University of Virginia Library

THE LONGER ALLEGIANCE

THE TORRENT

And here thy footsteps stopped? This writhing swell,
This surging, mad, voluminous, white stream,
Burst starving from the hills, knows what befell
That instant in the clear midsummer beam?
To me in the grey, azure iris-bed
Of the old garden, I was left to tend,
And tended, came the word that thou wert dead...
Is it on these round eddies I must spend
My passionate conjecture? Thou art gone;
And I am brought to these orchestral shores,
This clanging music, where I dare not moan,
Dare not lament! Fountain from fountain pours—
Yea, they have borne thee, yea, they bear thee on
To the smooth-rushing waters of the Rhone.

POSSESSION

Thou hast no grave. What is it that bereaves,
That has bereft us of thee? Thou art gone!
The forest with its infinite soft leaves
May have received thee, or thou wandered'st on,
The tender, wild, exhilarating flowers
Crowning thy broken pathway; or the white
Glare of the torrent smote thee; or the powers
Of the great sculptured country, from their height
Prompted thee upward. Thou hast made no plea
For rest or for possession; and thy hold
Is on the land forever: thine the gold
Brimming the crystal crests, the gold that fills
The vales, the valley's fountain purity,
And thine the inmost meadows of the hills.

FALLING LEAVES

To hush within my heart the beating cry
Up toward thy hills, I cross an English street,
On to a garden where great lindens meet:
The leaves are falling—ah, how free to die!
The leaves are falling, life is passing by,
The leaves are falling slowly at my feet,
And soon with the dead summer, soon—how sweet!—
They will be garnered safe from every eye.
Their honey-mingling life among the trees
Is as it had not been; by twos and threes
Wide to the dimming earth they fall, they fall,
Yet, as I watch them dropping, something stills,
Heart of my heart, that over-bitter call,
As for one lost, to thee among thy hills.

THE FOREST

He lay asleep, and the long season wore:
The forest shadows marked him limb by limb
As on a dial: when the light grew dim
A steady darkness on the spiny floor
He lay asleep. The Alpine roses bore
Their latest blooms and withered at the rim:
The harvest moon came down and covered him,
And passed, and it was stiller than before.
Then fell the autumn, little falling there
Save some quick-dropping fir-cone on the mould,
Save with the ebbing leaves his own white hair;
And the great stars grew wintry: in the cold
Of a wide-spreading dusk, so woodmen say,
As one asleep on his right arm he lay.

BURIAL

They found thee—Nature burying her dead,
Covering thee o'er with her dead summer dross:
Shrunk spikes of blossom lightly did she toss,
And the brown needles of the fir-tree spread
Thick as a cloak about thee, on thy bed
Of withering leaves, dropt earth, long mountain moss,
With little branches bowed and laid across,
And lapping over. Uninhabited
Was the wild wood, savage with crag and fir,
And the wild goats leapt 'mid the crags, so deep
In winter was the silence: but we found
Nature alone that waited on thy sleep,
Suffering no other eye on that strewn ground,
None nearer than the stars to watch with her.

TURNING HOMEWARD

We leave thy mountain vale, we, last of those
Most loath to turn away: we leave thee, but
For hoof-print up their steeps and icy rut,
To thy inviolate hills, the winter snows
Suspended on the sky and soon, one knows,
To cover up thy grave. Each signal hut
As we descend and wind about is shut;
All closes as we saw thy coffin close:
And we are turning homeward, ah, how drear!
What is there now of memory that is warm,
Of life that is not memory? At our feet,
By the shrunk torrent, folded from the storm,
Two lusty lambs, pressing their mother's teat,
Drink and are glad: we feel another year.

EROS

O Eros of the mountains, of the earth,
One thing I know of thee that thou art old,
Far, sovereign, lonesome tyrant of the dearth
Of chaos, ruler of the primal cold!
None gave thee nurture: chaos' icy rings
Pressed on thy plenitude. O fostering power,
Thine the first voice, first warmth, first golden wings,
First blowing zephyr, earliest opened flower,
Thine the first smile of Time: thou hast no mate,
Thou art alone forever, giving all:
After thine image, Love, thou did'st create
Man to be poor, man to be prodigal;
And thus, O awful god, he is endued
With the raw hungers of thy solitude.

