Flower o' the thorn :: :: University of Virginia Library

FIRST-BORN of woman, who shall read dry-eyed
The tale of that first horror of the Prime,
Which from Hell's pit to Life's auroral clime
Brought Death, grim guest, forever to abide,
How by thy bloody deed thy brother died
And thou, first murderer branded to all time,
Crowned with thy dreadful diadem of crime,
Fledst outlawed forth into the world-all wide?
Whether to pity of thee or fear more fain
We are, we know not, that, alike withdrawn
From man's approof and condemnation, Cain,
Blackenest the background of the worlds bygone
With thy stern stature, dark against the dawn,
A monument of misery, pride and pain.

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XV. JOAB.

FORTH of the mists of Israel's fable-tide,
Towering from Hell to Heaven, before mine eyes,
I see the giant ghost of Joab rise.
Wan through the battle-blaze I watch thee ride,
With fire and steel and slaughter, far and wide,
Hagen of the Hebrew Heldenlied, God-wise,
Graving, for all eternity's comprize,
Thy red renown on History's steep hill-side.
—Ill though thou wast as great, harrower of hosts,
Yet with dimmed eyes I read how, rended from
The very altar's horns, at the control
Of the cur Solomon, by the vengeful ghosts
Of Abner, Amasa and Absalom
Goaded, thou gavest up thy strenuous soul.

XI. JESUS OF NAZARETH.

PROPHET of the worlds within, schoolman and priest their worst
Have wrought to make thy name a synonym of hate,
Thy name that wouldst on Love have based a new estate,
Where the world's first the last should be, the last the first;
And those, who, after thee, o'er all the earth disperst,
Thy word for standard bore, thy doctrine for breed-bate
Uprearing and thy cross for battle-axe of Fate,
Have won well nigh to make thy memory accurst.
—But we, who through the web discern thy thought divine,
Which they have woven about thy superhuman shape,
Leaving the priest to lie, the schoolman ay or no
To argue and the fond fool folk to grin and gape,
To thy remembrance mild a holier place assign
Than to the man-made Gods in Heaven that come and go.

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XVII. GALLIO .

THY Stoic sense, belike in Attic air
Attempered and in hallowing Hippocrene,
For the fond figments of Judaic spleen,
For words and names and forms of fast and prayer,
For letter strait of Law and split of hair,
Knew only cold contempt and scorn serene
Nor vengeance deigned to wreak of aught so mean:
For none of these things, Gallio, didst thou care.
—Might but all traders in unrest, all foes
Of the world's weal find only Gallios,
Who, as the sun o'erlooks the mists of morn,
Should look on them and let them creep their course
And in the quagmires quibble out of scorn,
Nor by opposing lend their follies force!

Lucius Junius Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia under Claudius, (v. Acts XVIII, 12) appears, as far as can be made out from the tangled maze of Roman record, to have been the brother or other near relative of the famous Stoic moralist and poet Lucius Annaeus Seneca and to have shared the latter's philosophical opinions. His real name seems to have been Titus or Marcus Annaeus Noratus or Novatus, the name of Gallio being one of adoption. In any case, it is certain that he was a man of high culture and wide mind; and he is, perhaps, (momentary as is his appearance on the Christian scene) the most remarkable figure of the second or apostolic part of the New Testament.

XVIII. VASCO NUNEZ DE BALBOA.

(A.D. 1475–1517.)

VASCO, vauntcourier of the conquering crew
For whom the Old World was not enough wide,

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Forth-straining o'er the blue Pacific tide,
Out of the golden heart of far Peru
Thou wouldst for Spain have carven kingdoms new.
But envy, vengeful of thy venturous pride,
To moulder in a coffin's narrow side
Thy vaulting hopes and high ambitions threw.
Others in the page of history hold more room,
To whom the Gods have granted fairer fate;
But deeplier graven on the generous heart
Are such as thou, who played their knightly part
In vain and hounded down of vulturous hate,
Were given for guerdon but a traitor's tomb.

