The Poems of William Watson / Watson, William, 1858-1935

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Title: The Poems of William Watson

Author: William Watson

Release Date: August 15, 2004 [EBook #13179]

Language: English

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THE POEMS OF
WILLIAM WATSON




New York
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND LONDON
1893




Norwood Press
J.S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith.
Boston, Mass., U.S.A.




CONTENTS

MISCELLANEOUS--
  PRELUDE
  AUTUMN
  WORLD-STRANGENESS
  "WHEN BIRDS WERE SONGLESS"
  THE MOCK SELF
  "THY VOICE FROM INMOST DREAMLAND CALLS"
  IN LALEHAM CHURCHYARD
  THE FLIGHT OF YOUTH
  "NAY, BID ME NOT MY CARES TO LEAVE"
  A CHILD'S HAIR
  THE KEY-BOARD
  "SCENTLESS FLOW'RS I BRING THEE"
  ON LANDOR'S "HELLENICS"
  To ----
  ON EXAGGERATED DEFERENCE TO FOREIGN LITERARY OPINION
  ENGLAND TO IRELAND
  MENSIS LACRIMARUM
  "UNDER THE DARK AND PINY STEEP"
  THE BLIND SUMMIT
  TO LORD TENNYSON
  SKETCH OF A POLITICAL CHARACTER
  ART MAXIMS
  THE GLIMPSE
  THE BALLAD OF THE "BRITAIN'S PRIDE"
  LINES
  THE RAVEN'S SHADOW
  LUX PERDITA
  ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES
  HISTORY
  THE EMPTY NEST
  IRELAND
  THE LUTE-PLAYER
  "AND THESE--ARE THESE INDEED THE END"
  THE RUSS AT KARA
  LIBERTY REJECTED
  LIFE WITHOUT HEALTH
  TO A FRIEND, CHAFING AT ENFORCED IDLENESS
    FROM INTERRUPTED HEALTH
  "WELL HE SLUMBERS, GREATLY SLAIN"
  AN EPISTLE
  TO AUSTIN DOBSON
  TO EDWARD CLODD
  TO EDWARD DOWDEN
  FELICITY
VER TENEBROSUM, SONNETS OF MARCH AND APRIL 1885--
  THE SOUDANESE
  HASHEEN
  THE ENGLISH DEAD
  GORDON
  GORDON _(concluded)_
  THE TRUE PATRIOTISM
  RESTORED ALLEGIANCE
  THE POLITICAL LUMINARY
  FOREIGN MENACE
  HOME-ROOTEDNESS
  OUR EASTERN TREASURE
  REPORTED CONCESSIONS
  NIGHTMARE
  LAST WORD: TO THE COLONIES
EPIGRAMS
WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE
LACHRYMAE MUSARUM
DEDICATION OF "THE DREAM OF MAN"
THE DREAM OF MAN
SHELLEY'S CENTENARY
A GOLDEN HOUR
AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES LAMB
LINES IN A FLYLEAF OF "CHRISTABEL"
LINES TO OUR NEW CENSOR
RELUCTANT SUMMER
THE GREAT MISGIVING
"THE THINGS THAT ARE MORE EXCELLENT"
BEAUTY'S METEMPSYCHOSIS
ENGLAND MY MOTHER
NIGHT
THE FUGITIVE IDEAL
"THE FORESTERS"
SONG
COLUMBUS
THE PRINCE'S QUEST
ANGELO
THE QUESTIONER
THE RIVER
CHANGED VOICES
A SUNSET
A SONG OF THREE SINGERS
LOVE'S ASTROLOGY
THREE FLOWERS
THREE ETERNITIES
LOVE OUTLOVED
VANISHINGS
BEETHOVEN
GOD-SEEKING
SKYFARING





MISCELLANEOUS




PRELUDE

The mighty poets from their flowing store
Dispense like casual alms the careless ore;
Through throngs of men their lonely way they go,
Let fall their costly thoughts, nor seem to know.--
Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strews
The facile largess of a stintless Muse.
A fitful presence, seldom tarrying long,
Capriciously she touches me to song--
Then leaves me to lament her flight in vain,
And wonder will she ever come again.



AUTUMN

Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung,
  Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes,
  Thou metaphor of everything that dies,
That dies ill-starred, or dies beloved and young
    And therefore blest and wise,--
O be less beautiful, or be less brief,
  Thou tragic splendour, strange, and full of fear!
  In vain her pageant shall the Summer rear?
At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf,
    Crumbles the gorgeous year.

Ah, ghostly as remembered mirth, the tale
  Of Summer's bloom, the legend of the Spring!
  And thou, too, flutterest an impatient wing,
Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail,
    Thou most unbodied thing,
Whose very being is thy going hence,
  And passage and departure all thy theme;
  Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem,
And thou at height of thy magnificence
    A figment and a dream.

Stilled is the virgin rapture that was June,
  And cold is August's panting heart of fire;
  And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir
For thine own elegy thy winds attune
    Their wild and wizard lyre:
And poignant grows the charm of thy decay,
  The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting,
  Thou parable of greatness vanishing!
For me, thy woods of gold and skies of grey
    With speech fantastic ring.

For me, to dreams resigned, there come and go,
  'Twixt mountains draped and hooded night and morn,
  Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne,
From undiscoverable lips that blow
    An immaterial horn;
And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees,
  Thy ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet--
  Past and Future in sad bridal met,
O voice of everything that perishes,
    And soul of all regret!



WORLD-STRANGENESS

Strange the world about me lies,
  Never yet familiar grown--
Still disturbs me with surprise,
  Haunts me like a face half known.

In this house with starry dome,
  Floored with gemlike plains and seas,
Shall I never feel at home,
  Never wholly be at ease?

On from room to room I stray,
  Yet my Host can ne'er espy,
And I know not to this day
  Whether guest or captive I.

So, between the starry dome
  And the floor of plains and seas,
I have never felt at home,
  Never wholly been at ease.



"WHEN BIRDS WERE SONGLESS"

When birds were songless on the bough
    I heard thee sing.
The world was full of winter, thou
    Wert full of spring.

To-day the world's heart feels anew
    The vernal thrill,
And thine beneath the rueful yew
    Is wintry chill.



THE MOCK SELF

Few friends are mine, though many wights there be
Who, meeting oft a phantasm that makes claim
To be myself, and hath my face and name,
And whose thin fraud I wink at privily,
Account this light impostor very me.
What boots it undeceive them, and proclaim
Myself myself, and whelm this cheat with shame?
I care not, so he leave my true self free,
Impose not on me also; but alas!
I too, at fault, bewildered, sometimes take
Him for myself, and far from mine own sight,
Torpid, indifferent, doth mine own self pass;
And yet anon leaps suddenly awake,
And spurns the gibbering mime into the night.



"THY VOICE FROM INMOST DREAMLAND CALLS"

Thy voice from inmost dreamland calls;
  The wastes of sleep thou makest fair;
Bright o'er the ridge of darkness falls
  The cataract of thy hair.

The morn renews its golden birth:
  Thou with the vanquished night dost fade;
And leav'st the ponderable earth
  Less real than thy shade.



IN LALEHAM CHURCHYARD

(AUGUST 18, 1890)

'Twas at this season, year by year,
The singer who lies songless here
Was wont to woo a less austere,
    Less deep repose,
Where Rotha to Winandermere
    Unresting flows,--

Flows through a land where torrents call
To far-off torrents as they fall,
And mountains in their cloudy pall
    Keep ghostly state,
And Nature makes majestical
    Man's lowliest fate.

There, 'mid the August glow, still came
He of the twice-illustrious name,
The loud impertinence of fame
    Not loth to flee--
Not loth with brooks and fells to claim
    Fraternity.

Linked with his happy youthful lot,
Is Loughrigg, then, at last forgot?
Nor silent peak nor dalesman's cot
    Looks on his grave.
Lulled by the Thames he sleeps, and not
    By Rotha's wave.

'Tis fittest thus! for though with skill
He sang of beck and tarn and ghyll,
The deep, authentic mountain-thrill
    Ne'er shook his page!
Somewhat of worldling mingled still
    With bard and sage.

And 'twere less meet for him to lie
Guarded by summits lone and high
That traffic with the eternal sky
    And hear, unawed,
The everlasting fingers ply
    The loom of God,

Than, in this hamlet of the plain,
A less sublime repose to gain,
Where Nature, genial and urbane,
    To man defers,
Yielding to us the right to reign,
    Which yet is hers.

And nigh to where his bones abide,
The Thames with its unruffled tide
Seems like his genius typified,--
    Its strength, its grace,
Its lucid gleam, its sober pride,
    Its tranquil pace.

But ah! not his the eventual fate
Which doth the journeying wave await--
Doomed to resign its limpid state
    And quickly grow
Turbid as passion, dark as hate,
    And wide as woe.

Rather, it may be, over-much
He shunned the common stain and smutch,
From soilure of ignoble touch
    Too grandly free,
Too loftily secure in such
    Cold purity.

But he preserved from chance control
The fortress of his 'stablisht soul;
In all things sought to see the Whole;
    Brooked no disguise;
And set his heart upon the goal,
    Not on the prize.

With those Elect he shall survive
Who seem not to compete or strive,
Yet with the foremost still arrive,
    Prevailing still:
Spirits with whom the stars connive
    To work their will.

And ye, the baffled many, who,
Dejected, from afar off view
The easily victorious few
    Of calm renown,--
Have ye not your sad glory too,
    And mournful crown?

Great is the facile conqueror;
Yet haply he, who, wounded sore,
Breathless, unhorsed, all covered o'er
    With blood and sweat,
Sinks foiled, but fighting evermore,--
    Is greater yet.



THE FLIGHT OF YOUTH

Youth! ere thou be flown away.
Surely one last boon to-day
    Thou'lt bestow--
One last light of rapture give,
Rich and lordly fugitive!
    Ere thou go.

What, thou canst not? What, all spent?
All thy spells of ravishment
    Pow'rless now?
Gone thy magic out of date?
Gone, all gone that made thee great?--
    Follow thou!



"NAY, BID ME NOT MY CARES TO LEAVE"

Nay, bid me not my cares to leave,
  Who cannot from their shadow flee.
I do but win a short reprieve,
  'Scaping to pleasure and to thee.

I may, at best, a moment's grace,
  And grant of liberty, obtain;
Respited for a little space,
  To go back into bonds again.



A CHILD'S HAIR

A letter from abroad. I tear
Its sheathing open, unaware
What treasure gleams within; and there--
    Like bird from cage--
Flutters a curl of golden hair
    Out of the page.

From such a frolic head 'twas shorn!
('Tis but five years since he was born.)
Not sunlight scampering over corn
    Were merrier thing.
A child? A fragment of the morn,
    A piece of Spring!

Surely an ampler, fuller day
Than drapes our English skies with grey--
A deeper light, a richer ray
    Than here we know--
To this bright tress have given away
    Their living glow.

For Willie dwells where gentian flowers
Make mimic sky in mountain bowers;
And vineyards steeped in ardent hours
    Slope to the wave
Where storied Chillon's tragic towers
    Their bases lave;

And over piny tracts of Vaud
The rose of eve steals up the snow;
And on the waters far below
    Strange sails like wings
Half-bodilessly come and go,
    Fantastic things;

And tender night falls like a sigh
On _chalet_ low and _chateau_ high;
And the far cataract's voice comes nigh,
    Where no man hears;
And spectral peaks impale the sky
    On silver spears.

Ah, Willie, whose dissevered tress
Lies in my hand!--may you possess
At least one sovereign happiness,
    Ev'n to your grave;
One boon than which I ask naught less,
    Naught greater crave:

May cloud and mountain, lake and vale,
Never to you be trite or stale
As unto souls whose wellsprings fail
    Or flow defiled,
Till Nature's happiest fairy-tale
    Charms not her child!

For when the spirit waxes numb,
Alien and strange these shows become,
And stricken with life's tedium
    The streams run dry,
The choric spheres themselves are dumb,
    And dead the sky,--

Dead as to captives grown supine,
Chained to their task in sightless mine:
Above, the bland day smiles benign,
    Birds carol free,
In thunderous throes of life divine
    Leaps the glad sea;

But they--their day and night are one.
What is't to them, that rivulets run,
Or what concern of theirs the sun?
    It seems as though
Their business with these things was done
    Ages ago:

Only, at times, each dulled heart feels
That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals,
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
    And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
    Of all the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

On what strange track one's fancies fare!
To eyeless night in sunless lair
'Tis a far cry from Willie's hair;
    And here it lies--
Human, yet something which can ne'er
    Grow sad and wise:

Which, when the head where late it lay
In life's grey dusk itself is grey,
And when the curfew of life's day
    By death is tolled,
Shall forfeit not the auroral ray
    And eastern gold.



THE KEY-BOARD

Five-and-thirty black slaves,
  Half-a-hundred white,
All their duty but to sing
  For their Queen's delight,
Now with throats of thunder,
  Now with dulcet lips,
While she rules them royally
  With her finger-tips!

When she quits her palace,
  All the slaves are dumb--
Dumb with dolour till the Queen
  Back to Court is come:
Dumb the throats of thunder,
  Dumb the dulcet lips,
Lacking all the sovereignty
  Of her finger-tips.

Dusky slaves and pallid,
  Ebon slaves and white,
When the Queen was on her throne
  How you sang to-night!
Ah, the throats of thunder!
  Ah, the dulcet lips!
Ah, the gracious tyrannies
  Of her finger-tips!

Silent, silent, silent,
  All your voices now;
Was it then her life alone
  Did your life endow?
Waken, throats of thunder!
  Waken, dulcet lips!
Touched to immortality
  By her finger-tips.



"SCENTLESS FLOW'RS I BRING THEE"

Scentless flow'rs I bring thee--yet
In thy bosom be they set;
In thy bosom each one grows
Fragrant beyond any rose.

Sweet enough were she who could,
In thy heart's sweet neighbourhood,
Some redundant sweetness thus
Borrow from that overplus.



ON LANDOR'S "HELLENICS"

Come hither, who grow cloyed to surfeiting
With lyric draughts o'ersweet, from rills that rise
On Hybla not Parnassus mountain: come
With beakers rinsed of the dulcifluous wave
Hither, and see a magic miracle
Of happiest science, the bland Attic skies
True-mirrored by an English well;--no stream
Whose heaven-belying surface makes the stars
Reel, with its restless idiosyncrasy;
But well unstirred, save when at times it takes
Tribute of lover's eyelids, and at times
Bubbles with laughter of some sprite below.



TO ----

(WITH A VOLUME OF EPIGRAMS)

Unto the Lady of The Nook
    Fly, tiny book.
There thou hast lovers--even thou!
    Fly thither now.

