Poems

And yon, ye stars,
Who slowly begin to marshal,
As of old, in the fields of heaven,
Your distant, melancholy lines!
Have you, too, survived yourselves?
Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You too once lived;
You too moved joyfully,
Among august companions,
In an older world, peopled by gods,
In a mightier order,
The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent sons of heaven.
But now ye kindle
Your lonely, cold-shining lights,
Unwilling lingerers
In the heavenly wilderness,
For a younger, ignoble world;
And renew, by necessity,
Night after night your courses,
In echoing, unneared silence,
Above a race you know not,
Uncaring and undelighted,
Without friend and without home;
Weary like us, though not
Weary with our weariness.

No, no, ye stars! there is no death with you,
No languor, no decay! languor and death,
They are with me, not you! ye are alive,—
Ye, and the pure dark ether where ye ride
Brilliant above me! And thou, fiery world,
That sapp’st the vitals of this terrible mount
Upon whose charred and quaking crust I stand,—
Thou, too, brimmest with life! the sea of cloud,
That heaves its white and billowy vapors up
To moat this isle of ashes from the world,
Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down,
O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads
To Etna’s Lipareän sister-fires
And the long dusky line of Italy,—
That mild and luminous floor of waters lives,
With held-in joy swelling its heart: I only,
Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has failed,
I, who have not, like these, in solitude
Maintained courage and force, and in myself
Nursed an immortal vigor,—I alone
Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read
In all things my own deadness.

A long silence. He continues:—

Oh that I could glow like this mountain!
Oh that my heart bounded with the swell of the sea!
Oh that my soul were full of light as the stars!
Oh that it brooded over the world like the air!

But no, this heart will glow no more; thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought,—
But a naked, eternally restless mind!

After a pause:—

To the elements it came from,
Every thing will return,—
Our bodies to earth,
Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air:
They were well born, they will be well entombed.
But mind?...

And we might gladly share the fruitful stir
Down in our mother earth’s miraculous womb;
Well would it be
With what rolled of us in the stormy main;
We might have joy, blent with the all-bathing air,
Or with the nimble, radiant life of fire.

But mind, but thought,
If these have been the master part of us,—
Where will they find their parent element?
What will receive them, who will call them home?
But we shall still be in them, and they in us;
And we shall be the strangers of the world;
And they will be our lords, as they are now,
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled forever; and still thought and mind
Will hurry us with them on their homeless march
Over the unallied unopening earth,
Over the unrecognizing sea; while air
Will blow us fiercely back to sea and earth,
And fire repel us from its living waves.
And then we shall unwillingly return
Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life:
And in our individual human state
Go through the sad probation all again,
To see if we will poise our life at last,
To see if we will now at last be true
To our own only true, deep-buried selves,
Being one with which, we are one with the whole world;
Or whether we will once more fall away
Into the bondage of the flesh or mind,
Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze
Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power.
And each succeeding age in which we are born
Will have more peril for us than the last;
Will goad our senses with a sharper spur,
Will fret our minds to an intenser play,
Will make ourselves harder to be discerned.
And we shall struggle a while, gasp and rebel;
And we shall fly for refuge to past times,
Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness;
And the reality will pluck us back,
Knead us in its hot hand, and change our nature.
And we shall feel our powers of effort flag,
And rally them for one last fight—and fail;
And we shall sink in the impossible strife,
And be astray forever.
Slave of sense
I have in no wise been; but slave of thought?
And who can say: I have been always free,
Lived ever in the light of my own soul?
I cannot; I have lived in wrath and gloom,
Fierce, disputatious, ever at war with man,
Far from my own soul, far from warmth and light;
But I have not grown easy in these bonds,
But I have not denied what bonds these were.
Yea, I take myself to witness,
That I have loved no darkness,
Sophisticated no truth,
Nursed no dlusion,
Allowed no fear!

And therefore, O ye elements! I know know—
Ye know it too—it hath been granted me
Not to die wholly, not to be all enslaved.
I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud
Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.

Is it but for a moment?
—Ah, boil up, ye vapors!
Leap and roar, thou sea of fire!
My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!

[He plunges into the crater.

CALLICLES (from below).

Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame.

Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee;
But where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea,—

Where the moon-silvered inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,—
Oh, speed, and rejoice!

On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks:
On the cliff-side the pigeons
Roost deep in the rocks.

In the moonlight the shepherds,
Soft lulled by the rills,
Lie wrapped in their blankets
Asleep on the hills.

—What forms are these coming
So white through the gloom?
What garments out-glistening
The gold-flowered broom?

