The Poetical Works of Walter C. Smith :: :: University of Virginia Library

Evangelist and village smith, a man of good report,
And cunning among cattle, known to all the country near,
Luke could make the bellows snore, and also painfully exhort,
And feared the Lord, and had a new religion once a year.

He had been a Chartist leader in his hot and hopeful youth,
Talking gunpowder and bayonets about the rights of man,
Until he got converted, when he preached about the Truth,
The Blood and the Atonement, the Covenant and Plan.

Tired of his parish kirk, he tried the Baptists for a season,
Tired of them, and turned a Methodist, recanting all the past,
Tired again, and took to shady faiths that shun the ways of reason;
And every change, he vowed, had brought the peace of God at last.

And every change had left a stratum of belief on him,
With fossils here of Presbytery, there of his Baptist time,
Then traces of the Methodist, and now the footprints dim
Of creatures that had sprawled across the later mud and slime.

For partly Antinomian now, and partly Manichee,
He blundered back to Church, and deemed that he was orthodox,
And stormed at modern thinking as the raging of the sea
That cast up mire and dirt upon the everlasting rocks.

And yet his heart was right, although his thought was so confused—
A tangled knot of broken thrums he could not extricate;
All ordered thought of reason and of science he abused,
But he was full of pity, and his love was very great.

And because he was so earnest, and because he spoke good words
Whose meaning none searched nicely, and because he seemed to stir
Serious thoughts in careless hearts, as if he touched their higher chords,
He was sought, and he was looked to as a chosen minister.

A great broad-headed fellow, working hard through all the week,
And thinking hard, the while he worked, upon the fate of man,
He was fain to save the sinner and the erring, and would speak
A world about the chaff and wheat, and sifting with a fan.

There was a thick husk in his voice that weirdly rose and fell,
As with a knotted fist he smote upon a horny palm,
And poured his prophet-burden about sin and death and hell,
Now like tender, pleading Gospel, now like bitter cursing Psalm.

193

The man had power, for certain, for he had a human heart,
Gleams of humour, tender touches, too, of pathos, and throughout
A vein of clear sincerity whose might is more than art,
And the firmness of a soul that had not any wavering doubt.

And when he came about our house, at first, I liked to hear
His pithy words, good-humoured if you did not say him nay;
And stories of himself that were like flotsam drifting near
From tempests of an unknown sea whose storms were far away.

He had a keen shrewd humour, but it mostly had to do
With the meaner part of nature, and was blind to what is best;
He put his finger on a blot that shamed and humbled you,
And thought he read you truest when you showed unworthiest.

Though God was always in his mouth, you did not feel the awe
Which hangs about the Presence when he spoke of the Supreme;
He was more at home with Satan; then he spake as if he saw;
But to me his speech of God was like an echo, or a dream.

And yet I liked him, swinging with long strides at gloaming late,
And stretching his vast limbs beside the blazing winter fire,
With pale, lean face, and lanky hair, and speech deliberate,
That never ceased to flood the house, and never seemed to tire.

Not that it was good to hear him, for it did not raise you higher;
Is showed your baser self, but did not rouse the better part;
He could search the hidden evil, but he never could inspire
Unto any nobler life by his unveiling of the heart.

Man was not lovely to him, not yet lovely was his God;
The cynic thought breeds mostly bitter faith in things divine;
Who sees no beauty in the soul that bears its human load
Shall see but little glory where the gods of glory shine.

There was humour in his sayings, though he meant them not for jest—
Too earnest he for mirth, except a hard and bitter grin;
Yet his shrewdness had an oddness being quaintly oft expressed,
And I laughed with laugh the keener that I had to laugh within.

'Twas something fresh to me, to follow slowly up and down
The windings of his tangled talk, and make the thought complete;
I perused him like a volume whose leaves, dog-eared and brown,
Held bits of the rough poetry that lies about our feet.

