The Poetical Works of John Payne :: :: University of Virginia Library

The “Dedication to Richard Wagner”, commenced in 1869 and completed in February 1872, was first printed in 1872, as a Prelude to the first Edition of my “Songs of Life and Death”, at a time when to avow oneself an enthusiastic admirer of the great German composer, (to say nothing of his equally great contemporaries and in part precursors, Berlioz and Liszt,) was to be popularly considered something like a malignant maniac.

MASTER and chief of all for whom the singers
Strain with full bosoms and ecstatic throats,
For whom the strings beneath the flying fingers,
The sackbuts and the clarions, yield their notes,—

Lord over all for whom the tymbals thunder,
For whom the harps throb like the distant sea,
For whom the shrill sweet flutings cleave in sunder
The surges of the strings that meet and flee,—

O strong sweet soul, whose life is as a mountain
Hymned round about with stress of spirit-choirs,
Whose mighty song leaps sunward like a fountain,
Reaching for lightnings from celestial fires,—

O burning heart and tender, highest, mildest,
Nightingale-throated, with the eagle's wing,—
This sheaf of songs, culled where the ways are wildest
And the shade deepest, to thy feet I bring.

I hail thee as from many hearts that cherish,
Serve and keep white thy thought within their shrines,
Where the flame fades not, though its lustre perish,
Midmost the lurid and the stormy signs.

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I greet thee as from those great mates departed
Who first taught Song to know the ways of Soul,
Fit harbingers of thee, the eagle-hearted,
Saw in the art the new sun-planets roll.

I greet thee with a promise and a cheering,—
I, that have loved thee many weary years,
I, that, with eyes strained for the dawn's appearing,
Have clung to thee for hope and healing tears;

I, that am nought, whose weakling voice has in it
The shrill sole sadness of one wailing note;
No nightingale I, but a sad-voiced linnet,
Piping thin ditties from a bleeding throat;

I—since the masters lift no voice to-thee-ward
To stay thy battle in the weary time—
Send forth for thee these weak-winged songs to seaward,
To bear to thee their freight of idle rhyme.

Ah, how weak-voiced and little worth, my master!
Yet haply, as a lark-song on the breeze,
That, winging through the air, black with disaster,
Heartens some exile pacing by the seas,

So even mine, my weak and unskilled singing
May smite thine ear with no unpleasing notes,
What time the shrill sounds of the fight are ringing
About thee and the clamour of dull throats.

And peradventure (for least love is grateful)
The humble song may, for a little while,
Smoothe from thy brow the sadness high and fateful,
Call to thy lips the rare and tender smile.

My harmonies are harmonies of sadness,
My light is but as starlight on the wane:
Far nobler bards shall cheer thee with their gladness;
I bring thee but the song-pulse of my pain.

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Be not disheartened, O our Zoroaster,
O mage of our new music-world of fire!
Thou art not all unfriended, O my master!
Let not the great heart fail thee for desire.

What matter though the storm-wind round thee rages,
Though men judge weakly with imperfect sight?
O master-singer of the heroic ages,
Each dawn is brighter with the appointed light.

Hate's echoes on the inconstant air but languish,
Win not within the world's true heart to be,—
Faint wails for us of far-off souls in anguish,
That chide their own sick selves in all they see.

Thine is the Future—hardly theirs the Present,
The flowerless days that put forth leaf and die—
Theirs that lie steeped in idle days and pleasant,
Letting the pageant of the years pass by.

For the days hasten when shall all adore thee,
All at thy spring shall drink and know it sweet;
All the false temples shall fall down before thee,
Ay, and the false gods crumble at thy feet.

Then shall men set thee in their holy places,
Hymn thee with anthems of remembering;
Faiths shall spring up and blossom in thy traces,
Thick as the violets cluster round the Spring.

And then, perchance, when, in the brighter ages,
Men shall awake and know the god they scorned
And mad with grief, grave upon marble pages
(That therewithal the Future may be warned)

The tale of their remorse and shame undying,
They, coming where thy name has kept these sweet,
—These idle songs of mine,—shall set with sighing
My name upon the marble at thy feet;

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For that, when all made mock of and denied thee,
Seeing not the portent and the fiery sword,
I, from my dream, in the mid-heaven descried thee,
Saw and confessed thee, knew and named thee Lord.

February 1872.

A PRELUDE.

WHAT shall my song be of these latter days,
These darkened days of toil and weariness?
Lo! for sheer burden of the grief that slays
The adventure in men's hearts and for the stress
Of doubt, my feet turn from the sunlit ways,
My eyes drink darkness from the morning rays
And my tongue curses where it fain would bless.

Ah! who shall cure the sickness of the time?
Who shall bring healing to the wounded age?
Not I, forsooth. I—with my idle rhyme—
Right gladly would I blazon all the page
Of life with flowers and with the happy chime
Of heart-free songs, lift up the folk to climb
The peaks that soar out of the tempest's rage;

Ah, how soul-gladly! But the life in me
Is worn with doubt and agony and care:
Fain would I lead: alas! I cannot see
Myself the way. The presage in the air
Weighs on my thought and will not set it free.
Ah God! the helpless, saddened soul of me!
How shall I sing glad songs of my despair?

How shall I sing of aught but that I love?
How should I be in love with aught but sleep?
I, that have watched the morning mists remove

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And heaven break open to its grayest deep,
Straining my eyes around me and above,
Only to see the dreams that erst I wove
Melt in the noonday, leaving me to weep!

I, that thought once no ills should daunt my faith,
That hope should pluck the laurel from the abyss,
Can this be I of old, this world-worn wraith
Of brighter days, living on memories
And bitter food of dreams, in love with Death,
Seeking no laurel but a cypress-wreath,
Can this be I, with all my hopes grown this?

Alas! the long gray years have vanquished me,
The shadow of the inexorable days.
I am grown sad and silent: for the sea
Of Time has swallowed all my pleasant ways.
I am grown weary of the years that flee
And bring no light to set my bound hope free,
No sun to fill the promise of old Mays.

For, let the summer throne it as it will,
Life and the sun are sad and sere to him
(Sadder than Death and Night) who wearies still
For his desire and sees upon the rim
Of the pale sky no sign that shall fulfil
The covenant of promise every rill,
Each flower swore to him, whilst the dawn broke dim.

How shall the sunlight thaw his wintry thought?
His eyes look past the harvest and the throng
Of flower-crowned hours, to where the peace long sought
Lies on the fields and all the stress life-long
Into the ice-calm woof of sleep is wrought:
Needs must he wander, with void hope distraught,
Measuring his sad life with a less sad song.

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A SONG BEFORE THE GATES OF DEATH.

Sed satis est jam posse mori.

SMITE strings and fill the courts with thy lament!
Yea, let the singing thunder through the halls;
Wake all the echoes from the funeral walls,
From aisle to roof and porch to battlement!
Give forth thy sorrow till the roses' scent
Is blent for dole into the lilies' breath
And all the air is faint with balms of death,
Seeing the glory of the day is spent
And Death treads very nigh upon our feet.
Sing out and let the winds be filled with song!
Haply, the clangours of the chant shall greet
The great gods' senses, till the unheeding throng
Immortal hear in it the thunderous beat
Of Fate and tremble for remembered wrong.

Give me the vase. Drink deep as for the dead!
Drink Life and all its joys a long good-bye!
Surely, the wine shall hearten us to die.
Blood of the grape! Wine, that the earth has bled
From her slit painful veins, living and red
With all the deaths that have won life for thee!
I pour thee out for sign and memory,
For thanksgiving to life and goodlihead
Of the green earth and all her friendly hours:
The homage of the dead, that in her sods
Shall soon lie low and rot beneath the showers
Of the round year; yet, when the kind Fate nods,
Mayhap shall glorify the grass in flowers:
A godlike homage! For the dead are gods.

The dead are gods, seeing they lie and sleep,
Folded within the mantle of the night;

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Ay, more than gods! For lo! the heavy might
Of Death enrounds them. Never do they weep
Nor smile sad smiles nor strain against the sweep
Of rugged Doom. There is no Fate for them,
Lying, close-companied, within the hem
Of the pale fateful god: the long years creep
Over their heads and may not break their rest.
Who would not choose to die, when life is worn
And wan with wrong unto the utterest?
The fierce gods chase us to the brink with scorn;
Yet smite the strings! We are not so forlorn
But we may die, seeing that death is best.

Curse we the gods and die! Give me the lyre.
Now, Zeus, fling thunders from thine armouries
And Helios, rain down sunbolts from thy skies!
We die and fear you not and all your ire,
Impotent as the flaming of a fire
Against the dead. There is no hope for us,
Save of a sinking sweet and slumberous
Into the arms of rest. Pile up the pyre!
Great father Zeus, we reck not of thy grace:
It is thy wrath we crave with our last breath.
Look down in all thy terrors, King of Life!
Consume us with the splendours of thy face!
So shall the keen fire solve us from our strife
And our sad souls be ravished unto death.

FALSE SPRING.

THE linnet tapped at the window-pane,
The hawthorn shook down its silver rain,
The flower-scents called me again and again:
‘Come, for the Spring is here!’

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O linnet! the day is golden for thee;
O hawthorn! thy snow is pleasant to see;
O flowers! will the flower-scents waken for me
The dreams that are dead and sere?

‘Come out, come out, O poet!’ they said;
‘The violets wait in their cool green bed,
The windflowers beckon with silver head,
The pale blue crocuses linger
For thee, like a flame of the winter's end,
The hyacinth-clusters tinkle and bend,
The cowslips thrill with the scents they send
To comfort the weary singer.

‘The earth is singing her songs of green;
The cuckoo pipes in the heart of the treen;
There is no sadness in any, I ween,
Under the new Spring glamour.
Come out and live with the flowers again!
Thou hast fretted thy soul o'erlong in vain
With the olden strife and the olden pain
And the weary worldly clamour.’

‘O breezes and birds!’ I said, ‘I fear
Ye should bring me again the past-time drear
And the vanished shapes that I held so dear,
With their tender tearful grace.
I fear ye should raise in the hawthorn-bowers
The sad sweet wraiths of the bygone hours
And sadden my sight in the primrose-flowers
With a dear dead maiden's face.’

‘O poet,’ they said, ‘the Spring is glad;
The earth has buried the grief it had;
The fields have forgotten the winter sad,
The woods are laughing with blossom:

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There cometh no wraith of the bygone days
To moan in the wreaths of the woodbine maze;
But a golden glory of sunbeams plays
Over the young land's bosom!’

‘O birds! I fear ye will sing me anew
The golden songs that I taught to you,
When life was a kiss of the summer dew,
Under the blossomed flowers.
O breezes! I fear lest the voice of the dead
Should ring in your wafts, with the words she said
And the silver rain of the tears she shed,
In the old sweet happy hours.’

‘O poet!’ they said, ‘we will comfort thee,
No more shall our voices deceitful be;
We will sing to thee songs of the things we see
In the happy future's gold!
We will weave for thee delicate dreams and deep;
We will vex thee no longer nor make thee weep;
We will leave unstirred in their dreamless sleep
The happy days of old!’

There was no nay; so out I went,
Under the apples blossom-sprent;
And the Springtime kissed me, as I came,
With blue-bell breath and crocus-flame;
The birds did wreathe the air with singing
And on the breeze there came a ringing,
A noise of silver bells and gold,
From out the woodlands, as of old.

My feet did turn toward the wood;
And as I went, the hawthorns strewed
White snow and rosy in my way
And throstles piped from every spray.

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There seemed no dole in aught, nor guile:
The happy earth was all a-smile
With cowslip-gold and windflower-white;
Spring held all things with its delight.

So to the forest's edge I came
And saw the brooklet, like a flame
Of liquid silver, flow between
Lush column-work of arching green;
Fair flowers laughed archly in the moss;
The daffodils their heads did toss
For joyance and the gladsome bees
Hummed in the blue anemones.

There seemed no sadness in the air
Nor any thought of things that were
For me of old and are no more;
Nor any of the sad old lore
That in my heart the years laid deep,
To lie and sleep a troubled sleep,
Did seem to stir in that sweet shade;
And so I entered, undismayed.

O birds, 'twas not well done of you!
O flowers and breeze, right well ye know
The weary glamour that the Spring
Had laid for me on everything!
'Twas but to bring me back again
The memory of the olden pain,
Ye lured me out, with song of birds,
With violet-breath and fair false words!

For lo! my feet had hardly past
The woven band of flowerage, cast
Betwixt the meadows and the trees,
When, in the bird-songs and the breeze,

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Another strain was taken up
And out of every blue-bell's cup,
The mocking voices sang again
The olden songs of love and pain.

The flowers did mimic the old grace;
The wan white windflowers wore her face
And in the stream I heard her words;
Her voice came rippling from the birds.
Dead love, I saw thy form anew
Bend down among the violets blue,
And like a mist, the memory
Of all the past rose up in me.

HYMN TO THE NIGHT.

O NIGHT, that holdest all the keys of dreams,
Unfolding o'er the azure of the sea!
I give thee welcome with a flowerful hand,
For lo! I have been very fain for thee.
I give thee loving welcome, for meseems
Thou knowest well that I do love thee so
And in return dost hold my homage dear
And usest well to pour celestial balms
Of comfort, that thy servant winds have fanned
Together, on me from thy cool dusk palms
And from the jewelled hollow of thy sphere,
Brimmed with moon-pearl and silver of the stars.
For often, when my heart was sore with scars
Of striving and I could not weep for woe,
Thine airs have brought sweet singings to mine ears
And loosened all the silver springs of tears;
Thy hands have soothed the fierceness from my grief
And in thy robe's wide purple thou hast drawn
And folded all my sorrows, while the sills

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Of heaven dropped sapphire. So I had relief
Of sadness, ere the primrose of the Dawn
Budded pale gold upon the emerald hills.

Thou knowest I have ever been to thee,
Fair, simple Night, full constant in my love,
How I have cherished, all delights above,
The folding of thy pinions over me.
Mine has been no ephemeral fantasy,
That loves and loves not in one short hour's span
And knows not if Day's rose have sweeter breath
Than thine own violets. Ere the noon began
To burden all the air with weary gold
And doom all wandering winds to fiery death,
My spirit to thy sheltering arms did flee.
Ere yet the chariot of the sunset rolled
Fierce to the dying as an ancient knight
And many a mist grew painted o'er the sea,
I saw thee in the haze, with silent feet,
Sweep o'er the distance, Mother of the Night,
Wrapping the hills in shadow, fold on fold:
I saw thy vans across the landscape meet
And my faint soul arose to welcome thee.

My faint soul sinks into thy windless deeps,
Misted with gold, O Mother of the Dreams!
And gazes with a wonderless content,
Up through thy lymph, to where the azure floors
Of heaven are with a gradual glory rent,
That through the cloisters of the æther leaps
And in thy lap its spreading splendours pours,
In flood on flood of golden-crested streams.
For slow sweet wonders lie for me impearled
Within thy womb and in thy jewelled sands;
And all the lute-strings of my soul are swept,
By the unfolding ripples of thy tide
And rhythmic pulsing of thy tender hands,

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To melodies of some enchanted world,
That through the ardour of the day has slept
And will not glimmer through its veiling groves
Of tender mystery, till the Night divide
The gates of slumber: songs of half-felt bliss
And dreams, through which a strange sweet echo roves
And murmurs in a mist of fragrances
And all sound's sweets do wane and swell and kiss,
Like night-birds in the blossomed oranges.

My faint eyes loathe the ardours of the noon
And fiery splendours of the dying sun;
Joys that are stretched to madness, love that burns
And fierce delights that weary, scarce begun.
The roses wound me with their passionate bloom;
I weary of the lilies' laden breath;
And all the flowerage of my yearning turns
Toward its pearlèd lodestar of the moon
And tarries for thy grave and kindly gloom,
O thronèd Night! to soothe the hot fierce blue
Of heaven with its webs of amethyst;
My sad soul listens for thine airs to bring
Soft harmonies and low to me and sing
Sweet songs of thee and of thy shadow Death
And strains to see thy woven hands of mist
The meadows of the upper æther strew
With fair and tender lavishment of flowers
And sow thick goldcups in the purple meads,
Far dearer than the gay and flaunting weeds
That drink the sunlight in the noontide hours.

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MADRIGAL TRISTE.

IF we should meet,
You and I,
My sweet,
In some fair land where under the blue sky
The scents of the fresh violets never die
And Spring is deathless under deathless feet,
Should we clasp hands and kiss,
My sweet,
With the old bliss?
Would our eyes meet
With the same passionate frankness as of old,
When the fresh Spring was in the Summer's gold?
Ah, no! my dear.
Woe's me! our kisses are but frore;
The blossoms of our early love are sere
And will be fresh no more.

If we should stand,
You and I,
My sweet,
On that bright strand
Where day fades never and the golden street
Rings to the music of the angels' feet,
Would our rent hearts find solace in the sky?
Should we lose heed,
My dear,
Of the sad years?
Would our souls cease to bleed
For the past anguish and our eyes grow clear,
In heaven, from all the furrows of the tears?
Ah, no! my dear.
Needs must we sigh and stand aloof.
Once riven,
God could not heal our love,
Even in heaven.

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A SONG OF ROSES.

MANY a time and oft,
In the July weather,
When the breeze was soft
And the pleasant land
Purple with the heather,
Went we hand in hand,
Love and I together.

Round our happy feet
Twinkled out the roses,
Roses red and sweet,
Ruddy as the sky
When the dawn uncloses,
White as chastity,
Yellow as primroses.

Were the roses red,
Lo! my love was brighter.
Did the moonlight shed
Lilies on the ground,
Lo! my love was whiter
And her footsteps' sound
Than the breeze was lighter.

God! how glad we were!
All the birds were jealous.
Hovering in the air,
All the larks and linnets,
All the white-breast swallows,
Envied all our minutes
More than they could tell us.

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Thrushes knew no song
Like thy golden singing:
In the woodbirds' throng
There was no such sweetness
As thy voice's ringing
And thy footsteps' fleetness
O'er the heather springing.

Heavens! how we kissed!
Flowers to one another
Bending through the mist
Of the summer-calm,
Kissing each his brother,
With their breath of balm,
Filled not one the other

With such golden bliss,
With such tender glory
Prisoned in a kiss;
All the sweet Spring-gladness,
All the summer-story
And the autumn-sadness,
When the sky is hoary.

Through the harebells blue
Went the bees a-humming,
Singing of the dew,
Of the summer ceased
And the harvest coming
And the honey-feast
In the winter-gloaming.

Flower-dew, like the bee,
From thy lips so bonny,
'Gainst the flower-time flee,
Stole I in Love's name,
While July was sunny,
That, when winter came,
I too might have honey.

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Roses red and white
In my breast I treasured,
Whilst the sky was bright
And the fragrant ways
With the flowers were measured,
That in autumn's days
I might be rose-pleasured.

On my happy breast
Didst thou weep for gladness;
And thy tears, out-prest,
Falling on the roses,
Filled them with strange sadness,
Sweet as birdsong-closes,
In the new May-madness.

Then I learnt the song
That thy lips did utter;
Caught each jewelled throng,
Every glad clear trill,
Every low sweet mutter,
At thy voice's will
That did fly and flutter;

Treasured every note
In my heart's recesses,
Learnt them all by rote,
All the golden falls,
All the silver stresses,
All the joy that thralls,
All the love that blesses;

Stored them dearly up
In the hidden places,
In the white closed cup
Of my flower-bell fancies;
That, when white earth's face is
And the old romances
Gone with summer's graces,

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When my soul should grope
In the earth-mists sordid,
Far from love and hope,
I might turn for balm
To the music hoarded
And in its sweet psalm
Hope and be rewarded.

So the summer fled
And the autumn mellowed
All the leaves to red,
All the corn to gold;
And the winter followed,
With its silent cold
And its snows wind-hollowed.

Then I went alone;
For light Love had left me,
When the birds had flown
And the flowers were dead:
Winter had bereft me
Of the roses red
And the bliss Love weft me.

Then I said, “Have heart!
Thou hast yet thy treasure.
Though light Love depart,
Thou canst summon up
All the summer leisure
From its silver cup,
All the bygone pleasure.”

So I searched my heart
For the hoarded sweetness,
Honey set apart
'Gainst the days of sadness;
For the songs whose fleetness
Gave the summer gladness,
Gave my bliss completeness.

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Lo! the songs were wails,
Like the wind that surges
Through the moaning sails.
Lo! the sweets were gall.
Lo! the thoughts were scourges,
Bitter honey all;
And the pæans dirges.

Then from out my breast
Did I take the roses,
Roses tear-caressed,
Roses red and white,
That in the reposes
Of the noon-delight
I had plucked for posies.

Lo! the flowers were dead,
By the frost invaded;
But the tears she shed
Had, within the fronds
Of the petals shaded,
Grown to diamonds,
Lights that never faded.

So Love's gladness flees
And its sweets wax bitter;
But the memories
Of its hours of sorrow,
Holier and fitter,
On the winter morrow,
Turn to gems and glitter.

