Nocturne
The sun that hurt his lovers from on high
Is fallen; she more merciful is nigh,
The blessèd one whose beauty's even glow
Gave never wound to any shepherd's eye.
Above our lonely boat in shallows drifting,
Alone her plaintive form ascends the sky.
Oh, sing! the water-golds are deepening now,
Almost a hush is on the aspen bough;
Her light caresseth thine, as saint to saint
Sweet interchanged adorings may allow:
Sing, Eunoë, that lily throat uplifting:
They are so like, the holy Moon and thou!
To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Young father-poet! much in you I praise
Adventure high, romantic, vehement,
All with inviolate honour sealed and blent
To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays;
Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays;
And most, that verse of strict imperious bent
Heard sweetly as from some old harper's tent,
And clanging in the listener's brain for days.
At Framlingham to-night if there should be
No guest beyond a sea-born wind that sighs,
No guard save moonlight's crossed and trailing spears,
And I, your pilgrim, call you, Oh, let me
In at the gate! and smile into the eyes
That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.
Planting the Poplar
Because thou'rt not an oak
To breast the thunder-stroke,
Or flamy-fruited yew
Darker than Time, how few
Of birds or men or kine
Will love this throne of thine,
Scant Poplar, without shade
Inhospitably made!
Yet, branches never parted
From their straight secret bole,
Yet, sap too single-hearted!
Prosper as my soul.
In loneliness, in quaint
Perpetual constraint,
In gallant poverty,
A girt and hooded tree,
See if against the gale
Our leafage can avail:
Lithe, equal, naked, true,
Rise up as spirits do,
And be a spirit crying
Before the folk that dream!
My slender early-dying
Poplar, by the stream.
To One who would not Spare Himself
A censer playing from a heart all fire,
A flushing, racing, singing mountain stream
Thou art; and dear to us of dull desire
In thy far-going dream.
Full to the grave be thy too fleeting way,
And full thereafter: few that know thee best
Will grudge it so, for neither thou nor they
Can mate thy soul with rest.
God put thee from the laws of Time adrift.
Lo, He who moves without delay or haste,
Far less may love the sheaves of ghostly thrift,
Than some diviner waste.
Be mine to ride in joy, ere thou art gone,
The flame, the torrent, which is one with thee!
Saint, from this pool of dying sweep us on
Where Life must long to be.
Winter Peace
April seemed a restless pain,
June a phantom in the rain;
Weary Autumn without grain
Turned her home, full of tears.
O my year, the most in vain
Of the years!
While the furrowed field was red,
While the roses rioted,
While a leaf was left to shed,
There was storm in the air.
Now that troubled heart is dead,
All is fair.
'Neath a glow of copper-grey
Spreads the stubble far away,
And the hilltop cedars play
Interludes in accord,
And the sun adorns the day
Like a sword.
Even, usual, and slow,
Blue enchanted breakers go
Over carmine reefs in snow,
With a sail in the lee:
There's the godhead that we know
On the sea.
Ah, let be a promise vast
So mysteriously downcast!
I will love this year that passed
To her grave in the wild,
And is clear of stain at last
As a child.
Sleep
O glorious tide, O hospitable tide
On whose mysterious breast my head hath lain,
Lest I, all eased of wounds and washed of stain
Through holy hours, be yet unsatisfied,
Loose me betimes: for in my soul abide
Urgings of memory, and exile's pain
Weighs on me, as the spirit of one slain
May throb for the old strife wherein he died.
Often and evermore, across the sea
Of dark and dreams, to fatherlands of Day,
Oh, speed me: as that outworn King erewhile
By kind Phæacians borne ashore, so me,
Thy loving healèd ward, fail not to lay
Beneath the olive boughs of mine own isle.
Writ in my Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion
How life hath cheapen'd, and how blank
The Worlde is! like a fen
Where long ago unstainèd sank
The starrie gentlemen:
Since Marston Moor and Newbury drank
King Charles his gentlemen.
If Fate in any air accords
What Fate deny'd, Oh, then
I ask to be among your Swordes,
My joyous gentlemen;
Towards Honour's heaven to goe, and towards
King Charles his gentlemen!
