The point of view (some talks and disputations) :: :: University of Virginia Library

The point of view (some talks and disputations)

By Emily Lawless

Lawless, Emily (1845-1913)

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Prelude

“Let us discourse ...
For I am such another e'en as you,
A world within myself, as you in you,
A world high piled with folly, care, distrust,
Of pains a many, and of sins not few,
And yet a world with some few specks of worth,
Not merely vain, or mean, or dull, or vile,
Not quite denuded of the grace of love,
Not left unaided by kind pitying hearts,
Not without gleams at times of sudden light

Piercing the rain-clouds. And, this being so,
Let us discourse.” ... “Prithee,” you say, “of what?”
“Ah there, my friend, the puzzle fairly comes,
For talk is such an elfish tricksy sprite,
So full of doubles, twists, and vagaries
That no man ever yet could master it,
Since, like some headstrong colt, it takes the bit
'Twixt teeth, and then, hey presto! off it goes,
Down lane, up hill, at such a godless rate
That the best wits grow addled, and at last
You find yourself' twere hard to say just where!
Not certes where you first had thought to be,
Quite otherwise in fact. ... In very truth
We grey-heads are but foolish children still,
We run to greet each other, laugh and kiss,
Clasp hands, are glad to find a kindred soul,
Rush into friendship, and then—silly wights—
Advance no further. Spell-bound, vacant, dull,

With stammering lips and apprehensive eyes,
We gaze at one another. Scarce a word
Comes to the rescue: truly not as much
As a dog's whimper, or a crow's wise ‘caw’!
Each through the prison bars of his caged self,
Stares at his fellow.” “But, says Sir Wisdom,
“These are all Tokens of a passing day,
In that great unity to which hearts turn,
Where earth's loud discords melt to harmony,
And centre and circumference are one,
Such separations end, and soul with soul
Melts into unison, as wave in wave
Melts in mid ocean.” “Say we grant the claim!
Still, peering down that measureless To-Be,
Upfloats the thought; will any Potency
Howsoe'er potent reach the untravelled land
Where roams that stubborn bedouin, man's Soul?
A creature so untameable no law,

Force, hate, or love hath thus far captured it?
If not Sir Wisdom's unison is nought,
His fire-new order that self-slaying thing
A Unity of Many!”

OF THE VALUE OF MASTERPIECES

(A PROTEST)

Nothing, you say, was ever worth the throes
Of thinking save it met its counterpart
In other minds; no sonnet, lyric, tale,
Worth penning 'cept some meed of pence or praise
Acclaimed the doer; what slight men call “Fame”
Blew for one hour at least her good cracked horn?
The claim's familiar, yet you'll sure admit
That strains of harmony, divinely sweet,
Born in celestial spheres, may now and then
Sound at deep dead of night, heard of but few
Who wake and yawn, then promptly sleep again.
Nay, who durst swear no white Divinity,
Round-limbed, snow-bosomed, may have trod yon glade
This morn at cockcrow; kissed a hand, and fled,

Seen only of the silly browsing kine?
And so to our contention—who can say
On what poor, spent, and quite unhonoured brain
The pearly treasure of one spacious phrase,
Eight matchless words, worthy our dearest Keats,
May now and then alight, glow for a space,
And vanish, scarcely recognized while there,
And quite unguessed of by our sapient crowd?
At all events I who now speak to you
Would gladly—should some gracious power deign
(Say once or twice perchance in sixty years),
To make me the recipient of like gift,
And claim the promise—gladly would I vow
Here on mine oath no mortal save myself
Should see, hear, aye or catch a rumour of it;
Nay, to make matters certain, once the scroll
Writ out and conned, I would with mine own hand
Bury it where e'en moles would never nose it.
Or—a more seemly burial we'll concede—
Take boat and drop it twenty fathoms down
Where old Atlantic's surfiest billows roll,
There to be merged for aye with wracks and wrecks,
And dead men's bones, and vanished argosies,
And all the flotsam of unthrifty Time.

You smile! such triumphs in your eyes are nought?
Well, well! We each know what our own souls crave,
And for my part I know that I should live
The larger and the happier till the end;
Nay, that my secret should go out with me,
Worn like a jewel nearest to my heart,
Best of all jewels, just one flawless phrase,
To shine a diamond in the unlettered dusk!

THE LIGHT OCCULT

(ADDRESSED TO ONE WHO HOLDS BY IT)

Upwards? Nay, nay, but downwards, friend,
Your boasted lights to dimmest twilight tend;
To twilights, and the old Cimmerian way
Where dumb Confusion and blind Chaos stray.
Not mid the tossings of hag-haunted sleep,
Where half-drugged souls their purblind vigils keep,
Live strength or vision, truth or light,
But yonder on the hard-won upland height,
Sun-kissed, but fanned by every wind,
There, as at morning's break, mankind
His ancient rallying-ground will find.