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A FAREWELL.

TO part in midmost summer of our love,
When first the flower-scents and the linnets' tune
Have fallen into harmonies of June
About our lives new linked and all above
The flower-blue heaven lies for bliss aswoon,—
Were this not sad? Yet love must live by pain,
If one would win its fragrance to remain.

Were it not sadder, in the years to come,
To feel the hand-clasp slacken for long use,
The untuned heartstrings for long stress refuse
To yield old harmonies, the songs grow dumb
For weariness and all the old spells lose
The first enchantment? Yet this thing must be.
Love is but mortal, save in memory.

Too rare a flower it is, its bloom to keep
In the raw cold of our unlovely clime,
Too frail to thrive in this our weary time.
I would not have thy kisses, sweet, grow cheap
Nor thy dear looks round out an idle rhyme;
And so I hold that we loose hands and part.
Dear, with my hand you do not loose my heart.

Sweet is the fragrance of remembered love;
The memory of clasped hands is very sweet,
Joined lips that did not once too often meet
And never knew that saddest word ‘Enough!’
And so 'tis well that, ere our Springtime fleet,
Thus in the heyday of our love part we:
Farewell, and all white omens go with thee!

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Is it not well that we should both retain
The early bloom of love, untouched and pure?
There is no way by which it may endure,
Save if we part before its sweetness wane
And wither; since that life is so impure
And love so frail, it may not blossom long,
Unscathed, in this our stress of care and wrong.

We were not sure of love, my sweet,—and yet
The fragrance of its Spring shall never die.
Sweetheart, we shall be sure of memory,
That amber of the years, where Time doth set
The dear-belovèd shapes of things gone by,
That so their gentle semblance may evade
The ills that lurk in eld's ungenial shade.

So, sweet, our love shall, in the death of it,
Relive, as corn that withers in the ground,
Yet with fresh blades doth presently abound
And yields full golden sheavage in time fit.
It may be that new flowers will too be found
Among the stubble and the pale sweet blooms
Of Autumn glorify our woodland glooms.

The memory of our kisses shall survive
And in Time's treasure-house be consecrate.
Our love shall with the distance grow more great
And shall for us be sweeter than alive,
When dead; for memory shall reduplicate
The sweetness of the past, till you and I
Cherish as angels' food each bygone sigh.

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AUBADE.

WHEN the flocks of the morning gather in the East,
Golden-fleeced,
And the star-sparkles of the night are drawn
Into one great orient pearl of dawn,
The voice of my soul is as a bird that mourns
Because the night has ceased.
My voice is as a sorrowful sweet singing,
That murmurs o'er dim notes of faded morns,
Thick-misted with pale memories round them clinging,
Whose faint fresh bud of dawning did unfold
Into the noonday's burning flower of gold;
And all the cloisters of the air are ringing
With dreams of things that have been done and told
For me in days of old.

Amber of dawn, thou bringest me scant pleasure;
Sad treasure
Of fair and precious jewels that the years
Have worn and dulled with bitter rills of tears.
Thy gold is as the wraith of bygone hope
Poured without measure
Upon the upland meadows of my youth,
When Edens glittered on each cloudward slope
And all the sweet old lies seemed fairest sooth,
When all things wore the tender glow of dreaming.
(Alas! that such sweet error should have blown
To seeding and such bitter fruit have sown!)
Ah me! meseems the halls of heaven are streaming
With many a sweet old memory that has flown
And left me sad and lone.

Time was, the dawnflower, on the hills unfolding,
To me, beholding

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Brought visions of a fair and far ideal
And seemed the chalice of a new Sangreal.
I dreamt that I might win life's balm and bid
My fellows to the holding
Of the banquet of a new and nobler being,
Wherefrom old glooms and horrors should be rid
And no one eye should be shut out from seeing;
Where the despairing soul of man, grown faithful
To its own self, should find life no more scathful
With weary doubt and thrice accursèd ease
And the enfranchised air no more be wraithful
With phantoms of time-honoured wrong, that freeze
The speech in him that sees,—

Sees and is sick to vent his soul in singing,
That the song, ringing
Athwart the wild waste beauty of the world,
May free it from the dragons that lie curled
Round its sad heart, back, to the glory golden
Of old, Earth's deserts bringing,—
And may not work his will for damnèd use.
I dreamt that I might bring the unbeholden
Fear, that doth steep with such a venomed juice
The cup of being, to the light of dawn
And show it powerless; and that curse withdrawn,
Life should bloom fresh and fair with healthful dews.
This was my dream, O amber of the dawn,
In days long since bygone.

Lo! I have fought and perished in the striving;
Lo! and arriving
Before my goal of crystal and of gold,
Have seen its glories shrink off, fold by fold,
Leaving the bare waste hopelessness exposed.
I have grown sick with riving,
Mist after mist, the opals of the mirage,
That for my sight, blinded with dreams, enclosed

240

The prize of some new hero-high aspirage,
Gold to be won by who should dare the winning,
Who should cast off and leave in the beginning
The cumber of the fatal Past's empirage
And to old signs a new rich meaning giving,
Through death and sin win living!

Lo! I have failed and fallen in the gaining.
In the attaining
Life, has Death entered deep into my soul.
Lo! I have sunk defeated at the goal.
Eos, thy banners of the triumph, streaming
Over the pale night's waning,
Are wraiths to me of old deceptive glory,
Gold of the victory of the darkness, gleaming
Over the hills with pennants red and gory.
For me, thy downward heaven-reddening flood
Is as the river of the flush of blood
That hearts of men have shed for thy false story,
Since day first glittered on the new-born world,
Sun-crowned and iris-pearled.

Long to my sight the night has been the fairer,
The bearer
Of comfort to the souls of those that languish
With hopeless hope and weary with the anguish
Of saddening joy: the glamour of the setting
Sweeter and rarer,—
In the faint sadness of its purple fading
Toward the silver night and her forgetting,
Where there is only balm and no upbraiding,—
Is to my soul, that wearies for reposing,
More grateful than dawn-Daphne's fierce unclosing,
Wherein for aye I see old hopes evading
My grasp, and with a mocking light regilded,
Waste dreams my young hands builded.

241

COURANTE.

SILVER Spring;
Hawthorn-white,
Violet-scent,
May-delight;
Birds that sing
Noon and night,
Meadows sprent
With sunlight;
Woods that ring
With the pent
Streams that twine
In their flight
Shade and shine:
Whose content
Do they bring?
Whose delight?
Ah, not mine!

Gold of June;
Days afire
With flower-flush
Of desire:
Sun-sprent noon,
Hedge and brier
Rose a-blush
High and higher;
Linnet's tune,
Trill of thrush,
Nightingales
In the hush
Of the moon:
What avails

242

All the flush
Of the grass,
All the rush
Of the hours,
That o'erpass
Earth and sea,
Crowned with flowers,
Unto me?
What, alas?

Light of Love;
Lips that cling,
Hands that meet,
Souls that wing
Heavens above,
Wandering,
Joined and sweet;
Thoughts that sing,
Lives that move
To the beat
Of the hours,
Murmuring,
“Heaven is ours,
Ours that love,
While we twine
Hand in hand,
In the shine
Of Love's land;”
Whose glad feet
Tread that strand,
All divine?
Whose blest hand
Gathers flowers
In Love's land?
Ah, not mine!

243

Who complains?
Ah, not I!
Not a tear,
Not a cry.
All the rains
Of the sky
Cannot clear
Souls that sigh
Of their stains:
But I lie
Many a year,
Grief-opprest,
And the pains
In my breast
Never rest,
Never die.

THE DEAD MASTER.

A THRENODY.

“The Dead Master” in question was Walter Savage Landor, whose “Hellenics” were the delight of my youth.

Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam cari capitis?

WAST thou not with us, when the night departed,
O strong sweet singer that art ours no more!
Was not the harping thine that first gave o'er
The song of wailing, when the daybreak parted
And the glad heavens broke open, shore from shore,
Sun-crowned and iris-hearted?

Didst thou not smite the strings to jubilation,
Hymning the grand sweet scope of the To-be?
Did not our midnight dole and doubting flee
From thy glad strength and all our lamentation
Swell with thy song into an ecstasy
Of aspiration?

244

No more we wept and wailed for Life's undoing,
Following the golden notes that brake from thee,
Riding star-crowned upon that sudden sea
Which from thy soul poured forth for our renewing
Oceans of hope and jubilance, that we
Drank of, ensuing.

Didst thou not rend for us the gloom descending,
Scatter the veils of doubting from our sight,
Bring to our lives again the flower-delight,
Bird-songs and field-scents in thy verses blending?
Didst thou not save our spirits from the night
Stern and impending?

Lo! and the night has bound thee, O our master!
Lo! and the shadows gather round thy place!
Shall we then no more look upon thy face?
Surely the shades will fold to night the faster.
Surely Death's torches quicklier replace
Life's lamp of alabaster.

Shall we then no more see thee, O our singer,
Passing the love of women to our souls?
Shall then our lives be darkened and our goals
Deep in the gray dim distance fade and linger,
Since that no more thy voice our steps controls,
No more thy finger

Points and is clear along the hills that darken,
Clear with the distant glimmer of the day?
Will then the cliff-walls never roll away,
That thy song's sweetness hide from us that hearken,
Us that are weary in Life's mazèd way,
Weary of mists that starken?

245

Have we then heard thy singing for the last time
Shape us the glories of the olden days?
Have we a last time listened to the lays,
Wherein thou scaledst the ancient heavens for pastime
And in the future's iridescent haze
Buildedst the past-time?

Can we forget thee, high sweet soul and faithful,
Homer and Pindar of our modern time,
Lord of our thought and leader of our rhyme,
Thou that didst clear the air that was so deathful,
Filled it anew with scents of rose and thyme,
Made it bird-breathful?

Thou that for us wast some sublime Silenus,
Full to the lips of wise and lovely words,
Shaping to song the speech of flowers and birds,
Wast as a god on whose strength we might lean us,
And, our Apollo, piped to us thy herds
Songs of Camœnus!

What doth it irk us if we never saw thee,
Knew but thy presence as a god's afar,
Heard but thy song as music of a star?
Were we not with thee, part in thee and of thee?
Were not our souls akin to thine and are?
Did we not love thee?

With thee we lived in some enchanted Arden,
Glad with the echo of the wood-nymphs' feet,
Bright with old memories, very strange and sweet,
That in the shade of that Armida's garden
Did from our cold pale daylight hide and fleet,
Where all things harden.

246

Thou wast no wailer, no sweet-voiced unmanner,
That for weak men within an idle clime
Builded vain dreams to sweet and idle rhyme:
Thou hast built souls after the antique manner,
Souls that shall march through many a lapse of time,
Bearing thy banner,

Thy standard with its burden high and golden,
Daring to love and loving, know no shame,
Wit to reject the let of age-old blame,
Faith to rekindle altar-ashes olden,
Fan the old love of Nature to full flame,
Long unbeholden.

Friend, we have mourned and longed for thee with mourning;
Poet, our ears are sad with listening,
Straining for songs no breeze shall ever bring;
Master, thy lapse has dulled with dusk Life's morning,
Dimmed with black death each bright and lovely thing,
That in the adorning

Of thy high verse had erst been wont to sparkle,
Glitter and glow with glories of the past;
Spirit of song and flame of faith, the blast
Of thine eclipse has reft from us, anarchal,
Robbed us with thee of all the things thou wast,
Bard patriarchal!

Master, in vain we listen for thy singing,
Listen and long and languish for desire!
Unto our ears no echoes of thy lyre
Pulse from the darkness, no glad breeze comes bringing
Voices, no sparkles of the ancient fire
Reach us, wide-winging.

247

Will then thy song no more translate our yearning,
Mould our harsh cries to music of the spheres?
Will thy verse glitter no more with our tears?
Has then the sun of thy bright soul, whose burning
Lightened so oft the midnight of our fears,
Set, unreturning?

Or hast thou found thy dream in plains supernal,
Shapes of fair women, forms of noble men,
That, at the magic summons of thy pen,
Did, from the snows and solitudes hybernal,
Where they so long had slept, seek out again
The meadows vernal?

Do the long lapses of the ghost-land, lying
Stretched out beyond the portals of the grave,
Teem with fresh fruits and flowers for thee and wave
With the clear shapes of thine old dreams undying?
Has the dark flood been powerful to lave
From thy soul sighing,

Grief and the very memory of grieving,
Hope and the very thought of wearying
After the glow and glory thou didst sing?
Hast in the air such unimagined giving,
Splendour and flush of every godlike thing,
Wherefor thy living

Struggled and wearied in the bitter days?
Dost thou live out thy phantasies of gold
Under Greek skies and Attic woods of old,
Walk, crowned with myrtle, in the Dorian ways,
Peopled with all the dreams that did unfold
In thy high lays?

248

Surely, this thing alone could hold thee speechless,
Surely, in this alone couldst thou forget
Us that are left to struggle in the net
Of the sad world, to feel the days grow each less
Sweet to our souls, to weary with the fret,
Dumb and beseechless.

Surely, thy soul would yearn to us with longing:
Surely, no grave could keep thy voice from us,
Were not this so. The silence dolorous
Surely is voiceful of the years prolonging
Long bliss for thee and us to come, that thus
Unto the thronging,

Unto the cry and clamour of our yearning,
Still is the air and stirless is the light,
That from the grey grim bosom of the night
Comes back no sign or voice of thy returning,
Echoes no memory of the old delight,
Weariness spurning!

Well, be it so; mayhap, some day, unknowing,
We too shall rest and come to where thou art,
Press thee again full-raptured to our heart,
Gaze in thine eyes with eyes no less fire-glowing
And in like bliss forget the olden smart,
The weary going

Friendless and dumb about the ways of being,
Cast off the memory of the years we sighed
After thy song and presence sunny-eyed,
In the new splendour of thy lays, the seeing
All the old hopes fulfilled and sanctified,
No longer fleeing

249

Mirage-like from us through the earthly hazes;
Haply we too shall leave our olden pains
Off with our life and all its weary stains,
Put on like joy amid the light that blazes
There, the glad day that floods those golden plains,
Those songful mazes!

Till then, farewell! The joy shall be the greater
When we clasp hands and hearts to part no more:
For that the long lone life has been so sore,
For that no sign of thee to death played traitor,
Sharper shall be the bliss for us in store,
Sweeter if later.

VOCATION SONG.

‘La poésie est semblable à l'amandier: ses fleurs sont parfumées et ses fruits sont amers.’
Louis Bertrand, Gaspard de la Nuit.

LORD, what unto Thy servants shall be given,
That have so long, in pain and doubt and strife,
For Thee with hand and heart and song hard striven,
What time Thou givest out the crowns of life?

What time the lances of the light are driven
Athwart the gloom that holds Life's holiest throne,
What time the curtains of the mist are riven,
What time the trumpets of the dawn are blown?

We, who to tunes of love and light, unknowing,
Have chastened all the jarring chords of life,—
We, who, with lips with milk and honey flowing,
Have fed on galls of bitterness and strife,—

250

We do not ask of Thee, as this our guerdon,
To live a shining life among Thy blest;
'Twould be for us but shifting of our burden,
Not the fulfilment of the longed-for rest.

We have no kin with those uplifted faces,
Those ordered minstrels that before Thee bow,
Set rank on rank upon the holy places,
With stiff sharp laurel fringing every brow.

For us, no balms of Heaven could stay our yearning,
No crown of woven lilies and pale palms,
No City with eternal glory burning,
Set in the golden stress of ceaseless psalms.

Our souls are weary with the stress of seeing,
Wasted with burning thoughts that throb and throng,
Worn with the straining ecstasy of Being,
That passes through our heart-strings into song.

Our lives are sick with seeing all things' sadness,
Sad earth beneath us and sad heaven above;
Life's sweets to us are but as herbs of madness,
Sweet poison of the bitter bliss of Love.

Our souls are weary of the changing courses,
The sick alternative of smiles and tears,
Are weary of the unrelenting forces,
Are weary of the burden of the years;

The burden of the winds in river-sedges,
The burden of the torrents and the sea,
The burden of the woodbirds in the hedges:
‘Time is, Time was and Time will cease to be!’

Is it as nothing that the same flame courses
Athwart Thy veins that riots in our own?
Is it as nothing that the selfsame sources
Of light and life to us as Thee are known?

251

Shall we 'scape smiting with the 'scape of breath?
Shall we aye rest from bitter song's fierce smarts?
Will not the song-stress thrill the brain of death?
Will not the song-pulse throb in our cold hearts?

Lord God, wilt Thou not help us, that have striven
To do Thy work so hardly and so long?
Wilt Thou not give us rest from Thy high heaven
And peace from bitter weaving of sweet song?

Save us, O Lord, before the fire consume us,
Ere the hot chrism shrivel body and soul!
Let the soft arms of some sweet death entomb us
And hold us fast from love and joy and dole!

SUNDOWN.

I KNOW not whence it was, nor how it came,
That I should dream again the sad old dream,
That the recurrent years should bear the same
Sun-brightened bubbles to my life's dull stream.
So sad and sweet it was, both life and death
Did mingle in the perfume of its flowers;
It was compounded of the Spring's sweet breath
And of the gusty winter's snow-white hours.
The tender cadence of the soft May-wind
Fanned lovingly the misty winter air;
The old enchanted Mährchen-blooms combined
With chill frost-flowers to make it sad and fair.
Armida's garden was it for my feet,
Its air with magical delights was rife:
'Twas death to me, and yet so living sweet,
I welcomed death that was more fair than life.

252

‘Surely, the bitterness of death is past!’
I said, when once that weary dream was o'er;
‘Surely, the corpse of memory at last
Will rest in peace and trouble me no more!’
And so I buried sadly my dead love,
Laid it to sleep beneath the sands of Time.
It was no phœnix, but a wounded dove,
(I thought,) and would live only in my rhyme.
Alas! God's essence could not lightly die!
Its life was quickened by no mortal breath;
It rose again and filled my life's gray sky
With all the cold wan loveliness of death.
This phantom is it, whose persistence mars
The tender beauty of the summer hours,
Whose image blots from me the kindling stars
And saddens all the splendour of the flowers.

The months slid swiftly down the year's decline,
The flowers went drooping to their autumn tomb;
The dying leaves did, dolphin-like, outshine
With gold and red the summer's lavish bloom.
Springtide and summer did my grief assain
With primrose-blooms and rose-embalsamed air;
With dying summer seemed to die my pain
And for awhile the cruel foe did spare.
But all too soon I found the ancient fire
Slept only 'neath the rose and jasmine blooms:
It needed but a breath of dead desire
To stir old memories in their flowery tombs.
For one light flower-touch of thy white white hand,
One glance from out thy blue blue eye again,
Could call the dead Spring from the shadow-land
And bid relive for me the vanished pain.

Ah me, Madonna! we too have our hearts,
(Strange, seems it not?) and lose them sometimes, too!
Ay, and they break too, spite of all our arts!

253

‘'Tis true, 'tis pity! Pity 'tis, 'tis true!’
If I should say in earnest what in jest
So oft I've told you in an idle song,
Would you not treat it lightly as the rest
And deem it fancy? Yet you would be wrong;
For it is true, my sweet, as God is true,
I have no heart, no soul, that is not thine:
For it is true, as that the heavens are blue,
My heart's blood throbbed within the passionate line.
If stars give light, my love is star and moon;
If June bear roses, love is my heart's June.

If life be sleep and love the balm of death
And faith and beauty be but hour-long dreams;
If hoping faint, as faints the night-flowers' breath,
And pass away upon the years' cold streams;
If dreams be ghast with long-dead hopes and fears
And pale sad phantasms dim the glass of time;
If the unceasing rivulet of the years
Run no more lucent with the gold of rhyme;
If all Spring-blooms be chalices of woe
And all June-sweets with winter's breath be rife,
Ice-flowers shall mock for me the summer's glow;
If Love be Death, then Death shall be my life:
Sweet Death, sweet enemy, welcome to my breast;
For, pressing thee, I see, beyond thee, rest.

It is the old complaint we rhymers bear—
Half-known in heaven, wholly strange to earth—
The banquets of the Immortals now to share
And now to wake unto our mortal dearth.
Our souls a twofold burden must sustain;
And so, although we have no twofold joy,
Our double life is marred with double pain,
Our brightest hopes are dulled with earth's alloy.

254

We must have both—both love and fame—and strive
The golden chariot of the god of Day
Along the star-emblazoned track to drive,
With one immortal steed and one of clay.
Poor Phaëtons! no wonder that we fail,
Who would alike in earth and heaven prevail!

O tender beauty of the fleeting years,
O gilding glory of the sweet sad Past,
God's most effectual healing, that endears
To us our bitterest memories at last!
O exquisite strange magic, by whose powers
We live in an immortal wonderland,
Framed in the mist-screen of the fading hours,
A golden image in a mould of sand!
The memory of past loving gilds our lives;
New flower-times blossom from the brief annoy;
The olden beauty through a mist revives,
A faint sweet image of the ancient joy.
The fitful sunheat of the youthful sky
Mellows to sweetness as the years go by.