What sweet-breathing presence
Out-perfumes the thyme?
What voices enrapture
The night’s balmy prime?

’Tis Apollo comes leading
His choir, the Nine.
The leader is fairest,
But all are divine.

They are lost in the hollows!
They stream up again!
What seeks on this mountain
The glorified train?

They bathe on this mountain,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus,
Their endless abode.

—Whose praise do they mention?
Of what is it told?
What will be forever,
What was from of old.

First hymn they the Father
Of all things; and then,
The rest of immortals,
The action of men.

The day in his hotness,
The strife with the palm;
The night in her silence,
The stars in their calm.

BACCHANALIA; OR, THE NEW AGE.

I.

The evening comes, the fields are still.
The tinkle of the thirsty rill,
Unheard all day, ascends again;
Deserted is the half-mown plain,
Silent the swaths; the ringing wain,
The mower’s cry, the dog’s alarms,
All housed within the sleeping farms.
The business of the day is done,
The last-left haymaker is gone.
And from the thyme upon the height,
And from the elder-blossom white
And pale dog-roses in the hedge,
And from the mint-plant in the sedge,
In puffs of balm the night-air blows
The perfume which the day foregoes.
And on the pure horizon far,
See, pulsing with the first-born star,
The liquid sky above the hill!
The evening comes, the fields are still.

Loitering and leaping,
With saunter, with bounds,
Flickering and circling
In files and in rounds,
Gayly their pine-staff green
Tossing in air,
Loose o’er their shoulders white
Showering their hair,
See! the wild Mænads
Break from the wood,
Youth and Iacchus
Maddening their blood.
See! through the quiet land
Rioting they pass,
Fling the fresh heaps about,
Trample the grass,
Tear from the rifled hedge
Garlands, their prize;
Fill with their sports the field,
Fill with their cries.

Shepherd, what ails thee, then?
Shepherd, why mute?
Forth with thy joyous song!
Forth with thy flute!
Tempts not the revel blithe?
Lure not their cries?
Glow not their shoulders smooth?
Melt not their eyes?
Is not, on cheeks like those,
Lovely the flush?
—Ah! so the quiet was!
So was the hush!

II.

The epoch ends, the world is still.
The age has talked and worked its fill.
The famous orators have shone,
The famous poets sung and gone,
The famous men of war have fought,
The famous speculators thought,
The famous players, sculptors, wrought,
The famous painters filled their wall,
The famous critics judged it all.
The combatants are parted now;
Uphung the spear, unbent the bow,
The puissant crowned, the weak laid low.
And in the after-silence sweet,
Now strifes are hushed, our ears doth meet,
Ascending pure, the bell-like fame
Of this or that down-trodden name,
Delicate spirits, pushed away
In the hot press of the noonday.
And o’er the plain, where the dead age
Did its now-silent warfare wage,—
O’er that wide plain, now wrapped in gloom,
Where many a splendor finds its tomb,
Many spent fames and fallen nights nights—
The one or two immortal lights
Rise slowly up into the sky,
To shine there everlastingly,
Like stars over the bounding hill.
The epoch ends, the world is still.

Thundering and bursting
In torrents, in waves,
Carolling and shouting
Over tombs, amid graves,
See! on the cumbered plain
Clearing a stage,
Scattering the past about,
Comes the new age.
Bards make new poems,
Thinkers new schools,
Statesmen new systems,
Critics new rules.
All things begin again;
Life is their prize;
Earth with their deeds they fill,
Fill with their cries.

Poet, what ails thee, then?
Say, why so mute?
Forth with thy praising voice!
Forth with thy flute!
Loiterer! why sittest thou
Sunk in thy dream?
Tempts not the bright new age?
Shines not its stream?
Look, ah! what genius,
Art, science, wit!
Soldiers like Cæsar,
Statesmen like Pitt!
Sculptors like Phidias,
Raphaels in shoals,
Poets like Shakspeare,—
Beautiful souls!
See, on their glowing cheeks
Heavenly the flush!
—Ah! so the silence was!
So was the hush!

The world but feels the present’s spell:
The poet feels the past as well;
Whatever men have done, might do,
Whatever thought, might think it too.

EPILOGUE TO LESSING’S LAOCOÖN.

One morn as through Hyde Park we walked,
My friend and I, by chance we talked
Of Lessing’s famed Laocoön;
And after we a while had gone
In Lessing’s track, and tried to see
What painting is, what poetry,—
Diverging to another thought,
“Ah!” cries my friend, “but who hath taught
Why music and the other arts
Oftener perform aright their parts
Than poetry? why she, than they,
Fewer fine successes can display?

