POEMS OF THE PAST
AND THE PRESENT

“Wessex Poems”: First Edition, Crown 8vo, 1898.  New Edition 1903.
First Pocket Edition June 1907.  Reprinted January 1909, 1913

“Poems, Past and Present”: First edition 1901 (dated 1902)
Second Edition 1903.  First Pocket Edition June 1907
Reprinted January 1908, 1913, 1918, 1919

Sunday Night,
         27th January 1901.

Here, where Vespasian’s legions struck the sands,
And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,
And Henry’s army leapt afloat to win
Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,

Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,
As if they knew not that they weep the while.

While the far farewell music thins and fails,
And the broad bottoms rip the bearing brine—
All smalling slowly to the gray sea line—
And each significant red smoke-shaft pales,

“The quay recedes.   Hurrah!  Ahead we go! . . .
It’s true I’ve been accustomed now to home,
And joints get rusty, and one’s limbs may grow
   More fit to rest than roam.

“But I can stand as yet fair stress and strain;
There’s not a little steel beneath the rust;
My years mount somewhat, but here’s to’t again!
   And if I fall, I must.

“And where those villains ripped me in the flitch
With their old iron in my early time,
I’m apt at change of wind to feel a twitch,
   Or at a change of clime.

“And what my mirror shows me in the morning
Has more of blotch and wrinkle than of bloom;
My eyes, too, heretofore all glasses scorning,
   Have just a touch of rheum . . .

“Now sounds ‘The Girl I’ve left behind me,’—Ah,
The years, the ardours, wakened by that tune!
Time was when, with the crowd’s farewell ‘Hurrah!’
   ’Twould lift me to the moon.

“She’s waving from the wharfside, palely grieving,
As down we draw . . . Her tears make little show,
Yet now she suffers more than at my leaving
   Some twenty years ago.

“I pray those left at home will care for her!
I shall come back; I have before; though when
The Girl you leave behind you is a grandmother,
   Things may not be as then.”

I

O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough—
Light in their loving as soldiers can be—
First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them
Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea! . . .

—Rain came down drenchingly; but we unblenchingly
Trudged on beside them through mirk and through mire,
They stepping steadily—only too readily!—
Scarce as if stepping brought parting-time nigher.

III

Great guns were gleaming there, living things seeming there,
Cloaked in their tar-cloths, upmouthed to the night;
Wheels wet and yellow from axle to felloe,
Throats blank of sound, but prophetic to sight.

IV

Gas-glimmers drearily, blearily, eerily
Lit our pale faces outstretched for one kiss,
While we stood prest to them, with a last quest to them
Not to court perils that honour could miss.

Sharp were those sighs of ours, blinded these eyes of ours,
When at last moved away under the arch
All we loved.   Aid for them each woman prayed for them,
Treading back slowly the track of their march.

VI

Someone said: “Nevermore will they come: evermore
Are they now lost to us.”  O it was wrong!
Though may be hard their ways, some Hand will guard their ways,
Bear them through safely, in brief time or long.

VII

—Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,
Hint in the night-time when life beats are low
Other and graver things . . . Hold we to braver things,
Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fulness shall show.

I

Last year I called this world of gain-givings
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,
So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs
   The tragedy of things.

Yet at that censured time no heart was rent
Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter
By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter;
Death waited Nature’s wont; Peace smiled unshent
   From Ind to Occident.

Christmas-eve, 1899.

I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
   Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
   That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
   Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
   Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
   The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
   Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
   Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
   Grow up a Southern tree.
And strange-eyed constellations reign
   His stars eternally.

I
THE TRAGEDY

She sits in the tawny vapour
      That the City lanes have uprolled,
      Behind whose webby fold on fold
Like a waning taper
   The street-lamp glimmers cold.

II
THE IRONY

’Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,
      The postman nears and goes:
      A letter is brought whose lines disclose
By the firelight flicker
   His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh—firm—penned in highest feather—
      Page-full of his hoped return,
      And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn
In the summer weather,
   And of new love that they would learn.

I

   No wind fanned the flats of the ocean,
      Or promontory sides,
      Or the ooze by the strand,
   Or the bent-bearded slope of the land,
Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion
      Of criss-crossing tides.

III

   Soon from out of the Southward seemed nearing
      A whirr, as of wings
      Waved by mighty-vanned flies,
   Or by night-moths of measureless size,
And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond hearing
      Of corporal things.

IV

V

   And I heard them say “Home!” and I knew them
      For souls of the felled
      On the earth’s nether bord
   Under Capricorn, whither they’d warred,
And I neared in my awe, and gave heedfulness to them
      With breathings inheld.

VI

   Then, it seemed, there approached from the northward
      A senior soul-flame
      Of the like filmy hue:
   And he met them and spake: “Is it you,
O my men?”  Said they, “Aye!  We bear homeward and hearthward
      To list to our fame!”

   “I’ve flown there before you,” he said then:
      “Your households are well;
      But—your kin linger less
   On your glory arid war-mightiness
Than on dearer things.”—“Dearer?” cried these from the dead then,
      “Of what do they tell?”

VIII

   “Some mothers muse sadly, and murmur
      Your doings as boys—
      Recall the quaint ways
   Of your babyhood’s innocent days.
Some pray that, ere dying, your faith had grown firmer,
      And higher your joys.

IX

X

   “And, General, how hold out our sweethearts,
      Sworn loyal as doves?”
      —“Many mourn; many think
   It is not unattractive to prink
Them in sables for heroes.   Some fickle and fleet hearts
      Have found them new loves.”

