The Poetical Works of George Barlow In Ten [Eleven] Volumes |
I. |
II. |
III. |
IV. |
V. |
VI. |
VII. |
VIII. |
IX. |
X. |
XI. | Vol. XI |
The Poetical Works of George Barlow | ||
XI. Vol. XI
VOX CLAMANTIS:
SONNETS AND POEMS
TO ENGLAND
SONNET
That England's force is spent. Not till the sun
Pales in the heavens will England's work be done.
Nay the pure Sun-God, armoured all in gold,
Still guides and guards us as in days of old
And still the Sea's wild love-kiss may be won:
The kiss She gives with passionate mouth to none
Save those of knightly mark and kingly mould.
Strive onward, England. Lift thy giant load.
Whom heaven exalts no foeman can abase.
God gave thee a sword omnipotent when he
Left in thine hand the white hand of the Sea,
And set thy soul and Freedom face to face.
TWO SONNETS
I
THE UNIVERSE-CENTRE
So grief-devoured, should the grand centre be
Of that huge starry Universe we see,—
The end, the chief result, the crown of all!
Here is the battle fought. Here stand or fall
Armies whose swords flash through eternity.
We are the combatants, aye even we
Whose pigmy frames the sunlit voids appal.
If it be true, the tremulous soul of man!
To know that fragrance of an earthly rose
Through the vast flowerless scentless spaces goes
Lonely, divine,—to know that Love can curb
The winds, and aid or mar the cosmic plan.
II
“POWERS SUPREMER”
So sweet on earth should be alone indeed
In its pure beauty,—shaped, designed, decreed,
O'er all the marvelling heavens her spell to throw.
Perchance on not one other globe could grow
The flowers whose fragrant force the star-hosts need.
Here, here alone, can fail or can succeed
Love's dream. Here passion's foam-white torrents flow.
They find within the walls of their embrace
Life that will last when planets' lives are done.
Two lovers standing silent, face to face,
When strength divine worships diviner grace
Wield powers supremer than of star or sun.
“EVER MINE”
SONNET
The rays that from the starland float through space,
So ever doth the poet seek the face
Of Beauty, his by the eternal right
Of endless and unspeakable delight
That makes his heart her shrine in every place;
His in her fragrance, in her girlish grace,
Her passionate charm, her marvel and her might.
For she to him is as the force divine
That fills with life the flowers of all the meads.
O Beauty, summer's flower-sweet breath is thine!
I ask no frowning help of flowerless creeds
If thou art ever with me, ever mine.
THE CELTIC MOVEMENT
SONNET
By force, by sullen strength, by soulless deeds,
Strange if at last thine own soul intercedes
Even for thy conquerors! Pure and sweet reward,
Divine great vengeance, if thine heart is poured
Forth in wild singing o'er thine hills and meads,
If England hearkens, then the whole world heeds!
The Celtic harp may thrill the Saxon horde.
O charm residing in the mystic rose,
O power of passionate love that overflows,
O fairies white of soul and brow and hand,
Ye may reveal lost marvels, and the grand
Vast silent secret of the stars disclose.
“THE STERNEST HOUR”
SONNET
Most weak, most futile, if the truth were known
Might it not startle on her wave-washed throne
England, and streak her heaven with blood-red gleams?
Though all so calm, so safe, so tranquil seems,
What if on us man's race, on us alone,
The fate of all the Universe, sun-sown,
Depends? What if we shape the stellar schemes?
In all the life of all the globes we see
Thronging the dark plains of eternity.
Of all past ages ours may be the sum.
One planet speaks amid the millions dumb,
Urging huge hosts towards unknown victory.
“WHEN LIFE WAS YOUNG”
And splendid leaping waves shone spacious,
How did my lyre laugh forth in glee!
The pleasant world was all before me
And blue June skies stooped gently o'er me,
And thou wast waiting by the sea.
Are robed, nor crimson flush is tender
'Mid branches of the spring-bright tree,
And thou art gone, O woman peerless,
No more youth's queen, so pure, so fearless,
No more the lady of the sea.
The waves upon the same shores thunder
And suns and stars solicit me.
But all is changed. No more I enter
Love's golden temple's flame-crowned centre:
No more I worship by the sea.
Red autumn leaves and fruit I gather
From russet hill-side, sunburnt lea.
No more in all the morning's lightness
I mix my soul with shuddering whiteness
Of the soft-laughing green-haired sea.
The music-rush transfigures never
Though once God's hand it used to be.
And though the waves are blue they glow not
As once they flamed divine, and show not
Thy figure, shapely by the sea.
That all the heart may freeze and colder
May frown the thickening days that flee,
I'd give all knowledge and late pleasure
For one sweet August evening's treasure
Of moonlight o'er the old love-tinged sea.
“THOU DOST ENDURE”
Foam-crested, wild and deep,
And none can charm us of earth's sweetest daughters,
What refuge save in sleep?
In the sweet hollow way;
When the far skies with black-plumed clouds are wrestling
And all the seas are grey:
Our spirit stands apart
From man and woman, seeking comfort only;
When passion fails, and Art:
When woman's eyes grow dim,
Is there yet One who healeth nor upbraideth
And can we turn to him?
A Power beyond the skies,
Stronger than earth's sons, gentler than her daughters,
With more than woman's eyes?
Of endless high embrace,
And selfless rescuing love that knows no measure
In his most awful face?
And dead are mortal dreams,
And suns are hidden, or blaze forth but to blind us,
And hushed are all the old streams:
Of earth departs indeed,
And hearts grow sere, and aging heads grow hoary,
And world-pierced spirits bleed:
Quite as it fell of old,
And sweet enchantment quits the evening shadows,
Forsakes the sunset's gold:
And all the stars are pale,
Whom shall we seek, and whom for Leader follow,
And whom for Champion hail?
And infinite and high?
Fold us around with more than starlike splendour,
With more than sunset sky!
That, being strong, is pure.
Men change. Thou changest not in mortal fashion.
Hearts fail. Thou dost endure.
LOVE
Turn grey at anger of the evening breeze:
Though souls grow weary, and faint hearts turn pale:
Love hath avail, love hath avail!
And not the farthest hill-top yields us rest:
Though over endless heartless seas we sail:
Love hath avail, love hath avail!
Melt beyond mists of morn and sunset skies:
Though every hope we cherished seems to fail:
Love hath avail, love hath avail!
Shall soon be but a garment that has been,
Yet trees and blossoms cry, while wild winds wail,
“Love hath avail, love hath avail!”
As the stars seek the waves wherein they shine:
Whose wings control the loud ship-shattering gale:
This hath avail, this hath avail!
High as the sun and as the sweet sea wide:
The love that deepens when time's swords assail:
This hath avail, this hath avail!
Pierced till it faints and wounded till it bleeds:
With thorns on brow, through either hand a nail:
This hath avail, this hath avail!
Love hath the seas' pent force, the mountains' might:
Feet shod with love the blue heavens' summits scale:
Love hath avail, love hath avail!
BEYOND
We twain may meet
And watch the roses gleam on God's to-morrow
Soft, fair, and sweet.
One day we'll stand
And all our souls shall thrill with rapture waking,
Hand cleave to hand.
And pain shall flee
With weary down-bent vanquished coal-black pinion
Across the sea.
And one of peace,
While far upon the horizon grief's last thunder
Rolls, soon to cease.
Ah! rest,—how sweet.
How tender-soft the supple yielding clover
To tired-out feet!
While soft seas break
Before us, the melodious shingle spurning,
And lost dreams wake.
That we are dead:
That love's hand is as death's hand when it binds us,
When grief is fled!
Two souls shall rise
Entering eternal life's majestic portal
Whose bars are skies.
Will ne'er grow cold
But flame for ever o'er time's summits hoary
With wings of gold.
Me bruised and worn:
When pain was slain, and sorrow's rule was ended,
And hope was born.
TWO SONNETS
“OUR LEADER”
I
—The Bishop of Worcester at St. James's Hall, Sept. 29, 1903.
Darkness no star can pierce, no sunny ray
Of hope or life, no light of loftier dreams:
Blood-torrents tinging Macedonian streams,
Shed by the ravening wild hordes who obey
Him who should shrink to meet the face of day.
No answering flash of sudden sword that gleams:
A nation puzzling over fiscal schemes
And led by blindest guides for leagues astray.
“Oh, for one half-hour” of the heart that spake
And Tyranny with form abashed down-cowered,
And lands dishonoured and white souls deflowered
Saw through dense clouds a glimmer of sunshine break,
Seeing England's wrath in Gladstone's gaze awake,
Hearing the passionate voice divinely dowered.
“OUR LEADER”
II
Yet is it so? May not the spirit grandWho fought a battle no soul yet has fought
For England's nobler soul, who, set at nought,
Contemned, rejected, lifted yet the land
Towards heights we dimly now can understand,—
Who in man's heart a work unheard-of wrought,
Heedless of thrones, exalting Love and Thought,
Discrowning Evil with his strong right hand—
May not to-day that spirit superb look down
From some great realm the greater for his crown
Of deathless pity, and his human might?
May not that spirit with England's soul to-day
Commune, our Leader in the heroic way,
Our Guide through grief to joy, through gloom to light?
A LONDON NIGHT
SONNET
The clear moon hangs within a summer sky
Almost. What souls to-night with kiss and sigh
Will mix wild hearts and gather passion's flowers!
How through the night's dim moonlit lamplit hours
Bright angels and dark angels fleeting by
Will blend the joys that live, the joys that die!
At Woman's touch will gleam what magic bowers?
With all its own for love's sweet sake will part,
Trusting some human spirit with love supreme.
To-night...in thirty years what will night's air
Behold? A face immeasurably fair?
Or features fouler than hell's foulest dream?
THE SOUL OF ENGLAND
The soul that loves the weak,—
The soul that in the past arose
Vengeance divine to wreak;
Of those who strove and fought
On blood-red fields, in slippery ways,
For Freedom, Peace and Thought;
That clasped Mazzini's hand,
That aye responded to a call
For help by sea or land;
Of Swinburne hailed the young
Republic bursting chain and curb,
The strife that Hugo sung;
At last was saved and free
Sent o'er the blue Atlantic's wave
The greeting of the sea;
Of struggle, quite forgot
The toils of others and their tears,
But shared the human lot;
In tenderness supreme,—
That where a heart could throb or break
Found Song's divinest theme;
Hurled Rome's attacks aside,
And sought upon the ocean-ways
The ocean's breast for bride;
A mightier task may find
If from our love-crowned island-home
Spring thoughts that lift mankind;
All hopes have failed indeed:
Before the threats of hell, heaven quails,
Nor can one star succeed.
A POET AND A STATESMAN
SONNET
Ring like a trumpet, rousing hearts and hands,
Awaking noblest rage in listening lands,
Fierce with a righteous god's most passionate curse?
O statesmen, who in sentence trimmed and terse
For deeds that darken heaven apologize,
Do ye not shudder when a nation dies?
What sun shall ever such shoreless gloom disperse?
What great high-mettled leader ever found,
While shrieking villages were burnt and sacked,
While thunder of oppression shook the ground,
While a fair land with hell's own hordes was packed,
Life in a phrase, salvation in a sound?
ARMAGEDDON
SONNET
May leap, till Europe reddens into fire.
Ye who to-day towards slothful calm aspire
Yours is the error, yours will be the blame
If retribution on the track of shame
Follows, if agony's storm-sob rises higher
Till the winds hearken, and the waves inquire
Whence the long moan of human anguish came.
And all the armies of the world may clash
Together, and in one vast lightning-flash
Man may behold an Armageddon bring,
While suns on stars in hideous turmoil crash,
The end of love, of life,—of everything.
FOUNDER'S DAY AT HARROW
October 8, 1903
SONNET
And Chapel whence so many prayers have flown
Heavenward, your calm, your hopes were once my own:
Once I was with you, safe from pain and ill,
Young, ardent, happy, pure in soul and will.
Now I steer onward, evermore alone,
See sweetest memories vanish with a moan
But feel your power, a holiest influence, still.
Had known life's meaning better than I knew,
What heights half-climbed a conqueror's steps had trod!
Still would the everlasting skies be blue,
The sinless nights divine with starry rays,
And all the living world aflame with God.
FOUR SONNETS ON MACEDONIA
I
ENGLAND'S MOMENT
If but the voice of nobler England sounds,
The wild beast, Death, will pause upon his rounds:
Mankind will hearken, starriest heaven will hear.
It is no hour for weak-lipped doubts or fear
For lo! the Sultan hunts with hell's black hounds.
While Emperors smile, blood drips from children's wounds
And horror heightens with the freshening year.
Deep pity thrills the chivalry of France:
Mazzini's land is stirring and awake.
Others are moving. Shall we only dream?
Can no great passion lift us from our trance?
Immense the moment, and immense the stake.
II
A TRIPLE ALLIANCE
That Milton's, Dante's, Hugo's warrior-lands
Joined ardent hearts and crime-subversive hands
And won for once Love's victory by the sword!
Beyond all dreams might be those Powers' reward.
From flower to flower a righteous deed expands:
Fresh fruits it bears, as year by year commands
And heavenlier sunlight round its path is poured.
At last the ending of the blood-stained quest?
Might not the fleets that war with wave and breeze
Threaten the Turk, and in a twinkling gain
Through the near East a triumph for the West
Outtopping all old dull diplomacies?
III
TO THE POPE
A sword far-reaching, keen to save or smite,
Rise up, be strong, shed forth thy Church's light.
The hosts of hell at thy supreme command
May scatter, and that blood-drenched Eastern land
May change its robes of red to robes of white.
Plead with divine authority. Invite
Kings to confer, make nations understand.
Vast on the earth, yet vaster in the skies.
On saints, not only upon the living, call.
Trumpet to trumpet echoing through the past
Will answer. Angel-legions will arise,
And Jericho's towers will totter, wall by wall.
IV
TO THE WOMEN OF ENGLAND
The sunlit vale, the ocean-girdled shore,
The flower-sweet fields where no gaunt cannons roar,—
Queens of a land where love's heart may repose
Heedless of aught save the deep peace it knows,
The joys it brings, the heaven it can restore,—
Think of grim agony regnant, nor ignore
Measureless grief, most unexampled woes.
Not yet your hearts have spoken as of old
When pity and love and your own souls were one.
Your prayers can summon, white-winged from the sky,
Spirits of force undreamed-of. Speak, be bold.
Banish this darkness, and relight the sun.
“IF BUT THE DEAD WERE LIFTED QUITE”
To some glad land of heavenly air;
If they could vanish—all that once they were
At one swift stroke be riven from mortal sight;
The hand that fashioned, and the hand that slew:
Then might we say, “The loving soul we knew
Lives on, loves on,—no trace of it is here.”
Death doing so much, left still his task undone.
Death paused,—and left a mandate to the rains,
The frosts, the snows of years—the storms, the sun!
“UNMOVED’
Since these two died, so many a silent dream!
The crocus twice has dared the blast
And twice the sky grown blue within the stream.
And year by year the splendent dahlia vie
With the bright sunset-sky,
And lovelier lilies on the stream repose;
Yet fairer women year by year may rise
With unchanged charm in younger eyes,
Love's sceptre still in white imperial hand;
May chant, when chainless thought, supreme,
Prevails at last, no Church's dream,
But sovereign morning's tribute to the sun;
And still through many a maddening fight
Flame England's helm alight,—
Though clashing swords in our green lanes may sound;
Will hearken not, the dead within will lie
Unmoved by sunlight, clamour of the waves,
Beauty of woman, thunders of the sky.
JEAN RICHEPIN
Darkness over lake and mountain, over gulf and sunless sea,
Darkness when the Master left us—when no more at Hugo's glance
Morning lit with loveliest roseflush all the wakening fields of France.
Filling all the world with sunlight, holding all hearts with his dream:
When the dream at last was over, when the giant's eyes grew dim,
Came the reign of death and silence; Song, it seemed, had died with him.
Rude must seem all other accents, after his the sovereign tongue;
Dwarfish all the choirs of singers, pale their crowns beside the king's.
Flashed new stars upon the watchers, carrying on love's broken dreams.
Though the Master's harp was silent, yet the lyre of Richepin spoke,
And the waves and mountains listened, and the wood-nymphs smiled and woke.
Round his brow broods stubborn darkness, and his keen gaze probes the night.
Through his music rings the music, through his eyes there flames the glance,
Not of Hugo but Lucretius, new to flower-bright sanguine France.
Bold of heart to face the blackness, even the gloom of star-proof skies;
Quick of ear to catch and render in his anguish-maddened strain,
Not creation's hymn of triumph, but the gaunt world's groan of pain.
Right it is that one should question “May not life be living hell?”
Are not all things base, deceptive? what of altar and of shrine?
Can a world so racked and tortured in its dark depths be divine?
In his heart the love that fails not, on his lips the words of flame:
After summer-cradled waters, after Hugo's sunlit form,
Comes the wild wail of the breakers, comes the thunder-crested storm.
THIS LIFE
The stars, the laughing waves upon the sea,
Cry, “Death is throned as your perpetual king,
But life is ours, to all eternity.
Is endless, for its race will never die.
Deathless are all the stars that smile above:
Immortal are the clouds that fleck the sky.
Half with pure welcome, half with mocking scorn.
Man finds the beauteous earth so very sweet;
So fair he finds the pink cheek of the morn.
For but one night for him the stars are grand:
For but one little hour the purple tides
Watch lovers strolling on the golden sand.
The stars steer on across an unchanged sky.
The sun to-day is that same sun which shone
Ere man began to live and love,—and die.
Each star ye worship, greets you, but each cries
With the same voice that greets, ‘Farewell! Farewell’
‘Farewell!’ the great sun calls to you, from the skies.
Through viewless leagues of soft subservient air,
While ye will struggle on, and war with Fate,
And love and weep, and triumph and despair.
And all created things feel sad at heart
To think Creation's lord, and kingliest one,
Must soonest of all living powers depart.
But sighs a ‘Farewell!’ from its golden core.
While vanquished races from the earth retreat
Stars, oceans, flowers, abide for evermore.”
GONE
And hills and streams
By which she pondered,
And forests which awoke her girlish dreams,
And sings no more,
And chanteth never
Where the white waves break on the golden shore.
CHINESE LABOUR IN SOUTH AFRICA
SONNET
To British soil that very hour became
A freeman. Dead, we thought, was England's fame,
Dead every hope, if Liberty fell dead.
But now the halo fades from England's head:
We dally with dishonour. Huge our shame
When the soul's prostitution we proclaim,
Defiling lands where noblest blood was shed!
We deemed was England, fetterless and free,
For ever pure from Slavery's sordid stain.
But now the yellow myriads we enslave
And with their soulless toil dig Freedom's grave:
Grasping at gold, damnation we attain.
WORDSWORTH'S FOREBODING
SONNET
How were it then with England? Wordsworth knew
That England, to her loftier soul untrue,
Might lose the mandate of the hills and sea,
That both with one voice thundered: “Liberty!”
Well may we tremble lest that very fate
Looms at the threshold, threatens at the gate.
Is She a slave, who bade all slaves go free?
For nought indeed is left if England fails.
God cannot build again his towers so high.
If England fails, her passionate heart unheard,
Haul down for ever bright hope's sunny sails:
The stars are traitors, love's creed is a lie.
THE UNPARDONABLE CRIME
SONNET
Has there been wrought so strangely fair a thing
As the white wondrous woman-form we sing
And love. In heaven's dim regions faint and far
Where the bright golden-sailed swift sun-ships are
No queen is found for man the lonely king.
Here throbs the heart, and here the soft arms cling.
Here woman waits, for man to make or mar.
Is God's pure thought of woman, so sublime,
That the one vast unpardonable crime
Must be to change her laughter to a moan
Or fling her stainless roses to the ground,
Pollute her soul, or desecrate her throne.
SONGLESS
SONNET
Through horror and through darkness to its doom.
No fire heroic flashes through the gloom,
No mighty star-flame of impassioned song.
A wail ascends of unimagined wrong
But the dead singers stir not in their tomb.
Strange standards glisten, blood-stained lances loom:
The righteous falter, and the base wax strong.
When the great stormy music pealed and rolled
From Jersey, stern, implacable, supreme;
When the world knew that deathless words were spoken
And that the bonds of Tyranny were broken
And that God thundered through a poet's dream?
THE NEW DANGER
SONNET
Battling with sex, the nobler issues sink
Wholly from sight. We stand upon the brink
Of deadliest peril. Satan would perplex,
Confuse and harass, horrify and vex,
Till Man and Woman lose the power to think
Clearly, or in despairing madness drink
The senses' cup, whose after-flavour wrecks.
No victory over starlit space and time,
If Woman's true sweet self be changed indeed,—
If She be harnessed to a lower creed
Than that which through Christ's Resurrection taught
That body and soul are deathless and sublime.