XIX. DON QUIXOTE.

NOBLE unwit, that, in Life's medley thrust
Forth for a makesport to the ignoble wise,
—To those who see but with the body's eyes
And hearken but the voices of the dust,
—After Heav'n-gotten Truth and Faith august,
Birds that but breathe the aether of the skies,
Go'st groping in the darkling byres and sties
Of this our world of Will and lies and lust,
—One only name of all the names of men
Thine essence for our thought embodieth.
Phantom of knighthood, by Cervantes' pen
Evoked and quickened with no mortal breath,
Quixote,—whilst Heaven o'erarches earth and sea,
Saint of the dreamers' order shalt thou be.

XX. RALEIGH.

SEEKER of Eldorados in the West,
Bard, soldier, sailor, with the triple bays

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Bound for the travel of the worldly ways,
Despiteful Death for ending of thy quest
A bloody grave decreed; his hand unblest,
Unheeding worth and worship, power and praise,
Shut up the shining story of thy days,
Blotted the book nor let us read the rest.
—Vain was his malice, Raleigh! Long thy name
Shall glitter in the flowering garths of Fame,
When of the scurvy, pedant, peddling Scot,
Whose greed and spite untimely 'twas did blur
Thy life's fair picture, all shall be forgot,
Save this, that he was Raleigh's murderer.

XXI. A NAMELESS HERO.

SINCE Saul on Gilboa laid him down to die,
Since at Thermopylae, in battle set,
Leonidas the Persian onslaught met
With death-devoted breast, in days gone by,
So, in our own, unasking how or why,
Unnumbered heroes, dying, Life's last debt
Have paid to mother-country. Dulce et
Decorum est pro patriâ mori.
—Yet, most of all who for their native land
Life's service with Death's seal have certified,
The speech of that rude soldier stirs my mood,
Who, gasping out upon the Afric sand
His soul, with choked lungs muttered, “England's good
Enough to die for, isn't she?” And died.

A fact, related of one of the Devon men killed in the Boer War. The only alteration which has been made in his dying speech is the omission of the customary trivial epithet, “Wherewith, in these our days, the common folk Their talk do commonly encarnadine.”

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VOCES VANAE.

IN this our darkling day,—when men fear nought
So much as light nor will from Error's sleep
Be startled till the Judgment-summons leap
Forth of the trumpet and to reckoning brought,
The world awake to that which it hath wrought,
—Few seek the highest: most, like drowsing sheep,
Drone in fat pastures, far beneath the steep
And stony ways of brain-bewildering thought.
Knowledge they shun, as fearful lest unsweet
Truth prove and stir their dream-deluded sense
To question of Life's whither and its whence.
Like the shorn meadows, in the August heat
That love to lie and fatten, 'tis their one
Desire to steep and starken in the sun.

If some beyond Life's passing joy and pain
There be who seek assurance, who discern
And to their kind would teach the things etern,
Their single voices seldom may distrain
The web of dreams that blurs the general brain;
And such as waken at their summons stern,
Muttering, from one side to the other turn,
“Tis not yet morning,” say and sleep again.
—Yet, whiles, from out Thought's mystery-muted sphere,
To those there cometh that have ears to hear
Their speech's echo, like the word of wonder,
That summoned Samuel rise again and be,
Or like the thronging voices of the thunder,
Reverberate volleying o'er the sounding sea.

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

NIETZSCHE, I love thee not; thine every page
With insults to my Gods my teeth doth set
On edge and flouts my fondest faiths: and yet,
For all thy querulous quips, thy crackbrain rage
'Gainst many a well-graced actor on Life's stage,
For this at least I own me in thy debt,
That 'gainst Democracy's soul-straitening net
And dragon's maw thou hast armed the maudlin age.
—Ay, and to me thy thought-awakening word
Is as the angel's coming, erst that stirred
Siloam's sluggish tide and brought to life
Its hidden healing virtues. Good or ill,
My soul it floods with fertilising strife
And makes me know myself and what I will.