THE WAY HE TOOK

Thou wert alone: we know not what befell;
But God was there, and Nature, and with thee,
O thou most human, it was surely well,
Thy manhood lifted into trinity,
And all thy loneliness at once in face
Of its desire and finding of its mood,
And freedom of its passion in the grace
And wonder of the whitening solitude!
We think of those bare heights, that noon, thy strange
Remorseless wandering beyond mortal tread;
Then of the rest we found thee in—the change
And murmur of the firs above thy head,
When Death at last brought the assuaging sense
At foot of that fierce crag of providence.

INVOCATION

Ah me, but what a trysting place is here
Upon the trail of thy mortality!
Still am I found beside thy forest bier;
O lingering ghost, still keep thy tryst with me!
Thou art, I know, long since a soul in bliss,
There should I look for thee—yet stay awhile!
I would remember me how thou did'st kiss,
And part upon the pressure of thy smile.
I love, ah, not thy shadowy Paradise,
I love the very ground where thou hast lain,
This herbage that took record of thine eyes;
And where they faded there would I remain.
Love, leave thine azure heaven, the woods are brown,
Wizard, tempestuous, sheltering, full of night—come down!

ABSENCE

Should my beloved be absent from my sight,
All work is left unfinished if begun,
Even as jealous Nature, should the sun
Withdraw himself, leaves the young shoots the height
That he had reared them to, nor takes delight
In waxy droppings of her buds undone,
Nor passion of her tendril vines to run
From pole to pole in garlands through the light.
But should the dead desert me for an hour...
Ah me, the living may come in and out,
And the heart break not of its varying pain;
But if the dead be found wandering without,
Wandering as ghosts, scarcely the heart has power
To draw them down into its depths again!

WHITE WIND

O soft, fleet-faring wind, there is a shore,
Some pure, strong beach where thou dost find thy bed,
Far from this forest murmur round thy head,
From these bright-tinted plumes of hellebore:
The anemone flowers drop on thy head no more,
Nor autumn follows thee with clinging shred.
Thou art alone and the wide air is spread
Across thee as a coverlet: before
Thy couch and on beyond thee is the white
Of infinite farness, softer than a cloud...
And is it there that wingèd spirits shroud,
Hidden from thee, thou hunter of the light?
Ah, track them in their lair as in a gem;
Give me the clue; I needs must be with them!

THE HEAVENLY LOVE

Thy love, O God...nay, Thou art not the end.
Thy love, but not that I may love Thee back;
Something in mine own loving that I lack
I ask Thee for: in love Thou dost transcend.
Yea, I have tasted how Thou lovest: lend
Thine incantations, for the stream flows black
Between me and my dead! Thou art not slack
To close the iron gulf that sin doth rend,
Severing Thee from the soul that Thou dost crave.
O Love, Thine arts, Thy simpleness, Thy free,
Thy fierce ways of forgetting, so the grave
And memory shall not drag on my desire!
Teach me to love Thy instant way, and then
Look not that I should turn to Thee again!

COVENANT

What is there now betwixt my God and me?
Where is the bond? I do not reach the rim
Of the dark light beyond the seraphim,
Though I have breathed there in simplicity,
Breathing and taking breath of love as free
As the clean flames He feeds that leap to Him:
I am afar, far off; the earth is grim,
Graves in the grass and winter on the tree.
Yet there is this—He has the dead in sight,
Bosoms their sorrows; He is where their eyes
Open and smile and weep; He knows their plight
Mortal and lonely, dimples their new skies,
Makes soft their spring; then turns on me to shed
The glory, the refreshing of my Dead.

