SONNETS ON PRAYER
10
ON PRAYER
‘Hold not Thy peace at my tears’
What is the saddest, sweetest, lowest sound
Nearest akin to perfect silence? Not
The delicate whisper sometimes in the hot
Autumnal morning heard the cornfields round;
Nor yet to lonely man, now almost bound
By slumber, near his house a murmuring river
Buzzing and droning o'er the stones for ever.
Not such faint voice of Autumn oat-encrown'd,
And not such liquid murmur, O my heart!
But tears that drop o'er doubts as well as graves,
A sound the very weeper scarcely hears,
A music in which silence hath some part.
O! the all-gentle by all-hearing saves—
Hold not Thy peace then, Saviour, at my tears.
11
AN ETERNAL ROSE AND MOTHER
Look, if eternally a fair rose grew,
And if therefrom suns near yet not intense
Won out a purple-flamèd opulence,
Impassioning the paleness through and through
Eternally beneath the unchanging blue;
Then should that rose eternally from thence
Offer its beauty to the eyes and sense.
And if eternally some mother knew
Her gentle babe born under some ill star
Eternal—but eternally most weak—
Then should she ever wail her child of woe!
Such children, surely, are the dearest far.
For ever have her tenderest words to speak,
For ever have her purest tear to flow.
12
The roses and the mothers cannot choose
The roses and the mothers cannot choose
But give forth what of beautiful they have,
But give forth what fair love and sunshine gave
In tender sympathy, or delicate hues,
Soft scents eternal, love's undying dews.
And He who bore the man's heart from earth's wave
To Heaven's calm shore that He might sweetly save,
Cannot but pity as our wail renews.
Fragrant eternally were the eternal rose,
Eternal were compassion for the child,
Eternal are our sorrows in His sight;
And everlastingly compassion flows
From Him who bears Humanity undefiled,
For infinite pathos pity infinite.
13
WHAT PRAYER IS NOT
Prayer is not eloquence nor measured tone
Nor memory musical of periods fair.
The son forlorn forgetteth half his prayer.
Faith sighs its prayers, or weeps them with long moan,
Its periods have a grammar of their own.
Babes have no words, but only weep or e'er
The mother reads the little hunger there.
Faith looks its prayers. Behold, before the throne
There be full many love-looks of the saints;
And David's upward look from the earth's din
To yon long silence may be read, I think,
Legibly in Heaven's hymn-book of complaints.
Ah! the best prayers that we can ever win
Can scarcely be imprison'd by our ink.
