Songs of A Worker :: :: University of Virginia Library

I knew that in her beauty was the healing
Of sorrows, and the more than earthly cure
Of earth-begotten ills man may endure,
Gnawed on by cares, or blown by winds of feeling.
For in her beauty was the clear revealing
Of Truth; and with the sight a man grew pure,
And all his life and thinking steadfast, sure,
As one before a shrine of Godhead kneeling.
But then, alas! I saw that she was made
No whit less mortal, frail,—or she might miss
Death—than the summer substance of a flower;
That on her beauty Death had even laid
A touch, and in the distance called her his,
And Time might steal her beauty every hour.

A PRIEST OF BEAUTY.

Love's hard-earned grace I deem a scanty grace,
And hardly given seems the bliss Love gave;
For not at all times, nor in every place,
I have her whom I wholly seem to have,—
But days of barrenness that are as weeks
Divide the days of bliss that are as hours;
Brief weeks, I count for summers, my heart seeks,
And, for one flower I gain, lose many flowers.

For is not this the Lady who is mine
By all my winning, and by love's free hand?
Yea, for me only may she bloom or shine,
Or deck herself: I only may command

That splendid spirit that abides in her,
And makes her living form and look and voice,
A temple, whose sole priest and minister
I am by love's anointment and love's choice.

And lo! how is it that, ere some brief night
Hath had in whole impassioned sacrifice,
Through mystic incarnations of delight,
Her beauty that no priesthood may suffice—
How is it that some bitter envious morn
Compels me from her—intense haloes yet
Above her breasts, and many a joy unborn
In places that no kissing hath made wet?

How is it that long through the languid day,
With broken memories of unfinished bliss,
Soul torn from soul, heart from the heart its prey,
Kiss-seeking lips, lips still a-thirst to kiss—
Our reddening human flower rent in twain,
We agonise and die back through each gate

Of bloom and raptured past made void and vain,
For some supreme desire insatiate?

Alas! but all too oft, as though indeed
Sad widowhood and no fair happy part
With living lover were our fate decreed
By Love—the famine fierce in eyes and heart—
On either side the darkness, each to each
We yearn and stretch vain hands forth and make moan,
And frame fond words for ears they never reach,
And weep in vain, and sorrow all alone.

Is this Love's royalty? this all their state
Who smile beneath his purples and his crown,
His very favoured ones, whom all men rate?
Why am I not there when my Queen, my own,
All sleepless on her couch lies burning white,
Tossed with strange fevers, spent with strange unrest,

Beneath some waning lamp's pale opal light,
Sick of her sweet limbs many times carest?

Why am I not there when the amber morn
Brings her its gift of fragrance all diffused,
Repaints her lip and sets there newly born—
The honeyed store of kisses, to be used
That day, my Love thinks—as new blushes haste
To fill her face's flower from her heart's core—
Alas! nay, rather, to lie there, and waste,
Just like the kisses of the day before?

Why am I not there?—yea, for that hour's share
Of what should be my daily life-long bliss,
Her sight beloved—when, without shame or care,
She gives her body to the clinging kiss
Of waters that no memory preserve
Or impress of her beauty on their wave—
I who, for one sight of her side's fair curve,
Shall think of her for ever in my grave?

She lingers with her fairness, a warm eye
Worshipping all the unstained loveliness
Of her white self, smiling at smiles that lie
Hid in each rosy dimple that felt press
Some white tooth of the water—feeling joy
That she is even thus; till the sweet throng
Of effortless desires weary and cloy
With aching thought of days empty and long.

Truly, if any sight or kiss or sense
Be in the air and light of day, the touch
Of waters, the night's jealous prevalence,
Yea, all life's common ministers—then such
As these are they that have her and that learn
How sweet she is, not I who have their right:
Some coldest maid, her fellow, shall quite earn
More than I to be with her day and night.

Most bitter is it: for the world, ay, space
And times and duties and men's envious will

Are ever between me and my love's place,
That, having her, I should be joyless still,
As though I had her not. Ah, curse this wrong!
And ofttimes, when I haste to see her most,
Some jealous robe hath held from me too long
That beauty all my life hath too long lost.