THE LOVE OF GOD

Nothing there is on earth we may not lose,
Nothing quite firm: we lose the spring each year,
The sun each day, the flowers as they appear;
But when that sure, sad voice its plaint renews,
“Yea, it is possible that we may lose
Even our God”—O infinitely near,
Far Spirit, I am struck with sudden fear!
A fading falls across my thoughts. I choose
All to forego, all to obliterate
Sooner than miss remembered joy of Thee,
Who art alone most worth remembering.
Break every hope, save of Thyself, in me,
So that Thou fail me not, O Fount, O Spring
Given in the desert to my bitter state!

GOOD FRIDAY

This fall as of a cloud that leaves the height
And hangs moist darkness on the meadows fair,
This perfume that is trackless on the air,
Are not of spring: the dead who mourn their plight
Speak through this muffled pressure on the light;
The dead athirst for their old tears are there,
The dead who would return to us, and bear
Old age and grief, the pleasant fields in sight.
O infinite sorrow! With desire they call
For their mortality; and haunt and pace
About the nestless trees: but one hath grace,
Being Prince of Life, to travel home to die:
Mortal, He bleeds, His loved ones standing by,
And blesses us with lips that taste the gall.

APRIL

April is come to us, the air half-haze,
The dimpling clouds, the light that flows about
Like a soft streamlet, bubbling in and out,
That never further than the hazel strays:
April is come, and ever balmier days
Press round to honour her, the lovely rout
And choruses of wild-flowers, cuckoo-shout,
The blossoms rustling through the forest maze;
But yet my heart beats for another spring,
Even for the land from which fair April broke.
At rear of her sweet face a light is shed;
And rising, light of soul, and following
Into the far, far onward, I invoke
And fall on the profoundness of the dead.

TO GOD

O Thou who see'st, but lift me to Thy ken,
Let me but look an instant with Thy sight
O'er Thy marred world, the drift and din of men,
And all Thy glory troubled in its light!
Let me but look, as Thou, with Love's own hate,
Let me but feel Thy pain; let me but know
How, at Thy will, Thou can'st in me create
A world as fair as Eden in its blow,
As summer to Thy gaze....Oh, to redeem
Thy vision from its sorrow, give Thee space,
As where unfolded roses breathe and fill
Full of an eager quietness; a place
Where Thou may'st watch the working of Thy dream,
And every change a motion of Thy will!

THE MOUNTAIN POOL

We break through thy dark forest-land, among
The rocks thy hands have touched, the blossoming
Of Alpine roses: to the scaurs we cling,
By the bowed, rimming grass. But, see! along
This ledge a hollow, torrent winds have flung
Their hail across: no low song of a spring,
From shadow where the ferns creep shadowing,
No passion at the fount! Ice-stubborn, strong,
The storm-pool water offered to thy thirst,
Its bitterness a hurricane, the snow
Dun at its depths. O fated from the first
To desolation, draw'st thou near this brink?
From such thou hast drank a lifetime; even so,
Warm, sweet warm lips, stoop to your fate and drink!

A BACCHIC THEATRE

There is a spot given of a god to be
A tiny, silvan theatre—a seat;
Most common flowers are growing at our feet,
Wild thyme and little tufts of barberry,
With shoots of willow herb: in tragedy
We flung them earthy on the stream to meet,
To hallow our lost dead: but now we greet
A tomb, fair as the tomb of Semele
Drest fragrant with the vine, to life we spring;
We grow, increase in happiness; the air
Is twinkling of itself: we have in sight
The solemn fir-trees thickening up the height;
We have the exultation, the despair,
And all the lonesomeness of love to sing.

HIGH FOREST FLOWERS

What is the spell on these high sorest flowers?
What are they, but the flowers that we have known,
That, fresh in dart and glitter, here have blown
Through the sweetness of the solitary hours?
Harebells of every droop through grassy showers,
Wide pansies, violets of profounder tone,
A plot of daisies, crystal and alone,
Draining through every stalk the charmèd powers
Of air and earth and never-tainted dew:
Great comfort is it that they are not new,
But veritable, dear of face, with all
The sweets that in our memory we store.
Belovèd, when I look on thee once more,
So be it, so, my heart, may it befall!

