The Poetical Works of John Payne :: :: University of Virginia Library

O come, for I am weary of the day,
White-wingéd Night, that holdest to thy breast
The sorrowing and dost give the weary rest,
And fan the sunshafts of the noon away!
For one, that is full fair and kind alway,
Waits in the gloaming, till the aspiring moon
Have whelmed the world with silver, to untune
The tense harsh harp of day and soothe the air
With ravishment of music wild and rare
And stir my soul to harmonies of dreams.
Where dost thou tarry, sweet? The night is fair
And every star thine eyes' far radiance seems.

O haste! Too soon the flowerful hands of dawn
Shall strew with roses every eastern lawn.

In that fair pleasaunce, where on Beatrice
The eyes of Dante slaked their lifelong thirst,
My eyes did light upon my lady first.
I had been wandering through the night, I wis
Not how, and came to where soft airs did kiss
The frondage and the trees shone everydele
With silver of the moon; and I did feel
That there the Springtime never died away
Nor ripened to fierce summer; but the May
Did ever consecrate the place to sleep
And silver dreams. There did my fain steps stray:
And there I saw thee on a bank's slow steep;
And thou didst on my coming turn my way
And look'dst upon me with mild eyes and deep.

Thou wast upon a plaited bed reclined
Of hyacinths, the colour of thine eyes.
The moon of dreams did reign in those sweet skies
And therein such entrancements did I find
Of fantasy and wisdom intertwined,
That my faint soul became its satellite
And drew new radiance from that loveliest light.
Beside thee blew the flower-dream of the Spring,
Faint primrose, delicat'st and sweetest thing
Of all the lush year brings us; and its scent
Ethereal, on the cool dusk hovering,
Seemed as the fragrance of thy soul and blent
Itself and thee in my remembering,
As 'twere the Spring and thou but one bliss meant.

Thy hair lay gold upon the silvered grass
And floated on it, as a flower's full cup
And golden tassels float and waver up
Athwart a lake's cool crystal, through whose glass
The flooding moon forbids the eye to pass.

I deemed thee but a dream within a dream,
When first thou shon'st upon me,— all agleam
With glamour,— and did look to see thee fade
Into the faint far purple of the glade,
As I approached; but lo! thou didst arise,
And nearing, on my lips thy finger laid,—
Then, smiling with a sweetness high and wise,
Withdrew'st that wand of white and in its stead,
Didst kiss me welcome on the mouth and eyes.

The night was fragrant as a violet
With perfume of the early bloom of love;
The silence hovered o'er us, like a dove
Of peace, and in the ferns the brook did fret
Its stones to music. All my dreams were set
In silver and all sad old memories,
Reflected in the glory of thine eyes,
Did change to jewels, as a pebble laves
Its brown to pearl and jacinth, in the wave's
Alchymic crystal. Through the weary day,
I courted woes, that thou mightst dig them graves
Deep in thy bosom and upon them lay
Balsam of kisses and the love that saves
The holy sweets of sorrow from decay.

Can I forget how all the night did pause
And hung upon the wonder of thy words?
How, whilst thou spokest comfort, all the birds
Did intermit their lays? Thou wast the cause
That all were silent; for the woodland laws
Forbid the lesser songsters to prevail
Against the flutings of the nightingale.
Thou didst attune to mnsic all my sighs
And told'st my sorrows on such lovely wise,
That every fierce old sting of barbed wrong
Seemed rounded with a dream of Paradise
And linked into a cadence sweet and long

Of haunting thoughts and tender memories,
Fallen in the ripple of a perfect song.

My heaven with the setting sun was red:
Life was for me a waste without a smile
And I a Philoctetes on his isle.
But at thy kiss my gladness, that was dead,
Did burst the bonds of night; the shadows fled
And all the curtains of the dusk were drawn;
My sky once more was amber with the dawn
And I could watch to hail the new day's sun
With daybreak hope; for I at last had won
Full-breasted Love, that is the flower of life;
What though in dreams? If living, scarce begun,
Be bitter in the mouth with pain and strife
And loveless, 'tis in it we are undone
And in our dreams we have the truer life.

