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

Alone with nature's breathing things
We fashion care, or fashion mirth
In vague desire: some sense of spring's,
Some royal aspect of the earth,
Some cloud dissolved in pearly belt
Above the blue-coned mountain rise,
Can make the moment's day dream melt
In glories of the languid skies.

II

The serene domes of mounting lime,
The meadow's crest of dædal May,
And deep-eyed morning ere the time
Sleeking her curtain clouds away,
The lightning's glance, her brother's jar,
The crystal feel of hazy dawn,
The free bird floating like a star,
The triple zone in ether drawn—

III

Earth's royal aspects of delight,
They vary with the varying day,
From dawn to noon, from noon to night,
From birth to ripeness and decay.
The spirit opens largest eyes
And ponders meanings dim and clear:
Too vast the mighty garden lies:
He takes a blossom there and here.

IV

He feels the great world shift and roll
Thro' change and spaces, night and day:
And in the orbit of his soul
He feels a law: he must obey.
He sees the giant rivers grind
The weather'd alp-face evermore;
Behind him wrecks of hand and mind
Are lighted by the sun before.

V

He sees the breathing vital whole,
And province under province set
In nature, limitless control
And plastic freedom frëer yet.
He seeks the import of Before
To reach the sequel of Again:
He finds the engine in the ore,
And reads the river in the main.

VI

He sees creation's boundless plan:
“Whence cometh and where goeth he?”
That riddle heritage of man,
With fearfullest immensity,
Dashes in torture his delight:
He finds no answer any way,
No answer in the rushing light,
No answer in the shrine of day.

VII

No constant rule of sun or dark,
But endless alternation sways
His little planet: he can mark
His heart, now like November days
Now borne on gauzy spirit wing,
As changeful as the shatter'd grays,
Where cloudy isles of evening cling
To take the sun-shape, phase to phase.

VIII

The narrow pleasures of his kind
Enthral his fancy: not for long:
The stern reaction of the mind,
The vast ideal vaguely strong,
Can make him loathe what pleased before,
Can shred his flimsy sensual creeds:
He turns to nature to explore
The glory of her days and deeds.

IX

He climbs the silent mountain-brow
To drink the pure light, ere it reach
The valley: in severest snow
The peaks are slendered each on each,
As like a sound the mighty light
Comes up: and fountain horns of morn
Shatter in radiant drifts, and bright
The speary opals branch the dawn.

X

And, nature's old completeness, day
Sets out upon her order'd track:
A spirit instinct helms her way
And steers her into starlight back.
Erewhile she rose in fire and might,
And laugh'd to tread with vivid feet
Among the clouds: from that delight
She falters now in stormy sleet.

XI

The shadowy process wraps the wolds:
The purple splendour deepens, there
The forest quails within the folds
Of crisp magnetic cloud: and fair
The eery play of beam and blast
That tears the pinewood to its core,
Or calls the torrent surges past
To shred the frigate on the shore.

XII

Till rolling back its cloudy fear
The tempest rises like a veil.
Beyond, the lands are crystal-clear,
Within is drift of crumbling hail.
The storm becomes a cloud: no stain
Left in large azure else; but new
And steaming on the sleepy plain
Lies noon in wreaths of fiery blue.

XIII

The branchy mountains like a crown
Impend upon the lighted seas:
The vapour from a latent town
Strikes up and sharpens by degrees
Its moulded plumes: a noise of hives
Meridian-eager from her towers
Touches the wind, and hardly lives
Across the languid league of flowers.

XIV

A change: the noon descends to shake
A veiny glory thro' the leaves:
The vivid martin strikes the lake:
The country, like a wood of sheaves,
Is bordered round the cup-like mere:
Green-hoary alders near the wheat
Move their crisp glister: shade and clear
Shed changes on the water sheet.

XV

Like odorous fire the soughing grain
In one continuous upland swells:
The splendour tingles on the chain
Of ridgey mountain citadels:
Beneath are forests, cloud between,
And heaved from cloud three silent spires:
Rose-clouded belt on belt is seen,
A pavement pierced with starting fires.

XVI

The west lies crimson'd thro' and thro':
The echo-warmth about the east
Flush'd up to meet it: till the blue
Of Zenith, even to the least
Of every cloudy gauzy wreath,
That flakes and shores the utmost deep,
Becomes a tender rose to breathe
New colour on from steep to steep.

XVII

The rival of the evening star,
One cloudlet burns on ether pale.
Hear in the windless coppice far
The ring-dove's five-divided wail.
The lamb bleats low in mountain fold:
And, mellowing all the forest ground,
The sun-globe half is radiate gold,
And half a rayless vapour-round.

XVIII

Or when the enormous void appears,
Where autumn midnight brightens fast
The torches of her myriad spheres,
Colossal planets of the vast,
Slow moons and moony satellite,
Dense seeds of dimmer worlds in air,
The meteors churning thro' the height,
To take their lofty pastime there.

XIX

So noon and shade, and day and night,
Abashed by heaven and earth and sea,
Man wonders that a thing so light,
Weak, vain, and shorn of strength, as he,
Should come to know himself and think;
And, gaining on the brute a throne,
Ascend to God the nearest link,
And reap the mighty world alone.

XX

The trivial brook, that barely wets
Her pebbles, types not less the voice
Of something in himself than jets
Of roaring steam and arctic ice.
He sees himself in soughing woods,
He hears himself on winds that pass,
And nature in her myriad moods
Reflects his fancies as a glass.