 | The poetical works of Bayard Taylor |  |
248
HOME PASTORALS
1869-1874
AD AMICOS
MOUNT CUBA, OCTOBER 10, 1874.
Sometimes an hour of Fate's serenest weather
Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams;
Somewhere above us, in elusive ether,
Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams.
Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams;
Somewhere above us, in elusive ether,
Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams.
So, when the wayward time and gift have blended,
When hope beholds relinquished visions won,
The heavens are broken and a blue more splendid
Holds in its bosom an enchanted sun.
When hope beholds relinquished visions won,
The heavens are broken and a blue more splendid
Holds in its bosom an enchanted sun.
Then words unguessed, in faith's own shyness guarded,
To ears unused their welcome music bear:
Then hands help on that doubtingly retarded,
And love is liberal as the Summer air.
To ears unused their welcome music bear:
Then hands help on that doubtingly retarded,
And love is liberal as the Summer air.
The thorny chaplet of a slow probation
Becomes the laurel Fate so long denied;
The form achieved smiles on the aspiration,
And dream is deed and Art is justified!
Becomes the laurel Fate so long denied;
The form achieved smiles on the aspiration,
And dream is deed and Art is justified!
Ah, nevermore the dull neglect, that smothers
The bard's dependent being, shall return;
Forgotten lines are on the lips of others,
Extinguished thoughts in other spirits burn!
The bard's dependent being, shall return;
Forgotten lines are on the lips of others,
Extinguished thoughts in other spirits burn!
Still hoarded lives what seemed so spent and wasted,
And echoes come from dark or empty years;
Here brims the golden cup, no more untasted,
But fame is dim through mists of grateful tears.
And echoes come from dark or empty years;
Here brims the golden cup, no more untasted,
But fame is dim through mists of grateful tears.
I sang but as the living spirit taught me,
Beat towards the light, perchance with wayward wing;
And still must answer, for the cheer you've brought me:
I sang because I could not choose but sing.
Beat towards the light, perchance with wayward wing;
And still must answer, for the cheer you've brought me:
I sang because I could not choose but sing.
From that wide air, whose greedy silence swallows
So many voices, even as mine seemed lost,
I hear you speak, and sudden glory follows,
As from a falling tongue of Pentecost.
So many voices, even as mine seemed lost,
I hear you speak, and sudden glory follows,
As from a falling tongue of Pentecost.
So heard and hailed by you, that, standing nearest,
Blend love with faith in one far-shining flame,
I hold anew the earliest gift and dearest,—
The happy Song that cares not for its fame!
Blend love with faith in one far-shining flame,
I hold anew the earliest gift and dearest,—
The happy Song that cares not for its fame!
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PROEM
I
Now, when the mocking-bird returned, from his Florida winter,Sings where the sprays of the elm first touch the plumes of the cypress;
When on the southern porch the stars of the jessamine sparkle
Faint in the dusk of leaves; and the thirsty ear of the Poet
Calls for the cup of song himself must mix ere it gladden,—
Careful vintager first, though latest guest at the banquet,—
Where shall he turn? What foreign Muse invites to her vineyard?
Out of what bloom of the Past the wine of remoter romances?
Foxy our grapes, of earthy tang and a wildwood astringence
Unto fastidious tongues; but later, it may be, their juices,
Mellowed by time, shall grow to be sweet on the palates of others.
So will I paint in my verse the forms of the life I am born to,
Not mediæval, or ancient! For whatso hath palpable colors.
Drawn from being and blood, nor thrown by the spectrum of Fancy,
Charms in the Future even as truth of the Past in the Present.
II
Not for this, nor for nearer voices of intimate counsel,—When were ever they heeded?—but since I am sated with visions,
Sated with all the siren Past and its rhythmical phantoms,
Here will I seek my songs in the quiet fields of my boyhood,
Here, where the peaceful tent of home is pitched for a season.
High is the house and sunny the lawn: the capes of the woodlands
Bluff, and buttressed with many boughs, are gates to the distance,
Blue with hill over hill, that sink as the pausing of music.
