The Project Gutenberg eBook of Shylock reasons with Mr. Chesterton, and other poems

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Title: Shylock reasons with Mr. Chesterton, and other poems

Author: Humbert Wolfe

Release date: February 18, 2020 [eBook #61440]
Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif, MWS and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHYLOCK REASONS WITH MR. CHESTERTON, AND OTHER POEMS ***

 

SHYLOCK REASONS WITH
MR. CHESTERTON

AND OTHER POEMS

BY

HUMBERT WOLFE

Author of

“LONDON SONNETS.”


OXFORD
BASIL BLACKWELL
MDCCCCXX

 

 

DEDICATION.

ONLY this—that when I’ve done with wearing
 Gold words upon my heart and reaching after
 My immortality, I shall be hearing
 Then, and long afterwards (be sure!) your laughter.
Only this—that when I come to sleeping
 And later men appraise me in the quarrels
 Of poets and the bays, tell them I’m keeping
 No bays, but at my heart a lover’s laurels.

Some of these poems have appeared in “The Saturday Review,” “The Westminster Gazette,” and “The Saturday Westminster Gazette.” They are republished by the courtesy of the editors of those journals.

CONTENTS.

 Page
PERSONALITIES.
Shylock reasons with Mr. Chesterton7
The Unknown God:
    I. Pheidias12
  II. Paul16
Cassio hears Othello22
The First Airman23
Mary24
The Sicilian Expedition27
Caesar and Anthony30
The Dancers31
Battersea32
The Woodcutters of Hütteldorf33
Heine’s Last Song37
IMPERSONALITIES.
The Satyr39
Balder’s Song40
Mary the Mother42
Apples43
The Skies44
      I. Flecker45
    II. Edith Cavell45
  III. The Little Sleeper45
To him whom the cap fits46
France47
Alchemy48
Orpheus49
The Wind50
Gabriel51
Opals and Amber52
After Battle53
Mademoiselle de Maupin54
Du Bist wie eine Blume54
Cambridge55
A Room in Bohemia55
Victory56
Cleopatra56
Medusa57
The Jungle58
The Pencil59
Columbine60
The Crowder’s Tune61
Envoi63

PERSONALITIES.

SHYLOCK REASONS WITH MR. CHESTERTON.

