The Garden of Dreams

When day dies, lone, forsaken,
And joy is kissed asleep;
When doubt's gray eyes awaken,
And love, with music taken
From hearts with sighings shaken,
Sits in the dusk to weep:

With ghostly lifted finger
What memory then shall rise?—
Of dark regret the bringer—
To tell the sorrowing singer
Of days whose echoes linger,
Till dawn unstars the skies.

When night is gone and, beaming,
Faith journeys forth to toil;
When hope's blue eyes wake gleaming,
And life is done with dreaming
The dreams that seem but seeming,
Within the world's turmoil:

Can we forget the presence
Of death who walks unseen?
Whose scythe casts shadowy crescents
Around life's glittering essence,
As lessens, slowly lessens,
The space that lies between.

XIII.

Bland was that October day,
Calm and balmy as the spring,
When we went a forest-way,
'Neath paternal beeches gray,
To a valleyed opening:
Where the purple aster flowered,
And, like torches shadow-held,
Red the fiery sumach towered;
And, where gum-trees sentineled
Vistas, robed in gold and garnet,
Ripe the thorny chestnut shelled
Its brown plumpness. Bee and hornet
Droned around us; quick the cricket,
Tireless in the wood-rose thicket,
Tremoloed; and, to the wind
All its moon-spun silver casting,
Swung the milk-weed pod unthinned;
And, its clean flame on the sod
By the fading golden-rod,
Burned the white life-everlasting.
It was not so much the time,
Nor the place, nor way we went,
That made all our moods to rhyme,
Nor the season's sentiment,
As it was the innocent
Carefree childhood of our hearts,
Reading each expression of
Death and care as life and love:
That impression joy imparts
Unto others and retorts
On itself, which then made glad
All the sorrow of decay,
As the memory of that day
Makes this day of spring, now, sad.

XIV.

The balsam-breathed petunias
Hang riven of the rain;
And where the tiger-lily was
Now droops a tawny stain;
While in the twilight's purple pause
Earth dreams of Heaven again.

When one shall sit and sigh,
And one lie all alone
Beneath the unseen sky—
Whose love shall then deny?
Whose love atone?

With ragged petals round its pod
The rain-wrecked poppy dies;
And where the hectic rose did nod
A crumbled crimson lies;
While distant as the dreams of God
The stars slip in the skies.

When one shall lie asleep,
And one be dead and gone—
Within the unknown deep,
Shall we the trysts then keep
That now are done?

XV.

Holding both your hands in mine,
Often have we sat together,
While, outside, the boisterous weather
Hung the wild wind on the pine
Like a black marauder, and
With a sudden warning hand
At the casement rapped. The night
Read no sentiment of light,
Starbeam-syllabled, within
Her romance of death and sin,
Shadow-chaptered tragicly.—
Looking in your eyes, ah me!
Though I heard, I did not heed
What the night read unto us,
Threatening and ominous:
For love helped my heart to read
Forward through unopened pages
To a coming day, that held
More for us than all the ages
Past, that it epitomized
In its sentence; where we spelled
What our present realized
Only—all the love that was
Past and yet to be for us.

XVI.

'Though in the garden, gray with dew,
All life lies withering,
And there's no more to say or do,
No more to sigh or sing,
Yet go we back the ways we knew,
When buds were opening.

Perhaps we shall not search in vain
Within its wreck and gloom;
'Mid roses ruined of the rain
There still may live one bloom;
One flower, whose heart may still retain
The long-lost soul-perfume.

And then, perhaps, will come to us
The dreams we dreamed before;
And song, who spoke so beauteous,
Will speak to us once more;
And love, with eyes all amorous,
Will ope again his door.

So 'though the garden's gray with dew,
And flowers are withering,
And there's no more to say or do,
No more to sigh or sing,
Yet go we back the ways we knew
When buds were opening.

XVII.