Seven years hast thou for honour yearned,
    And scant praise earned;
But ah! to win, at last, _such_ friends,
    Is full amends.



ON EXAGGERATED DEFERENCE TO
FOREIGN LITERARY OPINION

What! and shall _we_, with such submissive airs
As age demands in reverence from the young,
Await these crumbs of praise from Europe flung,
And doubt of our own greatness till it bears
The signet of your Goethes or Voltaires?
We who alone in latter times have sung
With scarce less power than Arno's exiled tongue--
We who are Milton's kindred, Shakespeare's heirs.
The prize of lyric victory who shall gain
If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm?
More than the froth and flotsam of the Seine,
More than your Hugo-flare against the night,
And more than Weimar's proud elaborate calm,
One flash of Byron's lightning, Wordsworth's light.



ENGLAND TO IRELAND

(FEBRUARY 1888)

Spouse whom my sword in the olden time won me,
  Winning me hatred more sharp than a sword--
Mother of children who hiss at or shun me,
  Curse or revile me, and hold me abhorred--
Heiress of anger that nothing assuages,
  Mad for the future, and mad from the past--
Daughter of all the implacable ages,
  Lo, let us turn and be lovers at last!

Lovers whom tragical sin hath made equal,
  One in transgression and one in remorse.
Bonds may be severed, but what were the sequel?
  Hardly shall amity come of divorce.
Let the dead Past have a royal entombing,
  O'er it the Future built white for a fane!
I that am haughty from much overcoming
  Sue to thee, supplicate--nay, is it vain?

Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness,--
  Could we but see one another, 'twere well!
Knowledge is sympathy, charity, kindness,
  Ignorance only is maker of hell.
Could we but gaze for an hour, for a minute,
  Deep in each other's unfaltering eyes,
Love were begun--for that look would begin it--
  Born in the flash of a mighty surprise.

Then should the ominous night-bird of Error,
  Scared by a sudden irruption of day,
Flap his maleficent wings, and in terror
  Flit to the wilderness, dropping his prey.
Then should we, growing in strength and in sweetness,
  Fusing to one indivisible soul,
Dazzle the world with a splendid completeness,
  Mightily single, immovably whole.

Thou, like a flame when the stormy winds fan it,
  I, like a rock to the elements bare,--
Mixed by love's magic, the fire and the granite,
  Who should compete with us, what should compare?
Strong with a strength that no fate might dissever,
  One with a oneness no force could divide,
So were we married and mingled for ever,
  Lover with lover, and bridegroom with bride.



MENSIS LACRIMARUM

(MARCH 1885)

March, that comes roaring, maned, with rampant paws,
      And bleatingly withdraws;
March,--'tis the year's fantastic nondescript,
      That, born when frost hath nipped
The shivering fields, or tempest scarred the hills,
      Dies crowned with daffodils.
The month of the renewal of the earth
      By mingled death and birth:
But, England! in this latest of thy years
      Call it--the Month of Tears.



"UNDER THE DARK AND PINY STEEP"

Under the dark and piny steep
  We watched the storm crash by:
We saw the bright brand leap and leap
  Out of the shattered sky.

The elements were minist'ring
  To make one mortal blest;
For, peal by peal, you did but cling
  The closer to his breast.



THE BLIND SUMMIT

[A Viennese gentleman, who had climbed the Hoch-Koenig
without a guide, was found dead, in a sitting posture, near the
summit, upon which he had written, "It is cold, and clouds shut
out the view."--_Vide_ the _Daily News_ of September 10, 1891.]

So mounts the child of ages of desire,
Man, up the steeps of Thought; and would behold
Yet purer peaks, touched with unearthlier fire,
In sudden prospect virginally new;
But on the lone last height he sighs: "'Tis cold,
      And clouds shut out the view."

Ah, doom of mortals! Vexed with phantoms old,
Old phantoms that waylay us and pursue,--
Weary of dreams,--we think to see unfold
The eternal landscape of the Real and True;
And on our Pisgah can but write: "'Tis cold,
      And clouds shut out the view."



TO LORD TENNYSON

(WITH A VOLUME OF VERSE)

Master and mage, our prince of song, whom Time,
  In this your autumn mellow and serene,
  Crowns ever with fresh laurels, nor less green
Than garlands dewy from your verdurous prime;
Heir of the riches of the whole world's rhyme,
  Dow'r'd with the Doric grace, the Mantuan mien,
  With Arno's depth and Avon's golden sheen;
Singer to whom the singing ages climb,
Convergent;--if the youngest of the choir
  May snatch a flying splendour from your name
Making his page illustrious, and aspire
  For one rich moment your regard to claim,
Suffer him at your feet to lay his lyre
  And touch the skirts and fringes of your fame.



SKETCH OF A POLITICAL CHARACTER

(1885)

  There is a race of men, who master life,
Their victory being inversely as their strife;
Who capture by refraining from pursuit;
Shake not the bough, yet load their hands with fruit;
The earth's high places who attain to fill,
By most indomitably sitting still.
While others, full upon the fortress hurled,
Lay fiery siege to the embattled world,
Of such rude arts _their_ natures feel no need;
Greatly inert, they lazily succeed;
Find in the golden mean their proper bliss,
And doing nothing, never do amiss;
But lapt in men's good graces live, and die
By all regretted, nobody knows why.

  Cast in this fortunate Olympian mould,
The admirable * * * * behold;
Whom naught could dazzle or mislead, unless
'Twere the wild light of fatal cautiousness;
Who never takes a step from his own door
But he looks backward ere he looks before.
When once he starts, it were too much to say
He visibly gets farther on his way:
But all allow, he ponders well his course--
For future uses hoarding present force.
The flippant deem him slow and saturnine,
The summed-up phlegm of that illustrious line;
But we, his honest adversaries, who
More highly prize him than his false friends do,
Frankly admire that simple mass and weight--
A solid Roman pillar of the State,
So inharmonious with the baser style
Of neighbouring columns grafted on the pile,
So proud and imperturbable and chill,
Chosen and matched so excellently ill,
He seems a monument of pensive grace,
Ah, how pathetically out of place!

  Would that some call he could not choose but heed--
Of private passion or of public need--
At last might sting to life that slothful power,
And snare him into greatness for an hour!



ART MAXIMS

Often ornateness
Goes with greatness;
Oftener felicity
Comes of simplicity.

Talent that's cheapest
Affects singularity.
Thoughts that dive deepest
Rise radiant in clarity.

Life is rough:
Sing smoothly, O Bard.
Enough, enough,
To have _found_ life hard.

No record Art keeps
Of her travail and throes.
There is toil on the steeps,--
On the summits, repose.



THE GLIMPSE

Just for a day you crossed my life's dull track,
  Put my ignobler dreams to sudden shame,
Went your bright way, and left me to fall back
  On my own world of poorer deed and aim;

To fall back on my meaner world, and feel
  Like one who, dwelling 'mid some, smoke-dimmed town,--
In a brief pause of labour's sullen wheel,--
  'Scaped from the street's dead dust and factory's frown,--

In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll,
  Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:
Then journeyed home, to carry in his soul
  The torment of the difference till he die.



THE BALLAD OF THE "BRITAIN'S PRIDE"

It was a skipper of Lowestoft
  That trawled the northern sea,
In a smack of thrice ten tons and seven,
  And the _Britain's Pride_ was she.
And the waves were high to windward,
  And the waves were high to lee,
And he said as he lost his trawl-net,
  "What is to be, will be."

His craft she reeled and staggered,
  But he headed her for the hithe,
In a storm that threatened to mow her down
  As grass is mown by the scythe;
When suddenly through the cloud-rift
  The moon came sailing soft,
And he saw one mast of a sunken ship
  Like a dead arm held aloft.

And a voice came faint from the rigging--
  "Help! help!" it whispered and sighed--
And a single form to the sole mast clung,
  In the roaring darkness wide.
Oh the crew were but four hands all told,
  On board of the _Britain's Pride_,
And ever "Hold on till daybreak!"
  Across the night they cried.

Slowly melted the darkness,
  Slowly rose the sun,
And only the lad in the rigging
  Was left, out of thirty-one,
To tell the tale of his captain,
  The English sailor true,
That did his duty and met his death
  As English sailors do.

Peace to the gallant spirit,
  The greatly proved and tried,
And to all who have fed the hungry sea
  That is still unsatisfied;
And honour and glory for ever,
  While rolls the unresting tide,
To the skipper of little Lowestoft,
  And the crew of the _Britain's Pride_.



LINES

(WITH A VOLUME OF THE AUTHOR'S POEMS SENT TO M.R.C.)

Go, Verse, nor let the grass of tarrying grow
Beneath thy feet iambic. Southward go
O'er Thamesis his stream, nor halt until
Thou reach the summit of a suburb hill
To lettered fame not unfamiliar: there
Crave rest and shelter of a scholiast fair,
Who dwelleth in a world of old romance,
Magic emprise and faery chevisaunce.
Tell her, that he who made thee, years ago,
By northern stream and mountain, and where blow
Great breaths from the sea-sunset, at this day
One half thy fabric fain would rase away;
But she must take thee faults and all, my Verse,
Forgive thy better and forget thy worse.
Thee, doubtless, she shall place, not scorned, among
More famous songs by happier minstrels sung;--
In Shakespeare's shadow thou shalt find a home,
Shalt house with melodists of Greece and Rome,
Or awed by Dante's wintry presence be,
Or won by Goethe's regal suavity,
Or with those masters hardly less adored
Repose, of Rydal and of Farringford;
And--like a mortal rapt from men's abodes
Into some skyey fastness of the gods--
Divinely neighboured, thou in such a shrine
Mayst for a moment dream thyself divine.



THE RAVEN'S SHADOW

Seabird, elemental sprite,
  Moulded of the sun and spray--
Raven, dreary flake of night
  Drifting in the eye of day--
What in common have ye two,
Meeting 'twixt the blue and blue?

Thou to eastward carriest
  The keen savour of the foam,--
Thou dost bear unto the west
  Fragrance from thy woody home,
Where perchance a house is thine
Odorous of the oozy pine.

Eastward thee thy proper cares,
  Things of mighty moment, call;
Thee to westward thine affairs
  Summon, weighty matters all:
I, where land and sea contest,
Watch you eastward, watch you west,

Till, in snares of fancy caught,
  Mystically changed ye seem,
And the bird becomes a thought,
  And the thought becomes a dream,
And the dream, outspread on high,
Lords it o'er the abject sky.

Surely I have known before
  Phantoms of the shapes ye be--
Haunters of another shore
  'Leaguered by another sea.
There my wanderings night and morn
Reconcile me to the bourn.

There the bird of happy wings
  Wafts the ocean-news I crave;
Rumours of an isle he brings
  Gemlike on the golden wave:
But the baleful beak and plume
Scatter immelodious gloom.

Though the flow'rs be faultless made,
  Perfectly to live and die--
Though the bright clouds bloom and fade
  Flow'rlike 'midst a meadowy sky--
Where this raven roams forlorn
Veins of midnight flaw the morn.

He not less will croak and croak
  As he ever caws and caws,
Till the starry dance he broke,
  Till the sphery paean pause,
And the universal chime
Falter out of tune and time.

Coils the labyrinthine sea
  Duteous to the lunar will,
But some discord stealthily
  Vexes the world-ditty still,
And the bird that caws and caws
Clasps creation with his claws.



LUX PERDITA

  Thine were the weak, slight hands
That might have taken this strong soul, and bent
Its stubborn substance to thy soft intent,
And bound it unresisting, with such bands
As not the arm of envious heaven had rent.

  Thine were the calming eyes
That round my pinnace could have stilled the sea,
And drawn thy voyager home, and bid him be
Pure with their pureness, with their wisdom wise,
Merged in their light, and greatly lost in thee.

  But thou--thou passed'st on,
With whiteness clothed of dedicated days,
Cold, like a star; and me in alien ways
Thou leftest following life's chance lure, where shone
The wandering gleam that beckons and betrays.



ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES

She stands, a thousand-wintered tree,
  By countless morns impearled;
Her broad roots coil beneath the sea,
  Her branches sweep the world;
Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed,
  Clothe the remotest strand
With forests from her scatterings made,
New nations fostered in her shade,
  And linking land with land.

O ye by wandering tempest sown
  'Neath every alien star,
Forget not whence the breath was blown
  That wafted you afar!
For ye are still her ancient seed
  On younger soil let fall--
Children of Britain's island-breed,
To whom the Mother in her need
  Perchance may one day call.



HISTORY

Here, peradventure, in this mirror glassed,
Who gazes long and well at times beholds
Some sunken feature of the mummied Past,
But oftener only the embroidered folds
And soiled magnificence of her rent robe
Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties
That sweep the dust of aeons in our eyes
And with their trailing pride cumber the globe.--
For lo! the high, imperial Past is dead:
The air is full of its dissolved bones;
Invincible armies long since vanquished,
Kings that remember not their awful thrones,
Powerless potentates and foolish sages,
Impede the slow steps of the pompous ages.



THE EMPTY NEST

I saunter all about the pleasant place
  You made thrice pleasant, O my friends, to me;
But you are gone where laughs in radiant grace
  That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea.
To storied precincts of the southern foam,
  Dear birds of passage, ye have taken wing,
And ah! for me, when April wafts you home,
  The spring will more than ever be the spring
Still lovely, as of old, this haunted ground;
  Tenderly, still, the autumn sunshine falls;
And gorgeously the woodlands tower around,
  Freak'd with wild light at golden intervals:
Yet, for the ache your absence leaves, O friends,
Earth's lifeless pageantries are poor amends.



IRELAND

(DECEMBER 1, 1890)

In the wild and lurid desert, in the thunder-travelled ways,
'Neath the night that ever hurries to the dawn that still delays,
There she clutches at illusions, and she seeks a phantom goal
With the unattaining passion that consumes the unsleeping soul:
And calamity enfolds her, like the shadow of a ban,
And the niggardness of Nature makes the misery of man:
And in vain the hand is stretched to lift her, stumbling in the gloom,
While she follows the mad fen-fire that conducts her to her doom.



THE LUTE-PLAYER

She was a lady great and splendid,
  I was a minstrel in her halls.
A warrior like a prince attended
  Stayed his steed by the castle walls.

Far had he fared to gaze upon her.
  "O rest thee now, Sir Knight," she said.
The warrior wooed, the warrior won her,
  In time of snowdrops they were wed.
I made sweet music in his honour,
  And longed to strike him dead.

I passed at midnight from her portal,
  Throughout the world till death I rove:
Ah, let me make this lute immortal
  With rapture of my hate and love!



"AND THESE--ARE THESE INDEED THE END"

And these--are these indeed the end,
  This grinning skull, this heavy loam?
Do all green ways whereby we wend
  Lead but to yon ignoble home?

