University of Virginia Library

FIFTY SONNETS BY THOMAS WADE.

I. BIRTH AND DEATH.

Methinks the soul within the body held
Is as a little babe within the womb,
Which flutters in its antenatal tomb,
And stirs and heaves the prison where 'tis cell'd,
And struggles in strange darkness, undispell'd
By all its strivings towards the breath and bloom
Of that aurorean being soon to come—
Strivings of feebleness, by nothing quell'd:
And even as birth to the enfranchised child,
Which shows to its sweet senses all the vast
Of beauty, visible and audible,
Is death unto the spirit undefiled;
Setting it free of limit and the past,
And all that in its prison-house befell.

II. WHO MAY SAY?

When the so-gracious frame of her whose heart
Obeys of mine the gentle monarchy,
Veils with itself its own sweet counterpart;
Living like that, altho' invisibly,
And to appear hereafter, and expand
To human grace and glory; who may say,
That that Great Whole which doth from eyes demand
Infinite adoration—the Vast Round
O' the Visible Universe—doth not enfold
A Second Self, which, on some destined day,
May into vision-startling being bound;
And, in the vast of ages, wide unfold
Magnificence, to kindle and to live
After the model of its Primitive?

III. THE NEAR ADVENT.

Now that the little fabric of our loves
Waits, at the very portal of the world,
The moment in which first shall be unfurl'd
The banner of its being; and it moves,
With cadence gentle as the alight of doves
Toward light and breath; be perfect peace upcurl'd
In thy deep heart, Dear! and thy thoughts impearl'd
All, with the dews of joy! For it behoves
That which creates to temper its creation
With balmiest elements of blessedness,
After great Nature's visible dictation;
Who, when she teemeth with delicious spring,
Doth tend the coming birth with sunshining
And with bright rains and blandest airs caress.

IV. A WARNING.

In the great work of Human Good, sweet Child!
Be thou a new Messiah to the earth!
Much thought and love made prelude to thy birth,
And passion by no violence defiled;
Kindness and care upon thy coming smiled,
And brooded o'er thy helplessness and pain:
And, if intent by fate be made not vain,
Thou shalt be rear'd within all influence mild.
Ye who have children, hear!—The mind of ages
Is in your hands, to fashion as ye will—
Ancillary to Nature and to God:
The distant future, waiting on your nod
For good perpetual or continuous ill,
Will stamp your praise or shame on its eternal page.

V. THE CHILD.

Germ of a world of thought! that shall create
Thought-worlds, or else belie thy parentage—
What full profession doth thy spirit engage
Of all of which thine elders make debate,
And yet know nothing? What they contemplate,
Is it even now thy fresh mind's heritage
To know and feel, without that surplusage
Of reasoning which doth reason agitate?
There is no childish touch about thy look;
But seriousness and seeming thought-result—
A still-unwritten, but arrangéd book,
Which we are all too eyeless to consult:
But it assures us, as the heavens do,
Of infinite beauty veil'd by that we view.

VI. TO MY CHILD.

Oh! sink not from us, as a drop of dew,
From life's fresh rose to the obstructive sod,
Where ear may hear thee not, nor fond eye view;
But our hearts strike against the sullen clod
For ever, till they break. On morning new
Never came instant night: and dearest God
Grant that to thy sweet dawn of human day
A glorious noon and placid eve be fated,
And that to whither goes poor dust alway
We may descend before thee!—O, created
Of divine love and joy! do not forsake us
In this thy bud of being; but disclose
The fulness of life's flower, and therewith make us
A garden all of sweets, thou folded rose!

VII. THE FEAR.

The way this Child doth creep into my heart
Even fills my inmost being with alarm;
For fears, which from my soul I cannot charm
By any aidance of hope's rainbow-art,
Oppress me yet, that we are doom'd to part,
And all his pretty looks and breath of balm
Hear requiem'd by the grave-wind's winter-psalm,
And childless to the home of love depart!
But God is with him in his little ways,
His smiles and murmurs, cries and sufferings;
And if he be retaken to the springs
From whence all being flows, we yet will praise
The All-Disposer with a grief serene,
And o'er our dead bud fold its memory's fadeless green!