THE VAIN SEARCH
SONNET
When from the timorous music of the dayWe turn despondent, asking that some lyre
May wake a scintillation of the old fire
That seems for ever to have passed away;
When for some strong and passionate harp we pray,
Some soul of pure unconquerable desire
Whose heavenly might may seize and lift us higher,
A soul whose mandate peoples may obey;
When thus we yearn, as for some guiding star,
We who most sad and lost and lonely are,
We who recall the dead majestic years,
Who answers? One bard wanders 'mid his flowers,
Pointing towards strifeless fields and bloodless bowers:
Another roars camp Ballads in our ears.
ON THE BISHOP OF HEREFORD'S SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, AGAINST CHINESE SLAVERY
SONNET
While almost still the smoke-wreaths round her rolled,
Lent ear to curs whose clamour is for gold
And ceased to watch with passionate eyes as bright
The eyes of Freedom,—then in all men's sight
One Christian prelate took the pathway bold,
One only, one man wandered from the fold,
One fiery star flashed forth upon the night.
Fearless and firm and noble as was he
Who scorned the falterer's mode, the coward's plea,
And, facing abject and subservient lords,
Made Westminster ring bravely with the sound
Of one immortal protest, Hereford's.
TO A SILENT SINGER
SONNET
From the grand living voice a living word
Sweet as the chant that once Italia heard,
Proud as the young Republic's trumpet clear,
Stern as the curse that on Napoleon's ear
Smote with huge portent of tremendous doom
When prostrate Empire shuddered at its tomb
And dawned on Paris the terrific year.
As when the sunrise mingled with his song
And night's dim hosts were scattered at his glance;
As in the old storm-swept days when Swinburne knew,
While hellward the Imperial eagles flew,
The heart of Italy, the soul of France.
TO THE AUTHOR OF “FOR ENGLAND”
SONNET
Recalling England to her nobler dreams,
Strangely divine thy pure strong music seems.
Thou hast the ancient fire within thy heart,
Yet harrowest not the stately shrines of Art
By the harsh battle-trumpet's strident screams.
The voice of mountains and of mountain-streams
Allures thee more than turmoil of the mart.
And let the future England, when her eyes
Open at last and this day's madness dies,
Thrill at the memory of a mighty name,
The name of one who, weeping at her shame,
Said to her slumbering soul, “Awake, arise.”
SONG'S GOAL
SONNET
Weighs on him sometimes with a sense of doom:
Yea, life itself seems hopeless as the tomb.
What hand divine with conquering touch, we ask,
Shall ever tear aside Fate's awful mask?
What God shall scatter stars upon the gloom
Or make again the blackened dim groves bloom
Or in new suns bid risen summers bask?
And no white waves on any earthly shore,
Some goal is reached through long desire and pain,—
If, when far golden morns meet English eyes,
The love within my Song not wholly dies,
I have not wholly lived and striven in vain.
LOVE ETERNAL
I
Still each day the glad sun rises, still its conquering light surprisesFlower and flower together clinging 'mid the darkness and the dew:
Still the sea with flash of greeting smiles in heaven's face, proudly meeting
The gold sunshine in its robes of emerald green or sapphire blue.
II
Rose by rose shines out for ever, their gay groups will vanish neverFilling garden after garden, scenting all the summer breeze:
From the fern-lined quiet valleys still the silver streamlet sallies
And the white foam flings its stainless wedding-garment o'er the seas.
III
Or by orb the stellar legions fill the far sky's viewless regionsAnd the pale moon sails resplendent through the purple seas of space.
Darkness still is full of fancies for the hearts that weave romances,
Finding all the heavens' pure starlight in one human worshipped face.
IV
Still within the forest covers mix the hearts and hands of lovers,Still the lover seeks the eternal in the moment's endless bliss:
Still the silences are broken by the mystic old words spoken
And the rose becomes self-conscious and divine in woman's kiss.
V
But the souls that pass and leave us, as the swift fierce years bereave usOf our pleasures, of our gladness, of our health and hopes and ease,
What of Shelley when above him closed the mantle of the seas?
VI
He who sang the bright world's wonder, when he heard alone the thunderAnd beheld alone the curving loveless white breasts of the waves,
Did he then, no more a dreamer, pass to life and love supremer
Than our noblest living passion in this earth of flowers and graves?
VII
Or did speechless terror grasp him, as the waves' hands sought to clasp him,As the flower-sweet glad earth vanished from his thoughts and from his ken,—
As he turned towards one who waited, one for evermore unmated,
Or yearned back in that dread moment towards a lost love once again?
VIII
That is what to-day we wonder, striving madly now to sunderDeath's serene and sombre curtain, full of starlight or of gloom.
What of sins and wild offences when the human nerves and senses
Fail, or change their form and message at the gateway of the tomb?
IX
What of pain and expiation, what of undreamed tribulation,What of horror, what of anguish, what of darkness closing round,
When the soul, a conscience only, pays for life's sins, joyless, lonely,
Naked, helpless, homeless, loveless, in a realm without a sound?
X
What of souls for ever dying? Though we hear no groans nor cryingYet there may be round about us in the starshine, in the air,
On the souls we counted victors, on the faces we found fair.
XI
Passion changeless, love eternal! Yes: but this by hate infernalMay be dogged and dogged for ever. Life's dim secrets who shall tell?
Through unmeasured tribulations, on through endless incarnations
Still may toil the human spirit, changing fairest heaven for hell.
XII
What of noblest love that perished, unredeemed, uncrowned, uncherished,In the far-off silent eras that no legend may restore?
If in one life pain is boundless, what of pain's grim footsteps soundless
Over years that know no limit, or on seas that know no shore?
XIII
Love eternal may for ever bring sweet joy that lessens never,Growing upward, upward alway, gathering flowers in heavenly meads:
Love unchanging, stern and deathless, crowned with starless agony, breathless,
May for ever pant pursuing a pale ghost that still recedes.
XIV
Oh, we apprehend so little, we who deem love's bonds are brittle,What of mystery, strange, unfathomed, lurks within the gentlest eyes!
With her soul the woman holds us, when her soft embrace enfolds us,
And the soul releases never, and the last kiss never dies.
XV
Are not lovers still abiding in some union death-deriding?Are not all stars linked together? Is not changeless law supreme?
Now and then one mighty vision of God's face, one marvellous gleam!
XVI
Is it triumph, is it terror? Is it victory over errorThat the human race is winning, or a larger power of pain?
Is the crown of love most tender, after all, a blood-stained splendour?
Is it joy or is it anguish? Is it loss or is it gain?
Absit omen!
SONNET
Not wholly mean the ill-starred Louis rose
Erect amid not wholly heroic foes:
Dethroned, not all unmanned, he strove with doom.
Wrath's lightnings bring not dawn from midnight's gloom.
Slowly man's sense of larger justice grows:
Hugo abides, when blood-grimed Marat goes:
Heaven's true Republic builds not on the tomb.
Has been the darkling soul men call the Czar.
No flower-strewn path his wavering feet have trod.
Behold within the judgment-angel's face,
Than the sun's utmost flame more dreadful far,
The immense unswerving awful pity of God.
A DEAD PROPHET
I
Since the passing of the Master, death and sorrow and disaster,Grief and battle and grim horror, all before our eyes have gleamed.
Since the impassioned marvellous singing through the listening world went ringing,
What has time accomplished? Little—of the deeds the poet dreamed.
II
Still the world he loved, predicting that our strifes and aims conflictingWould be merged in peace made perfect in a nobler epoch born,
Struggles on, with anguish shaken. One by one life's hopes awaken:
One by one life's fair hopes perish, while the wild hours laugh in scorn.
III
Revolution's blood-bright glory still for Hugo closed the storyOf the people's timeless sorrow, brought unmeasured hopes to birth.
Then at last the strong sun's splendour forced all darkness to surrender,
So he deemed, proclaiming freedom to a saved exultant earth.
IV
Giant faith, supreme and splendid, ever widening, vast, extendedFrom our earth to farthest heaven,—reaching, fearless, down to hell!
How we miss the word that told us that Love's arms for ever hold us,
That with even the worst and saddest in the end it must be well.
V
To each woman, pale, heart-broken, some sweet word of new hope spokenShould bring solace everlasting, joy that deepens evermore.
“Yes, at Judas' wild repentance, I would change, reverse, the sentence:
I would say to Judas, ‘Enter.’ I would open wide the door.”
VI
Since the poet's great soul left us, since at last Time's hand bereft usOf the heart that sought grief's twilight, of the eyes that sought the sun,
Since that hour the world has darkened, men in vain have yearned and hearkened
For some voice of noble mandate, for some large song-victory won.
VII
Wars and pangs and desolation! For our sorrowing troubled nationCeased 'mid battle's peals of thunder the Victorian vast repose.
Through the forced down-beaten gateway surged in clamorous myriads straightway
All the spirits that foster discord, all love's strenuous dark-browed foes.
VIII
Strife in Africa raged chainless,—War's steeds, foaming, frantic, reinless,Dragged their chariots over thousands and the children wailed and fell.
Who shall tell us, who shall measure, what was lost of love's pure treasure,
What was wasted of soul-brightness, what of heaven's heart entered hell?
IX
If, divine from heights above us, longing yet to serve, to love us,On our earth the soul of Hugo, angel-great, majestic, gleamed,
How that pure soul must have shuddered as it watched the world unruddered
Drifting towards the white-mouthed breakers, knowing Love in vain had dreamed!
X
Then came Macedonia's terror—doubt, betrayal, darkness, error;All the summer flowers as ever towards God's heaven their fragrance poured:
But amid the flowers were wailing sobs that sought heaven unavailing,
Forms that wrestled as with demons, forms that writhed upon the sword.
XI
Then in Eastern far-off regions mixed Japan's and Russia's legions;Human blood-drops mingled ever with the white foam on the deep:
The bright moonbeams shone and sported on dead faces, weird, distorted,
Thousands hurled by man's inventions into sudden blood-stained sleep.
XII
Once the grand voice spake in thunder, and a world in silent wonderWatched as Empire shook and tottered, as Napoleon reeled and fell.
Would not Hugo's great heart darken, if to-day he had to hearken
To the deepening wail of anguish of the world he loved so well?
XIII
Hugo's stern Republic fighting still with Rome, old feuds excitingEver newer hate and anger in the world he thought reborn!
Darkness still around us brooding, from the darkness still protruding
Clustered swords we never dreamed of, not a token as yet of morn!
XIV
Can he bend, divinely grieving, o'er us, he who died believingThat the God of love was near us? Can he reach us with a word?
If a deed was done inhuman, deadly wrong to man or woman,
Still his spirit, so he told us, in the thunder would be heard.
XV
Yes, we linger, hoping, praying that the stars their light conveyingTo our earth may also bring us light of hope from souls afar:
That for man's redemption striving still works grandly, still surviving,
One whose heart with Christ's heart mingled, one whose soul is as a star.
THE BATTLE OF THE SEA OF JAPAN
May 27 and 28, 1905
SONNET
The deed by faith and patient valour done
When on Tsushima's waters sank the sun
And night's grim victory followed on the day's!
Before the Western nations' wondering gaze
The East stood forth, and fought for life, and won.
Ship by ship foundered, gun by giant gun,
And a new Empire met the morning's rays.
Fate's full desire what mortal power can name
Or read the secret of the word that came
Fire-winged from heaven through battle's monstrous hell?
But this we know, that some vast idol fell
And Nelson's land is glad at Togo's fame.
TWO SONNETS
AN ACTOR'S BURIAL
I
Sir Henry Irving died at Bradford on October 13, 1905, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on October 20.
Through dim October light a great man goes
From ceaseless labour to supreme repose:
The arduous part has been superbly played.
Death summoned,—and no dallying foot delayed:
The curtain falls that for the long toil rose.
To that strange stage no human eyesight knows
He passes, trusting, hopeful, undismayed.
His London for a moment feels alone.
Once more the Abbey's solemn arms extend
Welcome. No sound of ringing trumpets blown
Marshals this valiant spirit to his end,
But Memory's hands will rear his silent throne.
AN ACTOR'S BURIAL
II
When England's nobler drama, nobly done,
Shall on some grand ideal stage be one
With English acting, a most mighty power:
Heir of the age when, bursting into flower
At Marlowe's touch, its passionate life begun,
Beneath those heavens where Shakespeare was the sun
Our drama gave to time that priceless dower.
While Becket's last great words became his own,
Immortal, here he met his mortal end,
Treading the lampless ghostly boards alone;
Destined through all the undying years to be
On England's stage a deathless memory.
THE ANGEL OF ENGLAND
I
While our puny tasks engross us, while the hearts of thousands dream,While we dally with our pleasures or our grief,
Gladly, sadly, the world marches towards some destiny supreme
And it may be that the fatal hours are brief.
II
What of England? What of glory in the future shall there beLeft for England, if she loses in her turn
Lordship over many peoples with the lordship of the sea,—
If the fates that beckoned ever, change and spurn?
III
So a man may win a woman,—for an hour he guards and holds,For an hour, one fleeting moment. What avails?
There are watchful foemen waiting. What his conqueror's arm enfolds
May elude him, if his strength or wisdom fails.
IV
Lo! he wakes and she has vanished, and the world is left in dimUtter darkness, cold and starless evermore.
The queen-woman once made over, wholly trusted unto him,
Passes out, but pauses ghostlike at the door.
V
So a pause has come, a moment in our history, strange and stern,For we have to choose the pathway we will take,
And we have not long to loiter, for the tide is on the turn,
And a Bride's heart is our own, to win or break.
VI
Yea, the Spirit superb and stainless whose soft breath was on the seaAnd her sweetness in the roses of our land
Pauses yet with love and longing. Would we have her footstep flee?
Would we lose the passionate pressure of her hand?
VII
Not in fancy do we dream of watchful spirits who surround,Some with love, but some with hatred in their gaze.
One has led us, one has loved us, one has guarded us and crowned,
One has guided us through dark and devious ways.
VIII
But the seers whose souls can travel through the shadows and the gloomTremble now—they see behind the figure white
Darker forms that wait and threaten, evil hosts that tower and loom,
And they see the sun's orb menaced by the night.
IX
All the world is moved to turmoil. In the northland Russia stirs:The far Eastern peoples wake to life unknown.
India watches, dimly wondering what of changed doom may be hers:
Europe watches, from her still unshaken throne.
X
Revolution's undercurrent, soundless, ever tinged with red,Flows beneath the lordly palaces of kings.
Peace the Czar desired. The moonlight on white faces of his dead
Glitters now, the answering vultures wave their wings.
XI
Poland, Finland, lightward struggle, and the Russian with the JewWrestles, till at last the bomb does ruthless work.
O'er Armenia God looks down from ceaseless skies of sunlit blue,
But he sees the dripping weapons of the Turk.
XII
Such the world is in this vaunted twentieth century after Christ,With the Churches chanting hymn and solemn psalm:
Satan ever with the crimson-handed Sultan keeping tryst;
Europe gazing, half amused and wholly calm.
XIII
Mighty poets dead, forgotten, mighty statesmen passed away,While we dream of gold and luxury and gain!
No stern Leader whom the people with stern passion may obey:
Titans vanish,—but the clamorous dwarfs remain.
XIV
Women changing, not to angels, English women downward drawn,English streets at night a wonder and a crime,
While above our city still as ever breaks the sinless dawn
Crimson, golden, not in Christ's day more sublime.
XV
Still the Angel's gaze upon our wanton sinful city set,Still the love supreme in lingering heart and eye
Full of tender pity and yearning, one immense divine regret,
One immense divine redemptive agony!
XVI
Yet a moment have we, yet an hour to lift to heaven our gaze:At the doorway pauses ever the white Form
Who would save us, who would guide us through the future's darkling ways,
Ever shining, a star-beacon, through the storm.
VAE VICTIS!
I
Progress ever! Pure and holy shines the light of morning, slowlyBrightening all that seemed so evil, changing sad things into sweet!
Man the victor, man the giant, lord of all things, self-reliant,
Shall be crowned with golden sunshine, darkness trembling at his feet.
II
But the vanquished? What of roses that the summer morn disclosesLying pale and bruised and sodden in the miry heedless way?
What of violets in the hollows that no sunshine guards and follows,
Lying loveless, doomed and helpless, trodden slowly into clay?
III
One succeeds—a thousand falter. One to marriage's white altarBrings in triumph sweet and solemn the pure footstep of his bride.
With her wedding-robe around her, lo! what angel-hands have crowned her:
All the summer brings its lilies, all is joy and peace and pride.
IV
But another, even fairer, with a wealth of passion rarer,Lovelier far, it may be, hidden in the soul's depths dark and lone,
Through the horror of the passion that the lewd streets mould and fashion
Will pass downward towards the blackness circling Satan's lurid throne.
V
Oh, the misery to perceive it, the compulsion to believe it,That for every deed of virtue wrought beneath the approving sun
Some huge triumph of the darkness, some vast evil wildly done!
VI
Lo! in every generation the bright daughters of the nationBring to sweet life here in England all their purity, their power.
When the blossoms flame in splendour, then girl-blossoms far more tender
Bring their wealth of pure soul-fragrance, many a white or rose-flushed flower.
VII
Yet at that same moment, sinking deep and surely hellward, drinkingWith their pale wan lips for ever of a shame no tongue can tell,
There are women man would die for, some that angels' souls must sigh for,
Plunging downward, ever downward, while strange laughter rings from hell.
VIII
To the vanquished woe eternal! Yes, the sentence base, infernal,Seems in blood-red letters written on the universe's walls.
For the victor gratulation, joy and songs and acclamation!
Scorn and anguish never-dying for the soul that fails and falls!
IX
To the poet bring his laurel. Then for years dispute and quarrelOver all he loved and fought for. Take his sins, his errant deeds:
Let the sun's full light embellish these, enlarge with instinct hellish;
Cast them down amid the garbage where the prowling critic feeds.
X
Let his brave deeds be forgotten,—let them perish, rankling, rotten,Lost amid wild waves of rancour! Pour your uttermost disdain
Overlook, ignore for ever, all the love and all the pain.
XI
To the weak ones woe for ever! Let them rise to gladness never!Christ discerned his Father's likeness in the pure face of a child.
Yet the children, how they perish! Some would succour, some would cherish:
Yet the children grow life-weary, long before they even have smiled.
XII
Oh, our valour scientific, what avails it when terrific,Vast, unceasing, stern, tremendous, still the fight for life prevails?
Yea, the gentlest sooner falling, all in vain for help are calling,
All in vain, in vain for ever, for some blind god holds the scales.
XIII
Is the struggle of life extending to the stars,—do they too, blendingLife with starry life, it may be, ever fill the fields of space,
Where the thunders roar and rattle, with the din of deadliest battle,
Shifting ever rank and order, changing post and task and place?
XIV
Might we some day wake and murmur, “Heaven, we thought secure and firmerThan the solid earth we tread on, with its ceaseless starry rays,
Heaven itself is safe no longer, Change and Time have proved the stronger:
Lo! uncounted starry wreckage chokes the dark sky's gulfs and bays.”
XV
To the weaker woe unbending! Dream of life, life never-ending:Dream again, and shudder dreaming of what endless life may be!
Deeper grief on the day after, so throughout eternity.
XVI
Nation after nation bleeding in the huge strife, still succeedingTo another nation's riches, keeps the contest still alive.
Here again the weakest perish. Not the lands the pure gods cherish,
But the strongest, still the strongest, nations iron-wrought, survive.
XVII
Woe for ever to the weak ones, to the tenderest souls, the meek ones,To the loving, to the gentle, to the hearts that sympathize!
Not on them the victory hinges, on the war-flag's blood-stained fringes
Rather, on the smoke of battle and the fire-gleam in the skies.
XVIII
Yet...a Figure rises slowly, laurelled not, no conqueror, lowly,One too tender for the struggle, whom the world-gods slew with scorn.
Has he still, that vast heart broken, one more word of love unspoken?
Is his hand upon the rudder? Can his eyes foresee the morn?
“A ROSE OF GOD”
SONNET
As life's wild battle wavers, as we waitTill over hill and valley falls the gleam
Of angel armour flashing through a dream,
And angel hosts through morning's golden gate
Pour forth, more masterful than death or fate,
Or fools found godlike in their own esteem,
Or tongues with Self for their eternal theme,
We cry: “Will Love's heart triumph over hate?”
Yet, though tracked hard by shadows born of hell,
Woman's divineness deepens. She shall be
Fairer than word of living man may tell.
Bright shall be fields and air, serene the sea,
When forth she stands at last, grief's dim paths trod,
Man's rose on earth, in heaven a rose of God.
TWO SONNETS
THE NOBLER WOMAN
I
Through age on age the eyes of woman weep,The heart of woman, infinite in power,
Sorrows with summer, with the dying flower,
With all bright things that fail, and fade, and sleep.
From her soul's height her aspirations leap
Into the void, dashed down as from a tower.
Her cry of pain from wind-swept bower to bower
Is as the sea's wail blown from deep to deep.
Once, once, she sinned, and this tempestuous orb
Whose wild lips hang upon her wondrous kiss
Even at her fall was hurled to the abyss
Wherein the balefires and the storms absorb
Pale Eden's light that gleams, as gleam afar
The amazing turrets of the morning star.