JEW-BAITING still! Two thousand years are run
 And still, it seems, good Master Chesterton,
 Nothing’s abated of the old offence.
 Changing its shape, it never changes tense.
 Other things were, this only was and is.
 And whether Judas murder with a kiss,
 Or Shylock catch a Christian with a gin,
 All all’s the same—the first enormous sin
 Traps Judas in the moneylender’s mesh
 And cuts from Jesus’ side the pound of flesh.
 Nor is this all the punishment. For still
 Through centuries to suffer were no ill
 If we in human axes and the rod
 Discerned the high pro-consulate of God
 Chastening his people. But we are not chastened.
 Age after age upon our hearts is fastened
 The same cold malice, and for all they bleed
 They burn for ever with unchanging greed.
Grosser with suffering we grow, and one
 Calls to another “If in Babylon
 Are gold and silver, be content with them,
 Better found gold than lost Jerusalem.”
 They forget Zion; in the market place
 Rebuild the Temple for the Jewish race,
 And thus from age to age do Jews like me
 Have their revenge on Christianity,
 Since thus from age to age Christians like you
 Unchristian grow in hounding down the Jew.
 And thus from age to age His will is done,
 And Shylock’s sins produce a Chesterton.
But since we both must suffer and both are
 Bound in the orb of one outrageous star,
 Hater and hated, for a little while
 Let us together watch how mile on mile
 The heavenly moon, all milky white, regains
 Her gentle empery, and smooths the stains
 Of red our star left in her heaven, thus
 Bringing a respite even unto us
 Before the red star strikes again. The riot
 Of the heart for a moment sinks, and in the quiet
 Like a cool bandage on the forehead be
 Content a second with tranquillity.
 And from your lips the secular taunt of dog
 Banish, to hear what in the synagogue
 We heard once at Barmitzvah (as we call
 The confirmation, when the praying shawl
 Is for the first time worn, and the boy waits
 For law and manhood at the altar gates).
 Whether ’tis true or no, it shall be true
 just long enough to build a bridge to you,
 That hangs a shining second till your laughter
 Reminds me of my ducats and my daughter.
It happened thus. When the last “adonoi”
 Had faltered into silence of some boy
 Whose voice was all a silver miracle
 Of water, a voice echoed “Israel,”
 A sweeter voice than even his, but broken
 With a sorrowful thrill, as though the heart had spoken
 Of countless generations doomed to pain
 And none to ease them found. It cried again,
 Or so we thought who listened, “Ye do well
 To let the children come, O Israel,
 But even these are lost and unforgiven,
 Since not of these His kingdom and His heaven
 Who at their fathers’ fathers’ hands was sold
 In Calvary; and not their voice, though gold,
 Nor innocent eyes, nor ways that children have
 Of magic in their reaching hands, can save.
 For, though ye offer these as sacrifice,
 A nation’s childhood is too small a price
 To pay the interest upon the debt
 That all your sorrows cannot liquidate.
 O what a usury our God has made
 On thirty pieces that the high priest paid!
 Profit was none, but from the first the loss
 That grew of the fourth ghost upon the Cross.
 Two on the Cross were seen at Jesus’ side,
 The fourth, the fourth unseen and crucified
 With piercéd hands and feet, and heart as well,
 The ghost betrayed of traitor Israel.
 Yourselves ye bought and sold, yourselves decreed
 To the end of the world your doom. For who will heed
 The prayer or utter mercy on a child,
 However sweet he call? The heart is wild
 Of your own ghost, and not the softest lamb
 Of God escapes his sentence. For I am
 The wraith of all your children from the first
 Long ere their birth inexorably cursed.”
 None saw the ghost. Some said it was the boy
 That spoke. Yet someone answered “adonoi,
 Thy will be done” and it was finished. All
 Closer about their foreheads drew the shawl
 Fearing to see, and as the darkness grows
 Deeper save where above the altar glows
 One lamp, in hearts that Pharoah would unharden
 For pity rises not a cry for pardon,
 But to the Mills of God a bitter call
 “Grind quickly, since ye grind exceeding small!”
That is the tale. But mark, the moon in heaven
 Is hid with clouds. This little time was given
 To peace and to remembering one another
 Who might have been (God knows) brother with brother.
 But since ’tis over and the peace is done
 Shylock returns and with him Chesterton.

THE UNKNOWN GOD.

“Whom you ignorantly worship, him I declare unto you.”

