The Poetical Works of Sydney Dobell :: :: University of Virginia Library

Looking upon the lives of other men,
I see them move in apt and duteous signs,
That look like cause and consequent, through type
And antitype, day after equal day,

Year after answering year, from sire to son.
But life hath been to me a strange wild dream,
Wherein the prodigies that haunt and home
Within a human bosom have been brought
Marvel by marvel, as to Adam once
The monsters of the Earth, that I might name them,
And know them, and be friends with them.

A youth
In years, I hold the weft and woof of age,
And wheresoever Time may cut the web,
Can find no novel texture. One sole thread
Thou owest me, Lachesis! but I will trust thee,
Oh thou unfailing debtor! Upon Earth
All sights I have beheld but one; all sorrows
Either in type or kind endured but one.
Death, careful of my learning, hath withstayed
His final presence, lest his shade allay
My wounds, and, as before the King of Beasts,
The lesser horrors of the wilderness
Flee at his great approach. I have not seen him,
In cause or in effect. But he will come!
For till he come my perfect manhood lacks,
And this that I was born to do is done
By nothing less than man.

That I should do it,
And be the King of men, and on the inform
And perishable substance of the Time
Beget a better world, I have believed

Up thro' my mystic years, since in that hour
Of young and unforgotten exstacy
I put my question to the universe,
And overhead the beech-trees murmured ‘Yes.’
Therefore I grew up calm like a young god,
Having in well-assured serenity
No haste to reach and no surprise to wear
The inevitable stature; nor thought strange
To feel me not as others, to pursue
Amid the crowd a solitary way,
And take my own in the o'er-peopled world,
And find it no man's else. When at the first,
Because I was no higher than mankind,
All men went past, and no man looked on me,
I felt no humbler. When this ample frame
Expanded into majesty, and they
Who saw fell back admiring, I beheld
Their change, not mine; for the unconscious child,
Tho' for his childhead he be special child,
Is universal man, and in his thoughts
Doth glass the future. The thin sapling oak,
Hid in the annual herbage of the field,
Hath oaken members, and can boast no more
When they defy the storms of heaven, and roost
The weary-winged Ages. One alone,
Early and late,—faithful as she who knows
And keeps the secret of the foundling heir—
Did bear me witness. Nature from my birth

Confessed me, as who in a multitude
Confesseth her beloved and makes no sign;
Or as one all unzoned in her deep haunts,
If her true-love come on her unaware,
Hastes not to hide her breast, nor is afraid;
Or as a mother 'mid her sons displays
The arms their glorious father wore, and, kind,
In silence with discerning love commits
Some lesser danger to each younger hand,
But to the conscious eldest of the house
The naked sword; or as a sage amid
His pupils in the peopled portico,
Where all stand equal, gives no precedence,
But by intercalated look and word
Of equal seeming, wise but to the wise,
Denotes the favoured scholar from the crowd;
Or as the keeper of the palace gate
Denies the gorgeous stranger and his pomp
Of gold, but at a glance, although he come
In fashion as a commoner, unstarred,
Lets the prince pass.

I think my hour is nigh.
I am almost equipped; and earth and air
Are full of signs. The uncommanded host
Of living nations, swaying to and fro
Like waves of a great sea that in mid-shock
Confound each other, white with foam and fear,
Roar for a leader. All this last strange year

The clouds seemed higher, and each bird of wing
Doubled his usual flight, and the blue arch
Opened above, expansive; even as tho'
The labouring world drew in a deeper breath,
And raised her swelling bosom nearer Heaven
With expectation. My prophetic heart
Confirmed the omen, and, as ere the crash
Of earthquake the dull sun stands clothed upon
With sackcloth, and as to his golden head
Shorn, I am troubled with the fate not yet
Accomplished; an unreasoning melancholy
Directs me; I have lingered by the Past
As by a death-bed, with unwonted love
And such forgiveness as we bring to those
Who can offend no more. The very stones
Of old memorial have been dear to me,
Sitting long days on ancient stiles worm-worn,
And gazing thro' green trees o'er grassy graves
Upon the living village and the dead,
The early and the latter tryst that all
Have kept so long and well; or to the pile
Reared by those English whose ancestral feet
Trod the same path their children's children keep
Still hallowed, where the beauty of the vale,
The blushing girl of yonder bridal train,
Walks in her love and joy, and passing slow
Salutes unconscious with her wedding skirt
The gable end, no greyer than of yore,