MOULDERING LEAVES

O leaves that are not simple leaves that shed,
To us, that cannot be! To other men
They are the years that will not come again,
The years that fade; they are our fading dead:
For he, our lonesome One, was forest-led;
He drew not to Avernus' loathesome den;
But roamed and wearied in the woods, and then
Laid down to die, the forest overhead.
He gave himself to earth, even as the leaves,
In waste, in humbleness, by day, by night,
Before the sun, patient to disappear,
Patient to stay; therefore to us the leaves,
Even the mouldered leaves of every year,
Repeat the form of that slow, funeral rite.

LEVIN

All common joys of common days we miss,
As those banned Afric rocks where travellers trace
Continuously the tortured lightning's race,
That feel but storm and wind—nor any kiss
Of dew at secret in their crevices,
With leaf or shooting fibre or the grace
And tinct of verdure creeping o'er the place;
But keep their station where the lightning is,
Exposed and evermore to be assailed.
Thus, O my God, the life about the head
I love—my life! Thy levin hath not failed
To sear, and then hot-breathed to sear again.
So of a face most gentle it is said
That all its record is the brand of pain.

PARTING

Lo, even memory must give up its dead!
Where he has walked we must not walk again,
Nor pause by garden borders where he led,
Nor seek his flowers; we must unknot the pain.
For, if we look not on our memory's corse,
Sweet sculpture of our memory will abide;
The eyes, the lips will take their human force,
Life's lovely images keep by our side.
Anew in the young sunshine we shall meet,
By paths, belovèd, where thou hast not been;
Thou, being by, shalt make the strangeness sweet
Of the long, silver river and the green;
And all our passion grow a child to cling
About the freshness of thy welcoming.

LOW SUNDAY

Honouring this lesser feast my shrines I spread
With the unfragrant violet, and rehearse,
Plucking the small grape-hyacinth for thyrse,
My exultation that, tho' earth's low bed
Hath never been of flesh untenanted,
Forever taking leave, bowed by Time's curse,
Bowing to doom, for better and for worse,
Deep married to their breath men have the dead.
Without them were no god, no crownèd king,
No feast, no fair procession; they abide.
Bosomed by them the petals disappear
Frail on the wind; they are with every spring:
Though something keep us from them, though they hide,
May be forever hidden, they are near.

THE HALCYON

O Love, o bitter, mortal journeying
By ways that are not told!
I would not sing, no song is sweet to me
Now thou art gone:
But would, ah, would I were the halcyon,
That sky-blue bird of spring,
So should I bring
Fair sister companies of fleetest wing
To bear thee on,
Thou being old,
With an untroubled heart to carry thee
Safe o'er the ridges of the wearying sea.

THE OLD HUNDRED YEARS

God, Thou art gathering in Thy bosom's fold
The hundred years where all I love drew breath,
And sought and found their little age of gold,
And fell on dreams awhile, then fell on death.
Oh, sweet the summers that have known their praise,
The English hedgerows where the catkins blew
When they were passing by or breathed the time
Of the roses red and white and all their dew!
Oh, blest to them the earth, to them the sky!
But now, of human kind, one only hears
How ran their accents when great news befell:
Gone are those days of simple miracle:
Thou coverest their voices with the years.

ENNA'S CAVE

Full in my dreams a bride that I have seen,
Time's child, enchanted apparition fair;
For she was dressed in dress of orchard green,
And heaped in mounds her shadowing grey hair;
And on the lids small, rigid lines of care,
As in the darksome kingdom she had been;
But now had risen to the skyey air,
And in the taintless sunshine breathed serene.
Whence she has come I know—ah, Enna's cave,
Sharp crevice in the mountain!—but her face
Carries long-prisoned memories to the dew.
Time, since you had no happiness to grave
On those dark lids, power may be given you
Your long, slow-biting labour to erase!

