The Poetical Works of John Payne :: :: University of Virginia Library

I CRIED to myself in the night,
O God! is the day at hand?
My spirit longs for the light,
I weep in the shadow-land;
For the black night brings to me bitter tears,
The shadows call up the vanished years,
The past troops by with its many biers,
Ghosts in a ghastly band.

Very sad is the day,
I said; but the night I weep,
Weep for the woes that slay,
The terrors that compass sleep:
For the sounds of the wailing never cease,
The tides of the tears for aye increase,
The shadows will never have rest and peace,
What though the grave be deep.

I lay me down in the dusk,
After the day is done
And the clouds in their hodden husk
Have folded the golden sun:
Now shall I cease from travail, I say,
Now shall I put off the woes of day,
Now shall I bury me far away
Under the shadows dun.

266

Vulture-winged cometh the dark,
Brimming the air with the night;
And I, I lie and I hark
And strain mine eyes for a sight.
I watch and hope, with a faith unfed,
I lie and dream of a life unsped,
I live in the things that are long since dead,
I fancy the darkness light.

I strive with a mighty stress
To hold the terror from me,
To ward off the ghastliness
Of night and its mystery;
I spread out my hope like a sail on seas
That toss in the void to an unknown breeze,
I strain my sense for a faith that flees
And a joy that may not be.

But pitiless cometh the gloom
And the gray-winged spectres of Death,
And stealthily creepeth the doom
And the worm that continueth:
The night is full of the shapes of ill,
Strange phantoms moan at the window-sill,
The voices wail at the wild wind's will;
My heart grows cold with their breath.

The moon is a ghostly face,
The wraith of a radiance dead,
That wanders across the space,
Dead, but unhouselèd:
The stars are the eyes of the sad still sprights,
The lone lost souls that wander anights
And mock the day with their weirdly lights
And their flitting drearihead.

267

There wavers about my bed,
In the lurid gloom of the night,
The awful host of the dead,
Prisoned in spectral white:
I read in their eyes the dreadful scrolls,
The record of all the wrong that rolls,
The pain that gathers about the souls,
The terror that darkens light.

I read in their sightless eyes
The record of burning tears,
The writing that never dies,
The graven anguish and fears:
I hear in their silent mouths the sound
Of the wails that are mute and the cries that are drowned
In the sombre heart of the passionless ground
And the dead unburied years.

One by one, without end,
On through the night they go:
As each through the gloom doth rend,
I see a face that I know;
I feel a sorrow a man has known,
A brother-pain that has burnt and grown,
Through the long sad years and the midnights lone,
To a spectral shape of woe.

I see the life of my fear,
A ghastly wraith of the dead;
I hear his cry in my ear,
Though never a word be said.
I feel a pang that was dumb before,
I stand and gaze from a shadow-shore;
I hear the waves of the death-sea roar
And I know my heart has bled.

268

The terrors revive again;
The victims moan on the blast:
I weep with the world in pain;
I bleed with the wounded past:
My heart is heavy with memories,
My breast is weary with hopeless sighs;
The moon weeps tears of blood in the skies
And the stars with grief are ghast.

My heart leaps up to my mouth
With a mighty suffering;
My soul is sick with a drouth,
A nameless horrible thing:
I may not seize on the shape of my fear,
I may not close with my visions drear
And lay my wraiths on the saving bier;—
Ah, that my lips might sing!

Oh, that my soul might soar
On the living pinions of song
And open the prison door
Of life for that ghastly throng!
Ah, would I might call each shape by his name,
That my voice might chase them with singing flame
To the quiet graves from whence they came
And the slumber cold and long!

The stress of the things of life
With a throbbing agony stirred;
The night and its spectral strife
Took spirit and speech and word:
‘Shall none be potent to save?’ it cried;
‘Shall no light dawn in the darkness wide?
Shall no voice roll back the shadow-tide?
No saving song be heard?’

269

‘Lo!’ and it said, ‘For the stress,
The love fades out in men's hearts
And there fadeth the loveliness
From singers' and limners' arts;
For a man must work for the bitter bread,
Till his life has forgotten its goodlihead,
Till his soul is heavy with doubt and dread
And the bloom of his dream departs!

‘Surely a singer shall weep
And a poet shall weave his verse
With a pity tender and deep,
With love instead of a curse;
For all things thirst for a word of ruth;
The sweet Spring even has lost its youth:
The world is very dreary in truth
And pain grows daily worse.

‘Lo! if a prophet should come
And a singer to speak for men,
To give a voice to the dumb,
The world should be shriven then;
The folk should be freed from the unknown woes,
The griefs that are crimes and the pain that grows
To a fruit of hate from the unshared throes
And the unassoilzied pain.

‘The tyrant should recognize
His spirit's bitterness,
The sound of the agonies
That crush his heart with their stress,
The pain that has gathered to rage in his breast,
In the stifled sobs of the folk opprest;
The slayer should know his hopes unblest
In his victims' hopelessness.

270

‘The folk should turn in a day
To love and its years of gold;
The tyrant should cease to slay,
The years of anguish be told;
For the eyes of the folk should be cleared to know
That crime and sin and tyranny grow
From a common root in a common woe,
A sorrow dumb and cold.

‘Alas for the folk unsung
In the dark and sorrowful ways!
The earth is weary and wrung
For lack of the poet's lays!
O hearts of men, has the world no tears,
Is there none to weep for the vanished years
And the waste life troubled with doubts and fears
And the weary dying days?’

Alas! for I may not speak!
Alas! for my lips are dumb,
And the words that the spell would break,
Alas! for they will not come!
I lie and groan with a dumb desire,
I toss and burn with a sleepless fire
And I long for the sound of a golden lyre
And a poet's voice to come.

I long for a poet's voice
To lighten the sunless ways,
To say to the earth, ‘Rejoice!’
To hearten the dreary days,
To burst the chains of the silentness
That holds the world in its dismal stress,
To rend from being the prides that press
And the terrors that amaze!

271

I wait and am waiting still,
I lie and suffer and long;
How long shall the silence fill
The haunts of sorrow and wrong?
How long shall the great dumb host of the sad
Hold sternly aloof, whilst the heaped years add
To their anguish, for want of a singer had
And a succour? O God! How long?