     Look in my eyes, and tell me the lesson
     You read there; measure my nose, and tell me
     Where I am wanting!  A man's nose, Dominie,
     Is often the cast of his inward spirit;
     So mark mine well.  But why do you smile so?
     Pity, or what?  Is it written all over,
     This face of mine, with a brute's confession?
     Nothing but sin there? nothing but hell-scars?
     Or is it because there is something better —
     A glimmer of good, maybe — or a shadow
     Of something that's followed me down from childhood —
     Followed me all these years and kept me,
     Spite of my slips and sins and follies,
     Spite of my last red sin, my murder, —
     Just out of hell?  Yes? something of that kind?
     And you smile for that?  You're a good man, Dominie,
     The one good man in the world who knows me, —
     My one good friend in a world that mocks me,
     Here in this hard stone cage.  But I leave it
     To-morrow.  To-morrow!  My God! am I crying?
     Are these things tears?  Tears!  What! am I frightened?
     I, who swore I should go to the scaffold
     With big strong steps, and —  No more.  I thank you,
     But no — I am all right now!  No! — listen!
     I am here to be hanged; to be hanged to-morrow
     At six o'clock, when the sun is rising.
     And why am I here?  Not a soul can tell you
     But this poor shivering thing before you,
     This fluttering wreck of the man God made him,
     For God knows what wild reason.  Hear me,
     And learn from my lips the truth of my story.
     There's nothing strange in what I shall tell you,
     Nothing mysterious, nothing unearthly, —
     But damnably human, — and you shall hear it.
     Not one of those little black lawyers had guessed it;
     The judge, with his big bald head, never knew it;
     And the jury (God rest their poor souls!) never dreamed it.
     Once there were three in the world who could tell it;
     Now there are two.  There'll be two to-morrow, —
     You, my friend, and —  But there's the story: —

     When I was a boy the world was heaven.
     I never knew then that the men and the women
     Who petted and called me a brave big fellow
     Were ever less happy than I; but wisdom —
     Which comes with the years, you know — soon showed me
     The secret of all my glittering childhood,
     The broken key to the fairies' castle
     That held my life in the fresh, glad season
     When I was the king of the earth.  Then slowly —
     And yet so swiftly! — there came the knowledge
     That the marvellous life I had lived was my life;
     That the glorious world I had loved was my world;
     And that every man, and every woman,
     And every child was a different being,
     Wrought with a different heat, and fired
     With passions born of a single spirit;
     That the pleasure I felt was not their pleasure,
     Nor my sorrow — a kind of nameless pity
     For something, I knew not what — their sorrow.
     And thus was I taught my first hard lesson, —
     The lesson we suffer the most in learning:
     That a happy man is a man forgetful
     Of all the torturing ills around him.
     When or where I first met the woman
     I cherished and made my wife, no matter.
     Enough to say that I found her and kept her
     Here in my heart with as pure a devotion
     As ever Christ felt for his brothers.  Forgive me
     For naming His name in your patient presence;
     But I feel my words, and the truth I utter
     Is God's own truth.  I loved that woman, —
     Not for her face, but for something fairer,
     Something diviner, I thought, than beauty:
     I loved the spirit — the human something
     That seemed to chime with my own condition,
     And make soul-music when we were together;
     And we were never apart, from the moment
     My eyes flashed into her eyes the message
     That swept itself in a quivering answer
     Back through my strange lost being.  My pulses
     Leapt with an aching speed; and the measure
     Of this great world grew small and smaller,
     Till it seemed the sky and the land and the ocean
     Closed at last in a mist all golden
     Around us two.  And we stood for a season
     Like gods outflung from chaos, dreaming
     That we were the king and the queen of the fire
     That reddened the clouds of love that held us
     Blind to the new world soon to be ours —
     Ours to seize and sway.  The passion
     Of that great love was a nameless passion,
     Bright as the blaze of the sun at noonday,
     Wild as the flames of hell; but, mark you,
     Never a whit less pure for its fervor.
     The baseness in me (for I was human)
     Burned like a worm, and perished; and nothing
     Was left me then but a soul that mingled
     Itself with hers, and swayed and shuddered
     In fearful triumph.  When I consider
     That helpless love and the cursed folly
     That wrecked my life for the sake of a woman
     Who broke with a laugh the chains of her marriage
     (Whatever the word may mean), I wonder
     If all the woe was her sin, or whether
     The chains themselves were enough to lead her
     In love's despite to break them. . . .  Sinners
     And saints — I say — are rocked in the cradle,
     But never are known till the will within them
     Speaks in its own good time.  So I foster
     Even to-night for the woman who wronged me,
     Nothing of hate, nor of love, but a feeling
     Of still regret; for the man —  But hear me,
     And judge for yourself: —

