Stars.
The Stars.
(To J. D.)
SESTINA.
Stars in the sky, fold upon fold of stars!
And still beyond the stars those gulfs of air
Flecked soft and pale with milkier stars beyond,
Millions of miles above our dusky world:
Pale stars, whose light down the unplumbed abyss
Falls, ere it reach us, through a thousand years.
There was a God in the unwritten years
Who lit the flaming order of the stars:
Let there be Light! He said, and lo! the abyss
Grew live and tremulous with rustling air,
Grew bright with stars and moons, and each a world
Shining, a light to other worlds beyond.
O were you even as we, bright orbs beyond
Who shine and shed your glory all these years,
Not light, but smoke would fall from every world;
Smoke, black with human evil, black, O stars
With His neglect who lit the sparkling air;
But left within—unformed and void—the Abyss.
O stars that dance indifferent in the Abyss,
Our Earth may seem as bright to you beyond;
Yourselves, to them that breathe your delicate air,
As desolate; Life in the Lunar years
As long; and the straight rivers of the stars
And primal snows divide as drear a world.
And men, perchance, as we, in every world
Fill with their dreams the bright and vast abyss:
A Christ has died in vain on all the stars,
And each, unhappy, seeks a star beyond
Where God rewards the dead through endless years....
And so we circle, dumb, in the silent air.
What shall we find more holy in all the air?
Lo, when the first huge, incandescent world
Burst out of Chaos and flamed a million years,
Until, with too much flaming, thro’ the abyss
Flake after flake dropped off and flamed beyond:—
That was the God who lit the host of stars!
For Light, the stars; for breath, the realms of air;
For Hope, beyond this dark and suffering world,
Nought in the Abyss, nor ought in the endless years.
Etruscan Tombs.
I.
To think the face we love shall ever die,
And be the indifferent earth, and know us not!
To think that one of us shall live to cry
On one long buried in a distant spot!
O wise Etruscans, faded in the night
Yourselves, with scarce a rose-leaf on your trace;
You kept the ashes of the dead in sight,
And shaped the vase to seem the vanished face.
But, O my Love, my life is such an urn
That tender memories mould with constant touch,
Until the dust and earth of it they turn
To your dear image that I love so much:
A sacred urn, filled with the sacred past,
That shall recall you while the clay shall last.
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These cinerary urns with human head
And human arms that dangle at their sides,
The earliest potters made them for their dead,
To keep the mother’s ashes or the bride’s.
O rude attempt of some long-spent despair—
With symbol and with emblem discontent—
To keep the dead alive and as they were,
The actual features and the glance that went!
The anguish of your art was not in vain,
For lo, upon these alien shelves removed
The sad immortal images remain,
And show that once they lived and once you loved.
But oh, when I am dead may none for me
Invoke so drear an immortality!
%center%III.
Beneath the branches of the olive yard
Are roots where cyclamen and violet grow
Beneath the roots the earth is deep and hard
And there a king was buried long ago.
The peasants digging deeply in the mould
Cast up the autumn soil about the place,
And saw a gleam of unexpected gold,
And underneath the earth a living face.
With sleeping lids and rosy lips he lay
Among the wreaths and gems that mark the king
One moment; then a little dust and clay
Fell shrivelled over wreath and urn and ring.
A carven slab recalls his name and deeds,
Writ in a language no man living reads.
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Here lies the tablet graven in the past,
Clear-charactered and firm and fresh of line.
See, not a word is gone; and yet how fast
The secret no man living may divine!
What did he choose for witness in the grave?
A record of his glory on the earth?
The wail of friends? The Pæans of the brave?
The sacred promise of the second birth?
The tombs of ancient Greeks in Sicily
Are sown with slender discs of graven gold
Filled with the praise of Death: “Thrice happy he
Wrapt in the milk-soft sleep of dreams untold!”
They sleep their patient sleep in altered lands,
The golden promise in their fleshless hands.
Venetian Nocturne.
Down the narrow Calle where the moonlight cannot enter,
The houses are so high;
Silent and alone we pierced the night’s dim core and centre—
Only you and I.
Clear and sad our footsteps rang along the hollow pavement,
Sounding like a bell;
Sounding like a voice that cries to souls in Life’s enslavement,
“There is Death as well!”
Down the narrow dark we went, until a sudden whiteness
Made us hold our breath;
All the white Salute towers and domes in moonlit brightness,—
Ah! could this be Death?
The Dead Friend.
I.
When you were alive, at least,
There were days I never met you.
In the study, at the feast,
By the hearth, I could forget you.
Moods there were of many days
When, methinks, I did not mind you.
Now, oh now, in any place
Wheresoe’er I go, I find you!
You ... but how profoundly changed,
O you dear-belov’d dead woman!
Made mysterious and estranged,
All-pervading, superhuman.