THE NOBLER WOMAN
II
Yet when she rises, sovereign, stedfast, sure,Worshipped by angels, who seemed once alone,
Swaying the epochs from her boundless throne,
Supreme at last upon a planet pure,—
Strong, who could so unspeakably endure,—
Immortal, she whose task is to atone
For death through her made human, and the moan
Of multitudinous ages since the lure
Of Satan drew her from her seat sublime
Within the Paradise wherein man dreamed,
While in his eyes the light of godship gleamed
And all was love, and nought was shame or crime:
Then, shall she rule superb, her high task done,
And night and hell shall perish in the sun.
FOUR SONNETS
TO THE MEMORY OF A GREAT QUEEN
I
When time sinks fainting, when pain's race is run,When freedom's trumpet rings from pole to pole
And crime's stupendous storm-clouds cease to roll
In blood-red ridges, blotting out the sun:
When spirit at last with passionate sense is one
And through stern matter gleams the conquering soul:
When close upon us towers the ages' goal
And earth seems now a heavenly sphere begun:
Then shall we know why God, who gave to France
The matchless music of one song supreme,
And gave to Italy grim Dante's dream,
And bade the world bow down to Goethe's glance,
Made Shakespeare's England stronger, fairer far
Her face a warrior's, and her soul a star.
TO THE MEMORY OF A GREAT QUEEN
II
For, here, where Marlowe saw the morning breakAs all the heaven of song grew golden-bright,
Not since has been, nor ever will be, night.
O'er England answering and for England's sake
New splendour flashes, as the wild years take
Their solemn farewell, or triumphal flight.
Not more the beacons when, proud-sailed, in sight,
The Armada watched the fiery hills awake.
But stronger are we, in that surelier here
The soul of Woman passes to a throne.
For God led terribly through paths unknown
England, that on the world superbly clear
Might shine the Vision given to her alone
Of Love that, knowing no ending, knows no fear.
TO THE MEMORY OF A GREAT QUEEN
III
Here, where the spirit of Kingsley loved the airOf keen wild wintry England, where the rose
In soft delight of sun and shadow grows,
Veiled to the base, to loftiest angels bare,
A golden passion or a white-winged prayer,
The perfect love of woman proudly goes
Serene along the starry road she knows,
Past night's dim empires, kingdoms of despair.
We, we of all men, of all lands, have seen
What hope the high Victorian epoch gave,
What of strange greeting from beyond the grave,
What living mandate from a vanished Queen
Who, while our island paths she gently trod,
Looked on the face and held the hand of God.
TO THE MEMORY OF A GREAT QUEEN
IV
We, we who watched, and felt our hearts turn coldWhen England mourned Victoria, seeing the skies
Darken, as when a solemn sunset dies:
We, who now list to selfishness grown bold
And hear a new world's clamorous shout for gold,
Triumphs material, gauds that trick the eyes,
While barriers thicken and sensual mists arise
Denser and denser, covering fold on fold
The lessening heavens wherein the great souls shine:
We, who have met the blood-stained thrusts of hell
And felt the healing of a hand divine,
Know that, though nation after nation fell,
If but she follow where her sure stars sign
With England and her sons it shall be well.
ON THE MURDER OF THE KING AND CROWN PRINCE OF PORTUGAL
Saturday, February 1, 1908
SONNET
Before the first fair crocus veiled in whiteOr proud with stainless tints of starry gold
Lifted its crest above the quickening mould,
Anarchy's blossom gleamed and flamed, blood-bright.
Crowned was the morning, kingless was the night.
From land to land the thunder-tidings rolled
Of large defiance flung with hate untold
At God, and Man, and Liberty, and Light.
Through the shocked world wherein alas! was done
An act by murderous devils of hell decreed,—
In Freedom's name, whose eyes are as the sun,
From hearts that follow and from hearts that lead,
From Kingdoms and Republics all at one,
One voice of condemnation doth proceed.
THE HIGHER ENGLAND
Through the night the shining ripple of a golden starlight flows.
If the struggle be tremendous, yet God's power is more stupendous
Than the force of even the mightiest of all unseen fiends and foes.
Rave and rage, and fill our cities with the stench of hideous deeds;
Though they bluster, God-displacing, Satan's code and creed embracing,
More ignoble, more repellent than the snake amid the reeds;
Basest, foulest, falsest, filthiest, of the devil-spawned sons of time;
Though they prosper for a season, rotten-ripe with lies and treason,
Changing science into murder, making even research a crime;
With the unctuous old palaver to entice us and persuade;
Though they triumph with their gilding, and their prompt cathedral-building,
Striving to seduce the country they lack courage to invade;
Now his friend the Sultan shivers at the notion of extremes,
Watch our fleet with eyes most jealous, ever anxious, ever zealous,
Ever full of aspirations, he who lured the Boers with dreams;
To the teachings made emphatic by the deadly bomb they fling;
Though the grim Anarchic madness, with a burst of devilish gladness,
Slay for sport a prince or noble, or a statesman, or a king;
Girls whose beauty might be peerless, and whose soul might grow divine,
Sink and fade and perish yearly,—not the fate God marked out clearly
For his daughters, on whose foreheads he designed love's stars should shine;
Rank and wealth and high position,—though the lower lusts persuade;
Though we seem to be declining, though huge forces are combining
To cast God discrowned and swordless from the world that God's hand made;
Over mist-clad fields at sunset, lost in darkening wastes of air;
Though the people vaguely wonder, when they hear Song's sudden thunder,
“What can ail him, what can move him, seeing that gold is always fair?”
Shall Love's crimson awful sunrise on the planet flash and flame.
Was our small star counted friendless? Nay, the constellations endless
Are but sister-orbs attendant. To our planet Jesus came.
Round earth's shores the wild grey ocean in its chainless splendour flows.
Here have iron-willed statesmen taught us. Here have prophets' souls besought us.
Here hath woman won her kingdom from the kingdom of the rose.
To the fearless form of Freedom, lent to stars their crowns to wear.
Here hath wood and wave and fountain, forest deep and sunlit mountain,
Given our race the eternal mandate to look Godward and to dare.
For his marriage-crown and glory, finds God's tenderness in hers,
Then the haunting dreams of error that now hold us with their terror
Shall melt into air and vanish o'er the distant mountain-spurs.
Wholly choose to part for ever from our helper and our bride,
Can we touch the red hand dripping from the knife whose edge went ripping,
Just to show its skill, the offspring from some living dog's torn side.
Old and sad and dim and deadly all that England once found vile!
Nay: our women's truer mandate is “Win Liberty and hand it
To the waiting subject-races, widening worldward from our isle.”
Have been preaching through the centuries, till at last there comes the close
Of a sexless creed unsuited to man's yearning deeplier rooted,
Grandlier soaring,—so encountering nobler friends and subtler foes.
Round the world in tenderest passion arms that lift us from despair:
God whose womanhood revealing ever deeper joys is stealing
Through the stars its touch makes radiant, through the flowers its kiss makes fair:
To the depths of human anguish: not the God of hell and guile
But the God who shows his creatures woman's love through woman's features,
Not the Father's sword of judgment, but the Mother's sovereign smile.
POEMS
VICTORY
I
A moment I yield thee; 'tis but to shield theeThe better; 'tis but to be free to proclaim
To men that shall listen, soft eyes that shall glisten
As thine eyes glistened, thine own sweet name.
II
'Tis but to make greater our pleasure later,When both our hearts and our minds have grown.
Some spirit has told me that I shall enfold thee
One day, my lost one—but still mine own.
III
I feel, through the weary days, dismal and dreary,The far keen rapture of that embrace!
Its far keen glory—when life's dull story
Is quickened, by thine imperial face.
IV
I will be ready, my voice shall be steady,And all the airs around shall be sweet;
To the dim soft bower of love's first hour
We two will hasten, we twain will retreat.
V
There we will linger; I, the singer,Thou the singer's glory and crown;
And all life's labour, and life's red sabre,
In those far meadows I will lay down.
TO THE UNCHANGED GOD
I
Thou changest neverThough men change ever,
Yea, veer as waves of the shifting tides;
Our seasons pass,
We wither as grass
That lies burnt brown on the mountain's sides;
But thou remainest
And death disdainest,—
Thy firm foot over the centuries strides.
II
When Rome was youngThy lips in it sung,
The Grecian hill-sides caught from thee
Their rose-red light
Of joy; in the night
Of unknown eras thou wast, and the sea
Has known thee, O Lord,
And its music has poured
Forth for thee since ever it came to be.
III
Thou art in the bowersOf memory, the flowers
The long years gather and treasure and keep:
In first love's tender
And infinite splendour,
O infinite God, thine eyes too weep:
And thou dost delight
In the calm of the night
When lovers upon thy soft breast sleep.
IV
Not one white roseWithout thee blows,
Thou art in the meadows that smile in the morn;
The long grey hills
Thy presence fills,
And the roar of the breakers is thy strong scorn;
And summer divine
Is surely thine,
And all its scents at thy word are born.
V
To-day we sing to you,Our swift songs cling to you,
O world of blossoms we soon shall leave.
But what of to-morrow?
Will it bring sorrow?
Will some for our passing sigh once and grieve?
A singer to-day
Like a bird on a spray
Clings to the world's branch; will it receive?
VI
Will it receive him,Sadden or leave him,—
He for a day sings, only a day;
Others shall follow,
Never Apollo
Hath not a song-word potent to say;
But what world takes them
As this forsakes them,
The singers whom this world's gods betray?
VII
We pass through the flowers,World, of your bowers,
And some we gather and some disdain;
We pluck in your valleys
The flower-wreath that tallies
Best with the song-flowers born in our strain;
And then we fold
Our plumelets of gold,
Or of grey, and quit you; our songs remain.
VIII
But oh whither weDepart, to what sea
With strange dark waves, what garden, what bower,
Who knows or can say?
What summer-sweet day
Awaits us, or wintry companionless hour?
What guerdon to win?
What joys gathered in?
What rose of new passion, unspeakable flower?
IX
Are there women as whiteIn the bowers of the night
Of death as in rose-hung bowers of the day?
Are there faces as fair
In that desolate air
Where the wings of the hours hang sodden and grey?
Are there mouths that can kiss?
Is there infinite bliss
Of love, or doth all love vanish away?
X
No soul can reply:From that mystical sky
Come but faint murmurs, no clear voice rings
Downward in answer,
And but a romancer
Seems each one who doubtful or arrogant brings
Word from that far land,
Weirder than star-land,
Whence throbs all music on monstrous wings.
XI
For music is death,And God, and the breath
Of flowers who make fragrant the death they defy;
The lips of the Lord
Through its cadences poured
In it thunder and laugh and reward and reply;
In it seas of the speech
Of God on the beach
Of time plunge downward from fathomless sky.
XII
But all else changesAs time's foot ranges
Pitiless, ceaseless, over our plains;
His barren relentless
Blossomless scentless
Finger the date of our death retains;
And lo! as we sing
A sudden soft wing,
Death's, darkens the chamber and hushed are our strains.
THE WRESTLE FOR A SOUL
I
This I have won by my fightWith the spirits of sorrow and night:
To be followed, ever hereafter,
By a girl's glad sinless laughter.
II
Through my dream I heardHer maidenly new-born word:
Her virginal fresh-wrought speech.
It had power my heart to reach.
III
And now I am well contentThat the veil of life be rent.
For though I pass to the grave
This wonderful soul I save.
IV
Though I, dead, pass to the night,This blossom henceforth is white.
Though I am forgotten, I give
To her leave to laugh and to live.
TO THE REV. STOPFORD A. BROOKE, ON HIS LEAVING THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
And all the airs with mountain flowers are sweet,
Tread thou; the valleys yearn not for thy feet:
Their wreathed mists bar
The stars from thee, and thee from sight of star.
Seek thou with ever more familiar tread
The utmost summits where the sun burns red,
The strong free sun,
And where in air most fair God's crowns are won.
Thou passest now to the utmost peak, O friend,
Where in love's vision all our visions blend:
Our dreams and deeds
Fail us,—the undying love alone succeeds.
We watch at last the unimprisoned stars
Seen face to face and not through Church-forged bars:
Sweet even if brief
The hour when power doth shower from sun to sheaf.
Whose glory compensates for all the year
Of mingled pain and labour and swift fear;
When thought to flower
Springs, and the autumnal woodbine rings life's bower.
In passionate perfect love; this joy alone
Sets the divine sweet soul on God's pure throne:
This in our day
We yearn and burn to compass, as we may.
THE ONLY REST
Where hearts once joined in one turn traitors never,
The land of death.
There all is silent: through that pure dominion
Flies never a bird with wandering wistful pinion
And wistful breath.
Each sunset darkens for the night, sure-comer,
Pursues each hard:
Life robs us fast of sweet familiar faces,
Robs us of health, endows and then displaces
Each aging bard.
But beauty groweth dim,—the lips wax colder
That once were warm:
The flower-scent quits the neck and leaves the bosom
That once was wordless wealth a bloomless blossom,
Quits mouth and arm.
In mantle of chill gloom the dark days drape us;
The dark short days:—
The old summer thoughts and dreams are no more valid;
By autumn walls the autumn daisies pallid
Their dank heads raise.
Blossoms we loved the bleak wind leaves not scatheless,
It dims their cheeks:
In front of us lies mist-winged drear December;
Behind, the months we care not to remember,
The flower-filled weeks.
The very roots of hope and faith seem rotten
And rotten their leaves:
Death's kingdom seemeth to our spirit lonely
The one thing that abideth,—yea the only
Rest man achieves.
NO MORE
Again shall shine;
Again the June wind's subtle fingers strumming
Shall shake the pine;
Again the yellow-banded bee go humming
O'er clover and vine.
Shall storm the shore;
Again the moon pour forth her regal brightness
For stars to adore;
Yea, some shall love with the old unchanged heart-lightness,
But we no more.
Whose soft lips said
“I love you” yestereve,—against whose shoulder
We leaned our head:
She is changed to-day; and all the world's grown older!
Its charm is fled!
NOT CHRIST, BUT CHRIST'S GOD
SONNET
Though Christ we need not, yet the God of morn,The Lord of mountains and of stars, we need.
Though we despise the grey-beard Church's creed,
Christ we despise not,—nor his crown of thorn,
Nor loving heart that took the shafts of scorn.
We loathe the Church's lies, the Church's greed,
But unto Christ's pure genius we give heed,
Yet do no despite to the Christs unborn.
The God of Christ we yearn for more than we
Desire the Hebrew. 'Mid our lanes of rose,—
Where the soft clinging honeysuckle grows
And scents the shoreside,—by our own wild sea,—
We would with God the eternal Father be;—
Christ's God hath other secrets to disclose.
PANTHEISTIC DREAMS
SONNET
What is the worth of Pantheistic dreams?—Oh, what avails it at the hour of death
To mix our souls with countless roses' breath,
Or with the shining June-sky's sunset-gleams,
Or with the glory of blue-rippling streams?
What joy is there in groping underneath
The soil, to spring in roots of purple heath,—
What human rapture in the moon's white beams?
One hour of human life, though it be wild
And mad and sinful, is a nobler spell
Than long eternities in green deep dell,
Or ages where the autumnal leaves are piled.
The human form, degraded or defiled,
Is still the human soul's one citadel.
HEAVEN AND WOMAN
SONNET
What are ten thousand centuries unto God!Just one swift starry night, and nothing more;
Just one light speedy footfall on the floor
Of time: one flower beside a dusty road.
So mused I in Bond Street: and the ceaseless roar
Of carriages seemed like the centuries wheeling
Red ranks round God's throne, with wet eyes appealing
For pity,—crime on crime and war on war.
Through the blue sky I gazed as in a dream:—
Then my eyes fell, and in a carriage lo!
An olive-skinned clear face and lips that glow
With loveliest power of passion, and a gleam
Of Italy in the eyes, and forehead low
And shapely.—How far-off those star-thoughts seem!
ONE CHANCE
SONNET
One life; one chance; one woman to adore;One rose to worship:—once and never again
Love to our bosom with sweet tears to strain;
Once to kiss soft lips on some moonlit shore:
Once all our soul in music to outpour,
And once to enter Passion's golden fane,
And once to launch upon the stormy main
Of wild Romance where poets sank of yore:—
Just once, and then the end;—one chance we have,
One life for singing,—then our lips are sealed,
And over us the green grass of the field
And the green fern-fronds and white roses wave:
One life for music,—then the silent grave,
And lands where never morning bugle pealed.
LOVE'S IMMORTALITY
SONNET
Some say that passion dwindles with the years,Grows old and loses radiance,—but I say
That noble love can never pass away,
Made strong by pain, made perfect through its tears.
Who dreads pale Time's attempts, who doubts and fears
Lest noon should mar morn's promise to the day,
Shall perish crownless, loveless, in the fray:
When weak hearts wail, nor Love nor woman hears.
Not all hell's poisonous spears or swords of flame
Shall harm the soul that loves, though love seem crime
In the eyes of those who love not, for his fame
Shall everlasting be, his joy sublime,
And Love shall write in gold his deathless name:
He who would conquer Love, must conquer Time.
“TO-MORROW'S ROSE”
One woman doth forsake?Let not thy lone heart break.
Thy lips so full of pain
Fresh lips shall heal again.
To-morrow's rose is fair
As that which brought despair.
QUESTION AND ANSWER
She.He thinks me just a common wayside flower,
Not fitted e'er to bloom on poet's bower:
Is that not so?
He.
And you,—you are a rose of dainty hues
Whose petals tints most exquisite suffuse:
Is that not so?
She.
Ah no! I spread but common weary wings.
But you,—you deal with grand eternal things:
Is that not so?
He.
The grandest most eternal thing in Art
Is the sweet rendering of woman's heart—
She.
Yes, that is so!
A DEDICATION TO LOUISA S. BEVINGTON
Thou art among the chief of those who leadThe way; thou bringest woman's soul to bear
Upon our new-world thought and mak'st it fair,
Adding flower-softness to the future's creed.
And thou hast taken part with those who bleed
Battling amid the turrets of despair,
And hast borne arrows of the high keen air,—
Shafts that around thought's iciest summits speed.
Therefore I singing in the early day,
While yet the dew upon the grass is sweet
And our hill-paths are printed by few feet,
Bring thee these poems of the cloudland grey,
Written on the ridge where night and morning meet,
Ere the old faiths' stars have wholly passed away.
THE HUMAN LITANY
Christians.—Hear us, Father! since within the garden
Christ wept tears of blood, be kind and pardon
Numberless misdeeds:
Men and Women.—
Hear us, Mother! by the pangs of nations,
By unknown unmeasured tribulations,
By each soul that bleeds!
Chr.—
Hear us, Father! since thy Son sank slowly
Into awful death-embrace, the Holy
And the spotless King!
M. and W.—
Hear us, Mother! hear us by the crying
Of the waste sad world in darkness lying;
Help the hands that cling!
By Christ's bloody sweat and cross and passion,
Father, we beseech thee mould and fashion
Man to work thy will!
M. and W.—
Mother! though their Christ were god and prophet,
Yet our modern world, he knew not of it;
Knew not doubts that kill!
Chr.—
Father! by thy dear Son's awful anguish,
Help the weary sheep that faint and languish
Left on the earth alone!
M. and W.—
Mother! by the awful speechless burden
Many souls bear, grant for rest and guerdon
Lands where no hearts groan!
Chr.—
By the patience that he showed in dying,
We beseech thee, pardon sinners lying
Under thy just ban!
M. and W.—
Holy Mother-God! Christ's pains were single:
In the human cup all sorrows mingle:
On the cross of Man!
By the cross of Jesus, Father hear us!
Help us, guard us, sanctify and cheer us,—
By the nails that slew!
M. and W.—
By the cross of Man, O Mother save us!
In Man's own deep red blood-ocean lave us,
Till our souls are new!
Chr.—
Father! by the spears and mocking speeches,
Lift our heart, we pray,—till heaven it reaches,
Following in Christ's tread!
M. and W.—
By the cross of Woman, Mother, aid us:
When the eyes of soulless saints betrayed us,
Woman's gleamed instead!
Chr.—
By his slow heart-beats now nearly stopping
And the pale head on the shoulder dropping,
Hear us, O our Lord!
M. and W.—
By the strange weird glimmer of Her whiteness
Mingled on the Cross with that blood-brightness,—
Save from sorrow's sword!
By Christ's pain all human pains exceeding;
By his sacred body bruised and bleeding,
We beseech thee, hear!
M. and W.—
By the Cross where Woman through the ages
Hangs and dies, while round the rough crowd rages,
Soothe away our fear!
Chr.—
By Christ's goodness greater than of mortal,
We beseech thee, ope thou heaven's high portal;
Let us enter in!
M. and W.—
By the endless gentle heart of Woman
Christ-surpassing, and all valour human,
Wash away our sin!
Chr.—
By Christ's glory all things else excelling
And his love compassionate and compelling.
Make the far fields bright!
