University of Virginia Library


1

A PAGEANT OF POETS

FROM Landor to Swinburne


3

PRELUDE

1

Now ends our second age of sovereign song;
The final voice is hushed, the concord dies.
The latest lingerer of the vanished throng
Fades in unanswering skies,
Yet is not lost for long.
New, bird-like notes are fluting in the woods;
Strange tribes of carolling echoes trill
Round the rough slopes of glade and hill;
The winds entrap more subtle harmonies,
And in the strenuous throats of caves and floods
A wild, ecstatic music swells and cries.
In the deep night of Time, its count full-told,
A radiant galaxy of stars afire
Burns through the blackness, scintillant with gold,
Shaped in the likeness of the Song-god's lyre.

2

Deep in a fastness of the Sussex Downs,
Embowered in moss-grown oaks and laurelled ways,
Far from the dusty roads and smoke of towns,
A greensward hides within a woodland maze.
Therein a stone, grey-lichened altar stands
From immemorial days,
Whence sprang of old a sacrificial flame
Fed by a bronze-haired Sibyl's hands
In years of long forgotten fame.
Its carven shaft is girt by laurel bands
Twined by some hidden folk ye may not tell

4

Save from the goat-foot tracks that dint the sands
About yon bubbling well,
And to the apprehending mind declare
That still the Fauns, if not the Gods, are there.

3

Avow, ye Fauns, to whom our fathers reared
This altar in the glade!
To Pan, the Earth-god with the goatish beard,
Protector of their flocks and kine,
Or ruddy Bacchus for his gift of wine,
Or Dian, the disdainful, moon-cold Maid?—
Nay, to the God of sunshine, dawn, and song—
The young Apollo, beating back the Night,—
These laurel wreaths belong—
The thin flame kindled with his arrows' flight.
Oft round the vapours of the Tripod reeled
A Pythoness, raving of future ills;
And twice or thrice the cowering Fauns, concealed,
Saw in a blinding flash the God revealed
With lyre and loose-strung bow,
And all night long about the entrancéd hills
Heard the magnetic gusts of music blow.

4

Lured onward through the flush of April lanes
And paths by lamps of daffodils defined,
I came when the clear light of evening wanes,
Following faint murmurs born of string and reed,
Through tangled growths inextricably twined,
On that enchanted mead.

5

How still and void it seemed—no twig that stirred,
Rustle of leaf or sudden flitter of wings,
Movement or sound o'erheard,
Yet on me stole a sense of watching Things,—
Keen sentinels that stood
Alert within the wood
And cast swift webs in all its openings.
Then a thin mist of silver, luminous smoke
Forth from the altar broke
And snared me with its creeping somnolence,
Till at its base I swooned, yet dreamed or knew
That uncouth forest-creatures bore me thence
Within a pale of frondage screened from view.

5

Next surged anear the erst receding tune
With flutes and hautboys swelling, till the strain
Upborne with reedy voices, rent the noon
Of a new day with passionate refrain.
Then swooped a blinding radiance from the sky
Till the God gleamed apparent and drew nigh,
And his winged feet alighting starred the sward
With hyacinthine blooms that hailed their lord.
Around the laurelled margent of the glade,
Upholding new-peeled wands, with filleted brows,
The singing bands of boys and virgins ranged
In rainbow-coloured vesture, counter-changed
Wherever lambent beams of godhood strayed.
Thrust deep into the tangle of the wood,
A path of Triumph under feathery boughs
Ran down from where Apollo stood.
Mounting thereon with eyes serene and clear,
Eyes that outdared the sun and pierced the shade,
The lords of song drew near
To greet the lord of singers, unafraid.

6

THE PAGEANT

6
W. S. LANDOR

Foremost was Landor found,
His leonine mien with Attic charm subdued,
Supreme in sculptured verse, and radiant prose
Encroaching on its sister's narrower bound;
In every clime and scene his gathering ground—
City and camp and cloistral solitude;
His range the world, a cameo, or a rose.
He held a mirror to all mood and thought,
And, ere it fled, each swift reflection caught
Of poet, statesman, courtesan, and sage.
The art of Life, the life of Art, he scanned
And moulded as the potter to his hand:—
The life of Athens in its golden age:—
Of Tuscan gardens, under rambling bines
Repeopled with Boccaccio's Florentines:—
Of Arden before Shakespeare stormed the stage.