Shall these things be so, Love?—where is thy spell?
What care I now to do as others do?
Have I not honoured thee and served thee well?
Cannot some lightning-shaft of thine break throug
These shames?—or, make the world by night and day
Translucent to me, walls of things and space:
That robe too—so I see my love alway,
Bathe myself alway in her perfect grace?

That beauty of my Lady, meant for me—
That mortal gold no heaven can e'er repay;
My mortal life—is plundered secretly
By Death and Time; ay, every passing day

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Is ravishing what all my soul holds dear.
Each hour contends with me for what is mine,
And every moment—yea, in every year—
Spoileth some part of her for whom I pine.

How doth it profit me that in her—veiled
Beneath some robe—all miracles are met;
That forming hands long-striving once prevailed
In her? What life scarce tastes, death may forget.
How doth it profit me she is so fair,
My Lady, though all women should concur
There is no one for envy who durst bare
Her paler charms?—how doth it profit her?

Yea, her and me, how profiteth, alas,
This love, this loveliness of her divine?
Fooled by dull fates, we let the fair days pass
In which Time's miracle hath made her mine.
And, ah! I can but think in what slight space
She shall be lost to time and love and me:

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Shall I but find her once in any place
Quite on through all the bare eternity?

Shall not some gnawing voice of great regret,
Down in the grave, be taunting me for aye?
Saying, Thou hadst her, was her beauty set
Like holy flame before thee night and day?
Didst thou well use the moments—seeing so brief
Was life—to fill thine eyes with her, to throng
Thy heart with her? If not, great is thy grief:
Thou canst not do it now—and Death is long!

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LIVING MARBLE.

When her large, fair, reluctant eyelids fell,
And dreams o'erthrew her blond head mutinous,
That lollingly surrendered to the spell
Of sleep's warm death, whose tomb is odorous
And made of recent roses; then unchid
I gazed more rapturously than I may tell
On that vain-hearted queen with whom I dwell,
The wayward Venus who for days hath hid
Her peerless, priceless beauty, and forbid,
With impious shames and child-like airs perverse,
My great, fond soul from worshipping the sight
That gives religion to my day and night—
Her shape sublime that should be none of hers.

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The wonder of her nakedness, unspoiled
By fear or feigning, showed each passionate limb
In reckless grace that failed not nor recoiled;
And all the sweet, rebellious body, slim,
Exuberant, lay abandoned to the whim
And miracle of unabashed repose.
I joyed to see her glorious side left bare,
Each snow-born flow'ret of her breast displayed,
One white hand vaguely touching one red rose,
One white arm gleaming through thick golden hair.
I gazed; then broke the marble I had made,
And yearned, restraining heart and holding breath,
That sleep indeed were endless, even as death.

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BLACK MARBLE.

Sick of pale European beauties spoiled
By false religions, all the cant of priests
And mimic virtues, far away I toiled
In lawless lands, with savage men and beasts.
Across the bloom-hung est, in the way
Widened by lions or where the winding snake
Had pierced, I counted not each night and day,
Till, gazing through a flower-encumbered brake,
I crouched down like a panther watching prey—
Black Venus stood beside a sultry lake.

The naked negress raised on high her arms,
Round as palm-saplings; cup-shaped either breast,

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Unchecked by needless shames or cold alarms,
Swelled, like a burning mountain, with the zest
Of inward life, and tipped itself with fire:
Fashioned to crush a lover or a foe,
Her proud limbs owned their strength, her waist its span,
Her fearless form its faultless curves. And lo!—
The lion and the serpent and the man
Watched her the while with each his own desire

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THE LINE OF BEAUTY.

When mountains crumble and rivers all run dry,
When every flower has fallen and summer fails
To come again, when the sun's splendour pales,
And earth with lagging footsteps seems well-nigh
Spent in her annual circuit through the sky;
When love is a quenched flame, and nought avails
To save decrepit man, who feebly wails
And lies down lost in the great grave to die;
What is eternal? What escapes decay?
A certain faultless, matchless, deathless line,
Curving consummate. Death, Eternity,
Add nought to it, from it take nought away;
'Twas all God's gift and all man's mastery,
God become human and man grown divine.

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PENTELICOS.

