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

‘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.