7

7
R. SOUTHEY

Then followed him who sang,
Mid Greta's murmurings, of Domdaniel caves
Sunk in the spellbound waves;—
Madoc who earliest past unfurrowed seas
On virgin shores with the Red Dragon sprang;
And wondrous lays of grim Mythologies
Spun on the shuttle of Kehama's curse:
Who dowered the heroes of his cosmic verse
With the inherent virtues of his soul—
Faith, valour, fortitude, and self-control:
Who first, since Dryden, caught the laurel spray
From dull, belittling foreheads, smirched and torn,
And, shredding its long shrivelled leaves away,
Revived it in the fountains of the Morn.

8

8
S. T. COLERIDGE

The Dreamer next behold,
Coleridge, with introspective gaze sublime,
Whose ripe imaginings,
Within one matchless English summer-time,
Burst in a triple flower of flame and gold,
Unfurling splendid petals fold from fold,
Vivid with hues of stormy sunsettings
And sea-snakes' burnished scales,
And darting stamens palpitant like wings
Into the dazzled air,
Yet fading under Evening's falling veils
To phosphorescent flowers unearthly fair,
And by the moonlight blanched to phantom things.
So leapt his soul aflare,
But from that prodigality of bloom
Recoiled with flameless lamp burnt out and bare
Of song, as one whom his own thoughts consume.

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9
W. WORDSWORTH

Then Wordsworth passed with Nature-reading eyes,
The ‘Visionary Gleam’ at last assured.
Suckled and reared at mothering mountain breasts
And cradled mid their drifting lullabies,
The fells and streams grew playmates to the child—
His intimate touch endured,
And bared their secrets to his high behests
Or gay endearments as he roamed the wild.
Then, in the flush of manhood's conquering pride,
He thrust their final, reticent mask aside,
And saw within, in fitful, fleeting gleams—
As through a furnace grate
Opening and closing on its fiery spate—
The incandescent caverns of the Earth
Where the unborn and spent millenniums wait,
And ravished thence hidden, immortal dreams
Of life beyond the bounds of death and birth.

10

10
SIR WALTER SCOTT

Up the long path of Fame
See Scott advance, pure clarion of the band,
Supremest bearer of his Country's name,
Rekindling the deserted Border-land
With sudden gleam of spears and hurtling swords
Glinting behind bare crags or tufts of fern:
Gay pennons streaming up the winding glen;
Sacked towers aglow with lurid cores of flame,
Or broken armies trampling through the fords,
Shedding a trail of writhing steeds and men
From stricken fields—Flodden or Bannockburn.
Above the placid breasts of mountain lakes
The pibroch swells; lights kindle on the shore;
The Fiery Cross its blinding pathway breaks,
And the wild Clansmen toss the torch of war.

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11
LORD BYRON

Breaking the prison of an alien star
Like thine own rebel angels, earthward drawn
Toward signal flares of Dawn,
Byron, thy wild, dissentient spirit fell,
On tempest-buffeted pinions tossed afar,
With spheral music chiming in its bell:
Yet found no refuge from the shadowing bolt
In Passion's arms, or any languorous shade,
Nor banished from the riot of its revolt
Thought of the heaven wherefrom its flight had strayed.
Yet for the ransom paid
Of life, Apollo, that thy Greece might rise
Freed from the Moslem chain,
Accept the sacrifice,
Accept the varying strain
Though to the Night its strenuous chants belong—
Though to the Night its pain,—
Though to the Night the travail of its cries:
Accept the lone, unconquerable song!

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12
P. B. SHELLEY

And thou too, truant from the ranks of light,
Capturing in Shelley's soul thy transient home
As refuge from the phantoms of the night—
Near kinsman of the flower-drift and the foam
And fragile beings fugitive from sight
Haunting the hills, the forests, and the sea
About the Ægean isles and Italy,—
Suffused with thee, in his rare brain awoke
Vision and insight beyond mortal ken
Of elemental tragedies and woes;
Prometheus strangling in the Eternal yoke
Up the Caucasian, lightning-smitten glen,
Fast in his torments' throes;
Laon upon his column, and the crime
Of that abhorrent sire, accursed of Time.
Thine too the ultimate waft, the culminant sweep
Of rapture up the steep
Of the cloud-rack, revelling with winds and birds;
Till winds and waters noosed thee, drowned with sleep,
And quenched his flaming heart and springing words.