VIII. THE ENTREATY.

But, do not die! Sweet Cherub! do not die:
Yet fold within their human chrysalis
Thine angel-wings! We cannot yet let fly
The spirit from our gazing and our kiss:
It is a new and life-essential bliss
We've reap'd from thine existence; and the sky,
And all it girdleth, would but seem amiss
Without thy smile and little plaintive cry.
We've much to do with thee on earth, dear babe!
To see thee stagger on thy tiny feet;
To teach thee worded language—and so teach,
That thou hereafter may'st be as a stab,
Fatal, to wrong and woe. Live! We must reach
The grave ere thou, Love-Incarnation sweet!

IX. THE RETURN.

Smile, Baby! for thy Mother home is coming,
Again to clasp thee to her yearning heart;
Both memory and hope her way illuming
To the calm nook wherein thou nestled art.
Thou canst not run to meet her, Baby dear!
Nor hast sweet worded music on thy tongue
But thou the music of her voice canst hear,
And o'er thee see her tender gazings hung:
And little recollections, fond tho' dim,
Enkindled in thy soul thro' ear and eye
Shall lend thee graces of the cherubim
Saluted by the breath of deity:
Stir all thy tiny limbs, and softly trace
Sweet love-assurance on thy pretty face!

X. THE BARRIER-BOND.

I have seen flowers against each other's heart
Fearfully beaten by the sudden wind;
Until, as if toward instant death declined,
Low they have hung, and mournfully, apart—
By one green blade alone from earth protected;
Which, as they rose from out their state dejected,
Has with them risen, and a bond innected
Between them which no storm could unembind!
Thus be it with our loves, my more than wife!—
Too often sever'd by convulsive strife:
This gentle Infancy shall grow between
Our bosoms, as a bar 'gainst temper-harms;
And oft as passion threats our peace serene,
We'll seek reproof within his little arms.

XI. HIGH-SPEAKINGS.

In the still vacancy of common hours,
We need these stirrings from the Universe—
High-speakings to us from Superior Powers,
Which of remote existences rehearse
And in dream-regions all the spirit immerse;
And when they cease, or interlapse devours
The wonder of their utterance, our soul's sense
Frets, straining with divine impatience:
Most like a stepless and a wordless child,
Which listens to a sweet-toned instrument,
Touch'd by its mother's fingers, till beguiled
All into smiles and gestures eloquent;
And the loved music ceasing, pines and cries
For still-renewal of its harmonies.

XII. THE FIRST DAY OF THE FOURTH YEAR.

Best celebration, next to that most dear,
Of this memorial day of chainless union,
Is the plain falling-off of such as wear
The mask of truth in their most false communion:
So, let them go!—The fields and trees appear
Of fresher beauty, for the thoughts within us;
And all that speaketh unto eye or ear,
Not of itself, but through our hearts, doth win us.
Rich were we then beyond all worldly store;
But now that wealth is by comparison
From heap'd abundance made but seeming poor—
A Crœsus meagred to a beggar's-son!—
For there at home our little Willy lies
With our earth-paradise in his sweet eyes!

XIII. TO BABY.

Thou art thy father's Soul, I do believe,
My golden-hair'd and radiant-visaged Child!
Projected into light, and undefiled
By the dull flesh which makes it ache and grieve
Thro' thy brief scene, where shadow doth deceive,
Until by substance we are more beguiled:
With the strange thought I have both wept and smiled—
As one men suddenly from death reprieve.
O, speak to me of past and future things!
Of whence thou camest into this worn clay,
And whither thou dost tend in its decay.
Almost I seem to see cherubic wings
Ope from about thee, for swift heavenward flight;
And I grow dust in their departing light!