When by the same dark yew for ever old,
The same grey Time did hold his scythe above
Her grandame's head, whose silk of long ago
So rustled on the wall when she went by
A happy bride, and heard perchance that day
Tales from wan lips of the far morning when
Her mother's mother passed as fair as she.
Or on the leafy and live-long repose
Of country labour, and the unhasted life
That plods with equal step the wonted way,
A-field at morn and homeward slow at eve,
And slow with eve and morn through drowsy day
Doth toil and feed and sleep and feed and toil.
Or on lone homesteads and the untrespassed rest
Of immemorial pastures, and the tread
Of dreamful herds in verdant peace unvexed
And taskless thro' the round of sauntering day,
And all the dewy leisure of the meads.
As though the coming din of war should scare
The tenants of the field, and wildered fear
Distract the rural motion, and repeat
In bleating folds and trampled harvests loud
With dread, the desperate and delirious pulse
Of man; and knowing I did look my last
Of pastoral quiet, and the passive gait
Of ease that is the step of all their world,
Their world at pace with solemn things above,
With tardy-footed twilight, and all powers

Eterne that tread time with celestial wont
Immortal, with the seasons of the earth,
And with the calm procession of the stars.
'Tis well that on the landmark of to-day
I lean awhile, and with clear eyes look back
Upon the way I came, ere once again
I set forth on my journey to the goal
Which I have sworn to win.

That bard who lies
Like the old knight i' the picture, at the root
Of our hereditary tree, (first sire
Of the long line where Shakspeare is not last)
And by his posture measures height with none,
Beheld a ‘House of Fame.’ For me, I seek
A sterner architecture and a dome
More like the heavens, upon that hill which he
Who climbs is strongest among living men,
The seat of templed Power. Not Fame but Power.
Or Fame but as the noise of Power, a voice
That in the face is wind, but in the ear
Truth, Knowledge, Wisdom, Question, Speculation,
Hope, Fear, Love, Hate, Belief, Doubt, Faith, Despair,
Every strong gust that shifts the sails of man,
And so far worth the utterance; Fame the paid
Muezzin on the minaret of Power,
Calling the world to worship; Fame the pied
And gilded following of the royal house,
Whose function is without, to spread the awe

Of Power among the common herd, and hand
External homage to the chaste convoy
Of them who serve in presence; or at best,
An argent herald running on before,
Nor daring once to turn his menial mouth
To tell me what I know, and whose great trump
Tho' it blow Regnarok and wake the graves,
Is but a sounding brass. Not Fame but Power.
Power like a god's and wielded as a god!
I would have been the wind, and unbeheld
Rase the tall roaring forest, not the flash
That cannot move unseen; the influence
Unnamed that finds a city and leaves a tomb,
But not the conflagration to flame wide
A rabble holiday, round which the Town
Gapes, and whereof all men have leave to speak,
Cried in the civic streets and parodied
In pictures; and for which, at last put out,
No hand so base but had availed to do
The final deed, nor urchin but hath spat
Enough extinction. Whatsoe'er attains
In solitude, and out of sight doth sling
The stone of practice where no vulgar tongue
May cry unskilled applause on the wide throw
Of strong attempt, nor ever in men's eyes
Hath eminence so young that the kind hand
Of popular approval dare be laid
Upon its head, I love. The Victory

Which hath no mortal opposite to try
Conclusions and assess my over-match,
I covet. I could wish that the good Powers,
Which watched over my making had denied
The gifts that quell mankind. I would have gone
Into the wilderness, and in some cell
Of task severe and exercise divine,
Grown god-like till perforce the vigilant gods
Seeing me there made me their deputy
As being next to them. I would have sat
And blessed creation, seeing in calm joy
The thankless welfare, and content to know,
That from their far thrones, Potentates of Heaven,
When a new glory flushed this planet earth
Did look to me on mine. Whatever rules
By its mere nature and that native place
Holding of nought below it, from below
Receives nor of accession or decess,
Nay by its sovereign essence, is beyond
The praise and subject homage of the ruled,
I would have been; up from the viewless air
That feeds the unconscious world, or this rare life
Full in these throbbing veins that moves unfelt
The beating heart I feel, to the supreme
And central force that sways the universe
Unknown, and, being absolute, well pleased
Resigns the weight of glory, and permits
To shining suns and stars the gorgeous crown,

And golden signs of empire.