13

13
JOHN KEATS

Not writ in water only, but in fire
Across the climbing parapets of cloud
That mask our English skies,
Proud mid the nobly proud,
Keats, glow thy name's immortal; thine the lyre
Strung at the curved mouth of an ocean shell
Alluring there the sea-winds' wandering sighs,
The waves' antiphonies,
Whence issuing at thy will, or low or loud,
The soul of Beauty snares men with her spell.
Though thou unto the elder gods art gone,—
Unthroned, discarded,—in their starless vale
Shining among them like Hyperion,
On thee hath Time no hold, so earthly frail,
For, Adonais, on the surgent crest
Of song, the grief and glory of thee are blown
Through heaven in strains as soaring as thine own.
Still thy receding voice the nightingale,
Deep in the brooding thicket's shadowy nest,
Remembers in each midnight of its June;
Whenever Art revives the harmonies
Of Attic life and grace on plinth or frieze
Thine are the unageing lips that flute the tune.

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14
ROBERT BROWNING

The poet of the towering intellect
Lit late upon his fame, but doth abide
On the sheer crag with vivid mosses flecked
Whereby the kestrel's wafting pinions ride,—
Not further from the greatest than one stride.
He, even as Cleon in his island shrine,
From every Art its quintessence distilled;
Then in the seething caldron of his thought,
Turbid from grim endeavour half-fulfilled,
With each infusion wrought
The miracle of water turned to wine,
Sealed in its flask, matured, and clarified.
He too, within the brain's voluted coil
Appraised each duct and fibre that impel
Men toward the heaven or hell
They fashion out of life with endless toil;
Following the devious tracks by which they wind
Toward ends foredoomed and unescapable;
Lord of the analytics of the Mind.

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15
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Yet not alone he stands; his arms embrace
A weakling woman with a seraph's face
And love and pity in her tender eyes;
Dowered with rare dreams wherewith the gods endue
Heroic souls in tremulous ecstasies:
Whose spirit's frail, declining tenement
The immitigable music eddying through
Left torrent-swept and spent.
First, thin and sweet her virginal singing rang
As that of any sprite or summer bird
Lilting, at dawn, of Elemental things,
Yet soon with sadness blent;
By her own handsel of pain made free as air
Of all the zones of anguish and despair.
Then Love flew nigh and brushed her with his wings,
And twined her maiden bower
With the late glories of the Passion-flower,
And from her heart that chant of passion sprang
Which left the world no lovelier afterword
But gave her brow the doubled aureole
Of Browning's wife and Shelley's sister-soul.

16

16
LORD TENNYSON

Master, within the Palace of thine Art,
Built to the incantations of thy brain
And poised in air upon a golden chain,
A hundred radiant chambers hoard thy dreams.
In one, the spell-bound maid's arrested heart
Thrills to the step that tip-toes on the floors
Bringing her ecstasy of life again.
Here old Ulysses stems the ocean streams,
Trimming his tattered sail toward fabulous shores
With the thin remnant of his storm-tossed crew,
And constant in the grapple of the oars,
To seek “the great Achilles whom they knew”.
There drifts the dead Elaine with her dumb guard
Up the slow tide, a flower by Fortune marred.
Here, lost in muted cloisters, Guinevere
Prays on while Arthur spurs to his last fight:
Beyond the reed-beds of the wailing mere
The sword Excalibur is caught from sight.
And fleet and hushed the fugitive phantoms throng,
Snared in the meshes of thy magic song,
As through dissolving halls of dream we grope
To those twin shrines, lit with no earthly light,
Where Galahad clasps the handles of the Grail,
And thy lone craft, without an oar or sail,
Drifts out upon the tideway of the night,
Toward the dim beacon of a far-seen hope.

