The Poems of Sir William Watson :: :: University of Virginia Library

Thus much I know: what dues soe'er be mine,
Of fame or of oblivion, Time the just,
Punctiliously assessing, shall award.
This have I doubted never; this is sure.

DEDICATION

From Milton and from Shakespeare I learned more
Than from all other bards the wise adore.
This learning, or its fruits—for such they be—
Sweet wife of mine, thy true-love brings to thee.

SONNETS

THE FRONTIER

At the hushed brink of twilight—when, as though
Some solemn journeying phantom paused to lay
An ominous finger on the awestruck day,
Earth holds her breath till that great presence go—
A moment comes of visionary glow,
Pendulous 'twixt the gold hour and the grey,
Lovelier than these, more eloquent than they
Of memory, foresight, and life's ebb and flow.

So have I known, in some fair woman's face,
While viewless yet was Time's more cruel imprint,
The first, faint, hesitant, elusive hint
Of any invasion by the vandal years
Seem deeper beauty than youth's cloudless grace,
Wake subtler dreams, and touch me nigh to tears.

TO A FRIEND UNITING ANTIQUARIAN TASTES WITH PROGRESSIVE POLITICS

True lover of the Past, who dost not scorn
To give good heed to what the Future saith,—
Drinking the air of two worlds at a breath,
Thou livest not alone in thoughts outworn,
But ever helpest the new time be born,
Though with a sigh for the old order's death;
As clouds that crown the night that perisheth
Aid in the high solemnities of morn.

Guests of the ages, at To-morrow's door
Why shrink we? The long track behind us lies,
The lamps gleam and the music throbs before,
Bidding us enter: and I count him wise,
Who loves so well Man's noble memories
He needs must love Man's nobler hopes yet more.

AT THE SEASON'S END

A few more days in this unkind July,
This moon of stormy countenance livid and wan,
And you will hence have journeyed to put on
The moors and mountains like a robe laid by
And brought forth dipped in Nature's Tyrian dye.
For me, here lingering where your light hath shone,
A glamour will have passed, a witchery gone,
A vapid earth will wear a vacant sky.

Yet none the less our London as of old
Will throb with passionate heart-beats day by day,
And tower and spire will catch the dear last ray
Of suns that bid adieu with kiss of gold:
Thames will roll on, as long ago he rolled:
But 'mid wild glens you will be far away.

HISTORY

Darkly, as by some gloomèd mirror glassed,
Herein at times the brooding eye beholds
The great scarred visage of the pompous Past,
But oftener only the embroidered folds
And soiled regality of his rent robe,
Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties
And cumber with their trailing pride the globe,
And sweep the dusty ages in our eyes;

Till the world seems a world of husks and bones
Where sightless seers and immortals dead,
Kings that remember not their awful thrones,
Invincible armies long since vanquishèd,
And powerless potentates and foolish sages
Lie 'mid the crumbling of the mossy ages.

VOICE AND VISION

If I had never known your face at all,
Had only heard you speak, beyond thick screen
Of leaves, in an old garden, when the sheen
Of morning dwelt on dial and ivied wall,
I think your voice had been enough to call
Yourself before me, in living vision seen,
So pregnant with your Essence had it been,
So charged with You, in each soft rise and fall.

At least I know, that when upon the night
With chanted word your voice lets loose your soul,
I am stricken and pierced and cloven with Delight
That hath all Pain within it, and the whole
World's tears; all ecstasy of inward sight;
And the blind cry of all the seas that roll.

THE IDEAL POPULAR LEADER

He is one who counts no public toil so hard
As idly glittering pleasures; one controlled
By no mob's haste, nor swayed by gods of gold;
Prizing, not courting, all just men's regard;
With none but Manhood's ancient Order starred,
Nor crowned with titles less august and old
Than human greatness; large-brained, limpid-souled;
Whom dreams can hurry not, nor doubts retard;
Born, nurtured of the People; living still
The People's life; and though their noblest flower,
In nought removed above them, save alone
In loftier virtue, wisdom, courage, power,
The ampler vision, the serener will,
And the fixed mind, to no light dallyings prone.

LA HAUTE POLITIQUE

I sailed in fancy by a beach of gold,
Toward a golden city like a star,
That quivered on the morning from afar—
Turrets and domes and airy spires untold.
But when I neared the marble quays, behold,
Offal and ordure; lurking Shames, that mar
The affronted sunlight; Plagues that deadliest are;
And ancient Tribulations manifold.

So fair, so foul, I said, the craft of State!
Such is the glory, such the light that clings
About the footsteps and the deeds of kings;
And in the shadow Terror sits, and Hate;
The lazars crouch, the bravo lies in wait;
And mocked is heaven with all unheavenly things.

THE MODERN SADNESS

Old Chaucer, the unconquerably young,
Methought thou camest by, and didst incline
An ear to these poor fitful notes of mine,
And didst reprove, albeit with gentle tongue,
A lyre to joyous mood so seldom strung—
So little vowed to laughter or the vine,
Or her that rose a goddess from the brine,
Mother of half the songs the world hath sung.

Blandly arraigning ghost! 'tis all too true,—
A want of joy doth in these strings reside;
Some shade, that troubled not thy clearer day,
Some loss, nor thou nor thy Boccaccio knew.
For thou art of the morning and the May—
I of the autumn and the eventide.

NIGHTMARE

[_]

[Written during apparent imminence of war.]

In a false dream I saw the Foe prevail.
The war was ended; the last smoke had rolled
Away: and we, erewhile the strong and bold,
Stood broken, humbled, withered, weak, and pale,
And moaned: “Our greatness is become a tale
To tell our children's babes when we are old.
They shall put by their playthings to be told
How England once, before the years of bale,
Throned above trembling, puissant, grandiose, calm,
Held Asia's richest jewel in her palm;
And with unnumbered isles barbaric, she
The broad hem of her glistening robe impearled;
Then, when she wound her arms about the world,
And had for vassal the obsequious sea.”

TO ONE WHO ACCUSED ME OF POLITICAL APOSTASY

When reek of massacre filled the eastern skies,
Who among singers sang for Man but me?
These lute-strings were a scourge to tyranny
When you turned listless from those anguished cries.
A hundred times, when all the worldly-wise
Kept comfortable silence, I spoke free.
And would you now begrudge me liberty
To use my own brain, see with my own eyes?
When you hung rearward, I was in the van,
Among the whizzing arrows; and to-day,
Because in one thing I reshape my creed,
You cry “Apostate!”—Liberalism indeed!
Give me the Liberalism that guards for Man
His right to think his thought and say his say.

FRANCE

[_]

[June 25, 1894, the day after the murder of President Carnot.]

Light-hearted heroine of tragic story!
Nation whom storm on storm of ruining fate
Unruined leaves—nay, fairer, more elate,
Hungrier for action, more athirst for glory!
World-witching queen, from fiery floods and gory
Rising eternally regenerate,
Clothed with great deeds and crowned with dreams more great,
Spacious as Fancy's boundless territory!
Little thou lov'st our island, and perchance
Thou heed'st as little her reluctant praise;
Yet let her, in these dark and bodeful days,
Sinking old hatreds 'neath the sundering brine,
Immortal and indomitable France,
Marry her tears, her alien tears, to thine.

TO ONE ESPOUSING UNPOPULAR TRUTH

Not yet, dejected though thy cause, despair,
Nor doubt of Dawn for all her laggard wing.
In shrewdest March the earth was mellowing,
And had conceived the Summer unaware.
With delicate ministration, as of the air,
The sovereign forces that conspire to bring
Light out of darkness, out of Winter, Spring,
Perform unseen their tasks benign and fair.
The sower soweth seed o'er vale and hill,
And long the folded life waits to be born;
Yet hath it never slept, nor once been still:
And clouds and suns have served it night and morn;
The winds are of its secret council sworn;
And Time and nurturing Silence work its will.

CHRISTMAS DAY

The morn broke bright: the thronging people wore
Their best; but in the general face I saw
No touch of veneration or of awe.
Christ's natal day? 'Twas merely one day more
On which the mart agreed to close its door;
A lounging-time by usage and by law
Sanctioned; nor recked they, beyond this, one straw
Of any meaning which for man it bore!

Fated among Time's fallen leaves to stray,
We breathe an air that savours of the tomb,
Heavy with dissolution and decay;
Waiting till some new world-emotion rise,
And with the might of the unchained simoom
Sweep hence this dying Past that never dies.

1893

TO AN AMERICAN POET

Take, Poet, take these thanks too long deferred—
You that have made me richer year by year,
Across the vast and desert waters drear
Wafting your marriage-chimes of thought and word,
Your true-born, truthful songs. Not April bird
Utters abroad his wisdom morning-clear
From fuller heart. Still sing with note sincere,
And English pure as English air hath heard.
And so, though all the fops of style misuse
Our great brave language—tricking out with beads
This noble vesture that no frippery needs—
Help still to save, while Time around him strews
Old shards of empire, and much dust of creeds,
The honour and the glory of the muse.

1907

THE MOUNTAIN RAPTURE

Contentment have I known in lowlands green;
A quiet heart by mead and lisping rill;
But joy was with me on the cloven hill,
And in the pass where strife of gods hath been;—
Visible, there, is the ecstasy terrene
Whence leapt the cataracts; there may whoso will
Watch the primeval paroxysm that still
Writhes on the countenance of the seared ravine,
These peaks that out of Earth's great passions rose,
Wearing the script of rage, the graven pang,
The adamantine legend of her throes,—
These are her lyric transports! thus she sang,
With wild improvisation—thus, with clang
Of fiery heavings, throbbed into repose.

THE ENGLISH DEAD

[_]

[In the Soudanese campaign, 1885.]

Give honour to our heroes fall'n, while still
Dark on the desert the red war-stains lie.
Honour to him, the untimely struck, whom high
In men's salutes and praises 'twas Fate's will
With tedious pain unsplendidly to kill.
Honour to him, doom'd splendidly to die,
Child of the city whose foster-child am I,
Who hotly leading up the ensanguin'd hill
His charging thousand, fell without a word;
Fell, but shall fall not from our memory.
Also for them let honour's voice be heard
Who nameless sleep, while dull Time covereth
With no illustrious shade of laurel tree,
But with the poppy alone, their deeds and death.

GLADSTONE, 1885

This sonnet and the one immediately following it are likely to surprise some readers as being strangely at variance with each other in their language regarding a famous statesman. The reader is, however, requested to bear in mind that the two poems are separated by eleven years and much history.

[_]

[During the Soudanese War.]

A skilful leech, so long as we were whole:
Who scann'd the nation's every outward part
But ah! misheard the beating of its heart.
Sire of huge sorrows, yet erect of soul.
Swift rider with calamity for goal,
Who, overtasking his equestrian art,
Unstall'd a steed full willing for the start,
But wondrous hard to curb or to control.
Sometimes we thought he led the people forth:
Anon he seemed to follow where they flew:
Lord of the golden tongue and smiting eyes;
Great out of season and untimely wise:
A man whose virtue, genius, grandeur, worth,
Wrought deadlier ill than ages can undo.

MELANCHOLIA

In the cold starlight, on the barren beach,
Where to the stones the rent sea-tresses clave,
I heard the long hiss of the backward wave
Down the steep shingle, and the hollow speech
Or murmurous cavern-lips, nor other breach
Of ancient silence. None was with me, save
Thoughts that were neither glad nor sweet nor brave,
But restless comrades, each the foe of each.
And I beheld the waters in their might
Writhe as a dragon by some great spell curbed
And foiled; and one lone sail; and over me
The everlasting taciturnity;
The august, inhospitable, inhuman night,
Glittering magnificently unperturbed.

1901

A DIZZYING SURMISE

What if that fieriest Substance—found so late—
That cousin to the uranium of the sun—
Were proved a cause of all that we have done
And dreamed and been? A source of love and hate,
Vileness and valour, and beauty nobly great!
What if all this, ere Nature had begun
Man's fashioning, lay closed and hidden in one
Miraculous God-sown seed of Life and Fate?

Thus was the Genie of the Arabian tale
Sealed in a vial for a thousand years
Under the ocean, till a fisher's net
Drew forth the vial, and the fisher set
The captive free—but shrank amazed and pale,
When the loosed Afreet towered against the Spheres.

1909

NIGHT ON CURBAR EDGE

No echo of man's life pursues my ears;
Nothing disputes this Desolation's reign;
Change comes not this dread temple to profane,
Where time by æons reckons, not by years.
Its patient form one crag, sole stranded, rears,
Type of whate'er is destined to remain
While yon still host encamped on night's waste plain
Keeps armèd watch, a million glittering spears.

Hushed are the wild and wing'd lives of the moor;
The sleeping sheep nestle 'neath ruined wall,
Or unhewn stones in random concourse hurled:
Solitude, sleepless, listens at Fate's door;
And there is built and 'stablisht over all,
Tremendous silence, older than the world.

1894

ABDICATION

I think you never were of earthly frame,
O truant from some charèd world unknown!
A fairy empress, you forsook your throne,
Fled your inviolate Court, and hither came;
Donned mortal vesture; wore a woman's name;
Like a mere woman, loved; and so are grown
At last a little human, save alone
For the wild elvish heart not Love could tame.
And one day I believe you will return
To your far isle amid the enchanted sea—
There, in your realm, perhaps remember me,
Perhaps forget: but I shall never learn!
I, loveless dust within a dreamless urn,
Dead to your beauty's immortality.

WRITTEN IN A COPY OF R.L. STEVENSON'S “CATRIONA”

Glorious Sir Walter, Shakespeare's brotherbrain,
Fortune's unvanquishable victim, Scott,
Mere lettered fame, 'tis said, esteeming not,
Save as it ministered to weightier gain,
Had yet his roseate dream, though dreamed in vain:
The dream, that, crowning his terrestrial lot,
A race and line, of his own blood begot,
In proud succession o'er Abbotsford should reign.

The Fates forbade, but promised, in amends,
One mighty scion of his heart and mind;
And where strange isles the languorous ocean fleck—
Far from the cold kiss of our northern wind—
Sleeps the rare spirit through whom we hail as friends
The immortal Highland maid and Alan Breck!

THE SLAIN

[_]

[In the Boer War.]

Partners in silence, mates in noteless doom,
Peers in oblivion's commonalty merged;
Unto like deeds by differing mandates urged,
And equalled in the unrespective tomb;
Leal or perfidious, cruel or ruthful, whom
Precipitate fate hath of your frailties purged;
Whom duly the impartial winds have dirged,
In autumn or the glorying vernal bloom:
Already is your strife become as nought;
Idle the bullet's flight, the bayonet's thrust,
The senseless cannon's dull, unmeaning word;
Idle your feud; and all for which ye fought
To this arbitrament of loam referred,
And cold adjudication of the dust.

1903

ON THE AUTHOR'S SEVENTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY

Long watching wars and feuds, at last I am old.
The friends of my far youth are in the grave;
Buried less deeply than the unsung but brave
Whose hearts the embrace of the sea did leave full cold.
And now, though small the lure of fame or gold,
There is one boon that I indeed must crave.
Some gift the Gods to luckier mortals gave?
Ah, no: but the felicity to behold
This Nation, that survives the storms of Fate,
Still young in soul; still rich by secret dower
And cryptic birthright; casting rage and hate
From her remembrance; and throughout each hour
Strengthening the Forts of Peace, that they may tower
Impregnably mighty, and invincibly great.

FORCE AND FREEDOM

O doubtless ye can trample and enchain,
Sow wrath and breathe out winter; but can ye
Persuade the muttering bondsman he is free,
Or with a signal build the summer again?
O, ye can hold the rivulets of the plain
A little while from nuptials with the sea,
But the fierce mountain-stream of Liberty
Not edicts and not hosts may long restrain.
For this is of the heights and of the deeps,
Born of the heights and in the deeps conceived.
This, from the lofty places of the mind,
Gushes pellucid, vehemently upheaved;
And tears and heart's blood hallow it, as it sweeps
Invincibly on, with Might no Might can bind.

1902

THE MOCK SELF

Few friends are mine, though many wights there be
Who, meeting oft a phantasm that makes claim
To be myself, and hath my face and name,
And whose thin fraud I wink at privily,
Account this light impostor very me.
What boots it undeceive them, and proclaim
Myself myself, and whelm this cheat with shame?
I care not, so he leave my true self free,
Impose not on me also; but alas!
I too, at fault, bewildered, sometimes take
Him for myself, and far from mine own sight,
Torpid, indifferent, doth mine own self pass;
And yet anon leaps suddenly awake,
And spurns the gibbering mime into the night.

1888

TO A HIGHBORN BEAUTY

If you had lived in that more stately time
When men remembered the great Tudor queen,
To noblest verse your name had wedded been,
And you for ever crowned with golden rhyme.
If, mid Lorenzo's Florence, made sublime
By Art's Re-birth, you had moved, a Muse serene,
The mightiest limners had revealed your mien
To all the ages and each wondering clime.

Fled are the singers that from language drew
Its virgin secrets, and in narrow space
The mightiest limners sleep: and only He,
The Eternal Artist, still creates anew
What shames all else on earth—the breathing grace
That takes the world into captivity.

1909

PEACE AND WAR

The sleek sea, gorged and sated, basking lies;
The cruel creature fawns and blinks and purrs;
And almost we forget what fangs are hers,
And trust for once her emerald-golden eyes;
Though haply on the morrow she shall rise
And summon her infernal ministers,
And charge her everlasting barriers,
With wild white fingers snatching at the skies.

So, betwixt Peace and War, man's life is cast;
Yet hath he dreamed of purest Peace at last
Shepherding all the nations ev'n as sheep.
The inconstant, moody ocean shall as soon,
At the cold dictates of the bloodless moon,
Swear an eternity of halcyon sleep.

1904

ESTRANGEMENT

So, without overt breach, we fall apart,
Tacitly sunder—neither you nor I
Conscious of one intelligible Why,
And both, from severance, winning equal smart.
So, with resigned and acquiescent heart,
Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie,
I seem to see an alien shade pass by,
A spirit wherein I have no lot or part.
Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim,
From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn
That June on her triumphal progress goes
Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him
She is a legend emptied of concern,
And idle is the rumour of the rose.

1894

TO AUBREY DE VERE

Poet, whose grave and strenuous lyre is still
For Truth and Duty strung; whose art eschews
The lighter graces of the softer Muse,
Disdainful of mere craftsman's glittering skill:
Yours is a soul from visionary hill
Watching and harkening for ethereal news,
Looking beyond life's storms and death's cold dews
To habitations of the eternal will.

Not mine your mystic creed; not mine, in prayer
And worship, at the ensanguined Cross to kneel!
But when I mark your faith how pure and fair,
How based on love, on passion for man's weal,
My mind, half envying what it cannot share,
Reveres the reverence which it cannot feel.

1892

THE INEXORABLE LAW

We, too, shall pass; we, too, shall disappear,
Ev'n as the mighty nations that have waned
And perished. Not more surely are ordained
The crescence and the cadence of the year,
High-hearted June, October drooped and sere,
Than this grey consummation. We have reigned
Augustly; let our part be so sustained
That in far morns, whose voice we shall not hear,
It may be said: “This Mistress of the sword
And conquering prow, this Empire swoln with spoils,
Yet served the Human Cause, yet strove for Man;
Hers was the purest greatness we record;
We whose ingathered sheaves her tilth foreran:
Whose Peace comes of her tempests, and her toils.”

1902

BARREN LEVITY

I think the immortal servants of mankind,
If still they are watching by how slow degrees
The World-Soul greatens with the centuries,
Mourn most Man's barren levity of mind,
The ear to no large harmonies inclined,
The witless thirst for false wit's worthless lees,
The laugh mistimed in tragic presences,
The eye to all majestic meanings blind.

O prophets, martyrs, saviours, ye were great,
All truth being great to you: ye deemed Man more
Than a dull jest, God's ennui to amuse:
The world for you, held purport: Life ye wore
Proudly, as Kings their solemn robes of state;
And humbly, as the mightiest monarchs use.

1903

HIS SPLENDID DEFECT

'Twas said the gods, when they Porphyrion slew,
And vast Enceladus under Etna laid,
Could conquer only with a mortal's aid
These mortal giants and their snakish crew.
Poet who didst with radiant valour hew
At monsters old, thou fought'st them with a blade
Too wholly of celestial metal made,
And lacking help of mere gross human thew.
Therefore thou didst prevail not! For to quell
Earth's mightiest evil things 'tis not enough
To array against them things of heavenly birth.
Earthly auxiliaries thou need'st as well:
Earth-founded powers, and earth-forged weapons tough,
And breastplate hard as the iron breast of the earth.

1904

SECRET COMMUNION

Pert Folly said to skyborn Freedom: “Thou
Hast been so long unknown on Ireland's shore,
Art certain she doth miss thee any more?
Nay, if thou should'st return to-morrow, how
Will she remember thee, whose face is now
One of the vague, dim things of heretofore?
What if she pause, loth to unlatch her door
To such a stranger?” Then with a lit brow
Did Freedom speak: “Can Erin's soul forget
Mine, her companion 'mid the fields and streams
Of her far youth? Ah, no! And though it seems
Ages untold since she and I have met
Ev'n for a day, we meet at midnight yet,
For always am I with her in her dreams.”

TRANQUIL LIBERTY

First published October 23, 1914. I let it stand but commit myself to no opinion as to its wisdom or folly.

Pax est tranquilla libertas.—Cicero

Peace is no peace when all its dream is war;
Nor are repasts beneath the hair-swung sword,
That awed in Syracuse the tyrant's board,
Such banquets as the peoples hunger for.
Not to Europa's bull need toreador
Wave scarlet provocation; and Accord
Blooms ill from arsenals for ever stored
With mouths of death for ever in act to roar.
An areopagus of nations let
Men found hereafter, puissant to restrain
Flaunted armipotence, whether on earth or sea
Or the outraged air, and suchlike peace beget
As Tully envisioned; peace itself being vain,
That is not also tranquil liberty.

1914

TO A SON OF WALES

Since first I saw your mountains long ago,
Dark behind Conway's or Carnarvon's hold,
I have watched the Alps put on their evening gold,
And morning kindle peaks of Afric snow;
I have crossed Niagara's flood and Delaware's flow,
And loitered 'midst Italian vinelands old,
And visited isles which the far deeps enfold,
Where Spain is ashes and a sunset-glow.
But lovely as in youth are yet to me
Mona's bleak fields and Glaslyn's torrent wave;
And dearer now than ever, their wild charm,
When hardy Wales pours forth her children free,
Hungering to aid her ancient Conqueror's arm
Lest Freedom's self reel to a blood-red grave.

1915

THE PLAGUE OF APATHY

No tears are left; we have quickly spent that store!
Indifference like a dewless night hath come.
From wintry sea to sea the land lies numb.
With palsy of the spirit stricken sore,
The land lies numb from iron shore to shore.
The unconcerned, they flourish: loud are some,
And without shame. The multitude stand dumb.
The England that we vaunted is no more.
Only the witling's sneer, the worldling's smile,
The weakling's tremors, fail him not who fain
Would rouse to heroic deed. And all the while,
A homeless people, in their mortal pain,
Toward one far and famous ocean isle
Stretch hands of prayer, and stretch those hands in vain.

THE WORLD IN ARMOUR

By an unaccountable slip, in the footnote to a page of my volume A Hundred Poems, I stated that these three sonnets appeared in print ten years before the outbreak of the War which they seem to have prefigured. I subsequently found that they were first published (in the Spectator) on July 13, 1894, not ten but twenty years and a few days before that world-catastrophe, whose first sequel the last of these sonnets may, I think, be said to have foreshadowed not altogether obscurely.

[_]

[Three sonnets of 1894.]

I

Under this shade of crimson wings abhorred
That never wholly leaves the sky serene—
While Vengeance sleeps a sleep so light between
Dominions that acclaim Thee overlord—
Sadly the blast of Thy tremendous word,
Whate'er its mystic purport may have been,
Echoes across the ages, Nazarene:
Not to bring peace Mine errand, but a sword.

For lo, Thy world uprises and lies down
In armour, and its Peace is War, in all
Save the great death that weaves War's dreadful crown:
War unennobled by heroic pain:
War without triumph, without glorious fall;
War that sits smiling, with the eyes of Cain.

II

When London's Plague, that day by day enrolled
His thousands dead, nor deigned his rage to abate
Till grass was green in silent Bishopsgate,
Had come and passed like thunder, still, 'tis told,
The monster, driven to earth, in hovels old
And haunts obscure, though dormant, lingered late,
Till the dread Fire, one roaring wave of fate,
Rose, and swept clean his last retreat and hold.

In Europe live the dregs of Plague to-day,
Dregs of full many an ancient Plague and dire—
Old wrongs, old lies of ages blind and cruel.
What if alone the world-war's world-wide fire
Can purge the ambushed pestilence away?
Yet woe to him that idly lights the fuel!

III

A moment's fantasy, the vision came
Of Europe dipped in fiery death, and so
Mounting re-born, with vestal limbs aglow,
Splendid and fragrant from her bath of flame.
It fleeted; and a phantom without name,
Sightless, dismembered, terrible, said: “Lo,
I am that ravished Europe men shall know
After the morn of blood and night of shame.”

The spectre passed, and I beheld alone
The Europe of the present, as she stands,
Powerless from terror of her own vast power,
'Neath novel stars, beside a brink unknown;
And round her the sad Kings, with sleepless hands,
Piling the fagots, hour by doomful hour.