I do think
My throne is set. If this next year might bring
My one delayed experience! And, that past,
End, as with harvest, in some genial close
Of happier fortunes! For the fruit of sorrow,
Tho' it do grow in the shade ere it be ripe,
Asks light and heat, and I am now as when
Oblivious Nature holds the time o' year,
Brimfull in a dead level of dull days,
Till, reaching forth a hand, the sudden sun
Touches the cup, and spills upon the earth
The mantling season.

(Taking up a Manuscript.)

Oh thou first, last, work!
Thou tardy-growing oak that art to be
My club of war, my staff, my sceptre! Thou
Hast well nigh gained thine height. My early planned,
Long meditate, and slowly-written epic!
Turning thy leaves, dear labour of my life,
Almost I seem to turn my life in thee.
Thy many books my many votive years,
And thy full pages numbered with my days.
I could look back on all that I have built
As on some Memphian monument wherein
The kings do lie in glory, every one
Each in his house, and forward to thy blank
Fair future, as one gazes into depths
Of necromantic crystal, and beholds

The heavens come down.

I think I have struck off
One from the weary score of human tasks.
Having so told my story in a tongue
So common to the ages, that no man
In after times shall tell it, but the fact
To which I have given voice shall be laid by,
And this my sterling with mine image on,
Present the ponderous bulk; and I shall leave
This history my autograph, wherein
The hand that writes is part of what is writ,
And I, like the steeped roses of the east,
Become the necessary element
Of that which doth preserve me.

Howsoe'er
This be, and whether I attain or fail
To add another to those lights of heaven
That rule our day and night,—to set a sun
Of joy above us, or some saddest moon
Whose pale reflected rays, from their first aim
And primal course bent back and contravert
Like some Apollo's golden shaft returned
From an opposing bow, shall still bespeak
The splendour of their quiver—I do feel
I have deserved to win. Thought, Labour, Patience,
And a strong Will, that being set to boil
The broth of Hecate would shred his flesh
Into the cauldron, and stir deep with arms

Flayed to the seething bone ere there default
One tittle from the spell—these should not strive
In vain! No. I have lived what I have sung,
And it shall live. The flashes of the fire
Are fire, that which was soul is spirit still,
And shall not die. I sat above my work
As God above the new unpeopled world
Sat and foresaw our days, and sun and cloud
Of good and ill passed o'er the countenance
Ineffable, and filled the plains below;
Smiled all a floral kingdom thro' the world,
Or frowned a race of lions.

With the year
That ended yesterday, I close the book
Of mortal contest, and begin to sing
Record of the aërial tournaments
Whereof we are but shadows, on the fields
Where spirit meets with spirit, and god with god.
And first thee, Death,——

Enter Servant, with post-bag.

Letters!

(Opens and reads.)

Balder
(after a long pause).

Oh men, oh men,
What are ye that I yearn to you, and ye
To me, but that no grasp of mortal love
Against the strong enribbed heart can break
The mystic band that limits each from each,
Nor sternest edifice of separate life
Can wholly shut ye out? If nought can make

Us one, why can we not be twain in peace?
Why do you touch me, why do your kind eyes,
Unasked, look into mine? Why does your breath
Fall warm upon me, and infect my veins
With strange commotion? Is it to be borne,
That ye will neither enter into me,
Nor leave me? that men look upon my face,
And take me for another; that I know
Your wants before you tell them, feel the pains
You feel; give language to your secret bliss
Better than you who know it? That ye cure
My bodily ailments with the selfsame drug
That heals the fool; that he who should cut off
This right hand with nice science, that foreknows
Each sequent vein and muscle, learned his skill
Upon a felon? That my last death-sob
Will be much like what any hangman hears,
And that the very meanest lips alive
Do speak some word of mine?

Thou happy God,
That hast no likeness, wherefore hast Thou made
Me thus? Have I not gone into unknown
Unentered lands, and heard in alien tongue
Strange man unto strange man unload his heart,
And started in my soul, and said, ‘Eh ghost!
Art thou I?’