Yet Memory's track lies here, you say
In dusk and shadows? True, it may—
The memories that goad and sting
Of club, and claw, and scaly wing,
Of Earth's dim inauspicious dawn
Ere truth-pursuing thought was born,
Ere, rising to his being's height,
Man smote the assailing hosts of night,

With all their gibbering shadowy train,
The bat-winged progeny of Fright
Which batten on the blood and brain.
Nay, rouse thee, brother! Fling away
Such “bugs and goblins”; common day,
The sun-kissed heights, green meadows free,
May sure suffice for thee and me?
Let the fond slave of magic still
Wallow in portents if he will,
Pursue the evasive mystery,
With chattering teeth and knocking knee
Adown dark haunted alleys creep.
Let us the wind-blown summits keep,
Let storm and thunder, cloud and rain,
The friendly hill, the grassy plain,
Cry “Courage” to our heart and brain;
And when at eventide our eyes
Grow dim to these accustomed skies,
When work is done and tales are told,
Let us in no dim trance behold,
Spent with the labours of his day,
Wrinkled, and bronzed, and bent, and grey,
Yet fighting ever in the van,
Earth's sturdy old colossus—Man,
Outstriding Fate's invidious bars,
And mounting still from slime to stars!

IGNOBLE EASE

(A RETORT)

So so, fair sir, you say that you
Hold no faith proved, and few men true;
That in this scheme of things below
A “thinking heart that makes no show”
Wins little praise, has scarce more power
Than the least drop of Spring's least shower.
That easeful life alone is gain,
That prayer, love, art, and fame are vain,
In short, 'twere wiser to sit still,
To ply a mild subservient quill,
Or better, neither read, nor write,
Nor love, nor hate, nor pray, nor fight,
No mortal save ourselves to please,
But eat and drink, and take our ease,
Rest and be thankful, aye, or rest
And not be thankful. Share no jest,
No heights to climb, no depths to sound,
But sit, sit, sit, till we be found,
Sans teeth, or taste, or wit or will,
White-haired or bald, yet sitting still,

God help us! in our dim old age,
Like “Polly,” in a well-warmed cage!

Your creed, my friend, if dull, seems sound;
It stands, I own, on long-tried ground,
Clearer, I fear, its scope you see
Than mine, alas! is seen by me.
And yet—for there hath been a “yet”
Since man first did his kind beget—
A “yet” this time of scope immense,
Covering the entire world of sense,
Of sense, aye, and of spirit too,
All that this circumambient blue
O'er-arches; order, species, nation,
Our world-wide, sentient creation.
For see! E'en “Polly” has her place,
Not wholly mean, I deem, her case,
Behind her mistress and her cage,
Her sugar, and her wicker stage,
She hath, some hold, a Ruler too—
The same that ruleth me and you!
The Power that guards her foolish life
Swings the broad scales of peace and strife,
Reshapes the arch of change afar,
Renews the sun, and steers the star.
Then if from Him, as some still deem,
Comes all we see, and most we dream,
If nothing 'scapes that thinking eye
Under the blue or cloud-filled sky,

If He who laid down land and sea
Still feeds the shrimp and trains the bee,
Observes which way the squirrels bound,
Measures the strength of horse and hound,
Follows the hawk-moth's devious chase,
The lace-fly's dainty flitting grace;
Down ocean's valleys tracks the seal,
A mile below yon lumbering keel;
Perceives the blue velella frail
Lift from the brine its glassy sail;
Reckons the hydroid's countless bells,
The coral polyp's myriad cells—
In one immortal grasp immense
Gathers all things of life and sense—
May He not, oh too prudent friend,
To your and my poor needs attend?

TO TEAGUE O'TOOLE OF THE BURREN

(SONNET)

Those daystars of our life, Pathos and Mirth,
Have met, friend Teague, in thy unconscious face;
No classic profile thine, yet some past race
Hath sure impressed those features ere thy birth.

Dusky Iberians, wild-eyed sons of Dearth
And Fear, on those dark eyes have left their trace;
Scythians, who knows? fierce Celts in any case,
First-hand explorers of our procreant earth.

And, listening to thy fluent friendly speech,
Shrewd, garrulous, irresponsible, untaught,
Fashioned and coloured like some formless rhyme,
Back with a flash mine own soul seems to reach,
Till I too hear, all else becoming naught,
Those first wild flutings of unlessoned Time!