17

17
MATTHEW ARNOLD

Arnold, clear voice of melancholy doubt,
Wedded to thought and word serene as rills
Brimming a Vestal's well down beds of sand,
Perchance even now thou haunt'st the Cumner hills
Unvexed in dreams by the Philistian rout,
With Thyrsis' self redeemed from Arno's strand,
And that lone Scholar for thy company,
Heedless of faint-heard chimes in Oxford towers
Beneath thy trysting tree,
Unconscious of the burdens of the hours,
In ghostly evening gardens gathering
For Proserpine the pale, faint blooms of Spring.
Far from the sorrowful dirges of the sea
In Faith's extremity,
And wind-bleached mountain passes grey with dole,
Where not a root may cling
As anchor for the soul,
Let the great winds to the great tides go down:
The anguish of the world has passed from thee;
Thou hast achieved thy crown.

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18
D. G. ROSSETTI

Painter and poet, betwixt whose easel and page
Flits to and fro one mirrored, sensuous face—
Hers who resigned thee from the grave's embrace
Thy heart of hoarded melody and flame,—
Back-straying wanderer from that earlier age
Glorious with Dante's and Giotto's fame,
When Art, reborn, drank at the fount of Truth,
How hast thou lit our frigid Northern tongue
With palpitating songs of love and ruth
As when that Art was young!
Of love that deems the world upon its knees
For one enraptured hour, then stills its breath,
Shuddering beneath the swooping wings of Death,
And rakes thenceforth the dust of memories:
Of love, by lust or treachery overthrown:
Of love, turned hate, that works by sorcerers' charms
To wreck the thing erst cherished in its arms:
Of love that cannot make its heaven alone.

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19
WILLIAM MORRIS

Adown Epicurean garden paths,
Fresh with keen scents, with unsunned dewfall wet,
We follow thee, new Chaucer of our time,
By meadows where the scythe gleams through the swathes,
While garrulous elders in the shadows met
Recount their haunting legends of the Prime,
And Sagas, smitten through with Berserk wraths;
Or in a mist of unforbidden tears
Breathe forth the sorrowful mandate of the years:—
Glean in this fleeting aftermath of day
What tender joys we may.
No profit shall we reap from all our toil.
But once we live and all too soon we die;
Live now; the night is nigh;
Vain is our labour, vain the wild turmoil,
The thrashing of the seas, the endless strife:
Death ends the pain, the song;
Wipes out alike the memory and the wrong,
The dream, the deed; hoard what is left of life!
Not so; the palaces of Song endure:
When Time hath set his fluttering captive free,
There reigns the soul, remote, intact, secure,
In its own fabric of Eternity.

20

A. C. SWINBURNE

20

Captain of rhythm and sound,
Fusing our stubborn tongue in silver rain
And fashioning it again
In measures such as poet never wound
From any gulf of cloud or air or wave,—
Latest and loveliest of the singing clan
And last-born brother of the nightingales
Who set their watch till dawn about thy grave,
Didst thou then once, within some creek or cave
Ensnare and bind the Sirens or old Pan,
Or toss the Thyrsus round the midnight vales
While to thy soul their effluent music ran?
Or on Apollo's thunder-riven height,
Enswathed in lambent fire,
Didst thou throughout an unforgotten night
Allure to thee the music of his lyre?—
Nay, in an island-cavern far from these,
Round which the roaring stream of the world divides,
Rather some lonely Oceanides
Fostered thy childhood mid the clangorous tides;
Wherefore the freedom of the seas grew thine,
And scot and tithe from every vagrant tone
Leaping along the pathways of the brine
Or through its trumpets blown.

21

Yet since thy virgin arrow found the gold
First on the target set by Sophocles,
Didst thou, then, borne from that wave-guarded fold
Across thy sister seas

21

By wandering pirates and in Athens sold,
Chant in the thunder of his tragedies
And die of plague upon Aspasia's knees?
Then in thy next transmuted mortal day,
Brooding upon the inexorable Power
That shapes and shatters life like sculptor's clay,
Burst thine arrested thought in one resplendent flower.
Still let the vowed Arcadian huntress stand
Slipping the leash of the hounds with slim, cool hand
On the man-slaying boar, at last undone;
And let the wretched mother avenge again
Upon her son her brothers stricken and slain,
Meleager's life wane with the wasting brand
And all the appointed web of Fate be spun.