TO AMERICA, CONCERNING ENGLAND

I may be exposing my memory (not that it will greatly trouble me) to unfriendly if also well-meant criticism in reprinting this sonnet, in which America, during the period of her non-intervention in the late European War, was reproached for the neutral attitude which we must now suppose her to have afterwards believed it either her duty or her interest to abandon. But as my appeal to her is said, with every appearance of authority, to have influenced many serious minds in the United States, where it was undoubtedly read by countless multitudes, and where it called forth in many quarters such bitter retort as sufficiently proved it to have been a letter which reached its address, there can be no reason other than a merely capricious one, on my part, for seeking to efface all memory of it now. It may be permissible for me to add that if anyone regards this poem as convicting me of anti-American bias, I think more than enough printed evidence can be brought forward to justify my acquittal on that charge.

Art thou her child, born in the proud midday
Of her large soul's abundance and excess,
Her daughter and her mightiest heritress,
Dowered with her thoughts, and lit on thy great way
By her great lamps that shine and fail not? Yea!
And at this thunderous hour of struggle and stress,
Hither across the ocean wilderness
What word comes frozen on the frozen spray?
Neutrality! The tiger from his den
Springs at thy mother's throat, and canst thou now
Watch with a stranger's gaze? So be it, then!
Thy loss is more than hers; for, bruised and torn,
She shall yet live without thine aid, and thou
Without the crown divine thou might'st have worn.

1915

NIGHT AND TIME

On a grey city I looked down, where strove
Britain with Rome, and Saxon warred with Dane,
And faith to faith succeeded, fane to fane;
Where haply, shrined in immemorial grove;
Some god of dayspring faded before Jove;
Where Jove to Christ, where Christ's to Odin's reign,
Did yield; and Odin bowed to Christ again;
And each a darkness round a darkness wove.

And Silence was abroad, and Dreams went by;
And hearthfires paled and faltered and died out,
As dying gods had paled to ghosts and fled;
And a blear mist came slowly up like Doubt;
And there was only Night, and Time, and I,
And city upon city of the dead.

POWER AND CHARM

A cot was ours, lone on a wooded fell
That gazed into a fairy Mere renowned.
Dark mountains on our right hand camped around;
Green, on our left, were copse and ferny dell.
Thus betwixt Power and Charm we abode; and well
Loved we the brows of Power, with silence crowned;
Yet many a time, when awesomely they frowned,
To Charm we turned, with Charm, with Charm to dwell.

So have I turned, when overbrooded long
By that great star-familiar peak austere,
My Milton's Sinai-Helicon divine,
To some far earthlier singer's earth-sweet song:
A song frail as the windflower, and as dear,
With no more purpose than the eglantine.

RESTORED ALLEGIANCE

I also, though with hauntings of remorse,
Railed at our England, bidding her give heed
To better counsellors than the guides who lead
Power unbeloved, on yonder cold, proud course!
Yet ... when I look abroad, and track the source,
More selfish far, of other nations' deed,
And mark their tortuous craft, their jealous greed,
Their serpent-wisdom or mere soulless force,
Homeward returns my vagrant fealty,
Crying: “O England, shouldst thou one day fall,
Shatter'd in ruins by some Titan foe,
Justice were thenceforth weaker throughout all
The earth, and Truth less passionately free,
And God the poorer for thine overthrow.”

1885

TO ABERDEEN

[_]

[After receiving an academic honour, April 1904.]

At the great dance and upleap of the year,
For me, of late, the northwind's cold accost
Was all day long in thy warm welcome lost.
How can I choose henceforth but hold thee dear?
Hoary thy countenance, and thy mien severe,
And thou a nursling of the hailstorm wast,
But on thy heart hath fall'n no touch of frost,
O City of the pallid brow austere.
Grey, wintry-featured, sea-throned Aberdeen!
The stranger thou hast honoured shall not cease,
In whatsoever ways he rest or roam,
To wish thee happy fortune, fame serene:
Thee and thy towers of learning and of peace,
That brood benignant on the northern foam.

ON EXCESSIVE DEFERENCE TO FOREIGN LITERARY OPINION

What! and shall we, with such submissive airs
As age demands in reverence from the young,
Snatch at these crumbs of praise from Europe flung,
And doubt of our own greatness till it bears
The warranty of your Goethes or Voltaires?
We who alone in latter times have sung
Strains that had shamed not him from Mantua sprung—
We who are Milton's kindred, Shakespeare's heirs.
The prize of lyric victory who shall gain
If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm?
More than the wanton leer of fevered Night
Around the eddying flotsam of the Seine,
And more than Weimar's proud elaborate Calm,
One flash of Byron's lightning, Burns's light.

1889

OUR EASTERN TREASURE

One of a series of sonnets published in the National Review for June 1885. Their patriotism, being that of youth, was perhaps more vehement than chastened, but I feel warranted in reprinting this sonnet as it does not appear to be without pertinence and relevance at the present day.

Somewhere in cobwebb'd corners I can hear
A thin voice pipingly revived of late,
Which saith our India is a cumbrous weight,
An idle decoration bought too dear.
The wiser world contemns not gorgeous gear,
And knows that by a just and happy fate
The sense of greatness keeps a nation great,
Telling her when to fear not—when to fear!
It may be that if hands of greed could steal
From England's grasp the envied orient prize,
This tide of gold would flood her still, as now;
But were she the same England, made to feel
A brightness gone from out those starlike eyes,
A splendour from that constellated brow?

April 1885

HOME-ROOTEDNESS

First published at the same date, and in the same periodical, as the preceding sonnet. This is reproduced here for reasons which seem partly identical in both cases.

I cannot boast myself cosmopolite;
I own to ‘insularity,’ although
'Tis fall'n from fashion, as full well I know.
For somehow, being a plain and simple wight,
I am skin-deep a child of the new light,
But chiefly am mere Englishman below,
Of island-fostering, and can hate a foe,
And trust my kin before the Muscovite.
Whom shall I trust if not my kin? And whom
Account so near in natural bonds as these
Born of my mother England's mighty womb,
Nursed on my mother England's mighty knees,
And lull'd as I was lull'd in glory and gloom
With cradle-song of her protecting seas?

April 1885

TO A SCOTTISH FRIEND

Around your northern home, where never cease
The ebb and flow of Nith, whose waters glide
Rich with their memories of the Muse; whose tide,
In haunts of moorfowl and the wandering fleece,
Down by Caerlaverock beyond old Dumfries,
To Solway brings its dowry, like a bride;
There do the lowland mothers mourn with pride
The lowland sons, whom War hath lapped in Peace.
But you—be nobly gladsome, seeing that what
Was great aforetime still disdains to fade:
The spirit perfervid of the heroic Scot,
Its fire unlulled, and hardly in earth allayed:
The ancient native prowess unforgot,
Valour undrooped, and manhood undecayed.

1915

TERMONDE

In wrecked Termonde, that 'mid the tramp and bellow
Of War's mad herd saw ruin on ruin piled,
The enemy had deflowered with havoc wild
A fair abode of Sculpture without fellow;
And while the autumn sunlight rich and mellow
On Art's poor shattered glories sadly smiled,
There, still unmaimed, with her unwounded child,
Leaned a serene Madonna of Donatello.
O'er a fledged Hermes, lord of speed and spoil—
O'er a bemired and fall'n Laocoön—
Near a prone Venus of the dust, she shone.
O'er winged Deceit, and Agony's serpent coil,
And Beauty born to inflame and to entoil,
Motherhood, scatheless, lived divinely on.

1915

THE SCOTT MONUMENT, PRINCE'S STREET, EDINBURGH

Here sits he throned, where men and gods behold
His domelike brow—a good man simply great;
Here in this highway proud, that arrow-straight
Cleaves at one stroke the new world from the old.
On this side, Commerce, Fashion, Progress, Gold;
On that, the Castle Hill, the Canongate,
A thousand years of war and love and hate
There palpably upstanding fierce and bold.
Here sits he throned; beneath him, full and fast,
The tides of Modern Life impetuous run.
O Scotland, was it well and meetly done?
For see! he sits with back turned on the Past—
He whose imperial edict bade it last
While yon grey ramparts kindle to the sun.

ON HEARING MADAME OLGA SAMAROFF PLAY

What hopes and fears, what tragical delight,
What lonely rapture, what immortal pain,
Through those two hands have flowed, nor thrilled in vain
The listening spirit and all its depth and height!
Lovelier and sweeter from those hands of might
The great strange soul of Schumann breathes again;
Through those two hands the over-peopled brain
Of Chopin floods with dreams the impassioned night,
Yea, and he too, Beethoven the divine,
Still shakes men's bosoms with his bosom's throes,
O fair Enchantress, through those hands of thine;
And yet perchance forgets at last his woes,
Happy at last to think that hands like those
Have poured out to the world his heart's red wine.

MINIATURES

SCULPTURE AND SONG

The statue—Buonarroti said—doth wait,
Thralled in the block, for me to emancipate.
The poem—saith the poet—wanders free
Till I ensnare it to captivity.

1882

SHELLEY AND HARRIET

A star looked down from heaven and loved a flower
Grown in Earth's garden—loved it for an hour.
Let eyes that trace his orbit in the Spheres
Refuse not, to a ruin'd rosebud, tears.

1880

THE WINGS OF EROS

Love, like a bird, hath perch'd upon a spray
For thee and me to harken what he sings.
Contented, he forgets to fly away;
But hush!...remind not Eros of his wings.

1882

TO ---

Forget not, brother singer! that though Prose
Can never be too truthful or too wise,
Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose
Upon Truth's lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

1892

THE INTERRUPTION

In mid whirl of the dance of Time ye start,
Start at the cold touch of Eternity,
And cast your cloaks about you, and depart....
The minstrels pause not in their minstrelsy.

1883

THE FATAL SCRUTINY

The beasts in field are glad, and have not wit
To know why leapt their hearts when springtime shone.
Man looks at his own bliss, considers it,
Weighs, tests it; and 'tis gone.

1882

BETROTHAL AND WEDLOCK

In youth the artist voweth lover's vows
To Art, in manhood maketh her his spouse.
Well if her charms still hold for him such joy
As when he craved some boon and she was coy!

1881

TO CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Two songstresses have sung beneath the sun
As goldenly as thou dost—but not three!
Of those sweet twain the grass is green o'er one:
And blue above the other is the sea.

1881

FROM THE SPANISH

What is the Stage? A glass wherein
Reflected are all Adam's kin.
Who flies it? He that doth not dare
To meet his own self mirrored there.

THE UNSPOTTED ONES

Think you, demoiselle demure,
That to be cold is to be pure?
Pure is the snow—till mixed with mire!
Ah, but not half so pure as fire.

1908

AFTER READING “TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT”

No want of reverence for the superb and epoch-making genius of Marlowe is intended in this comment on what is acknowledged to be his crudest production—“this huffing tragedy,” as Leigh Hunt, a perfervid Marlovian, very properly called it.

For the information of those whom it may possibly interest I may mention that the greater number of the four-line pieces here called “Miniatures” are from my little volume, Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature, published provincially in 1884. The common sort of epigram—the epigram which, as Boileau says, “n'est souvent qu'un bon-mot”—was seldom the kind of plant I cultivated, my affections being set on a rarer variety. The little volume, like my still earlier book, The Prince's Quest— which Kegan Paul issued at the beginning of 1880, its author being then twenty-one—was published at my father's cost and found literally no buyers till several years later, except a few personal friends of the epigrammatist. It is pleasant, however, to recall the fact that it received one very kind and cordial though almost solitary piece of recognition, in the shape of an article contributed to the Oxford Magazine by Dr J. W. Mackail, whose many and eminent distinctions were still, for the most part, things yet to be.

Looking back I cannot remember to have scattered very lavishly among my early friends the little book of which I am speaking. But I recall that in one copy—before bestowing it

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upon a young lady—I inscribed on the fly-leaf some words from the Prince of Poets himself:

“Hamlet. Is this a prologue or the posy of a ring?
Ophelia. 'Tis brief, my lord.
Hamlet. As woman's love.”

Yon page being closed, my Shakespeare's let me ope.
How welcome—after gong and cymbal's din—
The continuity, the long slow slope
And vast curves of the gradual violin!

1882

THE ROBE OF THEMIS

How Justice in her courts may best be clothed
Moves me not much or hotly;
But there's one garb that I have ever loathed—
Ermine set off with motley.

1923

THE APPEAL TO PARNASSUS

Passion and Vision met full-armed of late,
Each lusting to be lord in Song's wide sphere.
O Muse, thou knowest them! Let both dominate!
Let neither domineer.

ON LONGFELLOW'S DEATH

To-day a Singer is dead whose silence grieves
A distant Nation towering great and strong.
What hath he done that earns her love? He leaves
America's air the sweeter for his song.

1882

AN EPITAPH

His friends he loved. His direst earthly foes—
Cats—I believe he did but feign to hate.
My hand will miss the insinuated nose,
Mine eyes the tail that wagg'd contempt at Fate.

1881

IMAGINARY INSCRIPTION

[_]

[On a rock resembling colossal human features.]

The seafowl build in wrinkles of my face.
Ages ere man was, man was mocked by me.
Kings fall, gods die, worlds crash. At my throne's base,
In showers of bright white thunder, breaks the sea.

1882

ACTS

We shape our deeds and then are shapen by them:
We are children of the things ourselves begot.
Were they born foul, Heaven cannot purify them;
Were they born fair, Hell can defile them not.

1912

JUST A POSSIBILITY

I'll take Life's hazards, rue not hours well wasted,
Hide my heart's wounds, ask no miraculous balm;
And ere I die, perhaps I shall have tasted
At last a little calm.

1925

TO A BERKELEYAN IDEALIST

If Nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st,
A splendid figment and prodigious dream,
To reach the Real and True I'll make no haste,
More than content with worlds that only Seem.

1883

A WISE PRECAUTION

When So-and-so gave us his “Songs without Flaws.”
How well engineered was that burst of applause!
The strings of the lyre are supposed to be ‘struck,’
But, bless you, it's pulling them seems to bring luck.

KEATS

He dwelt with the bright gods of elder time,
On earth and in their cloudy haunts above.
He loved them: and in recompense sublime,
The gods, alas! gave him their fatal love.

1882

YOUTH THE OVERPRAISED

Say what thou wilt, the young are happy never;
Give me bless'd Age, beyond the fire and fever.
Past the delight that shatters, hope that stings,
And eager flutt'ring of life's ignorant wings.

1883

BACH, IN THE FUGUES AND PRELUDES

Contentedly with rigorous strands confined,
Sports in the sun that oceanic mind.
To leap their bourn these waves did never long,
Or roll against the stars their rockbound song.

1883

FAIRY DIET

I love not wildly—as a rule—
The Poets of the Moony School.
But how heroic—to subsist
Exclusively on moon and mist!

1920

EPITAPH ON AN OBSCURE PERSON

Stranger, these ashes were a Man
Crushed with a grievous weight.
He had acquired more ignorance than
He could assimilate.

1924

BYRON THE VOLUPTUARY

Too avid of earth's bliss, he was of those
Whom Delight flies because they give her chase.
Only the odour of her wild hair blows
Back in their faces hungering for her face.

1883

ONE OF THE FALLACIES

Art is not Nature! Shakespeare's women and men,
Still quick and warm 'mid all the sparkless dead,
Say their fine things at just those moments when
Such things are never said.

THE CHURCH TO-DAY

Outwardly splendid as of old—
Inwardly sparkless, void and cold—
Her force and fire all spent and gone—
Like the dead moon, she still shines on.

1908

THE NOBLE ANGUISH

To keep in sight Perfection, and adore
Her beauty, is the artist's best delight;
His bitterest torture, that he can no more
Than keep her long'd-for loveliness in sight.

1882

YOUTH AND THE MUSE

No poet of golden name do I remember,
Who, when his youth was past, began to sing.
The blackbird cannot wait until September!
Come peace, come war, his songs will out in Spring.

1924

TO A CLEVER CRITIC

Glance loftily through my book. Take quite a minute
To allot its place among the damned or blest.
And O! be sure to quote the worst thing in it
As the poor author's best.

FROM THE FRENCH

Says Marmontel, The secret's mine
Of Racine's art-of-verse divine.
To do thee justice, Marmontel,
Never was secret kept so well.

1880

THREE KINDS OF SONG

Song have I known that fed the soul,
And Song that was liker a foaming bowl;
But the Song that I account divine
Is at once rare food and noble wine.

1924

TO A LADY RECOVERED FROM A DANGEROUS SICKNESS

Life plucks thee back as by the golden hair—
Life, who had feigned to let thee go but now.
Ah, wealthy is Death already, and can spare
Even such a prey as thou!

1892

AUREA MEDIOCRITAS

Never o'er the lowliest towering,
Never 'neath the mightiest cowering—
Thus let me live, and ev'n in dreams
Save me from Life's accurst extremes.

IN MEMORY OF THE LATE LORD OXFORD

When did the Muses giggle, looking down
From sacred heights with most unsolemn gaze?
'Twas when they saw our drowsiest statesman crown
Our drowsiest bard with bays.

ON A STATUE OF LIBERTY

Proud thing of fame, how strange at last thy doom!
Liberty's image, left to guard her tomb.

1924

ON A PEOPLE'S POET

Yes, threadbare seem his songs, to lettered ken.
They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.

1920

TO ONE BEREAVED

Nay, not rewardless did your hero fall!
No pealing fame could match this great repose;
Death's grassy calm, after life's bugle call,
And love's white lily after war's red rose.

THE BAFFLING COIL

Think not thy wisdom can illume away
The ancient tanglement of night and day.
Enough, to acknowledge both! Around thee here,
They see not clearliest who see all things clear.

1882

THE MASTER RHETORICIAN

The children romp within the graveyard's pale;
The lark sings o'er the madhouse and the jail.
Such deft antitheses of perfect poise
The master rhetorician, Chance, employs.

1883

THE TOMB OF A PHARAOH

Disturb not—thou wilt find him unforgiving—
The mighty and famed in his sepulchral bed.
Thou may'st out-tire the malice of the living,
But not the vengeance of the implacable dead.

THE CHARIOT OF THE UNTARRYING

Onward the chariot of the Untarrying moves;
Nor day divulges him nor night conceals;
Thou hear'st the echo of unreturning hooves
And thunder of irrevocable wheels.

BIRTH AND DEATH

'Twas in another's pangs I hither came;
'Tis in mine own that I anon depart.
O Birth, thou doorway hung with swords of flame,
How like to Death thou art!

WHAT OF THE NIGHT?

What of the night? From chime to chime,
It reels and staggers past.
What of the morning? Give it time,
To break (in storm?) at last.

LYRICS AND LONGER POEMS

NATURE'S WAY

“Faultily faultless” may be ill—
“Carefully careless” is worse still.
I bought of late a book of rhyme—
One long, fierce flout at tune and time;
Ragged and jagged by intent,
As if each line were earthquake-rent;
Leagues on seismal leagues of it,
Not unheroically writ,
By one of whom I had been told
That he, in scorn of canons old,
Pedantic laws effete and dead,
Went fearless to the pure well-head
Of song's most ancient legislature—
Art's uncorrupted mother, Nature.

Nature! whose lapidary seas
Labour a pebble without ease,
Till they unto perfection bring
That miracle of polishing;
Who never negligently yet
Fashioned an April violet,
Nor would forgive, did June disclose
Unceremoniously the rose;
Who makes the toadstool in the grass
The carven ivory surpass,
So guiltless of a fault or slip
Is its victorious workmanship;
Who suffers us pure Form to see
In a dead leaf's anatomy;
And pondering long where greenly sleep
The unravished secrets of the deep,
Bids the all-courted pearl express
Her final thoughts on flawlessness;

But visibly aches when doomed to bring
Some inchoate amorphous thing
Into a world her curious wit
Would fain have shaped all-exquisite
As the acorn cup's simplicity,
Or the Moon's patience with the sea,
Or the superb, the golden grief
Of each October for each leaf,
Phrased in a rhetoric that excels
Isaiah's and Ezekiel's.

1914

REJUVENESCENCE

The Day is young, the Day is sweet,
And light is her heart as the tread of her feet.
The Day is weary, the Day is old:
She has sunk into sleep through a tempest of gold.
Sleep, tired Day! Thou shalt rise made new,
All splendour and wonder and odour and dew.

1923

UNINHABITED

Behold a sapless husk, in name a man,
That never shook with laughter at a jest,
Or flashed in anger at a hateful deed,
Or loved a woman, or sinned a headlong sin!
In two score years grown old and moribund,
His lean soul, arid as the childless sands,
Crumbles, and dustily disintegrates,
Dies piecemeal, less lamented than a tree.

It is not the well-warmed, well-peopled house
That soonest falls to wrack. 'Tis the disused
And empty dwelling that, with fireless hearth,
Pictureless walls, and shuttered window-panes,
Coldly, untimely mopes into decay.

TO THE INVINCIBLE REPUBLIC

America! I have never breathed thy air,
Have never touched thy soil or heard the speed
And thunder of thy cities; yet would I
Salute thee from afar, not chiefly awed
By wide domain, mere breadth of governed dust,
Nor measuring thy greatness and thy power
Only by numbers: rather seeing thee
As mountainous heave of spirit, emotion huge,
Enormous hate and anger, boundless love,
And most unknown unfathomable depth
Of energy divine.

In peace to-day
Thou sit'st between thy oceans; but when Fate
Was at thy making, and endowed thy soul
With many gifts and costly, she forgot
To mix with these a genius for repose;
Wherefore a sting is ever in thy blood,
And in thy marrow a sublime unrest.
And thus thou keepest hot the forge of life,
Where man is still re-shapen and re-made
With fire and clangour.

And as thou art vast,
So are the perils vast that evermore
In thine own house are bred; nor least of these
That fair and fell Delilah, Luxury,
That shears the hero's strength away, and brings
Palsy on nations. Flee her loveliness,
For in the end her kisses are a sword.
Strong sons hast thou begotten, natures rich
In scorn of riches, greatly simple minds:
No land in all the world hath memories
Of nobler children; let it not be said
That if the peerless and the stainless one,

The man of Yorktown and of Valley Forge—
Or he of tragic doom, thy later born,
He of the short plain word that thrilled the world
And freed the bondman,—let it not be said
That if to-day these radiant ones returned,
They would behold thee changed beyond all thought
From that austerity wherein thy youth
Was nurtured, those large habitudes of soul.

But who are we, to counsel thee or warn,
In this old England whence thy fathers sailed?
Here, too, hath Mammon many thrones, and here
Are palaces of sloth and towers of pride.
Best to forget them! Round me is the wealth,
The untainted wealth of English fields, and all
The passion and sweet trouble of the Spring
Is in the air; and the remembrance comes
That not alone for stem and blade, for flower
And leaf, but for man also, there are times
Of mighty vernal movement, seasons when
Life casts away the body of this death,
And a great surge of youth breaks on the world.
Then are the primal fountains clamorously
Unsealed; and then, perchance, are dread things born,
Not unforetold by deep parturient pangs,
But the light minds that heed no auguries,
Untaught by all that heretofore hath been,
Taking their ease on the blind verge of fate,
See nothing, and hear nothing, till the hour
Of some vast advent that makes all things new.

1909

THE ETERNAL SEARCH

My little maiden two years old, just able
To tower full half a head above the table,
With inquisition keen must needs explore
Whatever in my dwelling hath a door,
Whatever is behind a curtain hid,
Or lurks, a rich enigma, 'neath a lid.
So soon is the supreme desire confessed.
To probe the unknown! So soon begins the quest,
That never ends until asunder fall
The locks and bolts of the Last Door of All.

1915

THE THREE GIVERS

England gave me sun and storm,
The food whereon my spirit throve;
America gave me hand-grasps warm,
And Ireland gave me her I love.

Heirs of unequal wealth they are,
These lands of fame, these givers three;
And it was the poorest one by far,
That gave the richest gift to me.

1912

THOMAS HOOD

No courtier this, and nought to courts he owed,
Fawned not on thrones, hymned not the great and callous,
Yet, in one strain, that few remember, showed
He had the password to King Oberon's palace.

And seeing a London seamstress's grey fate,
He of a human heartstring made a thread,
And stitched him such a royal robe of state
That Eastern kings are poorlier habited.

He saw wan Woman toil with famished eyes;
He saw her bound, and strove to sing her free.
He saw her fallen; and wrote “The Bridge of Sighs”;
And on it crossed to immortality.

1915

TO RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

Yes, I have had my griefs; and yet
I think that when I shake off life's annoy,
I shall, in my last hour, forget
All things that were not joy.

Have I not watched the starry throngs
Gather, and April's pent soul break in bud?
Have not I taken Schubert's songs
Into my brain and blood?

I have seen the morn one laugh of gold;
I have known a mind that was a match for Fate;
I have wondered what the heavens can hold
Than simplest love more great.

And not uncrowned with honours ran
My days, and not without a boast shall end!
For I was Shakespeare's countryman;
And wert not thou my friend?

O LIKE A QUEEN

O like a queen's her happy tread,
And like a queen's her golden head!
But O, at last, when all is said,
Her woman's heart for me!

We wandered where the river gleamed
'Neath oaks that mused and pines that dreamed.
A wild thing of the woods she seemed,
So proud, and pure, and free!

All heaven drew nigh to hear her sing,
When from her lips her soul took wing;
The oaks forgot their pondering,
The pines their reverie.

And O, her happy queenly tread,
And O, her queenly golden head!
But O, her heart, when all is said,
Her woman's heart for me!

1894

THE STORMS AND THE HAVENS

Your eyes were pining southward, and you said: “The lands are yonder
That can woo me with sweet fierceness o'er the interloping sea.”
But I answered: “Oh, I care not whether south or north we wander,
For the world is lovely everywhere if roam'd through with thee.”

We lingered by the waters as they rose and subsided;
We watched the plumy children of the foam and the spray;
We saw the massing clouds that in a moody silence glided;
We heard the tempest peal, amid the ruins of the day.