Ah well! Thine eyes invite to bliss;
  Thy lips are hives of summer still.
I ask not other worlds while this
  Proffers me all the sweets I will.



THE RUSS AT KARA

O King of kings, that watching from Thy throne
  Sufferest the monster of Ust-Kara's hold,
  With bosom than Siberia's wastes more cold,
And hear'st the wail of captives crushed and prone,
And sett'st no sign in heaven! Shall naught atone
  For their wild pangs whose tale is yet scarce told,
  Women by uttermost woe made deadly bold,
In the far dungeon's night that hid their moan?
Why waits Thy shattering arm, nor smites this Power
  Whose beak and talons rend the unshielded breast,
    Whose wings shed terror and a plague of gloom,
  Whose ravin is the hearts of the oppressed;
Whose brood are hell-births--Hate that bides its hour,
    Wrath, and a people's curse that loathe their doom?



LIBERTY REJECTED

About this heart thou hast
  Thy chains made fast,
And think'st thou I would be
  Therefrom set free,
And forth unbound be cast?

The ocean would as soon
  Entreat the moon
Unsay the magic verse
  That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon.

She stooped her pearly head
  Seaward, and said:
"Would'st thou I gave to thee
  Thy liberty,
In Time's youth forfeited?"

And from his inmost hold
  The answer rolled:
"Thy bondman to remain
  Is sweeter pain,
Dearer an hundredfold."



LIFE WITHOUT HEALTH

Behold life builded as a goodly house
And grown a mansion ruinous
With winter blowing through its crumbling walls!
The master paceth up and down his halls,
And in the empty hours
Can hear the tottering of his towers
And tremor of their bases underground.
And oft he starts and looks around
At creaking of a distant door
Or echo of his footfall on the floor,
Thinking it may be one whom he awaits
And hath for many days awaited,
Coming to lead him through the mouldering gates
Out somewhere, from his home dilapidated.



TO A FRIEND

CHAFING AT ENFORCED IDLENESS FROM INTERRUPTED HEALTH

Soon may the edict lapse, that on you lays
This dire compulsion of infertile days,
This hardest penal toil, reluctant rest!
Meanwhile I count you eminently blest,
Happy from labours heretofore well done,
Happy in tasks auspiciously begun.
For they are blest that have not much to rue--
That have not oft mis-heard the prompter's cue,
Stammered and stumbled and the wrong parts played,
And life a Tragedy of Errors made.



"WELL HE SLUMBERS, GREATLY SLAIN"

Well he slumbers, greatly slain,
  Who in splendid battle dies;
Deep his sleep in midmost main
  Pillowed upon pearl who lies.

Ease, of all good gifts the best,
  War and wave at last decree:
Love alone denies us rest,
  Crueller than sword or sea.



AN EPISTLE

(To N.A.)

So, into Cornwall you go down,
And leave me loitering here in town.
For me, the ebb of London's wave,
Not ocean-thunder in Cornish cave.
My friends (save only one or two)
Gone to the glistening marge, like you,--
The opera season with blare and din
Dying sublime in _Lohengrin_,--
Houses darkened, whose blinded panes
All thoughts, save of the dead, preclude,--
The parks a puddle of tropic rains,--
Clubland a pensive solitude,--
For me, now you and yours are flown,
The fellowship of books alone!

  For you, the snaky wave, upflung
With writhing head and hissing tongue;
The weed whose tangled fibres tell
Of some inviolate deep-sea dell;
The faultless, secret-chambered shell,
Whose sound is an epitome
Of all the utterance of the sea;
Great, basking, twinkling wastes of brine;
Far clouds of gulls that wheel and swerve
In unanimity divine,
With undulation serpentine,
And wondrous, consentaneous curve,
Flashing in sudden silver sheen,
Then melting on the sky-line keen;
The world-forgotten coves that seem
Lapt in some magic old sea-dream,
Where, shivering off the milk-white foam,
Lost airs wander, seeking home,
And into clefts and caverns peep,
Fissures paven with powdered shell,
Recesses of primeval sleep,
Tranced with an immemorial spell;
The granite fangs eternally
Rending the blanch'd lips of the sea;
The breaker clutching land, then hurled
Back on its own tormented world;
The mountainous upthunderings,
The glorious energy of things,
The power, the joy, the cosmic thrill,
Earth's ecstasy made visible,
World-rapture old as Night and new
As sunrise;--this, all this, for you!

  So, by Atlantic breezes fanned,
You roam the limits of the land,
And I in London's world abide,
Poor flotsam on the human tide!--
Nay, rather, isled amid the stream--
Watching the flood--and, half in dream
Guessing the sources whence it rose,
And musing to what Deep it flows.

  For still the ancient riddles mar
Our joy in man, in leaf, in star.
The Whence and Whither give no rest,
The Wherefore is a hopeless quest;
And the dull wight who never thinks,--
Who, chancing on the sleeping Sphinx,
Passes unchallenged,--fares the best!

  But ill it suits this random verse
The high enigmas to rehearse,
And touch with desultory tongue
Secrets no man from Night hath wrung.
We ponder, question, doubt--and pray
The Deep to answer Yea or Nay;
And what does the engirdling wave,
The undivulging, yield us, save
Aspersion of bewildering spray?
We do but dally on the beach,
Writing our little thoughts full large,
While Ocean with imperious speech
Derides us trifling by the marge.
Nay, we are children, who all day
Beside the unknown waters play,
And dig with small toy-spade the sand,
Thinking our trenches wondrous deep,
Till twilight falls, and hand-in-hand
Nurse takes us home, well tired, to sleep;
Sleep, and forget our toys, and be
Lulled by the great unsleeping sea.

  Enough!--to Cornwall you go down,
And I tag rhymes in London town.



TO AUSTIN DOBSON

Yes! urban is your Muse, and owns
An empire based on London stones;
Yet flow'rs, as mountain violets sweet,
Spring from the pavement 'neath her feet.

Of wilder birth this Muse of mine,
Hill-cradled, and baptized with brine;
And 'tis for her a sweet despair
To watch that courtly step and air!

Yet surely she, without reproof,
Greeting may send from realms aloof,
And even claim a tie in blood,
And dare to deem it sisterhood.

For well we know, those Maidens be
All daughters of Mnemosyne;
And 'neath the unifying sun,
Many the songs--but Song is one.



TO EDWARD CLODD

Friend, in whose friendship I am twice well-starred,
  A debt not time may cancel is your due;
  For was it not your praise that earliest drew,
On me obscure, that chivalrous regard,
Ev'n his, who, knowing fame's first steep how hard,
  With generous lips no faltering clarion blew,
  Bidding men hearken to a lyre by few
Heeded, nor grudge the bay to one more bard?
Bitter the task, year by inglorious year,
Of suitor at the world's reluctant ear.
  One cannot sing for ever, like a bird,
For sole delight of singing! Him his mate
Suffices, listening with a heart elate;
  Nor more his joy, if all the rapt heav'n heard.



TO EDWARD DOWDEN

ON RECEIVING FROM HIM A COPY OF "THE LIFE OF SHELLEY"

First, ere I slake my hunger, let me thank
The giver of the feast. For feast it is,
Though of ethereal, translunary fare--
His story who pre-eminently of men
Seemed nourished upon starbeams and the stuff
Of rainbows, and the tempest, and the foam;
Who hardly brooked on his impatient soul
The fleshly trammels; whom at last the sea
Gave to the fire, from whose wild arms the winds
Took him, and shook him broadcast to the world.
In my young days of fervid poesy
He drew me to him with his strange far light,--
He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,
And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself
Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.
Anon the Earth recalled me, and a voice
Murmuring of dethroned divinities
And dead times deathless upon sculptured urn--
And Philomela's long-descended pain
Flooding the night--and maidens of romance
To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come--
Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse
And thraldom, lapping me in high content,
Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.
And then a third voice, long unheeded--held
Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--
Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang
Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys,
Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,
And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;
And from the homely matter nigh at hand
Ascending and dilating, it disclosed
Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths
Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass
With roots that groped about eternity,
And in each drop of dew upon each blade
The mirror of the inseparable All.
The first voice, then the second, in their turns
Had sung me captive. This voice sang me free.
Therefore, above all vocal sons of men,
Since him whose sightless eyes saw hell and heaven,
To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love.
Yet dear is Keats, a lucid presence, great
With somewhat of a glorious soullessness.
And dear, and great with an excess of soul,
Shelley, the hectic flamelike rose of verse,
All colour, and all odour, and all bloom,
Steeped in the noonlight, glutted with the sun,
But somewhat lacking root in homely earth,
Lacking such human moisture as bedews
His not less starward stem of song, who, rapt
Not less in glowing vision, yet retained
His clasp of the prehensible, retained
The warm touch of the world that lies to hand,
Not in vague dreams of man forgetting men,
Nor in vast morrows losing the to-day;
Who trusted nature, trusted fate, nor found
An Ogre, sovereign on the throne of things;
Who felt the incumbence of the unknown, yet bore
Without resentment the Divine reserve;
Who suffered not his spirit to dash itself
Against the crags and wavelike break in spray,
But 'midst the infinite tranquillities
Moved tranquil, and henceforth, by Rotha stream
And Rydal's mountain-mirror, and where flows
Yarrow thrice sung or Duddon to the sea,
And wheresoe'er man's heart is thrilled by tones
Struck from man's lyric heartstrings, shall survive.



FELICITY

A squalid, hideous town, where streams run black
With vomit of a hundred roaring mills,--
Hither occasion calls me; and ev'n here,
All in the sable reek that wantonly
Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn,
One may at least surmise the sky still blue.
Ev'n here, the myriad slaves of the machine
Deem life a boon; and here, in days far sped,
I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate
To her companions, how a favouring chance
By some few shillings weekly had increased
The earnings of her household, and she said:
"So now we are happy, having all we wished,"--
Felicity indeed! though more it lay
In wanting little than in winning all.

Felicity indeed! Across the years
To me her tones come back, rebuking; me,
Spreader of toils to snare the wandering Joy
No guile may capture and no force surprise--
Only by them that never wooed her, won.

O curst with wide desires and spacious dreams,
Too cunningly do ye accumulate
Appliances and means of happiness,
E'er to be happy! Lavish hosts, ye make
Elaborate preparation to receive
A shy and simple guest, who, warned of all
The ceremony and circumstance wherewith
Ye mean to entertain her, will not come.



VER TENEBROSUM

SONNETS OF MARCH AND APRIL 1885


I

THE SOUDANESE

They wrong'd not us, nor sought 'gainst us to wage
The bitter battle. On their God they cried
For succour, deeming justice to abide
In heaven, if banish'd from earth's vicinage.
And when they rose with a gall'd lion's rage,
We, on the captor's, keeper's, tamer's side,
We, with the alien tyranny allied,
We bade them back to their Egyptian cage.
Scarce knew they who we were! A wind of blight
From the mysterious far north-west we came.
Our greatness now their veriest babes have learn'd,
Where, in wild desert homes, by day, by night,
Thousands that weep their warriors unreturn'd,
O England, O my country, curse thy name!


II

HASHEEN

"Of British arms, another victory!"
Triumphant words, through all the land's length sped.
Triumphant words, but, being interpreted,
Words of ill sound, woful as words can be.
Another carnage by the drear Red Sea--
Another efflux of a sea more red!
Another bruising of the hapless head
Of a wrong'd people yearning to be free.
Another blot on her great name, who stands
Confounded, left intolerably alone
With the dilating spectre of her own
Dark sin, uprisen from yonder spectral sands:
Penitent more than to herself is known;
England, appall'd by her own crimson hands.


III

THE ENGLISH DEAD

Give honour to our heroes fall'n, how ill
Soe'er the cause that bade them forth to die.
Honour to him, the untimely struck, whom high
In place, more high in hope, 'twas fate's harsh will
With tedious pain unsplendidly to kill.
Honour to him, doom'd splendidly to die,
Child of the city whose foster-child am I,
Who, hotly leading up the ensanguin'd hill
His charging thousand, fell without a word--
Fell, but shall fall not from our memory.
Also for them let honour's voice be heard
Who nameless sleep, while dull time covereth
With no illustrious shade of laurel tree,
But with the poppy alone, their deeds and death.


IV

GORDON

Idle although our homage be and vain,
Who loudly through the door of silence press
And vie in zeal to crown death's nakedness,
Not therefore shall melodious lips refrain
Thy praises, gentlest warrior without stain,
Denied the happy garland of success,
Foil'd by dark fate, but glorious none the less,
Greatest of losers, on the lone peak slain
Of Alp-like virtue. Not to-day, and not
To-morrow, shall thy spirit's splendour be
Oblivion's victim; but when God shall find
All human grandeur among men forgot,
Then only shall the world, grown old and blind,
Cease, in her dotage, to remember Thee.


V

GORDON _(concluded)_

Arab, Egyptian, English--by the sword
Cloven, or pierced with spears, or bullet-mown--
In equal fate they sleep: their dust is grown
A portion of the fiery sands abhorred.
And thou, what hast thou, hero, for reward,
Thou, England's glory and her shame? O'erthrown
Thou liest, unburied, or with grave unknown
As his to whom on Nebo's height the Lord
Showed all the land of Gilead, unto Dan;
Judah sea-fringed; Manasseh and Ephraim;
And Jericho palmy, to where Zoar lay;
And in a valley of Moab buried him,
Over against Beth-Peor, but no man
Knows of his sepulchre unto this day.


VI

THE TRUE PATRIOTISM

The ever-lustrous name of patriot
To no man be denied because he saw
Where in his country's wholeness lay the flaw,
Where, on her whiteness, the unseemly blot.
England! thy loyal sons condemn thee.--What!
Shall we be meek who from thine own breasts draw
Our fierceness? Not ev'n _thou_ shalt overawe
Us thy proud children nowise basely got.
Be this the measure of our loyalty--
To feel thee noble and weep thy lapse the more.
This truth by thy true servants is confess'd--
Thy sins, who love thee most, do most deplore.
Know thou thy faithful! Best they honour thee
Who honour in thee only what is best.


VII

RESTORED ALLEGIANCE

Dark is thy trespass, deep be thy remorse,
O England! Fittingly thine own feet bleed,
Submissive to the purblind guides that lead
Thy weary steps along this rugged course.
Yet ... when I glance abroad, and track the source
More selfish far, of other nations' deed,
And mark their tortuous craft, their jealous greed,
Their serpent-wisdom or mere soulless force,
Homeward returns my vagrant fealty,
Crying, "O England, shouldst thou one day fall,
Shatter'd in ruins by some Titan foe,
Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all
The world, and Truth less passionately free,
And God the poorer for thine overthrow."