Ah! to meet you as of yore,
Kind, alert, and quick to laughter:
You, the friend I loved Before;
Not this tragic friend of After.
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The house was empty where you came no more;
I sat in awe and dread;
When, lo! I heard a hand that shook the door,
And knew it was the Dead.
One moment—ah!—the anguish took my side,
The fainting of the will.
“God of the living, leave me not!” I cried,
And all my flesh grew chill.
One moment; then I opened wide my heart
And open flung the door:
“What matter whence thou comest, what thou art?—
Come to me!”... Never more
%center%III.
They lie at peace, the darkness fills
The hollow of their empty gaze.
The dust falls in their ears and stills
The echo of our fruitless days;
The earth takes back their baser part;
The brain no longer bounds the dream;
The broken vial of the heart
Lets out its passion in a stream.
And in this silence that they have
One inner vision grows more bright;
The Dead remember in the grave
As I remember here to-night.
(1890.)
Sonnet.
Since childhood have I dragged my life along
The dusty purlieus and approach of Death,
Hoping the years would bring me easier breath,
And turn my painful sighing to a song;
But, ah, the years have done me cruel wrong,
For they have robbed me of that happy faith;
Still in the world of men I move a wraith,
Who to the shadow-world not yet belong.
Too long, indeed, I linger here and take
The room of others but to droop and sigh;
Wherefore, O spinning sisters, for my sake,
No more the little tangled knots untie;
But all the skein, I do beseech you, break,
And spin a stronger thread more perfectly.
Song.
Oh for the wings of a dove,
To fly far away from my own soul,
Reach and be merged in the vast whole
Heaven of infinite Love!
Oh that I were as the rain,
To fall and be lost in the great sea,
One with the waves, till the drowned Me
Might not be severed again!
Infinite arms of the air,
Surrounding the stars and without strife
Blending our life with their large life,
Lift me and carry me there!
A Classic Landscape.
This wood might be some Grecian heritage
Of the antique world, this hoary ilex wood;
So broad the shade, so deep the solitude,
So grey the air where Oread fancies brood.
Beyond, the fields are tall with purple sage;
The sky bends downward like a purple sheet—
A purple wind-filled sail—i’ the noonday heat;
And past the river shine the fields of wheat.
O tender wheat, O starry saxifrage,
O deep-red tulips, how the fields are fair!
Far off the mountains pierce the quivering air,
Ash-coloured, mystical, remote, and bare.
How far they look, the Mountains of Mirage
Or northern Hills of Heaven, how far away!
In front the long paulonia-blossoms sway
From leafless boughs across that dreamy grey.
O world, how worthy of a golden age!
How might Theocritus have sung and found
The Oreads here, the Naiads gathering round,
Their pallid locks still dripping to the ground!
For me, O world, thou art how mere a stage,
Whereon the human soul must act alone,
In a dead language, with the plot unknown,
Nor learn what happens when the play is done.
Old Songs.
This song I wrote—ah me, how long ago!
When up the stair of Heaven and down again
(For even then I did not long remain),
With happy feet I used to come and go.
This ode I sang beneath a laurel-bough
Where I had sought for Truth among the dead;
This little verse (and still the page is red),
To soothe some easier pang forgotten now.
I took the dew of lilies grown apart;
The scanty wine of Amphoras; and, bright
And clear, the blood that flows from trivial scars;
But with the bitter ink of mine own heart
I have not written and I must not write,
Let rust and acid dim the eternal stars.
Versailles.
“Le monde est l’œuvre d’un grand Architecte qui est mort avant de l’avoir achevé.”
B. CONSTANT.
The king is dead who planned these terraces;
The turf has grown to meadow-grass again;
The lake is rank beneath the untended trees,
And down the mouldering statues drips the rain.
The king is dead. Ay, he, with all his kind,
Is absolutely vanished, lost, and gone,
And not a trace of him remains behind;
But the forsaken palace lingers on.
How desolate! The weary waters drowned
In mist, the empty alleys chill and frore,
The vast and melancholy pleasure-ground
Where the forgotten monarch comes no more.
How like an older Folly, planned no less
For beauty, where a greater monarch trod,
And now, grown old, in its extreme distress
Abandoned by the long-departed God!
Oct. 1888.
Melancholia.
(For an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.)
So many years I toiled like Caliban
To fetch the stones and earth to build my fane;
So many years I thought before the brain
Reluctant would divulge the final plan.
Years upon years to forge the invented tools
Novel, as all my temple should be new;
Years upon years to fashion and to hew
The stones that should astound a world of fools.
Now shall I build? Cui bono?—lo, the salt
Hath lost its savour and I have no will:
What reck I now of gate or dome or vault?
Among the ruins of the thing undone
I sit and ask myself Cui bono? till
The sun sets, and a bat flies past the sun.