XIV. THE RESULT.

From depths unfathomable that desire
Which gave us being, sprang; and fathomless
The sources of that being. We were born,
To meet and gaze and mingle. From the morn,
And noon, and eve, and night, did we inspire
The spirit of a gradual consciousness,
And from the visage and the voice and hand
Of human minist'rings: and grew and grew—
Imbibing from the skies and stream and land,
With every straining sense, that sacred dew
By which the roots of Thought are nourishéd,
And Feeling into bud and fruit is fed:
And hence the love in which our hearts exult,
And this divinest Child, its full and last Result.

XV.

Dear Lady mine! in whose sweet company
I walk at morning, noon and eventide;
Under cool trees, or placid streams beside;
Smiling on all fair things with loving eye:
The pleasant grass beneath; the leaves on high;
The tender flowers, in all fair colours dyed;
The glittering insects, in their sunshine pride;
And the glad birds, singing melodiously!
The thought of that drear hour when we must mingle
With dark dust under-ground, is solemn-sad,
And well might drive a human creature mad:
Yet e'en thro' that doth the quaint fancy tingle,
That our rechaos'd and soul-parted clay
Shall be the quiet nurse of such bright things as they!

XXV. ON HEARING SOME FINE MUSIC ILL-PLAYED.

Not in the noting, or the instrument
Fine Music's sweet sufficiency doth live;
But in the sight and touch executive
Of harmony's soul-active president,
Learn'd, and instinctive to her element.
How dull is Poesy which, read, doth give
Naught of its meanings clear-exempletive—
The poet lost, the reader evident!
I have heard Spenser, Shakspeare, and sage Ben,
Made Sternhold, Hopkins, Watts, by mouths ungifted,
Which spake untutor'd by the heart and brain:
And thus it is how Weber, Beethoven,
Whom hearing, I have been to heaven lifted,
Now steep me in a discord-hell of pain.

XXVI. THE FACE.—I.

The “joy for ever” of a beauteous thing
Is effluent from its beauty's memory:
Itself and all its loveliness take wing,
And only fixed in the thoughts they lie,
A worshipp'd, but unseen, Divinity
Like God himself! I never shall forget
That lucent face, but for a moment met:
Itself and all its loveliness must die
In death, or deathward life's maturity;
But, ever young and beauteous, in my dreaming
It shall contend for immortality,
Till o'er my dust the grass and flowers are teeming:
Nor perish then, if aught in this true page
May feed a dream thereof from age to age.

XXVII. THE FACE.—II.

It was a face that on the eyesight struck
Like the clear blue and starry arch of night,
When suddenly we quit a narrow chamber,
From the world's dust to teach our thoughts to clamber
To that invisible ether of delight
Which atmospheres the planets in their flight!
With lips, and brow, and eyelids that did pluck
The gaze from all the circling flash of faces,
And fix it on its beauties' combination;
So interflexed, that, star by star, its graces
Were noted not; but still, in constellation,
A harmony of grace, such as embraces
The innermost spirit with its concord fine
But which sense cannot note by note define.

XXVIII. POETRY AND SCIENCE.

A revelation of the essence of God
Is Poetry; Science, of his effluence:
This, a revealing of the power of God;
That, of his being is a vision intense:
This, a disclosure of the acts of God;
That, God himself reveal'd to evidence.
The Spirit of all things felt before he knew;
And from his feeling was his knowledge drawn—
Effect divine of a diviner cause!
So from the heart the head hath its prime laws;
For Poetry's noon-hues our souls imbue
Ere Science breaks on them with her cold dawn.
O, self-proud Head! bow down thy Science high
To the creator Heart and its great Poetry!

XXIX. COMPANIONSHIP.

God cannot feel alone; for unto Him
The Love of All Things is companionship—
Whether express'd by human hand and lip,
Or quivering wing within the forest dim,
Or silent gaze of flowers; or which o'erbrim
Doth not in act or look, but lieth deep
Folded in brain and bosom, like a sleep,
And singing to itself a dreamy hymn!
And thus should Man of heavy solitude
Break the dead clasp; and of all living creatures
Make the enjoyment and the love his love
And glee and dear associates: there be features
Of tenderness and joy in things endued
With plainest aspect, the dull'd spirit to move.