TO------ AGED TWENTY-TWO

(SONNET)

You will recal perchance some summer day,
Not this year, or e'en next, but some far year,
What time we two have stood together here,
Under this friendly, cloud-flecked sky of May.

The late-come swallows on their devious way,
The urgent questings of bewildered bees,
The chirp of some proud mother from the trees,
And the warm promise of the procreant clay.

All these will perhaps return, and if with these,
With sun, and cloud, and bird, and budding trees,
There mingles some old memories of me,
Keep them, but do not grieve. For naught abides,
The untiring river rolls, and down its tides
Wave follows wave into the same old sea.

TO A RHYMING CONTEMPORARY

Toss your visions to the wind,
Poet! Leave no word behind,
Better so.
Why fond reveries rehearse,
Meditations tell in verse?
Not so, ah no,
Silence keep through weal or woe,
Silence keep, and leave it so.

Shall a slight if living thought
Into careful words be wrought?
Ah no, not so,
Let it fall like autumn leaves,
Fluttering down in careless sheaves,
Fall and go.
Speak no word for weal or woe,
Silence keep, and leave it so.

THE FRIENDLY GOD

(QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS)

“Are your night-hours dreary?”
“Truly, and somewhat long
For limbs that ache and are weary,
And a soul indisposed for song.

Red? What is that on my walls?”
—“Only a gleam from the fire.”—
“Nay 'tis a god that calls
With the round of earth for his lyre!

See him ascending there,
Laughing and mad with glee,
Tossing the mists from his hair,
Calling aloud to me.

‘Coming, old friend!’ I cry,
‘I am up and am with you again!
Off with us over the sky!
Off to the Ultimate main!’”

TO X--- WHO REMEMBERS

In the clatter and clink of the years behind,
The good old years, so glad, so kind
When Hope was still a-growing,
How the sun shone as we plied the oar,
Danced on the billows, and danced on the shore,
For us all winds were blowing!

Broken and beaten, baffled and spent,
With splintered oars and cordage rent,
In the trough of the seas we lay,
Scarce a glimmer of light on wave or sky,
Or merely sufficient to curse and die,
So we drifted on day by day.

Now for good or ill the worst is past,
The voyage, God mend it! closing at last,
And though skies are sometimes scowling,
And hours long, still the years are short,
And the ships come sailing in to port,
No matter what winds are howling!

TO A ROSE IN AUTUMN

I saw you on Midsummer day,
Queen Rose you seemed, so fresh and glad,
Merry and light as a bird in May
Singing aloft on its bough like mad,
And Midsummer's scarce three months away!

What has changed you so much in the time, fair friend?
Turned your whole golden world to lead?
Is there aught a word, a hint might mend?
When clouds grow thick, and joys have fled,
Old wits may sometimes counsel lend?

You shake your head with a cheerless eye;
Well, medling ne'er mendeth, I own, fair friend;
Moreover whether to laugh or sigh
As down this slippery track you wend
Were best for you, God knows—not I!

TO SOME OF US WHO PUT ART ABOVE WORK

Bards, who lay bare your little gifts of rhyme
Upon the altar of grim smiling Time,
Who to the immortal Few would fain belong,
And rack the very heavens for one song!
What are your vaunted doings light or grave
Laid beside those of one who, songless, gave
Life's dearest peace to help, to draw, to save?
To bring fresh promise from the wasted years,
Order from chaos, hope from craven fears?
Acclaimed, denounced, he takes alike his way,
Heedless of what all foes, most friends may say,
Making the world to some few hearts appear
A place less sordid by his presence here,
Man's truth a dower easier to believe,
His native air itself more pure to breathe.
A feat—'tis rather curious to conceive—
Which we, dear brother bards, shall scarce achieve!

TO E. M.

You have known so many sorrows that I have wished that you,
Like some swift bird passing through,
Might leave behind you suddenly this harsh and cruel night,
And speed on to the light,
Might drop your load of weariness, worn fetters of the clay,
And know the perfect day;
Yet now that, won by waiting, your peace at last draws near,
My own sight grows more clear:
I see that to attain and gain the full and perfect rest
The hardest roads are best.

March 1908

A REMONSTRANCE

(SONNET)

Why reckon thus the years between us twain,
For what is Autumn when its leaves are brown,
And brutal winds lay bare the shivering plain,
Nipping all harvests with their deadly frown?