M. and W.—
Hear us, Mother-God! by Woman's glory,
We beseech thee; through the ages' story
See! she shines so white!
White is Christ: than man or woman whiter:
And his eyes than mortal eyes are brighter:
Hear us for his sake!
M. and W.—
Deeper eyes than Christ's we have among us:
Shafts of fiercer pain than his have stung us;
Do not our hearts break?
Chr.—
By the deep sweet eyes and by the splendour
Of Christ's heart and all his bounty tender,
Father, be our stay!
M. and W.—
By the heart of Man the Saviour riven,
And by Woman's heart which hath forgiven,
Help us on our way!
Chr.—
By the soul of Christ and all the treasure
Of his love-deep heart that knows no measure,
We beseech thee, save!
M. and W.—
By the grief that hallows all things human,
By the double cross of Man and Woman,—
Lift us from the grave!
FROM CHURCH TO THE SEA
With tongue that raved right well:
I left the Church and sought the sea,—
Its hand laid hold of me.
With mystic soothing sound:
The stars shone forth from flameless sky;
I knew hell was a lie.
He and his lake of fire:
The cool sweet sea put out his lake;
My worn heart ceased to ache.
His hand laid hold of me:
In all the waves that rose and fell
I saw no shadow of hell.
No hell-flames glittered through:
Above me bent the clear night-sky;
I heard no prisoners' sigh.
Sweet in his grand repose:
“Heed not these fools and liars,” he said,
“Whose souls are worse than dead.
Or in the wind-waved trees
And I will teach thee line by line
Secrets of love's and mine.”
That strange great night to me:
And hell-fire ceased for evermore,—
All slavish fear was o'er.
THE SEA
And love's soft summer hours,
Fragrance of girls and flowers,
To the sea
I pass: its great waves greet me;
Its salt pure strong winds meet me;
I am free.
Its ceaseless dull progression
Of hot days in procession
That weigh down:
The glad blue waters cheer me;
No flower or leaf is near me,
Red or brown.
Wide mass of waters seething
Around my feet is wreathing
Flowers of foam:
All other bloom forsakes me
As the sweet sea's breath takes me
To its home.
No enemy impeacheth:
The grey wild water reacheth
To the sky:
Whatever time be bringing,
To hear no sea's chant ringing
Is to die.
SEA-POPPIES
I
From preachers preaching by the sea,Good Lord, deliver me!
They preach of Christ and heaven and hell,
But the white sea-waves swell;
I turn from heaven—and sweet the drop is—
To the great gold sea-poppies!
II
They fill the air with fiery lies;I watch the grey clear skies:
The wreaths of sea-weed sweeter smell
Than their foul fumes of hell!
From preachers lying by the sea,
Sea-God, deliver me!
III
Sky-spaces stretch forth calm and farWaiting for crown of star;
These preachers belch their venom out
With ribald prayer and shout;
From preachers blustering by the sea,
Sky-God, deliver me!
IV
Fairer to me is one fair faceThan all their gold-harped place:
Blue bugloss and the pink rest-harrow
Laugh at their poisoned arrow!
The sun, the all-golden giant, copies
The golden-cheeked beach-poppies!
V
From vulgar narrowing thoughts of men,Lord, lift us forth again!
Stretch out thy sunlike gracious hand
Over the sea and land:
Blend our unfettered souls with thy
Great chainless sea and sky!
VI
From foolish tongues belying thee,Good Lord, deliver me!
Let the blue-leaved gold-faced sea-flowers
That kiss the sun for hours
And seek no crown and fear no hell
Proclaim that all is well!
A SEA-DAY
They surge with limitless delight;
To-day
What can one dream of but their might?
What flower-word can one say?
To-day around the rapt heart goes;
To-day
Before us the wide water flows
Green, blue, and wild and grey.
Thou layest hand and breath on me
To-day:
I join the reckless plangent glee
Of thy far-reaching spray.
Fade out beneath these salt strong showers
To-day:
And all the buds on woman's bowers
Fade swiftly quite away.
Smooth inland body gives delight;
To-day
I join thy curling swirling might,
Sea, filling all this bay!
And ripe red mouth is soft and fair:
To-day
Thy buoyant breath fills all the air,
Sea, and thy coursers play!
And full of scents that lull to sleep,
To-day:
I stand upon the shingle steep
Where gold sea-poppies stray.
Whose loving hand lays hold of me,
Spray-wet:
Let no white arms around me be!
And yet—and yet—and yet—
ANTIPHONES
Christians.In wondrous white attire we stand,
And round us gleams the heavenly land,
And faces by sweet airs are fanned—
Chorus of Greeks.
And we kiss Venus' snow-white hand!
Christians.
Saved from the flames of raging hell
With us and with our souls 'tis well;
Now for the lost world sounds its knell—
Chorus of Greeks.
How sweet these rain-washed roses smell!
No flowers of earth,—no lily or rose
That in pale temporal garden blows,—
Are sweet or white or pure as those—
Chorus of Greeks.
That Venus' flower-sweet lips disclose!
Christians.
Not gardens girt with earthly walls,
But heavenly lustrous sun-crowned halls
We have for dwelling: Venus falls—
Chorus of Greeks.
Nay, siluer-voiced her sons she calls!
Christians.
Hear us, O God! Thy face is bright
And we shrink backward from its light;
But Christ gives courage, power, and might—
Chorus of Greeks.
Her breast as moonlit foam is white!
Hear us, O tender Jesus! Red
Thy side is with the blood-drops shed
For us upon the hill-top dread—
Chorus of Greeks.
Praise Venus with the golden head!
AN ACTOR'S TRIUMPH
I
The lights, the music, and the crowdOf eager hearts and eyes:—
I had failed before,—to-night I vowed
To hold both weak and wise
And silence all applauding loud
Conventionalities,
And make the house one temple deep
Where men should yearn and women weep.
II
To-night my spirit-force should seizeTheir spirits,—hold them bound.
I swore it;—through the scenic trees
Whose green boughs waved around
I gazed,—She came:—upon my knees
I fell—my love was found;
My love who (in the drama) fled
For years, and who, I thought, was dead.
III
She came:—I lifted earnest gazeAnd all my heart grew cold;
'Twas not the actress' well-known face,
But one I loved of old;
(How through the crowded heated place
The fiery music rolled!)
I saw her,—and I saw the sea
Shine, when her eyes fell swift on me.
IV
Ten years had passed since we had met:But her grey changeless eyes
Flashed into mine and held me yet;
Through the gilt walls the skies
Gleamed, and a moonlit sea-shore wet
Before me seemed to rise—
(And still the orchestral music rolled
And wound about me, fold on fold!)
V
For months another had been thereAnd played that part with me:
To-night this woman with the old hair
And eyes,—how could it be?
And rolled that far-off sea
In unison with all the sound
Of music here that held me bound!)
VI
Then in a flash I saw that sheThis single night had come,
Sent by the gods to act with me,—
And wonder held me dumb;
Her dark hair fluttered loose and free,
Full of a strange perfume,
About me,—and my heart became
A godlike winged thrice-potent flame.
VII
This single night—no more again—(I saw it in a gleam)
I held her; she would vanish then,
And with her all my dream:
I felt the power, the joy of men
Who cross some fatal stream:
My nerves were iron, stretched and strung:
All heaven upon one moment hung.
VIII
To-night! to-night! then never more—To-night the prize must fall
Unto my lot; once let me soar,
Or ever, worm-like, crawl!
(Gods! give me this—this, I implore—
This,—or nought else at all!)
Then all that crowded house to me
Grew silent,—like the silent sea.
IX
I never acted so of old,And never shall again
Have force to seize and might to mould
The hearts of gazing men;—
My soul grew calm and great and bold,—
(Thundered the music then!)
I kissed her:—and through all the din
She knew I knew, and meant to win.
X
Her fiery lips clove fast to mine,And my fire thrilled her deep—
(We saw the white waves' laughing line
And the soft blossoms' sleep,—
My being with one leap
Sprang to a height where never yet
Actor's and lover's foot was set.
XI
“To-night,” I whispered, “fly with me”—(How soulless seemed the Play!)
I knew her sweet eyes saw the sea,
She could not but obey,
Mine was she this night,—nor could he,
Her husband, further sway
The heart that, mine throughout the years,
Filled mine this night with fire and tears.
XII
And, when the Play was over, outWe sprang,—and all the night
Around me seemed to laugh and shout
With mad divine delight,
And the gold stars shone every doubt
And tremor out of sight:
We swore that next night we would be
By the old white-winged love-sweet sea.
XIII
And next night not on any StageWe stood,—but by the deep:
And passion's billows ceased to rage,
And love's head fell asleep
Upon her breast,—and age on age
Seemed past our bower to sweep
Harmless and soundless, while we lay
Rapt in wild joy till dawn of day.
SONNETS
(1882)
SONNET I
MARY MAGDALENE
Of all high crowns and sweet the green earth gave,
Or the still height of Galilean air,
Or white Jerusalem that shone so fair,
Or blue Gennesaret with rippling wave,
Not one was sweet or high or winged to save
As hers who flooded with repentant hair
Christ's feet, and brought the ointment soft and rare
Of her own broken heart,—as “for his grave.”
So she first saw him when his spirit rose:—
And through all time, through scene on changing scene,
Who is there, knowing Christ, but also knows
The soiled heart made by soul-deep sorrow clean?
Aye! half his deathless halo Jesus owes
To the harlot: gold-haired Mary Magdalene.
SONNET II
TO IRELAND
O Ireland, Ireland,—yet we love thee well!—
Lo! thy green meadows are made foul with red
Blood-stains by thine own sons' mad folly shed;
The land was heavenlike: thou hast made it hell.
Thou hast set murder on the lonely fell,
And filled the night with shadows of the dead,
And made the moonlight shudder at the tread
Of monstrous deeds too horrible to tell.
And this is love of Ireland! Pause and think.
Would not your love on nobler pinions soar
If it were taught from cowardly crimes to shrink,—
Murder to hate, injustice to abhor?
Ye your own chains are forging link by link,
And barring on yourselves your prison-door.
SONNET III
A SON TO A MOTHER
Ah! mother, hadst thou died when I was young
I could not then have borne it. Then my eyes
Would have lost sight of thee within vague skies:
My youth would chiefliest of all shafts have stung.
I should have seen the far blue hill-tops rise
Peak above peak,—and to the lowest rung
Of the celestial stair I should have clung
Hopeless; or hoping but with wild surmise.
But, now that I am old, I feel so near
Thy dwelling. “Soon” I say with humble glee
“The day will come when I shall follow thee.
Thy country on my vision rises clear;
The whispers of its summer winds I hear;
Its populous streets I very soon shall see.”
SONNET IV
IN VENICE
What sound is this that soundeth through the night,
Like falling drops upon the marble floor,
In Venice?—“Doth some tender goddess pour
Dew from her finger-tips,—or sheds she bright
Rose-leaves in showers upon the marble white,—
Or is it but the plash of passing oar?”
The sleeping husband wondered. Evermore
The drops fell tinkling: many and soft and light.
He woke, and stretched out hand, and it was wet
When he withdrew it. Then upright he sprang!
Half-naked, white and stabbed, with hair like jet,
His true wife lay. A woman's footstep rang
Far-off.—Oh, horror! Stabbed in her young bloom?
Yes. And the worst thing was, he guessed by whom.
SONNET V
GOD AND WOMAN
God made a woman,—and he gazed aghast
For very wonder. There she stood quite white,—
Naked and perfect. In the golden light
Before him like a carven dream she passed.
Her black hair gleamed against her shoulder bright;
Backward, as ever, one quick look she cast:
God watched her slowly vanish, till at last
The pure superb shape glimmered out of sight.
“Now do I for the first time envy Man”
He said. “The woman never will be mine;”
Those dark thick tresses darker than the pine
And sweeter than the rose,—that body wan
And soft and scented like the dim woodbine,—
I cannot own for ever:—but he can.”
SONNET VI
FORSAKEN
Shall thy divineness wither, woman fair
Set in the midst of lonely desert days?
Dost thou lift up to heaven thy weary gaze
Yet see nought round thee but the void blue air?
Have no soft lips of lover kissed thine hair?
Hath thine hand never toyed with myrtle sprays?
Hast thou not wandered by the green-blue bays
In summer, full of dreams no heart could share?
Oh, it were sin to leave thee blossoming so—
Alone, unplucked, unloved:—as great a sin
As to pass by some lily set within
A jungle,—where with heavy gait and slow
The loveless monstrous beasts lurch to and fro,
Piercing the rush-beds with their gaze unclean.
SONNET VII
“GOD LOVES ALL THINGS”
God loves all things. Yes, even the spotted snake,—
The lion and tiger, and the bird of prey;
The spider's white web hanging o'er the way;
The pike who lurks within the weedy lake;
The leopard sidling through the tangled brake;
The shark who spots with blood the Southern bay;
The gnats who muster at the close of day;—
Can God who made, relinquish or forsake?
One day the tiger shall be pure and clean
From bloodshed,—and the human tiger too.
What hate degraded, sweet love shall renew.
Judas along with Jesus shall be seen:
The priest shall cease on Satan's arm to lean,
The pulpit cease to thunder to the pew.
PASSION AND LOVE
SONNET VIII
I
PASSION
The sense of wrong in passion is the power
That lights all passion: 'tis the subtle charm
That makes so sweet the softness of smooth arm
And adds a magic to each swift night-hour.
It is the moon that lights the mystic bower
Of passion,—and the stars between the trees,—
And the strange glamour of the blue-haired seas;
It is that weirdly perfumed lurking flower.
It is the joy within the joy,—the sense
Of curious ecstasy beyond control,—
The unholy holy strength within the soul;
It is the vial of marvellous wine from whence
The red soft lingering honied round drops roll
That fill the human veins with fires intense.
SONNET IX
II
LOVE
The sense of right in love is the one thing
Within it sweetest and of deathless might:
Its self-denial gives it larger light
Than light of summer, or than light of spring.
The sense of duty plumes love's eagle wing
For loftier trackless leagues of sunlit flight:
The sense of duty is the golden ring
Whereby love weds the morn, and baulks the night.
Ah! passion's eyes are dark: but love's are grey,—
Clear-grey, like greyness of the English seas.
One lives within the noon-tide and the day:
The other 'mid the darkling olive-trees.
Both are most sweet: yet each in her own way;—
And when one comes, the other sister flees.
SONNET X
THE LONELY SENTINEL
The sense of passion,—though the passion grew
Not on the licensed legal common tree,—
Made sudden Spring on every side of me
Flute with a music half divine and new.
It made the grey waves flash with sudden blue:
It filled the air with speechless ecstasy;
With golden gleams it lit the cloud-swept lea;
It tinged the world's white flowers with roseate hue.
And why?—I know not. Only God can tell
Why things that on one side seem pale and wrong
Are flushed and holy and sweet and full of song
Upon the other: why in depths of hell
Wherein black Satan's armoured hosts wax strong
Glitters one lonely seraph-sentinel.
SONNET XI
A LOVER TO HIS MISTRESS
Yes: every manner of creature you caress!
That yellow wanton evil-tongued canary,—
You hold the fluffy bird with laughter airy
Within your blue-silk amorous loosened dress.
You love your lover,—I could swear it,—less
Than that red squirrel! Wild coquettish fairy,
Of gifts to eager man so shy and chary,—
Yet all creation you would bend to bless.
With the dark tresses of that horse's mane
You mix your own: you kiss his shining neck:
You murmur pet names without end to him.
If I would kiss you, lo! you start and check
My passion with cold words: then turn again
To that canary on his saucer's rim.
SONNET XII
THE ANCIENT MOON
O moon, thou gazest on our London night!
Thou see'st the Thames' dark eddies roll along:
Thou hear'st coarse vulgar words, or snatch of song:
Jealous, thou battlest with the electric light.
Thou kissest thine old love, the obelisk white
Whom thou didst toy with in the unknown years.
Thou markest many a bridge with stately piers:
Thou followest steam-boats in their throbbing flight.
Yet how thou sneerest at us in thine heart,—
Thou, most aristocratic of all things!—
Thou who hast seen the Assyrian priestess stand
Where pillars pale abut on endless sand:
Thou who hast watched Gomorrha's black-haired kings,
And lent thy lustre to barbaric Art.
SONNET XIII
TWO NIGHTS
The same blue overhanging vault of sky
And the same stars, and the same breeze that leaps
Along the heavens,—and the same moon that sweeps,
Majestic, through the hedgeless fields on high,
Scanning creation with cold ageless eye.
But what a change in two nights—lo! the lone
And solemn desert, and a town half-shown
Under the moon,—and the warm night-wind's sigh;
White columns, and the brow-bound blue-black hair
Of the Assyrian harlot and her face
Hard and clear-cut within the market-place
(And that same changeless golden moon still there!):—
Another night: our Strand and all its glare,
And gay-gowned wantons of another race.
SONNET XIV
BETHLEHEM AND THE GREEN PARK
The barley-fields of Bethlehem,—the sky
Full of far depths of colour strange and sweet;
Boaz asleep,—and Ruth beside his feet
Dreaming—the feathery swift moths fleeting by.
Through his light sleep he hears a woman sigh
And wakes and finds her, and their spirits meet:—
Around them still that hush of Eastern heat,
And the broad yellow sunburnt plains and dry.
Another night:—the centuries have fled,
Fled fast: in London, underneath a tree
In the Green Park a soldier sits, and he
Circles his sweetheart with strong arm, till lo!
From the white barrack doth the bugle blow.
Love lives, though Ruth the Moabite is dead.
SONNET XV
“IF ONE COULD LIVE FOR EVER!”
If one could live for ever!—carrying on
The life of old Assyria till to-day!
See era after era pass away
Yet be oneself,—though all men else had gone.
The sun to-day is the same sun that shone
On Saul and David: why should man, I pray,
Be less long-lived than its fierce golden spray?
E'en the moon lives, though age has made her wan.
O God, to live for ever!—passing through
Each age, and knowing the ecstasy of each:
The same gaze that to-day, quite youthful, falls
On the dim dome and facade of St. Paul's
Having beheld the Pyramids quite new
And flashed response to Cleopatra's speech.
SONNET XVI
THIS CENTURY,—AND THE NEXT
This century knew Napoleon,—and it knew
Byron and Wordsworth, and its heart has heard
The vast French poet's century-equal word;
And it has seen the smoke of Waterloo.
It has seen France and Germany bestrew
The summer plains with dead. It marked the Third
Napoleon drop from empire. It has stirred
With iron keels the sea's untroubled blue.
Now, nearing its august and solemn close,
It has seen Maytime in the Phœnix Park
Shudder at a crime than which no crime more dark
Has ever stained May's hawthorn or May's rose.
It has seen Revolution's first red spark:
Will its child see the towering flame?—God knows.
Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were assassinated in the Phœnix Park, Dublin, on Saturday, May 6, 1882.
SONNET XVII
LOVE THAT ENDURES
Ye poets, think ye that the world will still
Cherish your memory when ye come to die?
Yes, for a little time,—with tear and sigh
Bending above you: for an hour she will.
Then will new song the woods and valleys fill
And new sunrises flush the fickle sky!
Again will passion's golden moments fly,
As shadows race along the wind-swept hill.
Will even the greatest live?—Yes, for awhile.
But ah! the world has endless youth in store
And unborn Shakespeares, Dantes, wait to pour
Song at her feet, and win her fairy smile.
Yet, Love that nought could conquer nor defile
Has its own godhead, safe for evermore.
ODE TO DEATH
When in life's autumn garden lo! the last
Red wind-swept rose doth blow;
When death stands in the austere gateway saying,—
While round him strains of music weird are playing,—
“Thou shalt no further go;”
And all the gladness of the green old earth,
And all her white may-trees?
Will all be new and strange in regions far
Beyond the fire-gleam of the faintest star
That rides the heavenly seas?
Lip touching pale lip, pale hand touching hand,
What shall be waiting there?—
Shall we meet poets true who went before,
Whom we saw landing on the fatal shore?
Shall conquering love shine fair?
Of sweet death waiting for our outstretched hand,—
Or find no flowers at all?
O spirits who have passed us, where are ye?
We left you on the margin of the sea,
Where blue waves rise and fall:
And turned one moment, just to gaze inland
And smell the hayfields' bloom.
When we looked back from cliff-tops to the sea
The waves were there (but grey), and where were ye?
Gone, through the deepening gloom.
We marked a white sail outlined, faint and far,
Upon the horizon dim.
Slowly we turned,—and up the valley-glade
We walked alone, alone, through beeches' shade,
With tightened lips and grim.
Though we have watched so many a gold sun set
Upon that ocean-marge:
Of winds and waters,—but no word flies after!
The distances are large.
“TOO SOON!”
And all the sapphire sky turned grey
In June.
Why wait not, when 'tis close of day
So soon?
Bright-coloured like the laughing skies
Of June.
They passed. Why is it summer dies
So soon?
Then left me lonely, having dreamed
Too soon.
When you had passed, no more it seemed
Like June!
LOVE AND TIME
Steal all its glory from the day?