I. Pheidias.

PHEIDIAS, the sculptor, dying bade them set
 His last-cut marble near lest he forget,
 Travelling, where beauty ends, what beauty is
 In the world and the light no longer his.
 And while they brought it, women, as they use,
 Sang in the house the litany of Zeus
 That is the god of gods, yet could not save
 His own beloved lady from the grave.
 “The dearest head” they sung, “yea even her’s,
 Whose hair was like a harp, when the wind stirs
 Upon the strings and wakes them, golden hair,
 Must droop upon the ground and perish there—
 Even her hair (the women sung), alas
 For loveliness! wherein Olympus was
 Lost for a god and found, when he, with mist
 About him of its glory twist on twist,
 Found on her mouth, more passionate for this,
 Mortality, that trembled in the kiss
—Even that hair, for all a high god’s art,
 Long since is dust, and dust that was her heart.”
 This song of ending in the darkness came
 To Pheidias in the courtyard, where the flame
 Of torches threw a final light and shewed
 Two pillars of the house, a turn of road
 That led (he thought) beyond all sight, and he
 Must walk it with a quiet company
 —The cold imagined gods, no prayer might cozen
 To help him on the way, immortal, frozen
 Glimpses of deity his hand, creating
 In marble out of his heart where they were waiting
 For life, had carved, and given them instead
 Of life the eternal gesture of the dead.
 He with those gods must walk, since he had grown
 Into their silence, and had made his own
 Their longings thus imprisoned, and their heart
 On one beat fixed for ever. He must start
 To follow, but before his striving spirit
 Steps out upon the road or falters near it,
 One god, that guards the passage, waiting stands—
 His latest marble, made like those, with hands,
 Fashioned, like those, of a man’s dreams, but overstepping
 His maker’s mind, and into a glory sweeping
 No man might share. For the great forehead lifted
 Out of the shade of life, and light had shifted
 Her quality, whose radiant indecision
 Found, though the eyes were closed, consummate vision.
 This was the god that dying Pheidias
 Had beaten out of marble. This he was,
 And would not share with other gods their death
 In beauty, but was living with the breath
 Of his creator, who with death at strife
 Laid down his own to give his creature life.
 This god they brought to Pheidias, for whom
 The whole great world had been a little room,
 Which he had used, as others use, but he
 Looked through the window on eternity.
 And seeing his god, upon his mind the cloud
 Faded an instant, and he cried aloud,
 As though all Hellas heard him, “O be proud
 Of beauty, Hellas, nor be curious
 Of what the secret is that haunted us
 Your poets, who had strained to it, and after
 Lay down to sleep, sealing their lips with laughter.
 For laughter is the judgment of the wise,
 Who measure equally with level eyes
 What the world is, what gods, and what are men,
 And twixt too great a joy, too sharp a pain,
 Strikes on a balance, so that tears are shot
 With laughter, laughter with tears, and these are not
 Themselves, but greater than themselves, and each
 From other learns and doth to other teach.
 We are content with beauty thus, who find
 That when all’s done—sculpture or song—behind
 What we have carved or sung, a greater thing
 Startles the heart with movement of a wing
 We neither see nor dare see. For our thought
 Is larger than we know, and what we sought
 Passes and has forgotten; what we do,
 The truth we did not guess at pierces through,
 If what was done was well done. This last bust
 Of mine not as I willed but as I must
 I carved, and now, at the end of all, I can
 See that the dream he does not dream is man.
 The earlier gods I carved and knew, they wait
 My coming as their master at the gate
 Of death, for what I knew is mine to have,
 Live with my life, and wither in my grave.
 Thus beauty known is fading, known love fades,
 And the truth we know a shadow in the shades,
 And only that which lies beyond our hands,
 Beauty, no earth-bound spirit understands,
 But guesses at and faints for in desire;
 And love, that does not burn, because the fire
 Is lit beyond the world, and truth that dies
 Beyond our thoughts in unimagined lies
 That are the truth beyond truth, only these
 Are lasting and outwit our memories.
 But the familiar gods that I have made—
 With those I will not walk. O be afraid
 Of beauty attainable and love attained
 And limited immortality. Unchained
 The greatest soul must walk and walk alone
 With what it has not seen and has not known!”
 Thus Pheidias spoke and presently the flame
 Of torches died, his god that had no name
 —His latest statue—watched his spirit pass
 And the dawn came that knew not Pheidias.