VIII

THE POLITICAL LUMINARY

A skilful leech, so long as we were whole:
Who scann'd the nation's every outward part,
But ah! misheard the beating of its heart.
Sire of huge sorrows, yet erect of soul.
Swift rider with calamity for goal,
Who, overtasking his equestrian art,
Unstall'd a steed full willing for the start,
But wondrous hard to curb or to control.
Sometimes we thought he led the people forth:
Anon he seemed to follow where they flew;
Lord of the golden tongue and smiting eyes;
Great out of season, and untimely wise:
A man whose virtue, genius, grandeur, worth
Wrought deadlier ill than ages can undo.


IX

FOREIGN MENACE

I marvel that this land, whereof I claim
The glory of sonship--for it _was_ erewhile
A glory to be sprung of Britain's isle,
Though now it well-nigh more resembles shame--
I marvel that this land with heart so tame
Can brook the northern insolence and guile.
But most it angers me, to think how vile
Art thou, how base, from whom the insult came,
Unwieldly laggard, many an age behind
Thy sister Powers, in brain and conscience both;
In recognition of man's widening mind
And flexile adaptation to its growth:
Brute bulk, that bearest on thy back, half loth,
One wretched man, most pitied of mankind.


X

HOME-ROOTEDNESS

I cannot boast myself cosmopolite;
I own to "insularity," although
'Tis fall'n from fashion, as full well I know.
For somehow, being a plain and simple wight,
I am skin-deep a child of the new light,
But chiefly am mere Englishman below,
Of island-fostering; and can hate a foe,
And trust my kin before the Muscovite.
Whom shall I trust if not my kin? And whom
Account so near in natural bonds as these
Born of my mother England's mighty womb,
Nursed on my mother England's mighty knees,
And lull'd as I was lull'd in glory and gloom
With cradle-song of her protecting seas?


XI

OUR EASTERN TREASURE

In cobwebb'd corners dusty and dim I hear
A thin voice pipingly revived of late,
Which saith our India is a cumbrous weight,
An idle decoration, bought too dear.
The wiser world contemns not gorgeous gear;
Just pride is no mean factor in a State;
The sense of greatness keeps a nation great;
And mighty they who mighty can appear.
It may be that if hands of greed could steal
From England's grasp the envied orient prize,
This tide of gold would flood her still as now:
But were she the same England, made to feel
A brightness gone from out those starry eyes,
A splendour from that constellated brow?


XII

REPORTED CONCESSIONS

So we must palter, falter, cringe, and shrink,
And when the bully threatens, crouch or fly.--
There are who tell me with a shuddering eye
That war's red cup is Satan's chosen drink.
Who shall gainsay them? Verily I do think
War is as hateful almost, and well-nigh
As ghastly, as this terrible Peace whereby
We halt for ever on the crater's brink
And feed the wind with phrases, while we know
There gapes at hand the infernal precipice
O'er which a gossamer bridge of words we throw,
Yet cannot choose but hear from the abyss
The sulphurous gloom's unfathomable hiss
And simmering lava's subterranean flow.


XIII

NIGHTMARE

(_Written during apparent imminence of war_)

In a false dream I saw the Foe prevail.
The war was ended; the last smoke had rolled
Away: and we, erewhile the strong and bold,
Stood broken, humbled, withered, weak and pale,
And moan'd, "Our greatness is become a tale
To tell our children's babes when we are old.
They shall put by their playthings to be told
How England once, before the years of bale,
Throned above trembling, puissant, grandiose, calm,
Held Asia's richest jewel in her palm;
And with unnumbered isles barbaric, she
The broad hem of her glistering robe impearl'd;
Then, when she wound her arms about the world,
And had for vassal the obsequious sea."


XIV

LAST WORD: TO THE COLONIES

Brothers beyond the Atlantic's loud expanse;
And you that rear the innumerable fleece
Far southward 'mid the ocean named of peace;
Britons that past the Indian wave advance
Our name and spirit and world-predominance;
And you our kin that reap the earth's increase
Where crawls that long-backed mountain till it cease
Crown'd with the headland of bright esperance:--
Remote compatriots wheresoe'er ye dwell,
By your prompt voices ringing clear and true
We know that with our England all is well:
Young is she yet, her world-task but begun!
By you we know her safe, and know by you
Her veins are million but her heart is one.



EPIGRAMS

'Tis human fortune's happiest height to be
  A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole;
Second in order of felicity
  I hold it, to have walk'd with such a soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

The statue--Buonarroti said--doth wait,
Thrall'd in the block, for me to emancipate.
The poem--saith the poet--wanders free
Till I betray it to captivity.

       *       *       *       *       *

To keep in sight Perfection, and adore
  The vision, is the artist's best delight;
His bitterest pang, that he can ne'er do more
  Than keep her long'd-for loveliness in sight.

       *       *       *       *       *

If Nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st,
  A splendid fiction and prodigious dream,
To reach the real and true I'll make no haste,
  More than content with worlds that only seem.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Poet gathers fruit from every tree,
Yea, grapes from thorns and figs from thistles he.
Pluck'd by his hand, the basest weed that grows
Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brook, from whose bridge the wandering idler peers
  To watch thy small fish dart or cool floor shine,
I would that bridge whose arches all are years
  Spann'd not a less transparent wave than thine!

       *       *       *       *       *

To Art we go as to a well, athirst,
  And see our shadow 'gainst its mimic skies,
But in its depth must plunge and be immersed
  To clasp the naiad Truth where low she lies.

       *       *       *       *       *

In youth the artist voweth lover's vows
To Art, in manhood maketh her his spouse.
Well if her charms yet hold for him such joy
As when he craved some boon and she was coy!

       *       *       *       *       *

Immured in sense, with fivefold bonds confined,
  Rest we content if whispers from the stars
In waftings of the incalculable wind
  Come blown at midnight through our prison-bars.

       *       *       *       *       *

Love, like a bird, hath perch'd upon a spray
  For thee and me to hearken what he sings.
Contented, he forgets to fly away;
  But hush!... remind not Eros of his wings.

       *       *       *       *       *

Think not thy wisdom can illume away
The ancient tanglement of night and day.
Enough, to acknowledge both, and both revere:
They see not clearliest who see all things clear.

       *       *       *       *       *

In mid whirl of the dance of Time ye start,
  Start at the cold touch of Eternity,
And cast your cloaks about you, and depart:
  The minstrels pause not in their minstrelsy.

       *       *       *       *       *

The beasts in field are glad, and have not wit
  To know why leapt their hearts when springtime shone.
Man looks at his own bliss, considers it,
  Weighs it with curious fingers; and 'tis gone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Momentous to himself as I to me
  Hath each man been that ever woman bore;
Once, in a lightning-flash of sympathy,
  I _felt_ this truth, an instant, and no more.

      *       *       *       *       *

The gods man makes he breaks; proclaims them each
  Immortal, and himself outlives them all:
But whom he set not up he cannot reach
  To shake His cloud-dark sun-bright pedestal.

      *       *       *       *       *

The children romp within the graveyard's pale;
The lark sings o'er a madhouse, or a gaol;--
Such nice antitheses of perfect poise
Chance in her curious rhetoric employs.

      *       *       *       *       *

Our lithe thoughts gambol close to God's abyss,
Children whose home is by the precipice.
Fear not thy little ones shall o'er it fall:
Solid, though viewless, is the girdling wall.

      *       *       *       *       *

Lives there whom pain hath evermore pass'd by
And Sorrow shunn'd with an averted eye?
Him do thou pity, him above the rest,
Him of all hapless mortals most unbless'd.

       *       *       *       *       *

Say what thou wilt, the young are happy never.
Give me bless'd Age, beyond the fire and fever,--
Past the delight that shatters, hope that stings,
And eager flutt'ring of life's ignorant wings.

       *       *       *       *       *

Onward the chariot of the Untarrying moves;
  Nor day divulges him nor night conceals;
Thou hear'st the echo of unreturning hooves
  And thunder of irrevocable wheels.

       *       *       *       *       *

A deft musician does the breeze become
  Whenever an AEolian harp it finds:
Hornpipe and hurdygurdy both are dumb
  Unto the most musicianly of winds.

       *       *       *       *       *

I follow Beauty; of her train am I:
  Beauty whose voice is earth and sea and air;
Who serveth, and her hands for all things ply;
  Who reigneth, and her throne is everywhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

Toiling and yearning, 'tis man's doom to see
  No perfect creature fashion'd of his hands.
Insulted by a flower's immaculacy,
  And mock'd at by the flawless stars he stands.

       *       *       *       *       *

For metaphors of man we search the skies,
  And find our allegory in all the air.
We gaze on Nature with Narcissus-eyes,
Enamour'd of our shadow everywhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

One music maketh its occult abode
  In all things scatter'd from great Beauty's hand;
And evermore the deepest words of God
  Are yet the easiest to understand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Enough of mournful melodies, my lute!
Be henceforth joyous, or be henceforth mute.
Song's breath is wasted when it does but fan
The smouldering infelicity of man.

       *       *       *       *       *

I pluck'd this flower, O brighter flower, for thee,
There where the river dies into the sea.
To kiss it the wild west wind hath made free:
Kiss it thyself and give it back to me.

       *       *       *       *       *

To be as this old elm full loth were I,
  That shakes in the autumn storm its palsied head.
Hewn by the weird last woodman let me lie
  Ere the path rustle with my foliage shed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ah, vain, thrice vain in the end, thy hate and rage,
And the shrill tempest of thy clamorous page.
True poets but transcendent lovers be,
And one great love-confession poesy.

       *       *       *       *       *

His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet,
  And whoso will may trample on his rhymes.
Should Time let die a song that's true and sweet,
  The singer's loss were more than match'd by Time's.

       *       *       *       *       *

ON LONGFELLOW'S DEATH

No puissant singer he, whose silence grieves
  To-day the great West's tender heart and strong;
No singer vast of voice: yet one who leaves
  His native air the sweeter for his song.

       *       *       *       *       *

BYRON THE VOLUPTUARY

Too avid of earth's bliss, he was of those
  Whom Delight flies because they give her chase.
Only the odour of her wild hair blows
  Back in their faces hungering for her face.

       *       *       *       *       *

ANTONY AT ACTIUM

He holds a dubious balance:--yet _that_ scale,
Whose freight the world is, surely shall prevail?
No; Cleopatra droppeth into _this_
One counterpoising orient sultry kiss.

       *       *       *       *       *

ART

The thousand painful steps at last are trod,
  At last the temple's difficult door we win;
But perfect on his pedestal, the god
  Freezes us hopeless when we enter in.

       *       *       *       *       *

KEATS

He dwelt with the bright gods of elder time,
  On earth and in their cloudy haunts above.
He loved them: and in recompense sublime,
  The gods, alas! gave him their fatal love.

       *       *       *       *       *

AFTER READING "TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT"

Your Marlowe's page I close, my Shakspere's ope.
  How welcome--after gong and cymbal's din--
The continuity, the long slow slope
  And vast curves of the gradual violin!

       *       *       *       *       *

SHELLEY AND HARRIET WESTBROOK

A star look'd down from heaven and loved a flower
Grown in earth's garden--loved it for an hour:

Let eyes that trace his orbit in the spheres
Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE PLAY OF "KING LEAR"

Here Love the slain with Love the slayer lies;
  Deep drown'd are both in the same sunless pool.
Up from its depths that mirror thundering skies
  Bubbles the wan mirth of the mirthless Fool.

       *       *       *        *

TO A POET

Time, the extortioner, from richest beauty
Takes heavy toll and wrings rapacious duty.
Austere of feature if thou carve thy rhyme,
Perchance 'twill pay the lesser tax to Time.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE YEAR'S MINSTRELSY

Spring, the low prelude of a lordlier song:
  Summer, a music without hint of death:
Autumn, a cadence lingeringly long:
  Winter, a pause;--the Minstrel-Year takes breath.

       *        *        *        *        *

THE RUINED ABBEY

Flower fondled, clasp'd in ivy's close caress,
  It seems allied with Nature, yet apart:--
Of wood's and wave's insensate loveliness
  The glad, sad, tranquil, passionate, human heart.

       *        *        *        *        *

MICHELANGELO'S "MOSES"

The captain's might, and mystery of the seer--
  Remoteness of Jehovah's colloquist,
Nearness of man's heaven-advocate--are here:
  Alone Mount Nebo's harsh foreshadow is miss'd.

       *        *        *        *        *

THE ALPS

Adieu, white brows of Europe! sovereign brows,
  That wear the sunset for a golden tiar.
With me in memory shall your phantoms house
  For ever, whiter than yourselves, and higher.

       *        *        *        *        *

THE CATHEDRAL SPIRE

It soars like hearts of hapless men who dare
  To sue for gifts the gods refuse to allot;
Who climb for ever toward they know not where,
  Baffled for ever by they know not what.

       *        *        *        *        *

AN EPITAPH

His friends he loved. His fellest earthly foes--
  Cats--I believe he did but feign to hate.
My hand will miss the insinuated nose,
  Mine eyes the tail that wagg'd contempt at Fate.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE METROPOLITAN UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

Here were a goodly place wherein to die;--
  Grown latterly to sudden change averse,
All violent contrasts fain avoid would I
  On passing from this world into a worse.

       *       *       *       *       *

TO A SEABIRD

Fain would I have thee barter fates with me,--
Lone loiterer where the shells like jewels be,
Hung on the fringe and frayed hem of the sea.
But no,--'twere cruel, wild-wing'd Bliss! to thee.

       *       *       *       *       *

ON DUeRER'S _MELENCOLIA_

What holds her fixed far eyes nor lets them range?
Not the strange sea, strange earth, or heav'n more strange;
But her own phantom dwarfing these great three,
More strange than all, more old than heav'n, earth, sea.

       *        *        *        *        *

TANTALUS

He wooes for ever, with foil'd lips of drouth,
The wave that wearies not to mock his mouth.
'Tis Lethe's; they alone that tide have quaff'd
Who never thirsted for the oblivious draught.

       *       *       *       *       *

A MAIDEN'S EPITAPH

She dwelt among us till the flowers, 'tis said,
  Grew jealous of her: with precipitate feet,
As loth to wrong them unawares, she fled.
  Earth is less fragrant now, and heaven more sweet.



WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE


TO JAMES BROMLEY

WITH "WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE"

Ere vandal lords with lust of gold accurst
  Deface each hallowed hillside we revere--
Ere cities in their million-throated thirst
  Menace each sacred mere--
Let us give thanks because one nook hath been
  Unflooded yet by desecration's wave,
The little churchyard in the valley green
  That holds our Wordsworth's grave.

'Twas there I plucked these elegiac blooms,
  There where he rests 'mid comrades fit and few,
And thence I bring this growth of classic tombs,
  An offering, friend, to you--
You who have loved like me his simple themes,
  Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,
And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams
  Are lovelier for his strain.