In dark days bitter between dream and dream,
I go bowed down with many a load of pain,
Increasing memory gathers to remain
From paths where now, all snakelike, lurk and gleam
Love's last deceits that loveliest did seem,
Or hurrying on with hope and thought astrain,
To reunite love's worn just broken chain,
Whose links fall through my fingers in a stream;
When, sometimes, mid these semblances of love,
Pursued with feverish joy or mad despair,
There flashes suddenly on my unrest
Some marble shape of Venus, high above
All pain or changing, fair above all fair,
Still more and more desired, still unpossest.

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PAROS.

When I took clay—with eager passionate hand
Inspired by love—to mould the yielding curves
Of all her shape consummate that deserves,
Immortal in the sight of heaven, to stand;
Then, undismayed, as at a god's command,
Laborious, with the obedient tool that serves
The sculptor's mighty art and never swerves,
Beside the crumbling form I carved the grand
Imperishable marble. Henceforth—seeing
The glory of her nakedness divine—
My heart is raised, I bend the knee and deem her
Not simply woman and not merely mine,
But goddess, as the future age shall deem her,
Ideal love of man's eternal being.

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CARRARA.

I am the body purified by fire;
A man shall look on me without desire,
But rather think what miracles of faith
Made me to trample without fear or scathe
The burning shares; the thick-set bristling paths
Of martyrdom; to lie on painful laths
Under the torturer's malice; to be torn
And racked and broken, all-victorious scorn
Strengthening the inward spirit to reject
The frame of flesh, with sins and lusts infect,
Whose punishment, like to the sin, was gross,
And man the executioner. I arose
Changed from those beds of pain, and shriven at last
From the whole shameful history of the past—

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Of earth-bound pride and revelry; yea, shriven
From Love, at first the one sin, and forgiven:
Beauty that other, with the vanity
That set me crowned before humanity;
So I was led, a priestess or a saint,
Robed solemnly, leaving the latest taint
Of earthliness in some far desert cell
Ascetic; and the hand late used to tell
Rough rosaries, the hand for ever chilled
With fingering the death-symbol, feels unthrilled
With any passionate luxury forbidden
The world's new wedlock. Man and woman chidden
For all their life on earth wed timorously,
And full of shames, fearing lest each should see
The other's greater sin; so they unite,
Two penitential spirits, to take flight,
In one ethereal vision sanctified,
Two bodies for the grave. I am the bride
Who clings with terror, suppliant and pale,
And fears the lifting of her virgin veil,

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Because the shrinking form, spite of her prayers,
Has grown to know its earthliness, and bears
The names of sins that gave up shameful ghosts
On antique crosses. Raised now amid the hosts
Of living men, my effigy is grown
Passionless, speechless through the postured stone
That holds one changeless meaning in its pose;
The murmuring myriads pass, and each man knows
And sees me with a cold thought at his heart;
For I am that from which the soul must part.

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DIALOGUE BETWEEN TWO VENUSES.

FIRST VENUS.

With me the soul's Eternity began,
Before me wastes of waters were, and earth,
And elemental agonies that ran
Through human chaos, till my perfect birth
Fulfilled the life and made the dream of man.

For I was with him in the foamless deep,
Vaguely he saw me through glistening water,
In the veined marble spell-bound or asleep,
A goddess, and a woman, and a daughter,
Of dreams, to make men joy henceforth, or weep,

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A goddess when I stood upon the wave
Green haloed further than all arms could reach;
A woman when I came to earth and clave
Unto men's lives, filling the heart of each—
Then died, and took the marble for a grave.

Until then Praxiteles, with passionate Art
Sought me, and saw, and lifted me to strange
Life, above life and death to stand apart,
The one thing of the world that cannot change,
The true religion of the human heart.

But what art thou, whom in the twilight time
Lifted by faint or failing hands I see,
Repeating timidly a form sublime?
Whose chisel hath made mimicry of me
In the cold quarries of what northern clime?

The mid-day sun caressing, warmed the soul,
Long in unchiselled marble slumbering;
On gleaming shores that felt the rhythmic roll,

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Of ancient azure waves: but thou pale thing,
Wert wrought beneath some ghost light of the pole.