[What of this love? Where doth it dwell?]

What of this love? Where doth it dwell?
Concentrate and yet harbouring,
Precious against a precious thing—
A Pearl within her shell.

OLD IVORIES

A window full of ancient things, and while,
Lured by their solemn tints, I crossed the street,
A face was there that in its tranquil style,
Almost obscure, at once remote and sweet,
Moved me by pleasure of similitude—
For, flanked by golden ivories, that face,
Her face, looked forth in even and subdued
Deep power, while all the shining, all the grace
Came from the passing of Time over her,
Sorrow with Time; there was no age, no spring:
On those smooth brows no promise was astir,
No hope outlived: herself a perfect thing,
She stood by that time-burnished reliquary
Simple as Aphrodite by the sea.

UNITY

They twain by Ostia's gardens, being spent
With a long journey, feeling need to win
New strength for a new voyage, far from din
Of the world's turmoil, in a window leant
Together and alone; and, with the scent
And flower of many roses flowing in,
Perceived the rule of the great peace begin
That has its towers beyond the firmament.
Love, were it possible that thou and I,
Being one day together soul to soul,
At shore of some wide waters, in the flush
Of roses tinging them, might so draw nigh
That we might feel of our accord the hush,
Binding all creatures, of God's pure control!

VALE!

There are, so strange it seems, there are who say
That distance gives intenseness to farewell.
Ah, no! If she should leave me for a day,
A year, without her life has lost its spell.
The withering senses shudder as they lose
Their warm possession; and it is all one
If for far voyage or a simple cruise,
Just where the stream is ocean, she is gone;
And if, but from my side, she disappears,
There follows her a piercing vale shout
From lips, from eyes, ah, most of all from ears
That starve and hope: nor time, nor narrow space
Can give ease to the senses left without
The appeal, the dear temptations of her face.

ELSEWHERE

BALSAM

The Past was with us and no morning rose
But we remembered something that had been,
Or thought with trembling of the summer's close,
Or clung too fast to April's tender green.
Ah, what we missed through those dull years of wrong,
Of tears, of praise, of precious laughter, how
The voice enchanting in caress and song
I heard as Orpheus' prisoned wife! But now,
O Loved, are we not happy? Nothing stems
The current of our freedom: all the day
We of ourselves sweet memories can make;
Nor other boon we crave than thus to stay
Watching the mists together at sunbreak,
Or gathering yellow balsams by the Thames.

NIGHTFALL

She sits beside: through four low panes of glass
The sun, a misty meadow, and the stream;
Falling through rounded elms the last sunbeam.
Through night's thick fibre sudden barges pass
With great forelights of gold, with trailing mass
Of timber: rearward of their transient gleam
The shadows settle, and profounder dream
Enters, fulfils the shadows. Vale and grass
Are now no more; a last leaf strays about,
Then every wandering ceases; we remain.
Clear dusk, the face of wind is on the sky:
The eyes I love lift to the upper pane—
Their voice gives note of welcome quietly
“I love the air in which the stars come out.”

HER HAIR

Nay, but a wind, a god from secret cave—
Nay, 'tis of him I speak;
For he hath touched thy cheek,
And with his hands
Smoothing hath brushed aside thy wayward hair;
Even as the tide
Leaves in soft mound the silver-golden sands.
Fair god, didst thou not find her temples fair?
Yea, 'tis to thee I speak!
Art thou not he
From the Æoliæ,
Fresh from the stars, the rain?
Did'st thou not find her brows most free from stain?
And shall I find
The fragrance of a kiss on her lulled eyes, O wind!

CONSTANCY

I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower: in all kinds
My love is perfect, and in each she finds
Herself the goal: then why, intent to teaze
And rob her delicate spirit of its ease,
Hastes she to range me with inconstant minds?
If she should die, if I were left at large
On earth without her—I, on earth, the same
Quick mortal with a thousand cries, her spell
She fears would break. And I confront the charge
As sorrowing, and as careless of my fame
As Christ intact before the infidel.