And the Ocean to this land of ours a wild kiss was throwing,
From the lips that ever babble of the Far and Unknown;
And the dream-tides were lapping, and the dreamwinds blowing,
In the harbours that we voyage to with dream-sails alone.

1922

DAWN ON THE HEADLAND

Dawn—and a magical stillness: on earth, quiescence profound;
On the waters a vast Content, as of hunger appeased and stayed;
In the heavens a silence that seems not mere privation of sound,
But a thing with form and body, a thing to be touched and weighed!

Yet I know that I dwell in the midst of the roar of the cosmic wheel,
In the hot collision of Forces, and clangour of boundless Strife,
Mid the sound of the speed of the worlds—the rushing worlds—and the peal
Of the thunder of Life.

1910

THE KNIGHTS AND THE KING

The Knights rode up with gifts for the King,
And one was a jewelled sword,
And one was a suit of golden mail,
And one was golden Word.

He has buckled the shining armour on;
He has girt the sword at his side;
He has flung at his feet the golden Word,
And trampled it in his pride.

The armour is pierced with many spears,
And the brand is breaking in twain;
But the Word has risen in storm and fire,
To vanquish and to reign.

1906

THE HUMOUR OF OLYMPUS

The Gods, being merry, and having for a whim
Created Man to make a jest of him,
And taken counsel of their hearts how best
To crown with a pure perfectness the jest,
Set him fast-anchored shiplike mid the foam
Of the Infinite Seas he else had joyed to roam.

There doth he bear, while tempest round him flits,
The laughter of the great, high, heavenly Wits;
And there, though he persuades himself that he
Is well contented with captivity,
He dreams of the isles he never hath espied,
And the far oceans to his sails denied.

1922

MYSTIC RECALL

That which was thou, and, being thou, was fair,
Perhaps still lives, but where?
From wave and star and flower
Some effluence rare
Was lent thee, a divine but transient dower!
'Tis yielded back, from eyes and lips and hair,
To wave and star and flower.

1890

THE CHURCHYARD IN THE WOLD

I wandered far in the wold,
And after the heat and glare
I came at eve to a churchyard old:
The yew-trees seemed at prayer.

And around me was dust in dust;
And the fleeting light; and Repose;
And the infinite pathos of human trust
In a God whom no man knows.

1906

THE FIRST SKYLARK OF SPRING

Two worlds hast thou to dwell in, Sweet—
The virginal untroubled sky,
And this vext region at my feet....
Alas, but one have I!

To all my songs there clings the shade,
The dulling shade, of mundane care.
They amid mortal mists are made—
Thine in immortal air.

My heart is dashed with griefs and fears;
My song comes fluttering, and is gone.
O high above the home of tears,
Eternal Joy, sing on!

Not loftiest bard, of mightiest mind,
Shall ever chant a note so pure,
Till he can cast this earth behind
And breathe in heaven secure.

We sing of Life, with stormy breath
That shakes the lute's distempered string:
We sing of Love, and loveless Death
Takes up the song we sing.

And born in toils of Fate's control,
Insurgent from the womb, we strive
With proud unmanumitted soul
To burst the golden gyve.

Thy spirit knows nor bounds nor bars;
On thee no shreds of thraldom hang:
Not more enlarged, the morning stars
Their great Te Deum sang.

But I am fettered to the sod,
And but forget my bonds an hour;
In amplitude of dreams a god,
A slave in dearth of power.

And fruitless knowledge clouds my soul,
And fretful ignorance irks it more.
Thou sing'st as if thou knew'st the whole,
And lightly held'st thy lore!

Somewhat as thou, Man once could sing,
In porches of the lucent morn,
Ere he had felt his lack of wing,
Or cursed his iron bourn.

The springtime bubbled in his throat,
The sweet sky seemed not far above,
And young and lovesome came the note;—
Ah, thine is Youth and Love!

Thou sing'st of what he knew of old,
And dreamlike from afar recalls;
In flashes of forgotten gold
An orient glory falls.

And as he listens, one by one
Life's utmost splendours blaze more nigh;
Less inaccessible the sun,
Less alien grows the sky.

For thou art native to the spheres,
And of the courts of heaven art free,
And carriest to his temporal ears
News from eternity;

And lead'st him to the dizzy verge,
And lur'st him o'er the dazzling line,
Where mortal and immortal merge,
And human dies divine.

1894

ART'S RIDDLE

Come, friend,—her skein I also would unravel!
Art is not Nature lost in man's control,
But Nature's reminiscences of travel
Across the human soul.

Or 'tis a tidal river, that, each day,
Ebbing and flowing under cliff and tree,
With mutual and eternal interplay
Takes and gives back the sea.

1915

THE LOST EDEN

But yesterday was Man from Eden driven.
His dream, wherein he dreamed himself the first
Of creatures, fashioned for eternity—
This was the Eden that he shared with Eve.

Eve, the adventurous soul within his soul!
The sleepless, the unslaked! She showed him where
Amidst his pleasance hung the bough whose fruit
Is disenchantment and the perishing
Of many glorious errors. And he saw
His paradise how narrow: and he saw—
He, who had well-nigh deemed the world itself
Of less significance and majesty
Than his own part and business in it!—how
Little that part, and in how vast a world.
And an imperative world-thirst drove him forth,
And the gold gates of Eden clanged behind.

Never shall he return: for he hath sent
His spirit abroad among the Infinitudes,
And can no more to the ancient pales recall
The travelled feet. But oftentimes he feels
The intolerable vastness bow him down,
The awful homeless spaces daunt his soul;
And half-regretful he remembers then
His Eden lost, as some grey mariner
May think of the far fields where he was bred,
And woody ways unbreathed-on by the sea,
Though more familiar now the ocean-paths
Gleam, and the stars his fathers never knew.

1896

REVELATION

When all the choric peal shall end,
That through the fanes hath rung;
When the long lauds no more ascend
From man's adoring tongue;

When whelmed are altar, priest, and creed;
When all the faiths have passed;
Perhaps, from darkening incense freed,
God may emerge at last.

1908

THE WIZARD'S CRUX

If I, by wondrous fate, possessed
The all-transmuting Alkahest,
Famed to resolve the World's Contents
Into their mother elements,
I then might change thee by its powers
Back to the ingredients of the flowers!
But ah, what sovereign sorcery could
Witch them again to Womanhood?

THE EXILES

Look!...the New Rose is rich and fair.
She puts imperial raiment on.
She hath the large imperial air;
But whither is the perfume gone?

Banished afar, it fled on wings
That bore it hence in haste unmeet,
With all the other cast-out things
That kept life sweet.

INVENTION

I envy not the Lark his song divine,
Nor thee, O Maid, thy beauty's faultless mould.
Perhaps the chief felicity is mine,
Who harken and behold.

The joy of the Artificer Unknown
Whose genius could devise the Lark and thee—
This, or a kindred rapture, let me own,
I have coveted ceaselessly!

A CHILD'S HAIR

A letter from abroad. I tear
Its sheathing open, unaware
What treasure gleams within; and there—
Like bird from cage—
Flutters a curl of golden hair
Out of the page.

From such a frolic head 'twas shorn!
('Tis but five years since he was born.)

Not sunlight scampering over corn
Were merrier thing.
A child? A fragment of the morn,
A piece of Spring!

Surely an ampler, fuller day
Than drapes our English skies with grey—
A deeper light, a richer ray
Than here we know
To this bright tress have given away
Their living glow.

For Willie dwells where gentian flowers
Make mimic sky in mountain bowers;
And vineyards steeped in ardent hours
Slope to the wave
Where storied Chillon's tragic towers
Their bases lave;

And over piny vales of Vaud
The rose of eve steals up the snow;
And on the waters far below
Strange sails like wings
Half-bodilessly come and go,
Fantastic things;

And tender night falls like a sigh
On chalet low and château high;
And the far cataract's voice comes by,
Where no man hears;
And spectral peaks impale the sky
On silver spears.

Ah, Willie, whose dissevered tress
Lies in my hand!—may you possess
At least one sovereign happiness,
Ev'n to your grave;
One boon than which I ask naught less,
Naught greater crave:

May cloud and mountain, lake and vale,
Never to you be trite or stale
As unto souls whose well-springs fail
Or flow defiled,
Till Nature's happiest fairy-tale
Charms not her child!

For when the spirit waxes numb,
Alien and strange these shows become,
And stricken with life's tedium
The streams run dry,
The choric spheres themselves are dumb,
And dead the sky—

Dead as to captives grown supine,
Chained to their task in sightless mine:
Above, the bland day smiles benign,
Birds carol free,
In thunderous throes of life divine
Leaps the glad sea;

But they—their day and night are one.
What is't to them, that rivulets run,
Or what concern of theirs the sun?
It seems as though
Their business with these things was done
Ages ago:

Only, at times, each dulled heart feels
That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals
The unmeaning heaven about him reels,
And he lies hurled
Beyond the roar of all the wheels
Of all the world.

On what strange track one's fancies fare!
To eyeless night in sunless lair
'Tis a far cry from Willie's hair;

And here it lies—
Human, yet something which can ne'er
Grow sad and wise:

Which, when the head where late it lay
In life's grey dusk itself is grey,
And when the curfew of life's day
By death is tolled,
Shall forfeit not the auroral ray
And eastern gold.

THE KEYBOARD

Five-and-thirty black slaves,
Half-a-hundred white,
All their duty but to sing
For their Queen's delight,
Now with throats of thunder,
Now with dulcet lips,
While she rules them royally
With her finger-tips!

When she quits her palace,
All the slaves are dumb—
Dumb with dolour till the Queen
Back to Court is come:
Dumb the throats of thunder,
Dumb the dulcet lips,
Pining for the despotism
Of her finger-tips.

Dusky slaves and pallid,
Ebon slaves and white,
When the Queen was on her throne
How they sang to-night!

O the throats of thunder!
O the dulcet lips!
O the gracious tyrannies
Of her finger-tips!

Silent, at her signal,
All their voices now!
Ah, then, did her soul alone
These with souls endow?
Waken, throats of thunder!
Waken, dulcet lips!
Touched to immortality
By her finger-tips.

THE FOILED PURSUERS

O curst with wide desires and spacious dreams,
Too cunningly do ye accumulate
Appliances and means of Happiness
E'er to be happy! Lavish hosts, ye make
Elaborate preparation to receive
A shy and simple guest, who, warned of all
The ceremony and circumstance with which
Ye mean to entertain her, will not come.

1889

ENGLAND MY MOTHER

I

England my mother,
Wardress of waters,
Builder of peoples,
Maker of men—

Hast thou yet leisure
Left for the muses?
Heed'st thou the songsmith
Forging the rhyme?

Deafened with tumults,
How canst thou harken?
Strident is faction,
Demos is loud.

Lazarus, hungry,
Menaces Dives;
Labour the giant
Chafes in his hold.

Yet do the songsmiths
Quit not their forges;
Still on life's anvil
Forge they the rhyme.

Still the rapt faces
Glow from the furnace:
Breath of the smithy
Scorches their brows.

Yea, and thou hear'st them?
So shall the hammers
Fashion not vainly
Verses of gold.

II

Lo, with the ancient
Roots of man's nature,
Twines the eternal
Passion of song.

Ever Love fans it,
Ever Life feeds it;
Time cannot age it,
Death cannot slay.

Deep in the world-heart
Stand its foundations,
Tangled with all things,
Twin-made with all.

Nay, what is Nature's
Self, but an endless
Strife toward music,
Euphony, rhyme?

Trees in their blooming,
Tides in their flowing,
Stars in their circling,
Tremble with song.

God on His throne is
Eldest of poets:
Unto His measures
Moveth the Whole.

III

Therefore deride not
Speech of the muses,
England my mother,
Maker of men.

Nations are mortal,
Fragile is greatness;
Fortune may fly thee,
Song shall not fly.

Song the all-girdling,
Song cannot perish:
Men shall make music,
Man shall give ear.

Not while the choric
Chant of creation
Floweth from all things,
Poured without pause,

Cease we to echo
Faintly the descant
Whereto for ever
Dances the world.

IV

So let the songsmith
Proffer his rhyme-gift,
England my mother,
Maker of men.

Grey grows thy count'nance,
Full of the ages;
Time on thy forehead
Sits like a dream:

Song is the potion
All things renewing,
Youth's one elixir,
Fountain of morn.

Thou, at the world-loom
Weaving thy future,
Fitly may'st temper
Toil with delight.

Deemest thou, only
Labour is earnest?
Grave is all beauty,
Sacred all joy.

Song is no bauble—
Slight not the songsmith,
England my mother,
Maker of men.

1892

APRIL

April, April,
Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish tears!
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears,
April, April,
Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!

1896

ODE IN MAY

Let me go forth, and share
The overflowing Sun
With one wise friend, or one
Better than wise, being fair,
Where the pewit wheels and dips
On heights of bracken and ling,
And Earth, unto her leaflet tips,
Tingles with the Spring.

What is so sweet and dear
As a prosperous morn in May,
The valiant prime of the day,
And the dauntless youth of the year,

When nothing that asks for bliss,
Asking aright, is denied,
And half of the world a bridegroom is,
And half of the world a bride?

The Song of Mingling flows,
Grave, ceremonial, pure,
As once, from lips that endure,
The cosmic descant rose,
When the temporal lord of life,
Going his golden way,
Had taken a wondrous maid to wife
That long had said him nay.

For of old the Sun, our sire,
Came wooing the mother of men,
Earth, that was virginal then,
Vestal fire to his fire.
Silent her bosom and coy,
But the strong god sued and pressed;
And born of their starry nuptial joy
Are all that drink of her breast.

And the triumph of him that begot,
And the travail of her that bore,
Behold, they are evermore
As warp and weft in our lot.
We are children of splendour and flame,
Of shuddering, also, and tears.
Magnificent out of the dust we came,
And abject from the Spheres.

O bright irresistible lord,
We are fruit of Earth's womb, each one,
And fruit of thy love, O Sun,
For this thy spouse, thy adored.

To thee as our Father we bow,
Forbidden thy Father to see,
Who is older and greater than thou, as thou
Art greater and older than we.

Thou art but as a word of his speech,
Thou art but as a wave of his hand;
Thou art brief as a glitter of sand
'Twixt tide and tide on his beach;
Thou art less than a spark of his fire,
Or a moment's mood of his soul:
Thou art lost in the notes on the lips of his choir
That chant the chant of the Whole.

1897

THE GLIMPSE

Just for an hour you crossed my life's dull track,
Put my ignobler dreams to sudden shame,
Went your bright way, and left me to fall back
On my own world of poorer deed and aim;

To fall back on my meaner world, and feel
Like one who, dwelling 'mid some smoke-dimmed town,—
In a brief pause of labour's sullen wheel—
'Scaped from the street's dead dust and factory's frown,

In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll,
Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:
Then journeyed home, to carry in his soul
The torment of the difference till he die.

1888

THE RAVEN'S SHADOW

Seabird, elemental sprite,
Moulded of the sun and spray—
Raven, dreary flake of night
Drifting in the eye of day—
Over crag and moor and mead,
Whither, whither would ye speed?

“Me to eastward mine affairs—
Things of weight and moment—call.”
“Me to westward many cares
Summon—mighty matters all.”
I, where land and sea contest,
Watch you eastward, watch you west,

Till, in snares of fancy caught,
Mystically changed ye seem,
And the bird becomes a thought,
And the thought becomes a dream,
And the dream, outspread on high,
Lords it o'er the abject sky.

Surely I have known before
Phantoms of the shapes ye be—
Haunters of another shore
'Leaguered by another sea.
There my wanderings night and morn
Reconcile me to the bourn.

There the bird of happy wings
Wafts the ocean-news I crave;
Rumours of an isle he brings,
Gemlike on the golden wave.
But the baleful beak and plume
Scatter immelodious gloom.

Though the flowers be faultless made,
Perfectly to live and die—
Though the cloudlets bloom and fade
Flow'rlike in a meadowy sky—
Where this raven roams forlorn,
Veins of midnight flaw the morn.

He not less will croak and croak—
He that yonder caws and caws—
Till the starry dance be broke,
Till the sphery pæan pause,
And the universal chime
Falter out of tune and time.

Coils the labyrinthine sea,
Duteous to the lunar will,
But some discord stealthily
Vexes the world-ditty still,
And the bird that caws and caws
Clasps Creation with his claws.

1884

TELL ME NOT NOW

Tell me not now, if love for love
Thou canst return,—
Now while around us and above
Day's flambeaux burn.
Not in clear noon, with speech as clear,
Thy heart avow,
For every gossip wind to hear;
Tell me not now!

Tell me not now the tidings sweet,
The news divine;
A little longer at thy feet
Leave me to pine.

I would not have the gadding bird
Hear from his bough;
Nay, though I famish for a word,
Tell me not now!

But when deep trances of delight
All Nature seal,
When round the world the arms of Night
Caressing steal,
When rose to dreaming rose says, “Dear,
Dearest,”—and when
Heaven sighs her secret in Earth's ear,
Ah, tell me then!

1894

UTOPIA

A life too great for folly
In a world too wise for wine
Is a life the saint or sage may love,
But I cannot boast it mine.

If all by law were sober,
And all by statute good,
I could not breathe the impeccable air—
And I would not if I could.

Nay, if denied for ever
All juice of grape or grain,
I'd leave this world to be destroyed
By water once again.

1924

THE SONGSTERS

Sing, Nightingale! There still be those who take
Thy music to be sweet.
Chant thine old chant—till the new fashions make
All melody obsolete.

I cannot doubt that soon the corncrake's note
Shall be to thine preferred!
What then? Sing on, with thy still golden throat,
Still tolerated bird!

1920

THE MUSE IN EXILE

Verse—a light handful—verse again I bring;
Verse that perhaps had glowed with lustier hues
Amid more fostering air: for it was born
In the penurious sunshine of an Age
That does not stone her prophets, but, alas,
Turns, to their next of kin, the singers, oft
An ear of stone: in bare, bleak truth an Age
That banishes the poets, as he of old,
The great child of the soul of Socrates,
Out of his visionary commonwealth
Banished them; for she drives them coldly forth
From where alone they yearn to live—her heart;
Scourges them with the scourge of apathy,
From out her bosom's rich metropolis,
To a distant, desert province of her thoughts,
A region grey and pale: or, crueller still,
Gives them, at times, gusts of applause, and then
Remands them to new frosts of unconcern;
Nay, to atone for some brief generous hour,
Holds back their dues, husbands the heartening word,
Until they dwell where praise cheers not the praised,

And scorn and honour are received in like
Silence, and laurel and poppy are as one.

Let me not slight her. Let me not do wrong
To her whose child I am: this giant Age,
Cumbered with her own hugeness as is the wont
Of giants. Yet too openly she herself
Hath slighted one of Time's great offspring: she
Hath slighted Song; and Song will be avenged:
Song will survive her; Song will follow her hearse,
And either weep or dance upon her grave.
For in Life's midmost chamber there still burns
Upon the ancient hearth the ancient fire,
Whence are all flamelike things, the unquenchable Muse
Among them, who, though meanly lodged to-day,
In dreariest outlands of the world's regard,
Foresees the hour when Man shall once more feel
His need of her, and call the exile home.

SCENTLESS FLOWERS

Scentless flow'rs I bring thee—yet
In thy bosom be they set!
In thy bosom each one grows
Fragrant beyond any rose.

Sweet enough were she who could,
In thy heart's sweet neighbourhood,
Some redundant sweetness thus
Borrow from that overplus.

THE LUTE-PLAYER

She was a lady great and splendid,
I was a minstrel in her halls.
A warrior like a prince attended
Stayed his steed by the castle walls.

Far had he fared to gaze upon her.
“O rest thee now, Sir Knight,” she said.
The warrior wooed, the warrior won her;
In time of snowdrops they were wed.
I made sweet music in his honour,
And longed to strike him dead.

I passed at midnight from her portal,
Throughout the world till death I rove:
Ah, let me make this lute immortal
With rapture of my hate and love!

1881

THE WINTER SLEEP

A maiden o'erwearied
With dance and song,
The Earth,
The Earth,
The Earth sleeps long.

And her dreams are all
Of one mad sweet thing—
The kisses,
The kisses,
The kisses of Spring.

Awake, O maiden,
For joy draws near.
Thy lover,
Thy lover,
Thy lover is here.

THE VISITOR ABHORRED

Unknowable Power is o'er me—
The might of unknowable Mind;
And fathomless Time is before me,
And fathomless Time is behind.

And I sit at the Feast of Illusion
In the Palace of Baffled Quest,
Awaiting the loathed intrusion
Of the silent Unbidden Guest,

Who passes the sleeping sentry,
And leaves him to slumber on—
And makes his triumphal entry,
And casts his dart, and is gone.

THE LARK AND THE THRUSH

O from too far, and from too high,
In too pure air above,
Doth the great Rhapsodist of the Sky
Utter melodious love.

Bird that from yonder branch dost pour
Songs of less heavenly birth,
'Tis thine, 'tis thine, that pierce me more,
Sweet Rhapsodist of the Earth.

THE THUNDER-SHOWER

I

We'll home and take shelter,
While romps o'er the plain
Like a herd helter-skelter
The rioting rain.

For the thunderclouds blacken,
To drench, as they pass,
The deer in the bracken,
The kine in the grass.

II

It is gone. Let us follow.
The heavens breathe free.
In hurst and in hollow
How glistens each tree!
And pure from the thunder
In sheen and in hue,
The world and its wonder
Are fashioned anew.

THE VOICE FROM DREAMLAND

Thy voice from inmost dreamland calls;
The wastes of sleep thou makest fair;
Bright o'er the ridge of darkness falls
The cataract of thy hair.

The morn renews its golden birth:
Thou with the vanquished night dost fade;
And leav'st the ponderable earth
Less real than thy shade.

1889

LIBERTY REJECTED

About this heart thou hast
Thy chains made fast,
And think'st thou I would be
Therefrom set free,
And forth unbound be cast?

The ocean would as soon
Entreat the moon
To unsay the magic verse
That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon!

She stooped her pearly head
Seaward, and said:
“Would'st thou I gave to thee
Thy liberty,
In Time's youth forfeited?”

And from his inmost hold
The answer rolled:
“Thy bondslave to remain
Is sweeter pain,
Dearer an hundredfold.”

A HUMBLE ENTREATY

I do not ask to have my fill
Of wine, or love, or fame.
I do not, for a little ill,
Against the gods exclaim.

One boon of Fortune I implore,
With one petition kneel:
At least caress me not before
Thou break me on thy wheel.

1894

THE CATHEDRAL MUSIC

I entered a dim minster, where
Aisles of praise and towers of prayer
Fenced me round from all the strife
Of this illegible, blurred life;

And I put from me, one by one,
Riddles that bemuse the Sun,
And deep into oblivion hurled
The undecipherable world.

And through the rich and jewelled gloom
That rubied some crusader's tomb,
There rose and rolled a golden wave:
Surged reverberant down the nave:
Ravishingly, with violence sweet,
Stormed the earth from 'neath my feet:
Swept me as a leaf abroad
In great tides of billowing laud:
And left me, amid regions far,
Desolate—cast upon a star.

1915

LUX PERDITA

Thine were the frail, slight hands
That might have taken and swayed this soul, and bent
Its stubborn fabric to thy soft intent,
And bound it unresisting, with such bands
As not the arm of envious heaven had rent.

Thine were the calming eyes
That round my course could well have stilled the sea,
And drawn thy voyager home, and bidden him be
Pure with their pureness, with their wisdom wise,
Merged in their light, and greatly lost in thee.

But thou—thou passed'st on,
With odour and bloom of dedicated days
About thy spirit; and me in alien ways
Thou leftest following life's chance lure, where shone
The wandering gleam that beckons and betrays.

THE TARN AND THE TORRENT

The Torrent came rushing and leaping,
And white was the crash of its glee!
Whence came it, a hunter unsleeping,
In headlong hunt for the sea?

From the cloistered Tarn up yonder,
The cataract's mother serene,
That dwells where the mountains ponder
On all that the Worlds may mean.

And there, hemmed round from commotion,
The cloistered Tarn is at rest,
That never has dreamed of the Ocean,
Or the wild dark heart in his breast.

NAY, BID ME NOT

Nay, bid me not my cares to leave,
Who cannot from their shadow flee.
I do but win a short reprieve,
'Scaping to pleasure and to thee.

I may, at best, a brief hour's grace,
And grant of liberty, obtain;
Remanded for a little space,
To go back into bonds again.

BAFFLED DEITY

God hath His failures, nowise few. Behind
His mighty dreams the oft-foiled Dreamer lurks,
The aroma of perfection round His mind
Reaching not half His works;
And thus doth He, the Idealist of the Spheres,

The Great Arch-Visionary, at moments wear
Delight that seems first cousin to despair
On His lone countenance void of mirth and tears!
For He is everywhere
The Eternal Master planning without cease
The Eternal Masterpiece—
Alas, impossibly fair.

1923

HATE

[_]

[To certain foreign traducers of England.]

Sirs, if the truth must needs be told,
We love not you that rail and scold;
And yet, my masters, you may wait
Till the Greek Calends for our hate.

No spendthrifts of our hate are we;
Our hate is used with husbandry.
We hold our hate too choice a thing
For light and careless lavishing.

We cannot, dare not, make it cheap!
For holy uses will we keep
A thing so pure, a thing so great
As Heaven's benignant gift of hate.

Is there no ancient, sceptred Wrong?
No torturing Power, endured too long?
Yea; and for these our hatred shall
Be cloistered and kept virginal.

1909

THE FLEETS OF INFINITY

On the Ocean of Space no thundrous wave is,
And there, through immense remoteness lighted,
Ride as of old the heavenly Navies,
Under what High Command united?

With course unchanging, with speed unfailing,
Mid countless squadrons that know not slumber,
The Earth o'er abysmal Deeps is sailing,
With tackle and gear, with coil and cumber.