Here the hawthorn blossoms, the breeze is blithe in the orchards,
Winds from the Chesapeake dull the sharper edge of the winters,
Letting the cypress live, and the mounded box, and the holly;
Here the chestnuts fall and the cheeks of peaches are crimson,
Ivy clings to the wall and sheltered fattens the fig-tree.
North and South are as one in the blended growth of the region,
One in the temper of man, and ancient, inherited habits.
III
Yet, though fair as the loveliest landscapes of pastoral England,Who hath touched them with song? and whence my music, and whither?
Life still bears the stamp of its early struggle and labor,
Still is shorn of its color by pious Quaker repression,
Still is turbid with calm, or only swift in the shallows.
Gone are the olden cheer, the tavern-dance and the fox-hunt,
Muster at trainings, buxom lasses that rode upon pillions,
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Gone, as they never had been!—and now, the serious people
Solemnly gather to hear some wordy itinerant speaker
Talking of Temperance, Peace, or the Right of Suffrage for Women.
Sport, that once like a boy was equally awkward and restless,
Sits with thumb in his mouth, while a petulant ethical bantling
Struts with his rod, and threatens our careless natural joyance.
Weary am I with all this preaching the force of example,
Painful duty to self, and painfuller still to one's neighbor,
Moral shibboleths, dinned in one's ears with slavering unction,
Till, for the sake of a change, profanity loses its terrors.
IV
Clearly, if song is here to be found, I must seek it within me:Song, the darling spirit that ever asserted her freedom,
Soaring on sunlit wing above the clash of opinions,
Poised at the height of Good with a sweeter and lovelier instinct!
Call thee I will not, my life's one dear and beautiful Angel.
Wayward, faithful and fond; but, like the Friends in the Meeting,
Waiting, will so dispose my soul in the pastoral stillness,
That, denied to Desire, Obedience yet may invite thee!
MAY-TIME
I
Yes, it is May! though not that the young leaf pushes its velvetOut of the sheath, that the stubbornest sprays are beginning to bourgeon,
Larks responding aloft to the mellow flute of the bluebird,
Nor that song and sunshine and odors of life are immingled
Even as wines in a cup; but that May, with her delicate philtres
Drenches the veins and the valves of the heart,—a double possession,
Touching the sleepy sense with sweet, irresistible languor,
Piercing, in turn, the languor with flame: as the spirit, requickened
Stirred in the womb of the world, foreboding a birth and a being!
II
Who can hide from her magic, break her insensible thraldom,Clothing the wings of eager delight as with plumage of trouble?
Sweeter, perchance, the embryo Spring, forerunner of April,
When on banks that slope to the south the saxifrage wakens,
When, beside the dentils of frost that cornice the road-side,
Weeds are a promise, and woods betray the trailing arbutus.
Once is the sudden miracle seen, the truth and its rapture
Felt, and the pulse of the possible May is throbbing already.
Thus unto me, a boy, the clod that was warm in the sunshine,
Murmurs of thaw, and imagined hurry of growth in the herbage,
Airs from over the southern hills,—and something within me
Catching a deeper sign from these than ever the senses,—
Came as a call: I awoke, and heard, and endeavored to answer.
Whence should fall in my lap the sweet, impossible marvel?
When would the silver fay appear from the willowy thicket?
When from the yielding rock the gnome with his basket of jewels?
“When, ah when?” I cried, on the steepest perch of the hillside
Standing with arms outspread, and waiting a wind that should bear me
Over the apple-tree tops and over the farms of the valley.
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III
He, that will, let him backward set the stream of his fancy,So to evoke a dream from the ruined world of his boyhood!
Lo, it is easy! Yonder, lapped in the folds of the uplands,
Bickers the brook, to warmer hollows southerly creeping,
Where the veronica's eyes are blue, the buttercup brightens,
Where the anemones blush, the coils of fern are unrolling
Hour by hour, and over them flutter the sprinkles of shadow.
There shall I lie and dangle my naked feet in the water,
Watching the sleeping buds as one after one they awaken,
Seeking a lesson in each, a brookside primrose of Wordsworth?—
Lie in the lap of May, as a babe that loveth the cradle,
I, whom her eye inspires, whom the breath of her passion arouses?
