In a little dust, in a little dust,
Earth, thou reclaim’st us, who do all our lives
Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage.
Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm,
Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows;
Descended passions sway it; it is distraught
With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted
With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement,
Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries.
Thou giv’st us life not half so willingly
As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem’st
The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard,
The lion maned with curlèd puissance,
The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin,
Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin;
And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat’st.
Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon,
And many a floating bank of fangs,
The scaly scourges of thy primal brine,
And the tower-crested plesiosaure.
Thou fill’st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow
On purple æons of kings; man’s hulking towers
Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun
Disglutt’st their splintered bones.
Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidæ
Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down
How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi,
And
perished cities whose great phantasmata
O’erbrow the silent citizens of Dis:—
Hast not thy fill?
Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink,
Even till thy dull throat sicken,
The draught thou grow’st most fat on; hear’st thou
not
The world’s knives bickering in their sheaths? O
patience!
Much offal of a foul world comes thy way,
And man’s superfluous cloud shall soon be laid
In a little blood.
In a little peace, in a little peace,
Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes
Of imposed being, and relenting, mend’st
Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus’
horse
Paws i’ the lucent dust as when he shocked
The East with rising; O how may I trace
In this decline that morning when we did
Sport ’twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence,
Which had not yet learned rending? we did then
Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us
Sentence
had passed of life, nor commutation
Petitioning into death. What’s he that of
The Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop,
Even where the low hic jacet answers him;
Thus low, O Man! there’s freedom’s seignory,
Tellus’ most reverend sole free commonweal,
And model deeply-policied: there none
Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously
Woos the impartial worm, whose favours kiss
With liberal largesse all; there each is free
To be e’en what he must, which here did strive
So much to be he could not; there all do
Their uses just, with no flown questioning.
To be took by the hand of equal earth
They doff her livery, slip to the worm,
Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance,
And that soiled workaday apparel cast,
Put on condition: Death’s ungentle buffet
Alone makes ceremonial manumission;
So are the heavenly statutes set, and those
Uranian tables of the primal Law.
In a little peace, in a little peace,
Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers,
We draw
together to one hid dark lake;
In a little peace, in a little peace,
We drain with all our burthens of dishonour
Into the cleansing sands o’ the thirsty grave.
The fiery pomps, brave exhalations,
And all the glistering shows o’ the seeming world,
Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see
Through the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith’s
fined
The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge
Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush
The cumbered gutters of humanity;
Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned,
Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o’ the strong;
Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws
Of the high-tided man; skull-housèd asp
That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth,
Where he that dips is deathless; being’s drone-pipe;
Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars,
And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun;
Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge
To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth
That
broker is of immortality.
Under this dreadful brother uterine,
This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,
Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike,
To turn thy weanlings’ mouth averse, embitter’st
Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,
I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last
Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,
Here I pluck loose the body’s cerementing,
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off
The bur o’ the world, man’s congregation shun,
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set
Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended
In a little peace.
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS
‘EX ORE INFANTIUM’
Little Jesus, wast
Thou shy
Once, and just so small as I?
And what did it feel like to be
Out of Heaven, and just like me?
Didst Thou sometimes think of there,
And ask where all the angels were?
I should think that I would cry
For my house all made of sky;
I would look about the air,
And wonder where my angels were;
And at waking ’twould distress me—
Not an angel there to dress me!
Hadst Thou ever any toys,
Like us little girls and boys?
And didst Thou play in Heaven with all
The angels that were not too tall,
With stars for marbles? Did the things
Play Can you see me? through their wings?
And did
Thy Mother let Thee spoil
Thy robes, with playing on our soil?
How nice to have them always new
In Heaven, because ’twas quite clean blue!
Didst Thou kneel at night to pray,
And didst Thou join Thy hands, this way?
And did they tire sometimes, being young,
And make the prayer seem very long?
And dost Thou like it best, that we
Should join our hands to pray to Thee?
I used to think, before I knew,
The prayer not said unless we do.
And did Thy Mother at the night
Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?
And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,
Kissed, and sweet, and thy prayers said?
Thou canst not have forgotten all
That it feels like to be small:
And Thou know’st I cannot pray
To Thee in my father’s way—
When Thou wast so little, say,
Couldst Thou talk Thy Father’s way?—
So, a
little Child, come down
And hear a child’s tongue like Thy own;
Take me by the hand and walk,
And listen to my baby-talk.
To Thy Father show my prayer
(He will look, Thou art so fair),
And say: ‘O Father, I, Thy Son,
Bring the prayer of a little one.’
And He will smile, that children’s
tongue
Has not changed since Thou wast young!
A QUESTION
O bird with heart of
wassail,
That toss the Bacchic branch,
And slip your shaken music,
An elfin avalanche;
Come tell me, O tell me,
My poet of the blue!
What’s your thought of me, Sweet?—
Here’s my thought of you.
A small thing, a wee thing,
A brown fleck of nought;
With winging and singing
That who could have thought?
A small thing, a wee thing,
A brown amaze withal,
That fly a pitch more azure
Because you’re so small.
Bird, I’m a small thing—
My angel descries;
With winging and singing
That who could surmise?
Ah, small things, ah, wee things,
Are the poets all,
Whose tour’s the more azure
Because they’re so small.
The angels hang watching
The tiny men-things:—
‘The dear speck of flesh, see,
With such daring wings!
‘Come, tell us, O tell us,
Thou strange mortality!