Looking on the desolate street,
Where the March snow drifts and drives,
Trodden black of hurrying feet,
Where the athlete storm-wind strives
With each tree and dangling light,—
Centers, sphered with glittering white,—
Hissing in the dancing snow ...
Backward in my soul I go
To that tempest-haunted night
Of two autumns past, when we,
Hastening homeward, were o'ertaken
Of the storm; and 'neath a tree,
With its wild leaves whisper-shaken,
Sheltered us in that forsaken,
Sad and ancient cemetery,—
Where folk came no more to bury.—
Haggard grave-stones, mossed and crumbled,
Tottered 'round us, or o'ertumbled
In their sunken graves; and some,
Urned and obelisked above
Iron-fenced in tombs, stood dumb
Records of forgotten love.
And again I see the west
Yawning inward to its core
Of electric-spasmed ore,
Swiftly, without pause or rest.
And a great wind sweeps the dust
Up abandoned sidewalks; and,
In the rotting trees, the gust
Shouts again—a voice that would
Make its gaunt self understood
Moaning over death's lean land.
And we sat there, hand in hand;
On the granite; where we read,
By the leaping skies o'erhead,
Something of one young and dead.
Yet the words begot no fear
In our souls: you leaned your cheek
Smiling on mine: very near
Were our lips: we did not speak.

XVIII.

And suddenly alone I stood
With scared eyes gazing through the wood.
For some still sign of ill or good,
To lead me from the solitude.

The day was at its twilighting;
One cloud o'erhead spread a vast wing
Of rosy thunder; vanishing
Above the far hills' mystic ring.

Some stars shone timidly o'erhead;
And toward the west's cadaverous red—
Like some wild dream that haunts the dead
In limbo—the lean moon was led.

Upon the sad, debatable
Vague lands of twilight slowly fell
A silence that I knew too well,
A sorrow that I can not tell.

What way to take, what path to go,
Whether into the east's gray glow,
Or where the west burnt red and low—
What road to choose, I did not know.

So, hesitating, there I stood
Lost in my soul's uncertain wood:
One sign I craved of ill or good,
To lead me from its solitude.

XIX.

It was autumn: and a night,
Full of whispers and of mist,
With a gray moon, wanly whist,
Hanging like a phantom light
O'er the hills. We stood among
Windy fields of weed and flower,
Where the withered seed pod hung,
And the chill leaf-crickets sung.
Melancholy was the hour
With the mystery and loneness
Of the year, that seemed to look
On its own departed face;
As our love then, in its oneness,
All its dead past did retrace,
And from that sad moment took
Presage of approaching parting.—
Sorrowful the hour and dark:
Low among the trees, now starting,
Now concealed, a star's pale spark—
Like a fen-fire—winked and lured
On to shuddering shadows; where
All was doubtful, unassured,
Immaterial; and the bare
Facts of unideal day
Changed to substance such as dreams.
And meseemed then, far away—
Farther than remotest gleams
Of the stars—lost, separated,
And estranged, and out of reach,
Grew our lives away from each,
Loving lives, that long had waited.

XX.

There is no gladness in the day
Now you're away;
Dull is the morn, the noon is dull,
Once beautiful;
And when the evening fills the skies
With dusky dyes,
With tired eyes and tired heart
I sit alone, I sigh apart,
And wish for you.

Ah! darker now the night comes on
Since you are gone;
Sad are the stars, the moon is sad,
Once wholly glad;
And when the stars and moon are set,
And earth lies wet,
With heart's regret and soul's hard ache,
I dream alone, I lie awake,
And wish for you.

These who once spake me, speak no more,
Now all is o'er;
Day hath forgot the language of
Its hopes of love;
Night, whose sweet lips were burdensome
With dreams, is dumb;
Far different from what used to be,
With silence and despondency
They speak to me.

XXI.

So it ends—the path that crept
Through a land all slumber-kissed;
Where the sickly moonlight slept
Like a pale antagonist.
Now the star, that led us onward,—
Reassuring with its light,—
Fails and falters; dipping downward
Leaves us wandering in night,
With old doubts we once disdained ...
So it ends. The woods attained—
Where our heart's desire builded
A fair temple, fire-gilded,
With hope's marble shrine within,
Where the lineaments of our love
Shone, with lilies clad and crowned,
'Neath white columns reared above
Sorrow and her sister sin,
Columns, rose and ribbon-wound,—
In the forest we have found
But a ruin! All around
Lie the shattered capitals,
And vast fragments of the walls ...
Like a climbing cloud,—that plies,
Wind-wrecked, o'er the moon that lies
'Neath its blackness,—taking on
Gradual certainties of wan,
Soft assaults of easy white,
Pale-approaching; till the skies'
Emptiness and hungry night
Claim its bulk again, while she
Rides in lonely purity:
So we found our temple, broken,
And a musing moment's space
Love, whose latest word was spoken,
Seemed to meet us face to face,
Making bright that ruined place
With a strange effulgence; then
Passed, and left all black again.