Say, shall I stray with bended head to look for her posies,
When with other wings than the coveted lift of the breezes
Far I am borne, at her call: and the pearly abysses are parted
Under my flight: the glimmering edge of the planet, receding,
Rounds to the splendider sun and ripens to glory of color.
Veering at will, I view from a crest of the jungled Antilles
Sparkling, limitless billows of greenness, falling and flowing
Into fringes of palm and the foam of the blossoming coffee,—
Cratered isles in the offing, milky blurs of the coral
Keys, and vast, beyond, the purple arc of the ocean:
Or, in the fanning furnace-winds of the tenantless Pampas,
Hear the great leaves clash, the shiver and hiss of the reed-beds.
Thus for the crowded fulness of life I leave its beginnings,
Not content to feel the sting of an exquisite promise
Ever renewed and accepted, and ever freshly forgotten.
IV
Wherefore, now, recall the pictures of memory? WhereforeYearn for a fairer seat of life than this I have chosen?
Ah, while my quiver of wandering years was yet unexhausted,
Treading the lands, a truant that wasted the gifts of his freedom,
Sweet was the sight of a home—or tent, or cottage, or castle,—
Sweet unto pain; and never beheld I a Highlander's shieling,
Never a Flemish hut by a lazy canal and its pollards,
Never the snowy gleam of a porch through Apennine orchards,
Never a nest of life on the hoary hills of Judæa,
Dropped on the steppes of the Don, or hidden in valleys of Norway,
But, with the fond and foolish trick of a heart that was homeless,
Each was mine, as I passed: I entered in and possessed it,
Looked, in fancy, forth, and adjusted my life to the landscape.
Easy it seemed, to shift the habit of blood as a mantle,
Fable a Past, and lightly take the form of the Future,
So that a rest were won, a hold for the filaments, floating
Loose in the winds of Life. Here, now, behold it accomplished!
Nay, but the restless Fate, the certain Nemesis follows,
As to the bird the voice that bids him prepare for his passage,
Saying: “Not this is the whole, not these, nor any, the borders
Set for thy being; this measured, slow repetition of Nature,
Painting, effacing, in turn, with hardly a variant outline,
Cannot replace for thee the Earth's magnificent frescoes!
Art thou content to inhabit a simple pastoral chamber,
Leaving the endless halls of her grandeur and glory untrodden?”
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V
Man, I answer, is more: I am glutted with physical beautyBorn of the suns and rains and the plastic throes of the ages.
Man is more; but neither dwarfed like a tree of the Arctic
Vales, nor clipped into shape as a yew in the gardens of princes.
Give me to know him, here, where inherited laws and disguises
Hide him at times from himself,—where his thought is chiefly collective,
Where, with numberless others fettered like slaves in a coffle,
Each insists he is free, inasmuch as his bondage is willing.
Who hath rent from the babe the primitive rights of his nature?
Who hath fashioned his yoke? who patterned beforehand his manhood?
Say, shall never a soul be moved to challenge its portion,
Seek for a wider heritage lost, a new disenthralment,
Sending a root to be fed from the deep original sources,
So that the fibres wax till they split the centuried granite?
Surely, starting alike at birth from the ignorant Adam,
Every type of the race were herein distinctly repeated,
Hinted in hopes and desires, and harmless divergence of habit,
Save that the law of the common mind is invisibly written
Even on our germs, and Life but warms into color the letters.
VI
Thence, it may be, accustomed to dwell in a moving horizon,Here, alas! the steadfast circle of things is a weary
Round of monotonous forms: I am haunted by livelier visions.
Linking men and their homes, endowing both with the language,
Sweeter than speech, the soul detects in a natural picture,
I to my varying moods the fair remembrances summon,
Glad that once and somewhere each was a perfect possession.
Two will I paint, the forms of the double passion of May-time,—
Rest and activity, indolent calm and the sweep of the senses.
One, the soft green lap of a deep Dalecarlian valley,
Sheltered by piny hills and the distant porphyry mountains;
Low and red the house, and the meadow spotted with cattle;
All things fair and clear in the light of the midsummer Sabbath,
Touching, beyond the steel-blue lake and the twinkle of birch-trees,
Houses that nestle like chicks around the motherly church-roof.