XI

   “And our wives?” quoth another resignedly,
      “Dwell they on our deeds?”
      —“Deeds of home; that live yet
   Fresh as new—deeds of fondness or fret;
Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly,
      These, these have their heeds.”

   —“Alas! then it seems that our glory
      Weighs less in their thought
      Than our old homely acts,
   And the long-ago commonplace facts
Of our lives—held by us as scarce part of our story,
      And rated as nought!”

XIII

   Then bitterly some: “Was it wise now
      To raise the tomb-door
      For such knowledge?  Away!”
   But the rest: “Fame we prized till to-day;
Yet that hearts keep us green for old kindness we prize now
      A thousand times more!”

XIV

XV

   And, towering to seaward in legions,
      They paused at a spot
      Overbending the Race—
   That engulphing, ghast, sinister place—
Whither headlong they plunged, to the fathomless regions
      Of myriads forgot.

XVI

   And the spirits of those who were homing
      Passed on, rushingly,
      Like the Pentecost Wind;
   And the whirr of their wayfaring thinned
And surceased on the sky, and but left in the gloaming
      Sea-mutterings and me.

December 1899.

I

At last!  In sight of home again,
      Of home again;
No more to range and roam again
   As at that bygone time?
No more to go away from us
      And stay from us?—
Dawn, hold not long the day from us,
   But quicken it to prime!

Now all the town shall ring to them,
      Shall ring to them,
And we who love them cling to them
   And clasp them joyfully;
And cry, “O much we’ll do for you
      Anew for you,
Dear Loves!—aye, draw and hew for you,
   Come back from oversea.”

III

Some told us we should meet no more,
      Should meet no more;
Should wait, and wish, but greet no more
   Your faces round our fires;
That, in a while, uncharily
      And drearily
Men gave their lives—even wearily,
   Like those whom living tires.

And now you are nearing home again,
      Dears, home again;
No more, may be, to roam again
   As at that bygone time,
Which took you far away from us
      To stay from us;
Dawn, hold not long the day from us,
   But quicken it to prime!

I

   In days when men had joy of war,
A God of Battles sped each mortal jar;
   The peoples pledged him heart and hand,
   From Israel’s land to isles afar.

II

III

   On bruise and blood-hole, scar and seam,
On blade and bolt, he flung his fulgid beam:
   His haloes rayed the very gore,
   And corpses wore his glory-gleam.

IV

   Often an early King or Queen,
And storied hero onward, knew his sheen;
   ’Twas glimpsed by Wolfe, by Ney anon,
   And Nelson on his blue demesne.

V

   But new light spread.  That god’s gold nimb
And blazon have waned dimmer and more dim;
   Even his flushed form begins to fade,
   Till but a shade is left of him.

   That modern meditation broke
His spell, that penmen’s pleadings dealt a stroke,
   Say some; and some that crimes too dire
   Did much to mire his crimson cloak.

VII

   Yea, seeds of crescive sympathy
Were sown by those more excellent than he,
   Long known, though long contemned till then—
   The gods of men in amity.

VIII

   Souls have grown seers, and thought out-brings
The mournful many-sidedness of things
   With foes as friends, enfeebling ires
   And fury-fires by gaingivings!

IX

X

   Yet wars arise, though zest grows cold;
Wherefore, at whiles, as ’twere in ancient mould
   He looms, bepatched with paint and lath;
   But never hath he seemed the old!

XI

   Let men rejoice, let men deplore.
The lurid Deity of heretofore
   Succumbs to one of saner nod;
   The Battle-god is god no more.

   O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,
   Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee
When from Torino’s track I saw thy face first flash on me.

   Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit
   On housebacks pink, green, ochreous—where a slit
Shoreward ’twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.

   And thereacross waved fishwives’ high-hung smocks,
   Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;
Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:

   Whereat I grieve, Superba! . . . Afterhours
   Within Palazzo Doria’s orange bowers
Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.

Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies—
A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust

The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,
And made immortal through times to be;—
Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.

Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle’s green,
Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;

And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline
Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,
Till came a child who showed an ancient coin
That bore the image of a Constantine.

For in my distant plot of English loam
’Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find
Coins of like impress.  As with one half blind
Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home
In that mute moment to my opened mind
The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,
And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show,
Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,
We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head,
Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:
It stirred me as I stood, in Cæsar’s house,
Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

And blended pulsing life with lives long done,
Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry
Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;
Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome
Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

And yet within these ruins’ very shade
The singing workmen shape and set and join
Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin
With no apparent sense that years abrade,
Though each rent wall their feeble works invade
Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day,
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

“Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she.
“Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy!
I worship each and each; in the morning one,
And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

“To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth
Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?”
—“Be not perturbed,” said she.  “Though apart in fame,
As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

“And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,
One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be—
Extern to thee nothing.  Grieve not, nor thyself becall,
Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!”

      Who, then, was Cestius,
      And what is he to me?—
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous
      One thought alone brings he.

      Whose purpose was exprest
      Not with its first design,
Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest
      Two countrymen of mine.

      Cestius in life, maybe,
      Slew, breathed out threatening;
I know not.  This I know: in death all silently
      He does a kindlier thing,

      In beckoning pilgrim feet
      With marble finger high
To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,
      Those matchless singers lie . . .

(The 110th anniversary of the completion of the “Decline and Fall” at the same hour and place)

      A spirit seems to pass,
   Formal in pose, but grave and grand withal:
   He contemplates a volume stout and tall,
And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

      “How fares the Truth now?—Ill?
   —Do pens but slily further her advance?
   May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

      “Still rule those minds on earth
   At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled:
   ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?”