What’s thy thought of us, Dear?—
Here’s our thought of thee.’
‘Alack! you tall angels,
I can’t think so high!
I can’t think what it feels like
Not to be I.’
Come tell me, O tell me,
My poet of the blue!
What’s your thought of me, Sweet?—
Here’s my thought of you.
FIELD-FLOWER
A PHANTASY
God took a fit of
Paradise-wind,
A slip of coerule weather,
A thought as simple as Himself,
And ravelled them together.
Unto His eyes He held it there,
To teach it gazing debonair
With memory of what, perdie,
A God’s young innocences were.
His fingers pushed it through the sod—
It came up redolent of God,
Garrulous of the eyes of God
To all the breezes near it;
Musical of the mouth of God
To all had eyes to hear it;
Mystical with the mirth of God,
That glow-like did ensphere it.
And—‘Babble! babble!
babble!’ said;
‘I’ll tell the
whole world one day!’
There was no blossom half so
glad,
Since sun of
Christ’s first Sunday.
A poet took a flaw of pain,
A hap of skiey pleasure,
A thought had in his cradle lain,
And mingled them in measure.
That chrism he laid upon his eyes,
And lips, and heart, for euphrasies,
That he might see, feel, sing, perdie,
The simple things that are the wise.
Beside the flower he held his ways,
And leaned him to it gaze for gaze—
He took its meaning, gaze for gaze,
As baby looks on baby;
Its meaning passed into his gaze,
Native as meaning may be;
He rose with all his shining gaze
As children’s eyes at play be.
And—‘Babble! babble!
babble!’ said;
‘I’ll tell the
whole world one day!’
There was no poet half so
glad,
Since man
grew God that Sunday.
THE CLOUD’S SWAN-SONG
There is a parable
in the pathless cloud,
There’s prophecy in heaven,—they did not lie,
The Chaldee shepherds; sealèd from the proud,
To cheer the weighted heart that mates the seeing eye.
A lonely man, oppressed with lonely ills,
And all the glory fallen from my song,
Here do I walk among the windy hills,
The wind and I keep both one monotoning tongue.
Like grey clouds one by one my songs upsoar
Over my soul’s cold peaks; and one by one
They loose their little rain, and are no more;
And whether well or ill, to tell me there is none.
For ’tis an alien tongue, of alien things,
From all men’s care, how miserably apart!
Even my friends say: ‘Of what is this he sings?’
And barren is my song, and barren is my heart.
For who can work, unwitting his work’s
worth?
Better, meseems, to know the work for naught,
Turn my sick course back to the kindly earth,
And leave to ampler plumes the jetting tops of thought.
And visitations, that do often use,
Remote, unhappy, inauspicious sense
Of doom, and poets widowed of their muse,
And what dark ’gan, dark ended, in me did commence.
I thought of spirit wronged by mortal ills,
And my flesh rotting on my fate’s dull stake;
And how self-scornèd they the bounty fills
Of others, and the bread, even of their dearest, take.
I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song;
Of him that set, wrapt in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.
But I, exanimate of quick Poesy,—
O then, no more but even a soulless corse!
Nay, my Delight dies not; ’tis I should be
Her dead, a stringless harp on which she had no force.
Of my wild lot I thought; from place to
place,
Apollo’s song-bowed Scythian, I go on;
Making in all my home, with pliant ways,
But, provident of change, putting forth root in none.
Now, with starved brain, sick body, patience
galled
With fardels even to wincing; from fair sky
Fell sudden little rain, scarce to be called
A shower, which of the instant was gone wholly by.
What cloud thus died I saw not; heaven was fair.
Methinks my angel plucked my locks: I bowed
My spirit, shamed; and looking in the air:—
‘Even so,’ I said, ‘even so, my brother the
good Cloud?’
It was a pilgrim of the fields of air,
Its home was allwheres the wind left it rest,
And in a little forth again did fare,
And in all places was a stranger and a guest.
It harked all breaths of heaven, and did
obey
With sweet peace their uncomprehended wills;
It knew the eyes of stars which made no stay,
And with the thunder walked upon the lonely hills.
And from the subject earth it seemed to
scorn,
It drew the sustenance whereby it grew
Perfect in bosom for the married Morn,
And of his life and light full as a maid kissed new.
Its also darkness of the face withdrawn,
And the long waiting for the little light,
So long in life so little. Like a fawn
It fled with tempest breathing hard at heel of flight;
And having known full East, did not disdain
To sit in shadow and oblivious cold,
Save what all loss doth of its loss retain,
And who hath held hath somewhat that he still must hold.
Right poet! who thy rightness to approve,
Having all liberty, didst keep all measure,
And with a firmament for ranging, move
But at the heavens’ uncomprehended pleasure.
With amplitude unchecked, how sweetly thou
Didst wear the ancient custom of the skies,
And yoke of used prescription; and thence how
Find gay variety no license could devise!
As we the quested beauties better wit
Of the one grove our own than forests great,
Restraint, by the delighted search of it,
Turns to right scope. For lovely moving intricate
Is put to fair devising in the curb
Of ordered limit; and all-changeful Hermes
Is Terminus as well. Yet we perturb
Our souls for latitude, whose strength in bound and term is.
How far am I from heavenly liberty,
That play at policy with change and fate,
Who should my soul from foreign broils keep free,
In the fast-guarded frontiers of its single state!