There, I know, there is innocence, ancient duty and honor,
Love that looks from the eye and truth that sits on the forehead,
Pure, sweet blood of health, and the harmless freedom of nature,
Witless of blame; for the heart is safe in inviolate childhood.
Dear is the scene, but it fades: I see, with a leap of the pulses,
Tawny under the lidless sun the sand of the Desert,
Fiery solemn hills, and the burning green of the date-trees
Belting the Nile: the tramp of the curvetting stallions is muffled;
Brilliantly stamped on the blue are the white and scarlet of turbans;
Lances prick the sky with a starry glitter; the fulness,
Joy, and delight of life are sure of the day and the morrow,
Certain the gifts of sense, and the simplest order suffices.
Breathing again, as once, the perfect air of the Desert.
Good it seems to escape from the endless menace of duty,
There, where the will is free, and wilfully plays with its freedom,
And the lack of will for the evil thing is a virtue.
VII
Man is more, I have said: but the subject mood is a fashionWrought of his lighter mind and dyed with the hues of his senses.
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As beseems to the haughty soul that is lifted by knowledge
Over the multitude's law, enforcing their own acquiescence,—
Lifted to longing and will, in its satisfied loneliness centred,—
This prohibits the cry of the nerves, the weak lamentation
Shaming my song: for I know whence cometh its languishing burden.
Impotent all I have dreamed,—and the calmer vision assures me
Such were barren, and vapid the taste of joy that is skin-deep.
Better the nest than the wandering wing, the loving possession,
Intimate, ever-renewed, than the circle of shallower changes.
AUGUST
I
Dead is the air, and still! the leaves of the locust and walnutLazily hang from the boughs, inlaying their intricate outlines
Rather on space than the sky,—on a tideless expansion of slumber.
Faintly afar in the depths of the duskily withering grasses
Katydids chirp, and I hear the monotonous rattle of crickets.
Dead is the air, and ah! the breath that was wont to refresh me
Out of the volumes I love, the heartful, whispering pages,
Dies on the type, and I see but wearisome characters only.
Therefore be still, thou yearning voice from the garden in Jena,—
Still, thou answering voice from the park-side cottage in Weimar,—
Still, sentimental echo from chambers of office in Dresden,—
Ye, and the feebler and farther voices that sound in the pauses!
Each and all to the shelves I return: for vain is your commerce
Now, when the world and the brain are numb in the torpor of August.
II
Over the tasselled corn, and fields of the twice-blossomed clover,Dimly the hills recede in the reek of the colorless hazes:
Dull and lustreless, now, the burnished green of the woodlands;
Leaves of blackberry briers are bronzed and besprinkled with copper;
Weeds in the unmown meadows are blossoming purple and yellow,
Roughly entwined, a wreath for the tan and wrinkles of Summer.
Where shall I turn? What path attracts the indifferent footstep,
Eager no more as in June, nor lifted with wings as in May-time?
Whitherward look for a goal, when buds have exhausted their promise,
Harvests are reaped, and grapes and berries are waiting for Autumn?
Wander, my feet, as ye list! I am careless, to-day, to direct you.
Take, here, the path by the pines, the russet carpet of needles
Stretching from wood to wood, and hidden from sight by the orchard
Here, in the sedge of the slope, the centaury pink, as a sea-shell,
Opens her stars all at once, and with finer than tropical spices
Sweetens the season's drouth, the censer of fields that are sterile.
Now, from the height of the grove, between the irregular tree-trunks,
Over the falling fields and the meadowy curves of the valley,
Climmer the peaceful farms, the mossy roofs of the houses,
Gables gray of the neighboring barns, and gleams of the highway
Climbing the ridges beyond to dip in the dream of a forest.
III
Ah, forsaking the shade, and slowly crushing the stubble,Parting the viscous roseate stems and the keen pennyroyal,
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Heat as intense and stillness as dumb, the immaculate ether's
Hush when it vaults the waveless Mediterranean sea-floor;
Golden the hills of Cos, with pencilled cerulean shadows;
Phantoms of Carian shores that are painted and fade in the distance;
Patmos behind, and westward the flushed Ariadnean Naxos,—
Once as I saw them sleeping, drugged by the poppy of Summer.