In a February Garden
One rose till after snowtime
O'erlooked the sodden grass;
Now crocuses are twenty
With spear and torch a plenty,
To keep our Candlemas.
So thin that winter greyness,
So light that sleep forlorn,
No seventh week uncloses
Between the martyr roses
And crocus newly born.
All doubt is hushed for ever,
Confuted without sound,
All ruin featly ended,
When bulbs begin their splendid
Gay muster overground;
And mid the golden heralds
That ride the icy breeze,
Man, too, divinely vernal,
Storms into life eternal
Victoriously with these.
O Beauty, O Persistence
Ineffable and strong!
Would we had borne with Sorrow
In her unlasting morrow:
And Death was not for long.
A Valediction
R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV
When from the vista of the Book I shrink,
From lauded pens that earn ignoble wage
Begetting nothing joyous, nothing sage,
Nor keep with Shakespeare's use one golden link;
When heavily my sanguine spirits sink
To read too plain on each impostor page
Only of kings the broken lineage,—
Well for my peace if then on thee I think,
Louis, our priest of letters, and our knight
With whose familiar baldric Hope is girt,
From whose young hands she bears the Grail away.
All glad, all great! Truer because thou wert,
I am and must be; and in thy known light
Go down to dust, content with this my day.
A Footpath Morality
Along the Hills, height unto height
Tosses the dappled light,
Rills in a torrent flow,
And cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow.
Young winds nothing can quell
Scale the wild-chestnut citadel,
Again to make
Its thousand faëry white pagodas shake.
Up many a lane
The blue vervain
A coverlid hath featly spread
For the bees' bed,
That those tired sylvan thieves
May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves.
And by to-morrow morn
Bright agrimony, in the thickets born,
Will high uphold
Each cinquefoil of plain gold;
Dogwood in white will hood herself apace,
And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace,
And copper pimpernel, true as a clock,
On some waste common, by a rock
Her small dark-centred wheel draw in
Long, long ere dusk begin.
This day
Of infinite May
Is far more fitly yours than ours,
O spirit-bodied flowers!
What heart disordered sore
Comes through the greenwood door,
Shall for your sake
Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break;
And hearts beneath no ban
Will in your sight some penance do for man,
Poor lagging man, content to be
Sick with the impact of eternity,
Who might keep step with you in the low grass,
Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass!
Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown
To flourish fair and fall fair, and be strewn
Deep in that Will of God, where blend
The origin of beauty and the end.
The Light of the House
Beyond the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live;
You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive;
You linger on the stair: Love's lonely pulses leap!
The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep.
Here, after all the years, you keep the heirdom still;
The youth and joy in you achieve their olden will,
Unbidden, undeterred, with waking sense adored;
And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord.
To every inmate heart, confirmed in cheer you brought,
Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought,
And to a wonted guest (not awestruck heretofore),
The sunshine that was you floods all the open door.
An Outdoor Litany
Donec misereatur nostri.
The spur is red upon the briar,
The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;
The wind shakes out the coloured fire
From lamps a-row on the sycamore;
The bluebird with his flitting note
Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;
The mink is busy; herds again
Go hillward in the honeyed rain;
The midges meet. I cry to Thee
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me!
Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
The lined gulls in the offing ride;
Along an edge of marshy ground
The shad-bush enters like a bride.
Yon little clouds are washed of care
That climb the blue New England air,
And almost merrily withal
The hyla tunes at evenfall
His oboe in a mossy tree.
So too,
Am I not Thine? Arise, undo
This fear Thou hast forgotten me.
Happy the vernal rout that come
To their due offices to-day,
And strange, if in Thy mercy's sum,
Excluded man alone decay.
I ask no triumph, ask no joy,
Save leave to live, in law's employ.
As to a weed, to me but give
Thy sap! lest aye inoperative
Here in the Pit my strength shall be:
And still
Help me endure the Pit, until
Thou wilt not have forgotten me.
Of Joan’s Youth
I would unto my fair restore
A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more,
On our sad shore,
The carmine grape, the moth's auroral wing.
Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose:
For so, alas,
With Love, alas,
With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.
In a Brecon Valley
Patulis ubi vallibus errans
Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater.
H.V. Ad Posteros.
