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

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.

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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?

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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,

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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.