The Poetical Works of Thomas Aird :: :: University of Virginia Library

A widowed father from the holy fount
Of Christian sprinkling bore his first-born babe
Home through the Sabbath noon. And aye his hand
Arranged the garment in a lighter fold
To overshade that breathing face upturned,
Yet let it freely drink the vital air.
And oft scarce walked he in his gaze intent,
Which fed on his boy's face,
Come out of his own loins,
Formed in the painful side
Of a dear mother—gone to barren dust.
O the wet violets of those sleeping eyes,
Which glisten through their silky fringèd lids!
Look to that dimpled smile! Look to those gums,
How sweet they laugh! His little features change,
To fear now fashioned in his baby dreams:
With many a kiss and many a murmured word,
Fain would that father chase away the shadow!

344

THE VISION CONTINUED.

The Sabbath sun went down the western day.
His sloping beam, mingled with coloured motes,
Came through the leafy checkered lattice in,
Passing into a little bed of peace,
Where lay, in vestments white of innocence,
That child of many vows; no ruder sound
Than chirp of lonely sparrow in the thatch,
Or fluttering wing of butterfly which beat
The sunny pane, to break his slumber calm.
Before him near, in that mild solemn light,
Kneeling his father prayed.

VISION SECOND.

The Bow was on the East:
One horn descending on a snow-white flock
Of lambs at rest upon a sleek hill-side,
The other showered its saffron and its blue
Down on a band of young girls in the vale,
Tossing their ringlets in their linkèd dance,
Laughing and winking to the glimmering sheen:
Through them and over them the glory fell,
Into the emerald meadow bending inward.
Beneath its arch,
Of beauty built, of promise, and of safety,
I saw that father as a woodman go;
And wide behind him ran his little boy.
They reached a woody gallery of hills,
And there that father felled the lofty trees,
Whose rustling leaves shook down their twinkling drops,
Wetting his clear axe, glittering in the sun.
Perversely sate aloof, and turned away,

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Nor gratified his parent with attention
To what he did, with questions all between,
That boy among the ferns, intently fixed,
Plaiting a crown of rushes white and green.
He tore it with fierce glee.
He tore his flowerets, gathered as he came,
Wildings of coloured summer, heeding ne'er
The freaks and fancies in their spotted cups.
The young outglancing arrows of his eye
Were tipped with cruel pleasure, as he sprung
With froward shoutings leaping through the wood,
O'er shadows lying on the dewy grass,
Hunting a dragon-fly with shivering wings.
The wild-bees swinging in the bells of flowers,
Sucking the honeyed seeds with murmurs hoarse,
Were crushed to please him, for that fly escaped.
The callow hedgelings chirping through the briar
He caught, and tore their fluttering little wings;
Then hied to where came down a sunless glade,
Cold tinkling waters through the soft worn earth,
Never sun-visited, but when was seen
His green and yellow hair from out the west
Thro' thinner trees, spun 'twixt the fresh broad leaves—
But ne'er it warmed the ground, bare save where tufts
Of trailing plants for ever wet and cold,
And tender stools of slippery fungi grew:
There in a sweet pellucid pool, that boy
Drowned the young birds of summer one by one.
Back came he near his father,
Yet to him turned not; whistling, looking round
To see what farther mischief he could do;
Then laid him down and dug into the ground.
Oft turned to him the while
His father fondly looked: Heart-crowding thoughts

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Of boyhood's growing wants, and coming youth,
Strengthened a parent's loins: faint shall they not,
Strong for his son shall be: forth shall he tread
The summer slope, the winter's dun green hill
Where melting hail is mingled with the grass,
To strike the gnarled elbows of the oaks.
Now, as he turned renewed unto his toil,
His bosom swelled into the heavèd stroke.
The self-willed boy,
Perversely angry that his father spake not,
And holding in his heart a contest with him,
Formed by himself, of coldness best sustained,
Refrained no longer, but looked round in spite:
He saw the sunbeam through the pillared trees
Fall on his father's bald and polished head,
Bowing and rising to the labouring axe;
Mouth, eye, and finger mocked that father's head!