Or what is Winter, when no flake of snow
Has touched the least leaf of one budding spray,
In happy climes where Summers never go,
But starlit night succeeds to laughing day;

When not one leaf in all the forest fades,
And dull December breathes of odorous June,
And flitting birds pipe through the soft green glades,
And every streamlet sings its old sweet tune?
Autumn is Winter when its days are chill,
But Winter without frosts is Summer still.

September 1892

TO THE SAME

I never meant when you were here
Strange hills to climb, or barren shores,
Forsaking gentler haunts of yours,
Yet now I cannot tell you, dear.

Well loved are still the mountains tall,
The soundless glens, the echoing shores,
Yet one small garden-plot of yours
To-day to me were worth them all!

July 1895

“SHALL ALL THEN PERISH?”

Shall all then perish, root and stalk?
Friend, in whose porch I love to talk,
All that we think, like, hope, believe,
—Our last long chat of yester-eve—
Pass like poor stuffs bad craftsmen weave?
Our infant lips with projects play,
Age finds us babbling on the way,
We hope, scheme, plan, discourse, and muse,
(Schemes which the gods must sure amuse!)
We spread our wings, and then—we pass,
Like frost-flowers from a sun-warmed glass.
And yet methinks some subtle trace
No depth of time can e'er efface
Must linger, else life stands confest
Too really pitiful a jest,
This globe of ours, of pride and grace,
Scarce decent as a dwelling-place!
Look up! Yon arch above your head
From rim to zenith flames to red,
That light now crimsoning the sky,
Those clouds resplendent ere they die,
Are good, e'en if they leave no trace,
And good these wild hopes of a race!

Five treacherous senses, one weak brain,
A fancy wandering, false, and vain,
With these undaunted we essay
To map the unnavigable way,
To count the innumerable years,
And tell the tales of all the spheres.
We fail, and yet—if half in jest,—
I hold such falterings aid the rest,
And stumbling pilgrims yet to be
May stumble less through you and me!

August 1901

A TWILIGHT COLLOQUY

I

Atween brown banks these nut-brown waters slip,
The hurrying nut-brown wavelets ripple by,
And like one tree the forest seems to dip,
Uttering one sigh.

Under yon bank, like some stream-haunting beast,
The archaic hermit fed his peaceful soul,
Kept his long fasts, enjoyed some meagre feast,
These woods his whole.

Ah, if to-night we two might meet that sage,
Might know for one brief hour what he has known,
Surprise his secret; step inside his age;
Forget our own!

Here, where in chequered shade we stand to-night,
Some earlier pilgrim may adown this stream
Have seen a coming world all bathed in light,
In one swift gleam.

Vision less stable than the ocean foam
To me; to you! Yet how divinely clear
To that wild heart whose little earthly home
Lies round us here.

II

Speak, grey survivors of a vanished age,
Gaunt Ossory oaks, with thick-set boughs still green,
Of that strange book, the world, what younger page
Have your boughs seen?

Leaf-choked and thick old Nore with accents hoarse
Mutters some inarticulate reply.
No other! Not a sound from any source,
Tree, stream, or sky.

Yet stay! What movement now the forest fills?
Splashes and tremblings mid the water weeds,
Small sudden nibblings; little darts and thrills
Amongst the reeds—

The twittering stir of some belated bird,
Slow moving currents, tiny gurgling moans,
Where, clogged with twigs, the ripples softly gird
Against their stones.

And hark again! Beyond that grass-fringed turn,
Where swifter, deeper, darker waters fleet,
Across a breeze-blown league of billowy fern,
One lonely bleat!

And fainter still, scarce heard amongst the leaves,
Thin elfish murmurings, only born to die,
The soul of this last woodland softly breathes
In one last sigh.

III

Think if we two for one short hour could share
The old, young life of all this sister throng,
Make it our own; even as He whose ear
Heeds the full song

Of deathless potencies that chaunting span
The argent throne—lords of the star-strewn skies—
Or muttered prayers breathed by some broken man
Who loves—and dies.

Small wordless sisters of the wood,
Deep gulfs in truth betwixt us reach,
Yet nearer is our sisterhood,
And breath than speech.

Beyond, beneath the spoken word
That earlier wordless language spreads,
From man to beast, from beast to bird,
It knits and weds

Life, as the seamless ocean tide
Whose single sovereign waters pour,
By different names through severance wide,
To the same shore.

IV

Can we, can you, whom thought has swept
High o'er these vales where earth-mists roll,
Barter that birthright, or accept
Less than the Whole?

Less than that vast and mystic scroll
Our Mother proffers; no mere part;
Her undivided realm; her whole
Exhaustless heart?