Could I face firm the Is, and with To-be
Trust Heaven; to Heaven commit the deed, and do;
In power contained, calm in infirmity,
And fit myself to change with virtue ever new;
Thou hadst not shamed me, cousin of the sky,
Thou wandering kinsman, that didst sweetly live
Unnoted, and unnoted sweetly die,
Weeping more gracious song than any I can weave;
Which these gross-tissued words do sorely
wrong.
Thou hast taught me on powerlessness a power;
To make song wait on life, not life on song;
To hold sweet not too sweet, and bread for bread though sour;
By law to wander, to be strictly free.
With tears ascended from the heart’s sad sea,
Ah, such a silver song to Death could I
Sing, Pain would list, forgetting Pain to be,
And Death would tarry marvelling, and forget to die!
TO THE SINKING SUN
How graciously thou
wear’st the yoke
Of use that does not fail!
The grasses, like an anchored smoke,
Ride in the bending gale;
This knoll is snowed with blosmy manna,
And fire-dropt as a seraph’s mail.
Here every eve thou stretchest out
Untarnishable wing,
And marvellously bring’st about
Newly an olden thing;
Nor ever through like-ordered heaven
Moves largely thy grave progressing.
Here every eve thou goest down
Behind the self-same hill,
Nor ever twice alike go’st down
Behind the self-same hill;
Nor like-ways is one flame-sopped flower
Possessed with glory past its will.
Not twice alike! I am not blind,
My sight is live to see;
And yet I do complain of thy
Weary variety.
O Sun! I ask thee less or more,
Change not at all, or utterly!
O give me unprevisioned new,
Or give to change reprieve!
For new in me is olden too,
That I for sameness grieve.
O flowers! O grasses! be but once
The grass and flower of yester-eve!
Wonder and sadness are the lot
Of change: thou yield’st mine eyes
Grief of vicissitude, but not
Its penetrant surprise.
Immutability mutable
Burthens my spirit and the skies.
O altered joy, all joyed of yore,
Plodding in unconned ways!
O grief grieved out, and yet once more
A dull, new, staled amaze!
I dream, and all was dreamed before,
Or dream I so? the dreamer says.
GRIEF’S HARMONICS
At evening, when the
lank and rigid trees,
To the mere forms of their sweet day-selves drying,
On heaven’s blank leaf seem pressed and
flattenèd;
Or rather, to my sombre thoughts replying,
Of plumes funereal the thin effigies;
That hour when all old dead things seem most dead,
And their death instant most and most undying,
That the flesh aches at them; there stirred in me
The babe of an unborn calamity,
Ere its due time to be deliverèd.
Dead sorrow and sorrow unborn so blent their pain,
That which more present was were hardly said,
But both more now than any Now can be.
My soul like sackcloth did her body rend,
And thus with Heaven contend:—
‘Let pass the chalice of this coming dread,
Or that
fore-drained O bid me not re-drain!’
So have I asked, who know my asking vain,
Woe against woe in antiphon set over,
That grief’s soul transmigrates, and lives again,
And in new pang old pang’s incarnated.
MEMORAT MEMORIA
Come you living or
dead to me, out of the silt of the Past,
With the sweet of the piteous first, and the shame of the
shameful last?
Come with your dear and dreadful face through the passes of
Sleep,
The terrible mask, and the face it masked—the face you did
not keep?
You are neither two nor one—I would you were one or two,
For your awful self is embalmed in the fragrant self I knew:
And Above may ken, and Beneath may ken, what I mean by these
words of whirl,
But by my sleep that sleepeth not,—O Shadow of a
Girl!—
Nought here but I and my dreams shall know the secret of this
thing:—
For ever
the songs I sing are sad with the songs I never sing,
Sad are sung songs, but how more sad the songs we dare not
sing!
Ah, the ill that we do in tenderness, and the
hateful horror of love!
It has sent more souls to the unslaked Pit than it ever will draw
above.
I damned you, girl, with my pity, who had better by far been
thwart,
And drave you hard on the track to hell, because I was gentle of
heart.
I shall have no comfort now in scent, no ease in dew, for
this;
I shall be afraid of daffodils, and rose-buds are amiss;
You have made a thing of innocence as shameful as a sin,
I shall never feel a girl’s soft arms without horror of the
skin.
My child! what was it that I sowed, that I so ill should reap?
You have done this to me. And I, what I to you?—It
lies with Sleep.
JULY FUGITIVE
Can you tell me
where has hid her
Pretty Maid July?
I would swear one day ago
She passed by,
I would swear that I do know
The blue bliss of her eye:
‘Tarry, maid, maid,’ I bid her;
But she hastened by.
Do you know where she has hid her,
Maid July?
Yet in truth it needs must be
The flight of her is old;
Yet in truth it needs must be,
For her nest, the earth, is cold.
No more in the poolèd Even
Wade her rosy feet,
Dawn-flakes no more plash from them
To poppies ’mid the wheat.
She has
muddied the day’s oozes
With her petulant feet;
Scared the clouds that floated,
As sea-birds they were,
Slow on the coerule
Lulls of the air,
Lulled on the luminous
Levels of air:
She has chidden in a pet
All her stars from her;
Now they wander loose and sigh
Through the turbid blue,
Now they wander, weep, and cry—
Yea, and I too—
‘Where are you, sweet July,
Where are you?’