VISION THIRD.

There stood a ruined house!
In days of other years, perchance, within
Were beds of sleep, bread, and the sacred hearth,
Children, and joy, and sanctifying grief,
A mother's lessons, and a father's prayers.
Where now that good economy of life?
Scattered throughout the earth?
Or has it burst its bounds,
And left this broken outer shell,
Swelling away into the eternal worlds?
The path to the weed-mantled well grows green;
The swallow builds among the sooty rafters,
Low flying out and in through the dashed window.

347

Throughout the livelong day
No form of life comes here,
Save now and then a beggar sauntering by
The stumps, wool-tufted, of the old worn hedge,
That scarcely marks where once a garden was:
He, as he turns the crazy gate, and stops,
Seeing all desolate, then comes away
Muttering, seems cheerless sad
Beyond his daily wants.
No sound of feet
Over that threshold now is heard,
Save when on bleak October eve,
The cold and cutting wind, which blows all through
The hawthorn-bush, ruffling the blue hedge-sparrow,
Shivers the little neat-herd boy beneath,
Nestling to shun the rain
That hits his flushed cheek with sore-driving drops,
And forces him to seek those sheltering walls,
Low running with bent head: But soon the awe
Of things gone by, and the wood-eating worm—
To him the death-tick—drives him forth again
Beneath the scudding blast.
There came an old man leaning on his staff,
And bowing went into that ruined house:
It was that father!
This was the home to which he brought his bride:
This was the home where his young wife had died:
This was the home where he had reared his boy.
Forth soon he came;
And many tears fell from his aged eyes
Down to the borders of his trembling garment.
Who comes? He shrinks away; he fears to meet
That man, his son! Bold strokes had made him rich:
And, vain not kind, he to a showy dwelling

348

Had ta'en his father from that lowly cot.
Yet there the old man totters; there those walls
Stand, what but record of his own mean birth?
He swept those walls away.

THE VISION CONTINUED.

An old old man sate near a lordly house,
Trembling, not daring once to lift his eyes
Even to the speckled linnet on the bush:
'Twas he—that father!
Came sweeping silks, a haughty pair went past:
That proud disdainful fellow is his son;
And she who leans upon his arm, attired
With impudence, his wife, whose wealth has made
Him higher still, both heedless of their father.

VISION FOURTH.

That father died neglected, and in death
With struggling love were mingled bitter thoughts—
A Father's Curse.
This, ere his head went down into the grave,
Dug in a corner where meek strangers lie,
Had upward sprung, a messenger succinct,
To trouble all the crystal range of Heaven,
To call on Hell, to post o'er seas and lands,
Nature to challenge in her last domain,
Not to let pass the accursed.
There came a voice—it cried,
“The storms are ready.”
Forth flew into mid air that Father's form,
No longer mean, a potentate of wrath,
To rule the elements and set them on.

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He called the Storms—they came;
He pointed to his son:
There stood that son—no wife was with him now,
No children pleaded for his naked head—
Upon a broken hill, abrupt and strange,
Under a sky which darkened to a twilight;
A huddled world of woods and waters crushed,
Hung tumbling round him, earthquake-torn and jammed
From Nature's difficult throes: cut off he stood
From ways of men, from mercy, and from help,
With chasms and ramparts inaccessible.
The tree-tops streaming toward his outcast head,
Showed that the levelled winds smote sore on him;
Gaunt rampant monsters, half-drawn from the woods,
Roared at him glaring; downward on his eyes
The haggard vulture was in act to swoop;
Rains plashed on him; hail hit him; darting down,
The flaming forks blue quivered round him keen,
And many thunders lifted up their voice:
All Nature was against him.
Out leapt a bolt,
And split the mount beneath his sinking feet.
O'er him his Father's form burnt fiercely red,
Nearer and nearer still,
Dislimned and fused into one sheeted blaze.
From out it fell a bloody drizzled shower,
Rained on that bad son's head descending fast,
Terror thereon aghast—he's down! he's gone!
Darkness has swallowed up the scene convulsed.