II. Paul.

PAUL the apostle, on the sacred hill
 Of Mars at Athens, felt a hidden will
 Working against his gospel. That was old
 (It seemed), yet had the thrust of boyhood cold,
 Yet tempered in wild fires, and sensing this
 He prayed in silence. The Acropolis,
 Making a final bid for beauty, took
 The dying sun to her heart with the wild look
 As of a woman yielding to her lover;
 And he in flame confederate leaning over
 With armfuls of clouded roses, blossom on blossom,
 Rifled the sweets of evening, and for her bosom
Dismantling heaven’s high pavilion
 With tumbled beauties wooed her thus and won.
This Paul from prayer rising saw, nor cared,
 Watching a Cross in the East, if these had snared
 The West with meshes trailing from the wrist
 Of Venus, also an Evangelist.
 “So little is the conquest of the flesh,
 So like a spinner, weaving her small mesh
 —And a boy tears it as he passes by—
 Embroiders fruitlessly her tapestry
 The Paphian woman, and the threads are thin
 And ghostly as the new light enters in—
 The tapestry that was the world and all
 The curtain Jesus tears aside” says Paul:
 “What is there worshipful here? These skies are fleeting,
 This beauty made by hands of the sun is beating
 Into the night that swallows her, and none
 Is warm, when night has fallen, with the sun;
 And the whole frame of the celestial
 Firmament, though dusted with the stars, must fall
 As being under death, and change in Hell,
 When death is conquered, her corruptible
 Beauty, and at the trumpet’s sound put on,
 As ye must also, incorruption.”
 And while he spoke the curtain of the sky
 Night fretted with the cool embroidery
 Of stars, and the moon upon her silent spindle
 Did all the velvet warp to silver kindle.
 But a young man of the philosophers,
 Who stood about him, said “The moonlight stirs
 With beauty in the heart, and in the mind
 The things that seem do such a glory find
 Lit with this wonder of the moon and star,
 As almost to persuade us that they are,
 But these we know are broken images
 Of patterns laid-up in heaven. Socrates,
 A citizen of Athens, was betrayed
 To death for teaching this, and smiling laid
 His cup of hemlock down, because his heart
 Already of eternity was part,
 And death for such is freedom. Yet for this
 He did surrender the Acropolis,
 That had all Hellas for a coronet
 About her forehead radiantly set,
 Island on island, and for this forsook
 The friendship of his friends, his dreams, the look
 Of hesitating spring that dare not stay
 Yet will not leave the hills of Attica.
 For this all gifts, all memories, he gave
 Freely believing that the narrow grave
 Was the end of all. Thus he passed out alone,
 Content to face the gods no man had known
 Because they beggar knowledge, and persuaded
 It was enough, that, when for him had faded
 The light, for us his death a light had lit
 Would shew a path and we might walk by it.
 ‘This is the spirit of man; in vain it reaches
 Beyond the limits ordained and vainly stretches
 To where truth, beauty, goodness, three in one,
 Find each in all supreme communion.
 For what is greater than we know,’ he said
 ‘It is well to die,’ and smiling he was dead.
 This he believed, all this he sacrificed.
 Did he teach better, Jew, whom you call Christ?”
A cloud passed by the moon, and no one spoke,
 Till suddenly her silver spear-head broke
 The cloudy targe, and leaning from the place
 She has in heaven struck with light the face
 Of Pheidias’ god. And Paul cried “Even thus
 Ye have your answer, superstitious
 Who set this idol up, and worshipped it
 In darkness, and behold the face is lit
 With fire from on high. A period
 Is set to ignorance and to the god
 Ye ignorantly worship, and the stone
 Or marble of the god ye have not known,
 Changes beneath my hand and in my speech
 Unto the living god I know and preach.
 Do you rejoice because that Socrates
 Died facing death and dark? I tell you these
 In Christ are conquered. Death has lost her sting,
 The dark her victory, and angels sing
 At the empty mouth of the grave, because my king
 Has made the grave a refuge and protection
 From the pain of living by His resurrection.
 Socrates sleeps; the god he did not know
 Sleeps with him, and long since the grasses grow
 Above their resting place, but flowers reach
 In vain their roots to find Him whom I preach.
 He is not there, but though we darkly see,
 As in a glass, his immortality
 Waits for us all, and beckons in the place
 Where we who find Him see Him face to face.
 Socrates, to death a prisoner, did well,
 But death was all; Christ by the miracle
 Of the open grave, his deity forsaken,
 For all the world has death a prisoner taken.
 Nor Socrates in vain all sacrificed
 If here his fruitless death has pled for Christ.”
 Dionysius the Areopagite
 Cried loudly unto Paul “Were it not right
 To shatter on his marble pedestal
 This idol that has stood for death?” and Paul
 Answered “What say ye brethren, for His sake
 Who vanquished death shall we the idol break?”
 But even as Paul raised his hand the light
 Faded upon the sculptured face. The night
 Cloaked it, and, though Paul pressed, the threatened blow
 Hung in the air and fell not. For a low
 Strange glory changed upon the face, and seemed
 A face that Paul had seen before or dreamed
 To see when near Damascus, and instead
 Of Pheidias’ god unknown another Head
 Sorrowful-sweet on Paul astonished shone
 And, ere his threatening hand could fall, was gone.
 But a voice whispered “Art thou after all
 Thine unknown God still persecuting, Saul?”

CASSIO HEARS OTHELLO.