Under the Trees.
I lay full length near lonely trees
Heart-full of sighing silences;
So far as eyes could see all round
There was no life, no stir, no sound.
I thought no more down in the grass
Of all that must be or that was;
My weary brain forgot to ache,
My heart was still and did not break.
So close I lay to earth’s large breast
I could have dreamed myself at rest;
Only that then the grass must be
Above instead of under me.
Wherefore, I thought, should I regain
My anxious life that is so vain?
Here will I lie, forgetting strife,
Till death shall end this death-in-life.
Ah, no: because, O coward will,
Thy destined work thou must fulfil,
Because no soul, be it great or small,
Can rise alone or lonely fall.
Therefore the old war must not cease,
The hard old inner war of peace,
With heart and body and mind and soul
Each striving for a different goal.
Therefore I will arise and bear
The burden all men everywhere
Have borne and must bear, and bear yet,
Till the end come when we forget.
Fire-flies.
I.
To-night I watch the fire-flies rise
And shine along the air;
They float beneath the starry skies,
As mystical and fair,
Over the hedge where dimly glows
The deep gold of the Persian rose.
I watch the fire-flies drift and float
Each is a dreamy flame,
Star-coloured each, a starry mote,
Like stars not all the same;
But whiter some, or faintly green,
Or wannest blue was ever seen.
They cross and cross and disappear,
And then again they glow;
Still drifting faintly there and here,
Still crossing to and fro,
As though in all their wandering
They wove a wide and shining thing.
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O fire-flies, would I knew the weft
You have the weaving of!
For, as I watch you move, bereft
Of thought or will or love,
I fear, O listless flames, you weave
The fates of men who strive and grieve.
The web of life, the weft of dreams,
You weave it ceaselessly;
A strange and filmy thing it seems,
And made in mystery
Of wind and darkness threaded through
With light these heavens never knew.
O pale, mysterious, wandering fire,
Born of the earth, alive
With the same breath that I respire,
Who know and think and strive;
You circle round me, stranger far
Than any charm of any star!
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Ah me, as faint as you, as slight,
As hopelessly remote
As you, who still across the night
Innumerably float,
Intangible as you, I see
The motives of our destiny.
For ah, no angel of the stars,
No guardian of the soul,
Stoops down beyond the heavenly bars
Our courses to control.
But filled and nourished with our breath
Are the dim hands that weave our death.
They weave with many threads our souls,
A subtle-tinted thing,
So interwoven that none controls
His own imagining;
For every strand with other strands
They twine and bind with viewless hands.
They weave the future of the past;
Their mystic web is wrought
With dreams from which we woke at last,
And many a secret thought;
For still they weave, howe’er we strive,
The web new-woven for none alive.
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And still the fire-flies come and go—
Each is a dreamy flame—
Still palely drifting to and fro
The very way they came—
As though, across the dark they wove
Fate and the shining web thereof.
Yet, even were I sure of it,
I would not lift a hand
To break the threads that shine and flit—
For, ah, I understand:
Ruin, indeed, I well might leave;
But a new web could never weave.
Spring.
Spring, the tender maiden,
Like a girl who greets her lover,
Comes, her apron laden
Deep with flower and leaf we liked of old;
Not a sprig forgetting
That we then demanded of her;
Changing not nor setting
Out of place the tiniest frill or fold.
See, the aspen still is
Hung awry to droop and falter;
Still the leaves of lilies
Lift aloft their tall and tender sheath.
Wiser than the sages,
Spring would never dare to alter
What so many ages
Showed already right in bloom and wreath.
Ah, could Spring remember
Every thrill and fancy perished
In the soul’s December;
Lost for ever, faded from the truth!
Holy things and tender,
Dead, alas! however cherished.
Breathe, O Spring, and render
That forgotten radiance of our youth!
Sacrifice.
O patient-eyed and tender saint,
Too far from thee I stand,
With vain desires perplexed and faint;
Reach out thy helping hand.
No fire is on the holy hill,
No voice on Sinai now;
But, in our gloom and darkness still
Abiding, help me thou.
They move on whom thy light is shed
Through lives of larger scope;
For them beneath the false and dead
There stirs a quickening hope.
So on some gusty morn we mark
The reddening tops of trees,
And hear in carols of the lark
Thespesian promises.
Writing History.
The profit of my living long ago
I dedicated to the unloving dead,
Though all my service they shall never know
Whose world is vanished and their name unsaid.
For none remembers now the good, the ill
They did, the deeds they thought should last for aye:
But in the little room my voice can fill
They shall not be forgotten till I die.
So, in a lonely churchyard by the shore,
The sea winds drift the sand across the mounds
And those forgotten graves are found no more,
And no man knows the churchyard’s holy bounds;
Till one come by and stoop with reverent hands
To clear the graves of their encumbering sands.