There, indeed, was the air, as with floating stars of the thistle
Filled with impalpable forms, regrets, possibilities, longings,
Beauty that was and was not, and Life that was rhythmic and joyous,
So that the sun-baked clay the peasant took for his wine-jars
Brighter than gold I thought, and the red acidity nectar.
Here, at my feet, the clay is clay and a nuisance the stubble,
Flaring St. John's-wort, milk-weed, and coarse, unpoetical mullein;—
Yet, were it not for the poets, say, is the asphodel fairer?
Were not the mullein as dear, had Theocritus sung it, or Bion?
Yea, but they did not; and we, whose fancy's tenderest tendrils
Shoot unsupported, and wither, for want of a Past we can cling to,
We, so starved in the Present, so weary of singing the Future,—
What is 't to us, if, haply, a score of centuries later,
Milk-weed inspires Patagonian tourists, and mulleins are classic?
IV
Idly balancing fortunes, feeling the spite of them, maybe,—For the little withheld outweighs the much that is given,—
Feeling the pang of the brain, the endless, unquenchable yearning
Born of the knowledge of Beauty, not to be shared or imparted,
Slowly I stray, and drop by degrees to the thickets of alder
Fringing a couch of the stream, a basin of watery slumber.
Broken, it seems; for the splash and the drip and the bubbles betoken
What?—the bath of a nymph, the bashful strife of a Hylas?
Broad is the back, and bent from an un-Olympian stooping,
Narrow the loins and firm, the white of the thighs and the shoulders
Changing to reddest and toughest of tan at the knees and the elbows.
Is it a faun? He sees me, nor cares to hide in the thickets.
Faun of the bog is he, a sylvan creature of Galway
Come from the ditch below, to cleanse him of sweat and of muck-stain;
Willing to give me speech, as, naked, he stands in the shallows.
Something of coarse, uncouth, barbaric, he leaves on the bank there;
Something of primitive human fairness cometh to clothe him.
Were he not bent with the pick, but straightened from reaching the bunches
Hung from the mulberry branches,—heard he the bacchanal cymbals,
Took from the sun an even gold on the web of his muscles,
Knew the bloom of his stunted bud of delight of the senses,—
Then as faun or shepherd he might have been welcome in marble.
Yea, but he is not; and I, requiring the beautiful balance,
Music of life in the body, and limbs too fair to be hidden,
Find, indeed, some delicate colors and possible graces,—
Moral hints of the man beneath the unsavory garments,—
Find them, and sigh, lamenting the law reversed of the races
Starting the world afresh on the basis unlovely of Labor.
V
Was it a spite of fate that blew me hither, an exile,Still unweaned, and not to be weaned, from the milk I was born to?
Bitter the stranger's bread to the homesick, hungering palate;
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Yet must I take it, yet live, and somehow seem to be healthy,
Lest my neighbors, perchance, be shocked by an uncomprehended
Violent clamor for that which I crave and they cannot supply me,—
Hunger unmeet for the times, anachronistical passions,—
Beauty seeming distorted because the rule is distortion.
Here is a tangle which, now, too idle am I to unravel.
Snared, moreover, by bitter-sweet, moon-seed, and riotous fox-grape,
Meshing the thickets: procul, O procul, unpractical fancies!
Verily, thus bewildering myself in the maze of æsthetic,
Solveless problems, the feet were wellnigh heedlessly fettered.
Thoughtless, 't is true, I relinquished my books; but crescit eundo
Wisely was said,—for desperate vacancy prompted the ramble,
Memories prolonged, and a phantom of logic urges it onward.
VI
Here are the fields again! The soldierly maize in tasselStands on review, and carries the scabbarded ears in its arm-pits.
Rustling I part the ranks,—the close, engulfing battalions
Shaking their plumes overhead,—and, wholly bewildered and heated,
Gain the top of the ridge, where stands, colossal, the pin-oak.
Yonder, a mile away, I see the roofs of the village,—
See the crouching front of the meeting-house of the Quakers,
Oddly conjoined with the whittled Presbyterian steeple.
Right and left are the homes of the slow, conservative farmers,
Loyal people and true, but, now that the battles are over,
Zealous for Temperance, Peace, and the Right of Suffrage for Women.
