AUTUMNAL ODE.
DEDICATED TO MY SISTER.
CURRAGH CHASE, OCTOBER, 1867.
I.
Minstrel and Genius, to whose songs or sighs
The round earth modulates her changeful sphere,
That bend'st in shadow from yon western skies,
And lean'st, cloud-hid, along the woodlands sere,
Too deep thy notes too pure for mortal ear!
Yet Nature hears them: without aid of thine
How sad were her decline!
From thee she learns with just and soft gradation
Her dying hues in death to harmonize;
Through thee her obsequies
A glory wear that conquers desolation.
Through thee she singeth, ‘Faithless were the sighing
Breathed o'er a beauty only born to fleet:
A holy thing and precious is the dying
Of that whose life was innocent and sweet.’
From many a dim retreat
Lodged on high-bosomed, echoing mountain lawn,
Or chiming convent 'mid dark vale withdrawn,
From cloudy shrine or rapt oracular seat
Voices of loftier worlds that saintly strain repeat.
II.
It is the Autumnal Epode of the year:
The Nymphs that urge the seasons on their round,
They to whose green lap flies the startled deer
When bays the far-off hound,
They that drag April by the rain-bright hair,
Though sun-showers daze her and the rude winds scare,
O'er March's frosty bound,
They by whose warm and furtive hand unwound
The cestus falls from May's new-wedded breast,
Silent they stand beside dead Summer's bier,
With folded palms, and faces to the West,
And their loose tresses sweep the dewy ground.
III.
A sacred stillness hangs upon the air,
A sacred clearness. Distant shapes draw nigh:
Glistens yon Elm grove, to its heart laid bare,
And all articulate in its symmetry,
With here and there a branch that from on high
Far flashes washed in wan and watery gleam:
Beyond, the glossy lake lies calm—a beam
Upheaved, as if in sleep, from its slow central stream.
IV.
This quiet, is it Truth, or some fair mask?
Is pain no more? Shall Sleep be lord, not Death?
Shall sickness cease to afflict and overtask
The spent and labouring breath?
Is there 'mid all yon farms and fields, this day,
No grey old head that drops? No darkening eye?
Spirits of Pity, lift your hands and pray—
Each hour, alas, men die!
V.
The love songs of the Blackbird now are done:
Upon the o'er-grown, loose, red-berried cover
The latest of late warblers sings as one
That trolls at random when the feast is over:
From bush to bush the dusk-bright cobwebs hover,
Silvering the dried-up rill's exhausted urn;
No breeze is fluting o'er the green morass:
Nor falls the thistle-down: in deep-drenched grass,
Now blue now red the shifting dew-gems burn.
VI.
Mine ear thus torpid held, methinks mine eye
Is armed the more with visionary power:
As with a magnet's force each redd'ning bower
Compels me through the woodland pageantry:
Slowly I track the forest's skirt: emerging,
Slowly I climb from pastoral steep to steep:
I see far mists from reedy valleys surging:
I follow the procession of white sheep
That fringe with wool old stock and ruined rath,
How staid to-day, how eager when the lambs
Went bleating round their dams!
I cross the leaf-choked stream from stone to stone,
Pass the hoar ash-tree, trace the upland path,
The furze-brake that in March all golden shone
Reflected in the shy kingfisher's bath.
VII.
No more from full-leaved woods that music swells
Which in the summer filled the satiate ear:
A fostering sweetness still from bosky dells
Murmurs; but I can hear
A harsher sound when down, at intervals,
The dry leaf rattling falls.
Dark as those spots which herald swift disease
The death-blot marks for death the leaf yet firm:
Beside the leaf down-trodden trails the worm:
In forest depths the haggard, whitening grass
Repines at youth departed. Half-stripped trees
Reveal, as one who says, ‘Thou too must pass,’
Plainlier each day their quaint anatomies.
Yon Poplar grove is troubled! Bright and bold
Babbled his cold leaves in the July breeze
As though above our heads a runnel rolled:
His mirth is o'er; subdued by old October
He counts his lessening wealth, and, sadly sober,
Tinkles his minute tablets of wan gold.
VIII.
Be still, ye sighs of the expiring year!
A sword there is: ye play but with the sheath!
Whispers there are more piercing yet more dear
Than yours, that come to me those boughs beneath;
And well-remembered footsteps known of old
Tread soft the mildewed mould.
O magic memory of the things that were:
Of those whose hands our childish locks carest,
Of one so angel-like in tender care,
Of one in majesty so god-like drest;
O phantom faces painted on the air
Of friend or sudden guest:—
I plead in vain:
The woods revere, but cannot heal my pain:
Ye sheddings from the Yew-tree and the Pine,
If on your rich and aromatic dust
I laid my forehead, and my hands put forth
In the last beam that warms the forest floor,
No answer to my yearnings would be mine;
To me no answer through those branches hoar
Would reach in noontide trance or moony gust!