22

Thy songs were of dead Queens,—
And gleaming out of mouldering Pyramids,
And frescoed caverns sealed in lost ravines
Anigh Damascus, Thebes, or Babylon,
Flash ruining harlot faces sweet or stern,
Darting once more, 'neath antimonied lids
Which the embalmers' eyes last gazed upon,
Rekindling rays wherein old passions burn.
And still therein shall Yseult's memory live
So long as Cornish water swirls and sags
About Tintagel's crags,
And over her haven of sleep
Seethes wandering, starred with foam-bells fugitive,
Or a low bark drives landward from the deep.
And evermore thy spacious trilogy
Enshrines that image of the World's Desire

22

Whose love consumed her lovers, fierce as fire,
And blazed her passage as a lightning blast
Its trail of sovereignty,—
Than very Death more dire,—
Yet broken by a woman at the last.

23

Though on thee oftener than thy peers there fell
The trance of vision, holding thee apart,
Untouched by the familiar human spell
And magic of the heart,
Yet ere its wane thy passionate pity yearned
Godlike above men's dramas of despair,
As when it shone on Yolande stricken and spurned,
Banned with the outcast's bell,
And white with leprous ash on skin and hair,
Whom the poor clerk forsook not in her hell
But for love's sake its torments leapt to share.
And still thy songs grow tenderer when they house
Like rose-leaves round the nest
Where Infancy's serene, unsmiling brows
Recapture their lost heavens of dreamful rest.

24

Hadst thou but lived to hear the battle cry
That thrilled our virgin coasts but yesterday,—
To see men's bird-winged fleets assail the sky,
Grim snakes of Death threading the waters grey
And striking undersea their shuddering prey,—
To see once more thy France, thine Italy,
Thine Italy grown one, thy reborn France,

23

Safe-issued from the tempests of their Dawn,
At death-grips with the seething dragon-spawn
Of ancient foes, bent on world-dominance,—
How had thy voice on Alp and Apennine,
And all the frothing crests of all the seas
Where England fought and smote their enemies
In Freedom's name, rung out in chant divine
To whip the laggard, brace the doubtful knees,
And from the gassed trench spur the avenging
Line!
Ah, wheresoever thou brood'st above thy lyre,
In what faint land of darkness or desire,
How must thou bloom in rapturous song to know
Song still breeds flame to set a realm on fire,
And thy heart throb to greet d'Annunzio!

25

Hail and farewell, whom to the dolorous turning
And stairway to the Dark the years have drawn.
For us or thee what dun or lurid dawn,
Or dreamless night devoid of tears and yearning
Remains, we know not: thou hast found the key
To the shut door of all that mystery—
Entered and seen what shadows lurk behind,
Unless indeed it prove, as thou hast said,
That Death sets term to Sense and thought and learning,
And dust of poppies seals each weary head,
Fanned by the soughing, intermittent wind
That swoons about the garden of the dead.
Yet here at least thy fame and praise shall linger
And live—thy Wraith swing out on every tide
Of heaving spume our samphired capes deride,
Lifting past laurelled brows a warning finger

24

Amid the rainbows arched above the waters,
Lest aught should frighten Nereus' singing daughters,
Or swaying with the tideway's rocking bell
Where the ships quiver and skim the ruining shoal:—
Though henceforth mellower concords haunt the shell,
Or thrill the winds' citole,
Yet no new strain of thine, the Master-Singer,
The oracular priest of song, shall ever swell
The clarion pierced and dumb, and re-express thy Soul.
Hail and—alas—Farewell!

25

26
L'ENVOI

Now my frail raft of dream, adrift so long,
Regains its creek, unships its fragile mast
And floats into the shade,
Borne inward on the tide of surgent song
From the bright ranks still marshalled in the glade,
Of which this echo only lingers last:—
These are of them who count a God for friend;
Who, standing in their lot, abide the End.
Wherefore about the altar of their God
Shall they too serve with that anointed choir
Who, in the lone, diverging paths they trod,
Redeemed his earth-strewn jewels from the mire,
And singing as they came,
Reset them in their carcanets of flame.
Last of the Mighty, to their ranks ascend!
Then song and vision faded and were past.
Waking, aloft a waxen moon rode high
Amid the still battalions of the sky.
About me, drowsy odours of the Spring:
A sense of uncouth watchers vanishing.