The Collected Poems of Lord De Tabley :: :: University of Virginia Library

The crocus, snow-drop, primrose, violet,
Outrun their tardy brethren to foretell
The icy tyrant's limit, and the swell
Of buds, the green dilation sudden-set

Between the forest arch an arching net,
Voiced with the eloquence of secret throats,
Vocal by long suspense, in tremulous notes
Calling electric Spring. She, nebulous yet,

Steams up, a sleepy vapour, from the rills
Soughing their ice like broken glass aside
Under the warm wind's mouth. Not less her craft

Strives at the heart of frozen loams, and fills
The pores of nature with her plastic tide
From the Alp blossom to the miner's shaft.

II

Is it because the summer is so nigh
That thou, crush'd heart, hast caught some mystic glow?
Why, numb in tears, dost thou disdain reply,
Changed from the level empire of thy woe?

As some poor moth with languid creeping wings,
How faded-torn the burnish of thy prime,
How mean thy future yoked with meanest things,
An heir of desolation to all time.

All gentle things with use grow false and sour,
The heart is sour when years the cheek deform,
The wavering planet of the lovers' bower
Burns out the constellation of the storm,—

And yet one year of kindness from those eyes
Would cancel all the wrong time multiplies.

III

Why should we loiter on this wavering sand,
Training the world at last to hear our will:
Why should we thrust our foreheads to its brand
And kneel and burn our abject incense still,

Serving to rule, dissembling to fulfil?
Let this world-idol grin with idiot shape:
Let the wise crowd, in wrestling fervour shrill,
Pray to the measured shadow of this ape,

And strangle Hope with each accursed prayer.
Then, to their wish, like birds that concourse flows,
One, a spring thrush, the upmost twig has bent
And cracks his heart with piping to the air:

Some, for worm banquet stalk as strutting crows
Behind the furrows of world government.

IV

Rosy delight that changest day by day
From dearest growing to a dearer favour,
Whom Thought and Sinew bondsmen to obey,
Slave out thy least command and may not waver.

My recompense and zenith of reward,
Bourn of all effort, thought behind all thinking,
Regent of sleep and centre of regard
Whereon the wakeful soul will pore unshrinking.

I cannot count the phases of this love,
Measure its growth or vindicate its reason.
I cannot doubt; the very smile that wove
My soul with love withholds me from love's treason.

I only know thou art my best delight,
Food of sweet thoughts and sum of all things bright.

V

When the day glooms my passion is at rest,
For thou hast nothing of the gloomy hour.
But when the face of day is gaudy dressed,
I trace thee imaged in each summer flower.

I think the earth is glorious, and I know
We twain might pace it under glorious stars:
To miss this crown of joy, my chiefest woe
New rankles sickly thought's half-healing scars.

Is the sky soft, and does the resting sun
Glow from the undercloud till wood and sky
Are glory-mantled? Am I not alone?
Let her be near and let the world go by,

Pass on with curious ears, and scornful eyes,
Or listless looks, a cankered heart's disguise.

VI

I look'd across the river for the morn.
The clouds came not, the air was very slow,
Till on the region past an underglow
And scorch'd the glimmering mantle of the dawn.

Then one clear star set in a branch of rose
Drew in before the river of bold light,
Foiling the ragged clouds to left and right,
To sort a crystal lake of raying glows.

I could not rest; a wilderness of mind
Was strong within me; love and shame and thought
Of days behind, at that one instant caught
To reason from the mental store-house blind.

Last thou, fair lily head, beyond night's fall
Steep'd in warm sleep, sweet central wish of all!

VII

I question'd with the amber daffodils,
Sheeting the floors of April, how she fared;
Where king-cup buds glowed out between the rills
And celandine in wide gold beadlets glared.

By pastured brows and swelling hedge-row bowers
From crumpled leaves the primrose bunches slip,
My hot face roll'd in their faint-scented flowers,
I dreamt her rich cheek rested on my lip.

All weird sensations of the fervent prime
Were like great harmonies, whose touch could move
The glow of gracious impulse: thought and time
Renewing love with life and life with love.

When this old world new-born puts glories on,
I cannot think thou never wilt be won.

VIII

If ever, in the waste of time unborn,
An hour shall come when thou shalt curse our meeting;
When ruin'd Love in ashes of self-scorn
Smiles a hard smile his own confusion greeting;

An hour when Faith is broken on the wheel,
And Hope, self-strangled in her own despair,
Sees Memory grinding down with iron heel
The small flower-faces that would spring elsewhere;

If then, perchance, with dull and altered eyes,
Thou comest to me and sayest “lo thy deed,
The temple thou hast shaken—how it lies
Wasted and bare and broken round with weed”—

Ah, Love—one fault was ours, the fault of change;
The rest is pure; this poison left us strange.