THUS for the last last time with the first kiss!
 O my white bird, here is the precipice!
 I throw you like a homing carrier
 Into the footless spaces of the air!
 And your spread wings, set free, beat up and out
 In mounting circles, storming death’s redoubt
 And the cloudy fortress of Avilion.
 Gone, my white bird, beyond all dreaming, gone!
 And my hands warm that held her. Cassio
 It was well done! Always to let her go
 In the grave they shall be open thus, and yet
 Feeling the half-poised wings—poor hands! Forget
 My madness, Cassio, and think of me
 As of a man who set his sea-bird free
 From the prison of his heart to see her win
 The deep blue floors of heaven and enter in.
 O I am glad, I am glad, I dared this thing.
 Even now my bird is home, awakening
 Among her shining sisters, far—so far,
 Not even the thoughts I have can trouble her.
 So carve upon the stone that marks my grave:
 “All that he had to death Othello gave,
And has kept nothing back but the sweet wound
 Of life, that grew so dear, because he found
 The mortal knife, that stabbed him, slit the strings
 That gave his bird the guerdon of her wings.”

THE FIRST AIRMAN.

GIVE me the wings, magician. I will know
 What blooms on airy precipices grow
 That no hand plucks, large unexpected blossoms,
 Scentless, with cry of curlews in their bosoms,
 And the great winds like grasses where their stems
 Spangle the universe with diadems.
 I will pluck those flowers and those grasses, I,
 Icarus, drowning upwards through the sky
 With air that closes underneath my feet
 As water above the diver. I will meet
 Life with the dawn in heaven, and my fingers
 Dipped in the golden floss of hair that lingers
 Across the unveiled spaces and makes them colder,
 As a woman’s hair across her naked shoulder.
 Death with the powdered stars will walk and pass
 Like a man’s breath upon a looking-glass,
 For a suspended heart-beat making dim
 Heaven brighter afterwards because of him.
Give me the wings, magician. So their tune
 Mix with the silver trumpets of the moon
 And, beyond music mounting, clean outrun
 The golden diapason of the sun.
 There is a secret that the birds are learning
 Where the long lanes in heaven have a turning
 And no man yet has followed; therefore these
 Laugh hauntingly across our usual seas.
 I’ll not be mocked by curlews in the sky;
 Give me the wings magician, or I die.
His call for wings or death was heard and thus
 Came both to the first airman, Icarus.

MARY.

(Sister of Martha.)

THERE was no star in the East the night I came
 With spikenard in hushed Jerusalem—
 But a light in an upper chamber dimly lit
 Was star enough—I would have followed it
 Through lonelier streets unto the smaller room
 Where afterwards it blossomed in the tomb.
 Light of the world, but how much more to me
 The light that other women also see!
No choiring angels in gold groups adored
 Their king that night, but searching for my Lord
 Unchoired, uncrowned, whose Kingdom had not come,
 I heard none call, but dumb, as death is dumb,
 The night misled his angels, or may be
 Night and the angels made a way for me.
 My footfalls in the street rang very clear
 As I drew on. It seemed that all must hear
 My coming, eyes that peered behind the grating,
 Cloaked hands to hold me at each corner waiting.
 But nothing stirred till suddenly there ran
 The flame of the moon in heaven for a span
 Less than a heart-beat, and I saw a man
 Steal out of Simon’s house, and pass me by
 With such a horror on his lips that I,
 Also a traitor, shrunk and knew him not—
 Him that was Judas called Iscariot.
 Also a traitor I, because I came
 Not worshipping the Master in that Name
 That his disciples called him, not the Christ
 Of God for me that night. I sought a tryst
 With a man of men, and if my heart had won
 The Son of God had died in Mary’s son,
 And he, who, knowing the appointed evil,
 Sent forth Iscariot to his task, a devil,
 Also accepted, though this was more hard,
 The sweet betrayal of the spikenard.
 He knew me what I meant and in his eyes,
 That for a moment smiled, was Paradise
 Lost unto love, that for the greater sin
 Than even Judas’ might not enter in.
 And when the disciples would have stayed my hands,
 “She does but good” He said “she understands.”
 And I who poured the unguent understood,
 But good it was not, as a man means good.
 For I forget the Master, I but see
 (A woman taken in adultery
 With a dream and a dream) his human face
 I would have saved from God, and in the place
 Of Gospel and of resurrection I
 Hear him say “Mary” and behold him die.
 Judas, to death who sold him for a kiss,
 Sinned less than I, who’d buy him back for this.
 And Christ forgave me—How shall I forgive
 Jesus, my love, the man who would not live?

THE SICILIAN EXPEDITION.