I would not have that love of ours revive,
(If I could backward tread the years again,)
Much as I prized it: life could scarce survive
A second access of the old sweet pain.
I would not, if I could; and in this strife
I cannot; for our man's heart has but room
For one short life: and Love itself is life
And can have but one summer and one bloom.
Is it so short, this love and life of ours?
Short in its sweetness, in its sadness long;
And yet we find, among its fleeting hours,
Some that are perfect as a linnet's song.
Dear, it was brief and left the sweeter peace:
The thought of true love lives, though loving cease.

255

SHADOW-SOUL.

‘Destiné à n'avoir que le songe de mon existence, pour moi je ne prétends pas vivre, mais seulement regarder la vie. . . . . Des jours pleins de tristesse, l'habitude rêveuse d'une âme comprimée, les longs ennuis qui perpétuent le sentiment du néant de la vie.’ —Senancourt.

‘On m'a demandé, “Pourquoi pleurez-vous?”
Et quand je l'ai dit, nul n'a
pleuré, parce que l'on ne me comprenoit
point. . . . . Je soupire parce
que la vie n'est pas venue jusqu'à moi.’ —
Lamennais.

THERE is a tale of days of old
Of how a man, by sorcery,
Wrought to defeat the spells that hold
The soul in bonds and spirit-free,
At will to wander, naked-souled,
About the earth and air and sea.

Long thus he went (the legend says)
Until at length a counter-spell,
Flung out upon the worldly ways
From some abysmal crack of hell,
Seized on him and, for all his days,
Doomed him to walk invisible;

Doomed him to pass among the things
Of life, its joy and strife and dole,
Note all men's hopes and wearyings,
Feel all their tides beside him roll,
Yet have in all no communings,
But walk a lone, unfriended soul.

256

So oftentimes to me it seems
As if some sad enchantment laid
Upon my life its hand, that teems
With many-mingling spells of shade,
And walled me in a web of dreams,
Shut out and sole from human aid.

For life has nought to do with me;
I stand and watch its pageant pass,
Stream by with pomp and blazonry
Of many goodly things. Alas!
Before my gaze its glories flee,
Like moon-motes on a dream-lake's glass.

Life's guerdons melt beneath my hands;
Its sweets fade from me like a mist:
I see folk conquer in the lands;
I know men crowned for what I missed;
I see my barren gray life-sands
Yield to them gold and amethyst.

My life is such a shadow-thing,—
So all unmixed with other lives,
With all men's joy and suffering
And all the aims for which life strives,—
I think sometimes each hour must bring
The nothingness whence it derives.

For men pass by me through the air,
Hot with bright stress of eager aims
Or furrowed with a sordid care,
Seeking sweet ease or blazoned names;
Glance at me with a passing stare
And vanish from me like swift flames.

257

My soul is like a wandering light
Born of marsh-solitudes and lost,
A hollow flame of heatless white,
Among a ruddy lifewarm host
Of living fires,—that may unite
With none, a solitary ghost.

My voice is like the voice of woods,
When the wind shrills between the pines;
An echo of sad Autumn moods,
Wherein the listening ear divines
A tale of endless solitudes,
Dim vistas stretched in shadowy lines.

My eyes are like some lake of dun,
Hid in the shadow of the hills;
Where all around, by day, the sun
Shines nor may pass athwart its sills
Of firs, but, when the day is done,
The white moon all the silence fills.

I gaze around me as I go,
A pale leaf drifting down the stream;
Men's lives flit by me on the flow,
Made dark or bright with shade or gleam:
For me, I feel them not, nor know;
Life passes by me like a dream.

I wander with sad yearning eyes
And heart a-longing for the lost,
(Known but in some dream-Paradise):
And ever as my way is crossed
By folk, my sad soul shrinks and flies,
Among live men a sighing ghost.

258

My feet love well to haunt the meads
And wander where the thrush is loud;
And yet some sad enchantment leads
Me aye among the busy crowd
And with bent head, my life proceeds,
Where the smoke hovers like a cloud.

And as I wander, once-a-while
I turn to gaze on folk gone by,
That seem to me not wholly vile,
Having some kindred in their eye:
They pass me mutely, and I smile
And my heart pulses like to die.

My heart feeds on its own desire:
The flowers that blossom in my breast
Blow out to frail life and expire,
Unknown, unloved and uncaressed;
And the pale phantom-haunted fire
Burns inward aye of my unrest.

I see twinned lovers, hand in hand,
Walk in the shadow of the trees;
Across the gold floor of the sand
Life passes by with melodies:
Alone upon the brink I stand
And hear the murmur of the seas.

I see afar full many a maid
Walk, musing of the love to come;
But, as I near them, in the shade
Of my sad eyes they read my doom
Of lonely life and fly afraid
And leave me silent in my gloom.

259

None may take hold upon my soul:
No spirit flies from men to me;
Billows of dreams between us roll,
Waves spreading out to a great sea:
Neither in gladness nor in dole
Can our desires conjoinèd be.

I have no heart in their delight;
My aim has nothing of their aim;
And yet the same flowers soothe our sight;
The air that rounds us is the same;
The same moon haunts our ways by night;
The same sun rises like a flame.

But over me a charm is cast,
A spell of flowers and fate and fire;
My hands stretch out through wastes more vast,
My dreams from deeper deeps aspire:
Life throbs around me, like a blast
That sweeps the courses of a lyre.

The merest unregarded thing,
Dropped into this my solitude,
Fills all my soul with echoing
Of dreams, as in some haunted wood
A pebble's plash into a spring
Is by the circling air renewed.

And yet there stirs a great desire
For human aid within my breast;
Men's doings haunt me like a fire,
My heart throbs loud with their unrest;
And now and then, as hope draws nigher,
My soul leaps to them, unrepressed.

260

For, though my feet in silence move
Alone across this waste of hours,
My heart strains hopeward like a dove,
My soul bursts out in passion-flowers;
My life brims o'er with a great love,
Alone in this wide world of ours.

My full soul quivers with a tide
Of songs; my head heaves with a hum
Of golden words, that shall divide
The dusk and bid the full light come.
Alas! men pass me, careless-eyed;
And still my lips are cold and dumb.

I go beneath the moon at night,
Along the grey deserted streets;
My heart yearns out in the wan light,
A new hope pulses in its beats;
Meseems that in the radiance white
My soul a like pale spirit meets;

As if the trance of the sad star
Were the mute passion of some spright,
That (like my own) some Fate did bar
From all Life's fruits of dear delight;
Some soul that aye must mourn afar
And never with its love unite.

Then doth my heart in blossoms ope;
A new sweet music sweeps along
The courses of my soul; the scope
Of heaven is peopled with a throng
Of long-pent thoughts and all my hope
Pours forth into a flood of song.

261

Bytimes, too, as I walk alone,
The mists roll up before my eyes
And unto me strange lights are shown
And many a dream of sapphire skies;
The world and all its cares are gone;
I walk awhile in Paradise.

But, in the day unfolded clear,
When the fresh life is all begun,
My soul into the old sad sphere
Falls off; my dull feet seem to shun
Once more the daylight and I fear
To face the frankness of the sun.

Alone and dumb, my heart yearns sore;
I am nigh worn with waste desire:
I stand upon a rocky shore,
Watch life and love sail nigh and nigher;
Then all pass by for evermore
And leave me by my last hope's pyre.

And yet I grieve not nor complain;
The time for me has long gone by,
When I could half assuage my pain
By giving it delivery:
My grief within my breast has lain
Unspoken and my eyes are dry.

I am confirmed in this my fate;
I lock my love within my breast
Nor look to find my soul a mate
Nor match with hope my hope unblest:
I am content to watch and wait,
Impassible in my unrest.

262

Long have I ceased the idle stress
Toward the rending of my gloom:
I am made whole in loneliness;
I lay no blame on this my doom;
I curse not, if I do not bless:
My life is silent as the tomb.

And yet (methinks) some day of days,
The silence, that doth wrap me round,
Shall at its heart of soundless ways
With some faint echoing resound
Of my own heart-cry and the rays
Of a like light in it be found.

Haply, one day these songs of mine
Some world-worn mortal shall console
With savour of the bitter wine
Of tears crushed out from a man's dole;
And he shall say, tears in his eyne,
There was great love in this man's soul!

Ay, bitter crushed-out wine of love,
Pressed out upon his every word;
A note as of some sad-voiced dove,
As of some white unfriended bird,
Dwelling alone in some dim grove,
Whose song no man hath ever heard;

But only the pale trackless sea
And the clear trances of the moon
Have quivered to his melody;
And for the rapture of the tune,
Their attributes, sad sanctity
And peace, they gave to him for boon;

263

So that his sadness, in the womb
Of the mild piteous years, has grown
A holy thing; and from the tomb,
Where in the shade he lies alone,
(As was in life his lonely doom)
The seed of his desire has blown

Into a flower above his grave,
Full of most fair and holy scent;
Most powerful and sweet to save
And to heal men from dreariment.
And I shall turn me in my grave
And fall to sleep again, content.

A BIRTHDAY SONG.

WHAT shall I say to my dearest dear,
On the sweetest day of the whole sweet year?
Shall I tell her how dainty she is and sweet,
From her golden head to her silver feet?
Love of my loves, shall I say to her—
Till the breeze catch tune and the birds repeat
The chime of my song—thou art bright and rare,
(Eyes of the gray and amber hair)
Who is so white as my love, my sweet?
Who is so sweet and fair?

Ah, no! for my song would faint and die,
Faint with a moan and a happy sigh,
For a kiss of her lips so clear and red,
For a touch of her dainty gold-wrought head
And a look of her tender eye!
And even the words, if words there were said,

264

Would fail for the sound of her lovely name,
Till the very birds should flout them to shame,
That they strove to render silver with lead,
To image with snow the flame!

So e'en I must sing her over again
The old old song with its one refrain,
The song that in Spring like the cooing dove
Has nothing for burden but just ‘I love.’
Go, O my songs, like a silver rain,
And flutter her golden head above;
Sing in her walks and her happy day,
Fill all her dreams with the roundelay,
‘I love’ and ‘I love her,’ again and again,
‘I love her,’ sorry or gay!

Is she thinking of me, my lady of love?
(Heart of my heart, is the day enough
For the thought and the wish of her daintiness
And the memory of the last caress?)
Do her lips seek mine, my gold-plumaged dove—
My little lady with glass-gray eyne—
In long sweet dreams of the night to press
From the grapes of delight Love's golden wine?
Does thought seem more and the world seem less,
As her hand strays, seeking mine?

Fly to her, fly, O my little song!
(Fly to her quickly; the way is long
And your little dove-coloured wings are weak.)
Nestle your head on her roseleaf cheek;
Say what I would, if my wings were strong
And the heaven were near to seek:
Take all the tender fancies that lie
And flower in my heart so silently;
Sing her the love I can never speak
Wholly, but in a sigh!

265

IN THE NIGHT-WATCHES.

‘The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth.’
Ezekiel.

I CRIED to myself in the night,
O God! is the day at hand?
My spirit longs for the light,
I weep in the shadow-land;
For the black night brings to me bitter tears,
The shadows call up the vanished years,
The past troops by with its many biers,
Ghosts in a ghastly band.

Very sad is the day,
I said; but the night I weep,
Weep for the woes that slay,
The terrors that compass sleep:
For the sounds of the wailing never cease,
The tides of the tears for aye increase,
The shadows will never have rest and peace,
What though the grave be deep.

I lay me down in the dusk,
After the day is done
And the clouds in their hodden husk
Have folded the golden sun:
Now shall I cease from travail, I say,
Now shall I put off the woes of day,
Now shall I bury me far away
Under the shadows dun.

266

Vulture-winged cometh the dark,
Brimming the air with the night;
And I, I lie and I hark
And strain mine eyes for a sight.
I watch and hope, with a faith unfed,
I lie and dream of a life unsped,
I live in the things that are long since dead,
I fancy the darkness light.

I strive with a mighty stress
To hold the terror from me,
To ward off the ghastliness
Of night and its mystery;
I spread out my hope like a sail on seas
That toss in the void to an unknown breeze,
I strain my sense for a faith that flees
And a joy that may not be.

But pitiless cometh the gloom
And the gray-winged spectres of Death,
And stealthily creepeth the doom
And the worm that continueth:
The night is full of the shapes of ill,
Strange phantoms moan at the window-sill,
The voices wail at the wild wind's will;
My heart grows cold with their breath.

The moon is a ghostly face,
The wraith of a radiance dead,
That wanders across the space,
Dead, but unhouselèd:
The stars are the eyes of the sad still sprights,
The lone lost souls that wander anights
And mock the day with their weirdly lights
And their flitting drearihead.

267

There wavers about my bed,
In the lurid gloom of the night,
The awful host of the dead,
Prisoned in spectral white:
I read in their eyes the dreadful scrolls,
The record of all the wrong that rolls,
The pain that gathers about the souls,
The terror that darkens light.

I read in their sightless eyes
The record of burning tears,
The writing that never dies,
The graven anguish and fears:
I hear in their silent mouths the sound
Of the wails that are mute and the cries that are drowned
In the sombre heart of the passionless ground
And the dead unburied years.

One by one, without end,
On through the night they go:
As each through the gloom doth rend,
I see a face that I know;
I feel a sorrow a man has known,
A brother-pain that has burnt and grown,
Through the long sad years and the midnights lone,
To a spectral shape of woe.

I see the life of my fear,
A ghastly wraith of the dead;
I hear his cry in my ear,
Though never a word be said.
I feel a pang that was dumb before,
I stand and gaze from a shadow-shore;
I hear the waves of the death-sea roar
And I know my heart has bled.

268

The terrors revive again;
The victims moan on the blast:
I weep with the world in pain;
I bleed with the wounded past:
My heart is heavy with memories,
My breast is weary with hopeless sighs;
The moon weeps tears of blood in the skies
And the stars with grief are ghast.

My heart leaps up to my mouth
With a mighty suffering;
My soul is sick with a drouth,
A nameless horrible thing:
I may not seize on the shape of my fear,
I may not close with my visions drear
And lay my wraiths on the saving bier;—
Ah, that my lips might sing!

Oh, that my soul might soar
On the living pinions of song
And open the prison door
Of life for that ghastly throng!
Ah, would I might call each shape by his name,
That my voice might chase them with singing flame
To the quiet graves from whence they came
And the slumber cold and long!

The stress of the things of life
With a throbbing agony stirred;
The night and its spectral strife
Took spirit and speech and word:
‘Shall none be potent to save?’ it cried;
‘Shall no light dawn in the darkness wide?
Shall no voice roll back the shadow-tide?
No saving song be heard?’

269

‘Lo!’ and it said, ‘For the stress,
The love fades out in men's hearts
And there fadeth the loveliness
From singers' and limners' arts;
For a man must work for the bitter bread,
Till his life has forgotten its goodlihead,
Till his soul is heavy with doubt and dread
And the bloom of his dream departs!

‘Surely a singer shall weep
And a poet shall weave his verse
With a pity tender and deep,
With love instead of a curse;
For all things thirst for a word of ruth;
The sweet Spring even has lost its youth:
The world is very dreary in truth
And pain grows daily worse.

‘Lo! if a prophet should come
And a singer to speak for men,
To give a voice to the dumb,
The world should be shriven then;
The folk should be freed from the unknown woes,
The griefs that are crimes and the pain that grows
To a fruit of hate from the unshared throes
And the unassoilzied pain.

‘The tyrant should recognize
His spirit's bitterness,
The sound of the agonies
That crush his heart with their stress,
The pain that has gathered to rage in his breast,
In the stifled sobs of the folk opprest;
The slayer should know his hopes unblest
In his victims' hopelessness.

270

‘The folk should turn in a day
To love and its years of gold;
The tyrant should cease to slay,
The years of anguish be told;
For the eyes of the folk should be cleared to know
That crime and sin and tyranny grow
From a common root in a common woe,
A sorrow dumb and cold.

‘Alas for the folk unsung
In the dark and sorrowful ways!
The earth is weary and wrung
For lack of the poet's lays!
O hearts of men, has the world no tears,
Is there none to weep for the vanished years
And the waste life troubled with doubts and fears
And the weary dying days?’

Alas! for I may not speak!
Alas! for my lips are dumb,
And the words that the spell would break,
Alas! for they will not come!
I lie and groan with a dumb desire,
I toss and burn with a sleepless fire
And I long for the sound of a golden lyre
And a poet's voice to come.

I long for a poet's voice
To lighten the sunless ways,
To say to the earth, ‘Rejoice!’
To hearten the dreary days,
To burst the chains of the silentness
That holds the world in its dismal stress,
To rend from being the prides that press
And the terrors that amaze!

271

I wait and am waiting still,
I lie and suffer and long;
How long shall the silence fill
The haunts of sorrow and wrong?
How long shall the great dumb host of the sad
Hold sternly aloof, whilst the heaped years add
To their anguish, for want of a singer had
And a succour? O God! How long?

A SONG OF DEAD LOVE.

THERE came to me a dream in the midnight
Of a fair shape beseen with glittering hair,
The semblance of a woman, very fair,
Yea, and most sorrowful; for all the light
Within her eyes was faded for despite

Of worldly woe, and all her bloom was fled,
For grieving over ghosts of dead delight
And wearying for Love and all his might,
That in the petals of the rose lay dead,
Mourned over by the lily's heavy head.

‘If any love,’ to me the shape did say,
(And as she spoke I turned me in my bed,
Wondering to look upon her goodlihead,)
‘Most meet it is, I should upon thee lay
The task of warning him from love away.

‘For bitter sooth it is that Love doth lie
All sadly buried from the eyes of day,
Under the shredded petals of the May;
And with his death did ease of lovers die
And nought is left for them but tear and sigh.

272

‘Wherefore, if one have the desire of it,
Unknowing what withal he must aby,
This strait commandment unto thee give I,
That thou with song do of Love's death let wit
Those foolish souls that still their lives do knit

‘About an idle woman's gold-red hair
And in the empty courts of Love do sit,
Watching the torches for his funeral lit,
That they should win their senses to forbear
From loving aught, because the thing is fair.

‘For, of a truth, henceforth the end of love
Shall be no more as it hath been whilere;
Since he is dead, to whom there did repair
Sick souls for solace. Whoso tastes thereof
Heart-hunger all his days shall surely prove

‘And shall on no wise come to ease his pain;
For, since Love's light is faded from above
The world into the grave, his silver dove—
That wont whilom all lovers to assain
With balm and quickly make them whole again,

‘Nestling soft wings against their wounded hearts—
Has for the sorrow of its Lord's death ta'en
The semblance of a falcon, all a-stain
With blood and milk, that of his rancour darts
His ruddy beak into each heart that smarts

‘With lover's woe and delving in the breast,
Doth tear and lacerate the inward parts,
Until all hope of future ease departs
From the sad soul and men are all opprest
With unsalved love unto the utterest.

273

‘Wherefore, sing thou and warn the folk of ill!’
And I: ‘O lady, would my tongue were blest
With happy words! But lo! I have no rest
For agonies of love, that doth fulfil
My sleepless soul and all its cruel will

‘Doth wreak on me, to bring me to despair.
How shall I ward from men the darts that kill,
When I myself am of their poison still
Nigh stricken unto death? O lady fair!
Teach me how I may win the bird to spare,

‘And then I will make shift for men to sing,
As thou dost bid.’ But she, with such an air
Of pity, answered, ‘First the song must fare,—
And haply salve shall rest upon its wing.’
Wherefore I made this song, awakening.

CADENCES.

(MINOR.)

THE olden memories buried lie,
And the ancient fancies pass;
The old sweet flower-thoughts wither and fly
And die as the April cowslips die,
That scatter the bloomy grass.

All dead, my dear! And the flowers are dead
And the happy blossoming Spring;
The winter comes with its iron tread,
The fields with the dying sun are red
And the birds have ceased to sing.

274

I trace the steps on the wasted strand
Of the vanished Springtime's feet:
Withered and dead is our Fairyland;
For Love and Death go hand in hand,
Go hand in hand, my sweet.

(MAJOR.)

OH, what shall be the burden of our rhyme
And what shall be our ditty when the blossom's on the lime?
Our lips have fed on winter and on weariness too long:
We will hail the royal summer with a golden-footed song!

O lady of my summer and my Spring,
We shall hear the blackbird whistle and the brown sweet throstle sing
And the low clear noise of waters running softly by our feet,
When the sights and sounds of summer in the green clear fields are sweet.

We shall see the roses blowing in the green,
The pink-lipped roses kissing in the golden summer-sheen;
We shall see the fields flower thick with stars and bells of summer-gold
And the poppies burn out red and sweet across the corncrowned wold.

The time shall be for pleasure, not for pain;
There shall come no ghost of grieving for the past betwixt us twain;
But in the time of roses our lives shall grow together
And our love be as the love of gods in the blue Olympic weather.