I
I followed thee, wild stream of Paradise,
White Usk, for ever showering the sunned bee
In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree;
And all along had magical surmise
Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies,
As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea,
Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly
The giant breakers form, and fall, and rise.
Above thy poet's dust, by yonder yew,
Ere distance perished, ere a star began,
His clear monastic measure, heard of few,
Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran;
And thou to me wert dear, because I knew
The God who made thee gracious, and the man.
II
If, by that second lover's power controlled,
In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o'erfills
Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils,
From distance unto distance trailing gold;
If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold,
Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills
Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills
Diviner run thy shallows than of old;—
If intellectual these, Oh! name my Vaughan
Creator too: and close his memory keep
Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn
Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep;
A play of thought more mystic than the dawn,
And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.
A Song of Far Travel
Many a time some drowsy oar from the nearer bank invited,
Crossed a narrow stream, and bore in among the reeds moon-lighted,
There to leave me on a shore no ferryman hath sighted.
Many a time a mountain stile, dark and bright with sudden wetting,
Lured my vagrant foot the while 'twixt uplifting and down-setting,—
Whither? Thousand mile on mile, beyond the last forgetting.
Long by hidden ways I wend (past occasion grown a ranger);
Yet enchantment, like a friend, takes from death the tang of danger:
Hardly river or road can end where I need step a stranger.
Spring
With a difference.—Hamlet.
Again the bloom, the northward flight,
The fount freed at its silver height,
And down the deep woods to the lowest
The fragrant shadows scarred with light.
O inescapeable joy of Spring!
For thee the world shall leap and sing;
But by her darkened door thou goest
Henceforward as a spectral thing.
The Colour-Bearer
Thy charge was: "Hold My banner
Against our hidden foe;
To war where sounds no manner
Of glorious music, go!"
And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."
Ah, not to brave Thy censure
But win Thy smile of light,
My heart of misadventure
Will end in the losing fight,
And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.
The day will pass of torment,
The evenfall be sweet
When I shall wear for garment
The nakedness of defeat.
But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet
That eagle of the wartime,
That oriflamme, outrolled
With strength of staff aforetime,
With cleanly and costly fold,—
Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,
And take from me (turned donor
That night on blood-soaked sand),
The stick and rag of Honour
There safe in a stiffened hand,
Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.
Sanctuary
High above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay's footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.
Hither Felicity
Doth climb to me,
And bank me in with turf and marjoram
Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
With golden barberry-wreath,
And bluets thick beneath;
One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
With bud-red breast,
Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
Float less than April fog below our hermitage.
Emily Brontë
What sacramental hurt that brings
The terror of the truth of things
Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.
'Twas thine, upon a headland set,
To view no isles of man's delight,
With lyric foam in rainbow flight,
But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,
Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.
Pascal
Thou lovedst life, but not to brand it thine
(O rich in all forborne felicities!),
Nor use it with marauding power, to seize
And stain the sweet earth's blue horizon-line.
Virgin the grape might in the trellis twine
Where thou hadst long ago an hour of ease,
And foot of thine across the unpressed leas
Went light as some Idæan foot divine.
Spirit so abstinent, in thy deeps lay
What passion of possession? Day by day
Was there no thirst upon thee, sharp and pure,
In forward sea-like surges unforgot?
Yes: and in life and death those joys endure
More blessedly, that men can name them not.
Borderlands
Through all the evening,
All the virginal long evening,
Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;
For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;
And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,
Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?
Yet in the valley,
At a turn of the orchard alley,
When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!
Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore
There in his room, whene'er the moon looks in,
To silver now a shell, and now a fin,
And o'er his chart glide like an argosy,
Quiet and old sits he.
Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast,
Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?
Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold
Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,
The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss
Their veering weight across.
On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled,
To lands where stunted cedars throw
A lace-like shadow over snow,
Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.
Again play up and down the briny spar
Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar,
Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,
The Labradorian blue;
All homeless hurricanes about him break;
The purples of spent day he sees
From Samos to the Hebrides,
And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.
Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,
Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,
Away, and far away, his barque is borne
Riding the noisy morn,
Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know
The helm and tightening halyards still
Follow the urging of his will,
And scoff at sullen earth a league below.
Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high,
And shackles him with many an inland tie,
And of his only wisdom makes a jibe
Amid an alien tribe:
No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.