When once the sun is put to flight,
Are all the heavens for ever grey?
Nay! through the heights and depths of space
The fiery-prowed wild star-ships race,
The Armadas of immensity:
The waves gleamed blue beneath the sun,
But, now the golden day is done,
The silver moon may kiss the sea.
New suns beyond our sun will rise:
Life cannot alter true love's face,
Nor dim the glory in love's eyes.
Just as the waves each morn are blue;
Just as the skies each morn are fair;
Just as each autumn's golden sheaves
Shine out afresh, and golden leaves
Glitter each autumn through the air.
The lordliest shrines and temples fall:
Death's sickle gathers in the grass;
No loiterer can escape his call.
The gods whom man has made and crowned
Lie pale, dismembered, on the ground:
Man bade them reign; Time bids them flee;—
Where once were prisons, now is corn;
Where blossoms smiled, are wastes forlorn;
Where rivers rippled, roars the sea.
The Roman legions poured along,
Beheld the English woods a-flower,
And heard the English billows' song.
Where are they now? The waves that saw
Their legions land with little awe
The waves reck little for they know
That nations, like the whirling snow,
Melt into nought, and pass away.
The whole world trembled at his tread:
He gave the thunder no repose;
At his sole word the streams ran red.
He changed his sceptre for a sword;
He longed to say, “I am the lord
Of every land beneath the sun.
There were two Rulers—God and I;
We threw with dice for sovereignty;
Jehovah lost: Napoleon won!”
The second Caesar passed away,
And once again the world might smile,
And once again keep holiday.
The corn was red at Waterloo,
But there to-day the sky is blue:
Two spectres pass. The flowers have heard
One whisper, “I am Wellington!”
Their soldiers rise not at their word.
Thrill Antony with sweet despair:
Time heard the small smooth aspick hiss;
Time saw the towers of Ilium flare.
In pre-historic dateless hours
Among great white unnamed strange flowers
Time saw the kiss of bird and bird:
When dying Jesus raised his eyes
Fast-darkening to the lurid skies
Time caught his last heart-broken word.
Glitter with love when life was young;
When young stars watched from cloudless skies,
And ruby-throated songsters sung.
Time saw the first kiss, and the last
Will see when passion's moods are past
And blind oblivion waits for man—
Time, who beheld the pencil seized
By God's swift hand when he well-pleased
Sketched out our planet's primal plan.
That heard the chief of poets sing,—
That watched the triumph and the pain
Of Hugo, and that crowned him king,—
That, at the last wild century's close,
Watched Revolution as it rose
Sea-like with blood-besprinkled surge,—
That saw the untrembling guillotine
Cleave through the white neck of a queen.
And heard the tocsin's cruel dirge,—
Of all things earthly nought abides:
Be walls of iron or beaten brass
Yet Time surmounts them and derides.
One day the glory of the Czar
Was glory as of sun or star,
A splendour measureless, sublime:
The next day at his feet the shell
Burst madly, and the White Czar fell,
'Mid laughter from the lips of Time!
Though nations plunge into the night;
Though aging stars give little light.—
We float along our century's stream,
We sing and toil, and love and dream,
But lo! we near the ocean's marge:
Our river-century soon will end
And, swelling into waves, descend
Into the sea-waves fierce and large.
What shall the twentieth century bear?
What ships shall sail upon its sea?
What new stars sparkle through its air?
We know not: only this we know,—
That love, though wild years come and go,
Will wander calm-eyed, gathering flowers;—
A thousand centuries are as one
Day to the never-dying sun
And unto love a few short hours.
A LOVING HEART
That findeth good in all:
A heart that through the summer sings,
And when the cold snows fall:
A heart that feels for others' pain
And makes the weary young again:
That cheers us on our way,
And so itself shall surely find
More joy than words can say.
For what we give to lighten pain
In gladness we receive again.
Stern foes around us stand,
And ripening years have dimmed the light
That gleamed from fairy land:
But never can that light depart
Which flashes from a loving heart.
“YONDER A CLOUD!”
Ever so small a cloud!
'Twill gather to thunder by and bye
And the storm will speak aloud.
Ever so small a cloud—pure white
On the blue sky's spotless space:
'Twill thicken to lurid black by night
And darken the sky's whole face.
Ever so small a cloud:
Yet gloom will gather, and light depart,
And souls will be bent and bowed.
Yonder a cloud! Be it ever so small,
Let the breeze of love awake
And hasten it forth, or hopes will fall
And sorrowful hearts will break.
And the great seas madden and rise,
Ere the fierce waves whiten the whole long shore
And the black clouds darken the skies.
Yonder a cloud! Be it ever so small,
Take warning—cease to be proud:
For world-wide grief, or an empire's fall,
Begins with “yonder a cloud!”
“IF I WERE AS OLD AS YOU!”
So said a child to me,
A child with eyes of fearless blue
Bright as the morning sea.
“If only I were as old as you,
With a great big beard and a hat”—
“Yes, my darling, what would you do?”
“I'd buy an owl and a cat!”
“And a string of amber beads,
And a soldier's suit of splendid red,
And do tremendous deeds.
I'd buy a ship, and a new toy-gun,
If I were as old as you,
And a helmet flashing like the sun,
With a plume of lovely blue!”
Does anything bring the joy
That a ship and a gun, or a cracker's blaze,
Brings to an eager boy?
Whatever I buy, I hear that cry,
“If I were as old as you,
I'd soon have a helmet like the sun,
With a plume of lovely blue!”
CROSS-PURPOSES
“Flowers of the earth and stars of the sky:
Thoughts like stars, and love like a flower,
Blossoms fit for a queen's own dower,
Gifts that a king might long to see”—
“Buy me this diamond brooch,” said she.
“You—why I thought you came from the sky!
Thought you a fairy, deemed you a queen;
Earth for your footstep seemed too mean.
You to ask for a brooch from me—”
“Buy me that necklace then,” said she.
Woman looks at the shops instead.
The lover dreams in his lady's eyes;
But the lady does not dream—she buys.
“Brighter than stars are your eyes,” thinks he—
“Eighteen and threepence, dear,” says she.
POST-MORTEM SURPRISES
I
How full of strange surprises must it be
For those who, struggling upward from death's gloom,
Behold new sunlight gild new shores and sea!
We are so wedded here to our own view,
To our own dreams,—Jew, Christian, heathen, Turk—
It will be hard to find that nought we knew.
The poet who believed that love was fair—
It will be hard, beneath heaven's golden skies,
To see his Jesus kiss a woman's hair.
For those who worshipped at the Virgin's feet
To know she had a husband after all,
And found the joys of marriage pure and sweet.
Who peered beneath the billows of the sea,
And pierced beyond the walls of mist and cloud,
And read the past, and read futurity:
Creation shone,—who named them one by one,
The stars that through the black night slowly sailed,—
Who faced the soulless Force that steers the sun:
Sad soul by soul, unpitied, to its doom,
And stand upon the abyss, close by the brink,
And gaze with steady eyes far through the gloom:
Alone for ever, with no God to speak;
Alone with darkness on the godless sea,
Alone with sunrise on the mountain-peak;
Would be discounted if a God were there
(The sculptor's presence makes each stately limb
Of woman to the thinker seem less fair):
Hath something of the greatness none the less
Of the vast God whose being he denies,
Tempered by man's eternal littleness:
The paltry God the Churches' hands have made,
Finds God within the sunlight on the shore
Or in the silent forest's moonlit shade:
That this world was not all! His one despair
Will be to find that God is living, though
God left no track upon the starlit air.
That there is sweetness in a harlot's eyes:
It will be hard for kings to leave a throne,
And own that flatterers' words were mostly lies.
Their Lord and Master in a lower place,
Perhaps, than thousands worshipped less than he;
To mark some weakness in his soul and face.
Yet shall we find, if heavenly life be given,
The most unselfish head was wisest too,—
The heart that loved the most knew most of heaven.
II
God judges us,—if righteous God there be.
Creeds are as thistle-down wind-tost and blown,
But deeds abide throughout eternity.
Whether you think that legends have their day
Then pass, with all they held of foul or fair,
Or whether still, Church-pent, you praise and pray.
In Venus' limbs a sweetness past man's speech,—
Heaven in the rose, a glory in the fern,
A million jewels on the sunlit beach;
For heavenly splendours glittering past the tomb,
Heedless that God, withholding these, would grant
Your eyes a sight of leagues of furze in bloom.
The sweetness of the land beyond the grave,
Or that Keats felt as never mortal can
The sweetness of the earth he came to save:
Of young love's rapture as none else can feel,
Or that the wild bright ocean's very soul
Was Byron's, past all question or appeal:
And Hugo as God's son, in very deed,
Or in the older manner worship one,
One God-man only, and nought else concede:
For man pure love, as pure love is to be,
And pierced the darkness of hell's lampless night
Retaining still song's tongue, and eyes to see:
Revealed for ever, perfect landscape-art;
That through the song of Shelley music pealed,
Pure as from pure depths of God's very heart:
Or in the blossoms, or within the sun;
Be heathen, Christian—but be not enticed
By any creed to leave true work undone.
Another long for pleasures in the sky;
One finds his music in a young girl's mirth,
And on her lips his immortality:
That only in Christ God's likeness must be sought;
Another toils through a long life to gain
A scholar's insight into ancient thought:
God is with us, Jehovah is our friend:
If self we worship, though our creed be true
We shall be found without God at the end.
GOD'S SERMON
I
Sometimes so God seems to say:
“Must I bear thee through death's portal?
Wouldst thou live beyond thy day?
Why shouldst thou aspire to be
Sentient through eternity?
Sunny dawns and silent eves;
Stars and moon and sun I lent thee,
Ruby flowers and emerald leaves;
Splendour of the sapphire main:
Yet thou cravest to live again!
Clamouring for a joyless boon.
If the heaven that shines so purely
Now with golden stars and moon
Shone for ever thus the same,
Nought it would be but a name.
Of the sights that seem so fair;
Even the sunlight would be dreary,
Sweet lips not what once they were;
Much have I the power to give,
Not the power to bid thee live.
I myself am changeful too:
Through new spheres my being ranges;
Other work I have to do
Than to keep a moth like thee
Plumaged through eternity.
Friendship's pleasure, passion's kiss;
Heart to love, and brain to reason,
Many a month of sunny bliss;
But my last gift is my best—
Peace from living, perfect rest.”
II
Nothing twice is quite the same:
Life's supremest joys are lonely,
Like the God from whom they came.
Only once a kiss is sweet;
Once as one the wild hearts beat.
Through a course of endless hours,
Thinkest thou that thou wouldst treasure
As thou dost the wayside flowers?
No: its coming death bestows
All its lustre on the rose.
Even the form thou lovest best
Passed into thy full possession
On the night it was possest.
Woman, blossom, sunset, sea,
Give their beauty once to thee.
I myself would sometimes give
All I know of heavenly gladness
For the simple right to live
On thine earth for fifty years,
Sharing human joys and tears.
Only in a measure see:
But thou art the full partaker,
Her whole self she gives to thee.
I, who first created this,
Half am envious of her kiss.
Lasteth, yet the mortal gains,
For there's more of rapture in it
Than eternity contains!
Take thy moment's bliss—then die
Happier after all than I.”
FATE'S EQUAL MEASURE
Nor summer's wealth of bloom:
October's days come, dark and hazy,
And clothed about with gloom.
The bleak autumnal wind
Sweeps through the frightened shuddering closes
And leaves no flowers behind.
Through every golden dream
The pallid morning thoughts come thronging
In one long ghostly stream.
But envy not their fate!
Sorrow and blank dismay and treason
Upon their threshold wait.
The clinging kiss shall last.
A thousand foemen wait to sever:
One rapture—then 'tis past!
The still lake boils with foam:
Spent is the green-leafed summer's gladness;
Afar the red leaves roam!
Have death beside their feet.
Lo! what a strange flower-raiment covers
The supple snake's retreat.
Fate's grim unbribed hand deals,
Bestowing pain, and stealing pleasure
From every heart that feels.
DESPAIR
I
Each flower hath fellow-flowers, and every leafMay share its grief:
The golden great stars roll in ordered course
And blend their force:
But on his solitary piteous throne
Man sits alone.
2
The skies have not one tender word to say,Black, red or grey:
The wavelets laugh; their laugh is not for him:
The forests grim
Wake in the morning by the fresh wind blown;
Man stands alone.
3
He hath no share in soulless Nature's glee,Not in the sea,
Nor in the life of plant nor joy of morn
Nor breeze-bowed corn:
Not in the life of flowers when these resume
Their last year's bloom.
4
Man lives alone beneath heaven's burning cope,Devoid of hope;
Meeting by night and day, and everywhere,
Gaunt-browed despair,
And knowing only that time must efface
Him and his race.
PAST MANY YEARS
And towards a wind-swept sea-kissed upland place
Where love was bright:
And round me still the far-off wonder flows
As the red sunset o'er the water throws
Its magic light.
And couldst thou find no solace in my song
Nor sense of rest?
Were the wild blossoms that earth's pilgrims seek
Poor by the flowers that nestle in thy cheek
And in thy breast?
No splendour greater than of gold sun-ray
Or silver moon?
Are there not stars and moons and suns within
The souls who struggle God's high goals to win,
For crown and boon?
How far thou art from love's supreme embrace,
How far from mine!
Thou lingerest in the green vales far inland
And the grey sea's waves win from thy white hand
No loving sign.
Wilt thou traverse the rocky road at last
And win the beach?
Wilt thou discern that where the great seas roar
Delight unspoken dwells for evermore
And love's own speech?
Thy soul for parcel of her force we claim,—
We claim thy power.
Remember that the fairest roses shine
Where storm and sun and cloud and light combine
To brace each flower.
But, by the loving lips of this salt spray
And by this place
And by all memories, if thine eyes I met,
It would be just as if no parting yet
Had dimmed love's face!
“THE SAME FLOWERS BUD, THE SAME FLOWERS BLOW”
But still the eternal rose is red:
The same flowers bud, the same flowers blow
That once ye loved, so long ago!
Ere new-world sorrow of heart was born?
The same flowers bud, the same flowers blow
That once ye loved, so long ago!
Being sweet made sweeter English ways?
The same flowers bud, the same flowers blow
That once ye loved, so long ago!
Coloured blue-grey like Irish skies?
The same flowers bud, the same flowers blow
That once they loved, so long ago!
The blue clear charmed Italian deep?
The same shores laugh, the same waves glow
That Shelley loved so long ago!
Uplifted, and the hill-streams white?
The same hills smile, the same streams flow
That Wordsworth loved so long ago!
But still the sad same world blooms on:
The same flowers bud, the same flowers blow
That all these loved so long ago!
Thy wreath is dust; thy crown is air:
But still the mocking lilies blow
That once we loved, so long ago!
“WHEN ALL THE TOIL IS ENDED”
This dreary land for ever,—I will go
Beyond the regions where the wet winds grieve
To lands of golden morn and crimson eve,
Beyond the snow!
Safe from our darkling weather's changeful stain
And where with silvery voice the clear streams flow
And through the moonlit night the lilies grow,
Beyond all pain,
Health, and the happier sense of lovelier things
Than those that under the fog's dreary reign
Struggle: I'll rest where in some leafy lane
The throstle sings.
And soothe me with soft laughter, and her eyes
Full of all glory woman's love-glance brings
Shall waken old lost joys of far-off springs
And far-off skies.
And deathless Rome; yea, blue Italian seas
O'er which the Southern light-winged zephyr flies,
Waters o'er which the gondola swift hies,
Mountains and trees:
I will return, for all my heart is there;
An exile from her streets and sunny leas
I pine in these thick streets and fields that freeze
For her sweet air.
When as a boy I wandered through thy ways!
Now that the grey is mixing with my hair
I would once more be calm and happy where
I knew bright days.
MAN AND THE DEMIURGUS
God said:
“Are suns on suns not heaped like golden treasure
That I may plunge glad hands in at my pleasure
When thou art dead?
Content?
Have I no lightning-steeds whose neighing is thunder,
By whose eye-flash the heights are cloven in sunder
And smitten and rent?
Beyond
The fairest dreams of man or tribe or nation?
Can I through whose frame throbs the world-sensation,
Can I despond?
Where light-beams dart?
Art thou not fearful, frail worm, of offending?”
“One thing thou hast not,” Man replied unbending:
“My heart.”
“IT WERE BETTER FOR HIM—”
Better be fathoms underneath the deepWhere sea-weeds wash and strange sea-creatures creep,
Thy neck enringed with stone,
Than change the eyes and soft lips of one child
Into the hardened eyes and mouth defiled
That haunt the streets, alone.
A MODERN PREACHER
I
In church, a few,A pale-eyed crew;
Around, the darkness of a starless sea,
And one who guides
Through blind deaf tides
That surge and leap to windward and to lee.
II
Just gathered hereIn hope, in fear,
In doubt, in wonder, a strange wandering band,
In this ark-church
Whose tossed planks lurch
From side to side, these people kneel and stand.
III
“What hope,” they say,“For us to-day?
The old God is dead. What new God canst thou bring
O preacher pale?
Lo! our ship's sail
Shrieks, as the wild wind-scourges lash and sting.
IV
“Preach. We will hearWith eager ear
And wrought-up passionate heart what thou canst tell.
Is there a God?
Why must man plod
Through miles of earth that might be miles of hell?
V
“The lights withinThis church, where din
And turmoil just for one sweet moment cease,
Are glad and bright.
But what wild night
Outside! What hope for man of lasting peace!
VI
“Preach, preach. We loveThy face, above
The old pulpit, full of noble thought and high.
But when we leave
The church this eve,
How wails the wind across black starless sky!
VII
“Steer the ship well,Past shoals of hell,
Past white fierce waters, past the cliffs that ring
With clash of tides:
The wind derides
Our hearts and voices even while we sing.
VIII
“Yet preach thou, friend.All hath an end:
Thy hope, our doubt, the wild world's storm-tossed way.
Steer straight thy church
In noble search
Through lampless midnight for the golden day.”
“A YEAR AGO”
And watched the star-ships slowly sail across the purple night.
He asked me “Did I love him?” Oh, the answer that I gave!
A woman loves but once on earth, but once beyond the grave.
A year ago! a year ago! He has forgotten quite:
But I remember every word of love we spoke that night.
And yet 'tis long enough to prove that woman's hopes are dreams.
I stand again to-night beside the blue Ægean wave:
Again the stars shine out—they seem to shine above my grave.
For oh, a woman loves but once! When once her soul is given
She cannot love again on earth, she cannot love in heaven.
He breathes into another's ear the words he spake to me.
The cold stars sail across the sky, the cold blue ripples break:
I loved the stars and wavelets once,—but only for his sake.
O love, my tenderest hopes were dreams, and now the dreams depart:
You gave me passion for an hour, but I gave you my heart.
THE TWO PROPHETS
I
“There is no death!”—when every day which fled
Murmured, “I carry with me hosts of dead
And pour their souls forth on the soulless air:”
When every sunrise whispered of despair,
Saying, “Ere to-night thou also mayest be led
Along the path thy parents had to tread,
Who heard no voice, nor saw the sunlight there.”
Of the clear certainty that all things die
To announce an endless life beyond death's gloom:
To cry, “There is a God of love and grace;
There is for each an immortality;
There is a power that can unseal the tomb.”
II
After so many centuries would revive
Despair, to man proclaiming “Thou shalt live
For this life only, like the grass or flower.
Hope, young imagination's fairy dower,
Has passed away for ever! Toil and strive
And love. But one reward the fates can give:
Silence. The rest lies far beyond their power.”
Proclaims: “The star that lighted mankind once
Now trembling towards the godless dark is driven!
Save in man's dreams your Master never rose;
The time has come for ever to renounce
All faith in God, and every hope of heaven.”
TWO SONNETS
I
MERCY AND JUSTICE
“Mercy, good Lord,” the sea-beach preachers pray:
“Mercy for sinful man; for he deserves
His doom, and thy great justice never swerves,—
Mercy for man in thy grim judgment-day!”
So they exclaim,—beside the sea-waves grey
O'er which that unconverted sea-gull curves.
And some with craven hearts and cowardly nerves
Bend to the lurid God their words portray.
But I—I stand secluded and apart,
And mix my spirit with the sea's great heart,
And with the voice, as it were, of all the sea
I cry: “Not mercy,—justice, we require;
Be thou true-souled, O God,—and be no liar;
Lo! that much sorrowing man demands from thee.”
II
THE GREAT CHANGE
Of old the singers spake of loving ways
Of God towards man, of wondrous mercies shown:
God was the Giver of all things—man alone
Received, and homage of high love and praise
Was due to God,—altars mankind must raise;
With gladness shout or for transgressions moan.—
But now crime's torrent gushes from God's throne!
God seems to us the sinner in these days.
Of old, it seemed, the heavenly eye pursued
Sinners who fled from it beyond the light,
Cowered in the darkness, trembled at the sun.
Now man demands of God: “But art thou good?
Hast thou, Lord God, in every point done right?