A FLOWER OF THE FIELDS.

Bee-bitten in the orchard hung
The peach; or, fallen in the weeds,
Lay rotting: where still sucked and sung
The gray bee, boring to its seed's
Pink pulp and honey blackly stung.

The orchard path, which led around
The garden,—with its heat one twinge
Of dinning locusts,—picket-bound,
And ragged, brought me where one hinge
Held up the gate that scraped the ground.

All seemed the same: the martin-box—
Sun-warped with pigmy balconies—
Still stood with all its twittering flocks,
Perched on its pole above the peas
And silvery-seeded onion-stocks.

The clove-pink and the rose; the clump
Of coppery sunflowers, with the heat
Sick to the heart: the garden stump,
Red with geranium-pots and sweet
With moss and ferns, this side the pump.

I rested, with one hesitant hand
Upon the gate. The lonesome day,
Droning with insects, made the land
One dry stagnation; soaked with hay
And scents of weeds, the hot wind fanned.

I breathed the sultry scents, my eyes
Parched as my lips. And yet I felt
My limbs were ice. As one who flies
To some strange woe. How sleepy smelt
The hay-sweet heat that soaked the skies!

Noon nodded; dreamier, lonesomer,
For one long, plaintive, forestside
Bird-quaver.—And I knew me near
Some heartbreak anguish ... She had died.
I felt it, and no need to hear!

I passed the quince and peartree; where
All up the porch a grape-vine trails—
How strange that fruit, whatever air
Or earth it grows in, never fails
To find its native flavor there!

And she was as a flower, too,
That grows its proper bloom and scent
No matter what the soil: she, who,
Born better than her place, still lent
Grace to the lowliness she knew....

They met me at the porch, and were
Sad-eyed with weeping. Then the room
Shut out the country's heat and purr,
And left light stricken into gloom—
So love and I might look on her.

THE WHITE VIGIL.

Last night I dreamed I saw you lying dead,
And by your sheeted form stood all alone:
Frail as a flow'r you lay upon your bed,
And on your still face, through the casement, shone
The moon, as lingering to kiss you there
Fall'n asleep, white violets in your hair.

Oh, sick to weeping was my soul, and sad
To breaking was my heart that would not break;
And for my soul's great grief no tear I had,
No lamentation for my heart's deep ache;
Yet all I bore seemed more than I could bear
Beside you dead, white violets in your hair.

A white rose, blooming at your window-bar,
And glimmering in it, like a fire-fly caught
Upon the thorns, the light of one white star,
Looked on with me; as if they felt and thought
As did my heart,—"How beautiful and fair
And young she lies, white violets in her hair!"

And so we watched beside you, sad and still,
The star, the rose, and I. The moon had past,
Like a pale traveler, behind the hill
With all her echoed radiance. At last
The darkness came to hide my tears and share
My watch by you, white violets in your hair.

TOO LATE.

I looked upon a dead girl's face and heard
What seemed the voice of Love call unto me
Out of her heart; whereon the charactery
Of her lost dreams I read there word for word:—
How on her soul no soul had touched, or stirred
Her Life's sad depths to rippling melody,
Or made the imaged longing, there, to be
The realization of a hope deferred.
So in her life had Love behaved to her.
Between the lonely chapters of her years
And her young eyes making no golden blur
With god-bright face and hair; who led me to
Her side at last, and bade me, through my tears,
With Death's dumb face, too late, to see and know.

INTIMATIONS.

I.

Is it uneasy moonlight,
On the restless field, that stirs?
Or wild white meadow-blossoms
The night-wind bends and blurs?

Is it the dolorous water,
That sobs in the wood and sighs?
Or heart of an ancient oak-tree,
That breaks and, sighing, dies?

The wind is vague with the shadows
That wander in No-Man's Land;
The water is dark with the voices
That weep on the Unknown's strand.

O ghosts of the winds who call me!
O ghosts of the whispering waves!
As sad as forgotten flowers,
That die upon nameless graves!

What is this thing you tell me
In tongues of a twilight race,
Of death, with the vanished features,
Mantled, of my own face?