It may be that his manly chant, beside
  More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be, thought has broadened since he died
  Upon the century's noon;
It may be that we can no longer share
  The faith which from his fathers he received;
It may be that our doom is to despair
  Where he with joy believed;--

Enough that there is none since risen who sings
  A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things
  Which is our source and goal;
And though at touch of later hands there float
  More artful tones than from his lyre he drew,
Ages may pass ere trills another note
  So sweet, so great, so true.



WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE

I

The old rude church, with bare, bald tower, is here;
  Beneath its shadow high-born Rotha flows;
Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near,
  And with cool murmur lulling his repose

Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near.
  His hills, his lakes, his streams are with him yet.
Surely the heart that read her own heart clear
  Nature forgets not soon: 'tis we forget.

We that with vagrant soul his fixity
  Have slighted; faithless, done his deep faith wrong;
Left him for poorer loves, and bowed the knee
  To misbegotten strange new gods of song.

Yet, led by hollow ghost or beckoning elf
  Far from her homestead to the desert bourn,
The vagrant soul returning to herself
  Wearily wise, must needs to him return.

To him and to the powers that with him dwell:--
  Inflowings that divulged not whence they came;
And that secluded spirit unknowable,
  The mystery we make darker with a name;

The Somewhat which we name but cannot know,
  Ev'n as we name a star and only see
His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
  And ever hide him, and which are not he.


II

Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave!
  When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then?
To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave,
  The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men?

Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine;
  Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view;
Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;
  Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.

What hadst thou that could make so large amends
  For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed,
Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends?--
  Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest.

From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze,
  From Byron's tempest-anger, tempest-mirth,
Men turned to thee and found--not blast and blaze,
  Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth,

Nor peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
  There in white languors to decline and cease;
But peace whose names are also rapture, power,
  Clear sight, and love: for these are parts of peace.


III

I hear it vouched the Muse is with us still;--
  If less divinely frenzied than of yore,
In lieu of feelings she has wondrous skill
  To simulate emotion felt no more.

Not such the authentic Presence pure, that made
  This valley vocal in the great days gone!--
In _his_ great days, while yet the spring-time played
  About him, and the mighty morning shone.

No word-mosaic artificer, he sang
  A lofty song of lowly weal and dole.
Right from the heart, right to the heart it sprang,
  Or from the soul leapt instant to the soul.

He felt the charm of childhood, grace of youth,
  Grandeur of age, insisting to be sung.
The impassioned argument was simple truth
  Half-wondering at its own melodious tongue.

Impassioned? ay, to the song's ecstatic core!
  But far removed were clangour, storm and feud;
For plenteous health was his, exceeding store
  Of joy, and an impassioned quietude.


IV

A hundred years ere he to manhood came,
  Song from celestial heights had wandered down,
Put off her robe of sunlight, dew and flame,
  And donned a modish dress to charm the Town.

Thenceforth she but festooned the porch of things;
  Apt at life's lore, incurious what life meant.
Dextrous of hand, she struck her lute's few strings;
  Ignobly perfect, barrenly content.

Unflushed with ardour and unblanched with awe,
  Her lips in profitless derision curled,
She saw with dull emotion--if she saw--
  The vision of the glory of the world.

The human masque she watched, with dreamless eyes
  In whose clear shallows lurked no trembling shade:
The stars, unkenned by her, might set and rise,
  Unmarked by her, the daisies bloom and fade.

The age grew sated with her sterile wit.
  Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.
Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,
  And craved a living voice, a natural tone.

For none the less, though song was but half true,
  The world lay common, one abounding theme.
Man joyed and wept, and fate was ever new,
  And love was sweet, life real, death no dream.

In sad stern verse the rugged scholar-sage
  Bemoaned his toil unvalued, youth uncheered.
His numbers wore the vesture of the age,
  But, 'neath it beating, the great heart was heard.

From dewy pastures, uplands sweet with thyme,
  A virgin breeze freshened the jaded day.
It wafted Collins' lonely vesper-chime,
  It breathed abroad the frugal note of Gray.

It fluttered here and there, nor swept in vain
  The dusty haunts where futile echoes dwell,--
Then, in a cadence soft as summer rain,
  And sad from Auburn voiceless, drooped and fell.

It drooped and fell, and one 'neath northern skies,
  With southern heart, who tilled his father's field,
Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise
  And touch quick nature's hem and go forth healed.

On life's broad plain the ploughman's conquering share
  Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew,
And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre
  The peasant's team a ruthless furrow drew.

Bright was his going forth, but clouds ere long
  Whelmed him; in gloom his radiance set, and those
Twin morning stars of the new century's song,
  Those morning stars that sang together, rose.

In elvish speech the _Dreamer_ told his tale
  Of marvellous oceans swept by fateful wings.--
The _Seer_ strayed not from earth's human pale,
  But the mysterious face of common things

He mirrored as the moon in Rydal Mere
  Is mirrored, when the breathless night hangs blue:
Strangely remote she seems and wondrous near,
  And by some nameless difference born anew.


V

Peace--peace--and rest! Ah, how the lyre is loth,
  Or powerless now, to give what all men seek!
Either it deadens with ignoble sloth
  Or deafens with shrill tumult, loudly weak.

Where is the singer whose large notes and clear
  Can heal and arm and plenish and sustain?
Lo, one with empty music floods the ear,
  And one, the heart refreshing, tires the brain.

And idly tuneful, the loquacious throng
  Flutter and twitter, prodigal of time,
And little masters make a toy of song
  Till grave men weary of the sound of rhyme.

And some go prankt in faded antique dress,
  Abhorring to be hale and glad and free;
And some parade a conscious naturalness,
  The scholar's not the child's simplicity.

Enough;--and wisest who from words forbear.
  The kindly river rails not as it glides;
And suave and charitable, the winning air
  Chides not at all, or only him who chides.


VI

Nature! we storm thine ear with choric notes.
  Thou answerest through the calm great nights and days,
"Laud me who will: not tuneless are your throats;
  Yet if ye paused I should not miss the praise."

We falter, half-rebuked, and sing again.
  We chant thy desertness and haggard gloom,
Or with thy splendid wrath inflate the strain,
  Or touch it with thy colour and perfume.

One, his melodious blood aflame for thee,
  Wooed with fierce lust, his hot heart world-defiled.
One, with the upward eye of infancy,
  Looked in thy face, and felt himself thy child.

Thee he approached without distrust or dread--
  Beheld thee throned, an awful queen, above--
Climbed to thy lap and merely laid his head
  Against thy warm wild heart of mother-love.

He heard that vast heart beating--thou didst press
  Thy child so close, and lov'dst him unaware.
Thy beauty gladdened him; yet he scarce less
  Had loved thee, had he never found thee fair!

For thou wast not as legendary lands
  To which with curious eyes and ears we roam.
Nor wast thou as a fane mid solemn sands,
  Where palmers halt at evening. Thou wast home.

And here, at home, still bides he; but he sleeps;
  Not to be wakened even at thy word;
Though we, vague dreamers, dream he somewhere keeps
  An ear still open to thy voice still heard,--

Thy voice, as heretofore, about him blown,
  For ever blown about his silence now;
Thy voice, though deeper, yet so like his own
  That almost, when he sang, we deemed 'twas thou!


VII

Behind Helm Crag and Silver Howe the sheen
  Of the retreating day is less and less.
Soon will the lordlier summits, here unseen,
  Gather the night about their nakedness.

The half-heard bleat of sheep comes from the hill,
  Faint sounds of childish play are in the air.
The river murmurs past. All else is still.
  The very graves seem stiller than they were.

Afar though nation be on nation hurled,
  And life with toil and ancient pain depressed,
Here one may scarce believe the whole wide world
  Is not at peace, and all man's heart at rest.

Rest! 'twas the gift _he_ gave; and peace! the shade
  _He_ spread, for spirits fevered with the sun.
To him his bounties are come back--here laid
  In rest, in peace, his labour nobly done.



LACHRYMAE MUSARUM
AND
OTHER POEMS



TO
RICHARD HOLT HUTTON
AND
MEREDITH TOWNSEND

WITH GRATITUDE



LACHRYMAE MUSARUM

(6TH OCTOBER 1892)

Low, like another's, lies the laurelled head:
The life that seemed a perfect song is o'er:
Carry the last great bard to his last bed.
Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute.
Land that he loved, that loved him! nevermore
Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild sea-shore,
Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit,
Or woodlands old, like Druid couches spread,
The master's feet shall tread.
Death's little rift hath rent the faultless lute:
The singer of undying songs is dead.

  Lo, in this season pensive-hued and grave,
While fades and falls the doomed, reluctant leaf
From withered Earth's fantastic coronal,
With wandering sighs of forest and of wave
Mingles the murmur of a people's grief
For him whose leaf shall fade not, neither fall.
He hath fared forth, beyond these suns and showers.
For us, the autumn glow, the autumn flame,
And soon the winter silence shall be ours:
Him the eternal spring of fadeless fame
Crowns with no mortal flowers.

  Rapt though he be from us,
Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus;
Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each
Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach;
Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach;
Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home;
Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech;
Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam,
Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave,
His equal friendship crave:
And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech
Of Athens, Florence, Weimar, Stratford, Rome.

  What needs his laurel our ephemeral tears,
To save from visitation of decay?
Not in this temporal sunlight, now, that bay
Blooms, nor to perishable mundane ears
Sings he with lips of transitory clay;
For he hath joined the chorus of his peers
In habitations of the perfect day:
His earthly notes a heavenly audience hears,
And more melodious are henceforth the spheres,
Enriched with music stol'n from earth away.

  He hath returned to regions whence he came.
Him doth the spirit divine
Of universal loveliness reclaim.
All nature is his shrine.
Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea,
In earth's and air's emotion or repose,
In every star's august serenity,
And in the rapture of the flaming rose.
There seek him if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the Whole;
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.

  For lo! creation's self is one great choir,
And what is nature's order but the rhyme
Whereto the worlds keep time,
And all things move with all things from their prime?
Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre?
In far retreats of elemental mind
Obscurely comes and goes
The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might:
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself, she knows.
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped;
Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said;--
Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale,
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o'er
All woodland chants immortally prevail!
And now, from our vain plaudits greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs, he trims his sail,
But far beyond our vision and our hail
Is heard for ever and is seen no more.

  No more, O never now,
Lord of the lofty and the tranquil brow
Whereon nor snows of time
Have fall'n, nor wintry rime,
Shall men behold thee, sage and mage sublime.
Once, in his youth obscure,
The maker of this verse, which shall endure
By splendour of its theme that cannot die,
Beheld thee eye to eye,
And touched through thee the hand
Of every hero of thy race divine,
Ev'n to the sire of all the laurelled line,
The sightless wanderer on the Ionian strand,
With soul as healthful as the poignant brine,
Wide as his skies and radiant as his seas,
Starry from haunts of his Familiars nine,
Glorious Maeonides.
Yea, I beheld thee, and behold thee yet:
Thou hast forgotten, but can I forget?
The accents of thy pure and sovereign tongue,
Are they not ever goldenly impressed
On memory's palimpsest?
I see the wizard locks like night that hung,
I tread the floor thy hallowing feet have trod;
I see the hands a nation's lyre that strung,
The eyes that looked through life and gazed on God.

  The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer;
The grass of yesteryear
Is dead; the birds depart, the groves decay:
Empires dissolve and peoples disappear:
Song passes not away.
Captains and conquerors leave a little dust,
And kings a dubious legend of their reign;
The swords of Caesars, they are less than rust:
The poet doth remain.
Dead is Augustus, Maro is alive;
And thou, the Mantuan of our age and clime,
Like Virgil shalt thy race and tongue survive,
Bequeathing no less honeyed words to time,
Embalmed in amber of eternal rhyme,
And rich with sweets from every Muse's hive;
While to the measure of the cosmic rune
For purer ears thou shalt thy lyre attune,
And heed no more the hum of idle praise
In that great calm our tumults cannot reach,
Master who crown'st our immelodious days
With flower of perfect speech.



DEDICATION OF "THE DREAM OF MAN"

TO LONDON, MY HOSTESS

City that waitest to be sung,--
  For whom no hand
To mighty strains the lyre hath strung
  In all this land,
Though mightier theme the mightiest ones
  Sang not of old,
The thrice three sisters' godlike sons
  With lips of gold,--
Till greater voice thy greatness sing
  In loftier times,
Suffer an alien muse to bring
  Her votive rhymes.

Yes, alien in thy midst am I,
  Not of thy brood;
The nursling of a norland sky
  Of rougher mood:
To me, thy tarrying guest, to me,
    'Mid thy loud hum,
Strayed visions of the moor or sea
    Tormenting come.
Above the thunder of the wheels
    That hurry by,
From lapping of lone waves there steals
    A far-sent sigh;

And many a dream-reared mountain crest
    My feet have trod,
There where thy Minster in the West
    Gropes toward God.
Yet, from thy presence if I go,
    By woodlands deep
Or ocean-fringes, thou, I know,
    Wilt haunt my sleep;
Thy restless tides of life will foam,
    Still, in my sight;
Thy imperturbable dark dome
    Will crown my night.

O sea of living waves that roll
    On golden sands,
Or break on tragic reef and shoal
    'Mid fatal lands;
O forest wrought of living leaves,
    Some filled with Spring,
Where joy life's festal raiment weaves
    And all birds sing,--
Some trampled in the miry ways,
    Or whirled along
By fury of tempestuous days,--
    Take thou my song!

For thou hast scorned not heretofore
    The gifts of rhyme
I dropped, half faltering, at thy door,
    City sublime;
And though 'tis true I am but guest
    Within thy gate,
Unto thy hands I owe the best
    Awards of fate.
Imperial hostess! thanks from me
    To thee belong:
O living forest, living sea,
    Take thou my song!



THE DREAM OF MAN

To the eye and the ear of the Dreamer
  This Dream out of darkness flew,
Through the horn or the ivory portal,
  But he wist not which of the two.