Hast thou loved justice? Yea, what hast thou done?”
THE HOLIER SEPULCHRE
In ages past, when Christian years began;
That, shameless, robbed the human race, and priced
The priceless flesh and blood poured out for man;
Closed up man's saviour in its vaults of night,
Stealing the struggling sunshine from the morn,
In God's name battling with the God of light;
Drove its proud spear-point through man's saviour's side,
Bade man adore no Jesus, but invoke
The Christ it robed in wealth and crowned with pride;
Time's stern strong judgment-sentence, “Thou hast sinned,
And lo! thy legend of unnumbered years
Shall pass, like dreams that leave no trace behind.”
Speaks, half with pity, half in deathless scorn:
Man lifts man's saviour from his second grave,
Lifts from his brow his second crown of thorn.
Is Jesus' resting-place, his timeless tomb:
Christ's newer sepulchre is mankind's heart—
No starless charnel-house of poisonous gloom.
“NOUGHT PERISHES”
Nought perishes. All love-dreams of the pastTransfigured, through all future years shall last.
LYRICS
TOGETHER
In the dawn of life's first May,
When in bright and sunny weather
Sang the birds from every spray.
Clear the heaven shone out above them;
Blue and radiant were the skies:
All things living seemed to love them,
And the Spring gleamed in her eyes.
Hand in hand and heart to heart,
They have borne the sultry weather
And have watched the days depart.
Still she is to him the maiden
Who stepped daintily of old
Through the grass, her apron laden
With bright buttercups of gold.
They will face life's autumn hours:
In the grim November weather
Love will strew their path with flowers.
For their love has ever brightened
Since the first long loving day,
And their happiness has heightened,
Though their hair is growing grey.
HEAVENLY WHISPERS
Somewhere glows a kindred heart;
Yes, though dreary days seem endless,
Though sad springs on springs depart.
If the rich man in his garden
Breathes the incense of the rose,
For the poor man at his window
White and pure the snowdrop blows.
If our silent hearth be lone,
Yet are we not all forsaken,
Dearer far the dead have grown.
Is there one sad soul who hears not
From the land beyond the grave
Loving voices, gentle whispers,
As of souls who yearn to save?
If the depth of heaven be gloom,
If the angel-voices cheer not,
Sound not from beyond the tomb,
Still no soul is friendless wholly;
Each one who the earth hath trod
Hath one Friend, one Friend undying,—
Every soul is dear to God.
THE HIGHER BEAUTY
Let him dream within the eyes
Of his loved one full of sunlight,
Sweeter than the sunniest skies:
Let him find in woman's glances
Theme for passion and for praise:
Let them fill with wild romances
All the dreams of all his days.
And a worthier gift by far
Is the love that crowns each duty
With the crown of sun or star.
Lovely even on earth is woman:
She's an angel from the skies
When she bends to help the helpless,
With God's pity in her eyes.
Beauty's every curve and line,
Worship even more devoutly
Woman's tenderness divine.
Sculptors, painters, ye who build her
Temples in the realm of Art,
Praise beyond a woman's beauty
Woman's ever-loving heart.
“MY QUEEN AND I”
The air was bright with spring:
Warm was the sun, and blue the sky,
And clear the lark did sing.
“O love, will you be ever true?”
“Aye, true till death!” she said;
“True, till the sun forsakes the sky,
Till every star is dead.”
She spoke, and looked up with a sigh:
And then we smiled, my queen and I!
Our path lay through the gold:
It was a perfect August morn,
Sweet as that morn of old.
“How short life seems,” she said;
“How sad to think that love must die,
As spring-flowers all are dead.”
I heard, and looked down with a sigh:
And then we smiled, my queen and I!
With golden leaves around,
Beneath grey sky my love and I
Shall wander, calm and crowned:
Crowned, not with summer dreams that melt
When sets the summer sun,
But with a sweetness only felt
When wedded hearts grow one.
Our looks will meet without a sigh
When we grow old, my queen and I!
“THINE EYES SHALL SEE THE KING!”
When earth's wild wastes are trod,
Thine eyes shall look on God:
Winter shall cease, and change to heavenly spring—
Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty,
Thine eyes shall see the King!
When sorrow's overpast
Him shalt thou see at last,
And tread with him the heavenly courts of gold—
Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty,
Thine eyes shall see the King!
The Vision surely waits
Beyond death's solemn gates,
Awful with light that only death can bring:
Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty,
Thine eyes shall surely see the King.
LIGHT IN DARKNESS
Though no starlight thou mayest mark,
Though the days bring deepening pain
And love's old sweet hopes seem vain,
Though thine eve belie thy morn,
Though thy brows be pierced with thorn,
Though thy path lie through the night,
Christ thy Lord shall be thy Light!
Passing through the vale of dreams,
Faint the mountains seem and far,
Flowers in myriads round thee are.
Yet thou needest Christ to guard!
Soon thy pathway may be barred
By an host as yet concealed:
Then thou needest Christ for Shield!
Each needs Christ for star and sun;
Christ for shield, and crown, and sword;
Christ's sweet welcome for reward.
When the golden gateways shine,
Then may Christ with voice divine
Say to each, “Thou need'st not fear;
We were waiting for thee here!”
“LITTLE THINGS”
Every heart can bless;
Every loving look and touch
Makes life's sorrow less.
Psalms are in the ocean's swell,
But the brooklet charms as well
With its laughter light.
Life and love pursue the sun,
Yet what starry work is done
In the purple night:
Stars complete his task begun
Through the purple night.
Cheers and lifts and speeds,—
Note of wren and robin's song,
Lisp of river-reeds.
Gives the wearied heart repose
As the daisy trim.
Is the road the Master trod
Over-hard for less than God?
Thou canst gaze at him:
Where he triumphed, thou canst plod
Humbly after him.
A FAIRY GARDEN
When we walked in childhood's ways,—
Starlit nights of happy dreaming,
Sunshine through the golden days.
But the moments passed, and left us
Somewhat weary, every one;
And each year of life bereft us
Of some further gleam of sun.
A pure angel from his skies
To watch over childish footsteps,—
And his love beamed from her eyes.
Ah! how many an angel-mother
Here has tarried for awhile,
Then has left us,—and no other
Has the sweetness of her smile!
God will leave us not alone.
Somewhat of a mother's sweetness
Soundeth in a younger tone.
God, who knew our childhood's dangers,
Knew the weariness of life,
Sent the child the mother-angel,—
Sends the man the angel-wife.
LIFE'S PATH
'Tis no use looking back:
The flowers we love and long for
Are further on the track.
Not in the old green valleys
Our haven can be found,
But where the North wind sallies
Across rough mountain ground.
Then ho! for noble climbing.
Life's work is not yet done:
Our work will not be over
Till the last peak is won.
And effort pure and high.
The green seductive valleys
Fade out from heart and eye.
Our path lies over these;
We quit the valley-fountains,
We quit the flowers and trees.
We struggle ever upward:
Upon the mountain's crest,
But never till we reach it,
Our weary souls may rest.
“HOME AT LAST!”
Wild seasons of unrest!
Hope blooming,—straightway dying
On Winter's frozen breast!
Through storm and strife God steers us,
Till storm and strife be past:
This one thought ever cheers us—
We shall win home at last!
Home at last!
Not fruitless is the pain
Of one flower-bud corroded
By harsh November's rain.
God brings the singing season,
And tunes the thrush's lute,
In spite of Winter's treason
Who gazes blank and mute,
Blank and mute!
And leads the years that wane:
The Love eternal heeds us,
And changes grief to gain.
Time lines and grooves our features;
Pain wears our spirits fast:
But God will bring his creatures
All safely home at last,
Home at last!
FLOWERS
SONNET
Mixed with the savour of that central RoseThat fills the temple of my heart with bloom
Float other seemly odours; there is room
For a soft lily tender as the snows,
And by her side a red anemone blows,
And a staunch wall-flower. Each of these I love:
White, red, and yellow banners wave above
The plot of quiet ground where each one grows.
And over them there stands that crimson flower
That, like a picture in a hollow frame,
Thrills the recesses of my heart with flame,
A very torrent of voluptuous power:
Yet from those smaller blossoms in their hour
Scents delicate and floods of colour came.
FOREBODING
SONNET
Oh hold me fast, my darling, hold me fast!I hear the terrible approaching wings
Of Time, like black-plumed pestilential things,
Like dim black-throated swifts with bodies cast
On the loose circles of an eddying blast:
I hear the hoarse reproach his coming brings.
Yea, he shall loosen that pale mouth that clings
To mine,—our passion shall be floated past
But as a red leaf on the autumnal wind.
And, therefore, for the last time, hold me tight,
And shine upon me with thine own sweet light
Of eyes whose magic I was wont to find
Even as summer, delicate and kind;
Even as spring, immeasurably bright.
CONFIDENCE
SONNET
I have written many sonnets of mistrustBut now I brush misgiving from me, dear:
My soul is confident, my brain is clear:
I tread my doubts and misery to dust.
I bid the east wind with a rapid gust
Sweep timid apprehension far from here:
I rest upon your faith without a fear:
I slay my weakness with a final thrust.
I know that thou art certainly as pure
As any snowdrop, and as soft and white:
That, even as the mountains do endure,
So doth the calm inviolable might
Of maidenhood and beauty, and that your
Sweet eyes are as the stars' unshaken light.
VIOLET-EYES
SONNET
Your eyes were grey before, but now they gleamLike violets set within an ivory frame:
So soft and so ethereal a flame
Doth play about them, that to me they seem
As subtle and as shifting as a dream.
Your lips are sweet as violets, and as red
As roses: round about your fair soft head
Hovers a silvery moon-forsaken beam.
What miracles hath Love within his power,
That these clear eyes, that were but sorry grey
A short while since, now bloom like any flower,
Unfolding a most lovely violet ray,
Increasing in its warmth from hour to hour,
And in its tenderness from day to day.
“THE MOMENT CAME”
The moment to die at the palace gate:
And for ever and ever my soul will rue it
That the message came, but came too late.
Why did ye not speak one warning word
Clear, straight, from immortals to one sad mortal
Whose very soul would have leapt, had he heard?
My loved one safe in the sweet safe nest
Now stained with the blood of the dove most stainless
And robbed for ever of sleep and rest?
NEVER MORE
New spring-tide breeze,
New shells upon the shore,
New leaves on trees,—
But never never more
Those blue waves, blue whatever winds might wail or roar.
Locks like the old,
New rose-mouth to adore,
New hands to hold,—
But never never more
The woman's face which lighted all that laughing shore.
Waves loved so well,
Where cliffs their gold flowers bore,
Whose tender tendrils swell
This year,—but never more
Shall crown the brown-haired head they crowned and bound of yore.
FIVE SONNETS
(1880)
SONNET I
THE FACES OF THE FUTURE
Will there be any loving song as clear,
As firm, as sure, as eager, as prolonged?
As loud a lover for as sweet an ear?
As many hymns of worship as have thronged
My harp, through many a sorrow-burthened year?
Would that my spirit but for one strange night
Might pierce the future with keen vision bright—
For but one hour the future's singing hear!
Would that I might for but one moment see
The faces of the future and the flowers
Set on those distant shores in place of thee:
Yea, plunge hot-handed 'mid the future's bowers,
And join its unawakened revelry,
And mark its streams, its towns, its golden towers!
SONNET II
SHOULD I NOT RETURN?
Then should I not return, O love, to thee,
Finding none other bride by no far stream;
No voice that burns the soul with ecstasy,
No living passion sweeter than a dream?
Should I not, swiftly turning, shortly seem
Upon our moonlit cliff-top to alight,
Spreading broad spirit-pinions weird and white,
That strangely in the moonrays, vaguely, gleam?
Should I not laugh to think that I had dared
To search the future, when that future, snared
And captured, sweet within thine hands doth lie?
Should I not smile, returning, at the thought
That, foolish, I through future lands had sought
To rid me of the inevitable sky?
SONNET III
THE CERTAIN SKY
For thou dost brood as certain as the sky
As sweet, as sure, above me; and thy glow
From sacred morn till eventide dost throw
About me, and within thine hands I lie
When the still breath of eventide doth sigh:
If through the future, winged and swift, I go,
Thou art within that future, sweet—and lo!
I fare no better, if death's door I try.
For thou art there within that solemn gateway
White, fair as ever, and the same—and straightway
I feel upon my brow the pulse of wings;
The rustle of the old same plumes sonorous,
The sweet wings' same soft pure air-winnowing chorus;
No change, but closer prison and glad, death brings.
SONNET IV
DEATH TRANSFORMED
Yea, all the face of death, death's bosom, changes;
I pass amid his broad imperious wings;
The warrior black who all the black night ranges
Is as a maid whose red mouth laughs and sings.
About me his resistless arms he flings,
But they are soft as woman's, and his face
As woman's, and his breath about me clings
As woman's—and the whole strange dimlit place
Seems like a lawn, a gladsome grassy space:
“So this is death,” I said, and as I spoke,
Death's arms were bent my body to embrace,
Round me they folded like a lissome cloak,
And in the eyes of death so sweet a thing
I saw revealed, it made my spirit sing.
SONNET V
DEATH'S TENDERNESS
Yea, when death touched me tender was his breast
As thy breast in the vision long ago;
Within the billow of sleep I sank to rest:
Tides crystal-clear above my head did flow.
Absolute peace for almost utter woe
Clothed all my spirit in harness like a flame:
My head sank back, and, sinking backward, lo!
The old immeasurable fragrance came,
The scent of blossoms with no mortal name,
And wrapt me in a regal incense-cloud,
And seemed my very inmost soul to claim,
Bearing it upward in a royal shroud
Through skies, past stars, past suns, past moons and seas,
Beyond the birthplace of the purest breeze.
GOLDEN SHEAVES
I
Through spring and summer we toil and slave,We suffer and strive and dream;
Our ships fly over the sun-bright wave,
Far, far as the waters gleam.
We struggle and wrestle for wealth and gold:
Though many a hope deceives,
Yet some men triumph as life grows old
And gather their golden sheaves—
Sheaves of silver and sheaves of gold,
Glorious golden sheaves!
II
But what is the sheaf that ever abides,That never can fade or pass?
That perishes not when Time derides
The blossoms and sundried grass?
That grows with the autumn leaves:
Yes, all true lovers, when Time slays grief,
Shall gather their golden sheaves—
Beautiful golden sheaves of love,
Beautiful golden sheaves!
III
When sheaves of silver and sheaves of goldShall crumble and rust and die,
Love's beautiful sheaf shall ne'er grow old,—
It is garnered and stored on high.
Faith delivers the heart from fear,
And the righteous soul believes
That all who have toiled in the cornfields here
Shall gather their golden sheaves—
Shall gather their golden sheaves in heaven,
Infinite golden sheaves!
“THE ENDING OF THE DAY”
The very lips of love, and find them sweet:
When death draws near
If then we hear
The unknown song no mortal may repeat:
Love tenderer then than poet ever told
Around us flow,
That we may know
Fruition of the dream we dreamed of old:
Sunrise eternal for us has begun:
If we may reach
The joys past speech
Alone by agony past language won:
Descends, a fragrance stranger than the rose,
On lips that seem
Not in a dream
To win what love conceals till love bestows:
That even a single pang were best away?
If suffering lead
To this indeed
Then death is life and starless night is day.
“A SOUL'S PURE RADIANCE”
I
A soul's pure radiance thrills Death's starrier airAnd shines around the path my loved one trod.
Suffering she bore which few have had to bear:
She rests to-night within the arms of God.
II
And I...God guide me through this torturing dream,Arm me with iron strength and purpose clear:
That She may say, when comes my hour supreme,
“I never left you. Husband, I am here.”
“THE DEAD HAVE NOT DEPARTED”
The dead have not departed,Their forms are very near:
Rise up, thou broken-hearted,
For there is nought to fear.
She whom thou lovest dearly
Is very close indeed.
She sees thy sad soul clearly:
Speak thou, for she will heed.
“CAN I FORGET?”
Forget the green-leafed glade in which it blows?
Can it forget
The shade the tender thicket round it throws?
Can I forget
The bower wherein my flowerlike passion grows?
Forget the green rich grass it glistened through?
Can it forget
The warm soft morning mists of pearly blue?
Can I forget
The hour when morning light was one with you?
Now that my lips have pressed thy lips grown cold?
Can I forget
Can love forget
The hair that shamed the sun with countless gold?
Or can night's robes without a star be spun?
Can these forget
Through whom their jewels and golden wealth are won?
Can I forget
Thee, mine in life, in death—and death is done.
SONGS OF ENGLAND AWAKING
ENGLAND AWAKING
Broke and scattered and vanished, came William's concert soon.
He grasped the hand of the Sultan, and his own from the grasp grew red:
“Lend me your valorous army, when the right time comes,” he said.
And I send no Pomeranian to break his bones in the dark.
If ever to throttle England becomes my brotherly work,
I can throttle her best by the fingers of the woman-strangling Turk.
And when that hour approaches, friend, my hope is in you.”
So the Sultan Abdul Hamid and William the Crafty clinked
Red-stained glasses together, and each at the other winked.
And they did it without bloodshed, but they roused in the West a storm.
For “What's to become of my Army, if the Young Turks change in a night?”
Wringing his hands, cried William: and he hated the dawning light.
For Herzegovina lured him, and the moral strife was brief:
An Emperor lied with an Emperor, a thief hitched on to a thief.
Give the trickster's honours to strategist Aerenthal.
Bismarck, Metternich, taught him, and he learned his lesson well:
And when they cabled, he knew not that they cabled straight from hell.
That a newer nobler Turkey may conquer and grow and thrive!
Such was the Teuton's message, cynical, devilish, dark:
Worthy of statesman Satan, worthy of fiend Bismarck.
As the babes and the younglings whimpered, and the wives and mothers flew.
By Abdul in eagled helmet, or William in fez of red!
Loathing the blood-stained darkness, longing for dawn and light.
Their hearts yearned out towards England, the land no Hamid has trod:
But that was a stab for William, though he trusted in Bismarck's God.
The Emperor apt at sermons, big with a godly fear.
So he prayed to God and Bismarck: and their Dual answer came,
Tongued like the flash of cannons, written in words of flame.
England is old and weary, and the world is sick of her too.
England was always a braggart: but she took three years to beat
A handful of Boers in their kopjes. William, strengthen the fleet.”
That behind the cuirassed German stood a cloven-footed God.
He knew not the God of England, for Christ smiles full in His gaze
And He guides the sons of England, if England walks in His ways.
Wherever he turned that tattered old flag of Britain flew.
“Pile up our naval programmes! On with the ships!” said he.
“Soon we shall hustle England. Leave but the job to me.”
“On the heels of earth's mightiest Navy we intend ere long to tread!”
“The prize is vast,” thought William—“the love of the soul of the sea:
The waves that fought for England may fight in the end for me.”
They heard the taunts of the giant, and his gibes at last sank deep.
Men and women wakened, and the soul of the sea once more
Spake to the soul of the nation, and it listened as heretofore—
Let England rule the waters with a mastering Navy still.
Long enough has the German vaunted, let him build till his shipyards quake,
Let him strain till his sinews splinter—he will never overtake.”
And our inner strifes were forgotten, and one was the loyal word.
Let the German sweat and struggle till his blood-shot eyes grow dim:
Not for him is the ocean, her passion is not for him.
It was not a question of voting. Nay, they voted all alike.
Every vote was a sword-stroke, though need was never to strike.
When the German big preamble and the German challenge came,
Ceased to contend for trifles. What was the suffrage worth
If nothing was left to vote for, with England wiped from the earth?
With passion and deep emotion, with the old delight and awe,
The soul of the sea brought closer, for ever face to face
With the conquering Anglo-Saxon, the one sea-conquering race.
Can lift all earth to a heaven, or sink all earth to a hell.
Militant force on the mainland: flames of hell on the sea.
Britain rules for freedom—if the British Power should fall,
If the Power that pocketed Alsace gets our Colonies well in his grip,
Freedom means violation, a kiss with a fang in the lip.
Blown by our foremost soldiers, that is little indeed to face.
Better compulsory service for the sake of the well-loved land
Than a slave's compulsory service, and cuffs from a master's hand.
Englishmen, Englishwomen, the centuries waited for you.
Yours is the word of the ages: for you the choice that will make
England the arbiter ever, England alert and awake.
Life and death are in balance: heaven and hell draw swords.
But the casting-vote for ever will rest with the wild sea's lords.
Our ships were manned by seamen, each strong man good as a host.
But the wide-winged storm fought for us, the soul of the sea was aflame,
And we know the word of destruction that forth on the storm-wind came.
And far in advance for England lie triumphs beyond all thought:
Triumphs of Art and Science, wonders that no man knows;
Light in the streams of the sunshine, love in the heart of the rose.
And love in the hearts of our women is nought but a grief or a pain
With the roar of unleashed lions, that chimes to the roll of the drums.
Watched but to overrule them, for He loves the soul of the sea:
And the soul of the sea prayed for us, and the sea's great Maker heard
The sob in her passionate waters, the sea's strange glorious word.
