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

I think it left me when the sun was great.
I cannot tell the very point of time
When the cure wrought and I was free of this.
What drave it from me less and least I know.
Was it some word compelling from without,
Some royal accent potent to expel
This tribe of thing? It rent my soul, and fled,
Upon the waste wind, down the void. Who knows?
Let me consider, I had no pain then.
Only a kind of echo-pain remained.
And yet my soul ached with the loss of this,
My old abhorrence. It had wrought its roots
And worked its fibres round my nature so,
That I was lost without the thing I loathed;
Painless, I seemed to hanker for old pain;
To crave a presence necessary long
Thro' custom, rather than that new unrest
Which had replaced the banished agony.

Well, it was gone at last and plucked away.
The day it went resembled other days
So much. The latest conflict with the thing
Was so like others, where I always sank

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Worsted. I thought as little it would go,
As that the sun would blacken his round orb.
I had grown feebler every day with it,
Cared, strove, and hated less, when like a clap
My soul was empty and the spirit gone.

Strangely I rose, felt myself sound and free,
But so belated; as a man that dreams,
And knows that he is dreaming in a land
Of phantoms, and he thinks; “My dream must break
This moment or the next. I will lie still
And only watch. All here is smoke, and dream.”
So nature seemed a filmy veil of sleep,
The hills delusion, the firm fields as mist,
The cloud-cones vapour, mirage the bright woods.
The languor and the vacancy of change
Replaced the antagonistic element,
That gave a substance to my life erewhile,
And stung my native energies from sleep,
To war against this noxious demon's way
And push of still encroaching filaments.
All this indeed had found most sudden end.
The ferment as by miracle withdrew.
The tyranny was gone and left no wound.
The agony's vibration smoothed itself
To apathetic calm. And I remained
A painless naked thing without a soul.

Then I fared forth alone beneath the skies
Without a will to guide me on my way,
In automatic motion like a drift;
Or as a feather teased by some side-breeze
Athwart the master-current of the wind.
So nerveless and chaotic was my life.

My stagnant heart was empty save of fear.
A little eddying influx strangely stirred
Of barren dread beneath my barren heart.
Oh, but indeed this thing is pitiful,
When fear, in dearth of any purpose, rules;
When the man, wretched beyond wretchedness,
Has still the primal instinct left of fear;

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Why should he fear, poor brute? yet he fears still.
And this ignoble thing usurps the seat
Of purpose, and her vacant function fills,
And, save one dreamy fear, the man is nought.

After this fashion I fared aimless then;
The sting that stood for purpose drave me on.
I wound along the roots of battered crags,
Arid as death; and jumbled as a dream
Of ruin driving thro' a sick man's brain,
Who doubts and wearies on his fevered bed.
Then, as I clomb, rose yawning heights, abrupt,
Broken in flanks and ledges of great flags,
Immeasurable levels of smooth death;
Tilted in pinnacles among the clouds,
Where the hill-raven faltered in the mist.
My mood was calmer in these solitudes,
I loathed to look upon the valley world,
Fat, with slow smoke, grey crowded homes, and squares
Of meadow, rank with juicy undermath,
And languid cropping kine dwarfed into bees;
And the faint sprinkle of the water-wheels,
And each mill-torrent's shudder-gleam below.
Weary was I of all my fellows' ways;
And lonely on the summits I was best.
Sometimes a peat-tarn capped the giant chain;
A waste of ice, pale grass, and sodden sedge
And rotten fangs of rush; whose trembling floor
Festered in moss, and darkened to decay.
Yet here I shuddered, as the star-time came,
To see the evil spirits of the fen
Trimming their lamps to lure me. And I sighed,
Knowing how fiends had marred the under vales,
To find new demons herded in the snows
Up in the eternal solitudes of God,
Therefore I wandered on, and still no peace:
And still I paced the uplands dry and drear.
And still the curse stung burning at my heart.

Then to myself I spake and spake with heed,—
The isolation and the restless feet
Of Cain are mine for always. Shall I choose
To roam for ever, with no living voice
Save mine own sighing, hear no word of love?
Love, tho' a lie on lying lips, still sweet—

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To wander till God blind me and I cease.
This is the desolation of the grave.
My pain erewhile to this was almost peace.
Is my gloom shaken with one rift of morn,
Is my verge radiant with one hint of sun?
Is this a phantom or a wreath of cloud
Eyed like a death, that beckons as I move?

And I with heedful steps devised return;
My slow blood sickened in the weary ways;
And all the evil I had ever done
Came crowding on me in slow loathsome shapes,
Saying, behold thy deed, changed, thy deed still,
In its corruption. 'Twas a merry deed
In thine old careless season. Mark it now;
For time is great to find things in their truth,
And this was foul beneath its shining hide
In those days even; but the taint has spread
And bloated it and shown the world its core.
And then came others, reaching out foul hands,
Distorted from young faces I had known,
Until I fled along the barren hills
And prayed to find death with a bitter prayer:
I loathed myself too greatly to endure
The hateful and irrevocable past.

What then sustained me through? No hand of heaven.
No death sat waiting by the granite slab,
Or in the cracks of that dread violet lake
Frozen and fast since God created snow.
The greedy chasm refused me: at my tread
The snows yelled downwards, loosened ere my feet
Had made two onward steps. The crazy shales
Withheld me by an inch of crumbling ledge
From the abysmal silence leagues below.

At last the plain, O God: the bitter heights
Are whistling long behind. This rooted flower
Comes on me like the voices of my friends.
There is my place, last of the level plain:
The mist had masked it wholly yet I know
The faintest border of the filmy wall,
And nearer, nearer drawn, my weary feet
Pause on the empty precinct of my race.

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Ay me, returning. This is no return.
The core of desolation, where no rest
Shall come for ever, or one eyelid fall
In that sweet pure oblivion of the just.
Empty and swept and garnished tho' it be,
This is no home, but some sepulchral den
Set round with urn and ashes of the dead;
Death breathes about its chambers like a blight,
The hearth is darkened with a phantom curse;
I think no child will play there any more,
And I am lonelier here than on the void.

So went I forth, and took unto my need
Seven former comrades in the naked walls;
They came and dwelt there, souls that mock the light,
And banter with the melancholy time,
Unheeding the to-morrow; drowning sense
And foresight down; contented to maintain
A grim carousal with a staring death,
And imminent destruction, in an hour
Ready to touch the cup and put away
From all pale lips for ever lust of wine.
Therefore the drift and end I do not know;
Only this thing is certain in my soul,
That man with men must change his words or die.
And this I hold, man lonely is not man,
Dowered with the curse and need of social bond,
And leavened by his fellows into sin,
Because he cannot take his path alone.
The fretful ache of living goads him on.
Tho' he pry vainly thro' the secret doors
Of future, only gloom and cloud within
Are seen for answer; joy before his feet
Fades, and sweet rest retires in rainbow foam;
Perilous instincts lure him and mislead.
Tho' for a season he may conquer down
And put to flight the traitor legion well,
Yet with to-morrow's light they will return;
And if he yield, relapsing to their rule,
Relapse is worse perdition to the man,
Than to have never left his sin at all.
Ay me, mysterious doom; what help is mine?

St. Luke xi. 24.