I reach into the ancient troubled deep—
Where many a rank old poison-weed has lain
And ripened to corruption— and again
Uproot them from their long and sullen sleep,
Expecting but that tears of blood they'll weep
And wring my heart to bleeding. Through the flood,
Curdled and foul and sick with year-old mud,
They rise, all hideous with remembered woe,
Up to the surface of the pool, and lo!
Thine eyes have won their nature to such fair
And exquisite forswearing, with their glow
Of tender glory, that the dank stems wear
A sudden garb of flowerage sweet and rare
And are all consecrate with blossom-snow.

So I forget the present in thine eyes,
And all my future is but one embrace
Of thine encircling arms, my hope thy face
And guerdon of thy kisses. Sorrow dies

And lives again in such delightsome guise
That pain is pleasure and the weary past
With Spring-flower-chains is bounden close and fast
To wait on Love and wring a sharp sweet pain
Out of old bitter cypress and vervain,
To lend new savour to his charmèd wine.
The bitter herbs that erst have been my bane,
Curdling the young blood's valour in each vein,
Striking new root in that rich heart of thine,
To change their souls to balsam have been fain.

I cull for thee a garland of sweet names,
Made fragrant with the perfume of fair deeds:
And lo! meseems they fade to scentless weeds;
For there is that in thee that naming shames
And wills to be Love's only, and not Fame's.
How shall I call thee, sweet? or not at all?
Yet mine ears weary till upon them fall
The linkèd music of thy name's sweet sound,
That with its phrases may entwine around
My heartstrings all the memories of thy breath,
Thy kisses and thine arms about me wound.
How shall I call thee, love? “Love,” Echo saith.
What if for thee my foolish wit have found
No other name save Love,—or haply Death?

Sweet, I have tracked thy footsteps in the wood,
Hard by the river of the death of pain
And for my heart's poor solace have been fain
To gather violets where thy feet have stood
And wooed the earth to flowering. Oh, I would
That I might see thee standing in the dawn
Upon the glad green of some upland lawn,

100

Before the blue day's waking,—aureoled
With some pale tender flush of early gold,
Saint-purely vestured as a lily's bell
In fair white garments, falling fold on fold,
And just one blush of purple, such as fell
Upon the wounded white-rose-leaves of old,
To show Love's light does in that sweet snow dwell!

O lady of my dreams, the night is past;
The pale day wakens and the east is red.
Thou, that dost shun the young day's lustihead,
Where dost thou harbour, when the stars fade fast
Into the burning and the world is ghast
With wraiths of dawning? Do thy swift feet skim
The primrose tufts that edge the rill's full brim
Or dost thou sit in gold-green woodland nooks
And weave new store of dream-sweet words and looks,
In place of those worn weary by the night's
Long inter-ravishments, and twine thy hair
Into new webs of woven eye-delights,
Following the brook's clear glitter and the air
Waved with a softened ripple of gold-lights?

A place of woven flowers and singing winds,
Jewelled with moss and plumed with nodding ferns;
A hall of silver silence, wherein burns
A soft star-glamour. Through the moss that binds
Fern-roots with gold, a slow clear water winds
And slackens into tiny pools of light,
Pale topaz, amethyst and chrysolite,
Set in the gilded tracery of the grass:
And there the charmèd hours do lingering pass,
Unwilling to forsake so fair a place.
In such a haunt I picture thee by day,
Stirring the air to rapture with the grace
Of thy sweet songs and wonder of thy face,
Until the slow West gloom to purple-grey.

101

The daytime is my Purgatory hill,
Up which I climb with halt and weary feet
Until the gold of sunset streams to meet
The purple of the dusk. Then stand I still
And watch the fire-crown'd pinnacles, until
Star-silver glimmers on the robe of night
And all the wood, that hides thee from my sight,
Is voiceful with the evening. Entering
By the strait pathway,— where the close boughs cling
Together o'er the path, as if to exclude
The soiling step of any uncouth thing,—
I see afar thy robe's white fluttering
And hear, through all that columned solitude,
The ripples of thy song's wood-silver ring.

“Da questa parte con virtù discende, Che toglie altrui memoria del peccato; Dall' altra d'ogni ben fatto la rende.” Dante, Purgatorio, xxviii. 127—9.,