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Ellen

A poem

Calvert, George Henry (1803-1889)

I. A SURPRISE.

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I.
A SURPRISE.

I.

The world is full of fire. Stars, aye ablaze,
Band the Infinitudes with burning links:
Wild comets flare on the tame earth amaze,
Hanging men's startled thought on being's brinks:
Fervent sun-scented gifts are all our days,
And of the solar surge each creature drinks;
While under Earth's cool grassy crust glows heat
That floods with soaring sap pine, rose, and wheat.

II.

Broad Nature feeds on warmth, whose overflow
Is but the momentary froth of waves;
As when Night reels with Lightning's sudden blow,
Or Lava's torrid tide turns towns to graves,
Or Conflagration, wrapt in ghastly glow,
Leaping from roof to roof, wind-maddened raves.
'Tis Nature's joy and life, this blessèd fire,
In all things hid, as music in the lyre.

III.

Earth's paragon, Nature's dear masterpiece,—
In whom has been, to hundredth proof, distilled
Her liveliest currents, whose unending lease
Of life (contracted here) is so o'erfilled
With great conditions, earth's select increase
Breeds but a fraction's mite of what was willed
When God made man, steeping a dormant clay
In the chaste baptism of immortal ray,—

IV.

He in the unmeasured circuits of his soul
Coils flame, whereto lava and thunder-burst
Are shafts short-aimed at evanescent goal,
Hot agencies that fiercely slake their thirst
On things terrene. Darting from pole to pole
Of being's sphere, man now is self-immersed
In seething sense, now flashing to the heights
Where he can track free angels in their flights:

V.

Himself a budded angel graft on clay;
Fresh Mercury a-tiptoe on the earth,
His wings invisible by solar day;
A new-born life, awaiting higher birth
With upward eyes, whose supersensuous play,
Seizing the farthest suns, draws in the worth
Beyond them swaying, inward to the nest
Where awe hatches great thoughts of God; and, blest

VI.

With glance supreme of intuition, man
Uplifts him o'er himself, to where pure mind
Rules in such ever-glowing light there can
No shadow come, and whither, unconfined
By doubt, unbalked by angered passion's ban,
He hies, his tangled counsels to unbind,
Free balanced clear of sense-cajoling clod,
Hearing with inward ear the voice of God.

VII.

What myriad worlds circle in the small round
Whence glow eyes bold to read the firmament;
Eyes lit with messages from realms whose bound
Is th' Infinite, thought's glittering legions pent
Within that petty spirit-swarming mound,
Aye luminous with orders heard or sent,
And lurid with a trembling glare at times,
When loves perverted boil to hates and crimes.

VIII.

Man is compact of loves; and when they turn
Inward upon himself, or outward spend
Unwarily their essences, they burn
Into the very frame of being, and rend
The impassioned pulses fine wherewith men earn
The all of joys that with life's labors blend.
The child of love, man is ensteeped in loves:
Promotion to their deepest music moves.

IX.

A stable hierarchy, a choral whole,
The multitudinous mind of man is strung
To chords vibrating harmonies that roll
Through fineless space; and 'tis because are rung
Through the Infinite the discords of his soul
That thence such deepening agonies are wrung,—
Unwitnessed agonies, whose inward pain
Beyond the sun throws shadows of their stain.

X.

For thence we come; and thither we return,
When the strong soul hath rent its clasping crust;
But if our restless fervors downward burn,—
We mixing us too freely with our dust,—
The ray divine, like lamp through earthen urn,
Irradiates not, or dimly, lightless lust,
With blight fraught single,—not from animalism,
But that, unchastened, lust works aye a schism;

XI.

Man's complex spheric being, for its weal
Needing co-active unity in all
His diverse powers, then only the white seal
Of good being set when act is not a thrall
Of passion, but the generous pulses feel
Their throb within its life. The ceaseless call
Of men to man were mocked by answers dark
With the close breathing of a bestial bark.—

XII.