SWEET-BRIAR IN ROSE

So sweet, all sweet—the body as the shyer
Sweet senses, and the Spirit sweet as those:
For me the fragrance of a whole sweet-briar
Beside the rose!

DYING

There was a dawn when it befell
My loved one drooped to die;
Parting was by—O strange to tell!—
Parting was close, and there was no farewell.
But the grey face forlorn
Slowly took on the sober shades of dawn,
And the slow breath
Heaved solitary from the airless coasts of Death.

FESTA

A feast that has no wine! O joy intense,
Clear ecstasy in one white river-room!
To-night my Love is with me in the bloom
Of roses—laughing at their redolence:
“A cedar-coffer, a miasma dense
With suck of honey.”...Dote on their perfume,
Find tropes! I, shuddering at thy rescued doom,
Sigh for some wider token to my sense
Of the wonder that I have of thee, my bride,
My feast....The candles burn: they are too few.
But, hist! the river-night hath heard my sigh:
The candles reappear and multiply.
Procession-wise in filmy lights outside;
And the oar plashes as from singing dew.

BACKGROUND

After long sickness she is growing well:
We drive together through an open space
Of plain, of forest; and I see her face
Peer from its muffling cloak, as the pure bell
From the bog-turf of tender pimpernel.
So frail, so coarsely wrapped, save for some trace
Of azure round the hat, no summer grace.
The terror of a love immeasurable!
Should tempest overtake her!—Even now
It overtakes. Beneath the azure knot,
Piercing the veil, to see, set in the rear
Of that great storm, her wonderful, most clear,
Clear eyes, athwart their blue a single spot;
And the air lighted from her cheek, her brow.

HER PROFILE

Nought from the changing seasons can we win:
I have desired that men should learn her spell
As it abides, profound, perpetual,
In contour from the forehead to the chin:
But there is such a tremor in the line,
Such quick beneath the chiselling—what art
The shore of her breath's egress can define?
What lips in all the world part as hers part?
Lo, of a chance, one night, she in her chair
A little from the hearth, a radiance swims
From candles lit beyond that face of hers,
So holden of a dream it never stirs,
While all its tender marge in shadow rims,
Even as a dusky pearl caresses air.

ALL SOULS' DAY

Walk through the garden of the falling leaves,
Walk with me, O my God!—yet should'st thou speak
Of love, I fear me that my heart would break:
With other love remorsefully it heaves,
And for the perished roses sobs and grieves.
And yet one test I do not flinch from—take
The creature fairest that Thy Hands did make,
From whom my soul morning and eve receives
Her dew, and all the confines of her light,
And let her mingle with the mists and fall
Sooner than Thou...Thou dost accept the cry,
Thrust forth the sacrifice; and, standing by
With her, my sovereign and my sole delight,
We worship Thee in faith perpetual.

A PALIMPSEST

MEDES AND PARTHIANS

IN LEASH TO THE STRANGER

BROWN WILLY

Seeing I have wronged thee and no speech relieves,
Brown Willy, very stubborn is thy heart,
And, in its shorter loneliness, conceives
Strange terrors with insufferable art;—
Desertion, trackless, huge forgetfulness
Pass thee by hollowly as Banquo's kings;
And when my hand draws nigh with its caress
Thou canst not speak how bitterly it clings.
So thou dost brood upon each slight neglect,
So inward on each fondled tone debate,
Fierce sorrows that thou canst not recollect
Are heaped upon thy undefended state:—
Brown Willy, but my heart so long has bled
For thee—I pray in thy own kind be comforted.

OUT OF THE EAST

ABSENCE

Yes, but a dog's love is a true, true thing!
For, if you turn back on your doorstep, hot
In temper for a name, a word forgot,
Is there not lauguor in your welcoming?
“So soon come back again and why?”—Thy spring
Whym Chow, thy raptured hurrying to the spot—
Thy face tense in the joy that thou hast got
This second, sweet return—the chance to cling
And snuff, and brood about me! Oh, renewed
As God's thy region of solicitude!
Nor could a moment of the past be dear
As this that drew me out of absence near.
Absence! And all thy glory to remit
Seven's seventy times the mortal sin of it.