Who doth forbid her to rest or tarry?
And whence evermore—from what veiled habitation—
Beholds He the souls her decks do carry
In ceaseless voyage about Creation?

And what if blind Storm, amid far-off morrows,
Convulse the vast Ocean whereon she is steering,
And leave her to founder—with blisses and sorrows
And all her cargo, like dreams, disappearing?

THE FOWLS OF THE AIR

In thickets and copses and hedges
The land-birds choose them a home,
But high on the wild cliff ledges
Are the gray-winged folk of the foam.

Not theirs such voices as twitter
And sing to the loved in the nest,
For the heart of the Ocean is bitter,
And he drives all Song from his breast.

Yet dear are the crags of granite,
And sweet is the smell of the sea,
To the Crested Grebe and the Gannet,
And the mate of my soul, and me.

CAPRICES OF THE GODS

Unseasonable July,
Pettish and rude and bleak—
Thou'rt Summer to the eye,
But Winter to the cheek.

Was Nature wise to vary
The order we held dear,
Turn revolutionary,
And bolshevize the year?

Oh, let her sing and play
Her carmagnolish tune—
But make December pay
The debts of bankrupt June!

THE NOBLEST VICTORY

Love, the defier, and Time, the defied,
Wrestled for sway, being equals in pride;
Love with his arrows about him as now;
Time with the dust of the stars on his brow.

Fate, intervening, gave rightful award:
“Time shall be vassal and Love shall be lord.”
And thus at her bidding they ended their feud,
Love, the subduer, and Time, the subdued.

THE TRUE IMPERIALISM

Here, while the tide of conquest rolls
Against the distant golden shore,
The starved and stunted human souls
Are with us more and more.

Vain is your Science, vain your Art,
Your triumphs and your glories vain,
To feed the hunger of their heart
And famine of their brain.

Your savage deserts howling near,
Your wastes of ignorance, vice, and shame—
Is there no room for victories here,
No field for deeds of fame?

Arise and conquer while ye can
The foe that in your midst resides,
And build within the mind of Man
The Empire that abides.

1900

A HALF-REAL SOLACE

Though I may sink o'erborne at last
In suddenness of the felling blast,
This do I know: when life is past,
Not quite shall I be out of place
In the earnest fire-fierce Earth's embrace,
As less a man than a grimace.

Rather shall I be wholly at home,
Mid the still quick and flameful loam.

CEASE, FOOLISH ROSEBUD

Cease, foolish rosebud, cease unfolding
So fast thy bosom's guarded sweetness!
Thy charm was a most rich withholding;
Thy beauty, a perfect incompleteness.

Ah, by thy youth to-day enchanted,
I must endure a honied sorrow,
Finding thy lovely self supplanted
By thy yet lovelier self to-morrow.

100

MIDNIGHT

December Thirty-first, 19—

Once vainglorious, now forlorn:
Dead and unlamented Year!
Thou to thy catafalque art borne,
Without the escort of a tear.

Thine were hopes that lived unblest,
Dying with the Summer's bloom.
They shall bestrew thy place of rest—
The only flowers upon thy tomb.

O TO SAIL

O to sail with thee, my dear,
Under headlands high and sheer,
At the mellow hour of daydroop when the lull of eve is near!

O to sail away, and be
From the curse of care set free,
Far from heart-ache, far from heart-break, on the great heart-healing sea.

SONG FROM AN UNFINISHED PLAY

Hope, the great explorer,
Love, whom none can bind,
Youth that looks before her,
Age that looks behind,
Joy with brow like Summer's,
Care with wintry pate—
Masquers all and mummers,
Miming before Fate!

101

Power with narrow forehead,
Wealth with niggard palm,
Wisdom old, whose hoar head
Vaunts a barren calm;
Haughty overcomers,
In their pomp and state—
Masquers all and mummers,
Round Death's Gate!

THE PROTEST

Bid me no more to other eyes
With wandering worship fare,
Weaving my numbers garland-wise
To crown another's hair.
On me no more a mandate lay
Thou wouldst not have me to obey!

Bid me no more to leave unkissed
That rose-wreathed porch of pearl.
Shall I, where'er the winds may list,
Give them my life to whirl?
Perchance too late thou wilt be fain
Thy exile to recall—in vain.

Bid me no more from thee depart,
For in thy voice to-day
I hear the tremor of thy heart
Entreating me to stay;
I hear ... nay, silence tells it best,
O yielded lips, O captive breast!

1891

102

THE FELLS

Guest of this lone abode, before thee rise
No frozen summits, that arrogantly aloof
Cannot forget their own magnificence
And greatness; but withal a brotherhood
As Alp or Atlas noble, in port and mien.
Do homage to these suavely eminent ones.
But privy to their bosoms wouldst thou be,
There is a vale whose seaward-parted lips
Murmur eternally some half-divulged
Reluctant secret, where thou mayst o'erhear
The mountains interchange their confidences,
Peak with his kindred peak, that think aloud
Their broad and lucid thoughts in liberal day.
Thither repair alone: the mountain heart
Not two may enter. Thence returning, tell
What thou hast heard. And mid the laurelled souls
Of poets divine, place shall be found for thee.

1897

SCIENCE AND NATURE

We babble of our ‘conquest of the air’;
Of Nature's secrets one by one laid bare.
Her secrets! They are evermore withheld:
'Tis only in her porches we have dwelled.
Could we once lift her veil as we desire,
We were burnt up as chaff before her fire.

O mighty is Knowledge, yet to this we are blind—
Art can create, Science can only find.
We do but nibble at Truth: our vaunted lore
Is the half-scornful alms flung from her door.
Our lips her weak and watered wine have known:
The unthinned vintage is for gods alone.

103

AUTUMN

Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung,
Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes,
Thou metaphor of everything that dies,
That dies ill-starred, or dies beloved and young
And therefore blest and wise,—
O be less beautiful, or be less brief,
Thou tragic splendour, strange, and full of fear!
In vain her pageant shall the Summer rear?
At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf,
Crumbles the gorgeous year.

Ah, ghostly as remembered mirth, the tale
Of Summer's bloom, the legend of the Spring!
And thou, too, flutterest an impatient wing,
Thou presence yet more fugitive and frail,
Thou most unbodied thing,
Whose very being is thy going hence,
And passage and departure all thy theme;
Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem,
And thou at height of thy magnificence
A figment and a dream.

Stilled is the virgin rapture that was June,
And cold is August's panting heart of fire;
And in the storm-dismantled forest-choir
For thine own elegy thy winds attune
Their wild and wizard lyre:
And poignant grows the charm of thy decay,
The pathos of thy beauty, and the sting,
Thou parable of greatness vanishing!
For me, thy woods of gold and skies of gray
With speech fantastic ring.

104

For me, to dreams resigned, there come and go,
'Twixt mountains draped and hooded night and morn,
Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne,
From undiscoverable lips that blow
An immaterial horn;
And spectral seem thy winter-boding trees,
Thy ruinous bowers and drifted foliage wet—
O Past and Future in sad bridal met,
O voice of everything that perishes,
And soul of all regret!

1890

ROME AND ANOTHER

She asked for all things; and dominion such
As never man had known
The gods first gave; then lightly, touch by touch,
O'erthrew her seven-hilled throne.

Imperial Power, that hungerest for the globe,
Restrain thy conquering feet,
Lest the same Fates that spun thy purple robe
Should weave thy winding-sheet.

1903

THE FOREST VOICES

I heard in the woodland a sound
From the heart of each visible thing;
And asking the reason, I found
'Twas the Earth giving thanks for Spring.

The Youth of the World had returned,
And the days were a Song of Re-birth,
Till I heard a great sighing, and learned
'Twas Spring taking leave of the Earth.

105

DUSK

The bats are busy in moonless eve
With the goblin web they seem to weave,
Here where the thrush, when morn was high,
Published his heart to the passer-by.

Twice, o'er the lane, like a guilty thing,
The shy owl flitted with noiseless wing,
Mid the silent breathing of frond and tree,
And of all that debauched the noontide bee.

Behind the fir-wood, red and large,
The sun went down like a warrior's targe;
And full of news from a secret shore,
The wanderer, Night, comes to the door.

JANUARY DOWN WEST

The snowdrops are awake, in the Gateway of the Year:
Already is the season of the daffodils near.
But the old trees shudder, the infirm trees fear,
For the storm comes rushing through the Gateway of the Year.

Oh, Spring has early spies, and in secret they are here;
And Winter watches well, lest his enemies appear.
And Time looks backward with a misty eye and blear,
And Love looks forward through the Gateway of the Year.

THE FALSE SUMMER

The Summer that begrudged its honey,
And promised boons it never gave,
Now, in its lean, mean parsimony,
Departs unto its dirgeless grave.

106

Come, honest Winter! Thou at least
Wilt not thy lack of heart conceal,
Or bid me to a monarch's feast
To mock me with a beggar's meal.

“THE THINGS THAT ARE MORE EXCELLENT”

As we wax older on this earth,
Till many a toy that charmed us seems
Emptied of beauty, stripped of worth,
And mean as dust and dead as dreams—
For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
Some recompense the Fates have sent;
Thrice lovelier shine the things that last,
The things that are more excellent.

Tired of eternal barren brawl,
An hour with silence we prefer,
Where statelier rise the woods than all
Yon towers of talk at Westminster.
Let this man prate and that man plot,
On fame or place or title bent:
The votes of veering crowds are not
The things that are more excellent.

Shall we perturb and vex our soul
For ‘wrongs’ which no true freedom mar,
Which no man's upright walk control,
And from no guiltless deed debar?
What odds though tonguesters heal, or leave
Unhealed, the grievance they invent?
To things, not phantoms, let us cleave—
The things that are more excellent.

107

Nought nobler is than to be free:
The stars of heaven are free because
In amplitude of liberty
Their joy is to obey the laws.
From servitude to freedom's name
Free thou thy mind in bondage pent;
Depose the fetich, and proclaim
The things that are more excellent.

And in appropriate dust be hurled
That dull, punctilious god, whom they
That call their tiny clan the world,
Serve and obsequiously obey:
Who con their ritual of Routine,
With minds to one dead likeness blent,
And never ev'n in dreams have seen
The things that are more excellent.

To dress, to call, to dine, to break
No canon of the social code,
The little laws that lacqueys make,
The futile decalogue of Mode—
How many a soul for these things lives,
With pious passion, grave intent!
While Nature careless-handed gives
The things that are more excellent.

To hug the wealth ye cannot use,
And lack the riches all may gain—
O blind and wanting wit to choose,
Who house the chaff and burn the grain!
And still doth life with starry towers
Lure to the bright, divine ascent!—
Be yours the things ye would: be ours
The things that are more excellent.

108

The grace of friendship—mind and heart
Linked with their fellow heart and mind;
The gains of science, gifts of art;
The sense of oneness with our kind;
The thirst to know and understand—
A large and liberal discontent:
These are the goods in life's rich hand,
The things that are more excellent.

In faultless rhythm the ocean rolls,
A rapturous silence thrills the skies;
And on this earth are lovely souls,
That softly look with aidful eyes.
Though dark, O God, Thy course and track,
I think Thou must at least have meant
That nought which lives should wholly lack
The things that are more excellent.

THE DREAM OF MAN

A Fantasy

To the eye and the ear of the Dreamer, this Dream out of darkness flew,
Through the gates of Truth or of Falsehood—he wist not which of the two.

It was the Human Spirit, of all men's souls the Soul,
Man the unwearied climber, that climbed to the unknown goal.
And up the stairs of the ages, the difficult, steep ascent,
Man, the unwearied climber, pauseless and dauntless went.
Æons rolled behind him with thunder of far retreat,
And still as he strove he conquered, and laid his foes at his feet.

109

Inimical powers of Nature, whirlwind and flood and fire,
The spleen of fickle seasons that loved to baulk his desire,
The breath of climates hostile, the ravage of blight and dearth,
The moody unrest that vexes the heart of the sleepless earth,
The tramp of the hooves of tempest on valley and golden plain,
The host whose sire is corruption, whose seed is venom and bane,
What powers soever are watchful to harass him or withstand,
He made them meek in his service and ductile to his hand.

That thing of a thousand talons, fierce Pain that none may assuage,
He drove into Night primeval, to flee from its own red rage,
Till Death, the lurker, the crouch'd one, the hateful Father of Fear,
No more with Furies for heralds came armed with dart and spear,
But gentle of voice and of visage, by calm Age ushered and led,
A guest, serenely featured, entering, woke no dread.

And now, as the rolling æons retreated with pomp of sound,
His spirit became too lordly for an orb like ours to bound.
By arts in his youth undreamed of his fetters terrene he broke,

110

With enterprise ethereal disdaining the natal yoke,
And, stung with divine ambition, and fired with a glorious greed,
He annexed the uncolonized planets and peopled them with his seed.

Then said he: “The infinite Scripture I have read and interpreted clear,
And searching all worlds I have found not my sovereign or my peer.
In what room of the palace of Nature resides the invisible God?
For all her doors I have opened, and all her floors I have trod.
If greater than I be her tenant, let him answer my challenging call:
Till then I admit no rival, but crown myself master of all.”

And forth as that word went bruited, by Man unto Man were raised
Fanes of devout self-homage, where he who praised was the praised;
And from vast unto vast of creation the new evangel ran,
And a savour of world-wide incense went up from Man unto Man;
Until, on a solemn feast-day, when the world's usurping lord
At a million impious altars his own proud image adored,
God spake as He stept from His ambush: “O great in thine own conceit,
I will show thee thy source, how humble, thy goal, for a god how unmeet.”

111

Thereat, by the word of the Maker the Spirit of Man was led
To a mighty peak of vision, where God to His creature said:
“Look yonder toward Time's sunrise.” And, age upon age untold,
The Spirit of Man saw clearly the Past as a chart outrolled—
Beheld his base beginnings, in the Earth's dim dawn, and his strife
With beasts and crawling horrors, for leave to live, when life
Meant but to slay and to procreate, to feed and to sleep, among
Mere mouths, voracities boundless, blind lusts, desires without tongue,
And ferocities vast, fulfilling their being's malignant law,
While Nature was one hunger and one hate, all fangs and maw.

With that, for a single moment, abashed at his own descent,
In humbleness Man's Spirit at the feet of the Maker bent;
But, swifter than light, he recovered the stature and pose of his pride,
And, “Think not thus to shame me with my mean birth,” he cried.
“This is my loftiest greatness, to have been born so low;
Greater than Thou the Ungrowing am I that for ever grow.”
And God forbore to rebuke him, but answered brief and stern,

112

Bidding him toward Time's sunset his vision forthwith turn;
And the Spirit of Man obeying beheld as a chart outrolled
The likeness and form of the Future, age upon age untold;
Beheld his own meridian, and beheld his dark decline,
His secular fall to nadir from summits of light divine,
Till at last, amid worlds exhausted, and bankrupt of force and fire,
'Twas his, in a torrent of darkness, like a sputtering lamp to expire.

Then a war of shame and anger did the realm of his soul divide.
“I believe not the mocking vision,” in the presence of God he cried.
“Thou thinkest to daunt me with shadows; not such as Thou feign'st, my doom.
From glory to rise unto glory is mine who am risen from gloom.
With spoil of Thy captured secrets already my ways are strown.
I doubt if Thou knew'st at my making how near I should climb to Thy throne.
Nor shall I look backward or rest me, till the uttermost heights I have trod,
And am equalled with Thee or above Thee, the mate or the master of God.”

Ev'n thus Man turned from the Maker, with thundered defiance wild,
And God with a terrible silence reproved the speech of His child.
And Man returned to his labours, and stiffened the neck of his will;

113

And æons rolled unto æons, and his power was crescent still.
But yet there remained to conquer one foe, and the greatest—although
Despoiled of his ancient terrors, at heart, as of old, a foe,
Who steals to the bower from the charnel, and winnows the world with his wing,
And is lord both of feast and of bride-bed—Death, the Spectre-King.

And lo, Man mustered his forces the war of wars to wage,
And with storm and thunder of onset did the foe of foes engage,
And the Lord of Death, the undying, was beset and harried sore,
In his immemorial fastness at night's aboriginal core.
And Man, during years ten thousand, beleaguered his enemy's hold,
While Nature was one dread tremor, and the heart of the world waxed cold,
Till the phantom battlements wavered, and the ghostly fort 'gan sway,
And the King of the Grave, a captive, in bondage, un-fled-from, lay.

And unto each star in the heavens the jubilant word was blown,
The annunciation tremendous, Death is overthrown!
And Life in her ultimate borders prolonged the exultant tone,
With hollow ingeminations: Death is overthrown!
And God in His house of silence, where He dwelleth aloof, alone,
Paused in His tasks to hearken: Death is overthrown!

114

Then a solemn and high thanksgiving by Man unto Man was sung,
In his temples of self-adoration, with his own multitudinous tongue;
And he said to his Soul: “Rejoice thou, for thy last great foe lies bound—
Unmaker of all, and despoiler—unmade, despoiled, discrowned.”

And behold, his Soul rejoiced not, for the breath of her being was strife,
And life that had nothing to vanquish was but as the shadow of life.
No goal invited and promised, and divinely provocative shone;
And Fear having fled, her sister, blest Hope, in her train was gone;
And the coping and crown of achievement was hell than defeat more dire—
The torment of all-things-compassed, the plague of nought-to-desire;
And Man the invincible queller, man with his foot on his foes,
In boundless satiety hungered, restless from utter repose,
Mighty o'ercomer of Nature, subduer of Death in his lair,
By mightier weariness vanquished, and crowned with august despair.

Then, throned at his dreadful zenith, he cried unto God: “O Thou
Whom erst in the days of striving methought that I needed not—now
In this my abject glory, my hopeless and helpless might,

115

Hearken and cheer and succour!” and God from His lonelier height,
From eternity's passionless summits, on suppliant Man looked down,
And His brow waxed human with pity, belying its awesome crown.
“Thy richest possession,” He answered, “blest Hope, will I restore,
And the wealth of weakness, the mantle thy strength o'er its armour wore:
And I will arouse from slumber, in his hold where bound he lies,
Thine enemy most benefic: O King of the Grave, arise!”
Then a sound like the heart of Nature in sunder cloven and torn
Announced, to the ear universal, undying Death new-born.
And ev'n as a hunter, awakened in a forest all sere and brown,
Shakes lightly the leaves from his raiment, so Death his bonds shook down.

And Deity paused and hearkened, then turned to the undivine,
And said: “O Man, My creature, thy lot was more blest than Mine.
I taste not delight of seeking, nor the rapture of wondering know,
For these are the blisses ecstatic, that I hoard not but bestow;—
The joys surpassing possession, that I gave without stint to thee,
Who flungest them forth untreasured, like pearl tost back to the sea.”

116

Thus, to the soul of the Dreamer, this dream came flying amain,
Through the gates of Truth or of Falsehood, but he kenned not which of the twain.

THE DESERT HEART

I hate the cold, void, desert heart,
That feels no human pain
When to their doom fair things depart,
To charm not Earth again.

Heart out of husks and offal made,
Thy presence will suffice
To cast o'er Hell a drearier shade,
Or poison Paradise.

THE BLIND SUMMIT

[_]

[A Viennese gentleman who had climbed the Hoch-König without a guide was found dead, in a sitting posture, near the summit, upon which he had written: “It is cold, and clouds shut out the view.”—Daily Press, September 10, 1891.]

So mounts the child of ages of desire,
Man, up the steeps of Thought; and would behold
Yet purer peaks, touched with unearthlier fire,
In sudden prospect virginally new;
But on the lone last height he sighs: “'Tis cold,
And clouds shut out the view.”

Ah, doom of mortals! Vexed with phantoms old,
Old phantoms that waylay us and pursue—
Weary of dreams, we think to see unfold
The eternal landscape of the Real and True;
And on our Pisgah can but write: “'Tis cold,
And clouds shut out the view.”

117

TO A YOUNG AMERICAN LADY

WHO HAD WRITTEN TO ASK ME FOR MY BOOKPLATE

Bookplate? I never had one. And my shelves
Carry no monstrous burden of books themselves.
Into a book called Life I oftener dip,
But even there I find a deal to skip:
Parts without glow—lack-lustre passages—
Its myriad soulless leaves—and round all these
The nightmare riddle of its authorship.

THE STRANGER-MINSTREL

O fair with broom and woodbine,
And rowan and wild rose,
Is the Land of Hope Deferred
Where the shamrock grows;
And thither did I stray
In the long-gone day,
And I gave my heart away
To sweet Ireland.

Dead Songsters of her household
Have loved her and adored,
And their love was like a flame,
And their song was like a sword;
But an alien bard to-day,
All world-worn and gray,
Has sung his heart away
To sweet Ireland.

COLUMBUS

From his adventurous prime
He dreamed the dream sublime:
Over his wandering youth
It hung, a beckoning star.

118

At last the vision fled,
And left him in its stead
The scarce sublimer truth,
The world he found afar.

The scattered isles that stand
Warding the mightier land
Yielded their maidenhood
To his imperious prow.
The mainland within call
Lay vast and virginal:
In its blue porch he stood:
No more did fate allow.

No more! but ah, how much,
To be the first to touch
The veriest azure hem
Of that majestic robe!
Lord of the lordly sea,
Earth's mightiest sailor he:
Great Captain among them,
The captors of the globe.

When shall the world forget
Thy glory and our debt,
Indomitable soul,
Immortal Genoese?
Not while the shrewd salt gale
Whines amid shroud and sail,
Above the rhythmic roll
And thunder of the seas.

119

THE UNVANQUISHED

My heart's companion, let
Us two forget,
And so make vain, all rude
Vicissitude,
And Time's betrayals, and countermine them yet!

Ah, Fortune's ebb we know,
More than her flow;
But not soon conquered, we
Hazard her sea,
And with much laughter through the gales we go.

1921

TO MY MOTHER'S MEMORY

This is the summit, wild and lone.
Westward the Cumbrian mountains stand.
Let me look eastward on mine own
Ancestral land.

O sing me songs, O tell me tales,
Of yonder valleys at my feet!
She was a daughter of those dales,
A daughter sweet.

Oft did she speak of homesteads there,
And faces that her childhood knew.
She speaks no more; and scarce I dare
To deem it true,

That somehow she can still behold
Sunlight and moonlight, earth and sea,
Which were among the gifts untold
She gave to me.

1897

120

THE WARRIOR LOVER

A Song

When War's red tempest shall depart,
That long hath sundered me
From those sweet precincts of thy heart
And all that heaven of thee;
If I return from where they rest
Whom battle's scythe hath mown,
Then in the fragrance of thy breast
I'll live for love alone.

But if, where warstorms wildest roll,
My life for her I yield—
That other empress of my soul,
Who called me to the field—
Though 'twixt you twain, with dying breath,
My homage I'll divide,
My heart will turn to thee in death,
To claim and clasp its bride.

1917

MASTERY

Guard me and save me, Muse, I pray,
From all who babble night and day
The doctrine that Intention high
Lifts Unachievement to the sky,
And that a mighty Will to sing
Makes the mere Power a needless thing!
Trench me around from such as prate
That only he who fails is great.

O, the brave tourneys of the Lyre
Are won by prowess, not desire,
And Art is capture, not pursuit—
Capture and conquest absolute,
Bliss of possession without bar.

121

And they the trophied hunters are,
Who from their cloudless brows efface
The last motes of the dust of chase,
Ev'n as great Victors let us see
Nought in their eyes save Victory.

The steeds of Helios will obey
None but the charioteer of day.
They bear, delighted, the command
Of his inexorable hand;
But if a meddler take the reins,
They rear, they toss their flaming manes,
Crash backward, or ramp wild anon,
In boundless scorn of Phaëthon.

1916

THE TWO IFS

If joy be thine, then guard the boon
From the gazing sun and the prying moon!
In a world that is lean with dearth of bliss,
'Twere cruel to flaunt a gift like this.

And if thine be woe, then do thy best
To immure it deep in thy cloistering breast!
'Twere callous to blazon abroad thy pain,
And harrow some happier heart in vain.

1920

STORM IN MID-ATLANTIC

Many have sung of the terrors of Storm:
I will make me a song of its beauty, its graces of hue and form:
A song of the lovelines gotten of Power,
Born of Rage in her blackest hour,
When never a wave repeats another,

122

But each is unlike his own twin brother,
Each is himself from base to crown,
Himself alone as he clambers up,
Himself alone as he crashes down;—
When the whole sky drinks of the sea's mad cup,
And the ship is thrilled to her quivering core,
But amidst her pitching, amidst her rolling,
Amidst the clangour and boom and roar,
Is a Spirit of Beauty all-controlling!
For here in the thick of the blinding weather
The great waves gather themselves together,
Shake out their creases, compose their folds,
As if each one knew that an eye beholds.
And look! there rises a shape of wonder,
A moving menace, a mount of gloom,
But the moment ere he breaks asunder
His forehead flames into sudden bloom,
A burning rapture of nameless green,
That never on earth or in heaven was seen,
Never but where the midmost ocean
Greets and embraces the tempest in primal divine emotion.
And down in a vale of the sea, between
Two roaring hills, is a wide smooth space,
Where the foam that blanches the ocean's face
Is woven in likeness of filmiest lace,
Delicate, intricate, fairy-fine,
Wrought by the master of pure design,
Storm, the matchless artist, lord of colour and line.

1910

THE ELF-KING'S DAUGHTER

The Kingdom of Elfland, proud and free,
With only the Law of Delight to bind it,
Where is it truly famed to be?
'Tis wheresoever we list to find it.

123

O'erwatched by all its peaks of gold,
There dwelt beside the Magic Water,
In forests drowsy with silence old,
That wild white Bliss, the Elf-King's Daughter.