                                 For a time the seasons
     Changed and passed in a sweet succession
     That seemed to me like an endless music:
     Life was a rolling psalm, and the choirs
     Of God were glad for our love.  I fancied
     All this, and more than I dare to tell you
     To-night, — yes, more than I dare to remember;
     And then — well, the music stopped.  There are moments
     In all men's lives when it stops, I fancy, —
     Or seems to stop, — till it comes to cheer them
     Again with a larger sound.  The curtain
     Of life just then is lifted a little
     To give to their sight new joys — new sorrows —
     Or nothing at all, sometimes.  I was watching
     The slow, sweet scenes of a golden picture,
     Flushed and alive with a long delusion
     That made the murmur of home, when I shuddered
     And felt like a knife that awful silence
     That comes when the music goes — forever.
     The truth came over my life like a darkness
     Over a forest where one man wanders,
     Worse than alone.  For a time I staggered
     And stumbled on with a weak persistence
     After the phantom of hope that darted
     And dodged like a frightened thing before me,
     To quit me at last, and vanish.  Nothing
     Was left me then but the curse of living
     And bearing through all my days the fever
     And thirst of a poisoned love.  Were I stronger,
     Or weaker, perhaps my scorn had saved me,
     Given me strength to crush my sorrow
     With hate for her and the world that praised her —
     To have left her, then and there — to have conquered
     That old false life with a new and a wiser, —
     Such things are easy in words.  You listen,
     And frown, I suppose, that I never mention
     That beautiful word, FORGIVE! — I forgave her
     First of all; and I praised kind Heaven
     That I was a brave, clean man to do it;
     And then I tried to forget.  Forgiveness!
     What does it mean when the one forgiven
     Shivers and weeps and clings and kisses
     The credulous fool that holds her, and tells him
     A thousand things of a good man's mercy,
     And then slips off with a laugh and plunges
     Back to the sin she has quit for a season,
     To tell him that hell and the world are better
     For her than a prophet's heaven?  Believe me,
     The love that dies ere its flames are wasted
     In search of an alien soul is better,
     Better by far than the lonely passion
     That burns back into the heart that feeds it.
     For I loved her still, and the more she mocked me, —
     Fooled with her endless pleading promise
     Of future faith, — the more I believed her
     The penitent thing she seemed; and the stronger
     Her choking arms and her small hot kisses
     Bound me and burned my brain to pity,
     The more she grew to the heavenly creature
     That brightened the life I had lost forever.
     The truth was gone somehow for the moment;
     The curtain fell for a time; and I fancied
     We were again like gods together,
     Loving again with the old glad rapture.
     But scenes like these, too often repeated,
     Failed at last, and her guile was wasted.
     I made an end of her shrewd caresses
     And told her a few straight words.  She took them
     Full at their worth — and the farce was over.
          .    .    .    .    .
     At first my dreams of the past upheld me,
     But they were a short support:  the present
     Pushed them away, and I fell.  The mission
     Of life (whatever it was) was blasted;
     My game was lost.  And I met the winner
     Of that foul deal as a sick slave gathers
     His painful strength at the sight of his master;
     And when he was past I cursed him, fearful
     Of that strange chance which makes us mighty
     Or mean, or both.  I cursed him and hated
     The stones he pressed with his heel; I followed
     His easy march with a backward envy,
     And cursed myself for the beast within me.
     But pride is the master of love, and the vision
     Of those old days grew faint and fainter:
     The counterfeit wife my mercy sheltered
     Was nothing now but a woman, — a woman
     Out of my way and out of my nature.
     My battle with blinded love was over,
     My battle with aching pride beginning.
     If I was the loser at first, I wonder
     If I am the winner now! . . .  I doubt it.
     My life is a losing game; and to-morrow —
     To-morrow! — Christ! did I say to-morrow? . . .
     Is your brandy good for death? . . .  There, — listen: —

