The Poetical Works of David Gray :: :: University of Virginia Library

Enter, scared mortal! and in awe behold
The chancel of a dying poet's mind,
Hung round, ah! not adorned, with pictures bold
And quaint, but roughly touched for the refined.
The chancel not the charnel house! For I
To God have raised a shrine immaculate
Therein, whereon His name to glorify,
And daily mercies meekly celebrate.
So in, scared breather! here no hint of death—
Skull or cross-bones suggesting sceptic fear;
Yea rather calmer beauty, purer breath
Inhaled from a diviner atmosphere.

I

If it must be; if it must be, O God!
That I die young, and make no further moans
That, underneath the unrespective sod,
In unescutcheoned privacy, my bones
Shall crumble soon,—then give me strength to bear
The last convulsive throe of too sweet breath!
I tremble from the edge of life, to dare
The dark and fatal leap, having no faith,
No glorious yearning for the Apocalypse;
But, like a child that in the night-time cries
For light, I cry; forgetting the eclipse
Of knowledge and our human destinies.
O peevish and uncertain soul! obey
The law of life in patience till the Day.

II

“Whom the gods love die young.” The thought is old;
And yet it soothed the sweet Athenian mind.
I take it with all pleasure, overbold,
Perhaps, yet to its virtue much inclined
By an inherent love for what is fair.
This is the utter poetry of woe—
That the bright-flashing gods should cure despair
By love, and make youth precious here below.
I die, being young; and, dying, could become
A pagan, with the tender Grecian trust.
Let death, the fell anatomy, benumb
The hand that writes, and fill my mouth with dust—
Chant no funereal theme, but, with a choral
Hymn, O ye mourners! hail immortal youth auroral!

III

With the tear-worthy four, consumption killed
In youthful prime, before the nebulous mind
Had its symmetric shapeliness defined,
Had its transcendent destiny fulfilled.—
May future ages grant me gracious room,
With Pollok, in the voiceless solitude
Finding his holiest rapture, happiest mood;
Poor White for ever poring o'er the tomb;
With Keats, whose lucid fancy mounting far
Saw heaven as an intenser, a more keen
Redintegration of the Beauty seen
And felt by all the breathers on this star;
With gentle Bruce, flinging melodious blame
Upon the Future for an uncompleted name.

IV

Oh many a time with Ovid have I borne
My father's vain, yet well-meant reprimand,
To leave the sweet-air'd, clover-purpled land
Of rhyme—its Lares loftily forlorn,
With all their pure humanities unworn—
To batten on the bare Theologies!
To quench a glory lighted at the skies,
Fed on one essence with the silver morn,
Were of all blasphemies the most insane.
So deeplier given to the delicious spell
I clung to thee, heart-soothing Poesy!
Now on a sick-bed rack'd with arrowy pain
I lift white hands of gratitude, and cry,
Spirit of God in Milton! was it well?

V

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
That drop is my death-warrant: I must die.
Poor meagre life is mine, meagre and poor!
Rather a piece of childhood thrown away;
An adumbration faint; the overture
To stifled music; year that ends in May;
The sweet beginning of a tale unknown;
A dream unspoken; promise unfulfilled;
A morning with no noon, a rose unblown—
All its deep rich vermilion crushed and killed
I' th' bud by frost:—Thus in false fear I cried,
Forgetting that to abolish death Christ died.

VI

Sweetly, my mother! Go not yet away—
I have not told my story. Oh, not yet,
With the fair past before me, can I lay
My cheek upon the pillow to forget.
O sweet, fair past, my twenty years of youth
Thus thrown away, not fashioning a man;
But fashioning a memory, forsooth!
More feminine than follower of Pan.
O God! let me not die for years and more!
Fulfil Thyself, and I will live then surely
Longer than a mere childhood. Now heart-sore,
Weary, with being weary—weary, purely.
In dying, mother, I can find no pleasure
Except in being near thee without measure.

VII

Hew Atlas for my monument; upraise
A pyramid for my tomb, that, undestroyed
By rank, oblivion, and the hungry void,
My name shall echo through prospective days.
O careless conqueror! cold, abysmal grave!
Is it not sad—is it not sad, my heart—
To smother young ambition, and depart
Unhonoured and unwilling, like death's slave?
No rare immortal remnant of my thought
Embalms my life; no poem, firmly reared
Against the shock of time, ignobly feared—
But all my life's progression come to nought.
Hew Atlas! build a pyramid in a plain!
Oh, cool the fever burning in my brain!

