University of Virginia Library

‘The clock's voice and the syllables of your dress
Together stay my hand. Tune and silk
Forbid a further flow of ink. The pen falls flat
Upon a blotter; the verseman nods to Love.
Dear, are you come for flowering
Amid the books and papers in my room?
Or do you wish to hear
Your poem, written to a second shape?
Or do you want no treasure else
Than sitting on my rug to learn
The whimsies breathed by wood and coal
For light to publish, at its own expense?
Do you know,
I think the third must be your favourite want.’
‘Yes; if you sit beside me in the dusk
And marry me again.’

‘How like you, Snowdrop!
Wilt thou have
This man to be thy wedded husband here,
With coal and wood for witnesses, by song
As homely as the verse of William Barnes?’

‘Thou being thou, I will!’

‘Lend me love's ring.
I want to feel it press
Along your finger on the way to home.
One night last week I broke a thought in half
To watch you rub a speck upon the gold
While kitty's soothing, soothing, in your lap—
Four-footed sameness never quite the same—
Recalled, in spite of fur, the evening of a dove.
Ring, kitten, Snowdrop! William Barnes
Had never bent to shape a theme so fair
While warm with tenderness and country song
At evenfall.’

‘Only a Fairyman could wander thus
Among the holiday parts of speech.
Oak, Coal, and Dorset dialect,
Collaborating, could not give so quick—
So bright—a run of melody,
For all their dear companionship.
Come close beside me on the rug and be
Man, kitten, dove combined,
With lots and lots—and other lots—of sweet.
To-morrow at this hour, if reading flame,
Let us consent to live as stirless as a bell
Not ringing on a white campanula.
Now's a too precious now.’

‘Agreed.
Besides, I want to tell you what was found
Midway between my first and second self
While you were weeding flowers this afternoon.’

‘Come closer—closer yet! I always shrink
From second selves; and yours is dark, dark, dark.’

‘The story is as quiet as a story told by moss.’

‘Quiet is a temple. Will the telling leave me glad?’

‘It will.
At four o'clock,
Being out of tune with tyrant words,
I dropped my pen, leaned back, and slept.
When near a wood, I met a Dream
Wearing the frock of lavender grey
You wore in Kent the April afternoon
That leaped to instant summer when you rose,
Came with a smile, and wondered if I cared
To see a flush of pansies all your own ...
Our meeting well-nigh broke my trance
With dreamlessness, so sharp the strain
Of fronting eyes and lips that had the look
Of sharing with your breast a hope
Of finding in my heart a king.
Were kisses trembling in the deep
Of blueness almost grey?
Love questioned. Love replied. Then—too soon
Having steadied to a calm, you pointed where
A glittering loftier than the trees disclosed
The spire of Brackenham Church.’

‘Where was that church?
Who spoke its name on being stopped by you?’

‘A lipless voice.
Not even a child in search of flowers
Wavered the air so sweet to Solitude;
And yet I heard intensely well
How you and I were come to Brackenham Church
It slept along the looping of a stream
Where meadowsweet was paler than its wont
And loosestrife purple lessened, since the sun
Of trance out-shone the sunning of our world.
Forward we went
As though a hidden thread
Of heavenly weaving drew us to the porch.
Next, while we wondered if the lock were fast,
The oaken halves moved inward.
Then was seen the aisle,
The flock of pews,
The Table of refreshment for the soul.
Thither we went, hand keeping hand,
Till we were come beneath a glory of glass
Devoted to a Saint among the Twelve
To whom their Lord, though shadowed then by death,
Busily tendered equal bread and wine.
How long we stood departed from our selves,
I cannot answer.
Was not the Ancient, Time,
Fallen fast asleep, as long ago he slept
For Israel serving God in Ajalon?
Then suddenly we, the statues of the fane,
Knelt as if two were one divinely told
The nearness of a miracle yet to—
A Priest! A Priest!—
The window was a life!
That Spirit moved toward the purple cloth,
As if remembering bread and wine,
And prophecy from the lips he loved,
Before, with not a rustle of robe, he turned
Toward our shaken hearts and gleamed
In front of us!
Never shall I forget how close he read
With eyes of Heaven the history of your face;
Nor how he shot the arrow of his look
To pierce my soul when yours had given to him
Reply in tune with question. Had he found
A fault in me too grave for Mercy's heart
To speak forgiveness?
So long endured his frozen search,
I feared he could not bless me, for a harm
In wait to shadow what he knew
Was loveliness resident in your life;
But, in a flash, the arrow lost
Its bitter point.
Turning from heart to heart,
His eyes embraced us both, and shone content.
Wordless, he took your tremulous hand in his
And made it one with mine;
Wordless, he melted gravity with a look
The shadow of a smile;
Wordless, his very presence was as though
A counsel given in words.
Then—we were left to pray.
Who walked with Christ of old was gone
Apart from us, without a sound or stir,
Without a backward look, to watch in hope
For souls in need of loneliness
And confirmation. We, he knew, were his.
By him to whom the clustering graves had vowed
That church—Saint John, the Dearly-Loved—
Our lives, confronted, questioned, weighed,
Had been accepted.
Thus ran my dream. I kept it for an hour
Of stillness spent with you in little light.’

