The Poetical Works of Aubrey De Vere

Your bark in turn is freighted. O'er the seas
You seek a refuge at the Antipodes.
Australia waits you. O my Lord, beware!
Australia! Floats not England's standard there?
Tyrconnell and Tyrone found rest more nigh:
Shrined on St. Peter's Mount their ashes lie.
Their cause is mine—and foes, till now, were we;
Now friends, ashamed were I thy shame to see.
Has Ruin no decorum? Grief no sense?
Shall England house thee? England drives thee hence!
O worker of thy sorrows with a vow
Bind thou that head reduced, and careful brow
Wholly to root that idol from thy heart:
Swear that thy race never shall have a part
In aught that England boasts, achieves, confers:
Her past is thine—thy future is not hers.

Loosed from the agony of fruitless strife
You stand, a lost man 'mid the wreck of life
And round you gaze. Sad Eva also gazed
All round that bridal field of blood, amazed;
Spoused to new fortunes. But your head is grey!
Beyond your castle droops the dying day;

344

And, drifting down loose gusts of wailing wind,
Night comes with rain before and frost behind.
Lean men that groped for sea-weeds on the shore
All day, now hide in holes on fen and moor.
The cliffs lean forth their brows to meet the scourge
Of blast on blast: around their base the surge
Welters in shades from iron headlands thrown:
Through chasm and cave subaqueous thunders moan—
That sound thou lov'st! Once more the Desmonds fall:
To-night old Wrongs shake hands in History's hall;
And, clashing through responsive vaults of Time,
Old peals funereal marry chime to chime.
Of such no more! Beside your fireless hearth
Sit one night yet: and, moody or in mirth
Compare the past and present, and record
The fortunes of your Order in a word.
England first used, then spurned it! Hour by hour,
For centuries her laws, her fame, her power
Hung on its hand. It gloried to sustain
High o'er the clouds that sweep the Atlantic main,
The banner with her blazonries enrolled:
Then came the change, and ye were bought and sold:
Then came the change, and ye received your due.
Sir, to your country had ye proved as true
As to your England, she had held by you:
Ruin ye might have proved; ye might have known
Even then, the scorn of others—not your own!

Pardon hard words. Your Race, not mine, is hard:
But wounds and work the hand too soft have scarred:
We are your elders—first-born in distress;
And century-seasoned woes grow pitiless.

345

Hierarchs are we in pain, where ye but learn:
We have an Unction, and our Rite is stern.
If on our brows still hang ancestral glooms,
Forgive the children of the Catacombs.
What have the dead to do with love or ruth?
I died; and live once more—I live for Truth:
Hope and delusion trouble me no more:
Therefore, expatriate on my native shore
Anguish and doubt shake other nerves, not mine:
I drop no tear into the bitter brine:
The world in which I move is masculine.

Why to Australia? Britain too was dear:
Must, then, the Britain of the southern sphere
Rack you in turn? Seek you once more to prove
The furies of a scorned, unnatural love
That cleaves to insult and on injury feeds
And, upon both cheeks stricken, burns and bleeds?
Son of the North, why seek you not once more
The coasts where sang the warrior Scald of yore?
If unhistoric regions you must tread,
Hallowed by no communion with the dead,
Never by saint, or sage, or hero trod;
Where never lifted fane upraised to God
In turn, the hearts of sequent generations,
Where never manly races rose to nations
Marshalled by knightly arm or kingly eye;
If with new fortunes a new earth you try,
Then seek, oh, seek her in her purity!
Drain not civilization's dregs and lees.
In many an island clipt by tropic seas,
Nature keeps yet a race by arts untamed,
Who live half-innocent and unashamed.
Ambition frets not them. In regions calm

346

Mid prairies vast, or under banks of palm,
They sing light wars and unafflicting loves
And vanish as the echo leaves the groves!
Smooth space divides their cradles and their graves:
What are they? Apparitions—casual waves
Heaved up in Time's successive harmony!
Brief smiles of nature followed by a sigh!
Why not with such abide awhile and die?

