University of Virginia Library

SECTION V. Brake and Brier.

DE MINIMIS CURAT DEUS.

You say—“I am nobody, nought, a thing
That can never tell in the total count
When the Creditor sums the grand amount,
Any more than a straw or bonnet string;
I am little and ugly and mean and fat,
With a face that has not one curve of comeliness
And a general look of squalid homeliness—
Not a touch of the true soft sweet Divinity
To redeem a life that is false and flat,
But the barren charm of a cheap virginity.”
And you add, “I would rather be a buckle
Or the crumpled tag of a creased rosette
On the harlot shoe of the fair Babette,
And have bastard sons at my breast to suckle
(Just the little accidents by the way)
With a score of gilded lovers gay
And a fuller past, and a bodice rounding
With the milk of joy and a lot abounding;
I would chance the priest and his musty morals,
And the prudes and their infant bells and corals,
Or risk the wrath of an outraged Deity
In a possible Heaven of impossible capers
Like a vestry lit with its prim wax tapers,
To be myself in all spontaneity.”
And you murmur—“I loathe the stays and starch,
The pitiful whole and wretched portion
Of a birth like mine, a mere abortion;
That must creep and crawl on the millround march
Of an unknown nameless and empty toiling,
And sneak and snivel for fear of soiling
The proper dress with improper attitudes
Or the tiniest trick of a semblance prurient,
And be choked with the husks and paltry platitudes
When the soul rebels in a rage esurient;
While the rich, the beautiful, and the luckier
May kick up their heels in a bean-fed coltishness
In the stews and palace brothels muckier,
And from every trammel of every code
Break free (if they sacrifice to the mode)
And rejoice in a wanton wild revoltishness.”
But you think—“The measures are not the same
For the poor and the wealthy, the plain and pretty;
And the form that is like imprisoned flame
With its ardent eyes and the lashes jetty,
May sin and repent and souse in the gutter
And emerge once more to the sheet and candle
With a cultured lisp and a dainty stutter,
For another bath in another scandal;
“Though I,” you moan, “may not taste a particle
Of the sweets forbidden to pauper stuff
And the yard-round waist and the doubtful cuff,
On the features without a bit of devil
And ruled to one dreary common level,
But must keep the law in its lightest article;
And life like this is not worth living
In its sordid ruts and the sober chances
And want of skittish nude skirt-dances,
When the legs at least are among wild oats
And may show with assurance of forgiving
Their womanly shape under petticoats.
And to put aside the mere pomps and vanities,”
You argue, “and social names and nods
And fashion's fooling and golden gods
Or the becks and bows of padded popinjays,
Like the dummies in town—if you only shop in Jay's,
I know nothing yet of the real humanities.
No, I have not truly lived a second,
Though I ate and drank and secreted matter
And excreted waste and grew out and fatter,
As a cabbage does in its garden row
Unseen in the vulgar shade below—
But life is by other standards reckoned.”
You conclude—“I would rather walk in the street
And drink of the darkness and the sweet,
Than live in the light and get salvation
By a process of nought but vegetation;
For I long to indulge my fling and fill,
Whatever the priest may brag and bellow
Who has grown with vice prematurely yellow
Though he now denies the smallest latitude,
Of the lusts for which I would gladly grill
In a brimstone fire and give up Beatitude.
I have never felt my pulses beat
In the madness of unlawful blisses,
With the rapture and the stolen kisses
When the blood was full at its fever heat;
I have never throbbed with the thrill of Nature,
Or yielded the palpitating flesh
To the lips that stamped their legislature
On the conquered mouth that asked afresh;
I have never loosed, what they want to hide in us
By the figleaf texts of a narrow quorum
And a starved and straightlaced dead decorum,