And the elfin world was all she knew,
Till at last, on rash and luckless pinions,
Out of her father's realm she flew,
And sped across Night to Man's dominions.

She flew through calms, she flew through storms,
She alighted here and mocked at danger;
But soon she beheld two darksome forms—
Pain the Unknown, and Death the Stranger.

Aghast she gazed upon both these twain:
She had seen no shapes that theirs resembled.
No word had she heard of Death or Pain,
And they looked in her face and she quailed and trembled.

She strove to flee, upon mistlike wings,
But the mistlike wings, with foiled endeavour,
Drooped at her sides as useless things,
Palsied in this our air for ever.

So here she remains, a wandering sprite,
And guards her secret and veils her story;
And sometimes, far in the heart of night,
She hath a glimpse of her vanished glory.

For then this region in dreams she spurns,
Revisits the verge of the Magic Water,
In dreams to her father's court returns,
And is—till the dawn—the Elf-King's Daughter.

November 1921

124

THE EARTH'S DESIRE

When a sigh as of abdication is wrung from lordly things
By the rumour of crumbling pride that the eve of autumn brings;

When the troubled splendours come, and the green perfections go,
Amid flitting of vagabond tempest irresolute to and fro;

“Ask, ask thou a boon,” say the Heavens to the wistful Earth; but in vain
She asks for the bliss of the Rose, and the pomp of the Nightingale's pain.

1917

IN DREAMS

In dreams the exile cometh home;
In dreams the lost is found;
In dreams the fettered slave may roam
The world around.

In dreams thou may'st a monarch be,
And sit upon a throne.
Give thanks, that this befalleth thee
In dreams alone.

1906

NIGHT

In the night, in the night,
When thou liest alone,
Ah, the sounds that are blown
In the freaks of the breeze,

125

By the spirit that sends
The voice of far friends
With the sigh of the seas
In the night!

In the night, in the night,
When thou liest alone,
Ah, the ghosts that make moan
From the days that are sped:
The old dreams, the old deeds,
The old wound that still bleeds,
And the face of the dead
In the night!

In the night, in the night,
When thou liest alone,
With the grass and the stone
O'er thy chamber so deep,
Ah, the silence at last,
Life's dissonance past,
And only pure sleep
In the night!

I CARE NOT

I care not though the Spring forget
Her golden promise made
To all the hearts that trust her yet,
However oft betrayed.
I care not though the Moon above
Forget the vassal Sea,
If thou, my love—if thou, my love—
If thou forget not me.

I care not though in shadowy bower,
With richest ruin strewn,
The Rose forget the entrancing hour
Of her sweet tryst with June.

126

I care not though yon prideful grove
Forget the stricken tree,
If thou, my love—if thou, my love—
If thou forget not me.

The stars forget their ancient birth;
The Sun forgets that time
When he espoused the youthful Earth
In his commanding prime.
But far from where we mortals move,
There shall some record be,
That I, my love—that I, my love—
That I forgot not thee.

CHANGE AND INTERCHANGE

When birds were songless on the bough
I heard thee sing.
The world was full of winter, thou
Wert full of spring.

To-day the world's heart feels anew
The vernal thrill,
And thine, near the o'er-brooding yew,
Is wintry chill.

1881

TU QUOQUE

Year after year, it grows more hard
For the Poet to capture the world's regard,
And the world asks lightly, What ails the bard?

But it never asks if some deep ill
Be making its soul more hard to thrill—
Some malady there, past leech's skill.

127

AN IDEAL PASSION

Not she, the England I behold,
My mistress is; nor yet
The England beautiful of old,
Whom Englishmen forget.

The England of my heart is she,
Long hoped and long deferred,
That ever promises to be,
And ever breaks her word.

1903

WHITHER AFAR?

In light, in night, in twilight,
I sought for very Thee!
But my light, was it Thy light?
I sought, and nought could see.

I strove by inward eyesight
To gaze on things to be:
But my sight, was it Thy sight?
I gazed, and nought could see.

Lost on Thine own great highway
Thou find'st me, bound or free!
If Thy way, then, be my way,
O whither lead'st Thou me?

SHAKESPEARE

O let me leave the plains behind,
And let me leave the vales below!
Into the highlands of the mind,
Into the mountains let me go.

128

My Keats, my Spenser, loved I well;
Gardens and statued lawns were these;
But not for ever would I dwell
In arbours and in pleasances.

Here are the heights, crest beyond crest,
Loftiest of all things cloud-encurled:
And I will watch from Everest
The long heave of the surging world.

1915

HYMN TO THE SEA

In this poem the elegiac metre is obviously and of necessity accentual, not quantitative. Tried by classical rules that are altogether inapplicable to our poetry and to our language it would of course sink ignominiously under the ordeal.

I

Grant, O regal in bounty, a subtle and delicate largess;
Grant an ethereal alms, out of the wealth of thy soul:
Suffer a tarrying minstrel, who finds, not fashions his numbers—
Who, from the commune of air, cages the volatile song—
Lightly to capture and prison some fugitive breath of thy descant,
Thine and his own as thy roar lisped on the lips of a shell,
Now while the vernal impulsion makes lyrical all that hath language,
While, through the veins of the Earth, riots the ichor of spring,
While, amid throes, amid raptures, with loosing of bonds, with unsealings—
Arrowy pangs of delight, piercing the core of the world—
Tremors and coy unfoldings, reluctances, sweet agitations—
Youth, irrepressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.

129

II

Lover whose vehement kisses on lips irresponsive are squandered,
Lover that wooest in vain Earth's imperturbable heart;
Athlete mightily frustrate, who pittest thy thews against legions,
Locked with fantastical hosts, bodiless arms of the sky;
Sea that breakest for ever, that breakest and never art broken,
Like unto thine, from of old, springeth the spirit of man—
Nature's wooer and fighter, whose years are a suit and a wrestling,
All their hours, from his birth, hot with desire and with fray;
Amorist agonist man, that, immortally pining and striving,
Snatches the glory of life only from love and from war;
Man that, rejoicing in conflict, like thee when precipitate tempest,
Charge after thundering charge, clangs on thy resonant mail,
Seemeth so easy to shatter, and proveth so hard to be cloven;
Man whom the gods, in his pain, curse with a soul that endures;
Man whose deeds, to the doer, come back as thine own exhalations
Into thy bosom return, weepings of mountain and vale;
Man with the cosmic fortunes and starry vicissitudes tangled,

130

Chained to the wheel of the world, blind with the dust of its speed,
Even as thou, O giant, whom trailed in the wake of her conquests
Night's sweet despot draws, bound to her ivory car;
Man with inviolate caverns, impregnable holds in his nature,
Depths no storm can pierce, pierced with a shaft of the sun:
Man that is galled with his confines, and burdened yet more with his vastness,
Born too great for his ends, never at peace with his goal;
Man whom Fate, his victor, magnanimous, clement in triumph,
Holds as a captive king, mewed in a palace divine:
Many its leagues of pleasance, and ample of purview its windows;
Airily falls, in its courts, laughter of fountains at play;
Nought, when the harpers are harping, untimely reminds him of durance;
None, as he sits at the feast, utters Captivity's name;
But, would he parley with Silence, withdraw for a while unattended,
Forth to the beckoning world 'scape for an hour and be free,
Lo, his adventurous fancy coercing at once and provoking,
Rise the unscalable walls, built with a word at the prime;
Lo, in unslumbering watch, and with pitiless faces of iron,
Armed at each obstinate gate, stand the impassable guards.

131

III

Miser whose coffered recesses the spoils of the ages cumber,
Spendthrift foaming thy soul wildly in fury away—
We, self-amorous mortals, our own multitudinous image
Seeking in all we behold, seek it and find it in thee:
Seek it and find it when o'er us the exquisite fabric of Silence
Perilous-turreted hangs, trembles and dulcetly falls;
When the aërial armies engage amid orgies of music,
Braying of arrogant brass, whimper of querulous reeds;
When, at his banquet, the Summer is languid and drowsed with repletion;
When, to his anchorite board, taciturn Winter repairs;
When by the tempest are scattered magnificent ashes of Autumn;
When, upon orchard and lane, breaks the white foam of the Spring:
When, in extravagant revel, the Dawn, a bacchante up-leaping,
Spills, on the tresses of Night, vintages golden and red;
When, as a token at parting, munificent Day, for remembrance,
Gives, unto men that forget, Ophirs of fabulous ore;
When irresistibly rushing, in luminous palpitant deluge,
Hot from the summits of Life, poured is the lava of noon;

132

When, as up yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,
Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.
Ah, she comes, she arises—impassive, emotionless, bloodless,
Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.
Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:
Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!
Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,
She, from the balconied night, unto her melodist leaned—
Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,
All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.

IV

Yea, it is we, light perverts, that waver, and shift our allegiance;
We, whom insurgence of blood dooms to be barren and waste.
Thou, with punctual service, fulfillest thy task, being constant;
Thine but to ponder the Law, labour and greatly obey:
Wherefore, with leapings of spirit, thou chantest the chant of the faithful;
Led by the chime of the worlds, linked with the league of the stars;
Thou thyself but a billow, a ripple, a drop of that Ocean,

133

Which, labyrinthine of arm, folding us meshed in its coil,
Shall, as to-night, with elations, august exultations and ardours,
Pour, in unfaltering tide, all its unanimous waves,
When, from this threshold of being, these steps of the Presence, this precinct,
Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed,
Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error and cancelled,
Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness of God.

1895

SHELLEY'S CENTENARY

Within a narrow span of time,
Three princes of the realm of rhyme,
At height of youth or manhood's prime
From earth took wing,
To join the fellowship sublime
Who, dead, yet sing.

He, first, his earliest wreath who wove
Of laurel grown in Latmian grove,
Conquered by pain and hapless love
Found calmer home,
Roofed by the heaven that glows above
Eternal Rome.

A fierier soul, its own fierce prey,
And cumbered more with mortal clay,
At Missolonghi flamed away,
And left the air
Reverberating to this day
Its loud despair.

134

Alike remote from Byron's scorn
And Keats's magic as of morn
Bursting for ever newly-born
On forests old,
To wake a hoary world forlorn
With touch of gold,

Shelley, the cloud-begot, who grew
Nourished on starbeams, air, and dew,
Into that Essence whence he drew
His life and lyre
Was fittingly resolved anew
Through wave and fire.

And it was strangely, wildly meet,
That he, who brooked not Time's slow feet,
With passage thus abrupt and fleet
Should hurry hence,
Eager the Great Perhaps to greet
With Why? and Whence?

Impatient of the world's fixed way,
He ne'er could suffer God's delay,
But all the future in a day
Would build divine,
And the whole past in ruins lay,
An emptied shrine.

Vain vision! but the glow, the fire,
The passion of benign desire,
These peradventure lift him higher
Than many a soul
That mounts a million paces nigher
Its meaner goal.

135

And power is his, if naught besides,
In that thin ether where he rides,
Above the roar of human tides
To ascend afar,
Lost in a storm of light that hides
His dizzy car.

Below, the unhasting world toils on,
And here and there are victories won,
Some dragon slain, some justice done,
While, mid the skies,
A meteor rushing on the sun,
He flares and dies.

But, as he cleaves yon ether clear,
Notes from the unattempted sphere
He scatters to the far-off ear
Of Earth's dim throng.
Nay, from the zenith he flings sheer
His torrents of song.

In other shapes than he forecast,
Fate moulds the Morrow. His fierce blast—
His wild assault upon the Past—
These things are vain.
Brief is Revolt, but born to last
Was the arrowy strain,

That seems the wandering voices blent
Of every virgin element;
A sound from azure spaces sent;
An airy call
From the Uranian firmament
O'erdoming all.

136

And in this world of worldlings, where
Souls rust in apathy, and ne'er
A great emotion shakes the air,
And life flags tame,
And rare is noble impulse, rare
The impassioned aim,

'Tis no mean fortune to have heard
A singer who, if errors blurred
His sight, had yet a spirit stirred
By vast desire,
And ardour fledging the swift word
With plumes of fire.

A creature of impetuous breath,
Our torpor deadlier than death
He knew not; whatsoe'er he saith
Flashes with life:
He spurreth men, he quickeneth
To splendid strife.

And in his gusts of song he brings
Wild odours shaken from strange wings,
And carries secret whisperings
From far lips blown,
While all the rapturous heart of things
Throbs through his own—

His own that from the burning pyre
One who had loved his wind-swept lyre
Out of the sharp teeth of the fire
Unmolten drew,
Beside the sea that in her ire
Smote him and slew.

1892

137

THE GREAT MISGIVING

“Not ours,” say some, “the thought of death to dread;
Asking no heaven, we fear no fabled hell:
Life is a feast, and we have banqueted—
Shall not the worms as well?

“The after-silence, when the feast is o'er,
And void the places where the minstrels stood,
Differs in nought from what hath been before,
And is nor ill nor good.”

Ah, but the Apparition—the dumb sign—
The beckoning finger bidding me forgo
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!

And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit,
And while the purple joy is passed about,
Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit
Or homeless night without;

And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see
New prospects, or fall sheer—a blinded thing!
There is, O grave, thy hourly victory,
And there, O death, thy sting.

1892

THE TOMB OF BURNS

What woos the world to yonder shrine?
What sacred clay, what dust divine?
Was this some Master faultless-fine,
In whom we praise
The cunning of the jewelled line
And carven phrase?

138

A searcher of our source and goal,
A reader of God's secret scroll?
A Shakespeare, flashing o'er the whole
Of man's domain
The splendour of his cloudless soul
And perfect brain?

Some Keats, to Grecian gods allied,
Clasping all beauty as his bride?
Some Shelley, soaring dim-descried
Above Time's throng,
And heavenward hurling wild and wide
His spear of song?

A lonely Wordsworth, from the crowd
Half hid in light, half veiled in cloud?
A sphere-born Milton, cold and proud,
In hallowing dews
Dipt, and with gorgeous ritual vowed
Unto the Muse?

Nay, none of these,—and little skilled
On heavenly heights to sing and build!
Thine, thine, O Earth, whose fields he tilled,
And thine alone,
Was he whose fiery heart lies stilled
'Neath yonder stone.

He came when poets had forgot
How rich and strange the human lot;
How warm the tints of Life; how hot
Are Love and Hate;
And what makes Truth divine, and what
Makes Manhood great.

139

A ghostly troop, in pale amaze
They melted 'neath that living gaze—
His in whose spirit's gusty blaze
We seem to hear
The crackling of their phantom bays
Sapless and sere!

For, mid an age of dust and dearth,
Once more had bloomed immortal worth.
There, in the strong, splenetic North,
The Spring began.
A mighty mother had brought forth
A mighty man.

No mystic torch through Time he bore,
No virgin veil from Life he tore;
His soul no bright insignia wore
Of starry birth;
He saw what all men see—no more—
In heaven and earth:

But as, when thunder crashes nigh,
All darkness opes one flaming eye,
And the world leaps against the sky—
So fiery-clear
Did the old truths that we pass by
To him appear.

How could he 'scape the doom of such
As feel the airiest phantom-touch
Keenlier than others feel the clutch
Of iron powers—
Who die of having lived so much
In their large hours?

140

He erred, he sinned: and if there be
Who, from his hapless frailties free,
Rich in the poorer virtues, see
His faults alone—
To such, O Lord of Charity,
Be mercy shown!

Singly he faced the bigot brood,
The meanly wise, the feebly good;
He pelted them with pearl, with mud;
He fought them well—
But ah, the stupid million stood,
And he—he fell!

All bright and glorious at the start,
'Twas his ignobly to depart,
Slain by his own too affluent heart,
Too generous blood;
A voyager that lost Life's chart
In midmost flood.

So closes the fantastic fray,
The duel of the spirit and clay!
So come bewildering disarray
And blurring gloom,
The irremediable day
And final doom.

So passes, all confusedly
As lights that hurry, shapes that flee
About some brink we dimly see,
The trivial, great,
Squalid, majestic tragedy
Of human fate.

141

Not ours to gauge the more or less,
The will's defect, the blood's excess,
The earthly humours that oppress
The radiant mind.
His greatness, not his littleness,
Concerns mankind.

A dreamer of the common dreams,
Here, mid the world that round us streams,
He chased the transitory gleams
That all pursue;
But on his lips the eternal themes
Again were new.

With shattering ire or withering mirth
He smote each worthless claim to worth.
The barren fig-tree cumbering Earth
He would not spare.
Through ancient lies of proudest birth
He drove his share.

To him the Powers that formed him brave,
Yet weak to breast the fatal wave,
A mighty gift of Hatred gave—
A gift above
All other gifts benefic, save
The gift of Love.

He saw 'tis meet that Man possess
The will to curse as well as bless,
To pity—and be pitiless,
To make, and mar;
The fierceness that from tenderness
Is never far.

142

And so his fierce and tender strain
Lives, and his idlest words remain
To flout oblivion, that in vain
Strives to destroy
One lightest record of his pain
Or of his joy.

And though thrice statelier names decay,
His own can wither not away
While plighted lass and lad shall stray
Among the broom,
Where evening touches glen and brae
With rosy gloom;

While Hope and Love with Youth abide;
While Age sits at the ingleside;
While yet there have not wholly died
The heroic fires,
The patriot passion, and the pride
In noble sires;

While, with the conquering Teuton breed
Whose fair estate of speech and deed
Heritors north and south of Tweed
Alike may claim,
The dimly mingled Celtic seed
Flowers like a flame;

While nations see in holy trance
That vision of the world's advance
Which glorified his countenance
When from afar
He hailed the Hope that shot o'er France
Its crimson star;

143

While, plumed for flight, the Soul deplores
The cage that foils the wing that soars;
And while, through adamantine doors
In dreams flung wide,
We hear, around these mortal shores,
The immortal tide.

1895

TEMPEST

Under the dark and piny steep
We watched the storm crash by:
We saw the bright brand leap and leap
Out of the shattered sky.

The elements were ministering
To make one mortal blest;
For, peal by peal, you did but cling
The closer to his breast.

1890

RETROGRESSION

Our daughters flower in vernal grace;
In strength our striplings wax apace;
Our cities teem; our commerce rides
Sovereign upon the fawning tides.
But while, to this our stronghold—where
The North Wind's wandering children fair,
Like wild birds from the waters sprung,
Built their wild nest and reared their young—
The fleets of peace for ever pour
Fruitage and vintage, gems and ore;
While here, within each ocean gate,
Long barricadoed against Fate,
We are served by all the alien seas,
And fed from the Antipodes,

144

Lo, everywhere the unplenished brain!
Everywhere, dire as bondman's chain,
Or laws that crush, or creeds that blind,
The leanness of the unnourished mind.

For few and fewer do they grow,
Who know, or ever cared to know,
The great things greatly said and sung
In this heroic English tongue,
This speech that is the rough-wrought key
To palaces of wizardry,
And many a fabric hung in air,
Our fathers' glory and our despair,
That firmer stands than boastful stone;
And many a tower of vigil lone,
Climbing whose stairway Wisdom viewed
The labyrinth of infinitude.

And shouldst thou have in thee to-day
Aught thou canst better sing than say,
Shun, if thou wouldst by men be heard,
The comely phrase, the wellborn word,
And use, as for their ears more meet,
The loose-lipped lingo of the street,
A language Milton's kin have long
Accounted good enough for song.
Or don that vesture doubly vile,
The beaded and bespangled style—
Diction o'erloaded and impure,
Thy thought lost in its garniture,
Thy Muse, ev'n to her raiment's hem,
Huddling uncostly gem on gem,
Striving her lax form to bestar
With all crude ornaments that are:
An empty and a dreary strife,
Vulgar in Letters as in Life.

145

Nor look for praise, save here and there
From a fast-dwindling remnant rare,
If thou beget with happy pain
The ordered and the governed strain
That peradventure had not shamed
Masters felicitously famed;
Dryden, the athlete large and strong,
Lord of the nerve and sinew of song;
A hewer and shaper who could see,
In adamant, plasticity;
Who tore from the entrails of the mine
The metal of his iron line,
And, born beside the haughty tomb
Of that rank time of overbloom
When poets vied in gathering each
Full-bosomed apple and buxom peach
That odorous in the orchard burned,
Had, from their purple surfeit, learned
The truth in Hellas seen so plain,
That the art of arts is to refrain;—
Or Gray, who on worn thoughts conferred
That second youth, the perfect word,
The elected and predestined phrase
That had lain bound, long nights and days,
To wear at last, when once set free,
Immortal pellucidity;
And who, in that most mighty Ode,
That like a pageant streamed and glowed,
Called up anew mid breathing things
The wan ghosts of our tragic Kings,
With doom-dark brows to come and go,
Trailing the folds of gorgeous woe.

1915

146

DISCLOSURE

On western shores we roamed, and there,
Watching a hill that watched the wave,
We called him dull in pose and air,
A bulk not grand but merely grave;
So many mountains had we seen,
Lordly of countenance, build, and mien.

Then came a snowstorm in the night,
And all his ribs of rock, next morn—
All his anatomy—sprang to light,
With form and feature, carved and worn,
That rose out of the salt abyss
Magnificent in emphasis.

Imagine not that thou canst know
Mountains or men in very truth,
Until the tempest and the snow
Strike them at midnight without ruth,
Publishing clear, to morning's gaze,
The lineaments they strove to erase.

1914

THE TERRORS OF TRUTH

A mighty wizard gave to an eastern King
The power to see, for but a single day,
Through all disguise, beholding everything
Stript bare of false array.

Then, to the monarch's gaze made manifest
In their true lineaments and native forms,
Foul demons, at the Enchanter's dread behest,
Came and passed by in swarms.

147

Yonder was that which he had deemed to be
Fair-smiling Friendship—one gorgonian frown;
And yonder was self-named Fidelity,
Hungering to seize his crown.

And hour by hour, serene and grave and mute,
He looked on the nude souls of evil things,
With the great calm that is the attribute
Of god-descended Kings.

But prone he fell, heart-cloven, when he saw
At last revealed, in light not from above,
Solely the harpy Beak, the harpy Maw,
Known, to the crowned, as Love.

ON ONE OF THE PORTRAITS OF EMMA, LADY HAMILTON

Sweet witch, whose form and face do here
Make neighbouring loveliness appear
A thing most faulty, a thing most flaw'd,
Though once becrowned with fame and laud:
The mighty victor's victress, thou
Hast conquered many heroes now,
And still triumphant, thou dost live
The great charm'd life that Art can give—
Thy frailties past—thy beauty alone
Less fragile than yon column'd stone.

THE INDESTRUCTIBLES

The dullards of past generations, the undiscerning crew
That turned deaf ears unto Shelley, that turned blind eyes upon Keats,
Unchangeably reincarnate, invincibly born anew,
Still buzz in the press and the salon, still lord it in learning's seats.

148

Do you think they are ever conquered? Do you think they are ever slain?
They are secular, sempiternal; the Powers that cannot die.
When all things else have perished, Stupidity shall remain,
And sit secure on the ruins of every star of the sky.

THE HEART OF THE ROSE

The Poet talked with the happy Rose,
And oft did the Rose repeat
How all her care was but to be fair,
And all her task to be sweet.

Ah, rash was the Rose—the tragic Rose!
She hath bared to the poet her heart!
And now he can take it, and crush and break it,
And rich in its attar depart.

1908

AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM

Rhona, as yet a tiny mite
Not three years old, looked up to-night
At the resplendent heavens, and said:
“What are 'ose 'tars for?”

Little maid,
I cannot tell, I ne'er have known—
Not being God upon His throne.

1915

149

MARCH

March, that with roar advances—to retreat
With most unleonine bleat;
March, that, discarding youthful thrift, grows old
Lavishing daffodil gold;—
When hath he sharp and bitter pangs extreme?
When, from her wintry dream,
He sees the Earth at some all-kindling kiss
Wake to demand wild bliss,
Foretaste of April and her treacheries sweet
That charm the hearts they cheat,
And of great hours beyond, when amorous May
For passionate June makes way.

ART MAXIMS

Often ornateness
Dwells with greatness.
Oftener felicity
Comes of simplicity.

Talent that's cheapest
Affects singularity.
Thoughts that dive deepest
Rise radiant in clarity.

Life being rough,
Sing smoothly, O Bard.
Enough, enough,
To have found Life hard!

No record Art keeps
Of her travail and throes.
There is toil on the steeps;
On the summits, repose.

150

THE LISTENERS

A Parable

The face of day is haggard,
The eye of day is blear,
And troubled is the earth,
For the storm steals near;
But the kine are in the grass-land,
Grazing without fear,
And busily the mill-wheel
Hums by the weir.

The kine are in the grass-land,
Grazing without fear,
But the shepherd in the mountains
And the sheep-dogs hear
The mutter of the thunder,
The first low thunder,
The rumble of the thunder,
On the moor and the mere.

1905

THE NEWS FROM THE FIELD

The King to the battle, the Queen to her bower.
She sits with her maidens and chides the slow hour.
There cometh no message, no word from the King,
And she chides the slow hour for the weight of its wing.

The bat flutters wavering noiselessly by;
The sun is gone down off the steps of the sky;
And the peacock has trailed his long splendours away
In the hush of the world at the fall of the day.

151

But hark, there are hoofbeats that clatter and ring!
A message, a message is come from the King.
Who bringeth the tidings, at last, and so late?
A riderless charger, that neighs at the gate.

TOO LATE

Too late to say farewell,
To turn, and fall asunder, and forget,
And take up the dropped life of yesterday!
So ancient, so far off, is yesterday,
To the last hour ere I had kissed thy cheek!
Too late to say farewell.

Too late to say farewell.
Can aught remain hereafter as of old?
A touch, a tone hath changed the heaven and earth,
And in a hand-clasp all begins anew.
Somewhat of me is thine, of thee is mine.
Too late to say farewell.