Moreover, if of those who Sorrow's chain
For Thought's sake drag, a hero were to seek,
Pagan or Christian, Latin, Jew or Greek,
What one of all Earth's Paladins of Pain
Worthier the bays were than this sage unsane,
Who scorned to own himself of Fortune's wreak
Beaten and with life, a bark of many a leak,
Beneath him foundering, and reeling brain,
Still followed on his mighty monstrous dream
Of lessoning mankind to turn away
From the vain quest of Truth the ne'er-to-find
And Life accepting with an equal mind,
To fit their faith unto its things that seem
And make the most of its recurrent day?

Cf. Nietzsche's capital doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of all things.

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THE HONEYSUCKLE.

THE honeysuckle clambers everywhere
And in the quickset hedges left and right
Runs, with its scrolls of gold and red and white
Broidering the rugged thorn, which, now though bare,
But yesterday with fragrant bloom was fair.
Like some sweet thought, too vagrant and too slight
To seize, too vague to follow in its flight,
Its breath of cream and almonds brims the air.
—With soft caressing clasp it seems the thorn
To solace for its loss of flower and scent,
Its bygone blossom-glories of the May,
As some kind humble love the soul forlorn
Heals of the heartbreak of a desolate day
And the repine of Passion's ravishment.

THE SANCTUARY LAMPS.

SEVEN lamps of gold the spirit's sanctuary
Illume, Hope, Justice, Temperance, Fortitude,
Faith, Prudence, Charity, which, when imbued
With oil of Grace, burn bright and clear and free
And with their shining over land and sea,
Startle the fiends of fancies fond and lewd
And hold thy fane unharrowed of their feud,
O soul, for thy Lord's coming unto thee.
—Who this Lord is, none knoweth. This one saith,
His name is Life, and that, his name is Death:

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Some say he bears a palm and some a sword.
This only know we; be he who he will,
My soul, thy lamps behoveth thee hold still
Bright-burning, 'gainst the coming of thy Lord.

QUEM DEUS VULT PERDERE.

YE, whom we blush for Englishmen to own
Who love the land that Shakspeare prized so dear,
Ye misbegotten moderns, on whose ear
The tale of England's glories trumpet-blown
Falls as an old wives' fable, ye who drone
Here where your fathers battled, hope nor fear
Having of aught that touches not your sheer
Brute sense, nor love but of your ease alone,
If, on your frenzy following to the end,
You hearken not to counsel and amend,
Nor in old Rome nor new France had the law
Such full approof as it shall find in you,
Which lives for ever in the Latin saw,
“God first dementeth whom He would undo.”

DUO IN DESERTIS.

PAUL, when the fable of Christ crucified
He dreamt, into the desert from the throng
Of men withdrew himself and three years long
Did with the sands and solitudes abide,
Wrestling in loneliness with lust and pride

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And wearying to sift out right from wrong,
Till in his heart faith flowered high and strong
And forth he fared, to sow it far and wide.
—Not so with thee, my soul! Though years, not three,
But three score, in Life's deserts hast thou dwelt
And watched the dull suns rise and set and felt
The sand-wind scorch the marrow up in thee,
Yet in thy core no faith hath flowered out,
No certitude of aught save only doubt.

THE SOUL'S COLOUR.

THE hue of Life, as of the Spring, is green,
The hue of Hope, sweet salver of our smarts.
Red is the rose's colour and the heart's,
As blood, which, having lips and cheeks beseen,
Its surplus spends upon the blossoms' queen:
And that of God Apollo's glittering darts,
Like joy, which even as they the dark disparts,
Imperial yellow is, the Summer's sheen.
But the sheer colour of the soul is blue;
For to this body of our mortal birth
The soul is as the heavens to the earth
And so for blazon shares their blessed hue.
Red, yellow, green, awhile may please the eye;
But peace is of the colour of the sky.

OLD CYNICS AND NEW.

TUB-TRUNDLING sage, that o'er Life's smooth its rough,
For Freedom's sake, preferredst and to please,

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Not the churl commons, but Diogenes,
How hadst thou of our cynics deemed, who stuff
Themselves with garbage at the general trough
And take for good whate'er the mob decrees,
Nor question whether it be chalk or cheese,
So but the gilt thereon be thick enough?
—For me, considering their hoggish lust,
Their brute complacency and base content
With the swine's husks of Life, perforce I must
Them to some landscape of the moon compare,
Forever void of water and of air,
As they of humour, wit and sentiment.