II.

The old enigmas of the deathless dawns,
And riddles of the all immortal eves,—
That still o'er Delphic lawns
Speak as the gods spoke through oracular leaves—
I read with new-born eyes,
Remembering how, a slave,
I lay with breast bared for the sacrifice,
Once on a temple's pave.

Or, crowned with hyacinth and helichrys,
How, towards the altar in the marble gloom,—
Hearing the magadis
Dirge through the pale amaracine perfume,—
'Mid chanting priests I trod,
With never a sigh or pause,
To give my life to pacify a god,
And save my country's cause.

Again: Cyrenian roses on wild hair,
And oil and purple smeared on breasts and cheeks,
How with mad torches there—
Reddening the cedars of Cithæron's peaks—
With gesture and fierce glance,
Lascivious Mænad bands
Once drew and slew me in the Pyrrhic dance,
With Bacchanalian hands.

III.

The music now that lays
Dim lips against my ears,
Some wild sad thing it says,
Unto my soul, of years
Long passed into the haze
Of tears.

Meseems, before me are
The dark eyes of a queen,
A queen of Istakhar:
I seem to see her lean
More lovely than a star
Of mien.

A slave, I stand before
Her jeweled throne; I kneel,
And, in a song, once more
My love for her reveal;
How once I did adore
I feel.

Again her dark eyes gleam;
Again her red lips smile;
And in her face the beam
Of love that knows no guile;
And so she seems to dream
A while.

Out of her deep hair then
A rose she takes—and I
Am made a god o'er men!
Her rose, that here did lie
When I, in th' wild-beasts' den,
Did die.

IV.

Old paintings on its wainscots,
And, in its oaken hall,
Old arras; and the twilight
Of slumber over all.

Old grandeur on its stairways;
And, in its haunted rooms,
Old souvenirs of greatness,
And ghosts of dead perfumes.

The winds are phantom voices
Around its carven doors;
The moonbeams, specter footsteps
Upon its polished floors.

Old cedars build around it
A solitude of sighs;
And the old hours pass through it
With immemorial eyes.

But more than this I know not;
Nor where the house may be;
Nor what its ancient secret
And ancient grief to me.

All that my soul remembers
Is that,—forgot almost,—
Once, in a former lifetime,
'Twas here I loved and lost.

V.

In eöns of the senses,
My spirit knew of yore,
I found the Isle of Circe,
And felt her magic lore;
And still the soul remembers
What flesh would be once more.

She gave me flowers to smell of
That wizard branches bore,
Of weird and sorcerous beauty,
Whose stems dripped human gore—
Their scent when I remember
I know that world once more.

She gave me fruits to eat of
That grew beside the shore,
Of necromantic ripeness,
With human flesh at core—
Their taste when I remember
I know that life once more.

And then, behold! a serpent,
That glides my face before,
With eyes of tears and fire
That glare me o'er and o'er—
I look into its eyeballs,
And know myself once more.

VI.

I have looked in the eyes of poesy,
And sat in song's high place;
And the beautiful spirits of music
Have spoken me face to face;
Yet here in my soul there is sorrow
They never can name nor trace.

I have walked with the glamour gladness,
And dreamed with the shadow sleep;
And the presences, love and knowledge,
Have smiled in my heart's red keep;
Yet here in my soul there is sorrow
For the depth of their gaze too deep.

The love and the hope God grants me,
The beauty that lures me on,
And the dreams of folly and wisdom
That thoughts of the spirit don,
Are but masks of an ancient sorrow
Of a life long dead and gone.

Was it sin? or a crime forgotten?
Of a love that loved too well?
That sat on a throne of fire
A thousand years in hell?
That the soul with its nameless sorrow
Remembers but can not tell?

TWO.

With her soft face half turned to me,
Like an arrested moonbeam, she
Stood in the cirque of that deep tree.

I took her by the hands; she raised
Her face to mine; and, half amazed,
Remembered; and we stood and gazed.

How good to kiss her throat and hair,
And say no word!—Her throat was bare;
As some moon-fungus white and fair.

Had God not giv'n us life for this?
The world-old, amorous happiness
Of arms that clasp, and lips that kiss!

The eloquence of limbs and arms!
The rhetoric of breasts, whose charms
Say to the sluggish blood what warms!

