TO COVENTRY PATMORE

Lo, my book thinks to look Time’s leaguer down,
Under the banner of your spread renown!
Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme
Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time,
Yet this one page shall fend oblivious shame,
Armed with your crested and prevailing Name.

Note.—This dedication was written while the dear friend and great Poet to whom it was addressed yet lived.  It is left as he saw it—the last verses of mine that were ever to pass under his eyes.

F. T.

‘Wisdom is easily seen by them that love her, and is found by them that seek her.
To think therefore upon her is perfect understanding.’

Wisdom, vi.

I

      Secret was the garden;
      Set i’ the pathless awe
      Where no star its breath can draw.
      Life, that is its warden,
Sits behind the fosse of death.  Mine eyes saw not, and I saw.

II

      It was a mazeful wonder;
      Thrice three times it was enwalled
      With an emerald—
      Sealèd so asunder.
All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their music thralled.

      The Lady of fair weeping,
      At the garden’s core,
      Sang a song of sweet and sore
      And the after-sleeping;
In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore.

IV

      With sweet-panged singing,
      Sang she through a dream-night’s day;
      That the bowers might stay,
      Birds bate their winging,
Nor the wall of emerald float in wreathèd haze away.

V

      The lily kept its gleaming,
      In her tears (divine conservers!)
      Washèd with sad art;
      And the flowers of dreaming
      Palèd not their fervours,
      For her blood flowed through their nervures;
And the roses were most red, for she dipt them in her heart.

      There was never moon,
      Save the white sufficing woman:
      Light most heavenly-human—
      Like the unseen form of sound,
      Sensed invisibly in tune,—
      With a sun-derivèd stole
      Did inaureole
      All her lovely body round;
Lovelily her lucid body with that light was interstrewn.

VII

      The sun which lit that garden wholly,
      Low and vibrant visible,
      Tempered glory woke;
      And it seemèd solely
      Like a silver thurible
      Solemnly swung, slowly,
Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of incense-smoke.

      But woe’s me, and woe’s me,
      For the secrets of her eyes!
      In my visions fearfully
      They are ever shown to be
      As fringèd pools, whereof each lies
      Pallid-dark beneath the skies
      Of a night that is
      But one blear necropolis.
And her eyes a little tremble, in the wind of her own sighs.

IX

      Many changes rise on
      Their phantasmal mysteries.
      They grow to an horizon
      Where earth and heaven meet;
      And like a wing that dies on
      The vague twilight-verges,
      Many a sinking dream doth fleet
      Lessening down their secrecies.
      And, as dusk with day converges,
      Their orbs are troublously
Over-gloomed and over-glowed with hope and fear of things to be.

      There is a peak on Himalay,
      And on the peak undeluged snow,
      And on the snow not eagles stray;
      There if your strong feet could go,—
      Looking over tow’rd Cathay
      From the never-deluged snow—
      Farthest ken might not survey
Where the peoples underground dwell whom antique fables know.

XI

      East, ah, east of Himalay,
      Dwell the nations underground;
      Hiding from the shock of Day,
      For the sun’s uprising-sound:
      Dare not issue from the ground
      At the tumults of the Day,
      So fearfully the sun doth sound
      Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay.

      Lend me, O lend me
      The terrors of that sound,
      That its music may attend me.
      Wrap my chant in thunders round;
While I tell the ancient secrets in that Lady’s singing found.

XIII

      On Ararat there grew a vine,
      When Asia from her bathing rose;
      Our first sailor made a twine
      Thereof for his prefiguring brows.
      Canst divine
Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster grows?

XIV

      On Golgotha there grew a thorn
      Round the long-prefigured Brows.
      Mourn, O mourn!
For the vine have we the spine?  Is this all the Heaven allows?

      On Calvary was shook a spear;
      Press the point into thy heart—
      Joy and fear!
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start.

XVI

      O, dismay!
      I, a wingless mortal, sporting
      With the tresses of the sun?
      I, that dare my hand to lay
      On the thunder in its snorting?
      Ere begun,
Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old Icarian way.

XVII

      From the fall precipitant
      These dim snatches of her chant
      Only have remainèd mine;—
      That from spear and thorn alone
      May be grown
For the front of saint or singer any divinizing twine.

      Her song said that no springing
      Paradise but evermore
      Hangeth on a singing
      That has chords of weeping,
      And that sings the after-sleeping
      To souls which wake too sore.
‘But woe the singer, woe!’ she said; ‘beyond the dead his singing-lore,
      All its art of sweet and sore,
      He learns, in Elenore!’

XIX

      Where is the land of Luthany,
      Where is the tract of Elenore?
      I am bound therefor.

XX

XXI

XXII

      So sang she, so wept she,
      Through a dream-night’s day;
      And with her magic singing kept she—
      Mystical in music—
      That garden of enchanting
      In visionary May;
      Swayless for my spirit’s haunting,
Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortal mornings grey.

      And as a necromancer
      Raises from the rose-ash
      The ghost of the rose;
      My heart so made answer
      To her voice’s silver plash,—
      Stirred in reddening flash,
And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal phantom blows.