275

AREOPAGITICA.

It may be expedient to note that the word “kings” is, by a quasi-elliptical figure, necessitated by the concision of expression inseparable from verse-composition, employed in this poem in a general sense, as a comprehensive term denoting, not only the traditional and semifabulous type of the bloodthirsty and heartless monarch of popular legend, but all kinds of egotistical and irresponsible oppressors of humanity, whether aristocratic or plebeian, ancient tyrants or modern exploiters of the Jacobin gospel of Liberty-to-oppress-one's-fellows, Flails of God or political breedbates, slavers or beanbaggers, worldwasters or Trade-union agitators, Philip II or Krüger, Lopez or Lassalle, Gengis Khan or Gambetta, Tiberius or Marat, Attila or O'Connell, Richard of Gloucester or Charles James Fox, Sylla or Moraes, Cromwell or Couthon, Borgia or Barère, Nero or Robespierre. (I confess that, for my part, I can see no moral difference,—except it be in favour of the superior frankness of the Roman ruffian, who, at least, did not claim to benefit humanity by the indulgence of his delirious appetites, —between the frenzied antics of the Imperial corybant, rhapsodizing over the ruins of his capital, and the hyena-orgies celebrated by the obscene cutthroats of the self-styled Comité du Salut Public, the dastardly purveyors of the guillotine, whilst engaged in organizing the cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent victims of the best and worthiest blood of France.) The monarchical tyrant of the legendary type has for centuries past ceased to exist, the last (and imperfect) example having perhaps been offered by Louis XIV, although it must be confessed that the late Prince Bismarck and his “empéreur mécanique” presented many of the characteristic features of the genus. The debonair and soft-hearted rulers of our own days, Franz Josef of Austria, Leopold I of Belgium, Maximilian of Mexico, Ludwig I of Bavaria, Napoleon III, Humbert of Italy, Frederick of Germany, Dom Pedro II of Brazil, &c., men illustrious for all the virtues calculated to adorn a private station and greatly to be pitied for the accident of fate which placed them in a position where their very qualities could not but militate against their security,—can in general be reproached with one sole default, to wit, the lack of the (to a monarch) indispensable capacity of sternness and determination, necessary for the protection, by the unsparing enforcement of justice and discipline, of themselves and their subjects from the irreconcilable enemies of society. Since the monstrous latter-day development (for its origin we must go back to the Garden of Eden or, yet farther into the dark backward of Time, to the birth of those eldest of the passions, greed and envy,) of the shameless and heartless juggle best known by the modern euphemism of “Liberalism” and the forcible inoculation of society with the Radical doctrines of “Ôte-toi de là, que je m'y mette” and “La carrière ouverte aux non-talents,” (notwithstanding the terrible object-lesson of the French Revolution, which demonstrated, once and for all and past all appeal, the radical falsity of the optimistic views of human nature maintained by Rousseau and his fellow-sentimentalists of the hysteric school and proved, with crushing conclusiveness, that the human animal, especially of the inferior ethnical strains, is, when unrestricted by laws and uncurbed by social and religious conventions, a ferocious and heartless wild beast, dangerous and pernicious to the world as to himself, the attempted realization of humanitarian theories and Republican chimeras, although absolutely unhindered and pursued, under exceptionally favourable circumstances, to its logical issue, having resulted in the absolute domination of the criminal classes and the utter ruin of France under the frightful oppression of the Jacobin leaders, men stained with the foulest vices, who would, under any decent system of government, have passed their whole lives in prison,) the equivalent of the old despot-type must be sought in the ranks of the so-called “popular” party, among the cynical and unscrupulous social and political agitators, who, in pursuit of their own private advantage, deliberately address themselves to excite class against class and to exploit, to their own profit, the brute passions and cupidities of the ignorant and gullible masses, upon whom the balance of political power has, by the incredible folly and weakness of their natural guardians and directors, been allowed to devolve; the “sophisticated rhetoricians” and professional humbuggers, the “tonguesters”, who, however carefully they may dissimulate the alliance, are the natural and inevitable abettors and coadjutors of the “knifesters”; the shameless jackpuddings who allow no consideration, public or private, to interfere with the flagrant indulgence of their raging vanity and of whom a fair sample is the crew of malignant busybodies who flood the less reputable portions of the press with their anti-patriotic vapourings and vent their spleen upon the country, which treats them with the well-merited contempt due to those who have an insatiable appetite for notoriety, but are naturally ungifted to achieve reputation by fair means, by heaping the filthiest calumnies on our armies and their commanders and extolling as saints and heroes the bandit hordes of froward and faithless churls, (notable for but one quality, a brute tenacity, an animal hardihood having little in common with the combination of magnanimous virtues, which we in England honour under the name of “courage”,) from whom our soldiers are now (March 1902) proceeding, with the noblest patience and with unexampled magnanimity, to deliver suffering South Africa; brief, among the tribe of fishers in troubled waters, who have, in the service of their own mean ends, extirpated the sense of moral obligation from the minds of the intellectually and morally lower classes (I speak of the wilfully ignoble “smart” class, so-called, at the top, no less than of the far more excusable, because passive and helpless, ethnical residuum at the bottom of the social scale) and have gone far to undermine the moral basis of society, the principle, incomparably formulated by Mazzini, of the performance of duty as the indispensable condition precedent of the enjoyment of any right, which is the necessary foundation of every social fabric. The names of such pests of society, men who have founded their fortunes, social, material and political, upon the ruin and misery of their dupes and the often irreparable injury of their native land, will suggest themselves (alas!) in abundance to all impartial students of contemporary politics and sociology,— names which will, it may safely be prophesied, be held by future generations in at least equal execration with those of the typical tyrants of tradition, as those of heartless and ruthless oppressors of their kind and enemies of humanity, who have brought more widespread ruin upon the world than Napoleon or Gengis Khan and who, by pursuing their private aims under the pretence of philanthropic enthusiasm and of engrossing concern for the welfare of their poorer fellows, have added the crowning sin of hypocrisy to the franker vices of their predecessors.

‘Parle aux oppresseurs; enveloppe-les des plaintes, des gémissements, des cris de leurs victimes; qu'ils les entendent dans leur sommeil et les entendent encore dans leur veille; qu'ils les voient errer autour d'eux comme des pâles fantômes, comme des ombres livides; que partout les suive l'effrayante vision; que ni le jour ni la nuit elle ne s'éloigne d'eux; qu'à l'heure du crépuscule, lorsqu'ils s'en vont à leurs fêtes impies, ils sentent sur leur chair l'attouchement de ces spectres et qu'ils frissonnent d'horreur.’ Lamennais, Une voix de prison.

I WENT in the night of the summer, under the woods in the gloaming,
Under the crown of the oaks and the solemn shade of the pines;
I followed the lamps of the angels, over the firmament roaming,
And sought for the ciphers of fate in their inscrutable signs.

And lo! as I went in the shade, at the hour when the sky is darkened
And the silver disc of the moon under the cloud-line dips,
I heard a sound in the air, as if the forest-world hearkened;
A power there was born in my breast and a spirit spoke from my lips,

Saying, ‘Come forth and be judged, O ye that have darkened living,
Ye that have stolen the sweet and the savour from pleasant life!
I tell you, the hour is at hand that shuts you out from forgiving,
The time you shall answer for all you've sown of anguish and strife.

276

‘Stand forth, o ye kings, in your purple! Stand forth, o ye priests, in your shame!
Merchants and slavers, ye all that thrive on the blood of your kind!
Ye all that have helped in men's bosoms to stifle the sacred flame,
Have stolen their fruit of gladness and left but the bitter rind!

‘Stand forth and give ear to the wrongs, as the bards and the sages have told them,
Your fellows have done to men, in the dusk of the bygone time!
Hearken and tremble for fear, as the eyes of your soul behold them
Bound in the singing hell of the poet's terrible rhyme!

‘Stand forth, o ye kings, in your purple; masters of nations and armies!
Ye all that have held in your hands the keys of evil and good!
Ye all that have ransacked life to search and to see where the charm is,
Have rifled the blossoms of hell to stay your hunger with food!

‘Ye all that have not been content with lusting and riot and madness,
Have sucked for a sharper delight in your people's anguish and fears,
Have made your life joyous with pain and glad from your servants' sadness,
Fair, fair with the horror of blood, sweet, sweet with the bitter of tears!

277

‘Behold! I will summon you up from the heart of the glooms infernal;
Up, up from your darksome graves; up, up from your slumbers of stone.
I will make you your shame for a sign and your anguish a thing eternal;
I will spare not a whit to your souls of the ruin and wrack you have sown.

‘Stand forth and be judged, o ye merchants! that heap you up gold without measure,
That wither to sparkling dross the golden fruit of the years,
That gather the incense of sighs and the sweat of men's blood for your treasure,
That fashion to gold our griefs and make coined gold of our tears!

‘Ye all that have thrived on the pain and the griefs and the need of the toilers,
Have bounden your burdens on life, that hold it tearless and dumb!
Ye all that, to lengthen the scope and the harvest-time for the spoilers,
Have sealed up the portals of Life, lest Death the deliverer come!

In allusion to the civil and religious prohibition of suicide, a truly fiendish invention of Semitic origin.

‘Stand forth and be judged, o ye priests! that suck out the souls of the nations,
That darken the azure of heaven into the gloom of a pall,
That fetter men's health and their strength with your prayers and your imprecations,
That poison their hopes with doubting and mingle their gladness with gall!

278

Ye all that have ever been ready to work out the will of the tyrants,
To toll, at a despot's bidding, fair Freedom's funeral knell!
Ye all that to strangle thought and to shackle its upward aspirance,
Have lengthened the struggles of life into the horrors of hell!

Behold! I will summon you up the pale sad shapes without number,
That gave up the ghost without speaking, the spoil of your pitiless hands!
I will call up the unnamed victims that whelm all the world with their cumber,
That fester the fields with their anguish and shade with their sorrow the lands!

‘You think ye have silenced them now; and the spirit within you rejoices!
You think that requital is none and none shall rebuke you again!
I tell you, I hear in mine ears the dumb inarticulate voices,
That speak with the clearness of thunder from ocean and forest and plain!

‘I tell you, the hollow graves, where the tyrants that went before you
Lie in the prison-sleep of the middle sepulchre's gloom,
Are bound with the selfsame fate that threatens and hovers o'er you,
Ring with the selfsame curse and quake with the selfsame doom!

279

‘For the doom that their victims wrought not, the curse that they died unspeaking,
Grew and shall grow for aye with their mouldering forms in the earth:
The vengeance they might not wreak, the winds and the worms are wreaking,
Breaking the sleep of the dead with a fierce and terrible mirth.

‘But lo! a more horrible doom and a nearer vengeance are waiting
For you, if ye turn not away from your sins and humble your heads.
For the fate, that is ripened for you, shall wait no death for its sating,
Shall grow in your living hearts and lie in your silken beds.

‘I tell you, the soul of the dead and the wailing dumb in their dying
Is gathered again by the winds and garnered up in the flowers:
I tell you, their yearning is hid and their curses and prayers are lying,
Ready to burst on your heads, in the womb of the coming hours.

‘For a season shall be when the meat that you eat shall be sad with their curses,
The drink that you drink shall be deadly and bitter to death with their tears,
The garments you wear shall burn and eat to your hearts like Dirce's,
The sights that you see shall be as a fire that maddens and sears.

280

‘The eyes of the dead shall look, with a doom and an accusation,
From the eyes of the friends you love and the maidens that kiss your lips;
The voice of the dead in your ears shall clamour without cessation;
The shade of their hate shall darken your lives with its fell eclipse.

‘And if you shall say: The grave will give us the peace we burn for,
Will bring us the senseless sleep and the rest untroubled by thought;
We shall sleep with our fathers of old and have the ease that we yearn for,
Free from the memory's pain and the wraiths of the things we wrought;

‘The doom that you laid on others shall fall on yourselves, unsparing;
The anguish you felt of old shall seem as nought to the new:
For the earth, that shall wrap you about, shall shutter you in from all sharing,
Shall fetter you fast in her arms, where nothing can succour you.

‘The lapses you had in life, when the anguish failed for a second
And the memory slid away from the moment's glitter and glow,
You shall never have them again, when once the angel hath beckoned,
When once your bodies are dust and your heads in the tomb are low.

281

‘For the wraiths of the wrongs you wrought shall compass you round, unceasing;
The spirits of all the dead you crushed in your bitter strife
Shall gird you about with a fire and an anguish for aye increasing,
Shall fashion for you in death a new and terrible life.

‘Wherefore I bid you repent. For the time draws nigh to the reaping;
The harvest ripens apace and the sickle lies in the tares.
I counsel you turn from your sins with fear and sorrow and weeping,
Whilst yet the trumpets are dumb and the fire of the judgment spares.’

‘Kein Gott, kein Heiland erlöst ihn je
Aus diesen singenden Flammen!’

—

Heine.

A BACCHIC OF SPRING.

‘Le beau Dionysos, dont le regard essuie
Les cieux et fait tomber la bienfaisante pluie,
Qui s'élance, flot d'or, dans les pores ouverts
De notre terre et fait gonfler les bourgeons verts.’
Théodore de Banville.

I.

OUT of the fields the snowdrops peep:
To work, O land!
Awake, O earth, from the white snow-sleep,
Shake off the coverlet soft and deep;
Spring is at hand.
Thou hast slumbered the months away long enough;
'Tis time for the winter rude and rough
To die and give way
To the bloomy May:
Awake and shake off the tyrant gruff!

282

Up from the numbing clasp of the snow!
Shake off the winter weather!
The breath of the year grows warm apace,
As the snowflakes melt from his fresh young face,
And the eastern moorlands are all aglow
With their budding heather.
Already the swallows are calling, “Cheep! cheep!
All things are waking from their long sleep,
We and the Spring together.”

See where the battle-host of the blooms
Waits for the fray;
See where the cowardly tyrant glooms:
He knows the scent of those soft bright dooms,
That say to him, ‘Hence away!’
Over the meadows their squadrons glitter,
Orange and purple and white and blue,
Jewel-helmed with the diamond-dew,
A fairy army of sweet Spring roses,
Of bluebell-blossoms and pale primroses,
Spreads out its ranks in the balmy air,
Whilst the lark and linnet and blackbird twitter
A quaint war-march for each elfin Ritter,
That troops in the alleys fair.

II.

Wearyful winter is gone at last,
With its wild winds sighing,
And the blooms of the Spring are flocking fast:
Primrose and cowslip and windflower-bells
Broider the grass in the cool wood-dells;
Cloud-roses over the sky are flying.
Evoë! the chill of the year is dying!
Good-bye to the bitter blast!
Iö! the hillocks are mad with bliss,
As the new sweet stirring

283

Quickens their hearts with the vernal kiss!
Silver and azure and golden green,
The meadows shine in the warm Spring-sheen
And the music of myriad wings is whirring,
As the birds, that fled from the winter frore,
Back to the isle with the silver shore
Hasten from spice-forests far away
In the Indian seas,
To revel in blossom-embroidered May,
As the flower-hosts chase out the winter gray
From the newly wakened leas.

Bacchus returns from the Eastern skies;
Welcome his train with their bright wood-sheen!
Evoë! he brings us the golden prize,
The charm of the Indian queen,
He battled so long for and won at last;
He brings us the spell that unchains the flowers
And loosens the wheels of the golden hours,
When the power of the frost is waning fast,
When the chill snowflakes from the landscape fly
And the dying eastwinds wearily sigh,
‘Alas! our winter is past!’
See! to the eastward his lance-points gleam!
Iö! the time is near!
Evoë! the winter wanes like a dream,
As the diamond helms of the Bassarids beam
And the May-blooms glow in the sun's full stream,
That glitters on every spear.
Already I hear their voices' hum
And the pipe and clang of their silver reeds
And their songs of the Spring-god's sweet flower-deeds,
As back from the golden East he leads
His sea-shell car with the tiger steeds:
Evoë! the Spring is come!

Evoë, Lyæus! the Spring is here!
Onward they come apace.

284

See how the landscape, bare and sere,
Flushes at once with a golden bliss,
As the earliest touch of the vernal kiss
Gilds with a tender grace
The grand old winter-enwounded trees,
That throb and sway in the balmy breeze,
Sweet from the flower-strewn plains;
Whilst the radiant train of the wine-god sweeps
Through the inmost heart of the woodland deeps
And the 'wildering thrill of the Springtide creeps
Up through their frost-dried veins.

A SOUL'S ANTIPHON.

I.

MY soul burst forth in singing,
My heart flowered like a rose;
Chimes of sweet songs fled ringing
Along the forest close.
Is it the new year springing?
Is it the May that blows?
No; it was none of those.

Among the trees came flying
A spirit like a flame;
A sound of songs and sighing,
Mixed, round his presence came;
A sound of soft airs dying,
The music of a name,
Fainting for its sweet shame.

A white shape wreathed with flowers,
A winged shape like a dove;
Hands soft as peach-bloom showers;
Eyes like an orange-grove

285

In whose enchanted bowers
The magic fire-flies rove:
I knew his name;—'twas Love.

‘O soul!’ I said, ‘the voices
That flutter in thy breast,
The yearning that rejoices
In its own vague unrest,
Are all in vain: the choice is
'Twixt Life's and Love's behest.
Choose now, which is the best.’

The winged white Love came calling,
With words like linnet-lays,
When hawthorn-snows are falling
About the forest ways.
His speech was so enthralling,
Such spells were in his gaze,
My heart flowered with his praise.

He came to me with kisses
And looked into mine eyes;
My soul brimmed up with blisses;
But with the bliss came sighs,
As when a serpent hisses
Beneath flower-tapestries
And moss piled cushion-wise.

The sad old thoughts came flocking
Up to that look of his:
For memory and its mocking,
I could not smile, ywis;
It was as the unlocking
Of doors on an abyss
Wherein old living is.

It was like grief recounting
The happy times of yore;

286

It was like gray waves mounting
A lost sun-golden shore,
Like sad thoughts over-counting
The sweet things gone before,
The days that are no more.

And as I looked with sighing
Into the sweet shape's eyes,
I saw a serpent lying
'Mid balms of Paradise;
I knew my dole undying,
The presage sad and wise,
The worm that never dies.

Love laughed and fled, a-leaping,
Between the flower-flushed breres,
And left my sad thoughts keeping
The vigil of the years:
My soul burst out in weeping;
I saw my hopes and fears
Troop by, embalmed in tears.

II.

My soul burst forth in weeping,
My heart swelled like a sea;
There came sad wind-notes sweeping
Across the golden lea:
Is autumn past, and reaping?
Is winter come for me?
No, no, it cannot be.

Among the trees came slowly
A spirit like a flower,
A lily pale and holy,
White as a winter hour:

287

Sad peace possessed him wholly;
Around him, like a sower,
He cast a silver shower;

A shower of silver lilies,
Each one a haunting thought:
It was as when a rill is
Across waste rose-bowers brought
And all the heart's grief still is
And one has pain in nought:
Such peace their perfumes wrought.

‘O soul!’ I said, ‘the sadness
That is in this one's breath
Is sweeter than the madness
That round Love fluttereth:
This one shall bring heart's gladness
And balms of peace and faith;
For lo! his name is Death.’

The pale sweet shape came strewing
Flower-tokens on the grass;
His face was the renewing
Of love in a dream-glass;
His speech was like bird-wooing,
When moonlight-shadows pass.
My soul sighed out, ‘Alas!’

He came to me with sighing,
My hand in his he took;
My soul wept nigh to dying,
For all his piteous look:
Yet in his eyes was lying
Peace, as of some still brook
Laid through a forest-nook.

The memories of past sorrow
Brimmed up mine eyes with tears;

288

I could not choose but borrow
Fresh grief from the waste years:
And yet some sweet to-morrow
Smiled through, as when rain clears
Off, and the sun appears.

It was as if one, peering
Into a well of woe,
Saw all the shadow clearing
From the brown deeps below;
Saw sapphire skies appearing
And woods with moss aglow
And Spring in act to blow.

With tearful looks, I, gazing
Into the sad shape's eyes,
Saw a new magic tracing
New lovely mysteries;
I saw new hope upraising
A new love-paradise
And clear moon-silvern skies.

My soul fled forth in singing,
My heart flowered like a rose;
Death smiled, with sweet tears springing,
'Twixt smile and smile that rose.
His arms closed round me, clinging:
Peace came and clipt me close;
Peace, such as no love knows.

A SONG OF WILLOW.

LOVE and Life have had their day,
Long ago;
Hope and Faith have fled for aye,
With the roses and the May;
This is but an idle show:
Come away!

289

Seekest thou for flowers of June,
Roses red?
Listenest for the linnet's tune?
Here the night-fowl wails the moon;
Here are lilies of the dead,
Tear-bestrewn.