[The moonlight lies a pavement on the grass]

The moonlight lies a pavement on the grass,
The forest is dark air against the sky—
I leave my chow-dog by the fire, and pass
The window-pane on to the void. A cry
Behind me, on my track, sharp as the sight
Of injured ghost, intrepid in its pain,
And whimsical as effort of a sprite
To do an errand on the earth again!
A cry—my knowledge of the heart it wrings
Has held me many years from liberty,
From Anet, and from Blois; and, as I live,
The motion of that tender vocative
Shall stay my foot from all those dreamèd things,
And all the diverse kingdoms over sea.

HALLS OF SUFFERING

TO SPRING

A greater stranger even that Death is Spring
Thou art a greater stranger even than Death!
So alien I taste the April breath,
So mad the hustle of the rook's dark wing!
And what of this acute, blithe colouring?
As by a sharp-cut monument that saith
Nothing to me, that but bewildereth,
The record of some life-forgotten thing,
I stand before the verdure of thy fields.
Nor is this life the wattle-sheepfold yields:
No eddying leaves did ever course a spell
So aimless as this flickering hazel-dell:
The roosted little cries and jerks, if blithe,
Flash single, as the whetting of Time's scythe.

WHYM CHOW

Nay, thou art my eternal attribute:
Not as Saint Agnes in loose arms her lamb,—
The very essence of the thing I am:
And, as the lion, at Saint Jerome's suit,
Stood ever at his right hand, scanning mute
The hollows of the fountainous earth, whence swam,
Emergent from the welter, sire and dam:
While Jerome with no knowledge of the brute
Beside him, wrote of later times, of curse,
Bloodshed, and bitter exile, verse on verse
Murmuring above the manuscript [in awe
The lion watched his lord, the Vulgate grew],
So it was wont to be betwixt us two—
How still thou lay'st deep-nosing on thy paw!

A MINUTE-HAND

Nay, my Beloved, thou canst not keep my pace;
But, as a tiny minute-hand within
A clock's wide frame doth stand
And with the ticking of the tiny paces
True to Time's race is,
So do thou mark my minutes—be
My little Now perpetually—
Sense of thy sweet
Tick-tack and beat
Buzzing about the essence of the hour!
So I renounce thy pattering feet—
So, so—the heavenly din,
The rich effulgence of thy coming in,
So thou wilt mark the pressure at its source
Of my blood's course;
And with the tiny trespass of thy being,
In every part
Dint all my senses' seeing:
Notching—O silver chime!—
The solitariness of incurious Time.

AGE OF GOLD

Even as Nelson is the very spring
Of joy to England, so that her allies,
Passing the column of his victories
Salute it, bowing low as to a king—
So his blue eyes burn to this sea-faring
And island people, as the very eyes
They stare with at the unmirrored distances—
My spirit, clear before me, triumphing,
Thou art. Oh, had I but thy courage fine!
Thou making of thyself one ardour bright,
Profuse and constant, of no fear gav'st sign,
Assuming thy Belovèd must requite
Thy mystical, great heart. And, thy days told
Are, as my years should count, one age of gold.

GOOD FRIDAY

There is wild shower and winter on the main.
Foreign and hostile, as the flood of Styx,
The rumbling water: and the clouds that mix
And drop across the land, and drive again
Whelm as they pass. And yet the bitter rain,
The fierce exclusion hurt me not; I fix
My thought on the deep-blooded crucifix
My lips adore, and there is no more pain.
A Power is with me that can love, can die,
That loves, and is deserted, and abides;
A loneliness that craves me and enthrals:
And I am one with that extremity,
One with that strength. I hear the alien tides
No more, no more the universe appals.