     When love goes out, and a man is driven
     To shun mankind for the scars that make him
     A joke for all chattering tongues, he carries
     A double burden.  The woes I suffered
     After that hard betrayal made me
     Pity, at first, all breathing creatures
     On this bewildered earth.  I studied
     Their faces and made for myself the story
     Of all their scattered lives.  Like brothers
     And sisters they seemed to me then; and I nourished
     A stranger friendship wrought in my fancy
     Between those people and me.  But somehow,
     As time went on, there came queer glances
     Out of their eyes, and the shame that stung me
     Harassed my pride with a crazed impression
     That every face in the surging city
     Was turned to me; and I saw sly whispers,
     Now and then, as I walked and wearied
     My wasted life twice over in bearing
     With all my sorrow the sorrows of others, —
     Till I found myself their fool.  Then I trembled, —
     A poor scared thing, — and their prying faces
     Told me the ghastly truth:  they were laughing
     At me and my fate.  My God, I could feel it —
     That laughter!  And then the children caught it;
     And I, like a struck dog, crept and listened.
     And then when I met the man who had weakened
     A woman's love to his own desire,
     It seemed to me that all hell were laughing
     In fiendish concert!  I was their victim —
     And his, and hate's.  And there was the struggle!
     As long as the earth we tread holds something
     A tortured heart can love, the meaning
     Of life is not wholly blurred; but after
     The last loved thing in the world has left us,
     We know the triumph of hate.  The glory
     Of good goes out forever; the beacon
     Of sin is the light that leads us downward —
     Down to the fiery end.  The road runs
     Right through hell; and the souls that follow
     The cursed ways where its windings lead them
     Suffer enough, I say, to merit
     All grace that a God can give. —  The fashion
     Of our belief is to lift all beings
     Born for a life that knows no struggle
     In sin's tight snares to eternal glory —
     All apart from the branded millions
     Who carry through life their faces graven
     With sure brute scars that tell the story
     Of their foul, fated passions.  Science
     Has yet no salve to smooth or soften
     The cradle-scars of a tyrant's visage;
     No drug to purge from the vital essence
     Of souls the sleeping venom.  Virtue
     May flower in hell, when its roots are twisted
     And wound with the roots of vice; but the stronger
     Never is known till there comes that battle
     With sin to prove the victor.  Perilous
     Things are these demons we call our passions:
     Slaves are we of their roving fancies,
     Fools of their devilish glee. —  You think me,
     I know, in this maundering way designing
     To lighten the load of my guilt and cast it
     Half on the shoulders of God.  But hear me!
     I'm partly a man, — for all my weakness, —
     If weakness it were to stand and murder
     Before men's eyes the man who had murdered
     Me, and driven my burning forehead
     With horns for the world to laugh at.  Trust me!
     And try to believe my words but a portion
     Of what God's purpose made me!  The coward
     Within me cries for this; and I beg you
     Now, as I come to the end, to remember
     That women and men are on earth to travel
     All on a different road.  Hereafter
     The roads may meet. . . .  I trust in something —
     I know not what. . . .

                             Well, this was the way of it: —
     Stung with the shame and the secret fury
     That comes to the man who has thrown his pittance
     Of self at a traitor's feet, I wandered
     Weeks and weeks in a baffled frenzy,
     Till at last the devil spoke.  I heard him,
     And laughed at the love that strove to touch me, —
     The dead, lost love; and I gripped the demon
     Close to my breast, and held him, praising
     The fates and the furies that gave me the courage
     To follow his wild command.  Forgetful
     Of all to come when the work was over, —
     There came to me then no stony vision
     Of these three hundred days, — I cherished
     An awful joy in my brain.  I pondered
     And weighed the thing in my mind, and gloried
     In life to think that I was to conquer
     Death at his own dark door, — and chuckled
     To think of it done so cleanly.  One evening
     I knew that my time had come.  I shuddered
     A little, but rather for doubt than terror,
     And followed him, — led by the nameless devil
     I worshipped and called my brother.  The city
     Shone like a dream that night; the windows
     Flashed with a piercing flame, and the pavements
     Pulsed and swayed with a warmth — or something
     That seemed so then to my feet — and thrilled me
     With a quick, dizzy joy; and the women
     And men, like marvellous things of magic,
     Floated and laughed and sang by my shoulder,
     Sent with a wizard motion.  Through it
     And over and under it all there sounded
     A murmur of life, like bees; and I listened
     And laughed again to think of the flower
     That grew, blood-red, for me! . . .  This fellow
     Was one of the popular sort who flourish
     Unruffled where gods would fall.  For a conscience
     He carried a snug deceit that made him
     The man of the time and the place, whatever
     The time or the place might be.  Were he sounding,
     With a genial craft that cloaked its purpose,
     Nigh to itself, the depth of a woman
     Fooled with his brainless art, or sending
     The midnight home with songs and bottles, —
     The cad was there, and his ease forever
     Shone with the smooth and slippery polish
     That tells the snake.  That night he drifted
     Into an up-town haunt and ordered —
     Whatever it was — with a soft assurance
     That made me mad as I stood behind him,
     Gripping his death, and waited.  Coward,
     I think, is the name the world has given
     To men like me; but I'll swear I never
     Thought of my own disgrace when I shot him —
     Yes, in the back, — I know it, I know it
     Now; but what if I do? . . .  As I watched him
     Lying there dead in the scattered sawdust,
     Wet with a day's blown froth, I noted
     That things were still; that the walnut tables,
     Where men but a moment before were sitting,
     Were gone; that a screen of something around me
     Shut them out of my sight.  But the gilded
     Signs of a hundred beers and whiskeys
     Flashed from the walls above, and the mirrors
     And glasses behind the bar were lighted
     In some strange way, and into my spirit
     A thousand shafts of terrible fire
     Burned like death, and I fell.  The story
     Of what came then, you know.