“For ’tis so, surely! Even in Greece,
Where best the poet framed his piece,
Even in that Phœbus-guarded ground
Pausanias on his travels found
Good poems, if he looked, more rare
(Though many) than good statues were—
For these, in truth, were everywhere.
Of bards full many a stroke divine
In Dante’s, Petrarch’s, Tasso’s line,
The land of Ariosto showed;
And yet, e’en there, the canvas glowed
With triumphs, a yet ampler brood,
Of Raphael and his brotherhood.
And nobly perfect, in our day
Of haste, half-work, and disarray,
Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong,
Hath risen Goethe’s, Wordsworth’s song;
Yet even I (and none will bow
Deeper to these) must needs allow,
They yield us not, to soothe our pains,
Such multitude of heavenly strains
As from the kings of sound are blown,—
Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn.”

While thus my friend discoursed, we pass
Out of the path, and take the grass.
The grass had still the green of May,
And still the unblackened elms were gay;
The kine were resting in the shade,
The flies a summer murmur made.
Bright was the morn, and south the air;
The soft-couched cattle were as fair
As those which pastured by the sea,
That old-world morn, in Sicily,
When on the beach the Cyclops lay,
And Galatea from the bay
Mocked her poor lovelorn giant’s lay.
“Behold,” I said, “the painter’s sphere!
The limits of his art appear.
The passing group, the summer morn,
The grass, the elms, that blossomed thorn,—
Those cattle couched, or, as they rise,
Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes,—
These, or much greater things, but caught
Like these, and in one aspect brought!
In outward semblance he must give
A moment’s life of things that live;
Then let him choose his moment well,
With power divine its story tell.”

Still we walked on, in thoughtful mood,
And now upon the bridge we stood.
Full of sweet breathings was the air,
Of sudden stirs and pauses fair.
Down o’er the stately bridge the breeze
Came rustling from the garden-trees,
And on the sparkling waters played;
Light-plashing waves an answer made,
And mimic boats their haven neared.
Beyond, the abbey-towers appeared,
By mist and chimneys unconfined,
Free to the sweep of light and wind;
While through their earth-moored nave below,
Another breath of wind doth blow,
Sound as of wandering breeze—but sound
In laws by human artists bound.
“The world of music!” I exclaimed,—
“This breeze that rustles by, that famed
Abbey, recall it! what a sphere,
Large and profound, hath genius here!
The inspired musician, what a range,
What power of passion, wealth of change!
Some source of feeling he must choose,
And its locked fount of beauty use,
And through the stream of music tell
Its else unutterable spell;
To choose it rightly is his part,
And press into its inmost heart.

“Miserere, Domine!
The words are uttered, and they flee.
Deep is their penitential moan,
Mighty their pathos, but ’tis gone.
They have declared the spirit’s sore,
Sore load, and words can do no more.
Beethoven takes them then,—those two
Poor, bounded words,—and makes them new;
Infinite makes them, makes them young;
Transplants them to another tongue,
Where they can now, without constraint,
Pour all the soul of their complaint,
And roll adown a channel large
The wealth divine they have in charge.
Page after page of music turn,
And still they live, and still they burn,
Eternal, passion-fraught, and free,—
Miserere, Domine!”

Onward we moved, and reached the ride
Where gayly flows the human tide.
Afar, in rest the cattle lay;
We heard, afar, faint music play;
But agitated, brisk, and near,
Men, with their stream of life, were here.
Some hang upon the rails, and some
On foot behind them go and come.
This through the ride upon his steed
Goes slowly by, and this at speed.
The young, the happy, and the fair,
The old, the sad, the worn, were there;
Some vacant and some musing went,
And some in talk and merriment.
Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells!
And now and then, perhaps, there swells
A sigh, a tear—but in the throng
All changes fast, and hies along.
Hies, ah! from whence, what native ground?
And to what goal, what ending, bound?
“Behold at last the poet’s sphere!
But who,” I said, “suffices here?

“For, ah! so much he has to do,—
Be painter and musician too!
The aspect of the moment show,
The feeling of the moment know!
The aspect not, I grant, express
Clear as the painter’s art can dress;
The feeling not, I grant, explore
So deep as the musician’s lore:
But clear as words can make revealing,
And deep as words can follow feeling.
But, ah! then comes his sorest spell
Of toil,—he must life’s movement tell!
The thread which binds it all in one,
And not its separate parts alone.
The movement he must tell of life,
Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife;
His eye must travel down, at full,
The long, unpausing spectacle;
With faithful, unrelaxing force
Attend it from its primal source,
From change to change and year to year
Attend it of its mid-career,
Attend it to the last repose
And solemn silence of its close.