ANNUS VOLUBILIS.

SPRING startles up the wander-lust in me,
The will to prove and to possess the earth,
To track the transient spirit of rebirth
O'er field and flood and mountain, shore and sea.
Sweet Summer brings me, like the homing bee,
Back to the hive's still cheer and homely mirth;
And Autumn peace for only worship-worth
Proclaims, the peace of death volition-free.
—But thought in me by Winter's stark repose
Still to unrest is stirred and questing goes
Upon the thither margent of the stream
Of Life and Death, the perfume of some rose
Of yesterday pursuing o'er the snows
And the far drift of some forgotten dream.

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THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.

SINGER of the worlds unseen, our world about
That press with viewless presence day and night,
Our lives encompassing, as darkness light,
Thy spirit sojourned in the ways without
The common clime of human hope and doubt,
Impalpable to all save those by right
Of birth who have the dreamer's second-sight
And are familiars of the shadow-rout.
Hast thou found peace, proud soul, that no content
Knew'st in the wonted ways of shade and sun?
I cannot rate thee with the rabble dead,
In the pale dust for ever dumbly pent:
Yet, in thine own great language hast thou said,
“Many are the ways: the little home is one.”

FREDERICK BURNABY.

(Abou Klea, Jan. 17, 1885).

THOU wast of those with heart and hand who reared
Our England to her high imperial place
And her therein maintained, despite the base
Curst crew, that fain upon the rocks had steered,
Her constant son, who none and nothing feared,
Nor at Life's hand asked any greater grace
Than leave to look far Danger in the face
And pluck rebated Peril by the beard.
—As first, so last, the Fates to thee were kind,

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Vouchsafing thee the true man's most desire,
Occasion for the land thou lov'dst so well
Fighting to fall and on the desert wind
Pass, borne of Battle's chariots of fire,
To where, death-shrined, the high-souled heroes dwell.

FELIX, INFELIX.

Den kann man selig preisen wessen Natur nichts fordert als was die Welt wünscht und braucht. GOETHE.

THRICE happy he who can himself content
With what the mob suffices of his mates,
Life at its current price who takes and rates
Its chances by the world's admeasurement,
Who to the common error can consent
And with his foolish fellows loves and hates
Nor from the general dupery deviates,
But steers astray by public precedent.
For such as this Life's paths are smooth and plain;
Its goods, its honours, clamour for his clutch;
No envies dog his deeds; no hates restrain
His hopes; all doors fly open to his touch;
And when he dies, unjealous of his fame,
Men on the roll of honour write his name.

But some there be, so destined to defeat,
So curst of Fate, so sadly clear of sight,
They cannot ill for good hold, wrong for right,
But for bread hunger better and more sweet
Than ever yet was baked of worldly wheat,
Nor on Life's empty husks of vain delight
Can batten, nay, would rather starve outright

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Than at the common swine-trough drink and eat.
Sons of some stranger star, through life they go,
For Pariahs branded in the public eye;
Men look on them and pass and greet them not.
Friendship nor pleasance, love nor peace they know,
But sorrow sole and strife; and when they die,
They buried are like dogs and so forgot.

PHANTOM QUEST.

DEEP in the darkness of my grief I grope,
Where, in their sepulchres of silence frore,
The memories of the Mays that are no more
Sleep shrouded in the Winter's marble cope,
So but I may, within the Present's scope,
By the reconquered heats of heretofore,
Rekindled at rememorance's store,
Yet force to flower some phantom rose of hope.
—By the corpse-candles of retorted thought,
I track the trace of bygone happiness,
As one who o'er the midnight-darkened plain,
Whereon a fierce world-battle hath been fought,
Fares seeking for some dear one 'neath the press
Of dead and seeks, as I, I seek, in vain.

NESSUN MAGGIOR DOLORE.