                                   But tell me,
     What does the whole thing mean?  What are we, —
     Slaves of an awful ignorance? puppets
     Pulled by a fiend? or gods, without knowing it?
     Do we shut from ourselves our own salvation, —
     Or what do we do!  I tell you, Dominie,
     There are times in the lives of us poor devils
     When heaven and hell get mixed.  Though conscience
     May come like a whisper of Christ to warn us
     Away from our sins, it is lost or laughed at, —
     And then we fall.  And for all who have fallen —
     Even for him — I hold no malice,
     Nor much compassion:  a mightier mercy
     Than mine must shrive him. —  And I — I am going
     Into the light? — or into the darkness?
     Why do I sit through these sickening hours,
     And hope?  Good God! are they hours? — hours?
     Yes!  I am done with days.  And to-morrow —
     We two may meet!  To-morrow! —  To-morrow! . . .

     The master-songs are ended, and the man
     That sang them is a name.  And so is God
     A name; and so is love, and life, and death,
     And everything.  But we, who are too blind
     To read what we have written, or what faith
     Has written for us, do not understand:
     We only blink, and wonder.

     Last night it was the song that was the man,
     But now it is the man that is the song.
     We do not hear him very much to-day:
     His piercing and eternal cadence rings
     Too pure for us — too powerfully pure,
     Too lovingly triumphant, and too large;
     But there are some that hear him, and they know
     That he shall sing to-morrow for all men,
     And that all time shall listen.

     The master-songs are ended?  Rather say
     No songs are ended that are ever sung,
     And that no names are dead names.  When we write
     Men's letters on proud marble or on sand,
     We write them there forever.

     Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,
     Ye that have eyes for all man's agony,
     Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, —
     Look with a just regard,
     And with an even grace,
     Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,
     Here on a suffering world where men grow old
     And wander like sad shadows till, at last,
     Out of the flare of life,
     Out of the whirl of years,
     Into the mist they go,
     Into the mist of death.

     O shades of you that loved him long before
     The cruel threads of that black sail were spun,
     May loyal arms and ancient welcomings
     Receive him once again
     Who now no longer moves
     Here in this flickering dance of changing days,
     Where a battle is lost and won for a withered wreath,
     And the black master Death is over all,
     To chill with his approach,
     To level with his touch,
     The reigning strength of youth,
     The fluttered heart of age.

     Woe for the fateful day when Delphi's word was lost —
     Woe for the loveless prince of Aethra's line!
     Woe for a father's tears and the curse of a king's release —
     Woe for the wings of pride and the shafts of doom! —
     And thou, the saddest wind
     That ever blew from Crete,
     Sing the fell tidings back to that thrice unhappy ship! —
     Sing to the western flame,
     Sing to the dying foam,
     A dirge for the sundered years and a dirge for the years to be!

     Better his end had been as the end of a cloudless day,
     Bright, by the word of Zeus, with a golden star,
     Wrought of a golden fame, and flung to the central sky,
     To gleam on a stormless tomb for evermore: —
     Whether or not there fell
     To the touch of an alien hand
     The sheen of his purple robe and the shine of his diadem,
     Better his end had been
     To die as an old man dies, —
     But the fates are ever the fates, and a crown is ever a crown.

     Come away! come away! there's a frost along the marshes,
     And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;
     There's a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
     Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.
     There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn
     Put off the summer's languor with a touch that made us glad
     For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow,
     To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.

          Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,
          Calling us to come to them, and roam no more.
          Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,
          There's an old song calling us to come!
     Come away! come away! — for the scenes we leave behind us
     Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that's young forever;
     And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,
     That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.
     The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,
     And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;
     But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us
     In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman's eyes.

          Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us —
          Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: —
          Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us,
          And a warm hearth waits for us within.
     Come away! come away! — or the roving-fiend will hold us,
     And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
     There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
     There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
     So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
     For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: —
     The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
     And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.

          Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us —
          Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
          That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
          And the long fall wind on the lake.