Too late to say farewell.
We are not May-day masquers, thou and I!
We have lived deep life, we have drunk of tragic springs.
'Tis for light hearts to take light leave of love;
But ah, for me, for thee, too late, dear Spirit!
Too late to say farewell.

THE FUGITIVE IDEAL

As some most pure and noble face,
Seen in the thronged and hurrying street,
Sheds o'er the world a sudden grace,
A flying odour sweet,
Then, passing, leaves the senses lorn—
Balked as with lustre of phantom Morn;

152

So, on our souls, the visions rise
Of that fair life we never led:
They flash a splendour past our eyes,
We start, and they are fled:
They vanish, and leave us with blank gaze,
Resigned to our ignoble days.

THE HOPE OF THE WORLD

In connection with this poem there is one thing for which I feel that I ought to express regret; and that thing is my own want of foresight in not realizing from the first that many would misunderstand its title, taking “the hope of the world” —the human world—to mean the hope of continued spiritual existence after bodily dissolution. I now perceive how natural it was for some persons thus to misapprehend the title before reading the poem, though why they should have persevered in such an error after reading it—or professing to have read it— is still rather incomprehensible.

The poem is, as I think any intelligent and moderately attentive reader will have recognized, an attempt to examine, within the doubtless too brief limits imposed upon himself by the author, the grounds of that largest and noblest hope of all —the quite disinterested and unselfish hope that the whole universe, and all existence whatsoever, are ultimately not only a progression but an ascension. The degree of confidence with which that hope can be maintained will naturally continue to vary with individual temperament; but there is surely something akin to cowardice, something unworthy of the adventurous human intellect, in blankly refusing to face whatever evidence it may be possible to adduce in the court of reason, whether it tend to fortify the hope here spoken of or to deject and weaken it.

I

Higher than heaven they sit,
Life and her consort Law;
And One whose countenance lit
In mine more perfect awe,
Fain had I deemed their peer,
Beside them throned above:
Ev'n him who casts out fear,
Unconquerable Love.
Ah, 'twas on earth alone that I his beauty saw.

II

On earth, in homes of men,
In hearts that crave and die.
Dwells he not also, then,
With Godhead, throned on high?
This and but this I know:
His face I see not there:
Here find I him below,
Nor find him otherwhere;
Born of an aching world, Pain's bridegroom, Death's ally.

III

Did Heaven vouchsafe some sign
That through all Nature's frame
Boundless ascent benign
Is everywhere her aim,

153

Such as man hopes it here,
Where he from beasts hath risen—
Then might I read full clear,
Ev'n in my sensual prison,
That Life and Law and Love are one symphonious name.

IV

Such sign hath Heaven yet lent?
Nay, on this earth, are we
So sure 'tis real ascent
And very gain we see?
'Gainst Evil striving still,
Some spoils of war we wrest:
Not to discover Ill
Were haply state as blest.
We vaunt, o'er doubtful foes, a dubious victory.

V

In cave and bosky dene
Of old there crept and ran
The gibbering form obscene
That was and was not man.
The desert beasts went by
In fairer covering clad;
More speculative eye
The couchant lion had,
And goodlier speech the birds, than we when we began.

VI

Was it some random throw
Of heedless Nature's die,
That from estate so low
Uplifted man so high?
Through untold æons vast
She let him lurk and cower:

154

'Twould seem he climbed at last
In mere fortuitous hour,
Child of a thousand chances 'neath the indifferent sky.

VII

A soul so long deferred
In his blind brain he bore,
It might have slept unstirred
Ten million noontides more.
Yea, round him Darkness might
Till now her folds have drawn,
O'er that enormous night
So casual came the dawn,
Such hues of hap and hazard Man's Emergence wore!

VIII

If, then, our rise from gloom
Hath this capricious air,
What ground is mine to assume
An upward process there,
In yonder worlds that shine
From alien tracts of sky?
Nor ground to assume is mine
Nor warrant to deny.
Equal, my source of hope, my reason for despair.

IX

And though within me here
Hope lingers unsubdued,
'Tis because airiest cheer
Suffices for her food!
As some adventurous flower,
On savage crag-side grown,
Seems nourished hour by hour
From its wild self alone,
So lives inveterate Hope, on her own hardihood.

155

X

She tells me, whispering low:
“Wherefore and whence thou wast,
Thou shalt behold and know
When the Great Bridge is crossed.
For not in mockery He
Thy gift of wondering gave,
Nor bade thine answer be
The blank stare of the grave.
Thou shalt behold and know; and find again thy lost.”

XI

With rapt eyes fixed afar,
She tells me: “Throughout Space,
Godward each peopled star
Runs with thy Earth a race.
Wouldst have the goal so nigh,
The course so smooth a field,
That Triumph should thereby
One half its glory yield?
And can Life's pyramid soar all apex and no base?”

XII

She saith: “Old dragons lie
In bowers of pleasance curled;
And dost thou ask me why?
It is a Wizard's world!
Enchanted princes these,
Who yet their scales shall cast,
And through his sorceries
Die into kings at last.
Ambushed in Winter's heart the rose of June is furled.”

156

XIII

Such are the tales she tells:
Who trusts, the happier he:
But nought of virtue dwells
In that felicity!
I think the harder feat
Were his who should withstand
A voice so passing sweet.
And so profuse a hand.—
Hope, I forgo the wealth thou fling'st abroad so free!

XIV

Carry thy largess hence,
Light Giver! Let me learn
To abjure the opulence
I have done nought to earn;
And on this world no more
To cast ignoble slight,
Counting it but the door
Of other worlds more bright.
Here, where I fail or conquer, here is my concern:

XV

Here, where perhaps alone
I conquer or I fail.
Here, o'er the dark Deep blown,
I ask no perfumed gale;
I ask the unpampering breath
That fits me to endure
Chance, and victorious Death,
Life, and my doom obscure,
Who know not whence I am sped, nor to what port I sail.

1897

157

TO THE LADY KATHARINE MANNERS

[_]

[With a volume of the Author's poems.]

On lake and fell the loud rains beat,
And August closes rough and rude.
'Twas Summer's whim, to counterfeit
The wilder hours her hours prelude.

And soon—pathetic last device
Of greatness fall'n and puissance flown!
She passes to her couch with thrice
The pomp of coming to her throne.

But while, by mountain and by mere,
Summer and you are hovering yet,
A vagrant Muse entreats your ear:
Forgive her; and not quite forget!

I would that nobler songs than these
Her hands might proffer to your hands.
I would their notes were as the sea's!
I know their faults are as the sands.

At least she prompts no vulgar strain;
At least are noble themes her choice;
Nor hath she oped her lips in vain,
For you take pleasure in her voice.

And she hath known the mountain-spell;
The sky-enchantment hath she known.
It was her vow that she would dwell
With greatest things, or dwell alone.

And various though her mundane lot,
She counts herself benignly starred—
All her vicissitudes forgot
In your regard.

Windermere August 1897

158

THE NORTH HAS MY HEART

“The land that lies eastward, the land that lies west,
The northland, the southland, which lovest thou best?”
“To eastward, to westward, to southward I stray,
But the North has my heart at the end of the way.

“Like a pearl is the East when the morn is begun,
And the West is a rose at the set of the sun,
And dear is the South as the ditties of May,
But the North has my heart at the end of the way.

“The East has her streams, and the West her white foam,
And the South her bland welcome to Spring tripping home—
But the North has her mountains majestic all day,
And the North has my heart, to the end of the way.”

A WORD WITH FORTUNE

I never ask to live and bask
In sunlight splendid.
I take my share of foul and fair
Till life be ended.

When knaves prevail I do not wail
And rend my raiment.
I bide the day when haply they
Shall reap due payment.

I nurse no spleen 'gainst Powers unseen,
Ev'n if they leave me
Torn to and fro 'twixt bliss and woe
Till Earth receive me.

159

GIVE NOT TO ME

Give not to me, mid the thunder
And speed of the world's hot wheels,
Such love as perhaps the Marble
For the Alabaster feels.

But love me with love as fiery
As the furnace whence arose
Both Marble and Alabaster,
In the Earth's primeval throes.

EARTH-SWEETNESS

The vast, vague dreams that are of little worth
I leave to dreamsome men,
And live well pleased the life of this good Earth—
The only world I ken.

And haply 'tis as fair as the orbs above,
That take with such a flaunted unconcern
My adoration, and the all-pure love
That asked for no return!

IRELAND'S EYE

A drear, waste, island rock, by tempests worn,
Gnawed by the seas and naked to the sky,
It bears the name it hath for ages borne
Of ‘Ireland's Eye.’

It looks far eastward o'er the desert foam;
Round it the whimpering, wild sea-voices cry.
The gulls and cormorants have their stormy home
On Ireland's Eye.

160

A strange and spectral head the gaunt crag rears,
And ghostly seem the wings that hover nigh.
Are these dim rains the phantoms of old tears
In Ireland's Eye?

The tide ebbs fast, the wind droops low to-day,
Feeble as dying hate that hates to die.
Blow, living airs, and blow the mists away
From Ireland's Eye.

ODE ON THE DAY OF THE CORONATION OF KING EDWARD VII

I

Sire, we have looked on many and mighty things
In these eight hundred summers of renown
Since the Gold Dragon of the Wessex Kings
On Hastings field went down;
And slowly in the ambience of this crown
Have many crowns been gathered, till, to-day,
How many peoples crown thee, who shall say?
Time, and the ocean, and some fostering star,
In high cabal have made us what we are,
Who stretch one hand to Huron's bearded pines,
And one on Kashmir's snowy shoulder lay,
And round the streaming of whose raiment shines
The iris of the Australasian spray.
For waters have connived at our designs,
And winds have plotted with us—and behold,
Kingdom in kingdom, sway in oversway,
Dominion fold in fold:
Like to that immemorial regal stone
Thy namesake from the northland reft away,
Symbol of sovereignty and spoil of fray,
And closed in England's throne.

161

So wide of girth this little cirque of gold,
So great we are, and old.
Proud from the ages are we come, O King;
Proudly, as fits a nation that hath now
So many dawns and sunsets on her brow,
This duteous heart we bring.

II

The kings thy far forerunners; he that came
And smote us into greatness; he whose fame,
In dark armipotence and ivied pride,
Towers above Conway's tide,
And where Carnarvon ponders on the sea;
He, that adventurous name,
Who left at Agincourt the knightly head
Of France and all its charging plumes o'erthrown,
But hath with royal-hearted chivalry
In Shakespeare's conquests merged at last his own;
And she, a queen, yet fashioned king-like, she
Before whose prows, before whose tempests, fled
Spain on the ruining night precipitately;
And that worn face, in camps and councils bred,
The guest who brought us law and liberty
Raised wellnigh from the dead;
Yea, she herself, in whose immediate stead
Thou standest, in the shadow of her soul;
All these, O King, from their seclusion dread,
And guarded palace closed to mortal key,
Mix in thy pageant with phantasmal tread,
Hear the long waves of acclamation roll,
And with yet mightier silence marshal thee
To the ancient throne thou hast inherited.

162

III

Lo, at the Earth's high feast, ere Autumn bring
His afterthoughts on greatness to her ear,
And with monitions of mortality
Perturb the revelling year,
Thou goest forth and art anointed King.
Nature disdains not braveries: why should we
The sombre foil to all her splendours be?
Let London rustle with rich apparelling,
And all the ways, with festal faces lined,
Casement and coign and fluttering balcony,
Wave welcome on the wind.
Now the loud land flames with imperial gear,
And life itself, so late in hues austere
And the cold reign of iron custom bound,
Puts off its gray subjection, and is here
One moment throned and crowned.
Now the long glories prance and triumph by:
And now the pomps have passed, and we depart
Each to the peace or strife of his own heart:
And now the day whose bosom was so high
Sinks billowing down: and twilight sorceries change
Into remote and strange
What is most known and nigh:
And changelessly the river sends his sigh
Down leagues of hope and fear, and pride and shame,
And life and death; dim-journeying pasionless
To where broad estuary and beaconing ness
Look toward the outlands whence our fathers came.
And high on Druid mountains hath the sun
Flamed valediction, as the last lights died
Beyond that fatal wave, that from our side
Sunders the lovely and the lonely Bride
Whom we have wedded but have never won.

163

IV

And night falls on an isle whose vassal seas
Remember not her prone regalities,
So withered from belief, so far and faint,
In such abjection before Time they lie,
Kingdoms and thrones forgotten of the sky.
Deira with her sea-face to the morn,
And Cumbria sunset-gazing; moist Dyvnaint,
A realm of coombs and tors; old greatnesses
From Dee to Severn, where the bards were born
Whose songs are in the wind by Idris' chair,
Whose lips won battles; and seats of puissance where,
With long grope of his desultory hand,
The ocean, prying deep into the land,
By Morven and the legends of wild Lorn,
Repents him, lost about Lochiel: all these
Have been, and 'stablisht on their dust we stand;
Thy England; with the northern sister fair,
That hath the heath-bells in her blowing hair;
And the dark mountain maid
That dreams for ever in the wizard shade,
Hymning her heroes there.

V

O doom of overlordships! to decay
First at the heart, the eye scarce dimmed at all;
Or perish of much cumber and array,
The burdening robe of empire, and its pall;
Or, of voluptuous hours the wanton prey,
Die of the poisons that most sweetly slay;
Or, from insensate height,
With prodigies, with light
Of trailing angers on the monstrous night,
Magnificently fall.

164

Far off from her that bore us be such fate,
And vain against her gate
Its knocking. But by chinks and crannies, Death,
Forbid the doorways, oft-times entereth.
Let her drink deep of discontent, and sow
Abroad the troubling knowledge. Let her show
Whence glories come, and wherefore glories go,
And what indeed are glories, unto these
'Twixt labour and the rest that is not ease
Made blank and darksome; who have hardly heard
Sound of her loftiest names, or any word
Of all that hath in gold been said and sung,
Since him of April heart and morning tongue,
Her ageless singing-bird.
For now the day is unto them that know,
And not henceforth she stumbles on the prize;
And yonder march the nations full of eyes.
Already is doom a-spinning, if unstirred
In leisure of ancient pathways she lose touch
Of the hour, and overmuch
Recline upon achievement, and be slow
To take the world arriving, and forget
How perilous are the stature and port that so
Invite the arrows, how unslumbering all
The hates that watch and crawl.
Nor must she, like the others, yield up yet
The generous dreams! but rather live to be
Saluted in the hearts of men as she
Of high and singular election, set
Benignant on the sea;
That greatly loving freedom loved to free,
And was herself the bridal and embrace
Of strength and conquering grace.

1902

165

LIGHTLY WE MET

Lightly we met in the morn,
Lightly we parted at eve.
There was never a thought of the thorn
The rose of a day might leave.

Fate's finger we did not perceive,
So lightly we met in the morn!
So lightly we parted at eve
We knew not that Love was born.

I rose on the morrow forlorn,
To pine and remember and grieve.
Too lightly we met in the morn!
Too lightly we parted at eve!

THE MIGHTY DENIER

Well he slumbers, greatly slain,
Who in splendid battle dies;
Deep his sleep in midmost main
Pillowed upon pearl who lies.

Ease, of all good gifts the best,
War and wave at last decree;
Love alone denies us rest,
Crueller than sword or sea.

1889

THE SAINT AND THE SATYR

[_]

[Mediæval legend.]

Saint anthony the eremite
He wandered in the wold,
And there he saw a hoofèd wight
That blew his hands for cold.

166

“What dost thou here in misery,
That better far wert dead?”
The eremite Saint Anthony
Unto the Satyr said.

“Lorn in the wold,” the thing replied,
“I sit and make my moan,
For all the gods I loved have died,
And I am left alone.

“Silent, in Paphos, Venus sleeps,
Jove, on Mount Ida, mute;
And every living creature weeps
Pan and his perished flute.

“The Faun, his laughing heart is broke;
The nymph, her fountain fails;
And driven from out the hollow oak
The Hamadryad wails.

“A God more beautiful than mine
Hath conquered mine, they say.—
Ah, to that fair young God of thine,
For me I pray thee pray!”

1893

THE EASIEST REVENGE

If one who lacks no just applause, and who
Stands like a living simile of success,
Should yet have sought to pierce me through and through
With his renowned pen-poniard, o'er and o'er,
Should I forgive him? Yes!
Nothing could cost me less,
Or gall him more.

1921

167

WALES: A GREETING

First published (in The Times) in June 1909, during the holding of the National Eisteddfod in London. The apprehensive

282

tone of the closing lines of this poem, with their reference to the ominous clouds then gathering on the international horizon, and to the possibly tremendous significance of these portents in our own case, was, alas! only too well justified five years afterwards.

In that wild land beyond Sabrina's wave;
In vales full of the voice of bards long mute,
From Gwent to far Demetia by the sea;
Or northward unto cloud-roof'd Gwynedd, where
The mountains sit together and talk with heaven,
While Mona pushing forth into the deep
Looks back for ever on their musing brows:
By silent mound and menhir, camp and cairn,
Leaf-hidden stream, and cataract's thunderous plunge:
In summer calms, or when the storming North
Whitens Eryri's crest and Siabod's cone—
Have I not roamed and lingered, from my youth,
An alien and a stranger, but amidst
A people gravely kind as suavely proud?—
A people caring for old dreams and deeds,
Heroic story, and far-descended song;
Honouring their poets, not in death alone,
But in life also, as is meet and well;
An ancient folk, speaking an ancient speech,
And cherishing in their bosoms all their past,
Yet in whose fiery love of their own land
No hatred of another's finds a place.

Sons—daughters—of Wild Wales, whose kindred swayed
This island, ages ere an English word
Was breathed in Britain—let an English voice
Hail and salute you here at England's heart.
On Europe, east and west, the dim clouds brood,
Disperse, and gather again; and none can tell
What birth they hold within them. But we know
That should they break in tempest on these shores,
You, that with differing blood, with differing spirit,
Yet link your life with ours, with ours your fate,

168

Will stand beside us in the hurricane,
Steadfast, whatever peril may befall:
Will feel no separate heartbeats from our own,
Nor aught but oneness with this mighty Power,
This Empire, that despite her faults and sins
Loves justice, and loves mercy, and loves truth,
When truly she beholds them; and who thus
Helps to speed on, through dark and difficult ways,
The ever-climbing footsteps of the world.

London June 15, 1909

THE PEERAGE OF THE LYRE

The bard of Power—the bard of Grace—
Which shall be chief? Nay, why inquire?
Have they not each his equal place
In the great peerage of the lyre?

To him who sumptuous wine adores,
No sovereign vintage comes amiss:
With the same reverence, he outpours
The ruddy or the golden bliss.

LINES READ BY THE AUTHOR AT THE DICKENS CENTENARY CELEBRATION IN NEW YORK

Where, where was born the man
Whom here we are met to praise?
Was it among the multitudinous ways
Where his loved London lifts her fevered brow
For cooling Night to fan?
Nay, nay,—but yonder by the embattled tides,
Where ships of war stept out with lofty prow
And heaved their stormy sides,

169

And where, far heard across the gaunt sea wall,
Rises through silence the long bugle-call—
There was he born amid the forts and guns,
One of Earth's fighting sons;
There, in that place of arms and battle-gear,
Where all the proud sea babbled Nelson's name,
Into the world this later hero came,
He, too, a man that knew all moods but fear,
He, too, a Warrior.

Yet not his the strife
That leaves dark scars on the fair face of Life!
He fought to tie, fought not to hold apart,
The strings of the world's heart;
And built a broad and noble bridge to span
The icy chasm that sunders man from man.
Wherever Wrong had fixed its bastions deep,
There did his fierce yet gay assault surprise
Some fortress propped with lucre or with lies;
There his light volley abased some arrogant keep;
There charged he up the steep—
A knight on whom no palsying torpor fell,
Keen to the last to break a lance with Hell.
And still undimmed his gallant weapons shine;
On his bright sword no spot of rust appears;
And still, across the years,
His soul goes forth to battle, and in the face
Of whatsoe'er is false, or cruel, or base,
He hurls his gage, and leaps among the spears,
Being armed with pity and love, and scorn divine,
Immortal laughter, and immortal tears.

170

WORLD-STRANGENESS

Strange the world about me lies,
Never yet familiar grown—
Still disturbs me with surprise,
Haunts me like a face half known.

In this house with starry dome,
Floored with gemlike plains and seas,
Shall I never feel at home,
Never wholly be at ease?

On from room to room I stray,
Yet my Host can ne'er espy,
And I know not to this day
Whether guest or captive I.

So, betwixt the starry dome
And the floor of plains and seas,
I have never felt at home,
Never wholly been at ease.

1889

BEWARE

The niggardly bosom in jewelled garb;
The nectar whose dregs are gall:
The arrows a knave or slave can barb,
And the battlements whence they fall;—
Beware, beware of them all.

The adders whose mouths are death or bale
Unto him in whose path they crawl;
And the owls that would hoot the nightingale
Whose song doth the world enthrall;—
Beware, beware of them all.

171

The sleep at the oar; the slip on the ice;
The crack in the stately wall;
The pearl that laughed at its own mad price,
And the tower that was built too tall;—
Beware, beware of them all.

1935

KILLINEY STRAND

The sea before me
Is harassed and stormy:
The low sky o'er me
Is haggard and wan.
With gray tides foaming,
And drear winds roaming,
And tired gulls homing,
Great Night comes on.

THE UNKNOWN GOD

When, overarched by gorgeous night,
I wave my trivial self away;
When all I was to all men's sight
Shares the erasure of the day;
Then do I cast my cumbering load,
Then do I gain a sense of God.

Not him that with fantastic boasts
A sombre people dreamed they knew;
The mere barbaric God of Hosts
That edged their sword and braced their thew:
A God they pitted 'gainst a swarm
Of neighbour Gods less vast of arm;

172

A God like some imperious king,
Wroth, were his realm not duly awed,
A God for ever harkening
Unto his self-commanded laud;
A God for ever jealous grown
Of carven wood and graven stone;

A God whose ghost, in arch and aisle,
Yet haunts his temple—and his tomb;
But follows in a little while
Odin and Zeus to equal doom;
A God of kindred seed and line;
Man's giant shadow, hailed divine.

O streaming worlds, O crowded sky,
O Life, and mine own soul's abyss,
Myself am scarce so small that I
Should bow to Deity like this!
This my Begetter? This was what
Man in his own crude youth begot.

The God I know of, I shall ne'er
Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.
Raise thou the stone and find me there,
Cleave thou the wood and there am I.
Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
Too near, too far, for me to know.

Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure
That I can pleasure him or vex:
I that must use a speech so poor
It narrows the Supreme with sex.
Notes he the good or ill in man?
To hope he cares is all I can.

173

I hope—with fear. For did I trust
This vision granted me at birth,
The sire of heaven would seem less just
Than many a faulty son of earth.
And so he seems indeed! But then,
I trust it not, this bounded ken.

And dreaming much, I never dare
To dream that in my prisoned soul
The flutter of a trembling prayer
Can move the Mind that is the Whole.
Though kneeling nations watch and yearn,
Does the primordial purpose turn?

Best by remembering God, say some,
We keep our high imperial lot.
Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come
When we forgot—when we forgot!
A lovelier faith their happier crown,
But history laughs and weeps it down!

Know they not well, how seven times seven,
Wronging our mighty arms with rust,
We dared not do the work of heaven
Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust?
The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still
The sanction of the heavenly will.

Unmeet to be profaned by praise
Is he whose coils the world enfold;
The God on whom I ever gaze,
The God I never once behold:
Above the cloud, beneath the clod:
The Unknown God, the Unknown God.

1897

174

ENGLAND'S CHOICE

Yonder where shakes with antic laughter
In elfin moonlight the spoilful sea,
What shall the stars behold hereafter—
Ireland captive or Ireland free?

Tempest or calm for the Mother who bore us,
Age-crowned England—which shall it be?
Reproach or acclaim in the morrow before us?
Ireland captive or Ireland free?

The quick and the dead have joined their voices,
O mighty and proud one, crying to thee—
“Choose—while as yet in thy hands the choice is:
Ireland captive or Ireland free.”

TO A FRIEND

[_]

[Chafing at enforced idleness from interrupted health.]

Soon may the edict lapse, that on you lays
This dire compulsion of infertile days,
This hardest penal toil, reluctant rest!
Meanwhile I count you eminently blest,
Happy from labours heretofore well done,
Happy in tasks auspiciously begun.
For they are blest that have not much to rue—
That have not oft mis-heard the prompter's cue,
Stammered and stumbled and the wrong parts played,
And life a Tragedy of Errors made.

1884

TO A STRENUOUS CRITIC

You scorn as idle—you who praise
Each posturing hero of the herd—
The lofty bearing of a phrase,
The noble countenance of a word.

175

“This has no import for the age!”
And so your votive wreaths you heap
On him who brought unto our Stage
A mightier dulness o'er the deep.

Great Heaven! When these with clamour shrill
Drift out to Lethe's harbour bar,
A verse of Lovelace shall be still
As vivid as a pulsing star.

1916

THE ADJECTIVE

Look not too coldly or too proudly down
On this poor bondslave to a haughty Noun!
Oft in his wallet hath he carried all
His master's wealth. Oft hath this captive thrall,
Marching before his lord with herald's blast,
Won him salaams who else had noteless passed.

1915

HER THIRD BIRTHDAY

My tiny lady, can it
Be true that you and I,
On something called a planet,
Are somewhere in the sky?

Yes—and at such a tearing
And madcap speed we've spun,
That you, with dreadful daring,
Have thrice been round the sun.

Nay, it yet more amazes,
That my far-venturing girl
Can be as fresh as daisies
After so wild a whirl!

176

And now 'neath western billow
The sun is put to bed,
And you, too, on your pillow
Must lay a golden head.