Am I one and every one,
Either and all? The innumerable race,

My Past; these myriad-faced men my hours?
What! have I filled the earth, and knew it not?
Why not? How other? Am I not immortal?
And if immortal now, immortal then;
And if immortal then, existent now;
But where? Thou living moving neighbour, Man,
Art thou my former self—me and not me?
Did I begin, and shall I end? Was I
The first, and shall I one day, as the last,
Stand in the front of the long file of man,
And looking back, behold it winding out,
Far thro' the unsearched void, and measuring time
Upon eternity, and know myself
Sufficient, and, that like a comet, I
Passed thro' my heaven, and fill'd it?

[Through the door are heard the rocking of a cradle, and the voice of Amy.]
Amy
(singing)
The cuckoo-lamb is merry on the lea,
The daisied lea; I would I were the lamb!
While that the lark will pipe, the lamb will dance,
And when the lark is mute he danceth still;
Up springs the lark, and pipes again for joy!
He, more by birth, than we by toil and skill,
Is happy with no labour but to live;
He leapeth early, and he leapeth late;
He leapeth in the sunshine and the rain,
Nor fears the hour that will not find him blest,
And milky plenty sauntering by his side.

Also the lamb that doth not toil nor spin,
Lies where he will, and where he lieth sleeps.
Sleeps on the hill-top like a cloud o' the hill,
Sleeps where the trembling Lily of the Vale,
Albeit she is so spotless, sleepeth not,
But like a naked fairy fears all night
The wind that for her beauty cannot sleep.
Sleeps on the nettle or the violet:
Or where the sun doth warm his trance with light,
Or where the runnel murmureth cool dreams,
Or where the eglantine not yet in bloom,
Like a sweet girl full of her sweeter thought,
Reveals unheard the sweetness still to be.
Or where the darnel nods, and, as they tell
Of beauty nursed upon a savage dug,
Sucks grace from the harsh bosom of the waste.
Sleeps in the meadow buttercups at noon,
—A babe a-slumber in a golden crib—
Or like a daisy by the way-side white,
And like a daisy quieteth the way.
The lamb, the lamb, I would I were the lamb!

Balder
(musing).
Thou most pure
And guileless voice. I never breathed thee! No,
Thou meek misfortune, thou art not my past.
My Amy, my own Amy, whom of old
I found as a wild sailor of the sea
Comes on some happy isle of Love and Peace,
Some isle where joys that in all other climes,

Sweet flying thro' the night of his dark way,
A moment rest upon his sail, pass on,
And are beheld no more, in equal haunts
And bright assured communion ever dwell,
Day without night, and native, brood and sing!
Thou who thro' the stern ordeal of this life
Didst cling beside me, while I showed my power,
And turned the dust and ashes where I stood,
To gold and ruby, so that the great throng
Cried out for envy, and with murderous shout
Demanded the pure jewel I had not,
And when I trembled, knowing that mine art
Was ended, and the clamorous people saw,
Unseen didst slide thy wealth into my hand
And save me, so that I, serene, unclosed
My palm before the Judge, and lo! a pearl;
My first Love and my last, so far so near,
So strong, so weak, so comprehensible
In these encircling arms, so undescribed
In any thought that shapes thee; so divine,
So softly human that to either stretch,
Extreme and farthest tether of desire
It finds thee still; my ministering saint,
Attendant sprite, enshrined Egeria!
My ornament, my crown, my Indian gem
And incommunicable amulet
Upon my breast, not me but warm with me!
(pauses.)
You heavens! how far a little breath may blow

The unstable bubble of inflated thought!
O voice, O little voice, what power of thine
Disbands my hosts, which, as a crowd of shades
That scatter at a word, in sudden rout
Like the four winds unloosed have sprung apart
And vanished into distance, until I,
Whose royal and innumerable train
Out-trooped the legioned gods, am left alone
As one uncounted? How those charmèd walls,
And airy castles, that we rear to hold
The powers that plague us, and do well contain
Imprisoned fiends, are pervious to the touch
Of any human hand! That we should build them,
And a mere child should put his vital finger
Thro' the main bulwark! That the head should write,
And, with a gush of living blood, the heart
Should blot it! As one proves there is no God
And falls upon his knees. Right sapient sage!
Supreme intelligence! Sole substantive!
Lord of the empty dark! True Prince of Nil
And Nihilo! a royal argument;
But ere thou sign triumphant demonstration
Be blest and let a benefit refute thee!
My little Amy!

[Exit.