VIII

From this entangling labyrinthine maze
Of doctrine, creed, and theory; from vague
Vain speculations; the detested plague
Of spiritual pride, and vile affrays
Sectarian, good Lord, deliver me!
Nature! thy placid monitory glory
Shines uninterrogated, while the story
Goes round of this and that theology,
This creed, and that, till patience close the list.
Once more on Carronben's wind-shrilling height
To sit in sovereign solitude, and quite
Forget the hollow world—a pantheist
Beyond Bonaventura! This were cheer
Passing the tedious tale of shallow pulpiteer.

IX

A vale of tears, a wilderness of woe,
A sad unmeaning mystery of strife;
Reason with Passion strives, and Feeling ever
Battles with Conscience, clear eyed arbiter.
Thus spake I in sad mood not long ago,
To my dear father, of this human life,
Its jars and phantasies. Soft answered he,
With soul of love strong as a mountain river:
We make ourselves—Son, you are what you are
Neither by fate nor providence nor cause
External: all unformed humanity
Waiteth the stamp of individual laws;
And as you love and act, the plastic spirit
Doth the impression evermore inherit.

X

Last Autumn we were four, and travelled far
With Phœbe in her golden plenilune,
O'er stubble-fields where sheaves of harvest boon
Stood slanted. Many a clear and stedfast star
Twinkled its radiance thro' crisp-leaved beeches,
Over the farm to which, with snatches rare
Of ancient ballads, songs, and saucy speeches,
He hurried, happy mad. Then each had there
A dove-eyed sister pining for him, four
Fair ladies legacied with loveliness,
Chaste as a group of stars, or lilies blown
In rural nunnery. O God! Thy sore
Strange ways expound. Two to the grave have gone
Without apparent reason more or less.

XI

Now,while the long-delaying ash assumes
The delicate April green, and, loud and clear,
Through the cool, yellow, mellow twilight glooms,
The thrush's song enchants the captive ear;
Now, while a shower is pleasant in the falling,
Stirring the still perfume that wakes around;
Now, that doves mourn, and from the distance calling,
The cuckoo answers, with a sovereign sound,—
Come, with thy native heart, O true and tried!
But leave all books; for what with converse high,
Flavoured with Attic wit, the time shall glide
On smoothly, as a river floweth by,
Or as on stately pinion, through the grey
Evening, the culver cuts his liquid way.

XII

Why are all fair things at their death the fairest?
Beauty the beautifullest in decay?
Why doth rich sunset clothe each closing day
With ever-new apparelling the rarest?
Why are the sweetest melodies all born
Of pain and sorrow? Mourneth not the dove,
In the green forest gloom, an absent love?
Leaning her breast against that cruel thorn,
Doth not the nightingale, poor bird, complain
And integrate her uncontrollable woe
To such perfection, that to hear is pain?
Thus, Sorrow and Death—alone realities—
Sweeten their ministration, and bestow
On troublous life a relish of the skies!

XIII

And, well-belovëd, is this all, this all?
Gone, like a vapour which the potent morn
Kills, and in killing glorifies! I call
Through the lone night for thee, my dear first-born
Soul-fellow! but my heart vibrates in vain.
Ah! well I know, and often fancy forms
The weather-blown churchyard where thou art lain—
The churchyard whistling to the frequent storms.
But down the valley, by the river side,
Huge walnut-trees—bronze-foliaged, motionless
As leaves of metal—in their shadows hide
Warm nests, low music, and true tenderness.
But thou, betrothed! art far from me, from me.
O heart! be merciful—I loved him utterly.

XIV

Father! when I have passed, with deathly swoon,
Into the ghost-world, immaterial, dim,
O may nor time nor circumstance dislimn
My image from thy memory, as noon
Steals from the fainting bloom the cooling dew!
Like flower, itself completing bud and bell,
In lonely thicket, be thy sorrow true,
And in expression secret. Worse than hell
To see the grave hypocrisy—to hear
The crocodilian sighs of summer friends
Outraging grief's assuasive, holy ends!
But thou art faithful, father, and sincere;
And in thy brain the love of me shall dwell
Like the memorial music in the curved sea-shell.

XV

From my sick-bed gazing upon the west,
Where all the bright effulgencies of day
Lay steeped in sunless vapours, raw and gray,—
Herein (methought) is mournfully exprest
The end of false ambitions, sullen doom
Of my brave hopes, Promethean desires:
Barren and perfumeless, my name expires
Like summer-day setting in joyless gloom.
Yet faint I not in sceptical dismay,
Upheld by the belief that all pure thought
Is deathless, perfect: that the truths out-wrought
By the laborious mind cannot decay,
Being evolutions of that Sovereign Mind
Akin to man's; yet orbed, exhaustless, undefined.