The wild free breath of the power libidinous.
I would rather be a depowdered trull,
Than the saint with the rouge inside her skull.”
I know—you are wrong in your facts and fancies,
And the gold-dust on the butterfly's wing
Has a place and part in the splendid whole;
As well as the sceptre of a king,
Or the presbyter decked in his painted stole—
And Truth is more than your gilt romances.
Not a useless thing, not a cypher rivet
In the grinding wheels of the grand machinery,
Not an idle spray in the hedge of privet
That is splashed about your home in greenery;
Not a speck of rust on the two-penny pannikin
That cooks the broth of the freeborn gipsy,
Not a stain of dirt on the booted mannikin
In the sleek of his sober groove or tipsy;
But each is an item with its weight,
And helps to the balance of all freight.
For you have a settled office if I can't
And not to be spared, in your quiet nook
No less than the sages with vast outlook,
And the veriest trifle is significant.
Why, if the least little screw or cog
In the awful sweep of the wide world's jog
As it grumbles round, were to get awry
And be lost in the cosmic swirl and sway,
Or but for a moment went astray,
It would unseat God in Eternity.
There is not a superfluous mite nor may be
In the supreme synthesis of totality,
And the molecule and the mightiest mount
Have each a place in the last account,
And every hair of the newborn baby
Must be reckoned too in the fair finality.
For each, if deducted, would be missed
By something or some one and by God
Who has never an atom more or less
Than He wants, and leaves not a mouth unkissed
Nor a pea without its enswathing pod,
In the width of His guardian watchfulness.
And were you away from the pensive corner
Where you sit and mope an unmated mourner,
Then the Universe would be so much lacking
And worse for the silent chord—you give
In your measure strength and beauty's backing
And proportion, whereby the Sum may live.
In the grand orchestra, absent Nicolo
Creates a blank, though it's but the piccolo.
I know—that our earth is sick with trouble,
And the poor and weak bear more than double
Because they are such, and the evil rises
Secure and crowned and above the curse—
If it only keeps the keys and purse;
But I will not own, that it has the prizes.
For to suffer is the highest blessing
And a fate Divine, that we drop with peril
To the soul thus left to a struggling sterile—
It is good, and the Father's fond caressing.
To be let alone is an Ephraim lot,
While you fool and flourish and heed no issue
And riot at ease in the pleasant places
With flattering lips and false embraces,
Regardless all of the canker spot
And gather more of the adipose tissue.
To romp in a round of elegant dresses
And a whirl of the sweetest eyes and hair
That to riches are always bright and fair,
While you ride on the flood tide of successes;
If you rake in the gold and never fail
To glut the passions howe'er importunate,
And lack the point of a single nail
Of a single care—you are the unfortunate.
If you hold your gun or stick to the station
Though it be but a barnacle's inch of rest,
And fulfil the end of your own creation—
By scrubbing a floor or washing a platter,
Or growing a grass blade out of a clod,
And planting a pulse of mind in matter—
You are dutiful, wise, and doing your best
And one with the inmost Heart of God.
For he aids, if but by the merest decimal,
Who falls in line with the marching orders
And steps to the tune by the piper played,
Whether all in rags or with silk arrayed,
But inside the fence of his nature's borders—
And we need both great and infinitesimal.
O the humblest beat of the human love,
Not a ripple upon the tidal river
Which rolls the earth on its wondrous way,
Has yet its mark and immortal ray;
It flings, to the Central Source above
And the uttermost orb, a vital quiver.
Would you be a discord or rusty screw,
In the onward journey to ripe perfection
Which is building the House of God anew?
Shall the dust rebel at its resurrection?