Her secret Heaven would keep, and mother Earth
Speak from her deep heart—‘Where thou know'st not, trust!’
IX.
That pang is past. Once more my pulses keep
A tenor calm that knows nor grief nor joy;
Once more I move as one that died in sleep,
And treads, a Spirit, the haunts he trod, a boy,
And sees them like-unlike, and sees beyond:
Then earthly life comes back, and I despond.
Ah life, not life! Dim woods of crimsoned beech
That swathe the hills in sacerdotal stoles,
Burn on, burn on! the year ere long will reach
That day made holy to Departed Souls,
That day whereon man's heart, itself a priest,
Descending to that Empire pale wherein
Beauty and Sorrow dwell but pure from Sin,
Holds with God's Church at once its fast and feast.
Dim woods, they, they alone your vaults should tread,
The sad and saintly Dead!
Your pathos those alone ungrieved could meet
Who fit them for the Beatific Vision:
The things which, as they pass us, seem to cheat
To them would be a music-winged fruition,
A cadence sweetest in its soft subsiding:
Transience to them were dear;—for theirs the abiding—
Dear as that Pain which clears from fleshly film
The spirit's eye, matures each spirit-germ,
Frost-bound on earth, but at the appointed term
Mirror of Godhead in the immortal realm.
X.
Lo there the regal Exiles!—under shades
Deeper than ours, yet in a finer air—
Climbing, successive, elders, youths, and maids,
The penitential mountain's ebon stair:
The earth-shadow clips that halo round their hair:
And as lone outcasts watch a moon that wanes
Receding slowly o'er their native plains,
Thus watch they, wistful, something far but fair.
Serene they stand, and wait,
Self-banished, by the ever-open gate,
Awhile self-banished from the All-pitying Eyes,
Lest mortal stain should blot their Paradise.
Silent they pace, ascending high and higher
The hills of God, a hand on every heart
That willing burns, a vase of cleansing fire
Fed by God's love in souls from God apart:
Each lifted face with thirst of long desire
Is pale; but o'er it grows a mystic sheen,
Because on them God's face, by them unseen,
Is turned, through narrowing darkness hourly nigher.
XI.
Sad thoughts, why roam ye thus in your unrest
The bourne unseen? Why scorn our mortal bound?
Is it not kindly, Earth's maternal breast?
Is it not fair, her head with vine-wreaths crowned?
Farm-yard and barn are heaped with golden store;
High piled the sheaves illume the russet plain;
Hedges and hedge-row trees are yellowed o'er
With waifs and trophies of the labouring wain:
Why murmur, ‘Change is change, when downward ranging;
Spring's upward change but pointed to the unchanging?’
Yet, O how just your sorrow, if ye knew
The true grief's sanction true!
'Tis not the thought of parting youth that moves us;
'Tis not alone the pang for friends departed:
The Autumnal pain that raises while it proves us
Wells from a holier source and deeper-hearted!
For this a sadness swells above our mirth;
For this a bitter runs beneath the sweetness;
The throne that shakes not is the Spirit's right;
The heart and hope of Man are infinite;
Heaven is his home, and, exiled here on earth,
Completion most betrays the incompleteness!
XII.
Heaven is his home.—But hark! the breeze increases:
The sunset forests, catching sudden fire,
Flash, swell, and sing, a million-organed choir:
Roofing the West, rich clouds in glittering fleeces
O'erarch ethereal spaces and divine
Of heaven's clear hyaline.
No dream is this! Beyond that radiance golden
God's Sons I see, His armies bright and strong,
The ensanguined Martyrs here with palms high holden,
The virgins there, a lily-lifting throng!
The Splendours nearer draw. In choral blending
The Prophets' and the Apostles' chant I hear;
I see the Salem of the Just descending
With gates of pearl and diamond bastions sheer.
The walls are agate and chalcedony:
On jacinth street and jasper parapet
The unwaning light is light of Deity,
‘Not beam of lessening moon or suns that set.
That indeciduous forestry of spires
Lets fall no leaf! those lights can never range:
Saintly fruitions and divine desires
Are blended there in rapture without change.
—Man was not made for things that leave us,
For that which goeth and returneth,
For hopes that lift us yet deceive us,
For love that wears a smile yet mourneth;
Not for fresh forests from the dead leaves springing,
The cyclic re-creation which, at best,
Yields us—betrayal still to promise clinging—
But tremulous shadows of the realm of rest:
For things immortal Man was made,
God's Image, latest from His hand,
Co-heir with Him Who in Man's flesh arrayed
Holds o'er the worlds the Heavenly-Human wand:
His portion this—sublime
To stand where access none hath Space or Time,
Above the starry host, the Cherub band,
To stand—to advance—and after all to stand!