NO greater grief, if we to Dante's saw
Give ear, there is than the remembering
Of happy days in time of sorrowing.

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Meseems, the saying's false to Nature's law.
Who would not bid Love's rose-red morning daw
Again in eld? Who would not Youth and Spring
Back from Time's limboes in Life's Winter bring
And warm his heart at Memory's fires of straw?
Alack! 'Tis misery only comes again
To our remembrance, overclouding joy.
Pain of itself existeth, pleasance not;
For pleasance absence only is of pain:
Whence it befalls of gladness and annoy
That this remembered is and that forgot.

WALLS OF SEVERANCE.

IF given us 'twere to meet again, my dear,
Whether in this world of man and moon and sun
Or in that other world, about this one
Of ours that spreads its mute mysterious sphere,
Methinks we should but sigh and stand unnear
Nor with wide arms on one another run:
The things that have of us been said and done
Their viewless walls between our loves would rear.
—Nor yet, Francesca like and Paolo,
Might we, at least, before the selfsame blast,
Handed, athwart th'infernal spaces go.
Nay, each, alone, the other should we view
Through crystal walls and reared 'twixt me and you,
The rampart of the irrevocable Past.

139

DATUR HORA QUIETI.

[_]

(See Turner's Watercolour Drawing).

IT is the pause of peace. With gold and rose
The setting floods the skies; the softened sun
Rains benediction down on day nigh done,
As some high passion, lighting up Life's close,
Love only grown, no longer flames, but glows.
It is the time when they, who for Heaven won
Trust and Hell 'scaped to some Omnipotent One
Unknown, are knolled to prayer and when of those
Who own no man-wrought God, no priest-made rite,
Whose service is to seek the True and Fair
And commune with the Universal Spright,
That breathes in every wafture of the air
And every undulation of the light,
The hour is given to quiet, as to prayer.

RESURGENT SORROW.

“SORROW, begone! I will no more of thee;”
I said, intent my heart on making whole
And all the haunted harbours of my soul
From the dim goblins of dead griefs set free,
On launching full upon Faith's sunny sea
Hope's bark, at last refloated from the shoal,
Where it had hung so long, of age-old dole,
With all sail spread toward the bright To-Be.
Alack! It hearkened not. Though heart of grace

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I took to bury it from sight of moon
And sun, it thrust up through the clodded clay
And showed its wan and weeping-frustred face,
Intrusive, in the laughing lanes of May
And the green garths of jasmine-girdled June.

LIFE TRIUMPHANT.

ONCE on a time, old legends tell, Life won
Th'unpartnered empery o'er the cowering earth.
All fair things shrank and shrivelled; nought of worth
Might bloom and breathe beneath the shadeless sun.
Against the ungovernable God was none
Might steadfast stand in all the round globe's girth.
The world with creatures of a monstrous birth,
East, West and South and North, was overrun.
No flowers there blew; but huge precocious fruits
Ripened and rotted on the stems of strife:
The world was given up unto the brutes;
Faith, Beauty, Honour, Hope, with bated breath,
Sheltered in darkness from Triumphant Life
And Love sought refuge in the arms of Death.

DIMENSIO QUARTA.

LENGTH, breadth and thickness! Take a two-foot rule
Here's length for Past and Future, New and Old,
Breadth for still-broadening Present, fold on fold,
And thickness, depth, to wit,—from June to Yule,

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High to low, reaching, throne to milking-stool,
From Hell's red gloom to Heaven's blithe blue and gold.
Here the world have we; in this triple mould
Life's things all fashioned are for sage and fool.
Yet that unsleeping somewhat in ourselves,
That never was contented with its lot,
Still seeks, upsoaring, through the wastes of Space,
Still in the sea dives, in the darkness delves
For some supernal sphere where Time is not,
Some realm unruled by Number and by Place.

RONSARD TO HIS MISTRESS.