BLOW THE TRUMP IN ZION.

MY GRANDFATHER.

LALOO.

THE DEAD MARCH OF THE LIVING.

We are marching, we are marching
Under heavens all overarching
But all pitiless and dumb,
In the winter cold and numb
And in summer pinched and parching;
Though the sparrow gets its crumb,
With a little drop of water
And a kind and cosy quarter
From the frost;
While we are tost
By the stony hearted street
To and fro
In want and woe,
With the tramp of countless feet.
And we stay not,
For we may not
Loiter upon Eden's borders,
Though the weakly
Ones fall meekly
Down and still beneath us lie;
For we have our marching orders
Marching though we drop and die,
Marching on
Though health is gone
And the early light that shone
Sweetly for the opening page
Of our early pilgrimage—
Though the pleasure in our toil
(When we started)
Which is only sin and soil
For the brow
And bosom now,
Has departed.
Marching on
Though friends are gone,
And our eyes can hardly con
Still the lesson we must learn,
While our hands do rarely earn
Just the pittance,
That is quittance
For the shadow that with blight
Enters not the rich man's door,
Darkens not the marble floor,
And at last is all our light.
Marching on,
If hope is gone
In the rags we scarce may don
With our tired and trembling fingers,
And the feeble fluttering breath—
Woe to him who turns or lingers,
When to lag behind is death!
Marching on
And marching on
Through the devil's Babylon,
Marching hence and marching hither,
But alas! we know not whither,
Up and down
And to and fro
In the many-palaced Town
Which on us does only frown,
Weary dreary must we go
Without pity, without rest,
Homeless, sleepless, and unblest;
With no bread
Except the stone,
With no bed
But earth alone.
Ah, if we indeed might stop
For a space
In some soft place
And learn some of Nature's grace
(Not in gutter or the shop)
In the sunshine, though we dim it
With our squalor, that may drop—
But, save death, can find no limit!
Dives with his gold and starch,
With his linen clean and fine
And his wine
Wetting lips that never parch,
With his pampered hounds and kine
Rests and revels while we march
Under heavens that overarch
All with equal shade and shine.
Flung like flotsam of the wave
On the shore
Which denies it of the store
That might save,
And repels it as before
To the grave—
Yes, to the grave.
We are marching, marching on,
Hope and health and living gone—
If we live,
Though we are dead
And our bodies only tread
Now the streets that grudge us bread,
And can nought but curses give;
We are ghosts and fugitive,
Ghosts of women, ghosts of men,
Ghosts of children—dead and gone,
From the jail and sweater's den,
From the paupers' cattle-pen,
Marching on
And marching on
Through this heartless Babylon;
Dwarfed and stunted,
Hooted, hunted
By the State that feasts its robbers
And its jobbers,
While it starves us
Down and carves us
With the scalpel of its scorn,
And protection
Not affection—
Wretches that were best unborn,
In our helplessness forlorn.
We are marching, while we can,
As we may,
The child and man
On the same old weary way
In one ragged disarray,
With no plan
But a brief and ghostly span,
As the ghosts of yesterday,
Just to keep still marching on,
(Where the hopes of childhood ran
And the lights of childhood shone),
Marching on
And marching on.
Outcasts in great Babylon.

BRIDE OF DEATH.

A STUDY IN GRAY.

THE BATTLE OF LIFE.

THE OLD FOGEY.

KING HODGE'S COMPLAINT.

THE SOULS OF THE CHILDREN.

THE ENGLISHMAN.

He washed his lips with honest beer,
As every Briton should,
Who loves his country and the cheer
Of health and hardihood.
He stood broad-breasted as a tower,
And imaged in his pipe
At every breath the pride of power—
His sentiments were ripe.
Frank was his face, with labour seamed
In lines, and sorrow some;
And in his open glances, gleamed
New empires yet to come.
Though rude and racy of the soil
And shaped by winter sky,
He showed beneath the tan of toil
A tender chivalry.
A trifle surly, if you will,
When babies come too fast;
A word, a buffet—he could strike,
And leave a manly mark—
Came ready to him, each alike
But never in the dark.
He honoured each high instinct much,
He drank of beauty springs;
And finding him, you seemed to touch
The fountain of all things.
And none could call that being poor,
Which mingled in its life
The fragrance of the mount and moor,
And breezy airs at strife.
The flowers and morning freshnesses
Were married with the flood
In him, and green wood impulses
Ran riot in his blood.
The rustling of the heather bell
And happy birds at play,
O'erflowed his limbs and with their spell
Made music of his day.
His sinewy arms had gathered strength
From many an iron storm,
Which hewed by tardy strokes at length
His gnarled and rugged form.
But thus he grew from Nature's mould
And by her broadening plan,
A thing of plastic clay and gold,
A true imperial man.

THE BUMBLEPUPPY.

I look around and see no rival fit
To break with me a lance or dance a measure
Of nudity and manliness, and grind
Beneath our cold conventionalities
With foot perfervid and indignant flight
Of fancy. I am young, I see, I know,
And never, never, never make mistakes;
Infallibility is mine and more,
The privilege of this assured estate,
Prerogative of callow beardlessness—
Modernity of mind. I am amazed
At my own grace and cleverness, I step
Aside from them and gaze and gaze enraptured
Before the wealth of this large littleness,
Which gathers of all times and chimes and cults
And dwells alike in gilded drawing-rooms
Or servants' halls, and equally at home
Romps with the housemaid or dear Duchesses
And steals a kiss from both impartially
With calm instructed ease and gentle might,
And grand indifference to the counter claims
Of pigwash and the thinnest bread and butter—
With educated armed neutrality.
In all the best societies I live,
The fast, the slow, the superfine, the mixed,
The white, the blue, the black, and suck the sweetness
From every one in turn. Adultery
And indiscretions of the softer sort
I love to dabble in, as children play
With dirt and danger; they admit of art
And big broad strokes, virilities, and strength
Restrained, the rich sub-possibilities
That prove the master's hand. I leave to fogeys
And frumps the feeble milk-and-water way.
Give me a canvas that will cover life,
And elbow-room and air; and, if you will,
From hospitals the flowers, and jeweled jests
Of titled dames who to the Conqueror
Ascend, with whiffs and splashes of the gutter
Thrown in to add a colour and a warmth
And raciness of soil and subject; I
Disdain no tool, not even the apprenticeship
Of others not so well equipt, but glad
To work with me to one illustrious end,
And clean my brushes—maids preferred—and share
The hopes and joys of commensality.