The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!
Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?
Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?
Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,
Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him!
Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole
Unto his subject soul,
Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,
Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,
But she may know that voice again,
And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.
And give him back, before his passion fail,
The singing cordage and the hollow sail,
And level with those ageing eyes let be
The bright unsteady sea;
And like a film remove from sense and brain
This pasture wall, these boughs that run
Their evening arches to the sun,
Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;
And on the shut space and the shallow hour,
Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,
With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,
Him whom thou lovedst, bring:
That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,
Not having, at the last, less grace
Of thee than had his roving race,
Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.
OXFORD AND LONDON
XXVI SONNETS
OXFORD
I. The Tow-Path
Furrow to furrow, oar to oar succeeds,
Each length away, more bright, more exquisite;
The sister shells that hither, thither, flit
Strew the long stream like scattered maple-seeds.
A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads,
Who with short calls his pace doth intermit:
An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sits,
Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.
West of the glowing hayricks, tawny black
Where waters by their warm escarpments run,
Two lovers, newly crossed from Kennington,
Print in the early dew a married track,
And drain the aroma'd eve, and spend the sun,
Ere in laborious health the crews come back.
II. Ad Antiquarium
My gentle Aubrey, who in everything
Hadst of thy city's youth so lovely lust,
Yet never lineal to her towers august
Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring,
Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering,
Thy comely manuscript, and interthrust
Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust,
Two centuries unkissed of any Spring.
Filling a homesick page beneath a lime,
Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor's now,
The endless terraces of ended Time
Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release
Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou,
Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.
III. Martyrs’ Memorial
Such natural debts of love our Oxford knows,
So many ancient dues undesecrate,
I marvel how the landmark of a hate
For witness unto future time she chose;
How 'gainst her own corroborate ranks arose
The Three, in great denial only great,
For Art's enshrining! Thus, averted straight,
My soul to seek a holier captain goes:
That sweet adventurer whom Truth befell
Whenas the synagogues were watching not;
Whose crystal name on royal Oriel
Hangs like a shield; who to an outland spot
Led hence, beholds his Star, and counts it well
To live of all his dear domain forgot.
IV. Parks Road
Viewed yesterday, in sad elusive light,
These everlasting heptarchs, tree by tree,
Seemed filing off to exile, lingeringly,
Each with his giant falchion, kinless quite.
All the wild winter day and flooded night
They feigned to march far as the eye could see,
Through transient oceans plunging to the knee
Their centuried greaves, ebon and malachite.
To-day, accustomed bole and branch all bare
Stand with old gems inlaid. Like coloured snow
Or vista'd flame along the drowsy air,
Their gold-green lichens stir and cling and glow.
What secret craftsmen painted them so fair?
Angels of Moisture and the Long Ago.
V. Tom
Hark! the king bell, loud in his vesper choir.
As in between each golden roar doth come
That solemn, plangent, unregarded hum
Chiding the truant with archaic ire,
On Worcester mere far off, in elfin gyre
The wavelets laugh, and laughter showereth from
May's chestnut like a lampadarium
By Brasenose, with every point afire.
Yet over all roofs to the uttermost,
Call, Shepherd dear, from thy dream-haunted ground:
For some there be, on whatsoever coast,
In midst of any morrow's ordered round,
Hear as of old (in earth and heaven an host!)
And like young lambs, leap homeward at the sound.
VI. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford
I
Imperial Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green,
And Templar Sandford in the boatman's call,
And sweet-belled Appleton, and Elsfield wall
That dost upon adoring ivies lean;
Meek Binsey; Dorchester, where streams convene
Bidding on graves thy solemn shadow fall;
Clear Cassington, soaring perpetual,
Holton, and Hampton Poyle, and fanes between:
If one of all in your sad courts that come
Belovèd and disparted! be your own,
Kin to the souls ye had, while yet endures
Some memory of a great communion known
At home in quarries of old Christendom,—
Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours.
II
Is this the end? Is this the pilgrim's day
For dread, for dereliction, and for tears?
Rather, from grass and air and many spheres
In prophecy his heart is called away;
And under English eaves, more still than they,
Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears
The long-arrested, the believing years
Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say:
"Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best
Who had such beauty"? or, with spirit fain
To watch beside her darkened doors, go by
With a new psalm: "O banished Light so nigh!