That heart whose universal flow
Warms the least crawler of this sod,
Wakes the wild pulses of yon glow,
And beats from God?

From God? Ah little, potent word,
On which we climb towards the light,
Till, deep within, the cry is heard
—“Behold the night!”

And round us, as we dream or pray,
It gathers; murky fold on fold,
Blotting the comfortable way,
Remorseless, cold;

Cold as the clay-cold foe of life;
The night-winds hurtle roughly by,
We cease the vain delusive strife,
And falling, lie

Without a word; with no more prayer
Than some crushed thing which, falling, feels
Across it, amid dust and glare,
The whirling wheels.

V

So fallen, comfortless we lie,
While hours come, while hours go,
Till far off, like a voiceless sigh,
As soft, as low,

A whisper trickles to our ears,
And down a dark unfriendly sky,
One little flickering gleam appears
And Hope glides by

Not glory-crowned as once her brows,
Not chaunting now loud songs of spring,
She lilts but as amid grey boughs
Brown robins sing.

Yet holds she out her friendly hands,
And we? Ah God! we grasp them then!
—Sole helper of unhappy lands,
And friendless men—

Whose eyes are full of kindly dreams,
Whose smile holds heaven itself in store,
Whose light 'cross bitter currents gleams
On a still shore.

Hope—solace of a desperate Past—
Hope—landmark in a maddening sea—
Of Love's whole starry brood the last,
All live in thee!

No offspring of a frozen creed,
Of man's warm hidden heart the child,
From Life's hard bond of custom freed,
Still young, still wild;

Young as these leaves, these waves are young,
Light as when from Fate's grip she sprang
And, where his shadow darkest hung,
Her challenge rang

Loud shrilling up at heaven's own gate,
Till every star and sphere replied
In joy and wonder, love or hate,
That challenge wild.

VI

Oh brother humans, heirs of God,
We were not born to glut decay!
What boots these trammels of the sod
Chains of a day,

Worn fetters of a bovine earth,
When loud the eternal tocsin rings,
And Hope her song of love and mirth
Divinely sings?

Mark but the strength of one brave verse,
How weak a thing, how small its weight,
Yet this brute clanging universe
Is scarce as great!

For on that ancient uttered word
Prophet and seraph, sea and land,
The immeasurable orbs, once heard,
Devoutly stand

Submissive till its accents fade,
Or down the gulfs of Silence die,
One word—the earth anew is made,
New shines the sky.

Shall Custom, withered, dull, and stale,
On us her beldam fingers lay?
Not so. The golden goal we hail,
First seen to-day.

Deep in Life's leafage sleeps the beast,
But thro' the flickering tree-tops shine
On us new lights; redeemed; released;
Human, divine.

Whose source we guess, yet cannot know,
Whose warmth we feel, but dare not name,
Lights whose divine, whose mystic glow
Slay Death and Shame.

VII

Alas, my words ring flat and tame,
And you? For you how speaks the night?
Dark as Time's purpose? Still the same?
Or pierced with light?

You answer, yet I cannot hear,
For ancient waves betwixt us roll,
And—sundering hearts however near—
The evasive soul!

Even as now, while you and I
Stroll back along these ferny glades,
Their furtive earlier inmates fly
To deeper shades,

So, smit with viewless fears and shames,
Each soul to its own covert hies,
Nor once its hidden self proclaims,
But silent dies.

We wait the embracing Unity;
In dreams alone that silent call
Steals earthwards 'cross infinity
To us; to all.

Oh longed-for end of human tasks.
Yet,—tireless rebel-born, fierce Soul—
Will thy rash spirit bend, one asks,
Even to that Whole?

Fond question! Here the summer swings
Her garlands; nights like these prolong
Their beauty, and the linnet sings
Her daybreak song,

For you. For me. Oh dull and dead,
Unfit to share so fair a fate,
To walk where shows like these are spread
For those who wait;

Who wait in laughter, wait in tears,
Lover by lover, friend by friend,
Yet each alone; while slowly nears
The accomplished end.

See the dusk deepens! Turn again,
River and forest now are still,
Some new-come presence seems to reign
O'er dale and hill.

Some pitying spirit seems to call,
Stretching a kind, if viewless, hand
Towards you, towards me, and over all
This tear-washed land.

This small, sad, much-loved speck of earth,
Of mother-earth, who holds her way,
Bowed 'neath what load of pain, death, birth,
Through Night towards Day.

July 1903

ISSERCLERAN

(A LETTER)

How rarely now do we together stand
Here where the clouds above us dreaming pass,
Where Time seems pointing with unchangeful hand,
And from the grass
The trefoils, tipped with red,
Look up with birdlike head
Over their stone-strewn floor,
And the wild wheels of Change seem locked for evermore.

