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

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And show it powerless; and that curse withdrawn,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

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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.