Of them was I, who bore thee and who blest:
Even here remember me when thou shalt reign."
VII. A December Walk
Whithersoever cold and fair ye flow,
Take me, O gentle moon and gentler wind,
Past Wyatt's cumbering portal, frost-entwined,
And Merton 'neath that huge tiara's glow,
And groves in bridal gossamer below
Saint Mary's armoured spire; and whence aligned
In altered eminence for dawn to find
Sleep the droll Cæsars, hooded with the snow.
White sacraments of weather, shine on me!
Upbear my footfall and my fancy sift,
Lest either blemish an ensainted ground
Spread so with childhood. Bid with me, outbound,
On recollected wing mine angel drift
Across new spheres of immortality.
VIII. The Old Dial of Corpus
Warden of hours and ages, here I dwell,
Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook
For good unborn; and towards a willow nook,
Pole, princely in the senate and the cell;
And doubting the near boom of Osney bell,
Turning on me that sweetly subtile look,
Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book:
Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.
Naught steadfast may I image nor attain
Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope
After my god, like him, inconstant bright:
But sun and shade will unto you remain
Alternately a symbol and a hope,
Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.
IX. Rooks: New College Gardens
Through rosy cloud and over thorny towers,
Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled,
From Isis' valley border, many-hilled,
The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers:
Not for men only, and their musing hours
By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build
These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,
These dearest inland melancholy bowers.
Blest birds! A book held open on the knee
Below, is all they guess of Adam's blight:
With surer art the while, and simpler rite,
They gather power in some monastic tree
Where breathe against their docile breasts by night
The scholar's star, the star of sanctity.
X. Above Port Meadow
The plain gives freedom. Hither from the town
How oft a dreamer and a book of yore
Escaped the lamplit Square, and heard no more
Inroll from Cowley turf the game's renown,
But bade the vernal sky with spices drown
His head by Plato's in the grass, before
Yon oar that's never old, the sunset oar,
At Medley Lock was laid reluctant down!
So seeming far the confines and the crowd,
The gross routine, the cares that vex and tire,
From this large light, sad thoughts in it, high-driven,
Go happier than the inly-moving cloud
Who lets her vesture fall, a floss of fire,
Abstracted, on the ivory hills of heaven.
XI. Undertones at Magdalen
Fair are the finer creature-sounds; of these
Is Magdalen full: her bees, the while they drop
Susurrant to the garth from weeds atop;
And round the priestless Pulpit, auguries
Of wrens in council from an hundred leas;
And merry fish of Cherwell, fain to stop
The water-plantain's way; and deer that crop
Delicious herbage under choral trees.
The cry for silver and gold in Christendom
Without, threads not her silence and her dark.
Only against the isolate Tower there break
Low rhythmic murmurs of good men to come:
Invasive seas of hushed approach that make
Memorial music, would the ear but hark.
XII. A Last View
I
Where down the hill, across the hidden ford
Stretches the open aisle from scene to scene,
By halted horses silently we lean,
Gazing enchanted from our steeper sward.
How yon low loving skies of April hoard
A plot of pinnacles! and how with sheen
Of spike and ball her languid clouds between
Grey Oxford grandly rises riverward!
Sweet on those dim long-dedicated walls
Silver as rain the frugal sunshine falls;
Slowly sad eyes resign them, bound afar.
Dear Beauty, dear Tradition, fare you well,
And powers that aye aglow in you, impel
Our quickening spirits from the slime we are.
II
Stars in the bosom of thy braided tide,
Soft air and ivy on thy gracile stone,
O Glory of the West, as thou wert sown,
Stand perfect: O miraculous, abide!
And still, for greatness flickering from thy side,
Eternal alchemist, evoke, enthrone
True heirs in true succession, later blown
From that same seed of fire which never died.
Nor Love shall lack her solace, to behold
Ranged to the morrow's melancholy verge,
Thy lights uprisen in Thought's disclosing spaces;
And round some beacon-spirit, stable, old,
In radiant broad tumultuary surge
For ever, the young voices, the young faces.