Who hath beheld her footprints,
Or the pathway she goes?
Tell me, wind, tell me, wheat,
Which of you knows?
Sleeps she swathed in the flushed Arctic
Night of the rose?
Or lie
her limbs like Alp-glow
On the lily’s snows?
Gales, that are all-visitant,
Find the runaway;
And for him who findeth her
(I do charge you say)
I will throw largesse of broom
Of this summer’s mintage,
I will broach a honey-bag
Of the bee’s best vintage.
Breezes, wheat, flowers sweet,
None of them knows!
How then shall we lure her back
From the way she goes?
For it were a shameful thing,
Saw we not this comer
Ere Autumn camp upon the fields
Red with rout of Summer.
When the bird quits the cage,
We set the cage outside,
With seed and with water,
And the door wide,
Haply we
may win it so
Back to abide.
Hang her cage of earth out
O’er Heaven’s sunward wall,
Its four gates open, winds in watch
By reinèd cars at all;
Relume in hanging hedgerows
The rain-quenched blossom,
And roses sob their tears out
On the gale’s warm heaving bosom;
Shake the lilies till their scent
Over-drip their rims;
That our runaway may see
We do know her whims:
Sleek the tumbled waters out
For her travelled limbs;
Strew and smoothe blue night thereon,
There will—O not doubt her!—
The lovely sleepy lady lie,
With all her stars about her!
TO A SNOW-FLAKE
What heart could
have thought you?—
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapour?—
‘God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered, He wrought me,
From curled silver vapour,
To lust of His mind:—
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So
purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.’
NOCTURN
I walk, I only,
Not I only wake;
Nothing is, this sweet night,
But doth couch and wake
For its love’s sake;
Everything, this sweet night,
Couches with its mate.
For whom but for the stealthy-visitant sun
Is the naked moon
Tremulous and elate?
The heaven hath the earth
Its own and all apart;
The hushèd pool holdeth
A star to its heart.
You may think the rose sleepeth,
But though she folded is,
The wind doubts her sleeping;
Not all the rose sleeps,
But
smiles in her sweet heart
For crafty bliss.
The wind lieth with the rose,
And when he stirs, she stirs in her repose:
The wind hath the rose,
And the rose her kiss.
Ah, mouth of me!
Is it then that this
Seemeth much to thee?—
I wander only.
The rose hath her kiss.
A MAY BURDEN
Through meadow-ways
as I did tread,
The corn grew in great lustihead,
And hey! the beeches burgeonèd.
By Goddès fay, by Goddès fay!
It is the month, the jolly month,
It is the jolly month of May.
God ripe the wines and corn, I say
And wenches for the marriage-day,
And boys to teach love’s comely play.
By Goddès fay, by Goddès fay!
It is the month, the jolly month,
It is the jolly month of May.
As I went down by lane and lea,
The daisies reddened so, pardie!
‘Blushets!’ I said, ‘I well do see,
By Goddès fay, by Goddès fay!
The thing ye think of in this month,
Heigho! this jolly month of May.’
As down I went by rye and oats,
The blossoms smelt of kisses; throats
Of birds turned kisses into notes;
By Goddès fay, by Goddès fay!
The kiss it is a growing flower,
I trow, this jolly month of May!
God send a mouth to every kiss,
Seeing the blossom of this bliss
By gathering doth grow, certes!
By Goddès fay, by Goddès fay!
Thy brow-garland pushed all aslant
Tells—but I tell not, wanton May!
Note. The first two stanzas are from a French original—I have forgotten what.
A DEAD ASTRONOMER
(FATHER PERRY, S.J.)
Starry amorist,
starward gone,
Thou art—what thou didst gaze upon!
Passed through thy golden garden’s bars,
Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars.
She, about whose moonèd brows
Seven stars make seven glows,
Seven lights for seven woes;
She, like thine own Galaxy,
All lustres in one purity:—
What said’st thou, Astronomer,
When thou did’st discover her?
When thy hand its tube let fall,
Thou found’st the fairest Star of all!
‘CHOSE VUE’
A METRICAL CAPRICE
Up she rose, fair
daughter—well she was graced
As a cloud her going, stept from her chair,
As a summer-soft cloud, in her going paced,
Down dropped her riband-band, and all her waving hair
Shook like loosened music cadent to her waist;—
Lapsing like music, wavery as water,
Slid to her waist.
‘WHERETO ART THOU COME?’
‘Friend,
whereto art thou come?’ Thus Verity;
Of each that to the world’s sad Olivet
Comes with no multitude, but alone by night,
Lit with the one torch of his lifted soul,
Seeking her that he may lay hands on her;
Thus: and waits answer from the mouth of deed.
Truth is a maid, whom men woo diversely;
This, as a spouse; that, as a light-o’-love,
To know, and having known, to make his brag.
But woe to him that takes the immortal kiss,
And not estates her in his housing life,
Mother of all his seed! So he betrays,
Not Truth, the unbetrayable, but himself:
And with his kiss’s rated traitor-craft,
The Haceldama of a plot of days
He buys, to consummate his Judasry
Therein with Judas’ guerdon of despair.
HEAVEN AND HELL
’Tis said
there were no thought of hell,
Save hell were taught; that there should be
A Heaven for all’s self-credible.
Not so the thing appears to me.
’Tis Heaven that lies beyond our sights,
And hell too possible that proves;
For all can feel the God that smites,
But ah, how few the God that loves!