XVI

The daisy-flower is to the summer sweet,
Though utterly unknown it live and die;
The spheral harmony were incomplete
Did the dew'd laverock mount no more the sky,
Because her music's linkëd sorcery
Bewitched no mortal heart to heavenly mood.
This is the law of nature, that the deed
Should dedicate its excellence to God,
And in so doing find sufficient meed.
Then why should I make these heart-burning cries,
In sickly rhyme with morbid feeling rife,
For fame and temporal felicities?
Forgetting that in holy labour lies
The scholarship severe of human life.

XVII

O God, it is a terrible thing to die
Into the inextinguishable life;
To leave this known world with a feeble cry,
All its poor jarring and ignoble strife.
O that some shadowy spectre would disclose
The Future, and the soul's confineless hunger
Satisfy with some knowledge of repose!
For here the lust of avarice waxeth stronger,
Making life hateful; youth alone is true,
Full of a glorious self-forgetfulness:
Better to die inhabiting the new
Kingdom of faith and promise, and confess,
Even in the agony and last eclipse,
Some revelation of the Apocalypse!

XVIII

Wise in his day that heathen emperor,
To whom, each morrow, came a slave, and cried—
“Philip, remember thou must die;” no more.
To me such daily voice were misapplied—
Disease guests with me; and each cough, or cramp,
Or aching, like the Macedonian slave,
Is my memento mori. 'Tis the stamp
Of God's true life to be in dying brave.
“I fear not death, but dying” —not the long
Hereafter, sweetened by immortal love;
But the quick, terrible last breath—the strong
Convulsion. Oh, my Lord of breath above!
Grant me a quiet end, in easeful rest—
A sweet removal, on my mother's breast.

XIX

October's gold is dim—the forests rot,
The weary rain falls ceaseless, while the day
Is wrapp'd in damp. In mire of village way
The hedge-row leaves are stamp'd, and, all forgot,
The broodless nest sits visible in the thorn.
Autumn, among her drooping marigolds,
Weeps all her garnered sheaves, and empty folds,
And dripping orchards—plundered and forlorn.
The season is a dead one, and I die!
No more, no more for me the spring shall make
A resurrection in the earth and take
The death from out her heart—O God, I die!
The cold throat-mist creeps nearer, till I breathe
Corruption. Drop, stark night, upon my death!

XX

Die down, O dismal day! and let me live.
And come, blue deeps! magnificently strewn
With coloured clouds—large, light, and fugitive—
By upper winds through pompous motions blown.
Now it is death in life—a vapour dense
Creeps round my window till I cannot see
The far snow-shining mountains, and the glens
Shagging the mountain-tops. O God! make free
This barren, shackled earth, so deadly cold—
Breathe gently forth Thy spring, till winter flies
In rude amazement, fearful and yet bold,
While she performs her custom'd charities.
I weigh the loaded hours till life is bare—
O God! for one clear day, a snowdrop, and sweet air!

XXI

Sometimes, when sunshine and blue sky prevail—
When spent winds sleep, and, from the budding larch,
Small birds, with incomplete, vague sweetness, hail
The unconfirmed, yet quickening life of March,—
Then say I to myself, half-eased of care,
Toying with hope as with a maiden's token—
“This glorious, invisible fresh air
Will clear my blood till the disease be broken.”
But slowly, from the wild and infinite west,
Up-sails a cloud, full-charged with bitter sleet.
The omen gives my spirit deep unrest;
I fling aside the hope, as indiscreet—
A false enchantment, treacherous and fair—
And sink into my habit of despair.

XXII

O winter! wilt thou never, never go?
O Summer! but I weary for thy coming;
Longing once more to hear the Luggie flow,
And frugal bees laboriously humming.
Now, the east wind diseases the infirm,
And I must crouch in corners from rough weather.
Sometimes a winter sunset is a charm—
When the fired clouds, compacted, blaze together,
And the large sun dips, red, behind the hills.
I, from my window, can behold this pleasure;
And the eternal moon, what time she fills
Her orb with argent, treading a soft measure,
With queenly motion of a bridal mood,
Through the white spaces of infinitude.

XXIII

Oh, beautiful moon! Oh, beautiful moon! again
Thou persecutest me until I bend
My brow, and soothe the aching of my brain.
I cannot see what handmaidens attend
Thy silver passage as the heaven clears;
For, like a slender mist, a sweet vexation
Works in my heart, till the impulsive tears
Confess the bitter pain of adoration.
Oh, too, too beautiful moon! lift the white shell
Of thy soft splendour through the shining air!
I own the magic power, the witching spell,
And, blinded by thy beauty, call thee fair!
Alas! not often now thy silver horn
Shall me delight with dreams and mystic love forlorn!