XXIV

      Her tears made dulcet fretting,
      Her voice had no word,
      More than thunder or the bird.
      Yet, unforgetting,
The ravished soul her meanings knew.  Mine ears heard not, and I heard.

XXV

      When she shall unwind
      All those wiles she wound about me,
      Tears shall break from out me,
      That I cannot find
Music in the holy poets to my wistful want, I doubt me!

This morning saw I, fled the shower,
The earth reclining in a lull of power:
The heavens, pursuing not their path,
Lay stretched out naked after bath,
Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still,
Nor was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill.

The river has not any care
Its passionless water to the sea to bear;
The leaves have brown content;
The wall to me has freshness like a scent,
And takes half animate the air,
Making one life with its green moss and stain;
And life with all things seems too perfect blent
For anything of life to be aware.
The very shades on hill, and tree, and plain,
Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain.

No hill can idler be than I;
No stone its inter-particled vibration
Investeth with a stiller lie;
No heaven with a more urgent rest betrays
The eyes that on it gaze.
We are too near akin that thou shouldst cheat
Me, Nature, with thy fair deceit.

Here I make oath—
Although the heart that knows its bitterness
Hear loath,
And credit less—
That he who kens to meet Pain’s kisses fierce
Which hiss against his tears,
Dread, loss, nor love frustrate,
Nor all iniquity of the froward years
Shall his inurèd wing make idly bate,
Nor of the appointed quarry his staunch sight
To lose observance quite;
Seal from half-sad and all-elate
Sagacious eyes
Ultimate Paradise;
Nor shake his certitude of haughty fate.

In this Avernian sky,
This sultry and incumbent canopy
Of dull and doomed regret;
Where on the unseen verges yet, O yet,
At intervals,
Trembles, and falls,
Faint lightning of remembered transient sweet—
Ah, far too sweet
But to be sweet a little, a little sweet, and fleet;
Leaving this pallid trace,
This loitering and most fitful light a space,
Still some sad space,
For Grief to see her own poor face:—

If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say: We see: your sin remaineth.

John ix. 41.

Not the Circean wine
Most perilous is for pain:
Grapes of the heavens’ star-loaden vine,
Whereto the lofty-placed
Thoughts of fair souls attain,
Tempt with a more retributive delight,
And do disrelish all life’s sober taste.
’Tis to have drunk too well
The drink that is divine,
Maketh the kind earth waste,
And breath intolerable.

Ah, for a heart less native to high Heaven,
A hooded eye, for jesses and restraint,
Or for a will accipitrine to pursue!
The veil of tutelar flesh to simple livers given,
Or those brave-fledging fervours of the Saint,
Whose heavenly falcon-craft doth never taint,
Nor they in sickest time their ample virtue mew.

And so the love which is thy dower,
Earth, though her first-frightened breast
Against the exigent boon protest,
(For she, poor maid, of her own power
Has nothing in herself, not even love,
But an unwitting void thereof),
Gives back to thee in sanctities of flower;
And holy odours do her bosom invest,
That sweeter grows for being prest:
Though dear recoil, the tremorous nurse of joy,
From thine embrace still startles coy,
Till Phosphor lead, at thy returning hour,
The laughing captive from the wishing West.

What is the song the stars sing?
   (And a million songs are as song of one.)
This is the song the stars sing:
   Sweeter song’s none.

One to set, and many to sing,
   (And a million songs are as song of one),
One to stand, and many to cling,
The many things, and the one Thing,
   The one that runs not, the many that run.

The ever new weaveth the ever old
   (And a million songs are as song of one).
Ever telling the never told;
The silver saith, and the said is gold,
   And done ever the never done.

Hidden stars by the shown stars’ sheen;
   (And a million suns are but as one);
Colours unseen by the colours seen,
And sounds unheard heard sounds between,
   And a night is in the light of the sun.

An ambuscade of light in night,
   (And a million secrets are but as one),
And a night is dark in the sun’s light,
   And a world in the world man looks upon.

Hidden stars by the shown stars’ wings,
   (And a million cycles are but as one),
And a world with unapparent strings
Knits the simulant world of things;
   Behold, and vision thereof is none.

Braced in its own fourfold embrace
   (And a million strengths are as strength of one),
And round it all God’s arms of grace,
The world, so as the Vision says,
   Doth with great lightning-tramples run.

And thunder bruiteth into thunder,
   (And a million sounds are as sound of one),
From stellate peak to peak is tossed a voice of wonder,
And the height stoops down to the depths thereunder,
   And sun leans forth to his brother-sun.

And the more ample years unfold
   (With a million songs as song of one),
A little new of the ever old,
A little told of the never told,
   Added act of the never done.

This is the song the stars sing,
   (Tonèd all in time);
Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring
A multitudinous-single thing,
   Rung all in rhyme.

In the chaos of preordination, and night of our forebeings.—

Sir Thomas Browne.

Et lux in tenebris erat, et tenebræ eam non comprehenderunt.—

St. John.

Firm is the man, and set beyond the cast
Of Fortune’s game, and the iniquitous hour,
Whose falcon soul sits fast,
And not intends her high sagacious tour
Or ere the quarry sighted; who looks past
To slow much sweet from little instant sour,
And in the first does always see the last.