TO A CHILD
Whenas my life shall
time with funeral tread
The heavy death-drum of the beaten hours,
Following, sole mourner, mine own manhood dead,
Poor forgot corse, where not a maid strows flowers;
When I you love am no more I you love,
But go with unsubservient feet, behold
Your dear face through changed eyes, all grim change
prove;—
A new man, mockèd with misname of old;
When shamed Love keep his ruined lodging, elf!
When, ceremented in mouldering memory,
Myself is hearsèd underneath myself,
And I am but the monument of me:—
O to that tomb be tender then, which bears
Only the name of him it sepulchres!
HERMES
Soothsay.
Behold, with rod twy-serpented,
Hermes the prophet, twining in one power
The woman with the man. Upon his head
The cloudy cap, wherewith he hath in dower
The cloud’s own virtue—change and counterchange,
To show in light, and to withdraw in pall,
As mortal eyes best bear. His lineage strange
From Zeus, Truth’s sire, and maiden May—the all-
Illusive Nature. His fledged feet declare
That ’tis the nether self transdeified,
And the thrice-furnaced passions, which do bear
The poet Olympusward. In him allied
Both parents clasp; and from the womb of Nature
Stern Truth takes flesh in shows of lovely
feature.
HOUSE OF BONDAGE
I
When I perceive
Love’s heavenly reaping still
Regard perforce the clouds’ vicissitude,
That the fixed spirit loves not when it will,
But craves its seasons of the flawful blood;
When I perceive that the high poet doth
Oft voiceless stray beneath the uninfluent stars,
That even Urania of her kiss is loath,
And Song’s brave wings fret on their sensual bars;
When I perceived the fullest-sailèd sprite
Lag at most need upon the lethèd seas,
The provident captainship oft voided quite,
And lamèd lie deep-draughted argosies;
I scorn myself, that put for such strange toys
The wit of man to purposes of boys.
The spirit’s ark sealed with a little
clay,
Was old ere Memphis grew a memory; [190]
The hand pontifical to break away
That seal what shall surrender? Not the sea
Which did englut great Egypt and his war,
Nor all the desert-drownèd sepulchres.
Love’s feet are stained with clay and travel-sore,
And dusty are Song’s lucent wing and hairs.
O Love, that must do courtesy to decay,
Eat hasty bread standing with loins up-girt,
How shall this stead thy feet for their sore way?
Ah, Song, what brief embraces balm thy hurt!
Had Jacob’s toil full guerdon, casting his
Twice-seven heaped years to burn in Rachel’s
kiss?
THE HEART
TWO SONNETS
(To my Critic, who had objected to the phrase—‘The heart’s burning floors.’)
I
The heart you hold
too small and local thing,
Such spacious terms of edifice to bear.
And yet, since Poesy first shook out her wing,
The mighty Love has been impalaced there;
That has she given him as his wide demesne,
And for his sceptre ample empery;
Against its door to knock has Beauty been
Content; it has its purple canopy
A dais for the sovereign lady spread
Of many a lover, who the heaven would think
Too low an awning for her sacred head.
The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink—
Yet shall that chasm, till He Who these did build
An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled.
O nothing, in this corporal earth of man,
That to the imminent heaven of his high soul
Responds with colour and with shadow, can
Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll
Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph
Be mighty through its mighty habitants;
If God be in His Name; grave potence if
The sounds unbind of hieratic chants;
All’s vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm
Nature is whole in her least things exprest,
Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm.
Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.
A SUNSET
FROM HUGO’S ‘FEUILLES D’AUTOMNE’
I love the evenings,
passionless and fair, I love the evens,
Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence
leavens,
In numerous
leafage bosomed close;
Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer,
Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere
On cloudy
archipelagos.
Oh gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds
in motion,
Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds’
commotion,
Their unimagined
shapes accord:
Under
their waves at intervals flames a pale levin through,
As if some giant of the air amid the vapours drew
A sudden
elemental sword.
The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still
keeps the sullen fold;
And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold,
The thatched
roof of a cot a-glance;
Or on the blurred horizons joins his battle with the haze;
Or pools the glooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze
Great moveless
meres of radiance.
Then mark you how there hangs athwart the
firmament’s swept track
Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back,
A triple row of
pointed teeth?
Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide,
The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds its tenebrous side
With scales of
golden mail ensheathe.
Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates—the
vision flees.
Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice
Ruins immense in
mounded wrack:
Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone
Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown
When the
earthquake heaves its hugy back.
These vapours with their leaden, golden, iron,
bronzèd glows,
Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose,
Muttering hoarse
dreams of destined harms,
’Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep,
As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep
His dreadful and
resounding arms!
All vanishes! The sun, from topmost
heaven precipitated,
Like to a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red
Into the furnace
stirred to fume,
Shocking
the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire,
Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire
The vaporous and
inflamèd spume.
O contemplate the heavens! whenas the
vein-drawn day dies pale,
In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil,
With love that
has not speech for need;
Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite:
If winter hue them like a pall; or if the summer night
Fantasy them
with starry brede.
HEARD ON THE MOUNTAIN
FROM HUGO’S ‘FEUILLES D’AUTOMNE’
Have you sometimes,
calm, silent, let your tread aspirant rise
Up to the mountain’s summit, in the presence of the
skies?
Was’t on the borders of the South? or on the Bretagne
coast?