XXIV

'Tis April, yet the wind retains its tooth.
I cannot venture in the biting air,
But sit and feign wild trash, and dreams uncouth,
“Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair.”
And when the day has howled itself to sleep,
The lamp is lighted in my little room;
And lowly, as the tender lapwings creep,
Comes my own mother, with her love's perfume.
O living sons with living mothers! learn
Their worth, and use them gently, with no chiding;
For youth, I know, is quick; of temper stern
Sometimes; and apt to blunder without guiding.
So was I long, but now I see her move,
Transfigured in the radiant mist of love.

XXV

Lying awake at holy eventide,
While in clear mournfulness the throstle's hymn
Hushes the night, and the great west, grown dim,
Laments the sunset's evanescent pride:
Lo! I behold an orb of silver brightly
Grow from the fringe of sunset, like a dream
From Thought's severe infinitude, and nightly
Show forth God's glory in its sacred gleam.
Ah, Hesper! maidenliest star that ere
Twinkled in firmament! cool gloaming's prime
Cheerer, whose fairness maketh wondrous fair
Old pastorals, and the Spenserian rhyme:—
Thy soft seduction doth my soul enthral
Like music, with a dying, dying fall!

XXVI

There are three bonnie Scottish melodies,
So native to the music of my soul,
That of its humours they seem prophecies.
The ravishment of Chaucer was less whole,
Less perfect, when the April nightingale
Let itself in upon him. Surely, Lord!
Before whom psaltery and clarichord,
Concentual with saintly song, prevail,
There lurks some subtle sorcery, to Thee
And heaven akin, in each woe-burning air!
Land of the Leal, and Bonnie Bessie Lee,
And Home, sweet Home, the lilt of love's despair.
Now, in remembrance even, the feelings speak,
For lo! a shower of grace is on my cheek.

XXVII

“Thou art wearin' awa', Jean,
Like snaw when it's thaw, Jean;
Thou art wearin' awa'
To the land o' the leal.”

O the impassable sorrow, mother mine!
Of the sweet, mournful air which, clear and well,
For me thou singest! Never the divine
Mahomedan harper, famous Israfel,
Such rich enchanting luxury of woe
Elicited from all his golden strings!
Therefore, dear singer sad! chant clear, and low,
And lovingly, the bard's imaginings,
O poet unknown! conning thy verses o'er
In lone, dim places, sorrowfully sweet;
And O musician! touching the quick core
Of pity, when thy skilful closes meet—
My tears confess your witchery as they flow,
Since I, too, wear away like the unenduring snow.

XXVIII

Uplift in unparticipated night
Oh indefinable Being! far retired
From mortal ken in uncreated light:
While demonstrating glories unacquired
When shall the wavering sciences evolve
The infinite secret, Thee? What mind shall scan
The tenour of Thy workmanship, or solve
The dark, perplexing destiny of man?
Oh! in the hereafter border-land of wonder,
Shall the proud world's inveterate tale be told,
The curtain of all mysteries torn asunder,
The cerements from the living soul unrolled?
Impatient questioner, soon, soon shall death
Reveal to thee these dim phantasmata of faith.

XXIX

And thus proceeds the mode of human life
From mystery to mystery again;
From God to God, thro' grandeur, grief, and strife,
A hurried plunge into the dark inane
Whence we had lately sprung. And is't for ever?
Ah! sense is blind beyond the gaping clay,
And all the eyes of faith can see it never.
We know the bright-haired sun will bring the day,
Like glorious book of silent prophecy;
Majestic night assume her starry throne;
The wondrous seasons come and go: but we
Die, unto mortal ken for ever gone.
Who shall pry further? who shall kindle light
In the dread bosom of the infinite?

XXX

O thou of purer eyes than to behold
Uncleanness! sift my soul, removing all
Strange thoughts, imaginings fantastical,
Iniquitous allurements manifold.
Make it into a spiritual ark; abode
Severely sacred, perfumed, sanctified,
Werein the Prince of Purities may abide—
The holy and eternal Spirit of God.
The gross, adhesive loathsomeness of sin,
Give me to see. Yet, O far more, far more,
That beautiful purity which the saints adore
In a consummate Paradise within
The Veil,—O Lord, upon my soul bestow,
An earnest of that purity here below.

This is a saying of Socrates.