XXX. THE FALLERS-SHORT.

When Great Men are not great, we needs must mourn,
More than for all the pranks of Littleness;
For that short-falling doth increase the weight
Our spirits bear beneath this dust forlorn.
Great Men are solid harbour-holding banks
Bounding the weltering waves of Life's distress;
And when they sink and fail us, we are left
Upon a shoreless ocean, hope-bereft.
O ye of lofty souls! what is there here,
In this poor antepast to the Eternal,
To lure ye to the glory-wrecking shoals
That should but tempt the idler voyager?
Your spirits in a Timeless mould are cast,
And should disdain to shrink within the mean Diurnal.

XXXI. THE SWAN.

O, blended majesty and grace of motion!
Majestic as a billow of the ocean;
And graceful as a matron's bosom heaving!
At the first coming of the twilight wan,
The crystal of the river whitely cleaving,
O'er his fair shadow floats a state-proud swan!
His wings upreared and curved; his fine neck arching;
His eyes to either shore intently peering;
His progress silent as the mighty marching
Of earth and all the planets round the sun!
He naught divergeth from his forth-careering
Till the far haven of his rest is won;
Where her close-nestled young his fond mate tendeth,
And her upraised neck to greet his coming bendeth!

XXXII.

When we behold the air-suspended sword
O'er human joy for ever pendulous;
And see the earthly pitfalls 'waiting us
Thickly along life's way; of act or word
We grow incapable, and fain would wait
Stirless and speechless for the coming state,
Wherein the millions of the past abide—
Their dust, their deeds, and their recorded pride:
And our vow'd spirits (like the devotees
In attitudinal monotony
Transfix'd in Indian forests, till the trees
O'ergrow them, and the wild birds build thereon)
Seem stricken to their place eternally,
And no more vital than a stock or stone.

XXXIII.

The life continual, the fast flow of things,
That welters round about us; every year
Bearing the next upon its changing wings,
And disappearing but to reappear
Like-visaged, tho' transfigured; rise and setting
Of sun and moon, planets, and starry crowds;
Coming and going of the solemn clouds;
Wild play of storms and streams, and billows, fretting
The ever-shifting girdle of the ocean;
The bursting of green buds, and fall of leaves;
The unfolding and decay of gracious flowers;
The music and the silence of the hours,
Still alternating: 'tis all this reprieves
Our spirits from their trance, to sweet commotion.

XXXIV. THE “POETRY OF EARTH.”

“The Poetry of Earth is never dead,”
Even in the cluster'd haunts of plodding men.
Before a door in citied underground,
Lies a man-loving, faith-expression'd hound—
To pastoral hills forth sending us; to den
Of daring bandit; and to regions dread
Of mountain-snows, where others of its kind
Tend upon man's, as with a human mind:
A golden beetle on the dusty steps
Crawls, of a wayside-plying vehicle,
Where wending men swarm thick and gloomily—
We gaze; and see beneath the ripening sky
The harvest glisten; and that creature creeps
Upon the sunny corn, radiantly visible!

XXXV. THE SERE OAK LEAVES.

Why do ye rustle in this vernal wind,
Sere Leaves! shaking a drear prophetic shroud
Over the very cradle of the Spring?
Like pertinacious Age, with warnings loud,
Dinning the grave into an infant's mind,
And shadowing death on life's first imaging!
Why to these teeming branches do ye cling
And with your argument renascence cloud;
Whilst every creature of new birth is proud,
And in unstain'd existence revelling?
Fall, and a grave within the centre find!
And do not thus, whilst all the sweet birds sing,
The insects glitter, and the flower'd grass waves,
Blight us with thoughts of winter and our graves!

XXXVI. THE SWAN-AVIARY.

A thousand swans are o'er the waters sailing,
And others in the reeds and rushes brood,
And some are flying o'er the sunny flood;
And all move with a grandeur so prevailing,
That long we stand without a breath-inhaling,
In admiration of their multitude,
And the majestic grace with which endued
They float upon the waves, their pride regaling.
The sky is blue and golden; clear as glass,
The sea sweeps richly on the glowing shingle;
All vernal hues in the near woods commingle;
And exquisite beauty waves along the grass;
But these things seem but humbly tributary
To the white pomp of that vast aviary!