And at the basis of the mount had you the Ocean tossed?
And there, leaned o’er the wave and o’er the
immeasurableness,
Calm, silent, have you harkened what it says? Lo, what it
says!
One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicensèd to
muse,
Had drooped its wing above the beachèd margent of the
ooze,
And,
plunging from the mountain height into the immensity,
Beheld upon one side the land, on the other side the sea.
I harkened, comprehended,—never, as from those abysses,
No, never issued from a mouth, nor moved an ear, such voice as
this is!
A sound it was, at outset, vast, immeasurable,
confused,
Vaguer than is the wind among the tufted trees effused,
Full of magnificent accords, suave murmurs, sweet as is
The evensong, and mighty as the shock of panoplies
When the hoarse melee in its arms the closing squadrons grips,
And pants, in furious breathings, from the clarions’ brazen
lips.
Unutterable the harmony, unsearchable its deep,
Whose fluid undulations round the world a girdle keep,
And
through the vasty heavens, which by its surges are washed
young,
Its infinite volutions roll, enlarging as they throng,
Even to the profound arcane, whose ultimate chasms sombre
Its shattered flood englut with time, with space and form and
number.
Like to another atmosphere with thin o’erflowing robe,
The hymn eternal covers all the inundated globe:
And the world, swathed about with this investuring symphony,
Even as it trepidates in the air, so trepidates in the
harmony.
And pensive, I attended the ethereal lutany,
Lost within this containing voice as if within the sea.
Soon I distinguished, yet as tone which veils
confuse and smother,
Amid this voice two voices, one commingled with the other,
Which did from off the land and seas even to the heavens
aspire;
Chanting the universal chant in simultaneous quire.
And I
distinguished them amid that deep and rumorous sound,
As who beholds two currents thwart amid the fluctuous
profound.
The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal
speech!
That was the voice o’ the surges, as they parleyed each
with each.
The other, which arose from our abode terranean,
Was sorrowful; and that, alack! the murmur was of man;
And in this mighty quire, whose chantings day and night
resound,
Every wave had its utterance, and every man his sound.
Now, the magnificent Ocean, as I said,
unbannering
A voice of joy, a voice of peace, did never stint to sing,
Most like in Sion’s temples to a psaltery psaltering,
And to creation’s beauty reared the great lauds of his
song.
Upon the gale, upon the squall, his clamour borne along
Unpausingly arose to God in more triumphal swell;
And every one among his waves, that God alone can quell,
When the other of its song made end, into the singing pressed.
Like that majestic lion whereof Daniel was the guest,
At intervals the Ocean his tremendous murmur awed;
And I, t’ward where the sunset fires fell shaggily and
broad,
Under his golden mane, methought, that I saw pass the hand of
God.
Meanwhile, and side by side with that august
fan-faronnade,
The other voice, like the sudden scream of a destrier
affrayed,
Like an infernal door that grates ajar its rusty throat,
Like to a bow of iron that gnarls upon an iron rote,
Grinded; and tears, and shriekings, the anathema, the lewd
taunt,
Refusal of viaticum, refusal of the font,
And
clamour, and malediction, and dread blasphemy, among
That hurtling crowd of rumour from the diverse human tongue,
Went by as who beholdeth, when the valleys thick t’ward
night,
The long drifts of the birds of dusk pass, blackening flight on
flight.
What was this sound whose thousand echoes vibrated unsleeping?
Alas! the sound was earth’s and man’s, for earth and
man were weeping.
Brothers! of these two voices, strange most
unimaginably,
Unceasingly regenerated, dying unceasingly,
Harkenèd of the Eternal throughout His Eternity,
The one voice uttereth: Nature! and
the other voice: Humanity!
Then I alit in reverie; for my ministering
sprite
Alack! had never yet deployed a pinion of an ampler flight,
Nor ever
had my shadow endured so large a day to burn:
And long I rested dreaming, contemplating turn by turn
Now that abyss obscure which lurked beneath the water’s
roll,
And now that other untemptable abyss which opened in my soul.
And I made question of me, to what issues are we here,
Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled
gear;
What doth the soul; to be or live if better worth it is;
And why the Lord, Who, only, reads within that book of His,
In fatal hymeneals hath eternally entwined
The vintage-chant of nature with the dirging cry of
humankind?
(The metre of the second of these two translations is an experiment. The splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman I have treated after the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics; with the occasional triplet, and even the occasional Alexandrine, represented by a line of eight accents—a treatment which can well extend, I believe, the majestic resources of the metre.)
ULTIMA
LOVE’S ALMSMAN PLAINETH HIS FARE
O you, love’s
mendicancy who never tried,
How little of your almsman me you know!
Your little languid hand in mine you slide,
Like to a child says—‘Kiss me and let me
go!’
And night for this is fretted with my tears,
While I:—‘How soon this heavenly neck
doth tire
Bending to me from its transtellar spheres!’
Ah, heart all kneaded out of honey and fire!
Who bound thee to a body nothing worth,
And shamed thee much with an unlovely soul,
That the most strainedest charity of earth
Distasteth soon to render back the whole
Of thine inflamèd sweets and gentilesse!
Whereat, like an unpastured Titan, thou
Gnaw’st on thyself for famine’s bitterness,
And leap’st against thy chain. Sweet
Lady, how
Little a
linking of the hand to you!