Ah, tears—they come so quickly,
For grief so quickly gone!
Yet joys have rained as thickly,
For you to dream upon.

1916

SONG IN AN ARCHAIC MANNER

Sweetest sweets that Time hath rifled,
Live anew on lyric tongue—
Tresses with which Paris trifled,
Lips to Antony's that clung.
These surrender not their rose,
Nor their golden puissance those.

Vain the envious loam that covers
Her of Egypt, her of Troy:
Helen's, Cleopatra's lovers
Still desire them, still enjoy.
Fate but stole what Song restored:
Vain the aspic, vain the cord.

Idly clanged the sullen portal,
Idly the sepulchral door:
Fame the mighty, Love the immortal,
These than foolish dust are more:
Nor may captive Death refuse
Homage to the conquering Muse.

1894

177

A GOLDEN HOUR

A beckoning spirit of gladness seemed afloat,
That lightly danced in laughing air before us:
The earth was all in tune, and you a note
Of Nature's happy chorus.

'Twas like a vernal morn, yet overhead
The leafless boughs across the lane were knitting:
The ghost of some forgotten Spring, we said,
O'er Winter's world comes flitting.

Or was it Spring herself, that, gone astray,
Across the unsentried frontier chose to tarry?
Or just a bold outrider of the May,
Or April-emissary?

The apparition faded on the air,
Capricious and incalculable comer.—
Wilt thou too pass, and leave my chill days bare,
And fall'n my phantom Summer?

1892

A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

When Man was yet so young upon the Earth
As to be just as lofty or as lowly
As other creatures, whether hoofed or taloned,
Feathered or scaled, that shared with him this orb;
It chanced upon a day that he peered down
From his hid perch, high in some forest tree,
And saw beneath him on the ground a beast
Of alien kind, his foe. Then did he spring,
With something 'twixt a chatter and a screech—
Knowing not other language—toward his victim;
And as from branch to branch he swung himself,

178

With long, thick, hirsute arms, down to the ground,
It so befell that the last branch of all
Broke off in his right hand. 'Twas his first weapon!
The father of all weapons wielded since!
Nay, more—from this, all instruments and tools,
Whether they be of war or peace, descend.
Thus, in that pregnant hour, that held within it
All after ages—thus, and then, and there,
Took he the first tremendous step of fate
In the long task of making earth, stone, iron,
His servants. Thus his great career began.

Such is my guess—which whoso will may scorn,
And whoso will may ponder—as to how
Dawned through the darkness this our human empire
Over the beast and bird, this human sway
Of the earth and air, this governance and power
Whereby we bind to our hot chariot wheels
The captive world, and shall not pause content
Until all Nature bear the yoke of man,
As man, half mutinous, bears the yoke of God.

1912

THE NECESSITY OF WRATH

Great and far Star, built yonder in gloom,
Art thou as tranquil as men might conceive thee,
Mortals accurst with immortal desire?
Nay, in thy bosom no peace may bloom;
Passions convulse thee, rages upheave thee,
Thy birth was fury, thy life is fire,
Thou art oceans of violence, abysses of ire,
And dreadfullest Calm shall but signal thy doom,
When the wealth of thy fierceness for ever shall leave thee,
And all that is Thou shall in ashes expire.

179

THE LIGHTHOUSE OF LOVE

Olove is like that glow
From lonely lighthouse poured—
That gleam it doth bestow
On sail and mast and cord,
When shore and ocean are
Unkissed by moon or star,
And Dawn in gloom afar
Still sheathes her golden sword.

My soul, a vessel frail,
Is launched on waters wide,
And in the swooping gale
Must through the surges ride.
But while yon lighthouse there
Makes night and tempest fair,
If Fate my barque upbear,
Let Love be lamp and guide.

APOLOGIA

Thus much I know: what dues soe'er be mine,
Of fame or of oblivion, Time the just,
Punctiliously assessing, shall award.
This have I doubted never; this is sure.
But one meanwhile shall chide me—one shall curl
Superior lips—because my handiwork,
The issue of my solitary toil,
The harvest of my spirit, even these
My numbers, are not something, good or ill,
Other than I have ever striven, in years
Lit by a conscious and a patient aim,
With hopes and with despairs, to fashion them;
Or, it may be, because I have full oft
In singers' selves found me a theme of song,

180

Holding these also to be very part
Of Nature's greatness, and accounting not
Their descants least heroic of acts renowned;
Or, yet again, because I bring nought new,
Save as each noontide or each Spring is new,
Into an old and iterative world,
And can but proffer unto whoso will
A cool and nowise turbid cup, from wells
Our fathers digged; and have not thought it shame
To tread in nobler footprints than mine own,
And travel by the light of purer eyes.
Ev'n such offences am I charged withal,
Till, breaking silence, I am moved to cry,
What would ye, then, my masters? Is the Muse
Fall'n to a thing of Mode, that must each year
Supplant her derelict self of yester-year?
Or do the mighty voices of old days
At last so tedious grow, that one whose lips
Inherit some far echo of their tones—
How far, how faint, none better knows than he
Who hath been nourished on their utterance—can
But irk the ears of such as care no more
The accent of dead greatness to recall?
If, with an ape's ambition, I rehearse
Their gestures, trick me in their stolen robes,
The sorry mime of their nobility
Dishonouring whom I vainly emulate,
The poor imposture soon shall shrink revealed
In the ill grace with which their gems bestar
An abject brow: but if I be indeed
Their true descendant, as the veriest hind
May yet be sprung of kings, their lineaments
Will out, the signature of ancestry
Leap unobscured, and somewhat of themselves
In me, their lowly scion, live once more.
With grateful, not vainglorious joy, I dreamed

181

It did so live; and ev'n such pride was mine
As is next neighbour to humility.
For he that claims high lineage yet may feel
How thinned in the transmission is become
The ancient blood he boasts; how slight he stands
In the great shade of his majestic sires.
But it was mine endeavour so to sing
As if these lofty ones a moment stooped
From their still spheres, and undisdainful graced
My note with audience, nor incurious heard
Whether, degenerate irredeemably,
The faltering minstrel shamed his starry kin.
And though I be to these but as a knoll
About the feet of the high mountains, scarce
Remarked at all save when a valley cloud
Holds the high mountains hidden, and the knoll
Against the cloud shows briefly eminent;
Yet ev'n as they, I too, with constant heart,
And with no light or careless ministry,
Have served what seemed the Voice; and unprofane,
Have dedicated to melodious ends
All of myself that least ignoble was.
For though of faulty and of erring walk,
I have not suffered aught in me of frail
To blur my song; I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my worst self for a gift.
And unto such as think all Art is cold,
All music unimpassioned, if it breathe
An ardour not of Eros' lips, and glow
With fire not caught from Aphrodite's breast,
Be it enough to say, that in Man's life
Is room for great emotions unbegot
Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot
Ev'n of the purer nuptials of the soul;
And one not pale of blood, to human touch

182

Not tardily responsive, yet may know
A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality,
When, rapt from all relation with his kind,
All temporal and immediate circumstance,
In silence, in the visionary mood
That, flashing light on the dark deep, perceives
Order beyond this coil and errancy,
Isled from the fretful hour he stands alone
And hears the eternal movement, and beholds
Above him and around and at his feet,
In million-billowed consentaneousness,
The flowing, flowing, flowing of the world.

Such moments, are they not the peaks of life?
Enough for me, if on these pages fall
The shadow of the summits, and an air
Not dim from human hearth-fires sometimes blow.

TOO SOON

Tired Time, that mowest down,
With thy slow-sweeping scythe,
Puissance and proud Renown,
Grave Wisdom, Pleasure blithe,
Some in their evenfall,
Some in their golden noon:
Thou mowest them all, thou mowest them all,
Too soon, too soon!

And thou more dreaded still,
Dark brother of loam and mould,
Death, that with hand so chill
So fiery a dart dost hold:
How oft, while Youth awaits
Love's visit as Life's chief boon,
'Tis thou com'st riding to the gates,
Too soon, too soon!

183

PART OF MY STORY

We met when you were in the May of life,
And I had left its June behind me far.
Some barren victories—much defeat and strife—
Had marked my spirit with many a hidden scar.

I was a man whose inward bruises men
Scarce guessed at; strangely weak; more strangely strong;
Daring at times; and uttering now and then,
Out of a turbid soul, a limpid song.

Fitful in effort—fixed and clear in aim;
Poor, but uncovetous of the wealth I lack;
Ever half-scaling the hard hill of fame,
And ever by some impish fate flung back—

Such did you find me, in that city gray
Where we were plighted, O my comrade true:
My wife, now dearer far than on the day
When this our love was new.

HEPHÆSTUS

The Subduer of Iron, the Lord of fierce Flame,
Amid mortals he tarried—the God that was lame;
And divine though his lineage, and heavenly his birth,
Full deep were his tangles with cavernous Earth,
When far in Mount Etna's hot heart he abode,
Where fearsome and splendid his furnaces glowed.

“Whatsoever is mighty,” he cried out in glee,
“'Twixt Hammer and Anvil is fashioned by me.”
And abysses volcanian up-thundered their joy,
For he smote like the Powers that create and destroy;
The Pow'rs that sublimely the fuel have hurled
On the fires of the forges where shaped is the world.

184

INDIA'S GUEST

[_]

[H.R.H. The Prince of Wales.]

Young Heir to an old, old throne! Your wandering prow,
'Neath many a wandering star,
Hath carried you erenow
Far westward, southward far;
And far into the hearts of men beside
Have been those voyagings wide.
At last, far eastward faring, you behold,
Under a heaven of vehement breath and hue,
Whose Day is fire of fire and gold of gold,
The home of all things ancient, all things new:
Great India, where, by mart and wharf and street,
By mosque or shrine, or mighty stream that pours
Its sacred waters between sacred shores,
Europe's and Asia's dreams so strangely meet;
And where the never-mingling faiths, that make
In unlike temples an unchanged abode,
Tell by what differing cups do mortals slake
The same deep thirst for God.

Guest of this ocean-seated, mountain-crowned
Mother of half Earth's tongues: on plain and hill,
Within her vast sea-bound,
So many are the peoples that did found
Famed cities, and so many and renowned
The Princedoms, their inheritors seeming still
Garbed as in fable and as in song bepearled,
That while you tread this million-memoried ground
'Tis not a land salutes you but a world!—
A world mysterious, bafflingly involved,
Multiplex, full of labyrinths obscure,
Full of enigmas not so wholly solved
As to be shorn of puissance to allure,

185

Yet from its cloistral bosom greeting now
You of the frank and the transparent brow,
You of the countenance like an open book,
Wherein, how curiously soe'er we look,
Nought may we read but things seemly and pure:
Kindliness, courtesy, honour and truth: the things
That, more than purple, adorn the sons of Kings,
And, more than arms, empower a throne to endure.

Ah, Heaven be thanked that suchlike things as these
Are the unponderous, the unmassive keys
That ope great doors with a most golden ease!
And the great doors of India's soul, that are
Closed to mere Might as with a mystic bar,
If Charm draw nigh seem left at least ajar.
Within, what is't we see?
Moods and emotions evermore apart
From all the way and wont o' the western heart!
And as we look on deeps we have never spanned,
There comes the thought—Perhaps 'twere well if we
Loved less to overawe than to understand:
To have true sight and very touch at last
Of this that far in an unfathomed Past
Rose and had Dayspring for its ancestry,
This Soul of the East, majestic, grave, sedate,
Grandiose of mien: a Spirit from ours aloof,
Yet knitted and beravelled with the woof
Of all our wondrous fate.

1921

186

THE SAVIOURS

You famed ones of old, who strove to guide,
Justly and nobly, peoples and nations,
In pathways high, where the high thoughts flower:
Though now, peradventure, ensphered you abide,
Hardly beholding the Earth's tribulations,
Lend us your wisdom for one great hour!

Nay, you are Shades! Past death and birth,
Silent you dwell, in folds of the ages,
Far from our wars and tears withdrawn,
While living hearts, on the living Earth,
Dream there shall rise other heroes and sages
Out of Creation's eternal dawn.

They shall rise—and haply shall rise in vain,
On thankless mortals their greatness wasting,
And, mighty of spirit, shall go to their doom;
Perhaps in the hour of the welter and pain
Of a world to its final twilight hasting,
Through fallen splendour and ruined bloom.

O PLACID MOON

Oplacid Moon; O pensive Moon;
Canst thou to mortals give only thy splendour?
Give thou thy Calm to all my soul!
Wane not so fast! Age not so soon!
Dream thy white dream, ever tranquil and tender—
Thou that hast found neither rest nor goal.

Loved on the earth, loved on the sea,
Share thou the wealth of thy smile with the waters;
Lull thou the surge where tides rage high!
When through my heart dark tempests flee,
Teach me, O fairest of Night's lovesome daughters,
Teach me but Peace, lest of storm I die.

187

THE MOUND IN THE MEADS

This is the mound that holds the slain
Who came to the meads to fight the Dane,
Who came to the meads from hut and hall,
Fair-haired Saxons lusty and tall,
Earl and churl, and thane and thrall.

For they went not back to hut and hall:
On his golden armlet swore the Dane
That none should be left uncleft in twain.
And this is the Barrow that hides them all,
This is the mound that holds the slain.

THE BETTER CHOICE

The Winter Sun is a Miser
His joy is to hoard and hold,
But the Summer Sun is wiser
He freely gives his gold.

With lavish and broad disbursal,
Beneath and around and above,
He sows his wealth Universal,
And reaps universal love.

LACRIMÆ MUSARUM

A friend who was present kindly supplied me with the following report of certain remarks which I made as a guest of the Poetry Society, at its summer meeting on the lawns of Aldworth in 1925:

“The President of the Poetry Society has paid me the graceful courtesy of asking me to read to you my poem, Lacrimæ Musarum, written at the time of Tennyson's death thirty-three years ago. It is a very real pleasure to comply with your President's request, but before doing so I must be allowed to say a few words about the circumstances in which the poem was written. When Tennyson died I was a young man of thirty-four, and during the formative years of youth and early manhood I had not been precisely among the very fervid admirers of his genius. I was extremely sensitive to his almost invariable charm, as well as to his frequent power, but my own special leanings were towards a more compressed and pregnant style than was habitual with him. When, however, he came to die—when he came to die that magnificent, and, if I may so phrase it, spectacular death, as of some mighty bard of old, passing from ken in a blaze of honour and glory—when that happened, the voice of criticism was for the moment hushed, and even we who had carped and cavilled a little during his lifetime were carried out of ourselves by a great surging wave of emotion. Under the stress of that emotion (of which I am not ashamed) this poem was written—and written, I take leave to say, with profound sincerity. For a threnody is not a criticism, not an occasion for scrupulously balanced judgment. One might almost say that an attitude of cool appraisement would be out of place in it. And more especially in an elegy on a great and renowned poet, who, after all, had for many years been a part, and no mean part, of our lives, the most fitting things are not criticism, not a careful measuring of comparative values, but simply reverence and homage and love. I will say no more, but will read you this elegy without further preamble.”

[_]

[The death of Tennyson.]

Low, like another's, lies the laurelled head:
The life that seemed a perfect song is o'er:
Carry the last great bard to his last bed.
Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute.
Land that he loved, that loved him! nevermore
Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild sea-shore,
Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit,

188

Or woodlands old, like Druid couches spread,
The master's feet shall tread.
Death's little rift hath rent the faultless lute:
The singer of undying songs is dead.

Lo, in this season pensive-hued and grave,
While fades and falls the doomed, reluctant leaf
From withered Earth's fantastic coronal,
With wandering sighs of forest and of wave
Mingles the murmur of a people's grief
For him whose leaf shall fade not, neither fall.
He hath fared forth, beyond these suns and showers.
For us, the autumn glow, the autumn flame,
And soon the winter silence shall be ours:
Him the eternal spring of fadeless fame
Crowns with no mortal flowers.

What needs his laurel our ephemeral tears,
To save from visitation of decay?
Not in this temporal light alone, that bay
Blooms, nor to perishable mundane ears
Sings he with lips of transitory clay.
Rapt though he be from us,
Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus;
Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each
Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach;
Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach;
Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home;
Keats, on his lips the eternal rose of youth,
Doth in the name of Beauty that is Truth
A kinsman's love beseech;
Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam,
Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave,
His equal friendship crave:
And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech
Of Athens, Florence, Weimar, Stratford, Rome.

189

Nay, he returns to regions whence he came.
Him doth the spirit divine
Of universal loveliness reclaim.
All Nature is his shrine.
Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea,
In earth's and air's emotion or repose,
In every star's august serenity,
And in the rapture of the flaming rose.
There seek him if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the Whole;
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.

For lo! creation's self is one great choir,
And what is Nature's order but the rhyme
Whereto, in holiest chime,
All things have moved with all things from their prime?
Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre?
In far retreats of elemental mind
Obscurely comes and goes
The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.
Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might:
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself, she knows.
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped:
Ev'n as the linnet sings, so I, he said:
Ah, rather as the imperial nightingale,
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o'er
All woodland chants immortally prevail!

190

And now, from our vain plaudits greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs, he sets his sail,
But far beyond our vision and our hail
Is heard for ever and is seen no more.

No more, O never now,
Lord of the lofty and the tranquil brow,
Shall men behold those wizard locks where Time
Let fall no wintry rime.
Once, in his youth obscure,
The weaver of this verse, that shall endure
By splendour of its theme which cannot die,
Beheld thee eye to eye,
And touched through thee the hand
Of every hero of thy race divine,
Ev'n to the sire of all the laurelled line,
The sightless wanderer on the Ionian strand.
Yea, I beheld thee, and behold thee yet:
Thou hast forgotten, but can I forget?
Are not thy words all goldenly impressed
On memory's palimpsest?
I hear the utterance of thy sovereign tongue,
I tread the floor thy hallowing feet have trod;
I see the hands a nation's lyre that strung,
The eyes that looked through life and gazed on God.

The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer;
The grass of yesteryear
Is dead; the birds depart, the groves decay:
Empires dissolve and peoples disappear:
Song passes not away.
Captains and conquerors leave a little dust,
And kings a dubious legend of their reign;

191

The swords of Cæsars, they are less than rust:
The poet doth remain.
Dead is Augustus, Maro is alive;
And thou, the Mantuan of this age and soil,
With Virgil shalt survive,
Enriching Time with no less honeyed spoil,
The yielded sweet of every Muse's hive;
Heeding no more the sound of idle praise
In that great calm our tumults cannot reach—
Master who crown'st our immelodious days
With flower of perfect speech.

1892

THE ELOPING ANGELS

A Caprice

Faust and his Mephistopheles, until
Night had long passed its prime, sat grave of brow.
“All fruitage have we plucked,” said Faust, “at will—
The unhallowed sorts most often; and erenow,
In the ennobling study of all things ill,
Little less diligent have I been than thou.”
He paused, and then, to him of demon-kind,
In forthright speech, unmuffled thus his mind:

“Ne'er shall I grudge thee thy just praise! Thou art
A devil of exceeding rich resource;
A veteran player of many a darksome part!
A nimble dodger of all hostile Force!
Thou carriest folded in thy brain a chart
Of Worlds and Systems and each planet's course.
Canst not procure us, by thy wit's rare power,
Admission into Heaven for half an hour?”

192

Reply came leisurely. “You underrate
The impediments—and the hardships! They're no jest.
Saint Peter wallows in routine. A weight
Of merciless etiquette whelms the unpractised guest.
You can't sneeze but as precedents dictate,
And red tape seems the ruin of all the Blest.
Still, as your thoughts now take a heavenward way,
We'll follow—ere the first young leer of Day.”

So, by demonic Power upborne, these twain
Mounted through desert Space and the steep night.
They saw the world that half resents man's reign
Shrink to a spark. They soared from height to height,
Till, in far reaches of the unmapped Inane,
Such domed and towered magnificence met their sight
As leaves all fancies pale, all fables cold,
Beggaring Dreamland and its courts of gold.

To a breach and orifice in the Heavenly Wall—
An outlook on infinity—they came,
Mephisto saying: “Between ourselves, I call
This escapade a frolic rather tame.
My own concern with Paradise is small,
And yours—forgive my plainness-much the same.
In fact, exploratory zeal so free
From all self-interest I scarce ever see.

“But,” he went on, “we will without debate
Pass through this entrance narrow and shadowyhued,
Reaching, as soon as by the accustomed gate,
The bowers and palaces of beatitude.

193

Our Merits, here, none questions: here we wait
No janitor's whim: and best of all, we elude
That white light of publicity, whose glow
I never yet have courted, as you know.”

“Soft!” answered Faust. “I hear a voice within,
And if it be not some enamoured youth,
Breathing rich heartwords to his heart's sweet kin
While prisoning her white bosom—then, forsooth,
Thou'rt not the adroit Ambassador of Sin,
Nor I a hunter of the fleet deer, Truth.
Nay, sure enough.... What an entrancing pair!. . .
Such grace! . . . And the dark wonders of her hair!”

He erred not far. These angels were indeed
Two human lovers, who, by an uncalm fate,
Full early from the yoke of life being freed,
Renewed their vows in that celestial state.
Now Faust was of a gentlemanly breed,
Whate'er his sins; and murmuring, “I should hate
To be a spy at tender scenes like this,”
He broke, with a kind suddenness, on their bliss.

“Fair, spotless Beings! Perfections nigh divine!
Behold,” he said, “two wanderers from a star
I think ye know—a world whose glories shine
Lost beyond vision, so remote they are!
If ye will affably an ear incline,
Nor scorn discourse with travellers from afar,
Fain would we learn such news as may be given
Of aught that now is agitating Heaven.”

“Friend, for such tidings you in vain apply
To me,” the radiant Youth Angelic said.
“We live a life withdrawn, this Maid and I,

194

Nor love the life by other angels led—
All idle hymns of praise to the Most High.
Our one supreme desire is to be wed,
And we were even now concerting schemes
How to escape, and turn to truth our dreams.

“For here, in Heaven, no marrying is, nor yet
Giving in marriage, and we dwell debarred
From that full tie whereon our hearts are set:
An interdict assuredly most hard.
Earthward we long to hasten, but we fret
At one thing that may all our plans retard,
To wit, this garb angelic, which on earth
May cause rude comment, if not ruder mirth.”

“Tut!” said Faust's pilot, to these lovers fond;
“Exchange apparel with my friend and me!
When your pure forms our raiment shall have donned—
'Tis of a simple grace, as you may see—
Then, through the blank untenanted deeps, beyond
This slightly crude Elysium, earthward flee!
My benison shall accompany you. And now
We will effect the exchange, if you'll allow.”

When Power Infernal would with Innocence deal,
Can Innocence bargain? By satanic aid,
Faust, ere he knows, appears from head to heel
Clad in the habit of the Angel Maid,
She in his own. Mephisto seems to feel
Deep peace, being suddenly like the Saints arrayed.
And as to the Angel Lover, he stands dressed
In garments from a wardrobe most unblest.

So Faust and his dark minister and ally
Entered—incognito—where seraphs dwell.

195

“Time gallops,” said Mephistopheles, “and I
Have anxious duties that must soon compel
My abrupt departure from a tranquil sky
Perhaps to the more strenuous air of Hell.
Meanwhile, I doubt if Heaven has changed one whit
Since its great crisis, the historic Split.”

But leave we yonder, high o'er earthly care,
Faust and that ripe though sulphurous sage, his guide,
And follow Love's bright fugitives, in their
Ethereal passionate journey side by side.
They, through Immensity's Saharas bare,
Sped without halt, and soon this orb espied,
Hung like a goblin lamp, with impish gleam,
Mid the wild strangeness of the Cosmic Scheme.

She, on the earth, a village girl, and he
A prince had been. 'Twas pure romance of love,
Idyllic and ideal as could be,
Cold prudence and expedience far above.
And when he fell by a hireling dagger, she
Could not survive him, poor disconsolate dove!
And now on earth they stepped once more, and met
The ghosts of old dead kisses deathless yet.

Night had evanished, morn possessed the sky;
The ploughman was already at his plough.
“Unto my father's palace let us hie,”
Said the returning prince. “Another, now,
Reigns in his stead, but cheerfully will I
Serve him, and loyally to his sceptre bow;
And us, I doubt not, he will entertain—
Strayed earthlings, welcomed home to Earth again.”

196

So to that palace—a dark scowl of stone—
They with their thoughts repaired; and having failed
In no observance meet, they approached the throne.
But the poor haunted King in terror quailed,
Shrieking, “More spectres! Out, ye wraiths, begone!
Has none of all my exorcists availed
To rid me of these phantom plagues, that make
Life a dread dream, whether I sleep or wake?”

Then, with strange questions in their eyes, the twain
Went musing from that presence, little loth
The presence of the guiltless fields to gain.
And she, sweet queen of his rich love and troth,
Said, very softly: “Dearest, wilt thou deign
To seek my father's cottage, where for both
Shall room and welcome be? For he doth own
A heart more royal than aught on yonder throne.”

Unto her father's cot they took their way.
They found him leaning on his gate, white-haired,
Full of the memory of a former day.
Calmly he greeted them, like one prepared
For loftiest visitants, as who should say:
“My son and daughter, that so far have fared,
I have expected you this many a year.
Enter and rest, my son and daughter dear.”

And entering in, they veiled their heavenly sheen
In homely vesture, and themselves resigned
To homely tasks. A milkmaid or a queen,
Her had you deemed: an emperor him, or hind.
Noble of carriage and yet meek of mien—
Immortals, thrilled with touch of mortal kind—
To notes of Earth they gave such tones as came
From some Tenth Sphere that puts the nine to shame.