Back, back along its chequered path my thought
Moves to a past bediamonded by Time,
Decked with a tender rippling pattern, wrought
Of sea, lake, moor, or rhyme,
Of moon-flecked night, and sunlit day,
Of rain-washed skies, divinely grey,
For whose worst wrath no mortal cared,
Since youth sang loud and strong with music unimpaired.

How little know they of the lights of morn
Who on such wind-swept grass have never strayed,
Who have not joyed, as thou, heedless of storm,
Uncanopied to range
The woods, the pastures wide,
To climb, to race, to ride,
In childish glee, in youth's wild mirth,
Living a joyous life that hath no peer on earth.

Now racing up some little hill at eve
In one glad rush; face seaward, hands held out,
As if the soul might slip its sheath, might leave
Behind it every doubt,
Westward across those plains to fare,
There meet its flying kindred, with them share
The gale's fierce raptures, and reform
Life to a winged thing grown great by ceaseless storm.

Again, where 'gainst a brook gnarled alders lean,
Prone on the grass I see thee with a book,
Head lifted, wide grey eyes intent and keen,
Fixed with entranced look
On visions gliding slow or fast,
The emblazoned Pageant of the Past;
Mid scouring sheep, and barking dogs,
And whiffs of thymy scent fresh blowing from the bogs.

Not without hints at times of ancient gloom—
Terrors close clinging to the skirts of ghosts—
Perturbed spirits, clothed and shod with doom,
Whose half-seen hosts,
Mist-grey, or glimmering white,
Scare at dead hour of night
The sleepers of yon stone-strewn plain,
By cries of quenchless rage or moans of sobbing pain.

Yet for such phantoms life had little room,
Since who could credit in those days of spring
That mortals ever tasted hopeless gloom?
While on light wing
The vagrant gull glanced overhead;
While thick and fast the roses shed
Their sun-filled sweetness; while birds sang,
And the swift coming years with pealing promise rang?

Oh flower-filled, and fairy-footed days,
Lingering so kindly, yet escaped so soon,
How far from you seemed Autumn's leaf-strewn ways,
December's snow-bound noon!

How could dull prescience e'er to you belong,
To you to whom sleep's self seemed all too long;
How dream that Peace her comrades could betray,
The shrill perfidious gusts scare even Hope away?

'Twixt that old shore and this on which we stand
—As 'twixt two headlands crowned each with a home—
Spreads a wild waste of waves, a cold rough strand,
Whitened with drifting foam.
Oh days, so intimately fair,
Thought flits, lovelit, towards you there,
Across yon space malign and black,
Yet days, kind beckoning days, I would not call you back!

Loudly men claim, fond pilgrims, to regain
The far-off, happy, golden strand once more,
Forgetting that before their bark could gain
That well-loved shore
It needs must skirt the shadowy place,
Where sits the ogre of our race,
Old Recollection in his bone-strewn lair,
A sight the very staunchest soul to scare.

Then not for thee, for me, that glittering strand,
We needs must keep to our predestined track,
In vain it calls, in vain with eager hand
Beckons us back;
The tide has run too fast, too long,
Too deep the gulf, the waves too strong,
Not ours to reach it now at will,
Yet, 'cross that mist-filled void, it smiles upon us still.

July 1906

OLD AGE (TO------ WHO ABHORRETH THE THOUGHTS OF IT!)

I

Yet this recal—the direst loss shows gain—
Wouldst hug and kiss a mouldering chain?
Wouldst smite the hand with feeble rage
Which frees the wild bird from its cage?
Wouldst pipe and moan around a change
That lends the spirit ampler range?
Up! Up! And if thy frame should be
Fettered in dull captivity,
Yet play the hero! All the more
Heart, brain, and spirit teach to soar,
Bid every ancient flag fly free,
Let not one fold, one wrinkle be,
Cry “Courage, soul, the fight's begun!”
And—ere thou know'st—that fight is won!

II

To doff the idle garments of a Part,
To seek th' enfolding vesture of the Whole,
To hear, through all the discords of the creeds,
The resounding echo of one sovereign soul;
So may men meet Old age as a good friend,
A kind blunt friend, who, if he bangs the door,
Opens at least unhoped for rifts o'erhead,
Sun-lighted clefts through which new rays may pour,
Under whose swift blows ancient halls wax frail,
But loftier mansions rise of statelier room.
Have we not here one star to gild the night?
One Sirius, outshining death and doom?