“RAGS AND BONES.”

HUNCHBACK AND ANGEL WINGS.

Hunchbacked and foul? And yet God made me so;
This piece of dark deformity
Came from the fulness of His loving Heart
And was His thought and of Himself a part,
As much as beauty's most bewitching show,
And is no mere enormity.
It has a meaning and a proper place
Somewhere in blue-rose gardens
Above, or in the bosom of broad earth,
And to the Maker's eye a secret grace;
If eye of other hardens,
And sees alone a land of utter dearth.
Last night I dreamed of pinions—
And up aloft I voyaged on great vans
That oared the purple space in proud content
And larger scope than any time-bound plans,
With Heaven my own dominions
And all the freedom of the firmament.
I am assured this very hunch of mine
Is one with bright and blest immortal things,
A sign of something better;
It will at last in unveiled glory shine
And blossom into sweet white angel wings,
When I have burst my fetter.
I know the thorn is an imperfect flower,
And shall by kindly tending
Have yet a goodly ending,
And even forget its nature and rude arms
Forsaking these for soft and other charms
And add its colour to some great Queen's bower.
The balance must be one and true and right,
For me just as for nations;
And I was carried in God's blessed womb
That bare me with a precious seed of light,
And I can read the joy beyond the tomb
In splendid compensations.
For earth is but a stage, and many still
Await the soul that travels forth and far
And heeds the horizon of no single star
Or constellation; but, a pilgrim rapt
By upward holy vision
And careless of the fleeting form or ill,
With feet of firm decision
Presses right onward through wide realms unmapt
And belted shade and iron brute bar and shoal,
In fierce and fiery chrisms
Over unplumbed abysms,
Straight to the grand inevitable goal.
Hunchback and foul? Nay, I am wondrous fair
To him who deeper looks than husk or skin,
And loves and hears the flutter
Of ardent unconjecturable hope
In golden courts and palaces within;
That steps a priest up the pure altar stair,
Baulked by a prison shutter
But shining out of its mean envelope,
With promise of all being
And infinite glad seeing.
The scaffolding of strnctures that will rise
Beyond our climbing fancies
Or transcendental truth of wildest dreams
In gentlest joyous fashion heavenly-wise,
Doth veil a moment unimagined gleams
Of uttermost romances;
But there the Temple, crowned and sure as fate,
And girt with many a column
In testimony solemn,
And builded by no touch of human hands
Unto its orbèd calmness consummate,
Inhabited by vernal
Airs and the Breath Eternal,
White, as of carven sunlight awful stands.

A LATE FLOWER.

THE WORLD'S DESIRE.

MIMNERMUS AND NANNO.

Say, Nanno, is it twice or thrice
A thousand years since we
Toyed with the trappings of the vice,
Which made thee softly free?
And did I act in human form,
Whilst thou upon the flute
Didst conquer every human storm
And win a world's repute?
And have I danced with purest joy
To hear thee sweetly play,
And were we ever girl and boy—
It seems but yesterday?
Yes, we have wandered wide and far
And drunk at other founts,
In many a dim and distant star
But by no fairer mounts.
And here we meet in aching dearth
To find a discrowned head,
And on a squalid homeless earth
We see our Hellas dead.
Ah, by her broken altars fling
Again thy breaking flute,
And for the shadow of a king
Let music now be mute.

SHOEBLACK BOY.

“SHE KNEW NOT HOW TO PLAY.”

IN A CIRCLE.

ROARING BILL

SWEARING SALLY.

BISMARCK.