SWEET, if you live, you will grow bowed and grey;
And when a worn old wife you are, with book
And broidery seated in the chimney-nook,
You will bethink you then of what I say
And curse yourself for casting love away.
Far better,—no relent old age will brook,
—With favour now on me it were to look
And love me now, whilst yet your age is May.
For I can keep your eyes for ever blue;
I can immortal make your golden hair,
Your coral lips; yea, I can render you
Immune to Fate's inexorable shears
And with my songs forfend from you, my fair,
Th'irreparable outrage of the years.

ÆTAS PERVERSA.

FOOL-FOSTERER age, base backer of the base,
Time, that thyself consolest for thy curse

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Of empty heart and brain with fulth of purse
And drownest, fearful of the frank sun's face,
In pleasure's poisoned draught thy dearth of grace,
That o'er the better choosest still the worse
And farest, ever favouring the perverse,
On thy mad course athwart the abyss of Space,
—When I the floods of fraud, the seas of sham
Consider, whereupon, all stress in vain,
With maniac shrieks and laughters, still thou'rt hurled
From dark to dark, I know not what I am,
Whether crazed only, where all else are sane,
Or alone sober in a crackbrain world.

MELIUS SIC.

UPON thee, like a curse, my soul, it weighs
That thou through life the world must'st walk alone
And never reaped'st that which thou hast sown,
Nor mightest win the loved one of thy lays
For solace of thy solitary days.
Yet comfort thee! How many hast thou known,
Who, snatching at success, their fields o'ergrown
With tares have found and harvested amaze!
How many a Jacob hast thou seen, whose life,
With blear-eyed Leah burdened, its dull streams
Through devious mazes drags of stress and strife,
Who, in mean misery wearing heart and brain,
His ten times seven years' service spends in vain
Nor ever clips the Rachel of his dreams!

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ABRANYI.

MAGYAR IRALYU SZONATA.

[_]

(Sonata in the Hungarian Gipsy style) Op. 84.

WHAT strain of far fantastic strife o'errides,
Abranyi, this thy high heroic tale,
What drone of age-old dreams of joy and ail,
By Orient oceans dreamed and streamlet-sides?
As in the shell a mystic murmur bides
(The poets fable) and a voice of wail,
Echo of its mother-ocean's surge and swale,
So in the stresses of thy song the tides
Of tune of ancient India swell and break,
Melodious memories of her sun-steeped plains
And passes, with nostalgic hearts and ears,
O'er range and river, land and sea and lake,
To our cold Europe of the snows and rains
Borne by the exiles of eight hundred years.

Kornel Abranyi (1822–1903) is perhaps the most remarkable of the modern Hungarian composers who have founded themselves upon the traditional music of the Magyar gipsies, now recognized as of Indian origin.

The Jâts, the minstrel-tribe of North-West India supposed to have been the ancestors of the gipsies, are reported to have migrated to Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

“NACH RAUM!”

I DO remember to have been one day,
Whilst straying on the Saxon hills, by night

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O'ertaken unawares, where, left and right,
The deep woods, darkling, hid the homeward way
And one sole signpost, after long essay
Found, these words only, by a match's light,
“Nach Raum!” discovered to the astonished sight,
As who in English “Unto Space!” should say.
—So with the thoughts of age. The goals, that clear
And solid showed as mountains to the eye
Of youth and manhood, being brought more nigh,
Melt as the mists of dawn and disappear,
Whilst, by Eld's night o'erdarkened, in their place,
The soul espies but endless empty Space.

LETHE.

OUR deeds, our words undying are. In vain
Endeavour is to efface the done and said.
Yet fabled 'tis that, when a man is dead
And to the shadow-land, the world inane,
He comes, he finds a river round the plain
With slack flood flowing, drowsed and dull as lead,
Whereto he may bow down his heavy head
And drink forgetfulness of joy and pain.
An idle tale! If we live after death,
Thought will live on with us and memory
Of all that in this world of mortal breath
We did and said and suffered: all that Life
Of pain and pleasance, solace had and strife,
Will dure with us to all eternity.

For First and Second Series (I–VI and VII–XIII) see my “Vigil and Vision” (1903) and “Carol and Cadence” (1908), both issued by the Villon Society.