SECOND VENUS. (‘The Venus of Gibson.’)
I am the pure ideal of a day
Purer than thine. Long since men put away
The ancient sin thou symbolest, and broke
Love's altars, and beat down his flower yoke;
No longer holding up his torch of flame
Drags he the soul dishevelled, and with shame,
A captive trampled with relentless feet.
Nor leads it haltered, powerless of retreat.
A weak, blindfolded child to consummate
Base union with Desire; nor a fate
With eyes averted, and strong cruel hand
Holding the shrivelled victim o'er the brand,
Maybe consume it as a moth at length.
A new and holier faith gave man new strength
And Athens lies a ruin, the ancient crowned
Passion-gods writhe as bitter serpents, bound

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In the all-quenchless hell that gave them birth;
And priests of virtue have transformed the earth.

FIRST VENUS.

I hear the language of some Gothic lie,
That like a darkness bred of one blown cloud
Hath spread itself over man's azure sky,
And his affrighted heart hath disavowed,
The glory set before his soul on high.

The poisoned moments of eclipse hath wrought
His fair fruits bitter, and diseased his breath;
And in the sour ranklings of his thought,
He hath tormented to a sense of death,
The clear bright truth of life Love's self had taught.

For on the sure swift pinions of desire
The soul was wont to soar to every height
Of heaven; and in Love's hand the only fire
Burnt upward, and in his hand the only light
Shone for the soul to spring from and aspire.

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And I a little higher than the heart,
A little further than the outstretched hand,
The very soul of man's soul, set apart
From all his shifting days, and toil by land
And sea, dwelt with him never to depart.

Sister, of all his thoughts, nowise he read
The marble meaning in my eyes of fate;
Made one with him, and mystically wed,
His bride, he left me still immaculate,
Yet had content of me, and rests, being dead.

What fairer helpmate is there given to each
Still striving soul of man for joy and good
'Twixt birth and death? What virtues can they teach
That were not perfect in my womanhood
Ere gods were known or there were priests to preach?

For whoso looks on me is filled with faith,
And walks exalted in a transformed earth,
Worshipping alway, serving no mere wraith

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Of dreaming, no frail vision's doubtful birth,
Nor leaning on the word that any saith.

And I am the great love, no thing may shun
My heart's warmth—as no flower can escape
The fever from the centre of the sun—
And I the single chastity, the shape
Adored by all and never given to one.

SECOND VENUS.
A god of virtue walked upon the earth,
And man repented him of love and mirth;
He looked upon the image he had made,
And, lo! 'twas naked; then he grew afraid,
And, with a righteous zeal, he overthrew
The marbles of Praxiteles: they strew
The trampled land of Greece; the shameless stone
Of Thespiæ fell, and grass of years has grown
Over the broken Cnidian; and that pride

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Of Athens, Artemis, whose lips denied
The kiss they seemed to covet—age by age
The growing storm of man's ascetic rage
Battered each sculptured fane, and burst upon
The chiselled idols of the Parthenon
With ruin; and when the vengeful tide that surged,
Stirred by the priests of man's new faith, had purged
The world of Phidias' works, or only left
Disordered remnants—goddesses bereft
Of arms and feet, Apollo scarce divine,
Marred of his manhood, Mercury supine,
Headless Cephissus and maimed daughters three
Of Cecrops—when the immortality
Of marble, fashioned in the form of lust
That once was Phryné, trodden into dust,
No longer stood between him and the sky,
Man put on sackcloth and rebuked the eye
Because of sight, and chid the hand for touch,
And chained the heart lest it should feel too much.

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Henceforth the daily thought of heaven or hell,
Chastened man's life; almost he fears to dwell
His perilous time of travail on the earth,
Full of pollutions, knowing first his birth
A shame done when the face of God was turned
Away in wrath or pity, having earned
His mortal right to labour with the hand
Till the brow sweats as an accursed brand
And punishment of sin; fleeing, the while
His sense is linked thereto, the deadly smile
And lure of beauty, worker of his ill
And sister of the serpent-temptress still,
Through all his trembling and divided days.
The sackcloth shrouds too in a thousand ways
That fallen form, ere death with safe last gloom
Hurries it to the darkness of the tomb—
A rotting secret, recordless; and shroud
And death and the revilings long and loud
Of priests, yea, and corroding sermons set
In each man's heart, as 'twere a worm, to fret

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Upon the earth; these have so well combined,
All men have passed the peril as though blind;
And the close veil that woman meekly wears,
No hand hath raised for eighteen hundred years.