Time to learn was given us, and we passed through Africa's hell,
And we bent to our work in earnest, and we won the game at last.
But that was a mere school-lesson: Pretoria lies in the past.
Think of the homes of England! Think of the leaping flame!
Remember the blaze of Bazeilles. “What a city to sack!”
The foot of the German giant, and the giant's foul blow dealt,
Never would horror greater have changed the land to a grave,
For the soul of an English woman is not the soul of a slave.
If all our former battles, our wrestles by land and sea,
Waterloo, Trafalgar, Inkerman, all were mere
Lessons of infant schooling? How if the test is here?
When the land must strike for Empire, or be but a kingdom past?
Rome and Greece sank downward, every dog has his day,—
Every country a splendour, a crown, a change, a decay.
With the stout hearts ready to landward, and the brave eyes keen by sea;
“God strike home for England, if the moment comes to strike!”
A PROTEST
I
Just because I claim for woman highest rank and queenliest placeIn her glory, in her beauty, in her gentle perfect grace,
Do I grieve to see her stooping to a quest the devil ordains,
For the devil it is who blinds her, and the devil it is who gains.
II
Higher than the highest of angels, so is woman in her power:Envied of the stars and sunlight, making jealous bird and flower.
When I wrote of Her triumphant, I was thinking of her eyes
With the force of love within them, and the scorn of liars and lies.
III
Just because on her for ever turns the future of the raceI would have her pure, imperial, flawless both in form and face:
Teaching outline to the sculptor, teaching sweetness to the flower.
IV
When I sang of Her victorious, I was dreaming not of thoseWhose ignoble hateful handling would deflower the fairest rose.
I was singing of the victory of the passionate God who gleams
In the eyes of English girlhood, and sends angels to her dreams.
V
If my words have been distorted, strained and twisted, misconceived,It is woman who has suffered, and the singer who has grieved.
Though a larger danger threatens than the keenest pang to one:
For the soul of woman altered, alters flower and star and sun.
LE FAUX BONHOMME
“The Kaiser told Mr. Hale that King Edward had been hounding and humiliating him for two years, and he was exasperated; that Germany was the paramount power in Europe, and England was trying to neutralize her power; that he (the Emperor) held France in the hollow of his hand, and Russia was of no account since the Japanese War.
“That if a pan-European war were inevitable the sooner it came the better, because he was now ready, and was tired of the suspense; that Great Britain had been a decadent nation ever since her victory over the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, because her cause was unrighteous and ungodly, and Divine judgment was bound eventually to overtake the powerful nation that waged such a war; that the Anglo-Japanese alliance was an iniquitous alliance against all the white races. England was proving absolutely her faithlessness as a Christian nation.”
—New York World, November 22, 1908.When your generals flagged and loitered, when your African wealth was at stake,
I sent for the facts and the figures—devoted the best of a day
To settling for Roberts and Buller the road that their troops should take.
History will do me justice: the ages that come will show
That my heart was one with England's, one if ever a man's
Strong heart beat for England, in that dread ‘Black Week’ of her woe.
And I lose at last all patience. I bubble and boil and chafe.
When Russia and France were plotting, it was I who interfered:
And I wired to Windsor Castle, to tell them England was safe.
I am scheming and building and fitting. Who knows what Japan may say
With her guns to the old-world nations, the Powers of the Continent?
The thunder of German broadsides may change the fate of a fray.”
And he spoke in the ear of the writer, the Yankee editor, Hale.
And these are the thoughts he uttered, a lesson for all concerned,
And once for all with a vengeance the Kaiser lifted the veil.
That the moment is ripe for decision. If war in the end must be
I would rather suspense were over, I am ready to draw the steel:
All that I ask for reward of putting the match to the flame
Will be Egypt, poor little Egypt: this, and the mad delight
Of feeling myself a war-god, a giant force in the game.
Looms and rises before me—to prison no Emperor now
But to darken the splendour of England, to hunt and humble a King?
To chase and harry the hunter, to steal from the topmost bough?
Who, seeing the Transvaal farmers by England oppressed, downtrod,
Shall arise as a Priest and a Prophet, majestic, immaculate, grim,
The sword, the revolver and rifle, the scourge and the dagger of God?”
On an Englishman, then on a Yankee, the Kaiser foisted his freaks.
And this was the nations' comment, the judgment of old and of young:
“Listen and learn from the Kaiser. Believe not a word that he speaks.”
LORD ROBERTS' SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS
Monday, November 23, 1908.
Mute and foiled and cowed and futile, things of clay and shapes of wood,
Rose a soldier, and he pleaded with the wavering multitude.
While the querulous lords around him mixed in conclave and conferred
England's heart made solemn answer, and the starriest heights were stirred.
Brought the halting nation grimly, yet superbly, face to face
With the God who guards our England by His sword-arm and His grace.
Dawned in fire upon our planet, made man lordlier, kinglier far,
For the destiny of England shapes the future of our star.
And the vast magnetic currents through the suns and systems roll
Hurled from planet unto planet, as on earth from soul to soul.
Here in London, in the dimness of the English winter day,
Drew his sword again for England, and he flung the sheath away.
Spake the Soldier to the lordlets, and his fervent words were borne
Far beyond the English borders, to the sunset and the morn.
Scoffed at ever by the weaklings, welcomed ever by the wise.
England forth upon the peoples with a stainless splendour gleams,
Men will grasp what that word scattered of a thousand hellish schemes.
But he shuddered at the trumpet as the sudden blast was blown
And he knew his hour was over, and his boastings all outgrown.
Came like lightning through the midnight when with words like strokes of swords
Roberts spoke for truth and England to the people, and the lords.
THE MODERN WOMAN
I
What an abyss for woman! Lo, what a depth to fall!She who might be the helper, angel and guide of all,
Changed to a frenzied creature, abject, lunatic, wild,—
Something of hell in her madness, something in her of a child!
II
Curses on those who did it, the elder women who taughtEnglish girls base lessons, poisoning soul and thought!
Cursed be these, the liars, who troubled the young girl's creed—
Told her that men were reptiles, reptiles they who mislead.
III
Cursed be these who, knowing nothing of love or of man,First the pitiful story of wrong and deceit began!
What can set right or atone for it? Nothing, till hell's waves whirl
Round the throat of a woman who lies to the soul of a girl.
IV
Feminine tongues, snake-skilful, have brought us even to this.Women who never have known the love in a strong man's kiss,
Never have known sweet passion that lights the land and the sea,
Never have known, nor will know it, while stars and the sun shall be,—
V
These, these most, these only, have changed the current of lifeTo a torrent of blood-red waters, and changed love's joy to a strife:
Mixing their base ambitions, their lust and anger and greed,
With the thoughts of flower-white girlhood, with our maidens' pure sweet creed.
VI
“Man is only a cipher”—so they, insolent, say.“Ours is the sex victorious. Ours is the world of to-day.”
So they write foul lustful stories, and they poison England's life;
And they leave no English maiden fit for an English wife.
VII
In the old glad days our women were noblest of all upon earth:Purest, happiest, sweetest; history's fairest birth.
But now they are changed and defiant. They have learned from the lips that lie
That man is a brute and a satyr, developed straight from the stye.
VIII
That is the teaching pestilent of the elder women whose liesHave saddened the sun of England, and clouded the English skies.
Woman was once a flower, a sunlit beautiful rose.
Now she carries a dog-whip, and slashes at friends and foes.
IX
War between woman and woman, mad war, war to the knife,War between woman and mankind, war between husband and wife,
The suffragettes' flag, Defiance, in a fiercer hurricane floats.
X
Contempt for the old traditions, scorn of love and of man,Hate of the older England, the merciless creed of a clan.
A strange-eyed group hysterical, women in nought but the name,
This it will mean for England—and ours, our own, is the shame.
XI
Shame on the manhood of England, that has let this dark thing riseTo strength and to vehement boasting beneath unvigilant eyes!
Shame on the manhood of England, that has let this come to pass!
Shame on the men of putty, seduced by the women of brass!
XII
Man was the leader of woman: she looked to the man to lead.He has failed in his sacredest duty. The moment he flinched and fell
Woman became the leader, and is leading her sex to hell.
XIII
Certain the end is, certain. If a virile race should arise,The sceptre will pass from our people, abject before our eyes.
Never a nation prospers, not even the nation of bees,
Where the feminine hosts are the leaders and the males are dwarfed and at ease.
XIV
“Read not the older authors. Let Charles Dickens alone.His women are namby-pamby: abject slaves we disown.
Rather study Lake Harris: a seer and a god upon earth.
XV
“Man is a lust organic, a tyrant lewd and supreme.Woman no more shall be subject. Women, wake from your dream!
America's girls shall be leaders. The scorpion, man, shall be trod
Deep underfoot for ever, by woman the star-crowned God.
XVI
“Keep but the stripes for mankind—vitriol, whips and blows.The stars are wanted for woman, who, scorning a slave's repose,
Arises, terrible, vengeful, a Mother with eyes of flame,
Driving her spouse before her, a man-form timid and tame.
XVII
“Woman must be the chooser, the arbiter. Hers is the wordIf man should rebel when we treat him—much as a cat or a tyke—
The women who spit at policemen will never be slow to strike.
XVIII
“We have lost the sense of smelling. We leave it to man who knowsThe scent of a rose from an onion, the scent of a shrimp from a rose.
In our progress onward and upward, the animal gifts we resign:
And garlic is even as violets, and drainage is like woodbine.
XIX
“Our lips are not eager for rapture of passion, for this we scorn.We are passionless, vigilant, virgin, loud-tongued, sexless, austere.
Do you doubt us? Hand us a dog-whip. That argument makes all clear.”
XX
Such are the words of woman, literal, monstrous, fact,To man and to woman her sister, the prelude to monstrous act.
Cursed be all such women! Blessed the first that goes
Along the street in the sunshine, sweet, a girl and a rose!
See Mrs. Swiney's book, The Awakening of Women. The authoress maintains that women have largely lost the sense of smell, and are consequently diviner and higher beings than man: smell being, in her opinion, the lowest and most animal of the senses, and therefore the first sense lost in an upward evolution.
Passion is only admissible, as a means for the procreation of children, according to the repulsive teaching of the neo-American female physiologists.
THE PATRIOT VOTER
I
“Wildest talk of an invasion! How can ever such thing be?Give the suffrage to the women, give the vote to them and me.
Trust us—trust no ships or weapons—trust not bayonets or the sea.
II
“Roberts tells us—Roberts warns us—he is talking ‘nonsense’ quite.I and God can put the Germans by our double vote to flight.
If I lift my star-ringed finger, they will vanish in a night.
III
“No: it does not ‘interest’ us, all this talk of swords and tars.We are daughters of the future, we are sisters of the stars,
And our dreams are dreams pacific, not man's murderous cult of Mars.
IV
“We have never read a history, we know nought of gun or boat.England does not ‘interest’ us. Let the throne and country float
Straight away to wreck stupendous, so we only get a vote!
V
“Little England is our England. Perish India, mount and plain!Let some German, or some Russian, o'er the dark-skinned myriads reign!
Nought to us the thing can matter, if our petty ends we gain.
VI
“Are the Indian mobs seditious? Send a peaceful message there.Is an Englishwoman murdered? Hold a meeting, and declare
That if several more are murdered, we shall think it most unfair.
VII
“That's the way to hold an Empire. It was sternly, keenly won.But a swordless grasp may keep it, let no flash be seen of gun,
Not a word be heard of anger, till our mission's fully done.
VII
“This indeed is our proud mission—what was given us, to betray:What was trusted to our keeping, with both hands to fling away:
What was won by battling centuries, to cast from us in a day.”
POWDER AND PATRIOTISM
I
No doubt it is good and pleasant to find in the whole wide earthValour and strength and beauty, virtue and grace and worth:
It is right to be just to a Frenchman or German, an alien birth.
II
Victors in Art and in Science may Russian or Prussian be.A German may study triumphant the nerves of a gnat or a flea.
Be large-souled, cosmopolitan. It matters nothing to me.
III
Never be insular, narrow. Teach your children at schoolNever to fight or be furious—to follow the golden rule.
If a fool should strike at your left cheek, turn your right to the fool.
IV
This is excellent teaching: this is the fashion and mode.Yet there are articles two, unchanged in my militant code—
That our bayonets refuse to bend and our powder consent to explode.
V
Russians, Germans, Italians, Austrians, Japs and Turks,All are hearty good fellows, pleasing in ways and works:
Yet they have guns, torpedoes, swords, destroyers and dirks.
VI
Taking account of all things, thinking still in the roadThat Nelson and Wellington followed, I cleave and cling to my code—
That British bayonets shall curve not, and British powder explode.
The British powder is said, on good authority, to be greatly inferior to the German. —December, 1908.
A WORD FOR THE ARMY
“Roberts is nothing but a soldier. He naturally sees as a soldier....
“The military spirit is the very child of the sex-devil—dividing into dualistic ranks class against class, and nation against nation, and sex against sex! ...
“I believe in a former letter I referred to a future life in which the Ego would no longer see, through sex bias, the ‘things that belong to God.’”
—English lady, and would-be voter.“To Carlyle, nineteen centuries after Christ, as to Thucydides, four centuries before Christ, war is the supreme expression of the energy of a State as such, the supreme, the tragic hour, in the life-history of the city, the nation, as such....
“In the light of History, universal peace appears less as a dream than as a nightmare which shall be realized only when the ice has crept to the heart of the sun, and the stars, left black and trackless, start from their orbits....
“With us, let me repeat, the decision rests, with us and with this generation. Never since on Sinai God spoke in thunder has mandate more imperative been issued to any race, city, or nation than now to this nation and to this people.”
—“Reflections on the Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain.” By J. A. Cramb, M.A., Professor of Modern History, Queen's College, London.I
1
Hark to a patriot's warning, worthy to store and keepIn our minds as a boon for ever, a prophecy sage and deep!
—“‘Roberts sees as a soldier’: this and nought else is he.
I am a woman-voter. As I woman, I think and see.
‘Roberts is only a soldier.’ I am for love and peace:
So I war with the old sex-devil, the devil of Rome and Greece,
The devil that so divides us. When sex with sex is one
The unified human creature will arise and shine as the sun.
2
“We must be unisexual. One sex, one alone,Stands erect in the heavens, and stares at God on his throne.
All will be well when woman, with power and victory shod,
Destroys the division of sexes and blends with the sexless God.
From this division of sexes evil and sin had birth.
If man had been woman, and woman had never been woman on earth,
All had been well with the peoples, clothed in beauty and grace:
Bearded and moustached woman will save and exalt the race.
3
“The old mere masculine error of worship of form must cease.Our booted and tight-laced beauty eclipses the beauty of Greece.
We are the form triumphant: no forms that Phidias saw
Could stir the beholder to terror, shaped by a loftier law
Than the law of sex we abolish, the law of the man and the maid,
Fit for the animal two-sexed, the law whose lessons degrade,
The law of the flowers' obsceneness, the law of the birds' loose joy,
The law that our teachers have given us the mandate now to destroy.
4
“Why will you understand not that sex shall be overthrownAnd the perfume of blossoms scattered, and the scent of a rose unknown?
For our sanctified nostrils smell not, and our glorified nerves are vexed
No longer by dreams of passion, that thrill not the forms unsexed.
But the chain of the old sex-devil was the firmest chain of all.
Following scent, the senses will drop from us one by one
Till we hear not music, and feel not the lewd male warmth in the sun.
5
“Men will be lifted and gladdened when intellect keen they findIn woman. The soul's embraces, the kisses of mind and mind,
Will wholly supplant the kisses from lip to lip that flew
When the young world laughed like a satyr, and its passionate young lusts grew.
From the graze of the tiniest pin-point to the thrust of the savagest sword
Every pain is by reason of man the reasonless lord.
Change but man to a woman, pare but his tiger claws:
Then Eve may re-enter her Eden, as man the devil withdraws.”
II
1
But the birds and the blossoms answered, and the universe of God,Its hills and its flower-sown valleys—“If sex were lonely and one
The stars and the moon would perish, and night would involve the sun.
Not a star could gaze at its Maker, nor could God's eyes gaze at a rose,
If the glory of sex were abolished, the splendour of love that goes
Flaming from planet to planet, flashing from height to height,
For the passion of woman for man is the passion of God for light.
2
“The passion of man for woman is the passion of God for the rose,His love for the soul of its sweetness, the marvellous scent that grows
Pure and soft on the senses till we know that the rose is one
With the passion of woman the blossom, with the passion of man the sun.
If the sexless lie and murderous that the sexless women have told
All things sweet must vanish, flowers no more could be:
And the radiance purple or sapphire would fade from the fields of the sea.”
3
Love and battle together: this is the law of the race.Strength and the masculine sword-arm: feminine curves and grace.
So hath the Lord designed it: so are his strange thoughts hurled
From man to woman, from woman to man, and from world to world.
Conflict, war, for ever! Palestine, Rome and Greece!
Conquering Goths and the Vandals! Races never at peace!
One thing only is certain: that Mars was armoured and shod
With fire and his red sword sharpened by the hand of actual God.
4
Nobler the ends for ever of the desperate strifes may be:Clearer her voice and her mandate as Nelson and Wellington meet:
The one with his word to our army, the other guiding our fleet.
But never till all stars darken and a sunless sky grows cold,
Never while morning's mantle is broidered on boundless gold,
While lives and the honour of women turn on the stroke of a sword,
May we put the steel and the scabbard back in the hand of the Lord.
5
Never—as Ruskin told us—can we draw diviner breathThan in that great game of battle “where the stakes are life and death.”
So hath the Lord ordained it: so must this great thing be:
While a sword can flame in the sunlight, or a ship's gun flash on the sea.
Deep in the heart of our nation is love of the true and right;
Sternest passion for justice, passionate search for light.
While in the world are falsehood, treachery, craft and crime,
Armies of unseen warriors call on the sons of time.
III
1
Hear not the voices of women, sent to cajole and mislead,The elder deceiving the younger, spreading a sexless creed:
Wholly divorced from England, a danger and curse to the land,
For their craft would weaken our manhood, and wheedle the sword from the hand.
For the sake of the nobler woman, the woman whom Dickens drew,
Milton and Shelley and Shakespeare, the woman tender and true,
Pure and divine and gentle, the woman whom England breeds,
England, England only, hear not the false-tongued creeds.
2
For the sake of the women of England, silent, loving unheard,Those who have not yet spoken the sweet imperative word;
For the sake of the trust reposed in us, never reposed in a land,
While the golden chance is given us, before the hour has fled,
Vote, ordain, that an army, noble and nobly led,
Shall spring from the manhood of England, armoured in truth and light
Passionate only for justice, stern alone for the right.
3
Once to a race, once only, Time speaks the imperial word.There are other races ripening: there are other clarions heard.
Still the chance is before us, and evil counsellors call,
Saying, “What do we want with an army? Our ships can answer for all!”
If we heed the smooth-tongued pleaders, whether men or women they be,
If we add not a nation's army to a nation's strength at sea,
Destruction huge, undreamed of, on a craven land may leap;
Our fathers won at the sword-point, and the sword alone can keep.
4
But surely the call will be answered. Surely from hand to hand.The signal torch will hasten, till its bright flame fills the land.
Surely from woman to woman the clear strong word will fly:
“To part from the love of England is worse, far worse, than to die.”
To say that the old Field-Marshal, urgent for England's sake,
Was talking but as a soldier, to sneer when a world is at stake,
This—and a woman did it—is worse, ignobler far,
Than war, though war be a demon, and war's red crown be a scar.
5
How if God “sees as a soldier”? How if from height to heightThe bugle of endless battle peals for the endless right?
How if thunders the thunder, lightens the lightning's flame
Ever in scorn of meanness, ever in Love's own name?
How if an army knightly, strong through love of the land,
How if an army defending fields no foeman has trod
Strikes with the force stupendous of the sword and the passion of God?
THE ELEVENTH HOUR
I
Still an hour is left to hearken: still an hour is left to wake:Still an hour to stifle discord and join hands for England's sake.
England, generous, largely trusting, asks what course will Asquith steer?
Asks for his sake, not for her sake, for her brightening road is clear.
II
Yet a moment's space is left him. Once for all he must decide:Flinch and cower and lapse and perish, crawl and whine and skulk and hide,
Or stand forth an English statesman, stronger when the sword-blades gleam
And the thunder-clash of conflict scares the hucksters from their dream.
III
But if craven be the answer, if we hear some timorous plea,From stern city unto city and from furious sea to sea
Will the Empire's verdict echo, flashed along the wires of time,
Judgment endless, unexampled, on an unexampled crime:
IV
“Leave to Asquith and McKenna, and the anti-English crewWho could twist and cant and shuffle, while the grim risk deadlier grew,
As they tumble from their benches and regain their jackals' den,
The contempt of English school-girls and the curse of English men.”
RETRIBUTION
Seek to win and grasp the Trident, rule the waves with sovereign sway,
Our bold striving, our whole effort, is to fling the gift away,
To procure a moment's respite, one more instant of delay.