It was the Human Spirit,
  Of all men's souls the Soul,
Man the unwearied climber,
  That climbed to the unknown goal.
And up the steps of the ages,
  The difficult steep ascent,
Man the unwearied climber
  Pauseless and dauntless went.
AEons rolled behind him
  With thunder of far retreat,
And still as he strove he conquered
  And laid his foes at his feet.
Inimical powers of nature,
  Tempest and flood and fire,
The spleen of fickle seasons
  That loved to baulk his desire,
The breath of hostile climates,
  The ravage of blight and dearth,
The old unrest that vexes
  The heart of the moody earth,
The genii swift and radiant
  Sabreing heaven with flame,
He, with a keener weapon,
  The sword of his wit, overcame.
Disease and her ravening offspring,
  Pain with the thousand teeth,
He drave into night primeval,
  The nethermost worlds beneath,
Till the Lord of Death, the undying,
  Ev'n Asrael the King,
No more with Furies for heralds
  Came armed with scourge and sting,
But gentle of voice and of visage,
  By calm Age ushered and led,
A guest, serenely featured,
  Entering, woke no dread.
And, as the rolling aeons
  Retreated with pomp of sound,
Man's spirit, grown too lordly
  For this mean orb to bound,
By arts in his youth undreamed of
  His terrene fetters broke,
With enterprise ethereal
  Spurning the natal yoke,
And, stung with divine ambition,
  And fired with a glorious greed,
He annexed the stars and the planets
  And peopled them with his seed.

Then said he, "The infinite Scripture
  I have read and interpreted clear,
And searching all worlds I have found not
  My sovereign or my peer.
In what room of the palace of nature
  Resides the invisible God?
For all her doors I have opened,
  And all her floors I have trod.
If greater than I be her tenant,
  Let him answer my challenging call:
Till then I admit no rival,
  But crown myself master of all."
And forth as that word went bruited,
  By Man unto Man were raised
Fanes of devout self-homage,
  Where he who praised was the praised;
And from vast unto vast of creation
  The new evangel ran,
And an odour of world-wide incense
  Went up from Man unto Man;
Until, on a solemn feast-day,
  When the world's usurping lord
At a million impious altars
  His own proud image adored,
God spake as He stept from His ambush:
  "O great in thine own conceit,
I will show thee thy source, how humble,
  Thy goal, for a god how unmeet."

Thereat, by the word of the Maker
  The Spirit of Man was led
To a mighty peak of vision,
  Where God to His creature said:
"Look eastward toward time's sunrise."
  And, age upon age untold,
The Spirit of Man saw clearly
  The Past as a chart out-rolled,--
Beheld his base beginnings
  In the depths of time, and his strife,
With beasts and crawling horrors
  For leave to live, when life
Meant but to slay and to procreate,
  To feed and to sleep, among
Mere mouths, voracities boundless,
  Blind lusts, desires without tongue,
And ferocities vast, fulfilling
  Their being's malignant law,
While nature was one hunger,
  And one hate, all fangs and maw.

With that, for a single moment,
  Abashed at his own descent,
In humbleness Man's Spirit
  At the feet of the Maker bent;
But, swifter than light, he recovered
  The stature and pose of his pride,
And, "Think not thus to shame me
  With my mean birth," he cried.
"This is my loftiest greatness,
  To have been born so low;
Greater than Thou the ungrowing
  Am I that for ever grow."
And God forbore to rebuke him,
  But answered brief and stern,
Bidding him toward time's sunset
  His vision westward turn;
And the Spirit of Man obeying
  Beheld as a chart out-rolled
The likeness and form of the Future,
  Age upon age untold;
Beheld his own meridian,
  And beheld his dark decline,
His secular fall to nadir
  From summits of light divine,
Till at last, amid worlds exhausted,
  And bankrupt of force and fire,
'Twas his, in a torrent of darkness,
  Like a sputtering lamp to expire.

Then a war of shame and anger
  Did the realm of his soul divide;
"'Tis false, 'tis a lying vision,"
  In the face of his God he cried.
"Thou thinkest to daunt me with shadows;
  Not such as Thou feign'st is my doom:
From glory to rise unto glory
  Is mine, who have risen from gloom.
I doubt if Thou knew'st at my making
  How near to thy throne I should climb,
O'er the mountainous slopes of the ages
  And the conquered peaks of time.
Nor shall I look backward nor rest me
  Till the uttermost heights I have trod,
And am equalled with Thee or above Thee,
  The mate or the master of God."

Ev'n thus Man turned from the Maker,
  With thundered defiance wild,
And God with a terrible silence
  Reproved the speech of His child.
And man returned to his labours,
  And stiffened the neck of his will;
And the aeons still went rolling,
  And his power was crescent still.
But yet there remained to conquer
  One foe, and the greatest--although
Despoiled of his ancient terrors,
  At heart, as of old, a foe--
Unmaker of all, and renewer,
  Who winnows the world with his wing,
The Lord of Death, the undying,
  Ev'n Asrael the King.

And lo, Man mustered his forces
  The war of wars to wage,
And with storm and thunder of onset
  Did the foe of foes engage,
And the Lord of Death, the undying,
  Was beset and harried sore,
In his immemorial fastness
  At night's aboriginal core.
And during years a thousand
  Man leaguered his enemy's hold,
While nature was one deep tremor,
  And the heart of the world waxed cold,
Till the phantom battlements wavered,
  And the ghostly fortress fell,
And Man with shadowy fetters
  Bound fast great Asrael.

So, to each star in the heavens,
  The exultant word was blown,
The annunciation tremendous,
  _Death is overthrown!_
And Space in her ultimate borders
  Prolonging the jubilant tone,
With hollow ingeminations,
  Sighed, _Death is overthrown!_
And God in His house of silence,
  Where He dwelleth aloof, alone,
Paused in His tasks to hearken:
  _Death is overthrown!_

Then a solemn and high thanksgiving
  By Man unto Man was sung,
In his temples of self-adoration,
  With his own multitudinous tongue;
And he said to his Soul: "Rejoice thou
  For thy last great foe lies bound,
Ev'n Asrael the Unmaker,
  Unmade, disarmed, discrowned."

And behold, his Soul rejoiced not,
  The breath of whose being was strife,
For life with nothing to vanquish
  Seemed but the shadow of life.
No goal invited and promised
  And divinely provocative shone;
And Fear having fled, her sister,
  Blest Hope, in her train was gone;
And the coping and crown of achievement
  Was hell than defeat more dire--
The torment of all-things-compassed,
  The plague of nought-to-desire;
And Man the invincible queller,
  Man with his foot on his foes,
In boundless satiety hungred,
  Restless from utter repose,
Victor of nature, victor
  Of the prince of the powers of the air,
By mighty weariness vanquished,
  And crowned with august despair.

Then, at his dreadful zenith,
  He cried unto God: "O Thou
Whom of old in my days of striving
  Methought I needed not,--now,
In this my abject glory,
  My hopeless and helpless might,
Hearken and cheer and succour!"
  And God from His lonely height,
From eternity's passionless summits,
  On suppliant Man looked down,
And His brow waxed human with pity,
  Belying its awful crown.
"Thy richest possession," He answered,
  "Blest Hope, will I restore,
And the infinite wealth of weakness
  Which was thy strength of yore;
And I will arouse from slumber,
  In his hold where bound he lies,
Thine enemy most benefic;--
  O Asrael, hear and rise!"

And a sound like the heart of nature
  Riven and cloven and torn,
Announced, to the ear universal,
  Undying Death new-born.
Sublime he rose in his fetters,
  And shook the chains aside
Ev'n as some mortal sleeper
  'Mid forests in autumntide
Rises and shakes off lightly
  The leaves that lightly fell
On his limbs and his hair unheeded
  While as yet he slumbered well.

And Deity paused and hearkened,
  Then turned to the undivine,
Saying, "O Man, My creature,
  Thy lot was more blest than Mine.
I taste not delight of seeking,
  Nor the boon of longing know.
There is but one joy transcendent,
  And I hoard it not but bestow.
I hoard it not nor have tasted,
  But freely I gave it to thee--
The joy of most glorious striving,
  Which dieth in victory."
Thus, to the Soul of the Dreamer,
  This Dream out of darkness flew,
Through the horn or the ivory portal,
  But he wist not which of the two.



SHELLEY'S CENTENARY

(4TH AUGUST 1892)

Within a narrow span of time,
Three princes of the realm of rhyme,
At height of youth or manhood's prime,
  From earth took wing,
To join the fellowship sublime
  Who, dead, yet sing.

He, first, his earliest wreath who wove
Of laurel grown in Latmian grove,
Conquered by pain and hapless love
  Found calmer home,
Roofed by the heaven that glows above
  Eternal Rome.

A fierier soul, its own fierce prey,
And cumbered with more mortal clay,
At Missolonghi flamed away,
  And left the air
Reverberating to this day
  Its loud despair.

Alike remote from Byron's scorn,
And Keats's magic as of morn
Bursting for ever newly-born
  On forests old,
Waking a hoary world forlorn
  With touch of gold,

Shelley, the cloud-begot, who grew
Nourished on air and sun and dew,
Into that Essence whence he drew
  His life and lyre
Was fittingly resolved anew
  Through wave and fire.

'Twas like his rapid soul! 'Twas meet
That he, who brooked not Time's slow feet,
With passage thus abrupt and fleet
  Should hurry hence,
Eager the Great Perhaps to greet
  With Why? and Whence?

Impatient of the world's fixed way,
He ne'er could suffer God's delay,
But all the future in a day
  Would build divine,
And the whole past in ruins lay,
  An emptied shrine.

Vain vision! but the glow, the fire,
The passion of benign desire,
The glorious yearning, lift him higher
  Than many a soul
That mounts a million paces nigher
  Its meaner goal.

And power is his, if naught besides,
In that thin ether where he rides,
Above the roar of human tides
  To ascend afar,
Lost in a storm of light that hides
  His dizzy car.

Below, the unhastening world toils on,
And here and there are victories won,
Some dragon slain, some justice done,
  While, through the skies,
A meteor rushing on the sun,
  He flares and dies.

But, as he cleaves yon ether clear
Notes from the unattempted Sphere
He scatters to the enchanted ear
  Of earth's dim throng,
Whose dissonance doth more endear
  The showering song.

In other shapes than he forecast
The world is moulded: his fierce blast,--
His wild assault upon the Past,--
  These things are vain;
Revolt is transient: what _must_ last
  Is that pure strain,

Which seems the wandering voices blent
Of every virgin element,--
A sound from ocean caverns sent,--
  An airy call
From the pavilioned firmament
  O'erdoming all.

And in this world of worldlings, where
Souls rust in apathy, and ne'er
A great emotion shakes the air,
  And life flags tame,
And rare is noble impulse, rare
  The impassioned aim,

'Tis no mean fortune to have heard
A singer who, if errors blurred
His sight, had yet a spirit stirred
  By vast desire,
And ardour fledging the swift word
  With plumes of fire.

A creature of impetuous breath,
Our torpor deadlier than death
He knew not; whatsoe'er he saith
  Flashes with life:
He spurreth men, he quickeneth
  To splendid strife.

And in his gusts of song he brings
Wild odours shaken from strange wings,
And unfamiliar whisperings
  From far lips blown,
While all the rapturous heart of things
  Throbs through his own,--

His own that from the burning pyre
One who had loved his wind-swept lyre
Out of the sharp teeth of the fire
  Unmolten drew,
Beside the sea that in her ire
  Smote him and slew.



A GOLDEN HOUR

A beckoning spirit of gladness seemed afloat,
  That lightly danced in laughing air before us:
The earth was all in tune, and you a note
    Of Nature's happy chorus.

'Twas like a vernal morn, yet overhead
  The leafless boughs across the lane were knitting:
The ghost of some forgotten Spring, we said,
    O'er Winter's world comes flitting.

Or was it Spring herself, that, gone astray,
  Beyond the alien frontier chose to tarry?
Or but some bold outrider of the May,
    Some April-emissary?

The apparition faded on the air,
  Capricious and incalculable comer.--
Wilt thou too pass, and leave my chill days bare,
    And fall'n my phantom Summer?



AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES LAMB, IN EDMONTON

Not here, O teeming City, was it meet
  Thy lover, thy most faithful, should repose,
  But where the multitudinous life-tide flows
Whose ocean-murmur was to him more sweet
Than melody of birds at morn, or bleat
  Of flocks in Spring-time, _there_ should Earth enclose
  His earth, amid thy thronging joys and woes,
There, 'neath the music of thy million feet.
In love of thee this lover knew no peer.
  Thine eastern or thy western fane had made
  Fit habitation for his noble shade.
Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,
Not here, in rustic exile, O not here,
  Thy Elia like an alien should be laid!



LINES IN A FLYLEAF OF "CHRISTABEL"

Inhospitably hast thou entertained,
O Poet, us the bidden to thy board,
Whom in mid-feast, and while our thousand mouths
Are one laudation of the festal cheer,
Thou from thy table dost dismiss, unfilled.
Yet loudlier thee than many a lavish host
We praise, and oftener thy repast half-served
Than many a stintless banquet, prodigally
Through satiate hours prolonged; nor praise less well
Because with tongues thou hast not cloyed, and lips
That mourn the parsimony of affluent souls,
And mix the lamentation with the laud.



LINES TO OUR NEW CENSOR

[Mr. Oscar Wilde, having discovered that England is unworthy
of him, has announced his resolve to become a naturalised
Frenchman.]

And wilt thou, Oscar, from us flee,
  And must we, henceforth, wholly sever?
Shall thy laborious _jeux-d'esprit_
  Sadden our lives no more for ever?

And all thy future wilt thou link
  With that brave land to which thou goest?
Unhappy France! we _used_ to think
  She touched, at Sedan, fortune's lowest.

And you're made French as easily
  As you might change the clothes you're wearing?
Fancy!--and 'tis so hard to be
  A man of sense and modest bearing.

May fortitude beneath this blow
  Fail not the gallant Gallic nation!
By past experience, well we know
  Her genius for recuperation.

And as for us--to our disgrace,
  Your stricture's truth must be conceded:
Would any but a stupid race
  Have made the fuss about you _we_ did?



RELUCTANT SUMMER

Reluctant Summer! once, a maid
  Full easy of access,
In many a bee-frequented shade
  Thou didst thy lover bless.
Divinely unreproved I played,
  Then, with each liberal tress--
And art thou grown at last afraid
  Of some too close caress?

Or deem'st that if thou shouldst abide
  My passion might decay?
Thou leav'st me pining and denied,
  Coyly thou say'st me nay.
Ev'n as I woo thee to my side,
  Thou, importuned to stay,
Like Orpheus' half-recovered bride
  Ebb'st from my arms away.



THE GREAT MISGIVING

"Not ours," say some, "the thought of death to dread;
  Asking no heaven, we fear no fabled hell:
Life is a feast, and we have banqueted--
  Shall not the worms as well?

"The after-silence, when the feast is o'er,
  And void the places where the minstrels stood,
Differs in nought from what hath been before,
  And is nor ill nor good."

Ah, but the Apparition--the dumb sign--
  The beckoning finger bidding me forego
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
  The songs, the festal glow!

And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,
  And while the purple joy is passed about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit
  Or homeless night without;

And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see
  New prospects, or fall sheer--a blinded thing!
_There_ is, O grave, thy hourly victory,
  And there, O death, thy sting.