Thinkest Love will come again,
Fresh and sweet,
With the apple-blossoms' rain?
Many a day dead Love has lain,
Folded in the winding-sheet.
Hope is vain.

See, Death beckons from the gloom;
(Come away!)
Life is wasted from its room,
Love is faded from its bloom;
Come and shelter in the gray
Of the tomb.

Come away! The bed is laid,
Soft and deep;
In the blossomed lindens' shade,
Underneath the moon-pale glade,
In the quiet shalt thou sleep,
Unaffrayed.

Kiss thy love, ‘Farewell’, and say,
‘Joy and pain!’
In the shadow come thee lay
Of the night that hath no day,
Where sleep healeth heart and brain:
Come away!

290

SONGS' END.

THE chime of a bell of gold
That flutters across the air,
The sound of a singing of old,
The end of a tale that is told,
Of a melody strange and fair,
Of a joy that is grown despair:

For the things that have been for me
I shall never have them again;
The skies and the purple sea
And day like a melody
And night like a silver rain
Of stars on forest and plain.

They are shut, the gates of the day;
The night has fallen on me:
My life is a lightless way;
I sing yet, while as I may.
Some day I shall cease, maybe:
I shall live on yet, you will see.

TOURNESOL.

These two poems served as Prelude and Postlude respectively to my “New Poems” published in 1880.

GEOFFREY of Rudel! How the name
Leaps to the lips like a flower of flame,
Holding the heart with a dream of days
When life lay yet in the flowered ways
And the winds of the world were stirred and strong
With blast of battle and silver of song;
When love was long and women were true
And the bell of the steadfast sky was blue

291

Over a world that was white as yet
From load of labour and fruitless fret
Of hunger for gain and greed of gold,
That now have made us our young world old!
I hail thee, honest and tender time!
I, last of many, that with rude rhyme
Ring out reproach to the cheerless air
And chide the age that it is not fair.
And first of any the blames I bring,
I chide it for lack of love-liking,
For fall of faith and hope grown cold,
For love turned lusting and youth grown old.
For where, I pray you, in this our day
Lives there the lover that loves alway
And where is the lady whose constant eye
Shall seek one only until she die?
Alack for Rudel and Carmosine,
Whose loves, as the constant sun his sheen,
Burn like a beryl in lays of yore!
Their day is dead as the bale they bore
For faithful fancy; and now alone
In minstrels' making their name is known.
Their thought is perished, their peerless fame
Faded and past as the marish flame
That flees from the blink of the breaking day;
And love is dead with them, wellaway!
For now men's love is a fitful fire,
A wayless desert of waste desire;
And women's love is a cold caprice,
A wind that changes without surcease.
For the lifelong love that in days of old
Was dearer than lands and grain and gold,
The love that possessed men's heart and soul
In life and leisure, in death and dole,
That stirred their spirits to many a deed
Of noble daring, that was the meed
Of haughty honour and high emprize,

292

That made men look in their lady's eyes
For gain and guerdon of all their strife,
This love lack we in our modern life.
For the folk through the fretful hours are hurled
On the ruthless rush of the wondrous world
And none has leisure to lie and cull
The blossoms that made life beautiful
In that old season when men could sing
For dear delight in the risen Spring
And Summer ripening fruit and flower.
Now carefulness cankers every hour;
We are too weary and sad to sing;
Our pastime's poisoned with thought-taking.
The bloom is faded from all that's fair
And grey with smoke is the grievous air.
None lifts to luting his hand and voice
Nor smites the strings with a joyful noise;
For all who sing in the land are pale;
Their voice is the voice of those that wail
For beauty buried and hang the head
For the dream of a day evanishèd.
How shall we say sweet things in rhyme
Of this our marvellous modern time,
We that are heavy at heart to sing,
But may not rejoice for remembering?
We care not, we, for the gorgeous glow
Of wealth and wonder, the stately show
Of light and luxury, that sweeps past,
Unheeded, before our eyes downcast.
The pageant of passion and pride and crime,
That fills the face of the turncoat time,
The gold that glitters, the gems that glow,
Hide not from us the wasting woe
That gnaws at the heart of the hungry age.
The starving soul in the crystal cage
Looks through the loop of the blazoned bars,
As out of heaven the sorrowing stars

293

Gaze on the grief of the night newborn.
What shall we do for the world forlorn,
We that drink deep of its sorrowing?
What can we do, alas! but sing?
Sing as the bird behind the wire,
That pours out his passion of dear desire,
His fret for the forest far away,
His hunger of hope for the distant day
When peradventure shall ope for him
The door that darkens on heaven's rim;
What can we do, bird-like, but pour
Into our singing the dreams of yore,
The long desire of the soul exiled
From some sweet Eden laid waste and wild?
And if, by fortune, we turn our feet,
Torn with long travel, toward that sweet,
That happy haven of “long ago”
And tune our lutany soft and low
To some dear ditty of things that were,
Memoried with melodies faint and fair,
Shall any blame us for this that we
Fordid Time's tyranny and forgot
Awhile life's lovelessness? I trow not;
For song is sinless and fancy free.

A FUNERAL SONG FOR THÉOPHILE GAUTIER.

WHAT shall our song be for the mighty dead,
For this our master that is ours no more?
Lo! for the dead was none of those that wore
The laurel lightly on a heedless head,
Chanting a song of idle lustihead
Among the sun-kissed roses on the shore:
This our belovèd, that is gone before,

294

Was of the race of heroes battle-bred
That, from the dawn-white to the sunset-red,
Fought in the front of war.

Lo! this was he that in the weary time,
In many a devious and darkling way,
Through dusk of doubt and thunder of dismay,
Held our hearts hopeful with his resonant rhyme,
Lifting our lives above the smoke and slime
Into some splendid summer far away,
Where the sun brimmed the chalice of the day
With gold of heaven and the accordant chime
Of woods and waters to the calm sublime
Carolled in roundelay.

This was our poet in the front of faith;
Our singer gone to his most sweet repose,
Sped to his summer from our time of snows
And winter winding all the world with death.
Who shall make moan or utter mournful breath
That this our noblest one no longer knows
Our evil place of toil and many woes,
Lying at the last where no voice entereth?
Who shall weave for him other than a wreath
Of laurel and of rose?

Hence with the cypress and the funeral song!
Let not the shrill sound of our mourning mar
His triumph that upon the Immortals' car
Passes, star-crowned; but from the laurelled throng,
That stands await, let every voice prolong
A noise of jubilance that from afar
Shall hail in heaven the new majestic star
That rises with a radiance calm and strong,
To burn for ever unobscured among
The courts where the Gods are.

295

Ay, let the hautboys and the clarions blow,
The air rain roses and the sky resound
With harpings of his peers that stand around,
What while the splendours of the triumph go
Along the streets and through the portico.
I, too, who loved the dead, as from the ground
The glow-worm loves the star, will stand, browbound
With winter-roses, in the sunset-glow,
And make thin music, fluting soft and low
Above his funeral mound.

I, too, who loved him, from beyond the sea,
Add my weak note to that sublime acclaim
That, soaring with the silver of his name,
Shall shake the heavens with splendid harmony,
Till all who listen bend in awe the knee,
Seeing a giant's spirit, like a flame,
Remounting to that heaven from which it came,
And many weep for very shame to see
The majesty they knew not till 'twas free
From earthly praise or blame.

Hail, O our master! From the hastening hours
This one we set above its grey-veiled peers,
Armed with thy name against the night that nears.
We crown it with the glory of the flowers,
We wind it with all magic that is ours
Of song and hope and jewel-coloured tears;
We charm it with our love from taint of fears;
We set it high against the sky that lowers,
To burn, a love-sign, from the topmost towers,
Through glad and sorry years.

296

ANOTHER BIRTHDAY SONG.

THE rose-time and the roses
Call to me, dove of mine;
I hear the birdsong-closes
Ring out in the sunshine;
In all the wood-reposes
There runs a magic wine
Of music all divine.

All things have scent and singing;
The happy earth is ringing
With praise of love and June:
Have I alone no tune,
No sound of music-making
To greet my love's awaking
This golden summer noon?

Ah, love! my roses linger
For sunshine of thine eyes;
For Love the music-bringer
My linnets wait to rise;
All dumb are birds and singer:
The song in kisses dies
And sound of happy sighs.

What need of songs and singing,
When love for us is ringing
Bells of enchanted gold?
Dear, whilst my arms enfold
My love, our kisses fashion
Tunes of more perfect passion
Than verses new or old.

297

LOVE'S AMULET.

SONG, be strong and true to hold
Love within thy locks of gold:
Bind my lady's thought with rhyme;
Kiss her if her lips grow cold;
Bring her thoughts of summer-prime,
Lest her heart catch winter-time.
Song, be quick and bold.

Take her flowers of love and light,
Blossoms of her soul's delight,
Roses of her heart's desire;
Bind her brow with lilies white;
Lilies' snow and roses' fire
Hold love's summer ever by her,
In the world's despite!

Strew the Springtime in her way,
Lest she weary of the day,
Lest the lonely hours be long;
Be her season ever May,
May, when Love is safe from wrong
And with larks' and linnets' song
All the world is gay.

Sweet, I wind thee with a chain,
Verses linked in one refrain,
“Love me, love, who love but thee,”
Piping ever and again;
Bind thy thought and heart to be
Constant aye to Love and me
Thorow joy and pain.

298

MADRIGAL GAI.

THE summer-sunshine comes and goes;
The bee hums in the heart of the rose:
Heart of my hope, the year is sweet;
The lilies lighten about thy feet.

A new light glitters on land and sea;
The turtles couple on every tree.
Light of my life, the fields are fair;
Gossamers tangle thy golden hair.

The air with kisses is blithe and gay;
Love is so sweet in the middle May.
Sweet of my soul, the brook is blue;
Thine eyes with heaven have pierced it through.

Now is the time for kisses, now
When bird-songs babble from every bough.
Sweetest, my soul is a bird that sips
Honey of heaven from out thy lips.

LOVE'S AUTUMN.

[_]

(Field's Nocturne in D Minor).

YES, love, the Spring shall come again;
But not as once it came:
Once more in meadow and in lane
The daffodils shall flame,
The cowslips blow, but all in vain;
Alike, yet not the same.

299

The roses that we plucked of old
Were dewed with heart's delight:
Our gladness steeped the primrose-gold
In half its lovely light:
The hopes are long since dead and cold,
That flushed the wind-flowers' white.

Ah, who shall give us back our Spring?
What spell can fill the air
With all the birds of painted wing
That sang for us whilere?
What charm reclothe with blossoming
Our lives grown blank and bare?

What sun can draw the ruddy bloom
Back to hope's faded rose?
What stir of summer re-illume
Our hearts' wrecked garden-close?
What flowers can fill the empty room
Where now the nightshade grows?

'Tis but the Autumn's chilly sun
That mocks the glow of May;
'Tis but the pallid bindweeds run
Across our garden way,
Pale orchids, scentless every one,
Ghosts of the summer day.

Yet, if it must be so, 'tis well:
What part have we in June?
Our hearts have all forgot the spell
That held the summer noon;
We echo back the cuckoo's knell
And not the linnet's tune.

300

What should we do with roses now,
Whose cheeks no more are red?
What violets should deck our brow,
Whose hopes long since are fled?
Recalling many a wasted vow
And many a faith struck dead.

Bring heath and pimpernel and rue,
The Autumn's sober flowers:
At least their scent will not renew
The thought of happy hours
Nor drag sad memory back unto
That lost sweet time of ours.

Faith is no sun of summer-tide,
Only the pale calm light
That, when the Autumn clouds divide,
Hangs in the watchet height,
A lamp, wherewith we may abide
The coming of the night.

And yet, beneath its languid ray,
The moorlands bare and dry
Bethink them of the summer day
And flower, far and nigh,
With fragile memories of the May,
Blue as the August sky.

These are our flowers: they have no scent
To mock our waste desire,
No hint of bygone ravishment
To stir the faded fire:
The very soul of sad content
Dwells in each azure spire.

301

I have no violets: you laid
Your blight upon them all:
It was your hand, alas! that made
My roses fade and fall,
Your breath my lilies that forbade
To come at summer's call.

Yet take these scentless flowers and pale,
The last of all my year:
Be tender with them; they are frail:
But, if thou hold them dear,
I'll not their brighter kin bewail,
That now lie cold and sere.

ASPECT AND PROSPECT.

“Cup of wine, heart's blood, on each One or other They bestow.” —
Hafiz. ccxxvi, 5.

I.

THE time is sad with many a sign and token;
Desire and doubting in all hearts have met;
The ancient orders of the world are broken;
The night is spent, the morning comes not yet:
Men go with face against the Future set,
Each asking each, “When shall the wreak be wroken?
When shall the God come and the word be spoken
To end Life's passion and its bloody sweat?”

For sowing-time hath failed us even at reaping;
Time hath torn out the eyes and heart of faith;
Of all our gladness there abideth weeping;
Of all our living we have woven us death:
For many a hope is dead for lack of breath
And many a faith hath fallen and is sleeping,
Weary to death with the long hopeless keeping
The watch for day that never morroweth.

302

For all our lives are worn with hopeless yearning;
There is no pleasantness in all our days:
The world is waste and there is no returning
For our tired feet into old flowered ways.
Long use hath shorn our summer of its rays;
Of all our raptures there is left but burning;
We are grown sadly wise and for discerning,
The sweet old dreams are hueless to our gaze.

We trust not Love, for he is God no longer:
Another hath put on his pleasant guise:
The greater God hath bowed him to the stronger;
Death looks at life from many a lover's eyes:
And underneath the linden-tree he lies,
The gracious torch-bearer of ancient story,
His sweet face faded and his pinions' glory
Dim as the gloss of grass-grown memories.

No gods have we to trust to, new or olden;
The blue of heaven knows their thrones no more:
The races of the gods in death are holden:
Their pale ghosts haunt the icy river's shore.
Availeth not our beating at their door:
There is no presence in their halls beholden;
The silence fills their jewelled thrones and golden;
The shadow lies along their palace-floor.

And lo! if any set his heart to singing,
Thinking to witch the world with love and light,
Strains of old memories set the stern chords ringing;
The morning answers with the songs of night.
For who shall sing of pleasance and delight,
When all the sadness of the world is clinging
About his heart-strings and each breeze is bringing
Its burden of despairing and despite?

303

Help is there none: night covers us down-lying
To sleep that comes uneath with devious dreams:
The morning brings us sadness but and sighing:
We gather sorrow from the noontide beams:
And if a man set eyes on aught that seems
An oasis of peace, he finds, on nighing,
Its promise false, and sad almost to dying,
Turns from the mirage and its treacherous streams.

II.

And yet one hope by well-nigh all is cherished,—
Albeit many hold it unconfest,—
The dream of days that, when this life has perished
And all its strife and turmoil are at rest,
Shall rise for men out of some mystic West,—
A paradise of peace, where death comes never
And life flows calmly as some dreamy river
That wanders through the islands of the Blest;

A dream of love-lorn hearts made whole of sorrow,
Of all life's doubts and puzzles fleeted by,
Of severed lives reknit in one to-morrow
Of endless bliss beneath the cloudless sky;
A dream of lands where hope shall never die,
But in the fair clear fields, browbound with moly,
Our dead desires shall wander, healed and holy,
And over all a mystic peace shall lie;

A peace that shall be woven of old sadness
And bitter memories grown honey-sweet,
Where our lost hopes shall live again in gladness,
Chaining the summer to their happy feet;
Where never fulness with desire shall meet
Nor the sweet earth divide from the clear heaven
Nor mortal grossness shall avail to leaven
The ecstasy of that supernal seat.

304

III.

Ah! lovely dreams that come and go!
Shall ever hope to harvest grow?
Of all that sow shall any reap?
I know not, I: but this I know;
Whether the years bring weal or woe,
Whether the Future laugh or weep,
I shall not heed it;—I shall sleep.

I have lived out this life of ours;
I can no more.—Through shine and showers,
March lapses into full July:
The May sun coaxes out the flowers,
And through the splendid summer hours
Their tender little lives go by;
And when the winter comes, they die.

But in the Spring they live again.
Not so with us, whose lives have lain
In ways where love and grief are rife,
Whose seventy years of sadness strain
Toward the gates of rest in vain;
Our souls are worn with doubt and strife;
We have no seed of second life.

And yet for those whose lives have been
Through storm and sun alike serene,
Drinking the sunshine and the dew
In every break of summer sheen,
I doubt not but the unforeseen
May treasure for these flower-like few
A life where heart and soul renew;

A life where Love no more shall bring
The pains of hell upon its wing,
Where perfect peace at last shall dwell,

305

That happy peace that is the king
Of all the goods we poets sing,
That all with aching hearts foretell,
Yet know them unattainable.

But we, whom Love hath wrecked and torn,
Whose lives with waste desire are worn,
Whose souls life-long have been as lyres
Vibrating to each breath that's borne
Across our waste of days forlorn,
Whose paths are lit with funeral fires,
The monuments of dead desires,

We, for whom many lives have past,
Through storm and summer, shine and blast,
Within our one man's span of years,
We may not hope for peace at last
Save where the shade of Sleep is cast
And from our eyes Death's soft hand clears
The thought alike of smiles and tears.

Yet (for we loved you, brothers all,—
That love us not,—despite the wall
Of crystal that between us lies,)
We, to whose eyes, whate'er befall,
No angel could the hope recall,
We dream for you of brighter skies,
Of life new-born in Paradise:

We hope for you that golden day
When God (alas!) shall wipe away
The tears from all the eyes that weep;
And from our lonely lives we pray
That, of that happy time, some ray
Of your filled hope, your souls that reap,
May reach us, dream-like, in our sleep.

306

MELISANDE.

These two poems served as Prelude and Postlude respectively to my “New Poems” published in 1880.

I.

AH lady of the lands of gold!
Who shall lay hands on thee and hold
Thy beauty for a space as long
As pausing of a linnet's song?
Ah lady of the lays of old,
When love is life and right is wrong!

Ah lady of the dear old dream!
We watch Love's roses on the stream
That spins its silver in the land
Where garlands glitter from thy hand:
Ah singer of the sweets that seem!
When shall the dream take shape and stand?

Ah dear in dreams, lost long ago!
A sound of lutings soft and low,
A scent of roses newly prest,
Cease never from the dreamful West:
When shall a man draw near to know
The sweetness of thy perfect breast?

II.

A dream of days too far to fill:
The thin clear babble of the rill
That trickles through the fainting flowers;
A monotone of mourning hours;
The dim dawn coming sad and still;
The evening's symphony of showers.

307

A lone land under a sere sky;
And stretching tow'rd the veil on high,
My soul, a flower that seeks the sun;
The dull days dropping, one by one;
The darkness drawing ever nigh;
And still nor dream nor life is won.

III.

Ah sunflower-heart! ah Melisande!
When shall the dream take shape and stand?
When shall thy lips melt into mine?
When shall I drink thy looks like wine?
Shall earth for once turn fairyland
And all the past take shape and shine?

Alas! such hopes were vain indeed:
The waste world knoweth not the seed
That bears the blossom of delight.
Shall one go forth to sow the night
And look to reap sun-coloured weed
And lilies of the morning light?

Who would not be content to know
That at the last,—when sin and woe
Had done their worst and life had lain
Before the gates that shut out pain,—
The bitter breeze of death should blow
The mirage from the sullen plain

And for a little sun-filled space
His sight should feed on his love's face
And in her eyes his soul drink deep,—
And then upon him death should creep
And snatch him, sudden, to the place
Where all things gather to a sleep?

308

Ah lovers, God but grant you this,
To breathe your life out in a kiss,
To sleep upon your lady's breast
The hour life lapses into rest!
For me, I ask none other bliss
Than Rudel's, deeming his the best.

IN MEMORIAM

OLIVER MADOX BROWN ob. Nov. 5, 1874.

FRIEND, whom I loved in those few years and fleeting
The envious fates, which hound all things that be
From death to birth, appointed thee and me
To be together in the nether air
Of this our world of care,
Swift severance and brief and seldom meeting,
I cry to thee with one last word of greeting,
Across the darkness and the unknown sea.

With one last word I cry to thee, my brother,
One word of love and memory and grief,
That on thy grave, even as an autumn leaf
Fallen from the tree of my sad soul, all sere
With winter drawing near,
May lie, for lack of rose or lys or other
Bloom of the Spring or Summer, that our mother
Hath ta'en from me, to fill her funeral sheaf,—

Our mother Death; for thou too knewst of sadness,
Even in the brief sweet season of thy Spring;
Ay, and the stroke of thine upmounting wing,
Thus early pointing to the eternal height,
Even in its callowest flight,
Bore thee far up above men's careless gladness
Into those realms of lone, yet glorious madness,
Where all God's poets suffer, see and sing.