O, summoned ere thy death to that repose
The grave concedes to others! by thy foes
Franchised with that which friendship never gave;
A heart as free from tremors as the grave!
Last of a race whose helm and lance were known
In furthest lands—now exiled from thine own—
Give thanks! How many a sight is spared to thee
Which we, thy sires in suffering, saw and see!
Thou hast beheld thy country, by the shocks
Of sequent winters, driven upon the rocks
High and more high. Thou shalt not, day by day,
See her dismembered planks, the wrecker's prey
Abused without remorse to uses base:
Thou hast beheld the home of all thy race
Their lawns, their walks, and every grove and stream
Their very tombs—pass from thee like a dream
And leave thee bare. But thou shalt not behold
Thy woods devastated, nor gathering mould
Subdue the arms high hung and blight the bloom
Of pomps heraldic redd'ning scroll and tomb;
Nor the starred azure touched by mists cold-lipped
Till choir and aisle are black as vault and crypt,
Nor from the blazoned missal wane and faint
The golden age of martyr, maid, and saint,

347

Umbria's high pathos, and the Tuscan might
And all thy wondering childhood's world of light.
Thou shalt not see that Cross thou loved'st so well
From minster towers rock-built, and hermit's cell
Swept by the self-same blast that sent the hind
Shivering to caves, and struck a kingdom blind!
All that was thine, while seas between thee roll
And them, in some still cloister of thy soul
Shall live, as, in a mother's heart inisled
Lives on the painless memory of a child
Buried a babe. One image all shall make
Still as the gleam of sunset-lighted lake
Kenned from a tower o'er leagues of wood and lawn;
Or as perchance our planet looks, withdrawn
From some pure spirit that leaves her; to his sight
Lessening, not lost—a disk of narrowing light
Sole-hung in regions of pure space afar—
Of old the world he lived in, now a star!

But the wind swells yon sails. Why waste we breath?
My Lord, for thy soul's sake, and a good death
Forget the things a Gael's unmannered pen
For thee records not but for later men.
Since hope is gone, let peace be thine instead.
The snows which heap too soon that Norman head,
Should calm it, and a heart that bleeds for aye
Has less to lose, and less to feel, each day.
Seek not thy joys when on the desolate shore
The raked rocks thunder, and the caverns roar,
And the woods moan, while shoots the setting sun
Discords of angry lights o'er billows dun.
Make white thy thoughts as is a Vestal's sleep;
Bloodless: prolong, beside the murmuring deep,

348

Thy matutinal slumbers, till the bird
That tuned not broke them, is no longer heard.
The flowers the children of the Stranger bring
Indulgent take: permit their latest Spring
To lure from thee all bitterness and wrath:
Into Death's bosom, genial as a bath
Sink back absolved. Justice to God belongs:
Soul latest-stricken, leave with Him thy Wrongs!

Justice, o'er angels and o'er men supreme
Still in mid heaven sustains her balanced beam,
With whose vast scales, whether they sink or rise,
The poles of earth are forced to sympathize.
Unseen she rules, wrapped round in cloud and awe;
Her silence is the seal of mortal law;
Her voice the harmony of every sphere:
Most distant is she ever yet most near,
Most strong when least regarded. From her eyes
That light goes forth which cheers the brave and wise;
And in the arm that lifts aloft her sword
Whatever might abides on earth is stored.
Fret not thyself. Watch thou, and wait, her hand!
The thunder-drops fall fast. In every land
Humanity breathes quick, and coming storm
Looks through man's soul with flashes swift and warm:
The fiery trial and the shaken sieve
Shall prove the nations. What can live shall live.
Falsehood shall die; and falsehoods widest-based
Shall lie the lowest, though they fall the last.

Down from the mountain of their greatness hurled
What witness bear the Nations to the World?

349

Down rolled like rocks along the Alpine stairs
What warning voice is theirs, and ever theirs?
Their ears the Nations unsubverted close
For who would hear the voice whose words are Woes?
Woe to ancestral greatness, if the dower
Of knightly worth confirm no more its power.
Woe to commercial strength, if sensual greed
Heap up like waves its insolent gold, nor heed
What solid good rewards the poor man's toil.
Woe to the Monarch, if the unholy oil
Of smooth-tongued flattery be his balm and chrism.
Woe to the State cleft through by social schism.
Woe to Religion, when the birds obscene
Of Heresy from porch to altar-screen
Range free; while from the temple-eaves look down
Doubt's shadowy brood, ill-masked in cowl or gown.
Woe to the Rulers by the People ruled:
A People drowned in sense, and pride-befooled
Trampling were sages once, and martyrs, trod.
Ye Nations meet your doom, or serve at last your God!

St. Pietro in Montorio.

University of Virginia Library

THE LAST IRISH GAEL TO THE LAST IRISH NORMAN;

OR, THE LAST IRISH CONFISCATION.

A PREDICTION, 1848.