The Alembic.
In this alembic have I cast my youth,
For here I do believe if anywhere,
Here where the fires of death burn all things bare
I may distil the eternal gold of Truth.
Therefore the future is an empty name,
And life to me a dream that will not last,
And all my care is only for the Past,
Veiled with the veil of no man’s ruth or shame.
Yea, Death, that hast the secret Life withholds,
Thy meek and patient servitor am I;
And from thine alchemy I will not cease
Until I find amid thine essences,
Writ in a little sand of divers golds,
The answer to the eternal How and Why.
The Wall.
The sun falls through the olive-trees
And shines upon the wall below,
And lights the wall which cannot know
The Sunlight that it never sees.
I lie and dream; the Eternal Mind
Rains down on me and fills me full
With secrets high and wonderful;
And still my soul is deaf and blind.
The Idea.
Beneath this world of stars and flowers
That rolls in visible deity,
I dream another world is ours
And is the soul of all we see.
It hath no form, it hath no spirit;
It is perchance the Eternal Mind;
Beyond the sense that we inherit
I feel it dim and undefined.
How far below the depth of being,
How wide beyond the starry bound
It rolls unconscious and unseeing,
And is as Number or as Sound.
And through the vast fantastic visions
Of all this actual universe,
It moves unswerved by our decisions,
And is the play that we rehearse.
The Ideal.
The night is dark and warm and very still,
Only the moon goes pallid and alone;
The moon and I the whole wide heavens fill,
And all the earth lies little, lost, unknown.
I walk along the byways of my Soul,
Beyond the streets where all the world may go,
Until at last I reach the hidden goal
Built up in strength where only I may know.
For in my Soul a temple have I made,
Set on a height, divine and steep and far,
Nor often may I hope those floors to tread,
Or reach the gates that glimmer like a star.
O secret, inner shining of my dream,
How clear Thou risest on my soul to-night!
Forth will I fare and seek the heavenly beam,
And stand within the precincts of the light.
And I will press beyond the curtain’d door,
And up the empty aisle where no one sings;
There will I fall before thee and adore,
And feel the shadowy winnowing of thy wings.
So will I reach thee, Spirit; for I have known
Thy voice, and looked upon thy blinding eyes;
And well thou knowest the world to me is grown
One dimness whence thy dreamy beacons rise.
Nor ask I any hope nor any end,
That thus for thee I dream all day, all night;
But, like the moon along the skies, I wend,
Knowing no world below my borrowed light.
God in a Heart.
I.
Once, where the unentered Temple stood, at noon
No sun-ray pierced the dim unwindowed aisle;
And all the flooding whiteness of the moon
Could only bathe the outer peristyle.
And as we passed we praised the Temple front;
But one went in; with careless feet he trod
The long-forgotten pavement moss’d and blunt
And found the altar of the unprayed-to God.
He reached and lit the tapers of the shrine
And let their radiance flood the vault obscure;
But ah! upon what evil things to shine,
Blind, crawling, chill, discoloured, and impure.
And as the Light burns clearer through the gloom,
More foul, more deathly, shows the illumined room.
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O light of God, lit in the heart of man,
More welcome than the well in desert sands,
We bless thee fallen hither for a span
To glorify the Temple made with hands.
We did not deem how foul the Temple was,
Until thou visitedst the untended shrine;
Thy glory is not peace for us, alas,
Illumination tragic and divine.
Yet unrelenting pour, revealing Light!
Scare and annihilate all our blind desires,
Shine through our thoughts, and purify the night,
And burn us clean with thy transcendent fires,
Until thou leavest us renewed and whole
Thy mortal Temple of the transient Soul.
Calais Beacon.
(To E. S.)
For long before we came upon the coast and the line of the surge,
Pale on the uttermost verge,
We saw the great white rays that lay along the air on high
Between us and the sky.
So soft they lay, so pure and still: “Those are the ways,” you said,
“Only the angels tread;”
And long we watched them tremble past the hurrying rush of the train
Over the starlit plain.
Until at last we saw the strange, pallid, electrical star
Burning wanly afar:
The lighthouse beacon sending out its rays on either hand,
Over the sea and the land.
Those pale and filmy rays that reach to mariners, lost in the night,
A hope of dawn and a light—
How soft and vague they lie along the darkness shrouding o’er
The dim sea and the shore.
And many fall in vain across the untenanted marshes to die,
And few where sailors cry;
Yet, though the moon go out in clouds, and all of the stars grow wan,
Their pale light shineth on.
O souls, that save a world by night, ye too are no rays of the noon,
And no inconstant moon;
But such pale, tender-shining things as yon faint beacon afar,
Whiter than any star.
No planet names that all may tell, no meteor radiance and glow,
For a wondering world to know.
You shine as pale and soft as that, you pierce the stormy night,
And know not of your light!