Orderly, moral, are they,—at least, in the sense of suppression;
Given to preaching of rules, inflexible outlines of duty;
Seeing the sternness of life, but, alas! overlooking its graces.
Let me be juster: the scattered seeds of the graces are planted
Widely apart; but the trumpet-vine on the porch is a token;
Yea, and awake and alive are the forces of love and affection,
Plastic forces that work from the tenderer models of beauty.
Who shall dare to speak of the possible? Who shall encounter
Pity and wrath and reproach, recalling the record immortal
Left by the races when Beauty was law and Joy was religion?
Who to the Duty in drab shall bring the garlanded Pleasure?—
Break with the chant of the gods, the gladsome timbrels of morning,
Nasal, monotonous chorals, sung by the sad congregation?
Better it were to sleep with the owl, to house with the hornet,
Than to conflict with the satisfied moral sense of the people.
VII
Nay, but let me be just; nor speak with the alien languageBorn of my blood; for, cradled among them, I know them and love them
Was it my fault, if a strain of the distant and dead generations
Rose in my being, renewed, and made me other than these are?
Purer, perhaps, their habit of law than the freedom they shrink from;
So, restricted by will, a little indulgence is riot.
They, content with the glow of a carefully tempered twilight,
Measured pulses of joy, and colorless growth of the senses.
Stand aghast at my dream of the sun, and the sound, and the splendor!
Mine it is, and remains, resenting the threat of suppression,
Stubbornly shaping my life, and feeding with fragments its hunger.
Drifted from Attican hills to stray on a Scythian level.
So unto me it appears,—unto them a perversion and scandal.
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VIII
Lo! in the vapors, the sun, colossal and crimson and beamless,Touches the woodland; fingers of air prepare for the dew-fall.
Life is fresher and sweeter, insensibly toning to softness
Needs and desires that are but the broidered hem of its mantle,
Not the texture of daily use; and the soul of the landscape,
Breathing of justified rest, of peace developed by patience,
Lures me to feel the exquisite senses that come from denial,
Sharper passion of Beauty never fulfilled in external
Forms or conditions, but always a fugitive has-been or may-be.
Bright and alive as a want, incarnate it dozes and fattens.
Thus, in aspiring, I reach what were lost in the idle possession;
Helped by the laws I resist, the forces that daily depress me;
Bearing in secreter joy a luminous life in my bosom,
Fair as the stars on Cos, the moon on the boscage of Naxos
Thus the skeleton Hours are clothed with rosier bodies:
Thus the buried Bacchanals rise unto lustier dances:
Thus the neglected god returns to his desolate temple:
Beauty, thus rethroned, accepts and blesses her children!
NOVEMBER
I
Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standethStern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,—
Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,—
Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top,
Breathing the reek of withered weeds, or the drifted and sodden
Splendors of woodland, as whoso piously groaneth in spirit:
“Vanity, verily; yea, it is vanity, let me forsake it!
Yea, let it fade, for Life is the empty clash of a cymbal,
Joy a torch in the hands of a fool, and Beauty a pitfall!”
II
Once, I remember, when years had the long duration of ages,Came, with November, despair; for summer had vanished forever.
Lover of light, my boyish heart as a lover's was jealous,
Followed forsaking suns and felt its passion rejected,
Saw but Age and Death, in the whole wide circle of Nature
Throned forever; and hardly yet have I steadied by knowledge
Faith that faltered and patience that was but a weary submission.
Though to the right and left I hear the call of the huskers
Scattered among the rustling shocks, and the cheerily whistled
Lilt of an old plantation tune from an ebony teamster,
These behold no more than the regular jog of a mill-wheel
Where, unto me, there is possible end and diviner beginning.
Silent are now the flute of Spring and the clarion of Summer
As they had never been blown: the wail of a dull Miserere
Heavily sweeps the woods, and, stifled, dies in the valleys.
III
Who are they that prate of the sweet consolation of Nature?They who fly from the city's heat for a month to the sea-shore,
Drink of unsavory springs, or camp in the green Adirondacks?