"THE THINGS THAT ARE MORE EXCELLENT"

As we wax older on this earth,
  Till many a toy that charmed us seems
Emptied of beauty, stripped of worth,
  And mean as dust and dead as dreams,--
For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
  Some recompense the Fates have sent:
Thrice lovelier shine the things that last,
  The things that are more excellent.

Tired of the Senate's barren brawl,
  An hour with silence we prefer,
Where statelier rise the woods than all
  Yon towers of talk at Westminster.
Let this man prate and that man plot,
  On fame or place or title bent:
The votes of veering crowds are not
  The things that are more excellent.

Shall we perturb and vex our soul
  For "wrongs" which no true freedom mar,
Which no man's upright walk control,
  And from no guiltless deed debar?
What odds though tonguesters heal, or leave
  Unhealed, the grievance they invent?
To things, not phantoms, let us cleave--
  The things that are more excellent.

Nought nobler is, than to be free:
  The stars of heaven are free because
In amplitude of liberty
  Their joy is to obey the laws.
From servitude to freedom's _name_
  Free thou thy mind in bondage pent;
Depose the fetich, and proclaim
  The things that are more excellent.

And in appropriate dust be hurled
  That dull, punctilious god, whom they
That call their tiny clan the world,
  Serve and obsequiously obey:
Who con their ritual of Routine,
  With minds to one dead likeness blent,
And never ev'n in dreams have seen
  The things that are more excellent.

To dress, to call, to dine, to break
  No canon of the social code,
The little laws that lacqueys make,
  The futile decalogue of Mode,--
How many a soul for these things lives,
  With pious passion, grave intent!
While Nature careless-handed gives
  The things that are more excellent.

To hug the wealth ye cannot use,
  And lack the riches all may gain,--
O blind and wanting wit to choose,
  Who house the chaff and burn the grain!
And still doth life with starry towers
  Lure to the bright, divine ascent!--
Be yours the things ye would: be ours
  The things that are more excellent.

The grace of friendship--mind and heart
  Linked with their fellow heart and mind;
The gains of science, gifts of art;
  The sense of oneness with our kind;
The thirst to know and understand--
  A large and liberal discontent:
These are the goods in life's rich hand,
  The things that are more excellent.

In faultless rhythm the ocean rolls,
  A rapturous silence thrills the skies;
And on this earth are lovely souls,
  That softly look with aidful eyes.
Though dark, O God, Thy course and track,
  I think Thou must at least have meant
That nought which lives should wholly lack
  The things that are more excellent.



BEAUTY'S METEMPSYCHOSIS

  That beauty such as thine
    Can die indeed,
Were ordinance too wantonly malign:
No wit may reconcile so cold a creed
  With beauty such as thine.

  From wave and star and flower
    Some effluence rare
Was lent thee, a divine but transient dower:
Thou yield'st it back from eyes and lips and hair
  To wave and star and flower.

  Shouldst thou to-morrow die,
    Thou still shalt be
Found in the rose and met in all the sky:
And from the ocean's heart shalt sing to me,
  Shouldst thou to-morrow die.



ENGLAND MY MOTHER

I

England my mother,
Wardress of waters.
Builder of peoples,
  Maker of men,--

Hast thou yet leisure
Left for the muses?
Heed'st thou the songsmith
  Forging the rhyme?

Deafened with tumults,
How canst thou hearken?
Strident is faction,
  Demos is loud.

Lazarus, hungry,
Menaces Dives;
Labour the giant
  Chafes in his hold.

Yet do the songsmiths
Quit not their forges;
Still on life's anvil
  Forge they the rhyme.

Still the rapt faces
Glow from the furnace:
Breath of the smithy
  Scorches their brows.

Yea, and thou hear'st them?
So shall the hammers
Fashion not vainly
  Verses of gold.


II

Lo, with the ancient
Roots of man's nature,
Twines the eternal
  Passion of song.

Ever Love fans it,
Ever Life feeds it,
Time cannot age it;
  Death cannot slay.

Deep in the world-heart
Stand its foundations,
Tangled with all things,
  Twin-made with all.

Nay, what is Nature's
Self, but an endless
Strife toward music,
  Euphony, rhyme?

Trees in their blooming,
Tides in their flowing,
Stars in their circling,
  Tremble with song.

God on His throne is
Eldest of poets:
Unto His measures
  Moveth the Whole.


III

Therefore deride not
Speech of the muses,
England my mother,
  Maker of men.

Nations are mortal,
Fragile is greatness;
Fortune may fly thee,
  Song shall not fly.

Song the all-girdling,
Song cannot perish:
Men shall make music,
  Man shall give ear.

Not while the choric
Chant of creation
Floweth from all things,
  Poured without pause,

Cease we to echo
Faintly the descant
Whereto for ever
  Dances the world.


IV

So let the songsmith
Proffer his rhyme-gift,
England my mother,
  Maker of men.

Gray grows thy count'nance,
Full of the ages;
Time on thy forehead
  Sits like a dream:

Song is the potion
All things renewing,
Youth's one elixir,
  Fountain of morn.

Thou, at the world-loom
Weaving thy future,
Fitly may'st temper
  Toil with delight.

Deemest thou, labour
Only is earnest?
Grave is all beauty,
  Solemn is joy.

Song is no bauble--
Slight not the songsmith,
England my mother,
  Maker of men.



NIGHT

In the night, in the night,
When thou liest alone,
Ah, the sounds that are blown
  In the freaks of the breeze,
By the spirit that sends
The voice of far friends
  With the sigh of the seas
    In the night!

In the night, in the night,
When thou liest alone,
Ah, the ghosts that make moan
  From the days that are sped:
The old dreams, the old deeds,
The old wound that still bleeds,
  And the face of the dead
    In the night!

In the night, in the night,
When thou liest alone,
With the grass and the stone
  O'er thy chamber so deep,
Ah, the silence at last,
Life's dissonance past,
  And only pure sleep
    In the night!



THE FUGITIVE IDEAL

As some most pure and noble face,
  Seen in the thronged and hurrying street,
Sheds o'er the world a sudden grace,
    A flying odour sweet,
Then, passing, leaves the cheated sense
Baulked with a phantom excellence;

So, on our soul the visions rise
  Of that fair life we never led:
They flash a splendour past our eyes,
    We start, and they are fled:
They pass, and leave us with blank gaze,
Resigned to our ignoble days.



"THE FORESTERS"

(Lines written on the appearance of Lord Tennyson's drama.)

Clear as of old the great voice rings to-day,
While Sherwood's oak-leaves twine with Aldworth's bay:
The voice of him the master and the sire
Of one whole age and legion of the lyre,
Who sang his morning-song when Coleridge still
Uttered dark oracles from Highgate Hill,
And with new-launched argosies of rhyme
Gilds and makes brave this sombreing tide of time.
Far be the hour when lesser brows shall wear
The laurel glorious from that wintry hair--
When he, the sovereign of our lyric day,
In Charon's shallop must be rowed away,
And hear, scarce heeding, 'mid the plash of oar,
The _ave atque vale_ from the shore!

To him nor tender nor heroic muse
Did her divine confederacy refuse:
To all its moods the lyre of life he strung,
And notes of death fell deathless from his tongue.
Himself the Merlin of his magic strain,
He bade old glories break in gloom again;
And so exempted from oblivious doom,
Through him these days shall fadeless break in bloom.



SONG

Lightly we met in the morn,
  Lightly we parted at eve.
There was never a thought of the thorn
  The rose of a day might leave.

Fate's finger we did not perceive,
  So lightly we met in the morn!
So lightly we parted at eve
  We knew not that Love was born.

I rose on the morrow forlorn,
  To pine and remember and grieve.
Too lightly we met in the morn!
  Too lightly we parted at eve!



COLUMBUS

(12TH OCTOBER 1492)

From his adventurous prime
He dreamed the dream sublime:
  Over his wandering youth
    It hung, a beckoning star.
At last the vision fled,
And left him in its stead
  The scarce sublimer truth,
    The world he found afar.

The scattered isles that stand
Warding the mightier land
  Yielded their maidenhood
    To his imperious prow.
The mainland within call
Lay vast and virginal:
  In its blue porch he stood:
    No more did fate allow.

No more! but ah, how much,
To be the first to touch
  The veriest azure hem
    Of that majestic robe!
Lord of the lordly sea,
Earth's mightiest sailor he:
  Great Captain among them,
    The captors of the globe.

When shall the world forget
Thy glory and our debt,
  Indomitable soul,
    Immortal Genoese?
Not while the shrewd salt gale
Whines amid shroud and sail,
  Above the rhythmic roll
    And thunder of the seas.



THE PRINCE'S QUEST
AND OTHER POEMS



THE PRINCE'S QUEST

PART THE FIRST

  There was a time, it passeth me to say
How long ago, but sure 'twas many a day
Before the world had gotten her such store
Of foolish wisdom as she hath,--before
She fell to waxing gray with weight of years
And knowledge, bitter knowledge, bought with tears,--
When it did seem as if the feet of time
Moved to the music of a golden rhyme,
And never one false thread might woven be
Athwart that web of worldwide melody.
'Twas then there lived a certain queen and king,
Unvext of wars or other evil thing,
Within a spacious palace builded high,
Whence they might see their chiefest city lie
About them, and half hear from their tall towers
Its populous murmur through the daylight hours,
And see beyond its walls the pleasant plain.
One child they had, these blissful royal twain:
Of whom 'tis told--so more than fair was he--
There lurked at whiles a something shadowy
Deep down within the fairness of his face;
As 'twere a hint of some not-earthly grace,
Making the royal stripling rather seem
The very dreaming offspring of a dream
Than human child of human ancestry:
And something strange-fantastical was he,
I doubt not. Howsoever he upgrew,
And after certain years to manhood drew
Nigh, so that all about his father's court,
Seeing his graciousness of princely port,
Rejoiced thereat; and many maidens' eyes
Look'd pleased upon his beauty, and the sighs
Of many told I know not what sweet tales.

  So, like to some fair ship with sunlit sails,
Glided his youth amid a stormless sea,
Till once by night there came mysteriously
A fateful wind, and o'er an unknown deep
Bore him perforce. It chanced that while in sleep
He lay, there came to him a strange dim dream.
'Twas like as he did float adown a stream,
In a lone boat that had nor sail nor oar
Yet seemed as it would glide for evermore,
Deep in the bosom of a sultry land
Fair with all fairness. Upon either hand
Were hills green-browed and mist-engarlanded,
And all about their feet were woods bespread,
Hoarding the cool and leafy silentness
In many an unsunned hollow and hid recess.
Nought of unbeauteous might be there espied;
But in the heart of the deep woods and wide,
And in the heart of all, was Mystery--
A something more than outer eye might see,
A something more than ever ear might hear.
The very birds that came and sang anear
Did seem to syllable some faery tongue,
And, singing much, to hold yet more unsung.
And heard at whiles, with hollow wandering tone,
Far off, as by some aery huntsmen blown,
Faint-echoing horns, among the mountains wound,
Made all the live air tremulous with sound.

  So hour by hour (thus ran the Prince's dream)
Glided the boat along the broadening stream;
Till, being widowed of the sun her lord,
The purblind day went groping evenward:
Whereafter Sleep compelled to his mild yoke
The bubbling clear souls of the feathered folk,
Sealing the vital fountains of their song.
Howbeit the Prince went onward all night long
And never shade of languor came on him,
Nor any weariness his eyes made dim.
And so in season due he heard the breath
Of the brief winds that wake ere darkness' death
Sigh through the woods and all the valley wide:
The rushes by the water answering sighed:
Sighed all the river from its reedy throat.
And like a winged creature went the boat,
Over the errant water wandering free,
As some lone seabird over a lone sea.

  And Morn pale-haired with watery wide eyes
Look'd up. And starting with a swift surprise,
Sprang to his feet the Prince, and forward leant,
His gaze on something right before him bent
That like a towered and templed city showed,
Afar off, dim with very light, and glowed
As burnished seas at sundawn when the waves
Make amber lightnings all in dim-roof'd caves
That fling mock-thunder back. Long leagues away,
Down by the river's green right bank it lay,
Set like a jewel in the golden morn:
But ever as the Prince was onward borne,
Nearer and nearer danced the dizzy fires
Of domes innumerable and sun-tipt spires
And many a sky-acquainted pinnacle,
Splendid beyond what mortal tongue may tell;
And ere the middle heat of day was spent,
He saw, by nearness thrice-magnificent,
Hardly a furlong's space before him lie
The City, sloping to the stream thereby.

  And therewithal the boat of its own will
Close to the shore began to glide, until,
All of a sudden passing nigh to where
The glistering white feet of a marble stair
Ran to the rippled brink, the Prince outsprang
Upon the gleamy steps, and wellnigh sang
For joy, to be once more upon his feet,
Amid the green grass and the flowers sweet.
So on he paced along the river-marge,
And saw full many a fair and stately barge,
Adorned with strange device and imagery,
At anchor in the quiet waters lie.
And presently he came unto a gate
Of massy gold, that shone with splendid state
Of mystic hieroglyphs, and storied frieze
All overwrought with carven phantasies.
And in the shadow of the golden gate,
One in the habit of a porter sate,
And on the Prince with wondering eye looked he,
And greeted him with reverent courtesy,
Saying, "Fair sir, thou art of mortal race,
The first hath ever journeyed to this place,--
For well I know thou art a stranger here,
As by the garb thou wearest doth appear;
And if thy raiment do belie thee not,
Thou should'st be some king's son. And well I wot,
If that be true was prophesied of yore,
A wondrous fortune is for thee in store;
For though I be not read in Doomful Writ,
Oft have I heard the wise expounding it,
And, of a truth, the fatal rolls declare
_That the first mortal who shall hither fare
Shall surely have our Maiden-Queen to wife,
And while the world lives shall they twain have life. _"

  Hereat, be sure, the wonder-stricken youth,
Holden in doubt if this were lies or truth,
Was tongue-tied with amaze, and sore perplext,
Unknowing what strange thing might chance him next,
And ere he found fit words to make reply,
The porter bade a youth who stood hard by
Conduct the princely stranger, as was meet,
Through the great golden gate into the street,
And thence o'er all the city, wheresoe'er
Was aught to show of wonderful or fair.