309

I cry into the dark with lamentation,
A cry of grief and love-longing and pain
For lack of that rich heart and teeming brain,
Which, had not envious Fate denied, were fain
To soar to such a strain
As should have gladdened folk in many a nation
And made men's hearts flower full with jubilation,
Even as the roses in the summer rain:

Yea, and regret for him my friend departed,
For solace lost to me and friendly cheer
And sympathy that made the world less drear,
Regret and memory and bitter dole
For that bright noble soul,
Swift-spirited, yet true and tender-hearted,
With whom full many a joy and pain I parted,
In that brief season he was with us here.

Ah, what is left, from Death's supreme surrender,
Of that bright wit, to all fair ends attuned,
That vaulting thought, which soared nor ever swooned
Nor drooped its pinions in the ethereal air
Of noble dreams and fair?
Only for us, to whom no prayers can render
Thy presence or thy heart so true and tender,
Memory abides, to solace and to wound.

Thou shalt not be of those whom Time effaces,
Whilst yet the mould is moist above their head,
Whose memories fade and pass and all is said;
Nay, for us all, who loved thee and who love,
Shining life's fret above,
Thy thought shall throne it in our hearts' high places,
Till Death blot past and present from our faces;
Thou shalt not be of the forgotten dead.

310

Thy face in many a page of mystic poet
Shall haunt me and thy voice in many a strain
Of strange sad music, to whose weird refrain
Our souls made answer with so whole a might
Of delicate delight
We grudged well-nigh that any else should know it,
Should bear its frail fair seed abroad and sow it,
To wither on the general heart and brain.

Thy speech, with all its high and generous passion
For noble things, its scorn of all untruth,
And all the dainty blossom of thy youth,
Thy youth oft wiser than my riper age,
Shall on the picturing page
Of memory itself anew refashion
And live, though time on thee took no compassion
And Death on us thy lovers had no ruth.

What though no power on earth avail to move thee
To sight or speech of any mother's son,
Thee, that art shut from sight of moon and sun?
For me, thy high sweet spirit, like a flower,
In this memorial hour,
Pierces the grass-grown earth that lies above thee;
Thou knewst I loved thee and thou knowst I love thee;
And in that knowledge still our souls are one.

And if thy life's untimely ended story,
Thy life so thick with many an early bloom
And seed of blooms yet brighter, hold no room,
For very ratheness, in the inconstant ken
Of quick-forgetting men,
Yet, for our hearts, though Time himself grow hoary,
The lily of love, if not the rose of glory,
Shall flower and fade not on thy timeless tomb.

311

SALUT D'AMOUR.

LOVE of leafy days,
Whilst the summer stays,
Whilst the fields are golden and the skies are blue,
I am sure of you.
Whilst the sunshine plays
In the scented ways
And the world is new,
In the glory of your gaze,
Sweet of summer, Love looks through.

Then I hold you, joy of June,
When the woods burst out in tune
And the marigolds are shining with their mirrors of the sun,
When the day and night are one,
When the sunlight's golden shoon
And the silver-sandalled moon
After one another run,
Through the pearl and opal cloisters of the sky,
Like a youth and maid that fly
From each other nor draw nigh
But at morning and at evening, when the twilight is begun.

Bird of August skies,
Love that never dies,
Whilst the sunshine lingers, hovers on your brow;
Still the love-looks rise
In your happy eyes:
Hap what may when winter rages,
In your breast when frosty age is
And the bleak and surly snowtime turns your blood to ice,
Now, at least, whilst throstles tarry and the blossom's on the bough,
Ours is present Paradise:
Come what will, you love me now.

312

EPILOGUE

TO THE BOOK OF THE THOUSAND NIGHTS AND ONE NIGHT.

The “new and valued friend” referred to in this “Epilogue” was the late Sir R. F. Burton.

TWELVE years this day,—a day of winter, dreary
With drifting snows, when all the world seemed dead
To Spring and hope,—it is since, worn and weary
Of doubt within and strife without, I fled

From the mean workday miseries of existence,
From spites that slander and from hates that lie,
Into the dreamland of the Orient distance,
Under the splendours of the Syrian sky,

And in the enchanted realms of Eastern story,
Far from the lovelessness of modern times,
Garnered the rainbow-remnants of old glory
That linger yet in those ancestral climes.

And now, the long task done, the journey over,
From that far home of immemorial calms,
Where, as a mirage, on the sky-marge hover
The desert and its oases of palms,

Lingering, I turn me back, with eyes reverted,
To this stepmother world of daily life,
As one by some long pleasant dream deserted,
That wakes anew to dull unlovely strife.

Yet, if none other weal the quest have brought me,
The long belovéd labour now at end,
This gift of gifts the untravelled East hath brought me,
The knowledge of a new and valued friend.

5th Feb. 1889.

313

DUST TO DUST.

DEAREST, when I am dead,
Fold not this form of mine
In webs of wool or silk or linen fine;
Nay, pillow not my head,
When there is no more breath in me, on down
Nor my cold brows with flowers funereal crown.
Coffin me not in epicedial elm;
Let them not seal
My slumbering sense with straitening bands nor whelm
My weary body in sepulchral steel.
Be not my breathless breast
With the accurséd winding-sheet opprest;
Let them not lap my nerveless limbs in lead
Nor nail me down,
Wound, like a wine-flask, in some woolly fleece,
Within the choking chest.
Indeed, I could not rest,
Enchained and prisoned in that narrow bed;
I could not sleep
Until the term of time be oversped
Nor slumber out the appointed years in peace,
If left to strangle in that darkling deep.

Lay me not in the ground,
In some sad city of the nameless dead,
Whose heaped-up hosts should let me from the light,
Where all about me, under, overhead,
Their million multitudes, untold, unknown,
Encompassing me round,
Pressing and crowding on me day and night,
To all eternity should elbow me
And straiten me beneath my funeral stone.
Enough in life it was with men to be,
To see
Their smileless faces pass me in the ways,

314

To meet
Their senseless eyes, wherein my wistful gaze
Could note no noble heat,
No hope of heavenly things, no care of right,
No heed of aught that is not bought and sold,
No thought, no wish, except the greed of gold.
Fain in my death from them I would be free.
Let them not mar the eternal rest for me,
Enforcing me the unvictorious fight
Fight on and on for all eternity,
Who hunger for deliverance at last
From the base present and the bitter past.

Not in the earth me lay:
I would not moulder lingeringly away
Within the stifling clay
Nor cower helpless in corruption's hold,
Midmost the darkness and the nether cold,
A prison-palsied prey
To the mean creatures of the middle earth.
I would not have my rottenness affray
Each delicate flower-birth
And cause it shun my foulness of decay.
I could not brook to think
The lilies or the violets should shrink
From my pollution, leaving the fat weed
And the base creatures that corruptions breed
Alone upon my festering flesh to feed,
Nor that the primrose or the cowslip's root,
Delving with dainty foot
In the earth's bosom for its sustenance,
Should flinch and shrivel from my funeral stance,
Deeming my mouldering dust not fair and good
Enough to be its food.

Nay, leave me overground;

315

Let me not lie to perish and to pine
Under the mould in some sepulchral mound;
But lay me, leave me in the open air;
On some wild moorland or some mountain bare,
Upon Helvellyn's crown or Snowdon's chine
Cast down these bones of mine.
There let me moulder underneath the skies;
Let the birds batten on my brain and eyes,
The wild fox tear me and the forest swine.
Yea, let me wither in the wind and rain;
The air shall purge me and the sun from stain;
The rains shall wash away
The soil of death, defilement and decay
And the breeze blow me clean and pure and white:
Nothing shall be in me to soil the sight,
To fright the fancy or the sense affray.
The winds shall be the playmates of my dust,
As in the air they waft it near and far;
The grass its spear-spikes through my ribs shall thrust
And the sweet influences of night and day
Look loving on me, sun and moon and star.
Yea, better far to wither in the wind,
To wait the fulness of the days assigned,
In the fair face of sky and stars and sun,
To feed the flying and the faring things,
The creatures in the grass that creep and run,
To scatter on the birds' and breezes' wings,
To mingle with the sunshiné and the rain
And with my breeze-borne ashes germ on germ
Of herb and grass and weed
To birth of beauty ever and again
To bring and help to harvest grain and seed,
Than in the clay to moulder, heart and brain,
The creatures of corruption there to breed,
To rot out tediously the ruthless term
And in the dark to feed
The foul blind beetle and the writhing worm.

316

There, in the sight of sky and moon and sun,
The elements shall garner, one by one,
Each gift, each grace they gave,
To make this body brave;
Let the four work-mates, earth, fire, water, air,
Resume again from me
That which I had of them and leave me bare;
Let all my parts again be what they were,
Before the fiat fell for me to be.

There, in the course of many a day and night,
Some gentian of the height,
Some rose, belike, shall blossom from my clay;
Some amaryllis of the wind-swept hills,
Some pansy, purple as the morning's sills,
Some fragrant flush of meadow-sweet, some white
Celestial lily of the morning-light,
Borne, yet in germ, upon the gracious gale,
Whereas I waste away,
The fragrances of wordless wistfulness
And longing love shall smell,
The overmastering spell
Of passion disembodied and desire
Purged and made pure of life's polluting stress
Mark, that my ashes on the air exhale,
Nor their sweet seeds and frail
Fear to the bosom of my love to trust,
Electing so to blossom from my dust
And their fair brightness found in my decay.

So shall I one anew
Be with the natural things I held so dear,
One with the sunshine and the waters clear,
One with the larks and linnets, flowers and grass,
Mountain and moor and torrent, herb and tree,
The candid creatures of the air and dew.
Nay, in the days to be,

317

It peradventure yet may come to pass
That, as your free foot strays
Along the moorland or the mountain-ways,
Noting the shadows in the brooklet's glass
Or following on the interlacing rays
That chase each other through the tangled trees,
Mayhap it shall be yours to recognize
My spirit in the bird-notes and the breeze,
My face in flowers, my thought in butterflies,
The subtle scions of the sun and skies:
Belike, some wandering breath
Of perfume, in the summer air afloat,
Shall to your senses speak of me in death:
Yea, by the brooklet straying, you shall note
Some bloom of gold and blue,
Some riverside ranunculus, of me
That haply shall remember you, shall see
Some flowering weed look on you with my eyes
Or hear
Some windwaft murmur of me in your ear,
Some birdsong answer with my speech to you.

VERE NOVO.

Since the writing (in March last) of this poem, my little Angora cat “Rover,” mentioned in v. 2, has died in her tenth year, to the infinite regret of all who knew her. She was the most loving and engaging of little creatures, far more intelligent than the majority of human beings, and was less to be described as a cat than as half-a-dozen pounds of affection and devotion done up in tabby fluff. Peace to her gentle memory! As Burton says, in the delightful “We and our Neighbours,” (one of the series of homely masterpieces by which the late Mrs. Beecher Stowe well-nigh atoned for her terrible political and literary crime of “Uncle Tom's Cabin”) “One's pets will die, and it breaks one's heart.”

OUT in my little garden
The crocus is a-flame;
The hyacinth-buds harden;
The birds no more are tame;
No more are they the same
That, in the sad snow-season,
Their Kyrie Eleison
Sang at my window-frame;
Lark, linnet, throstle, ousel,
With carol and carousal
For food to me that came.

318

The winter's woes are over;
My cats upon the wall,
Gruff, Top, Shireen and Rover,
Are basking one and all.
Soon will the cuckoo call
His “Summer, summer's coming!”
Soon will the bees be humming
About the tulips tall.
The lilac-buds are breaking;
A new blithe world is waking,
To gladden great and small.

I look on all things' gladness,
Half-gladdened, half opprest,
Delight at once and sadness
Debate it in my breast.
From out their winter's nest
My thoughts peep out at Springtime,
Misdoubting of their wing-time,
If sleep or wake be best;
For in me are two voices,
Whereof the one rejoices,
The other sighs for rest.

I know the old Spring story,
That stirs in every flower;
How Life grows never hoary,
But sleeps to gather power;
Then, with some passing shower,
Its face it laves from slumber
And casting off sleep's cumber,
Blooms forth in field and bower,
Unresting, still renewing,
For evermore ensuing
The ever-fleeting hour.

319

Ah Spring, thou tell'st me ever
The same contentless tale,
How spirit may not sever
Fore'er from body frail,
How, though the old forms fail,
In others yet imprisoned,
The soul, anew bedizened
With webs of joy and wail,
Still from the future's pages
Must spell, through endless ages,
Life's script of weal and bale.

I cannot dight my dreaming
To fit thy frolic glee;
Thy sweet, thy simple seeming,
Thine eager ecstasy
Are dulled with doubt for me.
I, who am heavy-hearted
For days and hopes departed,
I cannot joy with thee,
Unthoughtful, for the present,
Because to-day is pleasant,
Of Past and of To-be.

Yet, who shall still go glooming,
When Spring is on the stair,
When every bough is blooming
And every field is fair?
I stand in the soft air
And watch the grasses growing
And feel the March-breeze blowing
Away my winter's care.
A peace, as of sunsetting,
Is on me, a forgetting
Of joys and griefs that were.

320

This is the Springtide's magic:
Needs must, when April's nigh,
Its mask of winter tragic
The hardest heart lay by;
Beneath its watchet sky
The saddest soul despairing,
The coldest thought leave caring
To question how or why;
Content, while each day's bringing
New birds, new blossoms springing,
To live and not to die.

PRELUDE TO HAFIZ.

HITHER, hither, o ye weary, o ye sons of wail and woe,
Ye, who've proved the hollow shimmer of this world of fleeting show,
Ye, who've seen your hearts' hopes vanish, like the firstlings of the snow;

Ye, who scorn the brutal bondage of this world of misbelief,
Ye, who bear the royal blazon of the heart afire with grief,
Hearken, hearken to my calling; for I proffer you relief.

I am he whom men call teller of the things that none may see,
Tongue of speech of the Unspoken, I am he that holds the key
Of the treasuries of vision and the mines of mystery.

I am he that knows the secrets of the lands beyond the goal,
I am he that solves the puzzles of the sorrow-smitten soul,
I am he that giveth gladness from the wine-enlightened bowl;

I am he that heals the wounded and the weary of their scars,
I am Hafiz, son of Shiraz, in the pleasant land of Fars,
Where I flung my flouting verses in the faces of the stars.

321

See, my hands are full of jewels from the worlds beyond the tomb:
Here be pearls of perfect passion from the middle dreamland's womb;
Here be amethysts of solace, for the purging of your gloom:

Here be rubies red and radiant, of the colour of the heart,
Here be topazes sun-golden, such as rend the dusk apart,
Here be sapphires steeped in heaven, for the salving of your smart.

If your souls are sick with sorrow, here is that which shall appease;
If your lips are pale with passion, here is that which hath the keys
To the sanctuaries of solace and the halidomes of ease.

Let the bigot tend his idols, let the trader buy and sell;
Ears are theirs that cannot hearken to the tale I have to tell,
Eyes that cannot see the treasures which are open to my spell.

Where is he that's heavy-laden? Lo, my hand shall give him peace.
Where are they that dwell in darkness? I am he that can release.
Where is he that's world-bewildered? I will give his cares surcease.

Hither, hither with your burdens! I have that shall make them light.
I have salves shall purge the earth-mists from the fountains of your sight;
I have spells shall raise the morning in the middest of your night.

322

Come, o doubt-distracted brother! Come, o heavy-burthened one!
Come to me and I will teach you how the goal of rest is won;
Come and I will cleave your darkness with the splendours of the sun.

Leave your striving never-ending; let the weary world go by;
Let its bondmen hug their fetters, let its traders sell and buy;
With the roses in the garden we will sojourn, you and I.

Since the gladness and the sadness of the world alike are nought,
I will give you wine to drink of from the ancient wells of thought,
Where it's lain for ages ripening, whilst the traders sold and bought.

What is heaven, that we should seek it? Wherefore question How or Why?
See, the roses are in blossom; see, the sun is in the sky;
See, the land is lit with summer; let us live before we die.

THE DOPPER'S LAMENT.

PITY the sorrows of a poor
Perpetually harassed Boer,
The victim of a “beau sabreur”,
Who keeps him ever on the stir,
Without a moment to entrench.
I cannot speak, without a wrench,
The ruffian's name; it is such woe
To think, with folk who love us so,
—Who in their cups cry out, “Bravo!
Go on, brave Boers! Do all you know;
Avenge the wrongs of Jean Crapaud
And lay the brutal Britons low,

323

Those rude Rosbifs who let us crow
And only chuckle when we blow!”
—This pesky, intermeddling foe
Should share the honoured name of “French”.

We Doppers love to sleep at night
And (if we must) by day to fight,
Ensconced behind some rocky height
Or sheltered in some cosy trench,
Like any other decent mensch:
But this chap keeps us on the run
From break of day to set of sun,
Gives us no time to sleep or eat
Or take our schnapps of Hollands neat.
(—Washing and change of clothes, indeed,
Your true-born Burgher does not need;
He, like his sires, the Jews of old,
With soap and water does not hold.—)
What's death to us is just his fun:
Our working day is never done;
We get no rest or next to none;
For hardly have we closed an eye
Ere “Rooineks!” our sentries cry;
Putt! Putt! Whiz! Bang! The bullets fly
And “Look out there! Come on! Hi! Hi!
Give 'em the baggonet, my boys!”
And all the other horrid noise
Disturbs our dreams of dunghill joys:
Here comes that everlasting French!

No, hang it all! It is too mean
To come upon us, unforeseen,
Just when we're settled all serene.
I'll write and grumble to the Queen
And all the bishops on the bench.
Our brother Stead 'twill never suit
If honest Burghers cannot loot

324

And Rooineks in comfort shoot,
Ambushed behind some rock or root,
Without a day-and-night “En route!”
From that confounded fellow French.

Well, for a wonder, here's no sign
Of him just now: I'll stop and dine
And after on the veldt recline
And smoke the pipe of peace, in fine.
Then, when I've had a Dopper drench ,
If I can find some quiet trench,
Just forty winks will come in pat.
Good night! I'm off.—But stop! What's that?
I heard a sort of rat-tat-tat.
Yes! No! It must have been the cat.
Lord! There's a shell just where I sat,
And here's a bullet through my hat!
It cannot be! It is, that's flat,
It is that never-ending French.

Nov. 1900.

A “Dopper drench” is composed of Hollands flavoured with a few drops of coffee.

REQUIEM

FOR OUR DEAD IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore. Ecclesiasticus, XLIV, 14.

HAPPY are our dead that on the veldt are sleeping,
Our dear-belovéd dead, that died for England's sake!
They weary not, as we who watch and wake,
To follow on the war-tide's ebb and flow,

325

The fluctuant fight against the faithless foe,
Nor hear the widows and the orphans weeping.
Upon their graves the shadows come and go;
Their quiet sleep no battle-thunders break,
No shouts of jubilance, no wails of woe:
Their seed of sacrifice and duty shed
Upon the embattled field and with the red
Of their young hearts' blood watered, they lie low
And are content to sleep and wait the reaping:
They are at peace beneath the moonbeams creeping;
They feel the sunblaze not upon their head;
They shiver not beneath the winter's snow.
They need no pity; all with them is well;
O'er them the stars the eternal watch are keeping,
The refluent tides of heaven wane and swell;
The reverent skies rain softly on their bed:
Far oversea, beyond the wild waves' leaping,
They rest in peace, our well-belovéd dead.

Happy are our dead, that oversea are lying,
Our faithful dead, that fought and died to hold us true!
They do not hear the rude reviling crew,
They hearken not the venal nations vying
In slander each with each and vilifying
Of that magnanimous England who of yore
Wrought for their fathers in the front of war;
Who waded for their sakes through seas of gore,
Pouring like water forth her blood and store,—
England, with Sidney, Howard, Drake, who drew,
To free them from the fire and axe of Spain,
Her seraph-sword unconquerable, who,
With Blake and Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington,
From age to age her battle-banner on
Bearing, the braggart Bourbon overthrew
And drove his harlot-pander cohorts flying,
Who to the succour came of Europe sighing
Under the brute Republic's bloody reign,

326

Who loosed them from Napoleon's iron chain;
England, who heard and answered to their crying
So many a time of old and gave them bread;—
—These, who, as beasts that bite the hand which fed
And give for good, as is the churl's use, bane,
Bark at her heels like bandogs,—who, in vain
Fair arms and fairly used in loyal fight
Knowing against her archangelic might,
Catch up the dastard's weapons, filthy lying
And shameless slander, and withal adread
Lest she should turn and rend them, from afar
Hail their envenomed shafts upon her head,
Thinking to whelm her with the poisoned rain,—
Her tangled in a world-involving war;—
These at her heels who follow, fleeing, nighing,
Wolves at once fearful of the chase and fain,
Whilst she, proud Titan, scornful of replying,
Upon her path imperial of domain
Fares tireless on with her unfaltering tread,
The unsetting sun upon her radiant crest
A crown that cleaves the darkness East and West,
Nor heeds the yelping of the jackal train.
Happy are our dead, thrice happy in their dying,
In that their ears are deaf to all is said!
They sleep in peace upon the Afric plain;
No thunders stir their slumbers nor the hum
Of torrent-waters of the tropic rain:
They wait the fulness of the days to come,
When what they've sown shall gathered be for grain,
Nor hearken to the enviers decrying
The righteous cause for which they fought and bled.
They tarry for the harvest's testifying:
'Tis well with them, our well-belovéd dead.