III

Yet will I own—poor purblind child of thought,
I that would fain with weak hands grasp the Whole—
Soon, soon, those boasted powers come to nought,
When pain or anger sweep the re-captured soul!
When grim Despair, backed by a furious crowd,
With Folly, Fear or Passion hard behind,
Sweeps headlong down, with clamours shrill and loud,
The grey ill-lighted chancels of the mind.
Away, dark brood, begat of Wrath or Fear,
Earth's wild old sons! My half-won soul release,
The void of voids is coming very near,
Fain would I go my way to it in peace.

IV

Oh starry revels of the enfranchised soul,
When Use and Wont have slipp'd their dull control,
When Sense no longer can her dupe entice,
And Pelf, poor beast, is seen at his real price.
What hand such silent raptures may describe,
Such golden hours in golden verse inscribe?
What words shall ever gauge at its true worth
A free soul set in an unfettered earth?
Not the wild mænad at her giddiest round,
Or priest of Bacchus with red vine-leaves crown'd,
Might hope to touch at midmost ecstasy
That silent, sober, glad serenity.
So glad, so rapt, it moves to the late years,
Gathers new courage, sheds all hampering fears;
With ever widening eyes surveys the Past,
Smiles towards the infant Future. And at last,
Still silent and still smiling, turns to part,
With tears perchance, yet undisturbed in heart;
Mounts the grey path so many feet have trod,
Leaps one last barrier—leaves the rest to God.

TO THE WINGED PSYCHE, DYING IN A GARDEN

Reft of beauty, there you lie,
Not yet dead, but left to die,
Late outsoaring gleams and showers,
Painted queen of our sunlit hours.
Now on this old earth's dusty floor
Just one rose-coloured pinch the more!
Stirs the thought could I but creep
Inch by inch to where you lie,
Narrow my gaze to an insect's eye,
Listen and listen before you die,
Out of its dusky coil might leap
Some new ray from the dawn of life,
That twilight land where Love and Strife
Grew and were sundered—our Mother-land.
So I, even I, might understand
Something of what it is to be,
Some floating hint steal down to me
Of that riddle of riddles—Sentiency.

THE END OF AN ARGUMENT

Yet this word will I say before we part,
For never two enfranchised souls shall greet,
Discourse, dispute, grow hot, then calm again,
But wheresoe'er those disputants do meet
A spirit hovers, a vague shadowy third,
With cold ironic accents, never heard,
Yet in whose silence lurks the essential word.

So now. Be sure that neither thou nor I,
Nor all this world's wild disputants are right;
Whether in calm-eyed confidence, in despair,
They stand or crouch—to all alike comes night.
Let us be patient then! Lo each new day
Brings nearer to us that for which you pray,
And I await: the last great “Yea” or “Nay”!

KINSHIP

(AN EVOLUTIONARY PROBLEM)

Love thou thy kind! Yea, but that larger kind,
The dumb, fierce, roving, nameless kind that live
Scarce less within our frames? True kinsmen these,
Only too near. Thought, travelling slowly back,
Through the long, darkened corridors of Time,
Sees, like some traveller gazing down a gorge,
Perturbing visions, dimly prowling shapes
Threatening and ravenous, fiercely tooth'd and claw'd,
With eyes which stir, and redly glare across
The intolerable darkness. What of these?
Are these our brethren? Yonder crouching form,
Chattering, half prone, the inarticulate man,
The two-legg'd wolf—is he my brother too?
Another kinsman? Lo the family
Grows till the very welkin shrieks and groans
At its portentous hugeness! Must I pine
To share with him the lodges of the Past?
Aye or to join him, clasp his hand, and kiss,
Should I—the little thinking speck called me—

Survive this scheme of things, and—roused from sleep—
Walk in new pastures? Now may God forbid!
Yet dare I not deny him. Truly mine
Are those, dull, wistful, puzzled, slave-like eyes,
Mine too that sullen dreamful slothfulness,
Which were content to squander endless time
In uttermost inaction; aye or grope,
Like a stray'd child lost in some alien house,
Now here, now there, without a scope or plan,
Up and still up innumerable stairs,
Or down grey labyrinths, a dismal maze
Of wild, distraught, and vaguely tangled thoughts
Leading no whither. Mine, too, clearly mine,
That sense of dark and maddened impotence,
Such as assails the soldier maimed and left,
Or haunts some sick man, when his drowsy thought
Fights 'gainst the potent drug which tames his brain,
And knows his helplessness, yet knows it not,
Nay doubts if he be still a living man,
Or whether he in truth be sane or mad;
For whom the hated present is his All,
No past, no future; one vast whirling void,
Across whose endless pain-filled moments come
Sounds such as flow from inarticulate throats,
And visions too—No gracious airy shapes
Such as besieged the happier Attic brain,