‘I wish I knew a lovely way of thanks
In lovely keeping with a tremulous hour
Never to be forgotten.
Sleep will come slow to-night;
For, watchful of the window given by dream
The presence and the absence of that Priest
By whom our hands were joined,
How should I feel mere body slip away
From tumult? Wonder of wonders, this!
Now tell what force, what colouring, what increase
The poet in you added when he woke.’

‘I call Saint John to witness, of his truth,
That I have spoken nothing else than trance
Unaltered by a word of wakefulness.’

‘Even the beautiful can bring a wound.
This startling, will it be one load the more
To press a mind so lost in images,
So split,
So travel-stained?
Forgive me if I seem to cloud
Its vividness by telling of a breast
That falters when you lose your country self
Among immensities.
Are you aware of this,
That far too often in our bridal year,
Lover of lipless voices, you have given
No answer to my question? If you spoke,
Replies were contradiction of the sense,
Opposites hard for me to bear.
You could not tell me, even for a kiss,
The sudden wrong I did a week ago,
When, since a third time you had failed
To hear my voice, though but a yard
Divided us, I coloured in despair.
You cannot tell. Then listen. This was done:
I struck a glass so roughly with my spoon
That bowl and stem were shattered.
No word! No quivering! Breath alone!
Your soul and mine were strangers then.
Blankness so withered me,
Although I knew the riches of your love,
That now, Orion being shadowed, I am forced
To battle for my treasure, lest a mood
Already at the danger-point become a worse
Eclipsing of my household stars,
So true, so native, so resolved.
Forgive again!
Because my hour had come
To tell, to show, to plead,
I dared for gain or loss. Remember this,
If what you are must still be you,
Love can but teach me how to double love.’

‘Fragrance and Flower, how grieved I am!
To think of it!—
To think your voice became a shuffled sound
Without significance, the tuning dead
That should have sung me homeward from the mist!
Even in childhood I was wont
To lean my forehead on a windowpane,
Weary of being held so far
From lamb-like clouds without a friend
To fold them when the blueness died to grey.
At last—so late—I see, because of you,
Why Mother often ran to turn me round
And fill my ears with poems said
To fetch me out of sky to her.
Straining to breach the fortress held by Truth
Is Martyrdom; no less;
Each wrong direction but a setting-forth again.
So loss begets a losing;
So a zest of double fire
Becomes the master's master, hounding him
To leap, to snatch, to suffer empty hands.’

‘Is not the centre here?
Are not the radiants more than we can count?
Consider, Dearest, how a rose
Resembles well the nebula's way
Of bending petals from the heart
Of generation.
Be slow to hold a pansy's share
Of mystery smaller than the grant
Of mystery resident in a sun.
Why barter Here and There,
Since There and Here are samenesses?
To drift from what, being Earth-in-Star,
Has flowered so fair beyond expectancy
Is leaving love to pine.
If All is not beneath our roof,
Then am I not the All I long to be,
The All-in-All your fineness needs to have.’

‘Even the beautiful can bring a wound.
I must remember.
The windowpane my Mother lived to dread!—
The ambush in the heavens that caught a wife
Whose only zenith was her husband's roof!—
The nebula causing in my dream
(For this, I hold, can well explain
That tensity of hushed regard)
The Dearly-Loved to question if the souls
In front of him were fortified
Above defeat!
For long, the child of Tenderness, you breathed
As patient as a rosebud in the dark.
If, since the habit in my blood is strong,
You find me deaf and mute in seeming space,
Run to my chair! Recover me from quest!
Darken the Pleiades! certain of the end,
Sure of my folding love!
Home stars are best,
And you, Forgiveness, have the central light.’

‘Stand up, True Comforter!
Though blinded utterly by tears—
The happiest ever woman shed—
I see what lately was an hour
Flash to a new-come star.’