Happy are our dead, o'er whom the grass is growing,
Our noble dead, who fought and fell for liberty!
Our England's arm who were, from oversea

327

Six thousand miles outstretched for the bestowing
Of life upon the sad sons of the soil,
Who braved the ambush and the battle-clash,
Hunger and thirst and death and dearth and tòil
Direr than death, to set the bondman free,
To save him from the bullet and the lash,—
Who blenched not from the bitterest undergoing,
The slave to succour and their human spoil
To rescue from the ruthless Dopper dogs,
The spawn of Holland, with the Bushman hogs
Blood-blended! Where, to all eternity,
They lie and sleep beneath the waste-winds blowing,
They neither mark the mopping and the mowing
Of the sour apes, who, to their country's shame,
For that their rivals in the seats they see
Themselves must void for incapacity,
Spit forth their spite upon our England's name,
Their native land far rather in the mire
Than themselves choosing forced to the foregoing
Of their base aims and baulked of their desire,—
Nor heed the tattling of the traitor horde,
Who, to feed full their raging vanity,
Their vile vainglorious appetites to stay
And fill their lust of hate to overflowing,
With the foul foe for England's overthrowing
Confederate, fain would blunt her conquering sword
And maim her forearm. But what matter they?
What skill such screech-owls in the imperial choir
Of England's praise, that, like a living lyre,
Circles the echoing world from East to West,
Hailing her harbinger of peace and truth,
Sword of the just and shield of the opprest,
Time-honoured temperer of wrath with ruth?
Yet, happy, happy are our dead, unknowing
The shame our own have heaped upon our head,
The tares which these have mingled with their sowing
Who died for duty at their country's hest,

328

Tares with their wheat which shall be harvested,
To feed the future world with bitter bread!
'Tis well they know it not; 'twould stir their rest
Untimely, ere the appointed days be sped,
The term of time fulfilled and truth's forthshowing:
'Tis well they sleep, our dear and sacred dead.

Happy are our dead, that in our hearts are living,
Our holy dead, who died to hold us true and great!
Whatever lie beyond the years in wait,
Whatever webs the future may be weaving,
Theirs shall the glory be, for theirs the giving.
'Twas they that stemmed for us the storm of hate;
'Twas they that turned for us the tides of Fate:
Ours was the wreck; but theirs was the retrieving;
They gave us all and asked for no returning,
Fought on nor looked to know the darkness burning
With the bright signs of morning or to see
The dayspring and the dawn of victory.
Enough their faith for them and the believing
That England never from her fair estate
Should fail whilst yet her lion brood should be,
Each breast a bulwark in her foremost gate,
Strong with the strength of duty for the achieving
Of the impossible by land and sea,
Each one a little England, unafraid
To face the world in arms, where England bade.
Theirs is the triumph; ours is the bereaving;
The trophy theirs; ours but the broken blade,
The bloodstained arms, for love and memory laid,
Wet with our weeping, on the narrow bed
Whereas our heroes sleep, of doubt and dread
Absolved, of sorry thought and sad conceiving.
So leave we them to rest; but, in the leaving,
Let not their perfect peace our mourning mar;
Let not our tears upon their triumph jar.
They live and shall not die! Whilst England stands

329

Upon the Eastern and the Western strands,
The light of virtue haloing her head,
Crowned, from the morning to the evening-red,
Queen of the Orient and the Austral lands,
The memory of their deeds shall never die:
Whilst “England liveth yet!” it shall be said,
Defying Time that maketh low and high,
This one downsetting still and that upheaving,
They shall live on with England. Far and nigh,
Their names shall shine as polestars in her sky,
Till she and all her memories are sped.
Leave them to rest; there is no need of grieving.
Sleep on in peace, our unforgotten dead!

Fan. 1902.

BASSARID'S HORN.

(From “The Book of Hercules”.)

“The Book of Hercules,” here mentioned, is an unfinished epic upon the subject of the life and death of the great legendary successor of Prometheus, from which this song and “The Last of Hercules” (v. Vol. I, 363) are excerpts. Whether it will ever be completed is “upon the knees of the Gods.”

YOUNG, fair land,
Robe thyself with flowers; arise and shine!
Spring, that holdst the summer in the hollow of thy hand,
Come, for the sweetness of the year is thine.

Amethyst sea,
Blossom and birdsong have burst their winter's graves:
See, in the distance the month of storms doth flee:
Laugh with the lucent sapphire of thy waves.

Soul of man,
Shake off thy sadness, for the Spring is here.
Mark how the meadows have braved the winter's ban;
Glow with the gladness of the newborn year.

330

NOCTURN.

THE moon looks in upon me through the casement
And creeping round to where I lie at gaze,
Wide-eyed, and wait in vain coy sleep's embracement,
Upon my face her ghostly fingers lays.

I know that sign; she wills me rise and follow
Her feet; she lures me with her lamp of white,
Till at the window, o'er the wooded hollow,
I stand and look upon the silver night.

Pale lies the world and pure as a dead maiden;
No birdsong breaks the silence, thrush or merle:
The woodlands lie and slumber, heavy-laden
With dreams, beneath a dreaming sea of pearl.

From out that moony sea how many a hoping
Fain would I raise, that is for ever sped;
I go among old memories seeking, groping
For what I know is buried with the dead.

Still the moon calls me. What to wait availeth
For sleep unanswering? Better forth to go,
To wander 'twere, before her fair light faileth,
Before her horn th' horizon dips below.

White moon, thou ever wast my friend and lover;
Ne'er have I asked in vain for aid from thee;
Still all my toils and troubles didst thou cover
And drown'dst my sorrows in thy silver sea.

The doors stand barless all; the gates are gaping;
The ways are open to the open night,
Fulfilled with figures of the moonlight's shaping:
So forth I fare into a world of white.

331

In the wild park I stray, where all is sleeping,
Save in the dreaming avenue of elms,
Where down the moonlit aisles the ghosts are sweeping,
That may not rest in sleep's sepulchral realms.

Like me, they watch and wake whilst all else sleepeth;
Like me, the backward, not the forward ways,
They tread; like me, they sow when all else reapeth;
Like me, they love the nights and not the days.

Like me, outsetting know they, not arriving;
Like me, the night's their day, the moon their sun;
Like me, for ever, ever are they striving
To make the done undone, the undone done.

Among the ghosts I wander, dreaming, deeming,
Mid ghosts and dreams myself a dreaming ghost,
In the loud world of men a thing of seeming,
A wandering wraith amid a living host.

The silence solace brings to thought and feeling;
The quiet fills my bleeding heart with balm;
The moon upon my wounds pours oils of healing;
My cares are half-forgotten in the calm.

But lo! across the hills the dark is breaking;
The breeze of dawn sighs shrilly through the trees;
The world, so sweet that slept and dreamt, is waking,
To run its round of travail and unease.

And thou, who needst must wake, whilst others slumber,
Who, whilst all rest, the weapon-watch must keep,
Will the blue morning quit thee of thy cumber?
Shall the day wind thee in the woofs of sleep?

Nay, for thou ever wast a doubter, dreamer,
And he whose feet the paths of vision tread
Was ever out of grace with Sleep the Seemer;
She hath no crown of poppies for his head.

332

BARCAROLLE.

OUT sails to the fresh breeze!
My heart
Pines for the open seas.
The soft moon flowers, like a dream-delight,
Over the full tide-flow.
Shake out the sails! Sweetheart, we will depart,
We will depart and sail the seas to-night,
Whilst on the foam that flees
The blithe breeze flutters and the weed floats slow,
The moon above us and the tide below.

Where shall we steer to-night?
The moon
Lies, like a lane of white,
Far out beyond our vision in the West,
Over the dreaming sea,
As if some goddess walked with silver shoon
Over the dimples of each white-winged crest.
Sweetheart, the way is bright:
Shall we trim sails and follow it till we
Win to some shimmering world of fantasy?

Folk hold we chase a dream;
They say
That the bright worlds, which beam
Beyond the setting and the dying day,
Are shows begotten of the air and light,
Delusions distance-woven for the sight,
Mere mirages, that seem
And flee before us with unceasing flight:
We lose our lives, they tell us, following
A vain, unreal thing.

333

'Twere better far to bide
On shore,
To delve the round earth's side
For diamonds and golden glittering store
And in the strife for wealth and worldly praise
Join, heaping up the treasure of the days
With great and goodly store
Of what men follow in the mortal ways;
Since, as they say, these only real are
And all things else unreal as a star.

What matter what they say?
We know
That which on dullards' way
They prate but of, as idiots do, who go,
Strange spells and magic words without comprize
Reciting, which, if spoken wizard-wise,
Would overthrow
The world and rend with ruin earth and skies:
We soar, whilst here below they herd like sheep;
We waken, whilst they sleep.

For them, dull life once o'er,
They lie
And rot for evermore;
There is no part of them but all must die,
Since all their thoughts are earthy as their dust,
Their spirits as their bodies rust in rust;
No hope have they, on high
To raise them, but for ever perish must:
What shall avail to lift them from the grave
Of all that here they crave?

With them what shall they bear
Away,
Into the nether air,
Of all the goods they garner night and day?
Shall they regild death's darkness with their gold?

334

Shall their wealth warm them in the utter cold,
Their honour cleave the clay?
Will the worm do them worship in the mould?
Nay, earth to earth and dust to dust must back;
With life, all else shall lack.

But we, whose kingdom is not of the earth,
Whose weal
No world of death and birth
Might work nor fill the yearnings that we feel,
Our visions overlasting life and death,
Our dreams that cease not with the 'scape of breath,
From us death cannot steal
The splendour and the fulness of our faith;
We bear with us into the realms of Night
The seeds of life and light.

Not of the dust our hope,
Our thought,
That soars beyond earth's scope.
If here it gain the glories not it sought,
Itself its warrant is that such things are,
That the bright visions, here from us afar
Which flee, are not for nought;
Nay, though it be beyond the topmost star,
Our dreams, that seem delusions, simple sooth
Are in the air of truth.

Since here our each desire,
Fulfilled,
Becomes a wasting fire,
A mocking counterfeit of what we willed,
Thrice happy they who chase some Golden Fleece,
Beyond man's wit, who seek without surcease
Some vision that they build,
Some lovely land of everlasting peace,
Who, after some divinest dream, o'erstray
The strands of night and day!

335

Come, then, launch out with me
And steer
Into the shoreless sea!
Shake out the sails and follow without fear
Into the distance and the golden West!
We yet shall sight the Islands of the Blest;
We yet the Hesperian Gardens of our quest
Shall compass, if not here,
In this our world of ravin and unrest,
Then in those lands of a serener air
Where truth alone is fair.

ARCADES AMBO.

BIRDS at morning-red
Each to other said,
“See, the winter's over;
Soon it will be Spring.”
But, before the night,
All the world was white
And each feathered rover
For the South a-wing.

Quoth my heart one day,
“Love is come to stay:
Soul, have done with sorrow;
Give thyself to glee.”
But, ere day was done,
Light Love with the sun
Fled, and on the morrow,
Woe, ah woe was me!

Quoth the bud at morn,
“With my girth of thorn,
Who shall do me evil?
Am I not the rose?”

336

But, alack to tell!
Ere the midnight fell,
Came a frost uncivil
And the blossom froze.

Quoth I to my soul,
“Thou hast reached thy goal:
Me no more importune
With thy doubts and fears.”
But, ere I had spoken,
Lo! the spell was broken;
With a back-blow, Fortune
Turned my smiles to tears.

IMPERIA

(A DRAMATIC FRAGMENT.)

NAY, I am tired of kisses: let us sit
Awhile, that I may look into thine eyes
And watch the fair full dawning of desire
Flower out to passion. Nay, I prithee, rest;
I would not have thee kiss me yet awhile,
Lest the one sweetness mar the memory,
Sweeter than life, of that which went before.

Dear, dost thou love me? Nay, sweet, answer not.
'Tis but a lovers' litany, that needs
Responsion but as some half drowsy drone
Of Aves humming through the silver sound
Of the thrilled pipes, when the full hymn floats up
And all the incense shrivels up the nave;
An asking of a thing that is too sure
To need assurance, ay, that takes affright

337

And doubts, if one be careful to assure.

How long a season is it since we met
And looked upon and knew each all to each
And the world turning on our dual selves?
How long, my love? These few, short, golden years,
A whisper of the wind through orange groves,
Lit with the lamps of months and days and hours,
All fed with some sweet perfumed oil of praise,
Burnt to our love? Or else these many lives,
These long, full, dreamy, interfluent lives
Of termless time, that flow beside the years,
Around, between, before and after them,
Eking our pauses of unfilled accords
With complements of strange, sweet harmony.
Tell me, fair lord! Or rather, tell me not:
I will not have thee speak nor break the spell
That, like a flower, sits on thy happy lips,
Holding the silence with a scent of peace.
I will speak for thee, with thy hand in mine,
Nestling, a dove laid in a dove's white breast,
And thine eyes sacring me thy best belov'd,
With that full benediction of calm peace
That I do live by. I have never known
So whole an environment of content,
So golden an investiture of peace
And confidence as this that is on me
To-day; I have a sweetness at my heart,
An autumn glory of accomplished hope,
As of a soul that, with its whole wish won,
Sees Death come walking to it over flowers
And smiles for gladness of perfected peace
And pity of the sad condemned to live.
And to such folk, 'tis said, comes memory,
A fair young child, and takes them by the hand
And leads them, blithe and crowned with mystic palms,
Along the backward ways; and there they note
The by-gone landmarks overgrown with flowers

338

Of fair fulfilment and the rude wild wastes,
Where erst they wandered, sighing to the winds
And casting seeds of longing and despair,
Of hope and love and dole on every side,
Clad like a bride with many-coloured robes
Of blooms imperial. So it is with me;
For thus it seems full bliss doth mimic death,
Being alike fruition. Sit, my love,
And I will sing to thee some sweet sad song,
To spite our happiness; or, soothlier,
I will e'en tell thee yet once more again
The story of my life and how I grew
And fashioned forth myself, expecting thee;
Yet once again, of all these many times;
For, in my thought, each time I tell it thee,
I do once more reconquer me thy love,
Seeing it is to me like some fair fire,
That lights the backward and the forward ways,
Upon some travelled highway. Hearken, then.

I do remember, when I was a child,
A little, pale-faced child with eyes all wide
With the new wonder of the mystic world,
My thoughts were ever strained toward some mist
Of hope unformed, that should, in days to come,
Flower forth to wish. I was scarce fain to sport
And laugh and frolic as my fellows were,
Uncareful of the hopes the future held;
Nay, I was ever seeking for myself
The strange and solemn mysteries of things
Common and everpresent, yet unknown.
I could not touch another playmate's hand
Nor look into another's round void eyes,
The laughing, tearful eyes of infancy,
But something, that I comprehended not,
Stole through my veins and caused the sudden blood
Invade my visage and the nerves of life
Thrill as a harp thrills to the passing touch

339

Of the pale sprites that wander down the winds
Of night. I would build palaces of dreams
About some idle, vain, unanswering thing,
Twine wreaths of strange affection round the brows
Of some rough, careless mate, that half endured
And half repelled my timorous caress.
Or, failing these, I made some flighty goat,
Some silly kindly sheep my heart's delight
And loved the unresponsive world in it,
Decking its coyness with my childish toys,
Ribbons and beads and such like foolish gear. [OMITTED]

V. Les Contes Drôlatiques de Balzac, “La Belle Imperia Mariée.”

LITANY.

NIGHT and day and work and play, time and toil and thrall,
Shade and sun for all and one, death for one and all:

Watch and ward and chain and cord, rose and thorn and rue,
Fence and fate and bolt and gate; time and thought fare through.

Smile and tear and hope and fear still for you and me;
Love and life and sleep and strife; faith alone wins free.

Day and night and dark and light, sea and shore and sky,
Wealth and dearth: farewell to earth! Time it is to die.

Life and Love about, above, flutter to and fro;
Long they're sought and once they're caught, time it is to go.

All as one, the ripe years run, hasten to the night:
Feed thy fill, whilst lingers still, still a little light.

Hap and hope! In heaven's scope is how many a star!
Thick as bees they swarm and these even as we are.

What availing is in wailing or in railing, what?
If Life's weaving be deceiving, death shall cut the knot.

340

Joy is folly, melancholy idle: better be
Sea-birds sleeping on the leaping billows of the sea.

What's to do with me and you, in this world of dream?
Moth and fly are you and I, motes in the sun-beam.

Strife and seeming, doubt and deeming, let them play their play,
Let them flutter out their utter term and pass away.

If thy bosom bear a blossom, cherish it and heed
Not the jealous fools that tell us Love is but a weed.

Pain and pleasant, past and present, future, friend and foe,
All Life's weaving, glee and grieving, must thou leave and go.

Wheel and windle, spool and spindle, let them weave and spin;
Let them wind us what assigned us is, day out, day in.

Sweet and bitter, gold and flitter, all must have its day;
Little matter on Life's platter what for us they lay.

Vain contending, world-amending, dreams of sleep and wake:
Life's whole beauty is in duty done for duty's sake.

Cease thy sighing: day is dying, see, in yonder West:
Yet a little, in sleep's spital thou, too, shalt have rest.

LOVE SOLICITOUS.

LOVE, perfect love,
The loved Apostle tells us, casts out fear.
Ah, thou belovéd of the Lord, that hate
Nor doubt despiteful knewest, being here,
Whose hopes in heaven above
Alone had harbourage, who still await
Watched for Christ's coming through the golden gate

341

Of morn miraculous, straining with bent ear
For the first trumps of the Accepted Year,
What should thy heart, elate
With the sure hope of heaven at hand and near,
Know of the iron laws of loveless Fate,
Which ban content and cheer
From those who anywhat on earth hold dear,
Dooming them still misdoubt, all else above,
The loss of that they cherish, soon or late,
So fearlessness their joys may have for mate
Nor peace? Peace! What hath that celestial dove,
Which broodeth but on Faith's serener sphere,
To do with Love?
In this our sorry scheme of things create,
Is not incertitude Love's born estate?
Are not its sacrifices sigh and tear?
Is it not unto doubt as hand to glove?

He better knew
The laws and statutes of Love's mystery,
The Roman singer, in like time with thee,
By the cold shores of the Cimmerian Sea
Who lived and sighed for Latium's skies of blue
And his lost love's embrace;
Or he, the Tusculan, who did abase,
In the last days of Rome's democracy,
His golden speech the senseless populace
To raise rebellious 'gainst the Fates' decree
Which bids these servants and those masters be.
Well of Love's ordinance he wotted who,
Far from the loved sight of his lady's face,
Weaving his wreaths of rue,
Love all fulfilled of anxious fear did see;
Or he
Who, yearning back unto his youthful case,

342

When all the world was new
In his new eyes and over lawn and lea
The pleasant hours the pleasanter did chase,
Love all for sorrow and anxiety,
Solicitude unceasing, did beshrew,
Inapt for those who run the worldly race,
Concernless being never nor care-free,
To one and all untrue.

Yet, who were fain,
For all Love's miseries and all affrays,
To think that he its ravishments had missed?
Who would for woe desist
From loving? Who, because he'd felt Love's bane,
Would, in his loveless age, that he had kissed
And clipt in brighter days forget again?
For lightning-stroke and thunder, storm and blaze,
Who would sweet summer banish its domain?
Who list
The flowered Spring forbear for wind and rain?
More than the Galilean votarist,
Awatch to see, across the Egean main,
Christ's kingdom flower through the morning mist,
More than the Sulmonéan rhapsodist,
Still sighing, 'neath the chill Cimmerian rays,
For the rebirth of the Saturnian reign,
More than the Volscian revolutionist,
Rehearsing ever to the Alban ways
The time he swayed the commons with his hist,
More than the Syrian and the Romans twain,
Yea, most of all who sing its pleasant praise,
Of Love and all its mysteries he wist,
Our English amorist,
Well skilled the tangles of the wildering maze

343

Of loveful thought to loose and wind again,
Our minnesinger of the latter days,
Who said, nor said in vain,
“All other pleasures are not worth its pain.”

“Res est soliciti plena timoris amor.” —Ovid, Her. I, 12.

“Quam sit omnis amor solicitus et anxius.” —Cicero ad tticum, II, 25.

SUNSET-VOICES.

I.

THERE came a voice to me,
When the sun was like a star,
In the distance far away;
It spoke of worlds afar,
Beyond the sapphire sea,
Beyond the dying day.

Of other worlds it told,
Where Life and Love are one,
In some serener air;
Of shores beyond the sun,
Behind the evening-gold,
Where truth alone is fair;

Where one are thought and deed,
Where wish and will consent,
Where care comes not to blur
The face of fair intent
Nor faith's upspringing seed
Is baulked by falsehood's bur;

Where all our darling dreams,
Which died, whilst yet in leaf,
Shall know a brighter birth,
Where gladness pure from grief,
Where all is what it seems
And heaven unhemmed with earth.