FIRST VENUS.

Man raves, and in the madness of his dreams
A Moloch hath enslaved him; covetous priests
Have spoiled his good, and poisoned all his streams.
He dare not sit at any of the feasts
Of life, and, wholly darkened, he blasphemes

The goddess giver of true holiness
To all his days. If still his heart can find
A little love; if, in its abjectness,
A glimmering light of truth lasts in his mind,
So that he see not foul or meaningless;

Or, with distorted falsehood written o'er
Its shining parable of faultless Form,
Let him tear off the veil, and look once more

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On woman, white divinity, of marble warm,
With all of life, the soul hath waited for.

If he but see aright, in glory sweet,
Unsullied by dull heresies or lust,
Or vile invented shames designed to cheat
The soul, and dwarf into degraded dust
That truth in which God's heaven and man's earth meet,

He shall be healed. For the great purity
Of the soft bosom, guileless in its rest,
Yet holding all within the mystery
That maketh man, shall show that God hath blest
Birth and the secret of humanity.

And if he look upon the arms that hold
And circle round the heaven of his bliss,
And the mouth with its lovelier gift than gold,
Stored in the consummation of a kiss,
Then he shall know he hath been falsely told

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To count life's labour of relentless days
A cursed pain and punishment of sin.
Eternal light shall show the upward ways
Of toil, and man all holy entering in
Where heaven is earth's achievement and earth's praise.

And if he read in the revealing eyes
Looks of the spirit from the depths of time,
It shall be written in his heart what dies
Hopeless and lost, and what lives on sublime;
Clouds shall be cast away and he shall rise,

Lifted by love, as on a wing or wave,
To luminous heights above the world and live,
Full of all great and deathless thoughts that save
From death; so in no manner shall he give
His glory or his manhood to the grave.

Behold, moreover, if to the inward soul
Of any man there enter, to be known,
The presence of that Beauty, perfect whole,

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Goddess and woman, reigning on a throne
O'er all the thoughts and ways with sweet control.

If with surpassing revelation rare,
The mystery of the one ineffable line,
Transcending time and space, changelessly fair,
Before and after all things, law divine
Enter the soul and make religion there,

Then is man saved; for in that soul's clear sight
No falsehood or impurity shall stand;
That soul shall fashion darkness into light,
And moulding human clay with holy hand,
Exalt man pure upon a marble height.

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A VENUS.

Fallen from ancient Athens to the days
When sculpture hides her forms beneath a shroud,
I mingle sometimes with the bourgeois crowd
Of rich church-going serious folk, to gaze
On each demure-faced Venus who obeys
The crabbed daily rule of some purse-proud
Merchant or lawyer, graceless and bald-browed,
Cheating abroad for what at home he pays.
And marking well her beauty, which he bought
With cunning eye; I marvel is this she
Whom Paris knew? Does she not chafe at all?
And ofttimes sorely expiate in thought
Her desecrated godhead, secretly
Standing lone, white, upon some pedestal?

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THE LAST LOOK.

Lastly, an angel ushered me in haste
Out through the sunrise. I beheld the earth
Setting behind me; I beheld the Past
Reddened with life and love, and knew the worth
Of life itself, and love itself and time;
And of two women, there was one sublime
Waiting in sadness, tears, and love, and faith,
Clad brilliantly—crowned was that delicate wraith
Of white immortal face, and haloed hair,
Seen of remembered gold veiled in the fair
White widowhood of many a holy year;
And her tried soul, transcendent now and clear,

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Like the last summit, like a steadfast star,
And merged into the lucent opening far
Away in widening heaven.

Then I turned
To seek that other, for whom life had burned
So long unquenchably; and dimly seen
In dismal joys and anguish, that had been
An altered shadow on a failing shore,
Pained me awhile: then I looked back no more.

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A FRAGMENT.

Man shall not die. The darkness in his brain,
The canker at his heart, the ill of ages,
Shall pass and leave him as a worn-out pain.
Life from her books shall tear a thousand pages,
And like an unread record shall remain.

The history of his madness, when he fled
Beauty, the soul's bride, set before his gaze,
And followed necromantic ties to wed,
Death, with a lingering spousal all his days,
Gnawed on by worms as though already dead.