They, long since, have left with their samples of ferns and of algæ,
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Gossip of tree and cliff and wave and modest adventure,
Such as a graceful sentiment—not too earnest—admits of,
Heard in the pause of a dance or bridging the gaps of a dinner.
Nay, but I, who know her, exult in her profligate seasons,
Turn from the silence of men to her fancied, fond recognition,
I am repelled at last by her sad and cynical humor.
Kinder, cheerier now, were the pavements crowded with people,
Walls that hide the sky, and the endless racket of business.
There a hope in something lifts and enlivens the current,
Face seeth face, and the hearts of a million, beating together,
Hidden though each from other, at least are outwardly nearer,
Lending the life of all to the one,—bestowing and taking,
Weaving a common web of strength in the meshes of contact,
Close, yet never impeded, restrained, yet delighting in freedom.
There the soul, secluded in self, or touching its fellow
Only with horny palms that hide the approach of the pulses,
Driven abroad, discovers the secret signs of its kindred,
Kisses on lips unknown, and words on the tongue of the stranger.
Life is set to a statelier march, a grander accordance
Follows its multitudinous steps of dance and of battle:
Part hath each in the music; even the sacredest whisper
Findeth a soul unafraid and an ear that is ready to listen.
IV
Nature? 'T is well to sing of the glassy Bandusian fountain,Shining Ortygian beaches, or flocks on the meadows of Enna,
Linking the careless life with the careless mood of the Mother.
We, afar and alone, confronted with heavier questions,
Robbed of the oaten pipe before it is warm in our fingers,
Why should we feign a faith?—why crown an indifferent goddess?
Under the gray, monotonous vault what carolling song-bird
Hopes for an echo? Closer and lower the vapors are folded;
Sighing shiver the woods, though drifted leaves are unrustled;
Ghosts of the grasses that fled with a breath and floated in sunshine
Hang unstirred on brier and fence; for a new desolation
Comes with the rain, that, chilly and quietly creeping at nightfall,
Thence for many a day shall dismally drizzle and darken.
V
“See!” (methinks I hear the mechanical routine repeated,)“Emblems of faith in the folded bud and the seed that is sleeping!”
Knowledge, not Faith, deduced the similitude; how shall an emblem
Give to the soul the steadfast truth that alone satisfies it?
Joy of the Spring I can feel, but not the preaching of Autumn.
Earth, if a lesson is wrought upon each of thy radiant pages,
Give us the words that sustain us, and not the words that discourage!
Sceptic art thou become, the breeder of doubt and confusion,
Powerless vassal of Fate, assuming a meek resignation,
Yielding the forces that moved in thy life and made it triumphant!
VI
Now, as my circle of home is slowly swallowed in darkness,As with the moan of winds the rain is drearily falling,—
Hopes that drew as the sun and aims that stood as the pole-star
Fading aloof from my life as though it never had known them,—
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Stripped of the rags of Time I see the form of my being,
Born of all that ever has been, and haughtily reaching
Forward to all that comes,—yet certain, this moment, of nothing.
Chide or condemn as ye may, the truant and mutinous spirit
Turns on itself, and forces release from its holiest habit;
Soars where the suns are sprinkled in cold illimited darkness,
Peoples the spheres with far diviner forms of existence,
Questions, conjectures at will; for Earth and its creeds are forgotten.
Thousands of æons it gathers, yet scarce its feet are supported;
Dumb is the universe unto the secrets of Whence? and of Whither?
So, as a dove through the summits of ether falling exhausted,
Under it yawns the blank of an infinite Something—or Nothing!
VII
Let me indulge in the doubt, for this is the token of freedom,This is all that is safe from hands that would fain intermeddle,
Thrusting their worn phylacteries over the eyes that are seeking
Truth as it shines in the sky, not truth as it smokes in their lantern.
Ah, shall I venture alone beyond the limits they set us,
Bearing the spark within till a breath of the Deity fan it
Into an upward-pointing flame?—and, forever unquiet,
Nearer through error advance, and nearer through ignorant yearning?
Yes, it must be: the soul from the soul cannot hide or diminish
Aught of its essence: here the duplicate nature is ended:
Here the illusions recede, at man's unassailable centre.
And the nearness and farness of God are all that is left him.