XXXVII. SPIRIT SOLACE.

Perpetual moanings from the troubled sea
Of human thought, and wail from the vex'd wind
Of mortal feeling, fill our life's wide air:
Yet, let thereof the breather not despair:
For wind and wave obey a high decree,
Which we perceive not in this transit blind
From body unto soul. Oh! the clear calm
Of that wild ocean, and its sunlit splendours,
And even the rainbows of its tempests fierce,
Beget a tranquil spirit-trance, which renders
Its terrors dreadless: and the flower-fed balm
Of that wind, lull'd to zephyr, doth so pierce
The immortal senses with an odorous hope,
That earth seems verged on heaven, and all heaven's portals ope.

XXXVIII. DECEMBER—MAY.

“So sweet a day it is, that even December,
On the strange freshness of whose alter'd lip
I drink this balmy breath—despite the bare
And silent trees, and meadows flower-forsaken—
Seems beating with the pulse of joyous May!”
Thus said I, with a feeling all of May,
One gentle daytime bland of late December,
On the strange freshness of whose alter'd lip
I breathed mild airs of spring: and lo! the bare
And silent trees, and meadows flower-forsaken,
Grew leaf'd and musical, and flower-adorn'd;
And near and far spake out the cuckoo's soul!—
“Ah, God!” methought, “these things are in the soul;
And from Within is the Without adorn'd.”

XXXIX. THE SUN AND THE DAISY.

The temper'd Sun, down-verging to the West,
Shone full upon one Daisy's lonely bloom;
Of a bleak bank the solitary guest,
And only spirit risen from Winter's tomb!
But fair and bright and perfect-orb'd it gleam'd;
And, as the Sun the cold encircling sky,
To gild the barrenness around it seem'd,
And claim'd as constant tribute from the eye.
And worthily: for that vast globe of fire,
Unto the vision which no space controll'd,
Would show minute, compared with glories higher,
As unto ours that little disc of gold:
'Tis our poor faculties make large and small,
Where the same boundless wonder mantles all.

XL. THE ACCOMPANIMENT.

The lark, as I did read her sweetest letter,
Sang heavenward in divine accompaniment;
And as its gentle meanings ceased to fetter,
At intervals, all sense o' the outward ear,
I heard that loud bird-music piercing clear
The freshness of the morning element,
Descending as its minstrel made ascent
And timed to the soft written argument.
In Love is all-embracing sympathy:
All accents of the song of that high bird,
All modulations of its melody,
Were answer'd by that letter's spirit and word;
And the far bird re-echoed, tone for tone,
The love-notes which my tranced eye trembled on.

XLI. THE CRUCIFIXION.

All his pain'd life was nail'd and crucified
By selfish men, of hearts conventional:
And since his death, he many deaths hath died
On dull men's tongues; his godhead full denied,
His memory scourged, and rudely vilified,
And pierced by ruffians in its holy side.
Then should'st thou not, thou Man Imperial!
Whose thoughts do govern thought amidst us all,
Be worse than Pilate; in not being the thrall
Of place, as he, and yet abandoning
The sacred name of Shelley, deified,
To vulgar mockery, without championing
His spirit divine. O, marvel, shame and loss:
Our Pilate is turn'd Jew, and strains the Cross!

XLII. THE MAN-“GOD.”

It cannot last—this story of a manger
Being the Godhead's cradle!—“Miracles,”
Dealt upon fish and swine and jars-of-water!
Which, to the ceaseless Miracle that wells
Forth from th' unfathom'd Universe, are folly,
By Man the Knave to Man the Fool made holy.
Should we not laugh to know that flies and worms
Fabled that Godhead in their atom forms?
And what are we, but insects of an hour?—
Yet deeming that the Eternal God could cower
In our vile flesh his Omnipresent Fire!
It cannot last!—The Prophets of the Lyre,
And all men of great thought, do make it stranger
To brain and heart. God's “Son”!—Why not God's “Daughter”?