344

II.

Ah, vain, ah vaunting voice,
That wak'st my wounded heart
And mak'st it bleed again!
Yet must I needs rejoice
To hear thy speech, that art
My faded hopes' refrain.

For better, better far
To look and long and sigh
For some ideal thing,
To love some distant star,
Than chase, with churl and king,
Life's ever-changing lie!

Come back, come back to me
And murmur in my ear
Your melodies of yore,
O visions dread and dear,
O hopes of heaven in store,
Of Paradise to be!

For, since in one decay
Both good and ill must meet,
Why then, let run to waste
The dreams that were so sweet?
Why cast the cup away,
If transient its taste?

Since sun and stars and sky,
Since heaven and sea and land
Are mirages of sight,
Which melt, when close at hand,
And all which meets the eye
But visions of the night,

345

Why, then, ah, why disdain
Delusions fond and fair,
Delights that do but seem?
Come back, sweet shapes of air,
And make my days again
A dream within a dream.

TRINITAS TRINITATUM.

LOVE is best:
To lie and rest,
Cradled on some darling breast,
What is sweeter,
What completer
Peace in all the perimeter
Of this round of nights and days?
Go thy ways,
World of weariness and madness,
Passing glee and poisoned gladness,
Ceasing cheer and staying sadness,
Nought have I to do with thee.
Play thy plays
With other preys;
Love is all in all to me.

Peace is best:
O heavenly guest,
North and South and East and West,
What is fairer,
What is rarer,
For the weary, footworn farer
Of the ways of sea and land,
Than thy hand
Laid upon his forehead's burning,
Than to find, in his returning,

346

From his spirit stress and yearning,
From his deeming doubt and care
Barred and banned,
At thy command,
Sorrow silenced, foul made fair?

Sleep is best:
In slumber's nest,
All forgotten, strife and quest,
What is fitter,
What is better
For the weary would-be setter
Of this world, the crooked, straight?
Ope thy gate,
Bird of bliss, and sooth my sorrow;
From thy treasure bid me borrow
Dreams of some serener morrow,
Where with beauty one is truth:
Snatch me straight
From age and hate
To the lands of love and youth!

Whether best
Must be confessed?
Love, peace, sleep, the palm contest.
Love is sweetest,
Peace is meetest,
Sleep for sage and fool is featest:
Each divine is: but the three,
Met together in one treasure,
To the height fill up the measure
Of the heart's ideal pleasure.
Be all three into one sheaf
Bound for me
By fate's decree,
And I'll scoff at glee and grief.

347

DE PROFUNDIS.

COME, o ye nights and ye days of entrancement,
Back to my call!
Ye, with whose help for my spirit's enhancement,
Once I knew not what the strokes of mischance meant,
Feared not to fall;
Once had I youth, love and hope at my bidding,
Faith to enforce me 'gainst Fortune's forbidding;
Once was I ringed with resolve for the ridding
Thought of Time's thrall.
Now from me youth, love and hope have departed;
Left am I lonely and weariful-hearted,
Beggared of all.

Once was I buttressed and bastioned with dreaming,
Fenced from affray,
Vantaged with visions in glory still gleaming,
Fortressed of fancy 'gainst striving and seeming,
Doubt and dismay.
Now from my slumber, alack! I awaken,
Find myself lonely, forlorn and forsaken,
All that I cherished to flight having taken,
Fleeted away.
Fate of my loves, one and all, hath bereft me,
All my bright mates have betrayed me and left me
Naked to-day.

Where, oh my dreams and my visions, ah whither,
Where did ye fly?
Hither, again, oh ye runagates, hither
Come at my cry!
See, my soul sorrows, my bosom is bleeding;
Sore is my sufferance, utter my needing:

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Surely ye will not pass by me, unheeding,
Leave me to die,
Me that have fostered you, cherished you, cared for you,
When all the world was a desert unshared for you,
All passed you by!

Yet, if ye will not restore me, or may not,
Aught of increase,
If Fate's foreordinance summon you stay not,
Force you to cease,
For the sweet life's sake of old that I led with you,
By the wild ways that my spirit did tread with you,
Give me again my soul's angel that fled with you,
White-wingèd Peace!
Render me back the mild magic that made me,
Midmost the toils and the woes that waylaid me,
Gideon's fleece!

A GHAZEL OF SPRING.

THE bird of the morning pipes in the perfumed meads of Spring:
What shall the lips of the lover do in the May but sing?

What shall the heart of the poet do in the prime but hope,
When loosed are the locks of winter and Love in the land is King?

The larks are aloft in heaven; the finches flute on the bough;
The brakes are alive with birdsong, the meadows with blossoming.

The heart of the dreamer panteth with passion; his thought is thrilled
With glory of coming summer and gladness of harvesting:

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He heareth the cuckoo calling; he scenteth the rose afar;
He sees in the golden distance the cornfields glittering:

He seeth the ruby clusters aglow on the ripening vines:
'Twixt summer and Spring and autumn his wish is wavering.

The world from the wrack of winter rejoiceth redeemed to be;
The sweet of the year is swelling in every living thing;

The glee of the merry Maytime is glowing in every vein;
There's never a man but the poet that goeth pondering.

Since lover and dreamer revel, since blossom and bird rejoice,
Since all men acclaim the Maytime with carol and pipe and string,

What aileth the sorry singer that he hath no heart to joy,
That he to the new sweet season alone hath no song to sing?

Alack! for the doom he knoweth that doggeth the merry May;
He knoweth the woes of winter tread hard on the heels of Spring:

He knoweth the frost-times follow the track of the flowered year;
He knoweth the autumn cometh and setteth the birds a-wing.

Ye tell him in vain that winter will pass as the Spring hath past;
That May, with the year's returning, new blossoms and birds. will bring:

The joys that are dead, he knoweth, will never again relive;
The hearts that are sere will never again know flowering:

Whatever the future bring us, whatever the new time bear,
It cannot with morning's glamour regild our evening.

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Though bright be the blooms it proffer, though perfect its linnets' lilt,
It is not our flowers that flourish, it is not our birds that sing:

They all with our bygone gladness are fled to another clime
And there with our hopes are waiting another sun-rising.

‘Tis thus that the poet goeth alone in the May and mute,
When highway and hill with revel and meadow and moorland ring;

‘Tis thus that, when men are merry and all in the land are glad,
When mad is the world with music and fragrance and flowering,

His eyes, betwixt past and future, are blind to the blaze of noon;
His heart and his soul are haunted with thoughts of another Spring,

With dreams of that mother-country where life shall lie down to rest,
Where peace shall be had for passion and silence for sorrowing.

SOLITUDINEM FACIUNT.....

SILENCE on the sea,
Silence in the sky,
Nought aloof, a-lee,
Not a cloud on high;
Emptiness on every hand, Nothing far and nigh.

In this soul of me
Neither smile nor sigh;
All, for grief and gree,
Gone and fleeted by;
Nothing left of life and love, Nothing but to die.

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Once, afar, anear,
Waves ran high and low;
Once, now dark, now clear,
Heaven above did show;
Once a live sky frowned and smiled O'er a live tide-flow.

Once, with hope and fear
Filled, my life did go;
Once, with smile and tear
Bloomed my heart ablow;
Once with grief and gladness throbbed. Was it better so?

Fain the sea had been
Then unstirred and still;
Fain the sky serene
Then had been at will;
Fain o'er stirless sea had heaven Flawless stretched its fill.

Fain I then had seen
Peace from good and ill,
Peace from high and mean,
Peace from throb and thrill,
Fain from joys that waste had been Free and griefs that kill.

Breeze no more and blast
Now the ocean crease;
Heaven no more o'ercast
Is by fleck or fleece;
Sky and sea are blank of wane Now and of increase.

Now from life, at last,
Hath my soul release;
Now my thoughts from past
And from future cease;
Now in nothingness I have Peace; but is it peace?

352

BIRD-PEEP.

THE birds beset me in the mists of morning,
The chill thin twilight of the dawning day,
A note of urgence, bidding, chiding, warning,
Is in their lay.

“Arise!” So runs the burden of their flyting;
“And to the morrowing day our matins share;
For better far,” they say, Mohammed citing,
“Than sleep is prayer.

“Up, sluggard, up! The night is near its neaptide;
The morning shimmers through the shallowing mirk:
The hour is here that turns the sullen sleeptide
To wake and work.”

Begone, ye wanton, over-early wakers,
Nor tear my tired ears with your shrilling call!
If you have had your twelve hours' sleep, wiseacres,
Not so with all.

Nay, some like me there be who have no choosing,
Who cannot sleep when all are slumbering,
Who needs must watch and wake, whilst you are snoozing,
Head under wing.

Fain must they snatch their sleep, when all are waking,
Who, when all sleep, must watch, whose night is day,
Their scanty stint of rest and ease how taking
And when they may.

And as for prayer, forsooth, methinks the chatter,
With which you rend sleep's cobweb-subtle woof,
No more like prayer is than the pitter-patter
Of rain on roof.

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Go preach to those who but by day burn eyelight:
Your rede for those whose nights for slumber be,
O pert Muezzins of the morning twilight,
Is, not for me.

For me, who watch in this lugubrious London,
All-nightly wandering in the ways of wake,
Seeking the undone done, the done things undone
Again to make;

For me, whose prayer is work, whose lauds are labour,
Who watch the white stars scale the long sky-steep,
More excellent (permitting noise and neighbour)
Than prayer is sleep.

A LAST LULLABY.

INTO the rose-worlds of reverie, fairest, come follow me;
Cleave with me close to the skirts of the slackening day:
Be, ere the billows of blissfulness shadow and swallow me,
Hand in hand, heart in heart, woven with me for the Way.

Hark, on the strings of the harp of the sunsetting breezes,
Wafted, the voice of the Viewless for burden is borne,
Willing us steer with the sun to the lands where love's ease is,
Fare with night's feet to the shores of the shadowless morn!

Far in the fathomless gold upon gold of the setting,
See, where the love-lands arise from an ocean of rest,
Havens of peace and of healing, fiords of forgetting,
Ports of soul-solacement, infinite isles of the blest!

There, in those meadows and harbours of azure unmeasured,
Sojourns of sorrow sublimed and of peace after pain,
There not a dream of our days and our nights but is treasured,
There not a hope of our hearts but is garnered again.

354

See, where the dear ones of old, of whom death hath bereft me,
All who forewent me in faring the shadow-ward ways,
All their fair faces, the friends who have loved me and left me,
Shine in the hovering sheen of the sunsetting haze!

Hark, how they call to me! See, how they beckon and sign to me,
Bidding me launch with the light on the westering wave,
Lapse from this life, which was ever but passion and pine to me,
Steer to the shores where the peace is, the rest which I crave!

Hear'st thou, my soul, how they hail from the sunsetting towers?
Seest how they beckon me sever from bondage and strife?
Feel'st how my feet are impelled by invisible powers?
Thou alone holdest me fast in the fetters of life.

'Ware of the waves and the breezes, that watch to bereave thee!
Hold thou my hand, lest I drown in the halcyon deep:
Clip thou me close, O thou love of my loves, lest I leave thee,
Drawn of the dreams, lest I sink in the surges of sleep!

What, O my heart, were heav'n worth to me, save thou wert there with me?
Even to Paradise will me not pass without thee.
Come with me, comfort me, company, follow and fare with me;
Steer my soul's bark through the brume and the surge of Death's sea.

EVENSONG.

ONE by one,
The pale years pass;
One by one, in being's glass
Drop the sands of time, unheeded,

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Till the appointed term be run.
Faith hath fallen sere, unseeded;
Love is left to waste, unweeded:
What's to do with Life's unneeded
Moon and sun?

Were but life
To live again,
Sure, we fable, we were fain
Follow it on other fashion
Than the old of thrall and strife;
With more reason and less passion
It for the long road we'd ration,
Less contention, more compassion,
Ruth more rife.

Good of gain
Should take the place;
Gentleness should go with grace
Hand in hand in our new being,
Were our lives to live again:
Faith from fears should serve for freeing,
Ears for hearing, eyes for seeing,
Hands for holding, feet for fleeing
Peace and pain.

All above,
In this our new
Life, contentment we'd ensue,
All the world to hope embolden
With the lodestar of our love;
Cause a-brood to be beholden
O'er the world-all Peace, the olden
Eyes of light and pinions golden
Heaven's dove.

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All the hours
Of life we'd fill
With the wonders of our will;
Earth, with glories new, should, gleaming,
Bring to birth new fruits and flowers:
Certitude we'd win for seeming,
Faith fulfilled for doubt and deeming,
Wake to life and love this dreaming
World of ours.

Darling dreams,
Before the day
That must pale and pass away,
Flowers of fancy never blowing
But by Paradisal streams,
Grains that germ from no man's sowing,
Will ye evermore be showing
Us, with glories new still glowing,
What but seems?

Yet ye fill
Our straining eyes
With your dreams of brighter skies,
From Life's bald and barren stubble
Golden cornfields conjure still,
With the world-illusion's bubble
Fool us yet, lest, toil and trouble
Tired, we turn and burst Life's double
Web of Will.

Yet repine
Thou not, sad soul,
If the golden glittering goal
Never, from the mists unweaving,
On thy ravished vision shine.
Better gladsomeness than grieving,
Better than misdoubt believing
And deception than deceiving
Is, in fine.

357

Think not shame
For thy defeat:
Were thy visions vain, though sweet,
But the noble thus mistaken
Were, since life to light first came.
Hold thy heart in hope unshaken:
Hapless those who, faith-forsaken,
Find their dreams, when they awaken,
But a name!

Have no dole
For thy dead dream.
Though thou sawst what did but seem,
There shall flower from thy failing
Hope for many a hapless soul;
Solacement to still his wailing,
Confidence to quell his quailing,
Faith to hold his heart availing
White and whole.

One by one,
The days fill up,
Drop by drop, the Future's cup.
Hold thy hopes of right unrended
By the lapse of moon and sun;
Like the sentinel, watch ended,
Conscience clear, approof-attended,
Pass to rest, work wrought, way wended,
Duty done.

THE GRAVE OF MY SONGS.

BYTIMES, from out the stillness of my days,
Grown silent, as they nigh
The darkness and the undiscovered ways,
I hear folk question why

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The fountain of my songs, that once ran high
And full, is fallen dry;
Why in that concert of the fields and hills
Of poesy, that fills
Our English heaven with music never mute,
There is one broken lute,
One voiceless bird,
One linnet of the woods, whose wilding note,
Erst in the morning hours of some that heard
Held sweet, is dumb within his stricken throat,
Ere yet the glory of the noon be o'er,—
Whose song, though day still shines, is heard no more.
—They ask in very idleness nor pause
For answer; yet the cause
Who will may know:
My voice is dumb for weariness of woe.

I am no night-bird piping in the dark;
For me, as for the lark,
The sun must rise to set me on the wing:
Except hope shine on me, I cannot sing:
I cannot carol in a lightless land
Nor hymn the dawn, except it be at hand.
Love was my dayspring and my evenglow,
The sun that set my April blossoming,
That made my summer carolful; and lo!
My daystar set in darkness long ago.

My sun lies buried in a nameless tomb,
Midmost a mighty desert of the dead,
Where the great city's gloom
Lengthens its skirt of shadow overhead,
Darkening the morning and the evening-red.
There, in the narrow room,
After long pain and many a piteous day
Of hopeless waiting for the hopeless end,
Since love nor care might bend

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The iron course of fore-appointed doom,
Her weary head to lay
She came, for whom my songs were sung of yore,
For whom the barrens of my life ran o'er
With lush and lavish bloom.

Since that sad day, my songs are turned to sighs;
The flowerage of my heart is all fordone:
But she, the eternal rest so hardly won,
At peace she lies
And sleeps as well, frail lover of the sun,
Beneath our English skies,
Our pallid skies of watchet-chequered dun,
As if she lay where the rose-laurels run
Adown Grenada's hillside, torrent-wise,
Or where, amidst the Andalusian vines,
The rosy gold of Seville's turrets shines.

Ah, what is left us of the dear-loved dead?
The dainty gold-fledged head,
The eyes' soft gray,
From which the dreams of childhood never fled;
The mouth's rose-campion red,
The lips, on which the faint smile sat alway,
Sad as the break of April's youngest day;
The rose-blush cheeks and forehead, garlanded
With clustering curls astray,
Like woodbind tendrils in the flush of May;
The voice, too soft for joy, too sweet for pain,
That in its blithest tone
Had yet some note of never-ceasing moan,
Some half-enchanted strain,
As of some sad embodied spirit, fain
To be set free again
From this waste world, that never was its own,
Since in some clime unknown
The airs and flames of heaven to it were blown?

360

These hath Time taken back to its treasury,
In other worlds, mayhap, alas! but ne'er
In this of night and day reborn to be:
Nay, all are gone and even memory
Will fade of what they were.
Might we but deem some lapse of land and sea,
Some brighter sky
Should bring these back to heart and ear and eye,
These that in death's hand lie!
Ah God, to see the daisies springing there,
Year after year, as if life ne'er should die,
And see no sign and know no reason why
Her life that was so fair,
Her soul, that was so sweet, so heavens-high,
Is faded out for e'er
Into the deserts of the abysmal air!

Could we but hope the all-engrossing earth,
That for the eternal rest
Took back her blighted beauty to its breast,
Might yet enrich our dearth
With some unknown, enchanted wonder-birth
Of blossom, brilliant as her starry eyes,
Sweet as her balmy breath,
Some flowerage of heaven defying death,
Wherein our yearning memory might retrace
The frankness of her face,
In whose bright beauty thought might recognize
The spirit-prime of her lost loveliness,
Born as it were again
In some new earth, delivered from the press
Of mortal grossness by the purge of pain,—
Or might we deem the unresponsive air,
—That bore her gentle spirit far away
And scattered it for aye
Beyond the confines of the night and day,
To all the winds of being, nor would e'er

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Vouchsafe to our despair
One echo of her voice's dulcet strain,—
Should yet grow great with graciousness and bear
Some mystic birth of music strange and fair,
Some seraph-song of Paradisal bird,
Some melody of mortals never heard,
Wherein her silver speech
And the far memory of her voice might reach
Our longing ears and witness to our faith,
She was not all disfeatured by the scaith
Of unrespective death,
That something of her sweetness yet survives
In interstellar lands
Or in the sunset-calm of spirit-lives,
Nor was all scattered by the 'scape of breath!

Nay, hope is vain; in vain our lifted hands!
In vain our cryings storm the heaven's stair:
There are no ears to hearken anywhere,
No lips to speak in answer to our prayer.
The heavens are empty as the empty air;
The Gods are dead as she is dead and nought
Abides of her but thought
In one man's brain, who soon himself must go
To join the unnumbered nations that lie low
In that untravelled land where thought is none
And sight is senseless there of star and sun.

One sole man's thought against the grim array
Of Death and Fate her only hope and stay,
Her one
Frail-seeming fortalice! And yet, how slight
Soe'er it show against the iron might
Of the blind Titans of oblivion,
Methinks it shall suffice for many a day
To hinder Time's decay
From blotting out her traces; yea, despite

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The myriad graves that let her from the light,
Th'innumerable throngs
That overcrowd her of the nameless dead,
Remembrance still shall blossom o'er her head
And guard her gentle memory from Time's wrongs;
For in that narrow bed
With her my heart lies buried and my songs.

If you should find the hidden violet there,
Soft'ning the smoky air
With that sad scent of hers, that seems to hold
The very soul of tears, or see the mould
Lit with the lucent gold
Of thronging primrose,—if the breeze should bear
The roses' royal breath
And lilies white,
The fair flower-angels with the heart of light,
With jessamines unite
To glorify that darkling garth of death,—
Think not these are but flowers,
The common creatures of the sun and showers:
Nay, these are no mere scions of the Spring,
No Summer's blossoming,
The tired earth's homage to the lengthening hours;
These are the secret treasures of my prime,
My hoards of love and rhyme,
Which, did she live, were songs, but, she being dead,
Are flowers above her head.

If you should marvel there to hear the lark
Sunder the morning-dark
With that shrill clarion-call of his for light,
Out of the deeps of night,
Or mark the mavis and the ousel make
Their wild free music there for April's sake,—
Nay, if some magic in the air should bring
The nightingales to sing

363

Her requiem who rests beneath the earth
In this grim graveyard city of her birth,
Deem not but birds are these,
But simple songsters of the woods and leas.
These are no common choristers of air,
The singing sprites of heaven's lowest stair,
That hymn the Spring and Summer everywhere;
They are the tuneful creatures of my soul,
My thoughts of joy and dole,
Which, did she live, were music wild and free,
Pageant and jubilee,
Such as had overflooded land and sea
With tides of song, but, she being dead, I gave
To glorify her grave.