“The cattle rising from the grass,
His thought must follow where they pass;
The penitent with anguish bowed,
His thought must follow through the crowd.
Yes! all this eddying, motley throng
That sparkles in the sun along,—
Girl, statesman, merchant, soldier bold,
Master and servant, young and old,
Grave, gay, child, parent, husband, wife,—
He follows home, and lives their life.

“And many, many are the souls
Life’s movement fascinates, controls.
It draws them on, they cannot save
Their feet from its alluring wave;
They cannot leave it, they must go
With its unconquerable flow.
But ah! how few, of all that try
This mighty march, do aught but die!
For ill-endowed for such a way,
Ill-stored in strength, in wits, are they.
They faint, they stagger to and fro,
And wandering from the stream they go;
In pain, in terror, in distress,
They see, all round, a wilderness.
Sometimes a momentary gleam
They catch of the mysterious stream;
Sometimes, a second’s space, their ear
The murmur of its waves doth hear;
That transient glimpse in song they say,
But not as painter can portray;
That transient sound in song they tell,
But not as the musician well.
And when at last their snatches cease,
And they are silent and at peace,
The stream of life’s majestic whole
Hath ne’er been mirrored on their soul.

“Only a few the life-stream’s shore
With safe unwandering feet explore;
Untired its movement bright attend,
Follow its windings to the end.
Then from its brimming waves their eye
Drinks up delighted ecstasy,
And its deep-toned, melodious voice
Forever makes their ear rejoice.
They speak! the happiness divine
They feel runs o’er in every line;
Its spell is round them like a shower;
It gives them pathos, gives them power.
No painter yet hath such a way,
Nor no musician made, as they,
And gathered on immortal knolls
Such lovely flowers for cheering souls.
Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach
The charm which Homer, Shakspeare, teach.
To these, to these, their thankful race
Gives, then, the first, the fairest place;
And brightest is their glory’s sheen,
For greatest hath their labor been.”

Cold bubbled the spring of Tilphusa,
Copais lay bright in the moon,
Helicon glassed in the lake
Its firs, and afar rose the peaks
Of Parnassus, snowily clear;
Thebes was behind him in flames,
And the clang of arms in his ear,
When his awe-struck captors led
The Theban seer to the spring.
Tiresias drank and died.
Nor did reviving Thebes
See such a prophet again.

Well may we mourn, when the head
Of a sacred poet lies low
In an age which can rear them no more!
The complaining millions of men
Darken in labor and pain;
But he was a priest to us all
Of the wonder and bloom of the world,
Which we saw with his eyes, and were glad.
He is dead, and the fruit-bearing day
Of his race is past on the earth;
And darkness returns to our eyes.

For, oh! is it you, is it you,
Moonlight, and shadow, and lake,
And mountains, that fill us with joy,
Or the poet who sings you so well?
Is it you, O beauty, O grace,
O charm, O romance, that we feel,
Or the voice which reveals what you are?
Are ye, like daylight and sun,
Shared and rejoiced in by all?
Or are ye immersed in the mass
Of matter, and hard to extract,
Or sunk at the core of the world
Too deep for the most to discern?
Like stars in the deep of the sky,
Which arise on the glass of the sage,
But are lost when their watcher is gone.

“They are here,”—I heard, as men heard
In Mysian Ida the voice
Of the mighty Mother, or Crete,
The murmur of Nature, reply,—
“Loveliness, magic, grace,
They are here! they are set in the world,
They abide; and the finest of souls
Hath not been thrilled by them all,
Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.
The poet who sings them may die,
But they are immortal and live,
For they are the life of the world.
Will ye not learn it, and know,
When ye mourn that a poet is dead,
That the singer was less than his themes,
Life, and emotion, and I?

“More than the singer are these.
Weak is the tremor of pain
That thrills in his mournfullest chord
To that which once ran through his soul.
Cold the elation of joy
In his gladdest, airiest song,
To that which of old in his youth
Filled him and made him divine.
Hardly his voice at its best
Gives us a sense of the awe,
The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom,
Of the unlit gulf of himself.

“Ye know not yourselves; and your bards—
The clearest, the best, who have read
Most in themselves—have beheld
Less than they left unrevealed.
Ye express not yourselves: can ye make
With marble, with color, with word,
What charmed you in others re-live?
Can thy pencil, O artist! restore
The figure, the bloom of thy love,
As she was in her morning of spring?
Canst thou paint the ineffable smile
Of her eyes as they rested on thine?
Can the image of life have the glow,
The motion of life itself?

“Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me,
The mateless, the one, will ye know?
Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell
Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast,
My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift
To have rendered the gleam of my skies,
To have echoed the moan of my seas,
Uttered the voice of my hills?
When your great ones depart, will ye say,—
All things have suffered a loss,
Nature is hid in their grave?

“Race after race, man after man,
Have thought that my secret was theirs,
Have dreamed that I lived but for them,
That they were my glory and joy.
—They are dust, they are changed, they are gone!
I remain.”

THE YOUTH OF MAN.

We, O Nature, depart:
Thou survivest us! This,
This, I know, is the law.
Yes! but, more than this,
Thou who seest us die
Seest us change while we live;
Seest our dreams, one by one,
Seest our errors depart;
Watchest us, Nature! throughout
Mild and inscrutably calm.

Well for us that we change!
Well for us that the power
Which in our morning prime
Saw the mistakes of our youth,
Sweet, and forgiving, and good,
Sees the contrition of age!

Behold, O Nature, this pair!
See them to-night where they stand,
Not with the halo of youth
Crowning their brows with its light,
Not with the sunshine of hope,
Not with the rapture of spring,
Which they had of old, when they stood
Years ago at my side
In this self-same garden, and said,—
“We are young, and the world is ours;
Man, man is king of the world!
Fools that these mystics are
Who prate of Nature! but she
Hath neither beauty, nor warmth,
Nor life, nor emotion, nor power.
But man has a thousand gifts,
And the generous dreamer invests
The senseless world with them all.
Nature is nothing; her charm
Lives in our eyes which can paint,
Lives in our hearts which can feel.”

Thou, O Nature, wast mute,
Mute as of old! Days flew,
Days and years; and Time
With the ceaseless stroke of his wings
Brushed off the bloom from their soul.
Clouded and dim grew their eye,
Languid their heart—for youth
Quickened its pulses no more.
Slowly, within the walls
Of an ever-narrowing world,
They drooped, they grew blind, they grew old.
Thee, and their youth in thee,
Nature! they saw no more.

Murmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world!
Make, oh, make yourselves felt
To the dying spirit of youth!
Come, like the breath of the spring!
Leave not a human soul
To grow old in darkness and pain!
Only the living can feel you,
But leave us not while we live!

Here they stand to-night,—
Here, where this gray balustrade
Crowns the still valley; behind
In the castled house with its woods
Which sheltered their childhood; the sun
On its ivied windows; a scent
From the gray-walled gardens, a breath
Of the fragrant stock and the pink,
Perfumes the evening air.
Their children play on the lawns.
They stand and listen; they hear
The children’s shouts, and at times,
Faintly, the bark of a dog
From a distant farm in the hills.
Nothing besides! in front
The wide, wide valley outspreads
To the dim horizon, reposed
In the twilight, and bathed in dew,
Cornfield and hamlet and copse
Darkening fast; but a light,
Far off, a glory of day,
Still plays on the city-spires;
And there in the dusk by the walls,
With the gray mist marking its course
Through the silent, flowery land,
On, to the plains, to the sea,
Floats the imperial stream.

Well I know what they feel!
They gaze, and the evening wind
Plays on their faces; they gaze,—
Airs from the Eden of youth
Awake and stir in their soul;
The past returns: they feel
What they are, alas! what they were.
They, not Nature, are changed.
Well I know what they feel!

Hush, for tears
Begin to steal to their eyes!
Hush, for fruit
Grows from such sorrow as theirs!

And they remember,
With piercing, untold anguish,
The proud boasting of their youth.
And they feel how Nature was fair.
And the mists of delusion,
And the scales of habit,
Fall away from their eyes;
And they see, for a moment,
Stretching out like the desert
In its weary, unprofitable length,
Their faded, ignoble lives.

While the locks are yet brown on thy head,
While the soul still looks through thine eyes,
While the heart still pours
The mantling blood to thy cheek,
Sink, O youth, in thy soul!
Yearn to the greatness of Nature;
Rally the good in the depths of thyself!

About This Book

BACCHANALIA; OR, THE NEW AGE.

I.

II.

EPILOGUE TO LESSING’S LAOCOÖN.

PERSISTENCY OF POETRY.

A CAUTION TO POETS.

THE YOUTH OF NATURE.

THE YOUTH OF MAN.

PALLADIUM.