XLIII. TRACES.

Thy name upon the sands, my Spirit's bride!
Lo! I have writ; and the fast-coming sea
Advances, that will sweep it utterly
Out of all mark and meaning: but the tide,
And the sleek shore o'er which its waters glide,
Newly configurate and changed shall be
By that impressure, though invisibly,
And ever with the touch thereof abide:—
And thus, thy name, thy beauty, and thy love,
Whose traces Time's obliterating ocean
Hath wash'd from out my action-smoothéd mind,
Shall, with a fix'd effect, be intertwined
Therewith eternally, and deep inwove
With Time's own everlasting voice and motion.

XLIV.—XLV. BEETHOVEN'S “SONATA WITH THE FUNERAL MARCH.”

XLVI. CHRISTMAS 1866.

He stopp'd beneath the mistletoe, and kiss'd
Imaginary lips—and then he wept;
Lips which an everlasting silence kept
Within a far-off grave, but did exist
For him most livingly in memory,
With love and music that could never die,
Save with himself: and then, this weakness fled,
If weakness were it, he the revel sought;
Its joyous spirit in his spirit caught,
And only sadness in some minor thought:
“Why did I weep?” unto himself he said;
“Youth, beauty, love, are all renascent here,
“Making a spring time of the dying year;
“And what is gone, I do not think is dead.”

XLVII. WRITTEN AFTER HEARING GREAT MUSIC.

Pianoforte! ne'er before, perchance,
Thy alien name with English verse was blent;
But now 'tis meet thou to that place advance,
As rival to whatever instrument:
This Priestess of thy spirit-mysteries
Makes thee oracular; and harmonies
Soar from beneath her touch, which sing aloud
Of things imagined, but not seen nor known:
The rush of angels' wings; the flit of elves',
The creatures of the rainbow and bright cloud;
And the loved Dead, who in our dreams appear:
Cramer and Hummel, 'tis believed, are gone;
Yet in this heaven-of-sound we seem to hear,
Not echoes of them, but their living selves.

XLVIII. WRITTEN AFTER HAVING RECEIVED A PRESENT OF FLOWERS.

I do not know, but (such is Fantasy!)
I could believe these flowers are musical,
However silent unto our deaf hearing:
At least they speak to me of Music's crown,
And tell of great Musicians whom men name—
Mozart, Beethoven, at the height of fame,
And others, gifted but of less renown,
And their Interpreter, accomplish'd high,
Whose power compels their thoughts to reappearing,
And their clear inspiration doth recall,
In its rich eloquence ethereal,
And beam it bright around us! Flowers must die;
And so must we, and all things; yet there seems
Still, something deathless amid all our dreams.

XLIX. A TRIBUTE TO THE PRESENT, AND A REMINISCENCE OF THE FAR PAST.

Sovereign Creatrix of the World of Sound
Which vibrates on the raptly-listening ear,
Thou breath'st a meaning subtle and profound
Through every note whose beating pulse we hear:
Of One Beloved we feel the end of life,
The suffering, fear and hope, and then the death,
And next the tears and sobs and wailing strife
Of those who mourn the cease of that dear breath;
Then the black funeral from whose clouding rolls
The dark at length, until the adoring eye
Sees radiant armies of triumphant souls
In thunder pacing towards eternity.
Beethoven's spirit shines englass'd in Thine,
Which mirrors all its depths and effluence divine!

L. TO THE PIANOFORTE.

Nobly, Piano! hast thou held thy place
(Inspired by brain-and-heart-enkindled hands)
In strength, in sweetness, majesty and grace,
Beside the Frame loud bruited in the lands,
In which it higher laud than thine commands:
Unjustly, seems it: I would rather hear,
In the rapt stillness of this peopled room,
From thy roused depths—when, even as now, inform'd
(Thy coldness into passionate utterance warm'd)
By this High Priestess of thy Mysteries—
Beethoven's Pathos and dread March of doom,
In their great melodies and harmonies,
Than from all sound-shrines, gather'd to one sphere,
In Palace, or in full-throng'd Theatre!