Though I should touch yours careless for a year,
Not one blue vein would lie divinelier blue
Upon your fragile temple, to unsphere
The seraphim for kisses! Not one curve
Of your sad mouth would droop more sad and sweet.
But little food love’s beggars needs must serve,
That eye your plenteous graces from the street.
A hand-clasp I must feed on for a night,
A noon, although the untasted feast you lay,
To mock me, of your beauty. That you might
Be lover for one space, and make essay
What ’tis to pass unsuppered to your couch,
Keep fast from love all day; and so be taught
The famine which these craving lines avouch!
Ah! miser of good things that cost thee naught,
How know’st thou poor men’s hunger?—Misery!
When I go doleless and unfed by thee!
A HOLOCAUST
‘No man ever attained supreme knowledge, unless his heart had been torn up by the roots.’
When I presage the
time shall come—yea, now
Perchance is come, when you shall fail from me,
Because the mighty spirit, to whom you vow
Faith of kin genius unrebukably,
Scourges my sloth, and from your side dismissed
Henceforth this sad and most, most lonely soul
Must, marching fatally through pain and mist,
The God-bid levy of its powers enrol;
When I presage that none shall hear the voice
From the great Mount that clangs my ordained
advance,
That sullen envy bade the churlish choice
Yourself shall say, and turn your altered glance;
O God! Thou knowest if this heart of flesh
Quivers like broken entrails, when the wheel
Rolleth
some dog in middle street, or fresh
Fruit when ye tear it bleeding from the peel;
If my soul cries the uncomprehended cry
When the red agony oozed on Olivet!
Yet not for this, a caitiff, falter I,
Beloved whom I must lose, nor thence regret
The doubly-vouched and twin allegiance owed
To you in Heaven, and Heaven in you, Lady.
How could you hope, loose dealer with my God,
That I should keep for you my fealty?
For still ’tis thus:—because I am so true,
My Fair, to Heaven, I am so true to you!
BENEATH A PHOTOGRAPH
Phœbus, who
taught me art divine,
Here tried his hand where I did mine;
And his white fingers in this face
Set my Fair’s sigh-suggesting grace.
O sweetness past profaning guess,
Grievous with its own exquisiteness!
Vesper-like face, its shadows bright
With meanings of sequestered light;
Drooped with shamefast sanctities
She purely fears eyes cannot miss,
Yet would blush to know she is.
Ah, who can view with passionless glance
This tear-compelling countenance!
He has cozened it to tell
Almost its own miracle.
Yet I, all-viewing though he be,
Methinks saw further here than he;
And, Master gay! I swear I drew
Something the better of the two!
AFTER HER GOING
The
after-even! Ah, did I walk,
Indeed, in her or even?
For nothing of me or around
But absent She did leaven,
Felt in my body as its soul,
And in my soul its heaven.
‘Ah me! my very flesh turns soul,
Essenced,’ I sighed, ‘with
bliss!’
And the blackbird held his lutany,
All fragrant-through with bliss;
And all things stilled were as a maid
Sweet with a single kiss.
For grief of perfect fairness, eve
Could nothing do but smile;
The time was far too perfect fair,
Being but for a while;
And ah, in me, too happy grief
Blinded herself with smile!
The sunset at its radiant heart
Had somewhat unconfest:
The bird was loath of speech, its song
Half-refluent on its breast,
And made melodious toyings with
A note or two at best.
And she was gone, my sole, my Fair,
Ah, sole my Fair, was gone!
Methinks, throughout the world ’twere right
I had been sad alone;
And yet, such sweet in all things’ heart,
And such sweet in my own!
MY LADY THE TYRANNESS
Me since your fair
ambition bows
Feodary to those gracious brows,
Is nothing mine will not confess
Your sovran sweet rapaciousness?
Though use to the white yoke inures,
Half-petulant is
Your loving rebel for somewhat his,
Not yours, my love, not yours!
Behold my skies, which make with me
One passionate tranquillity!
Wrap thyself in them as a robe,
She shares them not; their azures probe,
No countering wings thy flight endures.
Nay, they do stole
Me like an aura of her soul.
I yield them, love, for yours!
But mine these hills and fields, which put
Not on the sanctity of her foot.
Far off, my dear, far off the sweet
Grave pianissimo of your feet!
My earth, perchance, your sway abjures?—
Your absence broods
O’er all, a subtler presence. Woods,
Fields, hills, all yours, all yours!
Nay then, I said, I have my thought,
Which never woman’s reaching raught;
Being strong beyond a woman’s might,
And high beyond a woman’s height,
Shaped to my shape in all contours.—
I looked, and knew
No thought but you were garden to.
All yours, my love, all yours!
Meseemeth still, I have my life;
All-clement Her its resolute strife
Evades; contained, relinquishing
Her mitigating eyes; a thing
Which the whole girth of God secures.
Ah, fool, pause! pause!
I had no
life, until it was
All yours, my love, all yours!
Yet, stern possession! I have my
death,
Sole yielding up of my sole breath;
Which all within myself I die,
All in myself must cry the cry
Which the deaf body’s wall immures.—
Thought fashioneth
My death without her.—Ah, even death
All yours, my love, all yours!
Death, then, he hers. I have my
heaven,
For which no arm of hers has striven;
Which solitary I must choose,
And solitary win or lose.—
Ah, but not heaven my own endures!
I must perforce
Taste you, my stream, in God your source,—
So steep my heaven in yours.