IX

My heart is vext with this fantastic fear,—
Had I been born too soon or far away,
Then had I never known thy beauty, dear,
And thou hadst spent on others all thy May.

The idle thought can freeze an idle brain
Faint at imagined loss of such dear prize;
I pore upon the slender chance again,
That taught me all the meaning of those eyes.

But creeps a whisper with a treason tongue—
Had'st never sunn'd beneath this maiden's glance
Another Love thou hadst as madly sung,
For Love is certain but the loved one chance.

Deject and doubtful thus I forge quaint fear,
But question little, Love, when thou art near.

X

O thou rich vision, thou hast plunged this day
After thy dreaming upon discontent,
Yearnings that search a rack of dreams, or pray
For clouds, or track sweet music where it went.

For even if she would stoop, as in the dream
Whose sweetness leaves an odour round my brain,
Would I accept the offering, though a beam
Of heaven disclosed to flood my sense again?

Nay; for the close of that tumultuous joy,
Slain with itself, should make me love her less,
Cankering the perfect bloom with mean employ,
Finding a sequel of unworthiness,

In that which cannot taint and cannot sin,
Purer than aught beside this old world in.

XI

Sweet, thou art gone and I must write a word
To tell how I have loved thee, and how clear
The memory of thy presence shall record
Thy dearest eyes thro' many a lapsing year,

The sweetest face that ever maiden wore,
The kind true heart, the nameless sympathy,
Perfect of flaw rich youth in all its store—
Dear little thing, I love thee fixedly.

Fair little form, how precious every fold
Of thy grey dress: each glancing shade how sweet
Of movement, from the ringlet-woof of gold
To those dear steps and tiny-printed feet.

Ah, Love, I love thee so, yet my weak praise
Thinks with full heart, but speaks in old love-lays.

XII

Record is nothing, and the hero great
Without it; the vitality of fame
Is more than monument or fading state
That leaves us but the echo of a name.

Rumour, imperial mistress of the time,
Is slandered where she feigns no specious lies,
Caters no reticence of cringing rhyme,
To blow her dust-cloud full on unborn eyes—

The glory of the shows of gilded shields,
Wild music, fluttering blazons,—and 'tis all.
Lonely the dead men stare on battlefields,—
Can glory reach them now tho' clarions call?

Some shadow of their onset's broken gleam
May yet outlast the pageant and the dream.

XIII

Raise thro' the tempest thine immortal eyes,
When the sere earth is shaken like a wave;
When the sick racking trees with anguish sighs
Tear up their spurry fastenings, as they rave,

Branches all wild for aidance. Gird the cloud,
Child of the equinox! unfold thy wings;
Thy brows are moist, and thy fierce hands are loud
Snapping the crowns of ancient forest-kings.

The pines upon the pine-ridge crash and slide,
The cataract has caught them, in a smoke
Of rain and mountain-waters: near and wide
The double mountain-voice in terror woke.

Crash on, frail planet, sad for aye to me;
Sad as my faltering life whirl'd on with thee.

XIV

She came, the fire of heaven upon her brow,
And dared not glance upon the face of day
With her meek eyes, as shrinking from the glow
Of this rough world, a maiden pure alway.

And I who held this miracle of shadows,
This pearl of fancy, precious as the dreams
Of angels rested in their violet meadows—
Have known her smiles for lying mirage gleams:

And I who saw no taint in this pure snow
Too white to harbour near the alien ground,
Have touched the surface veil and bared below
The poisoned lees of all dishonour found—

And, trustless where I trusted, flaunt in scorn
For trustful men my broken wings forlorn.

XV

Lives that are patch'd of trifles have no thread
Of purpose, aimless as the days of birds,
Spending in no prevision deed and words,
Weaklings of chance; as troops without a head

That pause and fear and vanish, when instead
These same had crush'd the phalanx in its war,
Or torn the bastion'd rampant rock and bar
And forc'd the very cope of hardihead—

The paltriness of lives with no beyond,
Days roll to months and months result in years,
The man no inch the nobler as he nears

His problem's end, that puts him from his bond
With nature, and no reverence on his wane,
His grave forgetful silence or disdain.

XVI

If in the mental man, as with his growth,
Time alters and repairs with silent feet,
And we are fools of Circumstance the cheat,
Or drugg'd beneath the hemlock wine of Sloth.

We give the fickle years a slavish troth,
Withholding not the soul's stability
Ring'd round and fenced from mutability.
One stream takes all the willing and the loth.

Go, barren plea perpetual to despair;
Inaction numbs the freshness of the powers,
Leaves the disease and taints the remedy;

Better to dare and fail than not to dare;
Rest is unrest that drowses jostling hours,
Poison sweet sleep that lets occasion by.