A sunny brook, on whose clean floor the stones
Sparkle unstained, that suddenly befoul,
Deep at its forest-head, putrescent bones
Thrust there by murder done beneath night's cowl
On trustful travellers, whose unpitied moans,
Heard but in Heaven, were married to the howl
Of wolves,—the brooklet's laughing life bedimmed,
Its glad pellucid pools with poison brimmed:

XIII.

A sward-bound bed the sun and earth and air
(Wedding their blissful craft at beauty's hest)
Have hid with flowers, so fresh, so flashing fair,
With tender-tinted flames they seem possest,
When swiftly,—as if Hell's subjacent lair
Into their veins had shot a biting pest,—
They fall disbloomed, their sweetened delicate breath
Quenched in the blackness of unsavory death:

XIV.

What image else can hang within your eyes
Nature disrupted, thwarted, maimed, and bleak,—
Ocean senseless to wind, a Paradise
Ravished of blossoms,—such will faintly speak
What were those youthful women who in guise
Of modest maidenhood, so flattering meek,
Welcomed Horatio, whose unhardened skin
Flushed ruby at the sudden thought within;—

XV.

Then swift the bashful blood rewarmed his heart,
And pale, an anger'd eye he cast around
For the false comrade who had played the part
Of trifler with him; but as swift the wound
Healed of itself. An impulse then to dart
Forth from the gairish room, and at a bound
Heaven's air rebreathe, shot through him. That, too, died;
And almost ere it parted, at his side

XVI.

Spake one whose sleepy yearning tones were links
Of chain, whose other end a lisping child
Bound to her mother's lap, a dimpled minx,
Who in the mother's plundered bosom piled
Such heaps of love, they brimmed the very brinks
Of joy at times, and overflowed in mild
Unwitnessed tears, which quick were sunned away
By arch look of the little girl at play.

XVII.

Where two small velvet valleys greenly met,
To slope as one towards hearkened Hudson's shore,
Their cottage nestled by a rivulet
That ran outleaping from the shadows hoar
Of stormy oaks, and prattling with her, wet
The fondling's feet, and made her fingers more
Like bursting rose-buds, as in sultry heat
She dabbled in it with her hands and feet.

XVIII.

A playmate was she of the blossomed trees,
The first to spy the unlooked-for gleaming rings
Of wild flowers in the grass, as at her knees
New violets peeped from their cold coverings
To watch her joy. The summer-heated bees
Sang round her, as she were of honeyed things,
And birds near her in Eden were, and lighted
Upon her shining shoulder unaffrighted.

XIX.

When the fleet years had poured into her veins
The rapid juice of more ambitious blood,
Her little longings leaped to loftier gains,
And taught the senses wider walks. The flood
Of the quick rivulet,—more quick with rains,—
She mounted gleesome to its lowering wood.
There mystery answered mystery, and the deep
Dim silence, like to sense-upfolding sleep,

XX.

Unlocked her soul and loosed a brood of thought
That ranged for food within the obscurer caves
Of umbrage, where in rock-strewn dusk were taught
The hushed delight of awe that, like the waves
Of untrod ocean, is with tidings fraught
From worlds which vast imagination laves.
Thence with the mimic cataracts she bounded
Back to her home with naked feet unwounded.

XXI.

The mould-exhalèd balms of many springs
So fed the fragrance of her breathful day,
That she was like the perfumed offerings
Of a wild wilderness of buds to May.
So dashed were eye and cheek by tints from wings
Of mounting morns, dyed was the mortal clay
In light as from a heaven-expirèd air;
And sunbeams hid them in her golden hair.

XXII.

Not closer did the summer-shrunken brook
Cling to its pebbly bed, than the bereft
Deserted mother worn, with heart and look
To the one single child, all that was left
To love of her own blood. Her eyelids shook
Heart-moisture on the sleeping girl, a theft
Of covert sorrow from the darkness,—tears
Folded by day within blind bodeful fears.

XXIII.

Death grasping her pale child—this was the view
Old dolors graved upon a bruisèd brain.
And they were kind; for had they limned the new
Unheralded rank truth, so near, the pain
Had rift her clay; for when it fell it slew
Her earth-life at a stroke; and now the rain,
That made the brook laugh with her laughing child,
Wets sod above her lonely body piled.