At last I said—I have my God,
Who doth desire me, though a clod,
And from His liberal Heaven shall He
Bar in mine arms His privacy.
Himself
for mine Himself assures.—
None shall deny
God to be mine, but He and I
All yours, my love, all yours!
I have no fear at all lest I
Without her draw felicity.
God for His Heaven will not forego
Her whom I found such heaven below,
And she will train Him to her lures.
Nought, lady, I love
In you but more is loved above;
What made me, makes Him yours.
‘I, thy sought own, am I
forgot?’
Ha, thou?—thou liest, I seek thee not.
Why what, thou painted parrot, Fame,
What have I taught thee but her name?
Hear, thou slave Fame, while Time endures,
I give her thee;
Page her triumphal name!—Lady,
Take her, the thrall is yours.
UNTO THIS LAST
A boy’s young
fancy taketh love
Most simply, with the rind thereof;
A boy’s young fancy tasteth more
The rind, than the deific core.
Ah, Sweet! to cast away the slips
Of unessential rind, and lips
Fix on the immortal core, is well;
But heard’st thou ever any tell
Of such a fool would take for food
Aspect and scent, however good,
Of sweetest core Love’s orchards grow?
Should such a phantast please him so,
Love where Love’s reverent self denies
Love to feed, but with his eyes,
All the savour, all the touch,
Another’s—was there ever such?
Such were fool, if fool there be;
Such fool was I, and was for thee!
But if
the touch and savour too
Of this fruit—say, Sweet, of you—
You unto another give
For sacrosanct prerogative,
Yet even scent and aspect were
Some elected Second’s share;
And one, gone mad, should rest content
With memory of show and scent;
Would not thyself vow, if there sigh
Such a fool—say, Sweet, as I—
Treble frenzy it must be
Still to love, and to love thee?
Yet had I torn (man knoweth not,
Nor scarce the unweeping angels wot
Of such dread task the lightest part)
Her fingers from about my heart.
Heart, did we not think that she
Had surceased her tyranny?
Heart, we bounded, and were free!
O sacrilegious freedom!—Till
She came, and taught my apostate will
The winnowed sweet mirth cannot guess
And tear-fined peace of hopefulness;
Looked,
spake, simply touched, and went.
Now old pain is fresh content,
Proved content is unproved pain.
Pangs fore-tempted, which in vain
I, faithless, have denied, now bud
To untempted fragrance and the mood
Of contrite heavenliness; all days
Joy affrights me in my ways;
Extremities of old delight
Afflict me with new exquisite
Virgin piercings of surprise,—
Stung by those wild brown bees, her eyes!
ULTIMUM
Now in these last
spent drops, slow, slower shed,
Love dies, Love dies, Love dies—ah, Love is dead!
Sad Love in life, sore Love in agony,
Pale Love in death; while all his offspring songs,
Like children, versed not in death’s chilly wrongs,
About him flit, frighted to see him lie
So still, who did not know that Love could die.
One lifts his wing, where dulls the vermeil all
Like clotting blood, and shrinks to find it cold,
And when she sees its lapse and nerveless fall
Clasps her fans, while her sobs ooze through the webbèd
gold.
Thereat all weep together, and their tears
Make lights like shivered moonlight on long waters.
Have peace, O piteous daughters!
He shall not wake more through the mortal years,
Nor comfort come to my soul widowèd,
Nor breath to your wild wings; for Love is dead!
I slew, that moan for him: he lifted me
Above myself, and that I might not be
Less than myself, need was that he should die;
Since Love that first did wing, now clogged me from the sky.
Yet lofty Love being dead thus passeth base—
There is a soul of nobleness which stays,
The spectre of the rose: be comforted,
Songs, for the dust that dims his sacred head!
The days draw on too dark for Song or Love;
O peace, my songs, nor stir ye any wing!
For lo, the thunder hushing all the grove,
And did Love live, not even Love could sing.
And, Lady, thus I dare to say,
Not all with you is passed away!
For your love taught me this:—’tis Love’s true
praise
To be, not staff, but writ of worthy days;
And that high worth in love unfortunate
Should still remain it learned in love elate.
Beyond your star, still, still the stars are bright;
Beyond your highness, still I follow height;
Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view,
Beyond your trueness, Lady, Truth stands true.
This
wisdom sings my song with last firm breath,
Caught from the twisted lore of Love and Death,
The strange inwoven harmony that wakes
From Pallas’ straying locks twined with her
ægis-snakes.
‘On him the unpetitioned heavens descend,
Who heaven on earth proposes not for end;
The perilous and celestial excess
Taking with peace, lacking with thankfulness.
Bliss in extreme befits thee not, until
Thou’rt not extreme in bliss; be equal still:
Sweets to be granted think thy self unmeet
Till thou have learned to hold sweet not too sweet.’
This thing not far is he from wise in art
Who teacheth; nor who doth, from wise in heart.
ENVOY
Go, songs, for ended
is our brief, sweet play;
Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow:
And some are sung, and that was yesterday,
And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow.
Go forth; and if it be o’er stony way,
Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow:
And it was sweet, and that was yesterday,
And sweet is sweet, though purchasèd with
sorrow.
Go, songs, and come not back from your far
way:
And if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow,
Tell them ye grieve, for your hearts know To-day,
Tell them ye smile, for your eyes know
To-morrow.