We are sapient trusty Sea-Lords, all we do is wisely done.
If we choose to work in darkness, why let in the dangerous sun?
All is ready: armour-plating, mast and halyard, shot and gun.
Rings the German bright war-trumpet on pale Europe's listening ear!
We will blow a friendly bugle, for our bugling friends to hear.”
And a stormier Trumpet sounded, for it thundered forth the close
Of an era of deception, lies and frauds and shifts and shows,
And a fiery retribution on our leaders, not our foes.
SONNETS OF EMPIRE
SONNET I
A PRIME MINISTER
With clank of hammer and with clink of steel
The German dockyards echo, day and night.
Unnumbered legions ripen for the fight
While English statesmen fawn and cringe and kneel.
In English dockyards men without a meal
Stand idle, sullen, in most piteous plight.
Asquith, found brazen in the whole world's sight,
Stamps truth to dust with a most shameless heel.
Our Navy chained, mishandled, and held back,
Pants feebly along the inexorable track,
While the grim German Navy swells apace.
Though this man knows and England knows he lies,
No thunder threatens from the silent skies
And no truth's Angel smites him in the face.
SONNET II
A PRAYER
That these may pass from power, and men may rise
Born of the moment, equal to the time,
Keen-eyed to probe the black depths of a crime,
Most proudly fearless, mercilessly wise!
Armoured to win the incalculable prize
A nobler England flashes forth, sublime,
Whose fleets shall carry peace from clime to clime,
Or thunder war, till the last despot dies.
One moment of sharp struggle grim and grave,
Then with her heel upon the Arch-Serpent's head
May England stand, she who just now was dead
And no man deemed that God or man could save!
But now her feet are swift upon the wave
And golden morning lightens round her tread
SONNET III
A CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER
“Lord Savile, speaking at Eakring in support of Mr. Hume Williams, Unionist Candidate for the Bassetlaw division of Notts, said that 200 members of the House of Lords had been in the Army and Navy, and seventy served as volunteers in the South African War.
“What was Mr. Lloyd-George doing while these peers were gallantly fighting for their Queen and country, and England was mourning the loss of so many brave sons? He was sitting comfortably in the House of Commons. This was the man—this miserable Little Englander—this enemy of his King and country—who now sought to destroy the Lords, and who considered no device too mean or low to attain this end.”
—Daily Mail, December 23, 1909.The straight good thrust!—and every English soul
That watched the blow felt that the stroke was meet.
When true men speak, base demagogues retreat
Or snarl and foam, furious beyond control.
Remember how this man, when horror stole
From home to home with red news to repeat,
Sat with the dogs who yelped at each defeat
And louder grew, while darker grew the goal.
If in some Dantesque fashion stern and great
Could fall, would not this man be hurled by Fate
Far from the stars, the sea-waves and the sky,
For ever doomed to twist and writhe among
The venomous refuse of his own foul tongue?
SONNET IV
PERFECT IGNOMINY
To tax the rich and make the poor man's lot
Harder; to watch the German fleet expand;
To leave our Navy weak and undermanned;
To hear truth told and alter not a jot;
To shuffle, quibble, drivel, palter, plot;
To skulk round corners, lest some woman's hand
Strike; to give aid to every alien land;
To leave our working folk to starve and rot;
To clip the Army and curtail the Fleet;
To cringe to every rowdy in the street;
To cadge for votes, half knave, half smug-faced fool;
Was this enough? Nay, he must add to this
A lecherous longing for the Irish kiss,
A shameless rank adultery with Home Rule.
SONNET V
VICTORY
At the General Election of January, 1910, the Unionist Party, in the face of lying and misrepresentation unprecedented in English electoral history, secured a net gain of 105 seats.
Breaks, and a newer nobler day begun
Restores to England gladness and the sun.
'Mid lies and deeds too base for aught but scorn
Rulers 'mid lies and base devices born
Feel death upon them, see their brief reign done,
And watch the swift sands through the hour-glass run,
Crime-smeared, by foul dissensions racked and torn.
The traitors slowly pass into the night
With furtive wolf-like gaze and shackled hands,
While England in the golden sunlight stands,
Her eyes made glorious with imperial light,
And one wild trumpet-blast proclaims her free
From dawn to sunset and from sea to sea.
SONNET VI
“ONCE AGAIN”
What is he who floods our ears with speech in flood?
See the long tongue lick the dripping hand that smokes and reeks of slaughter!
See the man of words embrace the man of blood!”
Swinburne's poem, “The Commonweal, a Song for Unionists”: published in the Times on the eve of the Home Rule Election of 1886.
Another long tongue licks another hand,
And once again the battle must be fought
As though the former strange great fight were nought.
Wrath, doom and darkness, shadow all the land.
Left are a few—a staunch unbroken band
Who will not bow the knee. Unbribed, unbought,
They give their lives, their prayers, their toil, their thought,
Freely; and if they fall, their fall is grand.
Men who loved England, when her nobler heart
Tore Gladstone's webs and sophistries apart
And wrenched the clean truth from him without fear,
Stand firm: while all wise spirits and faithful pray
That scorn may sweep such Ministers away,
Lest blood should stain the Coronation Year.
SONNET VII
A LIBERAL PROGRAMME
Though Gladstone erred, it was a Titan's sin.
But his successors—Liberals? What of these?
To keep in place by crawling on their knees
Through muddiest Labour bogs, or plunging in:
To make five hundred Peers, all on the grin,
'Mid scorn of proud Dominions over-seas:
Shameless, to drink shame's blackest filthiest lees:
To play with flames of War, so they but win:
This is their plan. To build their power on lies:
To toss each dog the sop that satisfies:
Then, once their project is in perfect swing,
To prostitute the Flag 'neath Redmond's feet,
Reduce our Navy to a fourth-class Fleet,
To sell the nation and coerce the King.
SONNET VIII
“BRAVE WORDS!”
“I will suppose that owing to some cause the Liberal Party was called upon to deal with this great Constitutional question of the Government of Ireland in a position where it was only a minority dependent on the Irish vote for converting it into a majority.
“Now, gentlemen, I tell you seriously and solemnly that although I believe the Liberal Party itself to be honourable, patriotic, and trustworthy, in such a position as this it would not be safe for it to enter upon the consideration of the principle of a measure with respect to which at every step of its progress it would be in the power of a party coming from Ireland to say: ‘Unless you do this and unless you do that we will turn you out tomorrow...’
“Not only the Liberal Party, but the Empire, will be in danger, because questions of the gravest moment and of Imperial weight and of vast consequences may come forward, and there will be no party qualified to deal with them in that independence of position which alone can secure a satisfactory and an honourable issue.”
—Mr. Gladstone, speaking at Edinburgh on November 9, 1885.Brave words!—But three months later he betrayed
England, himself, and Ireland. He forbore
To keep the “serious solemn” oath he swore.
All that his hands had built up, he unmade.
Men, foul with blood, he fondled and obeyed.
Warned us what not to do, then did far more.
A trickster's shuffling meanest game he played.
First having spoken truth, he did the lie.
Invoking “Empire,” next he chose to stake
Empire upon the casting of a die.
He sealed his murdered honour in the tomb:
Then, with a people weeping for his sake,
Marched madly towards the inexorable doom.
SONNET IX
OUR “MODERATES”
I marked the Hell that will be. There I found
With thinnest star-flame given them for a light
Our “Moderates,” and I counted in that night
Grey, Haldane, Morley, Birrell, hound by hound.
Alive and damned, by his own falsehoods bound,
Birrell felt Ireland's hate like poison bite:
Morley, with India saved in his despite,
Had India's curse to hold him underground.
I watched in dust and chains the docile Crewe
Who sneered at Roberts, yet no lightning slew:
Who, 'mid the laughter of the House of Lords
Feeblest and foolishest of all things born,
Too weak for wrath of man or woman's scorn,
Moved to send Germany our broken swords.
SONNET X
THE CHARGE OF THE PEERS' BRIGADE
Asquith's five hundred Peers! Brave souls who stoop
When Redmond foams with slaughterous intent
To be his serving-men: bold warriors bent
Like reeds when Dillon's Irish curse and hoop.
Weighted with unctuous phrases till they droop,
Chaste flowers of choicest Nonconformist scent,
May not their robes be splashed, their ermine rent?
Hell's scorn may greet and blast the godly troop.
Think how tumultuous England will deride,
Think how our kindred o'er the seas will jeer,
As each proud noble marches to his place,
His belly puffed with hopes, his brain with pride,
His past anonymous, his future clear,
Gold in his hands, and Judas in his face!
SONNET XI
FIELD-MARSHAL EARL ROBERTS
He told the truth to England.—Never yet
Has any told the straight truth without fear
But England's deepest soul has given an ear.
The Commons paltered, timorous statesmen met:
Not one would trust the nation. 'Mid regret,
Hate, anger, indecision, dawns the year
That should have brought the imperial moment here.
Lurid at sunrise, how will this year set?
One thing we know—that one man spoke the truth
And warned a palsied people. Once he drew,
And lit the darkness with a sudden sword.
He shamed our craven Church, our cowardly youth,
Our men debauched in brothel or in pew.
He wielded, once, the lightning of the Lord.
SONNET XII
M. MÉLINE AND MR. ASQUITH
Once, only once, a group of men held sway
As wholly false and despicable as those
Whose grovelling souls dishonour and depose
Freedom, inveterate serfs whom slaves obey.
Till the black Dreyfus night-mare passed away
From wakened France when truth and Zola rose,
Méline was Asquith.—At one victim's throes
Tempestuous France grew armed, to mock or slay.
But what of men as truthless and as coarse
Here, who, for some malign nefarious scheme,
Plunge on from crime to crime without remorse:
Who, with mad curse and gibe or vulture's scream,
Cry, till their cowardly senseless throats turn hoarse,
“Empire is but a bauble or a dream?”
SONNET XIII
ENGLAND DECADENT
If we are doomed to watch the mighty land
That warriors' swords and singers' souls made great
Reel like a helmless vessel on her fate,
Saved by no mastering voice, no pilot's hand:
If leaders take to flight when fools withstand:
If, called to manhood's service for the State,
Men tremble and argue, plead and hesitate:
If we turn suppliants, who could once command:
If England's arm has lost its power to strike,
If England's heart has lost its power to feel,
If England's tongue has lost its power to speak
Truth to her statesmen like a thunder-peal,
War would be better; wherein strong and weak
May perish, undishonoured, all alike.
SONNET XIV
CHRISTMAS, 1910
“Watcher, what of the night?”—The night is black
For the most part, but here and there a star
Shines forth,—how few and faint, how dim and far!
The thunder of guns upon the forward track
Is ceaseless. Limp and flabby, soft and slack,
From ball to concert, club to motor-car
Our “men” escort our “women.’ On a par
The sexes seem, for sex alike they lack.
Haunted by dreams of old Victorian days
Poets and thinkers contemplate, alone,
The ruins of an Empire half o'er-thrown:
Watch sparks predicting no bright Christmas blaze
But conflagrations kindled in wild ways,
Saddest and fiercest that this land has known.
SONNET XV
THERE AND HERE
On December 21 and 22, 1910, two English officers, Captain Trench and Lieutenant Brandon, were tried at Leipzig, for espionage. They received a singularly fair and generous trial.
Ministers kicked by Socialistic feet
Or hoofed by Redmond's lambs that roar and bleat,
Now with mild accents, now with lungs of brass.
There, as from this distracted land we pass,
Militant order, tranquil and complete:
A German Army and a German Fleet
Backed by Crown, nobles, peasants, people, en masse.
There, a fair judgment given by generous men
Who, safe and unassailable at home,
Conscious of strength, can hold an even way:
While, here, our furious anti-patriots foam
And gnash their teeth like vicious curs at bay,
Or plot with Lloyd-George in some miners' den.
SONNET XVI
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
To count the swallows flying o'er the pond
Or circling round the pump: to sit and doze
While nation after nation gains and grows:
To march thus far, but not a step beyond.
To win an Empire—hugely to despond,
To hurl it from us: the Election shows
That half the nation thus decides. Who knows
What spell has fallen from what enchanter's wand?
We who dictated are content to bend:
To watch our fleets rejected of the sea,—
India, South Africa, in alien hands:
To hear the savage laughter of the lands
Crying, “This was England once. Now this is She;
Proud at the outset, abject at the end.”
SONNET XVII
THE DECLARATION OF LONDON
Nations have risen and fallen, but none as yet
While every sane and patriot voice withstands
Has signed its own death-warrant, on demands
Most paltry most irrevocably set,
Though wrath and unappeasable regret
Thrill through the hearts and spirits of friendliest lands.
Like silliest fish lured on by subtlest hands
We plunge and leap and dart into the net.
Of all man's history's base and cowardly deeds
At which the historian sickens or despairs
No cowardlier baser deed was lightlier done
Than this that eloquent infamy prepares,
This,—that will darken if the plot succeeds
Our Empire's sunlit sea-way, and the sun.
TWO SONNETS
SONNET XVIII
FOR CORONATION DAY, THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1911.
I
At this stern moment when black treason prowlsFrom land to land, and base sedition plots,
While patriotism shrinks, and manhood rots,
And womanhood, degraded, shrieks and howls,
And decadent girls, half-dressed and eyed like ghouls,
Crowd mocking streets: while Irish, Welsh and Scots,
Would have the kingdom parcelled into lots:
While Little England snarls and spits and scowls:
At such an hour, when traitorous tongues go free
And every loyal heart commits a crime,
A keener sword is needed than of rhyme
That, Royal at home, Imperial o'er the sea,
Our English Monarch's opening reign may be
The turning-point of history and of time.
SONNET XIX
FOR CORONATION DAY, THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1911.
II
No task uncertain, no half-dubious thingIs set before us. England up or down
Must journey, and with England moves the Crown.
Not to an Emperor, not to any King
Did seasons strange, austere or joyous, bring
So vast a chance of an undreamed renown:
Whether the statesmen-chatterers praise or frown,
Or world-wide jealousy point its venomed sting.
Dark India summons with a soul of fire:
Far Canada's plains, each snow-lit mountain-gorge,
Australia's heart, and Africa's desire:
While all who still can fight and still can pray
Cry, on this stately Coronation Day,
“God guard our Empire, and God save King George!”
SONNET XX
THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Fear, treachery, folly, intrigue, all that's base
And foul in politics, heaped up pell-mell
Converged, as if through some magician's spell,
When Lansdowne and his fate stood face to face.
Was no high instinct left, no pride of race?
Prone at the feet of Ford the noblesse fell:
And for one night the House of Lords was hell,
“His Lordship” striving to outlie “His Grace.”
Then...forth the traitors surged, one rabble-rout,
Each blindly pressing first to scamper out,
Lords, Bishops, one great shameless wrestling sea,
While from the tongues of those who still stood fast
As the black herd of wolves and apes swept past
Rose with a cheer the name of Halsbury.
SONNET XXI
THE NAVAL PRIZE BILL
The Naval Prize Bill, which carries with it the Declaration of London, was thrown out by the House of Lords on Tuesday, December 12, 1911.
Yet once again, as often, England's Lords,
Stood between her and meanest foemen's swords
Nor were found wanting in the crucial hour.
The Code wherethrough as from a vantage tower
Fly all the poisoned darts of alien hordes,
Devised to maim and bind her as with cords,
Shrinks like a parchment which red flames devour.
This much is left—the horror to conceive
(For this we must) that Englishmen were found
Of mind so feeble or of soul so base
As to fling German filth in England's face:
Conscious, to sell their country and achieve
Damnation here and elsewhere beyond bound.
SONNET XXII
WOMAN SUFFRAGE
With screech of parrot or with yelp of fox
The wild dishevelled sisters cry for votes:
While each who honours woman sadly notes
How in vast thoughtless heartless dangerous flocks
These sexless creatures surge against the rocks
Of duty, love, and wreck their fragile boats
Till only some stray spar or top-mast floats,
Sight pitiful 'mid the rough green waves' shocks.
So, beaten down, dismayed and out of heart,
Fed forcibly on their own turgid dreams,
Will these mad women swiftly plunge apart
From all the world of work and honest schemes,
From noble passion and from glorious Art,
While Pethick Lawrence rants and Pankhurst screams.
SONG FOR THE BOYS OF BRITAIN
I
A trumpet sounds that never soundedIn all the history of the race.
A danger threatens, grim, unbounded:
Strange peril stares us in the face.
But all our Empire's grand old story
Is yours, from which to learn the way
Through duty done to deathless glory:
He conquers who can best obey.
Be ready and steady
Of hand and heart and eye.
Work or fight for England!
For England live or die!
II
No time have English lads to trifle:The day of faltering purpose ends.
Make England's hills and streams your friends.
From sea to sea, from Scottish borders
To Dover's cliffs of snowiest white,
Learn every road. Your sudden orders
May flash from guns some noon or night.
Our England is in danger:
Danger will vanish when
Her men are all as giants
And all her boys are men.
III
For all our fathers died to gain;For all their sons must fight to keep;
For meadow, mountain, sunlit plain,
Tombs where our Titans' memories sleep;
For all that England most esteems;
For kindred lands beyond the foam;
For hopes that flash through far-off dreams;
For truth and right, for King and home;
For Freedom ripening slowly,
For all high aims, contend.
The country trusts you wholly:
Each may be England's friend.
IV
Behind you lie the deeds of daringThat built the Empire you behold;
High courage, honour, toil unsparing,
And swords of steel and hearts of gold.
A few short years! Then forth may thunder
The trumpet-peal that calls on you,
While weaklings palter, argue, blunder,
To close your ranks, to dare and do.
Be ready, be steady:
Be men in thought and deed.
Yours are the arms that England
In days to come will need.
THE HIGHER WOMAN
I
When the centuries' tasks are finished, and the light of judgment gleamsCrowning the lonely fighters, making an end of dreams,
Great will be our days' glory, that our century overthrew
The devil of vivisection, whose red hand laughed as it slew.
II
Now, when woman arises, beautiful, pure-souled, strong,Eager to save the creatures whose moment of life we wrong,—
Now that the hope in her glances brings new hope to the race,
She, the divine crusader, in the war takes glorious place.
III
This is a quest for woman, for love is her soul's chief might,Love of the God of the sunshine, scorn of the devil of night,
Hate of the hand that tortures, love of the skill that heals,
But not by a butcher's study of a nerve that quivers and feels.
IV
This is a woman's question, if ever a question grewLarge and pressing for woman, urgent, imminent, new.
For our young girl-students suffer. Is it wise, is it safe, is it well
To teach that the road to knowledge leads straight through the pit of hell?
V
How can woman be mother of love and of hope and of lifeIf her heart be inured to the torture, her hands be trained to the knife?
Harden the hearts of your maidens, and all the world turns grey:
The sun grows dim in the heavens, the stars' crowns vanish away.
VI
Tear from the heart of a woman the tender and pitiful dreamAnd you snatch from the skies their glory, you darken the moon's white gleam:
You ruffle the souls of the roses, you ravish their scent from these,
VII
To-day the word of the nations through the nobler womanhood speaks.Away with the darkling horror that flushes with shame the cheeks
When we think that moment by moment, in London, day after day,
Keen knives are athirst for the helpless, and brute hands ready to slay!
VIII
The thing is obscene, un-English; hateful, cowardly, base.The man who would visit his mother, or look his wife in the face,
His red hand smelling of slaughter, his fingers foul from the crime,
Is not the man whom a woman deems lord of the world and of time.
IX
Man is a god, deems woman—her sweet heart breaks when she knowsIn some hellish hospital dungeon, watching it quiver and swerve,
Or carving a bound live rabbit, dissecting muscle and nerve.
X
That was the work of the student, medical, masculine, grand,An honour to English science, the scalpel's gift to the land,
While the student's wiser sister, with a knowledge nobler far,
Found Christ's love in a flower, watched God's face in a star.
XI
But the thing must end for ever, the days of horror must close.A vast pure current of pity through the dawning century flows.
Ever in woman's footsteps the angels of heaven have trod
For the anger of love in a woman is the sternest anger of God.
XII
Yes: the anger of woman at an innocent child's deep wrongOr a coward's thrust at the creature that sought us with love or with song
Is the wrath of Christ and his Father, the flash of the sun's keen sword,
And the softest hand of woman deals the strongest stroke of the Lord.
XIII
All true souls in accordance here are firm and at one,Stern to resolve and determine that a royal deed be done.
Here can nation and nation, man and woman, agree:
Rulers of plains or of mountains, princes of land or sea.
XIV
Long and strange is the battle, patience and prayer we need:Faith in the hearts that follow, strength in the souls that lead.
Eager and brave girl-soldier, here is a sword for your hand:
And you use that sword for England, for love is the life of the land!
XV
Vast are the world's grim armies; millions trained to obeyWait but some general's orders to unsheathe wild swords and slay.
But behind the men and women who follow love as a star
Are unseen armies vaster, and a Leader mightier far.
The Poetical Works of George Barlow | ||