There was a rude ideal which he struggled to attain,
A poem floating in his mind, but mangled by the lack
Of ordered thought to shape the hope, the passion and the pain;
And he blundered into broken paths to shun the beaten track.

194

What puzzled me about him was, to see him still so sure,
So changeful, yet so certain that his way was always right;
And that his vision was so dim, although his heart was pure,
And that he could so grossly err, yet be a child of light.

I read his meaning partly, as one reads a palimpsest,
Dimly traced upon the vellum under monkish hymns and prayers
And trumpery tales of wonder; and I understood him best
When I watched his human kindness taking up our human cares.

He fancied I was smitten with his views, when I was only
Making him a curious study for the work I had to do,
Just a theme for long reflection, as I sat in silence lonely,
Shaping out the world around me in the poet's large review.

But I had no right to trifle with the follies of a friend,
Or to play upon his humour to find matter for a book;
I might have known that that would come to some unhappy end,
For to toy with human hearts, is more than human hearts will brook.

'Tis the sin of art's fine passion that it only seeks to know,
Not to perfect, any creature that his lot he may fulfil;
It has charity to bear with any rankest weeds that grow
Unto any picturesqueness, and to leave them growing still.

Priest and prophet try to save, and so their work is blessed; but mine
Strove only just to see, and reproduce the picture true,
Making sacrifice of duty for the trimming of a line,
Heeding not of higher wisdom in the itch for something new.

Oh my heart and its misgivings! I am never wholly sure.
Was the art of Greece so perfect that its life was also high?
Is the heavenly vision only seen what time the heart is pure?
Is the poem but the poet as he dares to live and die?

Could I be a mere onlooker, and yet see what should be seen?
Standing calmly on the outside, could I paint this life aright?
Nay, that could never come to any perfect fruit, I ween,
Could yield but sickly blossom nipt by any frosty night.

Better wield a pick or spade, or drive a furrow in the soil,
Bear a hod, or hurl a barrow among fustian-wearing men,
Win humblest daily bread by daily sweat of honest toil,
Than live to find in life but stuff for scrawling with a pen!

One evening Luke, as usual, held discourse of human ills,
And I turned me somewhat weary from his everlasting bleat,
Monotonous, like sheep among the solitary hills,
As he mooned away to Hilda sitting on the window seat.

195

Something, I know, had fretted me—I cannot now say what,
Only living among dreams, and sitting far into the night,
With none to bid good-speed unto the labour I was at,
And a pained, though dumb suspicion that, perhaps, I did not right

To peril all the tender bliss of home for such an aim,
Bred an irritable temper when I was not all alone,
And so it fevered me to hear—though they were not to blame—
Her weary stitching needle, and his weary preaching drone.

He had, somehow, raised the wonder that begets a woman's faith,
The sense of power and mystery that awes her with belief;
His God was not the Father that giveth life and breath,
Yet she looked to him for guidance, and for comfort in her grief.

Women cling to any spirit that is confident and bold,
Taking doubt to be a sin, the sign of an untrustful mind;
And I was sure of nought; I saw the shadows round me fold,
And felt that life was very dark, and I was very blind.

I was not fit to guide her, for myself I could not guide
Through the valley of the shadow; only groping as I went,
Step by step, and never certain of the shepherd at my side,
And my soul was often troubled, and my heart was often faint.

But he was sure of all things in earth and hell and heaven,
Sure that we were devil's children all, and heirs of wrath to come,
Sure that on the bitter cross a sum of ransom had been given
To purchase men from Satan, or at least to purchase some.

And this so certain dogmatism she took for faith divine,
Infallible, intrenched within a wall of texts and creeds,
And believed in him entirely, while she turned from words of mine
As from henbane, hemlock, nightshade, or other deadly weeds.

That night he went on, ceaseless, in his hortatory tone
Half-saying and half-singing, and I could not choose but hear
Broken snatches of his doctrine, like the melancholy moan
Of the wind that in the crannies sounds so dismal to the ear.