  With that the Prince, beside his willing guide,
Went straightway through the gate, and stood inside
The wall, that, builded of a rare white stone,
Clasp'd all the city like a silver zone.
And thence down many a shining street they passed,
Each one appearing goodlier than the last,
Cool with the presence of innumerous trees
And fountains playing before palaces.
And whichsoever way the Prince might look,
Another marvel, and another, took
His wildered eyes with very wonderment.
And holding talk together as they went,
The Prince besought his guide to tell him why
Of all the many folk that passed them by
There was not one that had the looks of eld,
Or yet of life's mid-years; for they beheld
Only young men and maidens everywhere,
Nor ever saw they one that was not fair.
Whereat the stripling: "Master, thou hast seen,
Belike, the river that doth flow between
Flowers and grasses at the city's feet?"
And when the Prince had rendered answer meet,
"Then," said the other, "know that whosoe'er
Drinks of the water thou beheldest there
(It matters not how many are his years)
Thenceforward from that moment he appears
Like as he was in youthly days, before
His passed summers told beyond a score:
And so the people of this land possess
Unto all time their youth and comeliness."

  Scarce had his mouth made answer when there rose
Somewhat of tumult, ruffling the repose
Of the wide splendid street; and lifting up
His eyes, the Prince beheld a glittering troop
Of horsemen, each upon a beauteous steed,
Toward them coming at a gentle speed.
And as the cavalcade came on apace,
A sudden pleasure lit the stripling's face
Who bore him company and was his guide;
And "Lo, thou shalt behold our queen," he cried,--
"Even the fairest of the many fair;
With whom was never maiden might compare
For very loveliness!" While yet he spake,
On all the air a silver sound 'gan break
Of jubilant and many-tongued acclaim,
And in a shining car the bright queen came,
And looking forth upon the multitude
Her eyes beheld the stranger where he stood,
And round about him was the loyal stir:
And all his soul went out in love to her.

  But even while her gaze met his, behold,
The city and its marvels manifold
Seemed suddenly removed far off, and placed
Somewhere in Twilight; and withal a waste
Of sudden waters lay like time between;
And over all that space he heard the queen
Calling unto him from her chariot;
And then came darkness. And the Dream was not.


PART THE SECOND

  A fearful and a lovely thing is Sleep,
And mighty store of secrets hath in keep;
And those there were of old who well could guess
What meant his fearfulness and loveliness,
And all his many shapes of life and death,
And all the secret things he uttereth.
But Wisdom lacketh sons like those that were,
And Sleep hath never an interpreter:
So there be none that know to read aright
The riddles he propoundeth every night.

  And verily, of all the wondrous things
By potence wrought of mortal visionings
In that dark house whereof Sleep hath the keys--
Of suchlike miracles and mysteries
Not least, meseems, is this among them all:
That one in dream enamoured should fall,
And ever afterward, in waking thought,
Worship the phantom which the dream hath brought.
Howbeit such things have been, and in such wise
Did that king's son behold, with mortal eyes,
A more than mortal loveliness, and thus
Was stricken through with love miraculous.

  For evermore thereafter he did seem
To see that royal maiden of his dream
Unto her palace riding sovranly;
And much he marvelled where that land might be
That basking lay beneath her beauty's beams,
Well knowing in his heart that suchlike dreams
Come not in idleness but evermore
Are Fate's veiled heralds that do fly before
Their mighty master as he journeyeth,
And sing strange songs of life and love and death.
And so he did scarce aught but dream all day
Of that far land revealed of sleep, that lay
He knew not where; and musing more and more
On her the mistress of that unknown shore,
There fell a sadness on him, thus to be
Vext with desire of her he might not see
Yet could not choose but long for; till erewhile
Nor man nor woman might behold the smile
Make sudden morning of his countenance,
But likest one he seemed half-sunk, in trance,
That wanders groping in a shadowy land,
Hearing strange things that none can understand.
Now after many days and nights had passed,
The queen, his mother well-beloved, at last,
Being sad at heart because his heart was sad,
Would e'en be told what hidden cause he had
To be cast down in so mysterious wise:
And he, beholding by her tearful eyes
How of his grief she was compassionate,
No more a secret made thereof, but straight
Discovered to her all about his dream--
The mystic happy marvel of the stream.
A fountain running Youth to all the land;
Flowing with deep dim woods on either hand
Where through the boughs did birds of strange song flit:
And all beside the bloomy banks of it
The city with its towers and domes far-seen.
And then he told her how that city's queen
Did pass before him like a breathing flower,
That he had loved her image from that hour.
"And sure am I," upspake the Prince at last,
"That somewhere in this world so wide and vast
Lieth the land mine eyes have inly seen;--
Perhaps in very truth my spirit hath been
Translated thither, and in very truth
Hath seen the brightness of that city of youth.
Who knows?--for I have heard a wise man say
How that in sleep the souls of mortals may,
At certain seasons which the stars decree,
From bondage of the body be set free
To visit farthest countries, and be borne
Back to their fleshly houses ere the morn."

  At this the good queen, greatly marvelling,
Made haste to tell the story to the king;
Who hearing laughed her tale to scorn. But when
Weeks followed one another, and all men
About his person had begun to say
"What ails our Prince? He groweth day by day
Less like the Prince we knew ... wan cheeks, and eyes
Hollow for lack of sleep, and secret sighs....
Some hidden grief the youth must surely have,"--
Then like his queen the king himself wox grave;
And thus it chanced one summer eventide,
They sitting in an arbour side by side,
All unawares the Pince passed by that way,
And as he passed, unmark'd of either--they
Nought heeding but their own discourse--could hear
Amidst thereof his own name uttered clear,
And straight was 'ware it was the queen who spake,
And spake of him; whereat the king 'gan make
Answer in this wise, somewhat angerly:
"The youth is crazed, and but one remedy
Know I, to cure such madness--he shall wed
Some princess; ere another day be sped,
Myself will bid this dreamer go prepare
To take whom I shall choose to wife; some fair
And highborn maiden, worthy to be queen
Hereafter."--So the Prince, albeit unseen,
Heard, and his soul rebelled against the thing
His sire had willed; and slowly wandering
About the darkling pleasance--all amid
A maze of intertangled walks, or hid
In cedarn glooms, or where mysterious bowers
Were heavy with the breath of drowsed flowers--
Something, he knew not what, within his heart
Rose like a faint-heard voice and said "Depart
From hence and follow where thy dream shall lead."
And fain would he have followed it indeed,
But wist not whither it would have him go.

  Howbeit, while yet he wandered to and fro,
Among his thoughts a chance remembrance leapt
All sudden--like a seed, that long hath slept
In earth, upspringing as a flower at last,
When he that sowed forgetteth where 'twas cast;
A chance remembrance of the tales men told
Concerning one whose wisdom manifold
Made all the world to wonder and revere--
A mighty mage and learn'd astrologer
Who dwelt in honour at a great king's court
In a far country, whither did resort
Pilgrims innumerable from many lands,
Who crossed the wide seas and the desert sands
To learn of him the occult significance
Of some perplexing omen, or perchance
To hear forewhisperings of their destiny
And know what things in aftertime should be.
"Now surely," thought the Prince, "this subtile seer,
To whom the darkest things belike are clear,
Could read the riddle of my dream and tell
Where lieth that strange land delectable
Wherein mine empress hath her dwelling-place.
So might I look at last upon her face,
And make an end of all these weary sighs,
And melt into the shadow of her eyes!"
Thus musing, for a little space he stood
As holden to the spot; and evil, good,
Life, death, and earth beneath and heaven above,
Shrank up to less than shadows,--only Love,
With harpings of an hundred harps unseen,
Filled all the emptiness where these had been.

  But soon, like one that hath a sudden thought,
He lifted up his eyes, and turning sought
The halls once more where he was bred, and passed
Through court and corridor, and reached at last
His chamber, in a world of glimmer and gloom.
Here, while the moonrays filled the wide rich room,
The Prince in haste put off his courtly dress
For raiment of a lesser sumptuousness
(A sober habit such as might disguise
His royal rank in any stranger's eyes)
And taking in his hand three gems that made
Three several splendours in the moonlight, laid
These in his bosom, where no eye might see
The triple radiance; then all noiselessly
Down the wide stair from creaking floor to floor
Passed, and went out from the great palace-door.

  Crossing the spacious breadth of garden ground,
Wherein his footfalls were the only sound
Save the wind's wooing of the tremulous trees,
Forth of that region of imperial ease
He fared, amid the doubtful shadows dim,
No eye in all the place beholding him;
No eye, save only of the warders, who
Opened the gates that he might pass therethrough.

  And now to the safe-keeping of the night
Intrusted he the knowledge of his flight;
And quitting all the purlieus of the court,
Out from the city by a secret port
Went, and along the moonlit highway sped.
And himself spake unto himself and said
(Heard only of the silence in his heart)
"Tarry thou here no longer, but depart
Unto the land of the Great Mage; and seek
The Mage; and whatsoever he shall speak,
Give ear to that he saith, and reverent heed;
And wheresoever he may bid thee speed,
Thitherward thou shalt set thy face and go.
For surely one of so great lore must know
Where lies the land thou sawest in thy dream:
Nay, if he know not that,--why, then I deem
The wisdom of exceeding little worth
That reads the heavens but cannot read the earth."


PART THE THIRD

  So without rest or tarriance all that night,
Until the world was blear with coming light,
Forth fared the princely fugitive, nor stayed
His wearied feet till morn returning made
Some village all a-hum with wakeful stir;
And from that place the royal wayfarer
Went ever faster on and yet more fast,
Till, ere the noontide sultriness was past,
Upon his ear the burden of the seas
Came dreamlike, heard upon a cool fresh breeze
That tempered gratefully a fervent sky.
And many an hour ere sundown he drew nigh
A fair-built seaport, warder of the land
And watcher of the wave, with odours fanned
Of green fields and of blue from either side;--
A pleasant place, wherein he might abide,
Unknown of man or woman, till such time
As any ship should sail to that far clime
Where lived the famous great astrologer.

  Entered within its gates, a wanderer
Besoiled with dust and no-wise richly drest,
Yet therewithal a prince and princeliest
Of princes, with the press of motley folk
He mixed unheeded and unknown, nor spoke
To any, no man speaking unto him,
But, being wearied sore in every limb,
Sought out a goodly hostel where he might
Rest him and eat and tarry for the night:
And having eaten he arose and passed
Down to the wharves where many a sail and mast
Showed fiery-dark against the setting sun:
There, holding talk with whom he chanced upon,
In that same hour by great good hap he found
The master of a vessel outward-bound
Upon the morrow for that selfsame port
Whither he sought to go (where dwelt at court
The mage deep-read in starry charact'ry).
An honest man and pleasant-tongued was he,
This worthy master-mariner; and since
He had no scorn of well-got gain, the Prince
Agreed to pay him certain sums in gold,
And go aboard his vessel, ere were told
Two hours of sunlight on the coming day;
And thus agreed they wended each his way,
For the dusk hour was nigh, and all the West
Lay emptied of its sun. But as he pressed
Up the long seaward-sloping street that ran
Through half the town, the Prince sought out a man
Who dealt in pearls and diamonds and all
Manner of stones which men do precious call;
To whom the least of his three gems he sold
For a great price, and laden with the gold
Forthwith returned unto his hostelry
And dreamed all night of seaports and the sea.

  Early the morrow-morn, a fair soft gale
Blowing from overland, the ship set sail
At turning of the tide; and from her deck
The Prince gazed till the town was but a speck,
And all the shore became a memory:
And still he gazed, though more he might not see
Than the wide waters and the great wide sky.
And many a long unchangeful day went by
Ere land was sighted, but at length uprose
A doubtful dusky something, toward the close
Of the last hour before one sultry noon:
Most like an isle of cloud it seemed, but soon
The sailors knew it for the wished strand,
And ere the evenfall they reached the land,
And that same night the royal wanderer lay
In a strange city, amid strange folk, till Day
Rose from the dim sea's lap and with his wings
Fanned into wakefulness all breathing things.

  Then he uprose, but going forth that morn
A sadness came upon him, and forlorn
He felt within himself, and nowise light
Of heart: for all his lonely travel might
Prove void and fruitless and of no avail,
(Thus pondered he) and should it wholly fail,
What then were left him for to do? Return
To his own country, that his kin might learn
To know him duped and fooled of fantasies,
Blown hither and thither by an idle breeze
From Dreamland? Or in lieu, perchance, of this,
Wander unresting, reft of hope and bliss,
A mariner on a sea that hath no coast,
Seeking a shade, himself a shade, and lost
In shadows, as a wave is lost i' the sea.

  Thus in a heart not lightsome pondered he,
And roamed from unfamiliar street to street,
Much marvelling that all he chanced to meet
Showed faces troubled as his own: for some
Did weep outright, and over all a gloom
Hung, as a cloud that blotteth out the sun.
Wherefore the Prince addressed him unto one
Of sadder visage even than the rest,
Who, ever as he walked, or beat his breast
Or groaned aloud or with his fingers rent
His robe, and, being besought to say what meant
This look of rue on all men's faces, cried
In loud amazement, "What, can any abide
Within this city, having ears to hear,
Yet know not how this morn the mighty seer
Hath died and left the land all desolate?
For now, when sudden ills befall the state,
There will be none to warn or prophesy
As he, but when calamities are nigh
No man will know till they be come and we
Be all undone together, woe is me!"

  Thus ended he his outcry and again
Passed on his way and mixed with other men
Scarce joyfuller than he, if less they spake.
Meanwhile upon the Prince's heart there brake
Grief like a bitter wind, beneath whose breath
Hope paled and sickened well-nigh unto death:
For lo, those dumb and formless fears that came
Within his heart that morn, and, like a flame
That flickers long and dimly ere it die,
Tarried and would not pass, but fitfully
Flickered and flared and paled and flared again,--
Lo, those mysterious messengers of pain,
Dumb formless fears, were they not verified?
And lo, that voyage o'er the waters wide,
Was it not vain and a most empty thing?
And what might now the years avail to bring,
But hopes that barren live and barren die?

  Thus did his heart with many an inward sigh
Ask of itself, though answer there was none
To be returned: and so the day, begun
Tristfully, trailed an ever wearier wing;
Till toward night another questioning
Like a strange voice from far beset his soul:
And as a low wind wails for very dole
About a tarn whereof the listless wave
Maketh no answer to its plaining, save
A sound that seems the phantom of its own,
So that low voice making unbidden moan
No answer got, saving the many sighs
Its echoes; and in this reproachful wise,
Heaping new pain on him disconsolate,
The low voice spake and spake, importunate:
_O Prince that wast and wanderer that art,
Say doth love live within thy hidden heart
(Love born of dream but nurtured wakingly)
Ev'n as that Once when thy soul's eyes did see
Love's visible self, and worshipt? Or hast thou
Fall'n from thy faith in Her and Love ere now,
And is thy passion as a robe outworn?
Nay, love forbid! Yet wherefore art thou lorn
Of hope and peace if Love be still thine own?
For, were the wondrous vision thou hast known
Indeed Love's voice and Fate's (which are the same)
Then, even as surely as the vision came,
So surely shall i