Had God or Fiend assigned this hour
That bloomed,—where love had all of power,—
The senses' aphrodisiac flower?

The dawn was far away. Nude night
Hung savage stars of sultry white
Around her bosom's Ethiop light.

Night! night, who gave us each to each,
Where heart with heart could hold sweet speech,
With life's best gift within our reach.

And here it was—between the goals
Of flesh and spirit, sex controls—
Took place the marriage of our souls.

TONES.

I.

A woman, fair to look upon,
Where waters whiten with the moon;
While down the glimmer of the lawn
The white moths swoon.

A mouth of music; eyes of love;
And hands of blended snow and scent,
That touch the pearl-pale shadow of
An instrument.

And low and sweet that song of sleep
After the song of love is hushed;
While all the longing, here, to weep,
Is held and crushed.

Then leafy silence, that is musk
With breath of the magnolia-tree,
While dwindles, moon-white, through the dusk
Her drapery.

Let me remember how a heart,
Romantic, wrote upon that night!
My soul still helps me read each part
Of it aright.

And like a dead leaf shut between
A book's dull chapters, stained and dark,
That page, with immemorial green,
Of life I mark.

II.

It is not well for me to hear
That song's appealing melody:
The pain of loss comes all too near,
Through it, to me.

The loss of her whose love looks through
The mist death's hand hath hung between:
Within the shadow of the yew
Her grave is green.

Ah, dream that vanished long ago!
Oh, anguish of remembered tears!
And shadow of unlifted woe
Athwart the years!

That haunt the sad rooms of my days,
As keepsakes of unperished love,
Where pale the memory of her face
Is framed above.

This olden song, she used to sing,
Of love and sleep, is now a charm
To open mystic doors and bring
Her spirit form.

In music making visible
One soul-assertive memory,
That steals unto my side to tell
My loss to me.

UNFULFILLED.

In my dream last night it seemed I stood
With a boy's glad heart in my boyhood's wood.

The beryl green and the cairngorm brown
Of the day through the deep leaves sifted down.

The rippling drip of a passing shower
Rinsed wild aroma from herb and flower.

The splash and urge of a waterfall
Spread stairwayed rocks with a crystal caul.

And I waded the pool where the gravel gray,
And the last year's leaf, like a topaz lay.

And searched the strip of the creek's dry bed
For the colored keel and the arrow-head.

And I found the cohosh coigne the same,
Tossing with torches of pearly flame.

The owlet dingle of vine and brier,
That the butterfly-weed flecked fierce with fire.

The elder edge with its warm perfume,
And the sapphire stars of the bluet bloom;

The moss, the fern, and the touch-me-not
I breathed, and the mint-smell keen and hot.

And I saw the bird, that sang its best,
In the moted sunlight building its nest.

And I saw the chipmunk's stealthy face,
And the rabbit crouched in a grassy place.

And I watched the crows, that cawed and cried,
Hunting the hawk at the forest-side;

The bees that sucked in the blossoms slim,
And the wasps that built on the lichened limb.

And felt the silence, the dusk, the dread
Of the spot where they buried the unknown dead.

The water murmur, the insect hum,
And a far bird calling, Come, oh, come!—

What sweeter music can mortals make
To ease the heart of its human ache!—

And it seemed in my dream, that was all too true,
That I met in the woods again with you.

A sun-tanned face and brown bare knees,
And a hand stained red with dewberries.

And we stood a moment some thing to tell,
And then in the woods we said farewell.

But once I met you; yet, lo! it seems
Again and again we meet in dreams.

And I ask my soul what it all may mean;
If this is the love that should have been.

And oft and again I wonder, Can
What God intends be changed by man?

HOME.

Among the fields the camomile
Seems blown steam in the lightning's glare.
Unusual odors drench the air.
Night speaks above; the angry smile
Of storm within her stare.

The way for me to-night?—To-night,
Is through the wood whose branches fill
The road with dripping rain-drops. Till,
Between the boughs, a star-like light—
Our home upon the hill.

The path for me to take?—It goes
Around a trailer-tangled rock,
'Mid puckered pink and hollyhock,
Unto a latch-gate's unkempt rose,
And door whereat I knock.

Bright on the old-time flower-place
The lamp streams through the foggy pane.
The door is opened to the rain;
And in the door—her happy face,
And eager hands again.