VIII
Lo! as I muse, there come on the lonely darkness and silenceGleams like those of the sun that reach his uttermost planet,
Inwardly dawning; and faint and sweet as the voices of waters
Borne from a sleeping moutain-vale on a breeze of the midnight,
Falls a message of cheer: “Be calm, for to doubt is to seek whom
None can escape, and the soul is dulled with an idle acceptance.
Crying, questioning, stumbling in gloom, thy pathway ascendeth;
They with the folded hands at the last relapse into strangers.
Over thy head, behold! the wing with its measureless shadow
Spread against the light, is the wing of the Angel of Unfaith,
Chosen of God to shield the eyes of men from His glory.
Thus through mellower twilights of doubt thou climbest undazzled,
Mornward ever directed, and even in wandering guided.
God is patient of souls that reach through an endless creation,
So but His shadow be seen, but heard the trail of His mantle!”
IX
Who is alone in this? The elder brothers, immortal.Leaned o'er the selfsame void and rose to the same consolation,
Human therein as we, however diviner their message.
Even as the liquid soul of summer, pent in the flagon,
Waits in the darksome vault till we crave its odor and sunshine,
So in the Past the words of life, the voices eternal.
Freedom like theirs we claim, yet lovingly guard in the freedom
Sympathies due to the time and help to the limited effort;
Thus with double arms embracing our duplicate being,
Setting a foot in either world, we stand as the Masters.
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Give me thy hand!—the soft and quickening life of thy pulses
Spans the slackened spirit and lifts the eyelids of Fancy:
Doubt is of loneliness born, belief companions the lover.
Ever from thee, as once from youth's superfluous forces,
Courage and hope are renewed, the endless future created.
Out of the season's hollow the sunken sun shall be lifted,
Bringing faith in his beams, the green resurrection of Easter,
After the robes of death by the angels of air have been scattered,
Climbing the heights of heaven, to stand supreme at his solstice!
L'ENVOI
I
May-time and August, November, and over the winter to May-time,Year after year, or shaken by nearness of imminent battle,
Or as remote from the stir as an isle of the sleepy Pacific,
Here, at least, I have tasted peace in the pauses of labor,
Rest as of sleep, the gradual growth of deliberate Nature.
Here, escaped from the conflict of taste, the confusion of voices
Heard in a land where the form of Art abides as a stranger,
Come to me definite hopes and clearer possible duties,
Faith in the steadfast service, content with tardy achievement.
Here, in men, I have found the elements working as elsewhere,
Ever betraying the surge and swell of invisible currents,
Which, from beneath, from the deepest bases of thought in the people
Press, and heavy with change, and filled with visions unspoken,
Bear us onward to shape the formless face of the Future.
II
Now, if the tree I planted for mine must shadow another's,If the uncounted tender memories, sown with the seasons,
Filling the webs of ivy, the grove, the terrace of roses,
Clothing the lawn with unwithering green, the orchard with blossoms,
Singing a finer song to the exquisite motion of waters,
Breathing profounder calm from the dark Dodonian oak-trees,
Now must be lost, till, haply, the hearts of others renew them,—
Yet we have had and enjoyed, we have and enjoy them forever.
Drops from the bough the fruit that here was sunnily ripened:
Other will grow as well on the westward slope of the garden.
Sorrowing not, nor driven forth by the sword of an angel,
Nay, but borne by a fuller tide as a ship from the harbor,
Slowly out of our eyes the pastoral bliss of the landscape
Fades, and is dim, and sinks below the rim of the ocean.
III
Sorrowing not, I have said: with thee was the ceasing of sorrow.Hope from thy lips I have drawn, and subtler strength from thy spirit,
Sharer of dream and of deed, inflexible conscience of Beauty!
Though as a Grace thou art dear, as a guardian Muse thou art earnest,
Walking with purer feet the paths of song that I venture,
Side by side, unwearied, in cheerful, encouraging silence.
Not thy constant woman's heart alone I have wedded;
One are we made in patience and faith and high aspiration.
Thus, at last, the light of the fortunate age is recovered:
Thus, wherever we wander, the shrine and the oracle follow!
| The poetical works of Bayard Taylor | |