But things without a name, that spawn and grow
In foul prolificness; a teeming mass
Shapeless and brainless; swelling like the tide,
Gelatinous, hideous, to Life's utmost bounds;
Or feeling round it with ten thousand legs,
Threadlike, or wormlike; writhing, ell-long things
Which sprawl, entangle, clutch and maim themselves;
Or, loathlier still, yon black-winged carrion swarm
Which, like some fetid curtain, lifts and turns
Through the dense air; then settles closely back,
Breeding corruption. Painted visions, too,
Come floating thickly through the tangled woods
On sail-like wings, decked with a thousand eyes.
Eyes! Eyes! At that one word the very air
Seems choked with them! Innumerable eyes
All gazing downward with a quenchless hate,
A hate no Cain for sure hath ever earned,
Not though he slew his Abel fifty times!
Ox-eyes and dog-eyes; eyes of harmless things
That frisk in plain and woodland. Nay forbear!
I pray you curse not, suffering eyes, have pity.—
A pity never shown to you or yours!
Yet still they grow and grow; sea, shore, and plain,
Earth, our hard-trodden earth, to its last sod
Sickens beneath them. The soft summer skies,

Nay God's great heaven of heavens itself appears
One nightmare horror of accusing eyes!

Pass, pass, poor spirit. Time is vast and deep,
The dead are dead. Let not thine anguish'd soul
Thus beat and maim itself in mouldering vaults
Reeking of blood, dark lusts, old cruelty.
Rather let it uplift itself, and bask
On the broad summits of an earlier world,
The windless mountain-tops of ancient day,
Ere man, or beast, or silly buzzing fly
Troubled that stillness. Bid it pasture there;
And, as the silence filters slowly down
To the last quivering nerve of its torn depths,
Let it absorb—what only silence shows—
How man's worst worst still hath a hopeful core,
How the night's darkest breathes of coming day;
And in that changeless, mild, pellucid air,
Leaning adown the abysmal hollows, mark
The eternal drama wending on its way;
That drama which hath known no opening scene,
That drama for which Time reserves no end;
Till, through its tangles, slowly like a dream,
May dawn—What is it? sight? or sound? or thought?
Something to see and feel? or merely guess?

A play within a play? a solving touch?
Some vision of completeness? Who knows what?
That which in any case lay hidden there
Ere yet the eternal Playwright fashioned it:
That end to which all else were but a dream
Dreamed by some sick man. Thought, eternal Thought,
Itself sole actor, and sole dramatist,
Goal of whatever hopes, and strives, and loves,
Wholly divine, and therefore wholly human,
From which our best and clearest stands as far
As sounds from words, as words from living thought,
As death from life. So leave it. Let no cry,
Song, word, or even prayer disturb that hope,
Seeing that what is Highest hath no words,
And what is Best transcends the need of prayer,
And that which we desire may yet be ours,
Though not as now we crave. Sleep, and beyond
That merciful enfolding faithful sleep
Lies—What may be. Only of this be sure—
That He who ruleth hath no preference,
No narrow choice, no blind exclusiveness;
We and our kin, to the last drop of blood,
The first dull dawn of hovering consciousness,
Shall share and share. Aye, and not only we,
But all the crowded denizens of Space,

World after world, till the long muster-roll
Be closed and sealed. Then?—Ah well then, poor Faith,
Fainting thou fallest, and canst see no more!
Yet—even as earth's streams leap to join earth's sea—
May we not, myriad parts of one vast whole,
In no obscure or arbitrary sense,
Seeking renew, and by such seeking find
Each in that Wholeness his own larger Self?

So runs the Hope. Now to our several tasks.

Epilogue

Oh, strong-souled Silence! Let us leave
In thy majestic hands the rest—
Our hopes, our fears—Thy modes are best,
Less prone to be misunderstood,
Weightier of scope, more large for good.
So in the heart of some deep wood,
When sunset lights begin to glow,
And leaves pale shadow-patterns weave,
A sudden hush is felt to grow,
A breathing stillness; o'er our sense
Creeps an unwonted quietness,
A thin clear note of difference.
And birds grow songless, one and all,
And unseen atoms lightly fall,
And tiny moths with stealthy stir
Ruffle the brown pins of the fir.

And up and down that silent wood
Throbs one strong throb of brotherhood,
Inaudible, yet understood.

Such silences have golden wings,
Faint preludes of celestial things
Across their noiseless moments rings.

The End.