LONDON
I. On First Entering Westminster Abbey
Holy of England! since my light is short
And faint, Oh, rather by the sun anew
Of timeless passion set my dial true,
That with thy saints and thee I may consort;
And wafted in the cool enshadowed port
Of poets, seem a little sail long due,
And be as one the call of memory drew
Unto the saddle void since Agincourt.
Not now for secular love's unquiet lease
Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile
Hath broken tryst with transitory things;
But seal with her a marriage and a peace
Eternal, on thine Edward's altar isle,
Above the storm-spent sea of ended Kings.
II. Fog
Like bodiless water passing in a sigh,
Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
The towery vista sinks upon the eye,
As if it heard the horns of Jericho,
Black and dissolved; nor could the founder, know
How what was built so bright should daily die.
Thy mood with man's is broken and blent in,
City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown
The natural light in which thy life began;
Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, though the dark visor's down.
III. St. Peter-ad-Vincula
Too well I know, pacing the place of awe,
Three Queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;
More in his halo, Monmouth's mocking eye,
The eagle Essex in a harpy's claw;
Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw
Sundown of Scotland; how with treasons lie
White martyrdoms: rank in a company
Breaker and builder of the eternal Law.
Oft as I come, the piteous garden-row
Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,
Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,
Infects me: suddenly must I depart,
Ere thought of man's injustice then and now
Add to these aisles one other broken heart.
IV. Strikers in Hyde Park
A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave,
How slow! but never once they slip the thread.
Hither, upon the Georgian idlers' tread,
Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,
Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,
Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,
Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,
Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.
What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange
Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so
The clear Republic waits the general throe,
Along her noonday mountains' open range.
God be with both! for one is young to know
The other's rote of evil and of change.
V. Changes in the Temple
The cry is at thy gates, long-lovèd ground,
Again: for oft ere now thy children went
Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent
Some old red alley with a dial crowned;
Some house of honour, in a glory bound
With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;
Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent
Hard by a little fountain's friendly sound.
Oh, for Virginius' hand, if only that
Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!
Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,
Her walled oasis, and where once it was
All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat
Echo and ivy, and the loitering moon.
VI. The Lights of London
The evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot
Far down into the valley's cold extreme,
Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream
Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.
The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot
Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,
From chaos climb with many a hasty gleam,
London, one moment fallen and forgot.
Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright
Prick door and window; every street obscure
Sparkles and swarms with nothing true nor sure,
Full as a marsh of mist and winking light:
Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure
Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.
VII. Doves
Ah, if man's boast and man's advance be vain,
And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,
And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome,
That monstrous island of the middle main;
If each inheritor must sink again
Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb
Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?—
I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.
What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!
Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,
Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's
Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,
And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.
"God keeps," I said, "our little flock of years."
VIII. In the Reading-Room of the British Museum
Praised be the moon of books! that doth above
A world of men, the sunken Past behold,
And colour spaces else too void and cold
To make a very heaven again thereof;
As when the sun is set behind a grove,
And faintly unto nether ether rolled,
All night his whiter image and his mould
Grows beautiful with looking on her love.
Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray,
Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!
Feebly along a venerable way
They climb the infinite, or perish quite:
Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,
While in this liberal house thy face is bright.
IX. Sunday Chimes in the City
Across the bridge, where in the morning blow
The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain
Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain,
And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;
Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,
Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:
From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain,
Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.
Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower
A subtle beauty on the empty hour,
From all their dark throats aching and outblown;
Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,
Like the last gull that up some naked coast
Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.
X. A Porch in Belgravia
When, after dawn, the lordly houses hide
Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest
(Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast,
Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide,
Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied
Camped round, and dreams how, seaward and southwest,
Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest,
And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside),
Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft,
Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still,
Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft
Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore
Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable,
Which cannot but have been, for evermore.
XI. York Stairs
Many a musing eye returns to thee,
Against the formal street disconsolate,
Who kept in green domains thy bridal state,
With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee;
And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity,
Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight
Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate;
Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.
Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus
Till the next fury; teach the time and us
Leisure and will to draw a serious breath:
Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed,
Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud
Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.
XII. In the Docks
Where the bales thunder till the day is done,
And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope;
Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,
Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;
Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,
A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;
Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,
I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!
O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm,
To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound,
Away, away from this too thoughtful ground,
Sodden with human trespass and despair,
Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,
A sick mind follows into Eden air.