197

And on Earth's breast, as angels, they remained,
Yet more than angels, being lovers too;
All their celestial loveliness retained,
And hour by hour in earthly sweetness grew.
Thus lost they nothing of angelic, and gained
Everything human save what men must rue,
Uniting all below with all above,
Linking the flowers and stars in secret love.

Yet theirs were many griefs, for evermore
They made the pangs of other hearts their own,
Feeling all pain they saw; and thus they bore
The burden of the universal moan,
Wept with all tears, and with all wounds were sore.
But likewise all the joy by others known
Became their joy; and in the worldwide scale,
Pleasure, they found, o'er pain did still prevail.

But being deathless, ever 'twas their doom,
Loving their fellows, to lament them dead.
Age after age, they saw the opening tomb,
And saw it closed on a true comrade's head.
Yet what the grave took from them the world's womb
Gave back: “For death is but a form,” they said,
“Birth a convention. Nought is less or more.
And Nature does but borrow to restore.”

“I think,” said Faust—alighting here below
From his adventurous translunary jaunt—
“This earth is still the goodliest place I know.
Tedious were any world whose habitants flaunt
Always a vapid bliss where'er they go,
As do the average dwellers in that haunt
Where we have just been privileged to see
The abodes of unrelieved felicity.”

198

“True,” said his Fiendship, “if a trifle stale.
Well, on those foibles of the Saints who spend
Their hours in amaranthine meadow and vale,
Let us look gently. Though they may offend
Taste like our own, soon they'll be memories pale!
Heaven has its charms—for some. But in the end
'Twill be to a realm far differently devised
That thou'lt have need to grow—acclimatized.”

1892-1927

THE SAPPERS AND MINERS

In lands that still the heirs of Othman sway,
There lives a legend, wild as wildest note
Of birds that haunt the Arabian waste, where rolls
Tigris through Baghdad to the Persian Sea.
'Tis fabled that the mighty sorcerer,
King Solomon, when he died, was sitting aloft,
Like one that mused, on his great lion-throne;
Sitting with head bent forward o'er his staff,
Whereon with both his hands he leaned. And tribes
And peoples moved before him, in their awe
Not venturing nigh; and tawny fiercenesses,
Panther and pard, at timorous distance couched;
While Figures vast, Forms indeterminate,
Demons and Genii, the Enchanter's thralls,
Cloudily rose, and darkly went and came.
But so majestic sat he lifeless there,
And counterfeited life so perfectly,
That change of hue or feature was by none
Seen, and none guessed him dead, and every knee
Rendered him wonted homage, until worms
Gnawing his staff, made fall that last support,
And with it fell the unpropped Death, divulged
In gorgeous raiment to the wondering world.

199

So may an Empire, from whose body and limbs
The spirit hath wholly fled, still seem to breathe
And feel, still keep its living posture, still
Cheat with similitude of glory and power
The gazing Earth, until the evil things
That burrow in secret, and by night destroy,
Unseat the grandiose Semblance, and man's heart
Hastes to forget the obeisances he made
To a jewelled corse, long ripe for sepulture.

THE HUSBANDMAN OF HEAVEN

[_]

[Lines written near the burial-place of Burns.]

Poet, whose very dust, here shed,
Is as the quick among the dead,
Where revels thy carousing soul?
What Hebe fills what mighty bowl,
Mantling with what immortal drink?

Nay, great and blissful one! I think
That, taught by Time himself to flee
The taverns of Eternity,
Amid yon constellations thou
Drivest all night the heavenly Plough,
Wooing with song some sky-nymph fair
Who sits in Cassiopeia's Chair,
Or half unravels on her knees
That tangled net, the Pleiades,
Or, at thy over-amorous strain
Bridling with wrath she needs must feign,
Flits to a region pale and gray,
Shimmers through nebula away,
But wandering back, with starlike tears
Yields to the Ploughman of the Spheres.

1914

200

TO A GOVERNMENT

Yes, we are mighty: yet such things have been,
As the imperceptible exit of proud Power,
When in a Nation whoso watched hath seen
Lax guardship of her dower.

Lords of Unthrift, it is of little use
To caulk and solder tiny leaks to-day,
If, in vast torrent, through your open sluice,
Treasure be drained away.

War, with her secret burrow in ocean's breast,
And hellish ambush in the heavenly air—
War found you wise: and is fell Peace the test
Your wisdom least can bear?

Look,—the sweet truant, beloved Prosperity,
To happier lands returning, shuns these shores,
Where, daily engulfed as in some hungry sea,
Million on million pours.

Lock, lock the floodgates. Lag not now; for when
The leaders halt and hover, Fate makes haste!
And loftiest, noblest wasters may be then
Cast rudely forth as waste.

1922

THE BALLAD OF SEMMERWATER

[_]

[North-country legend.]

Deep asleep, deep asleep,
Deep asleep it lies,
The still lake of Semmerwater
Under the still skies.

201

And many a fathom, many a fathom,
Many a fathom below,
In a king's tower and a queen's bower
The fishes come and go.

Once there stood by Semmerwater
A mickle town and tall;
King's tower and queen's bower,
And the wakeman on the wall.

Came a beggar halt and sore:
“I faint for lack of bread.”
King's tower and queen's bower
Cast him forth unfed.

He knocked at the door of the herdman's cot,
The herdman's cot in the dale.
They gave him of their oatcake,
They gave him of their ale.

He has cursed aloud that city proud,
He has cursed it in its pride;
He has cursed it into Semmerwater
Down the brant hillside;
He has cursed it into Semmerwater,
There to bide.

King's tower and queen's bower,
And a mickle town and tall;
By glimmer of scale and gleam of fin,
Folk have seen them all.
King's tower and queen's bower,
And weed and reed in the gloom;
And a lost city in Semmerwater,
Deep asleep till Doom.

1903

202

TO A GREAT POET OF A PAST ERA

Poet, thy strain, a mountain cataract, leaps
From so remote and superhuman steeps,
It never finds the valley, but midway
Hangs beautifully lost upon the day,
In iridescence lost, in vapour spent,
Yet made immortal in evanishment.

TO A SLOVENLY VERSIFIER

Your gems, I take it, even in the rough,
For this rude age are more than good enough?
Too mean were lapidarian toil for you;
'Tis work we drudges may be left to do:
Poor painful slaves of our own paltry skill,
Doting uxorious on Perfection still.

EDENHUNGER

O that a nest, my mate! were once more ours,
Where we, by vain and barren change untortured,
Could have grave friendships with wise trees and flowers,
And live the great, green life of field and orchard!

From the cold birthday of the daffodils,
Ev'n to that listening pause that is November,
O to confide in woods, confer with hills,
And then—then, to that palmland you remember,

Fly swift, where seas that brook not Winter's rule
Are one vast violet breaking into lilies:
There where we spent our first strange wedded Yule,
Far in the golden, fire-hearted Antilles.

1914

203

TO MY ELDEST CHILD

My little firstborn daughter sweet—
My child, yet half of alien race—
England and Ireland surely meet,
Their feuds forgotten, in thy face.

To both these lands I'd have thee give
Thy maiden heart, surrendered free;
For both alike I'd have thee live,
Since both alike do live in thee.

In thee they lay their strife aside,
That were so worn with dire unrest;
These whom the waters parted wide,
But who commingle in thy breast.

These would I teach thee to revere,
To love, and serve, and understand;
Nor would I have thee hold less dear
Thy mother's than thy father's land.

The English fields, in sun and rain,
Were round about thee at thy birth;
But thou shalt ache with Ireland's pain,
And thou shalt laugh with Ireland's mirth.

Thou shalt be taught her noble songs,
And thou shalt grieve whene'er is told
The story of her ancient wrongs,
The story of her sorrows old.

And often, in thy English home,
Her voice will call, and thou obey.
Thy heart will cross the sundering foam,
Thy soul to Ireland sail away.

204

Ah, little flower! in Irish ground
Thy roots are deeper than the sea,
Though English woodlands murmured round
The house of thy nativity.

Of both these peoples thou wert born;
Of both these lands thou art the child;
Surely a symbol of the morn
That shall behold them reconciled.

1914

ODE TO LICINIUS

[_]

[Horace paraphrased.]

Licinius, wouldst thou wisely steer
That barque which is thy soul,
Not always trust her without fear
Where deep-sea billows roll;
Nor, to the sheltered beach too near,
Risk shipwreck on the shoal.

Who sees in fortune's golden mean
All his desires comprised,
Midway the cot and Court between
Hath well his life devised;
For riches, hath not envied been,
Nor, for their lack, despised.

Most rocks the pine that soars afar,
When leaves are tempest-whirled.
Direst the crash when turrets are
In dusty ruin hurled.
The thunder loveth best to scar
The white brows of the world.

205

The steadfast mind, that to the end
Is fortune's victor still,
Hath yet a fear, though Fate befriend,
A hope, though all seem ill.
Jove can at will the winter send,
Or call the spring at will.

Full oft the darkest day may be
Of morrows bright the sire.
His bow not everlastingly
Apollo bends in ire.
At times the silent Muses he
Wakes with his dulcet lyre.

When stormy narrows round thee roar,
Be bold; nought else avails.
But when thy canvas swells before
Too proudly prospering gales,
For once be wise with coward's lore,
And timely reef thy sails.

1894

THEY AND WE

With stormy joy, from height on height,
The thundering cataracts leap.
The mountain tops, with still delight,
Their changeless patience keep.

Man only—tired of calm, and rent
By Joy's tempestuous throes—
Neither from passion drinks content,
Nor drinks it from repose.

206

CROSS BROW, AMBLESIDE

[_]

[The Author's dwelling at the time referred to.]

My smallest daughter had wondered how
Her dear home came by its name, ‘Cross Brow’:
Her home mid the meres, that loveliest seem,
In their autumn trance and their winter dream:
Her home at the feet of the mountains high,
That have entanglements with the sky.

So I told her how, in a time half known
And half forgotten, a cross of stone,
'Twixt field and fellside, here had stood—
More frail than a certain Cross of Wood;
And how sweet souls that fared this way
May have halted before it to kneel and pray.

It is seen no longer, from dale or hill:
'Tis the Cross of Wood that is lasting still!
But here, in a world of pain and loss,
Where each must carry his destined cross,
A frolicsome child remembers now
Why the house she romps in is called Cross Brow,
Though little indeed Life's gleeful morn
Can know of the Brow that was crowned with thorn.

1921

DOMINE, QUO VADIS?

A Legend

This poem first appeared in the Spectator in 1894, some two years or more before the publication of the novel, Quo Vadis, founded on the same theme.

Against the azure roof of Nero's world,
From smouldering Rome the smoke of ruin curled;
And the fierce populace went clamouring—
“These Christian dogs, 'tis they have done this thing!”
So to the wild wolf Hate were sacrificed
The panting, huddled flock whose crime was Christ.

207

Now Peter lodged in Rome, and rose each morn
Looking to be ere night in sunder torn,
Or haled to crucifixion, or by fire
Slain at the altar of a people's ire.
And unto him, their towering rocky hold,
Repaired those sheep of his great Master's fold
Upon whose fleece as yet no blood or foam
Bare witness to the ravening fangs of Rome.
“Lighter than chaff,” they cried, “we hold our lives,
And rate them cheap as dust the whirlwind drives:
As chaff they are winnowed and as dust they are blown;
Nay, they are nought; but priceless is thine own.
Not in yon streaming shambles must thou die;
We counsel, we entreat, we charge thee, fly!”
And Peter answered brief: “My place is here;
Through the dread storm, this ship of Christ I steer.”

Then one stood forth, the flashing of whose soul
Enrayed his presence like an aureole.
“Let us,” he cried, “be in the wine-press trod,
And poured a beverage for the lips of God.
Behold, the Church hath other use for thee;
Thy safety is her safety, thou must flee.
Ours be the glory at her call to die,
But quick and whole God needs His great ally.”
And Peter said: “Do lords of spear and shield
Thus leave their hosts uncaptained in the field,
And from some mount of prospect watch afar
The havoc of the hurricane of war?
Yet, if He wills it.... Nay, my task is plain—
To serve, and to endure, and to remain.
But frail of spirit I stand before you all.
Ah, prop me Thou, lest at a breath I fall.”

There knelt a noble youth at Peter's feet:
Ev'n as a viol's voice, his voice was sweet.
He said: “My sire and brethren yesterday

208

The heathen did with ghastly torments slay.
An offering richer yet, can Heaven require?
O live, and be my brethren and my sire.”
And Peter answered: “Son, there is small need
That thou exhort me to the easier deed.
Rather I would that thou and these had lent
Strength to uphold, not shatter, my intent.
Already my resolve is shaken sore.
I pray thee, if thou love me, say no more.”

And even as he spake, he went apart,
Somewhat to hide the brimming of his heart,
Wherein a voice came flitting to and fro,
That now said “Tarry!” and anon said “Go!”
And louder every moment, “Go!” it cried,
And “Tarry!” to a whisper sank, and died.
And as a leaf when summer is o'erpast
Hangs trembling ere it fall in some chance blast,
So hung his trembling purpose and fell dead;
And he arose, and hurried forth, and fled
To the Campania glimmering wide and still,
And strove to think he did his Master's will.

And darkness fell, and mocking Shapes pursued,
And with blind hands he fought a phantom brood.
Doubts, like a swarm of gnats, o'erhung his flight,
And “Lord,” he prayed, “have I not done aright?
Can I not, living, more avail for Thee
Than whelmed in yon red storm of agony?
The tempest, it shall pass, and I remain,
Not from its fiery sickle saved in vain.
Are there no seeds to sow, no desert lands
Waiting the tillage of these eager hands,
That I should beastlike 'neath the butcher fall,
And fruitlessly as oxen from the stall?
Is earth so easeful, is men's hate so sweet,
Are thorns so welcome unto sleepless feet,

209

Have death and heaven so feeble lures, that I,
Choosing to live, should win rebuke thereby?
Not mine the dread of pain, the lust of bliss!
Master who judgest, have I done amiss?”

Lo, on the darkness brake a wandering ray:
A vision flashed along the Appian Way.
Divinely in the pagan night it shone—
A mournful Face—a Figure hurrying on—
Though haggard and dishevelled, frail and worn,
A King, of David's lineage, crowned with thorn.
“Lord, whither farest?” Peter, wondering, cried.
“To Rome,” said Christ, “to be re-crucified.”

Into the night the vision ebbed like breath;
And Peter turned, and rushed on Rome and death.

1894

AT A BURIAL

Lord of all Light and Darkness,
Lord of all Life and Death,
Behold, we lay in earth to-day
The flesh that perisheth.
Take to Thyself whatever may
Be not as dust and breath—
Lord of all Light and Darkness,
Lord of all Life and Death.

IN LALEHAM CHURCHYARD

[_]

[The burial-place of Matthew Arnold.]

'Twas at this season, year by year,
The singer who lies songless here
Was wont to woo a less austere,
Less deep repose,
Where Rotha to Winandermere
Unresting flows—

210

Flows through a land where torrents call
To far-off torrents as they fall,
And mountains in their cloudy pall
Keep ghostly state,
And Nature makes majestical
Man's lowliest fate.

There, mid the August glow, still came
He of the twice-illustrious name,
The loud impertinence of fame
Not loth to flee—
Not loth with brooks and fells to claim
Fraternity.

Linked with his happy youthful lot,
Is Loughrigg, then, at last forgot?
Nor silent peak nor dalesman's cot
Looks on his grave.
Lulled by the Thames he sleeps, and not
By Rotha's wave.

'Tis fittest thus! for though with skill
He sang of beck and tarn and ghyll,
The deep, authentic mountain-thrill
Ne'er shook his page!
Somewhat of worldling mingled still
With bard and sage.

And 'twere less meet for him to lie
Guarded by summits lone and high
That traffic with the eternal sky
And hear, unawed,
The everlasting fingers ply
The loom of God,

211

Than, in this hamlet of the plain,
A less sublime repose to gain,
Where Nature, genial and urbane,
To man defers,
Yielding to us the right to reign,
Which yet is hers.

And nigh to where his bones abide,
The Thames with its unruffled tide
Seems like his genius typified—
Its strength, its grace,
Its lucid gleam, its sober pride,
Its tranquil pace.

But ah! not his the eventual fate
Which doth the journeying wave await—
Doomed to resign its limpid state
And quickly grow
Turbid as passion, dark as hate,
And wide as woe.

Rather, it may be, overmuch
He shunned the common stain and smutch,
From soilure of ignoble touch
Too grandly free,
Too loftily secure in such
Cold purity.

But he preserved from chance control
The fortress of his 'stablisht soul;
In all things sought to see the Whole;
Brooked no disguise;
And set his heart upon the goal,
Not on the prize;

212

And with those few he shall survive
Who seem not to compete or strive,
Yet with the foremost still arrive,
Prevailing still:
The Elect with whom the stars connive
To work their will.

1890

VERSES TO THE DUCHESS OF HAMILTON

[_]

[After the death of Admiral Lord Fisher.]

At your Dungavel, solitary and high,
That looks o'er vales of tilth to mountains barren,
And faintly sees against the western sky
The dark, far brows of Arran—

There first I heard his voice, mid moorsides lone,
And last in haunts of the soft southland weather,
Where daily your fair children and my own
Played on your lawns together.

His ageless eyes burned with unsquandered power;
His countenance, when that magic smile came o'er it,
Was like a sea-crag breaking into flower
Though all the tempests gore it.

Famed, feared, and loved: with no proud riches, save
A purer wealth than heaped and warded treasure:
The rare and noble friendship that you gave
In most abounding measure;—

Such did I see him, such did he stand forth,
Catching the light of your own gentler presence,
On those grave uplands of the stormy North,
Or mid your southern pleasance.

213

And I behold him still—though but in dream:
Fighting the thunderous battle his fate denied him:
Fighting for England her dread fight supreme,
With her great soul beside him.

1920

THE FATHER OF THE FOREST

I

Old emperor Yew, fantastic sire,
Girt with thy guard of dotard kings—
What ages hast thou seen retire
Into the dusk of alien things?
What mighty news hath stormed thy shade,
Of armies perished, realms unmade?

Already wast thou great and wise,
And solemn with exceeding eld,
On that proud morn when England's eyes,
Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld
Round her rough coasts the thundering main
Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain.

Hardly thou count'st them long ago,
The warring faiths, the wavering land,
The reddened sky's delirious glow,
And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand.
Wailed not the woods their task of shame,
Doomed to provide the insensate flame?

Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she,
The sweet queen of a tragic hour,
Crowned with her snow-white memory
The crimson legend of the Tower?
Or when a thousand witcheries lay
Felled without ruth, at Fotheringay?

214

Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread
And clang of many an armoured age,
And well recall'st the famous dead,
Captains or counsellors brave or sage,
Kings that on kings their myriads hurled,
Ladies whose smile embroiled the world.

Rememberest thou the perfect knight,
The soldier, courtier, bard in one,
Sidney, that pensive Hesper-light
O'er Chivalry's departed sun?
Knew'st thou the virtue, sweetness, lore,
Whose nobly hapless name was More?

The roystering prince, that afterward
Belied his madcap youth, and proved
A greatly simple warrior lord
Such as our warrior fathers loved—
Lives he not still? for Shakespeare sings
The last of our adventurer kings.

His battles o'er, he takes his ease,
Glory put by, and sceptred toil.
Round him the carven centuries
Like forest branches arch and coil.
In that dim fane, he is not sure
Who lost or won at Azincour!

Roofed by the mother minster vast
That guards Augustine's rugged throne,
The darling of a knightly Past
Sleeps in his bed of sculptured stone,
And throws, o'er many a warlike tale,
The shadow of his sable mail.

215

The monarch who, albeit his crown
Graced an august and sapient head,
Rode roughshod to a stained renown
O'er Wallace and Llewellyn dead,
And eased at last by Solway strand
His restless heart and ruthless hand;

Or that disastrous king on whom
Fate, like a tempest, early fell,
And the dark secret of whose doom
The Keep of Pomfret kept full well;
Or him whose lightly leaping words
On Becket drew the dastard swords;

Or Eleanor's undaunted son,
That, starred with idle glory, came
Bearing from 'leaguer'd Ascalon
The barren splendour of his fame,
And, vanquished by a stripling's bow,
Lies vainly great at Fontevraud;

Or him, the footprints of whose power
Made mightier whom he overthrew;
A man built like a mountain-tower,
A fortress of heroic thew;
The Conqueror, in our soil who set
This stem of Kinghood flowering yet;—

These, or the living fame of these,
Perhaps thou minglest—who shall say?—
With ev'n remoter memories,
And phantoms of the mistier day,
Long ere the tanner's daughter's son
From Harold's hands this realm had won.

216

What years are thine, not mine to guess!
The stars look youthful, thou being by;
Youthful the sun's glad-heartedness;
Witless of time the unageing sky!
And these dim-groping roots around
So deep a human Past are wound,

That, musing in thy shade, for me
The tidings scarce would strangely fall
Of pagan despots of the sea
Scaling fierce-eyed our ocean wall,
From their dark ships of norland pine,
Their surf-steeds, ridden o'er wilds of brine.

Nay, hid by thee from Summer's gaze
That seeks in vain this couch of loam,
I should behold, without amaze,
Camped on yon down the hosts of Rome,
Nor start though these lulled woodlands heard
The self-same mandatory word

As by the Cataracts of the Nile
Marshalled the legions long ago,
Or where the lakes are one blue smile
'Neath pageants of Helvetian snow,
Or mid the Syrian sands that lie
Sick of the day's great tearless eye,

Or on barbaric plains afar,
Where, under Asia's fevering ray,
The long lines of imperial war
O'er Tigris passed, and with dismay
In fanged and iron deserts found
Embattled Persia closing round,

217

And mid their eagles watched on high
The vultures gathering for a feast,
Till, from the quivers of the sky,
The gorgeous star-flight of the East
Flamed, and the bow of darkness bent
O'er Julian dying in his tent.

II

Was it the wind befooling me
With ancient echoes, as I lay?
Was it the antic fantasy
Whose elvish mockeries cheat the day?
Surely a hollow murmur stole
From wizard bough and ghostly bole:

“Who prates to me of arms and kings,
Here in these courts of old repose?
Thy babble is of transient things,
Broils, and the dust of foolish blows.
Thy sounding annals are at best
The witness of a world's unrest.

“Goodly the loud ostents to thee,
And pomps of time: to me more sweet
The vigils of Eternity,
And Silence patient at my feet;
And dreams beyond the deadening range
And dull monotonies of Change.

“Often an air comes idling by
With news of cities and of men.
I hear a multitudinous sigh,
And lapse into my soul again.
Shall her great noons and sunsets be
Blurred with thine infelicity?

218

“Now from these sinews, year by year,
Strength and the lust of life depart;
Full of mortality is here
The cavern that was once my heart!
Me, with blind arm, in season due,
Let the aerial woodman hew.

“For not though mightiest mortals fall,
The starry chariot hangs delayed.
His axle is uncooled, nor shall
The thunder of His wheels be stayed.
A changeless pace His coursers keep,
And halt not at the wells of sleep.

“The South shall bless, the East shall blight,
The red rose of the Dawn shall blow;
The million-lilied stream of Night
Wide in ethereal meadows flow;
And Autumn mourn; and everything
Dance to the wild pipe of the Spring.

“With oceans heedless round her feet,
And the indifferent heavens above,
Earth shall the ancient tale repeat
Of wars and tears, and death and love;
And, wise from all the foolish Past,
Shall peradventure hail at last

“The advent of that morn divine
When nations may as forests grow,
Wherein the oaks hate not the pine,
Nor does the elm wish cedars woe,
But all, in their unlikeness, blend
Confederate to one golden end—

219

“Beauty: the Vision whereunto,
In joy, with pantings, from afar,
Through sound and odour, form and hue,
And mind and clay, and worm and star—
Now touching goal, now backward hurled—
Toils the indomitable world.”

1895

A RECIPE

Or, Hints on how to write Poetry such as may please Certain Contemporary Palates

The method is simple. With care and with pains,
Conceal, if you have them, all semblance of brains.
Exclude from the scope and wide range of your pen
Whatever is still of some moment to men,
And prance on the memory of aught that has long
Been supposed, by a doddering world, to be Song.
Let Metre eternally jump, jolt, and lurch:
For limitless crudeness make infinite search.
Tradition—Form—fiddlesticks! Play your own part,
Like nothing in Nature—and nothing in Art.
Remember, a spavinless Pegasus counts,
In the eyes of true moderns, as poorest of mounts,
And nought that your fathers so blindly enjoyed
Can be else than a blunder their sons must avoid;
So beware lest a line inadvertently scan,
And of course be as odd and as queer as you can.
At the slightest intrusion of Grace take alarm,
And nip in the bud the least menace of Charm.
Let Euphony rank as a cardinal sin;
Be careful that Comeliness does not creep in;
And write in a fashion that makes men of sense,
At the mere name of Poetry, haste to fly hence.

But lose not an hour, lest the floodtide be past,
And the market for twaddle be glutted at last.

220

ON A TOO PROLIFIC ESSAYIST

The cruellest torture that a man can know,
Passing all Torquemada's racks, is said
To be the ceaseless, measured, leisured, slow
Drip-drop of water on the victim's head.

Surely it were a torment like in kind,
If in degree less maddening, to sit still
Under the leakage of this good man's mind,
The eternal trickle of this blameless quill.

1915

LINES WRITTEN IN RICHMOND PARK

Fair one, were you but here!
The Autumn flames away,
And pensive in the antlered shade I stray.
The Autumn flames away, his end is near.
I linger where deposed and fall'n he lies,
Prankt in his last poor tattered braveries,
And think what brightness would enhance the Day,
Were you—were you but here!
Though hushed the woodlands, though sedate the skies,
Though dank the leaves and sere,
The storèd sunlight in your hair and eyes
Would vernalize
November, and renew the agèd year,
Fair one! were you but here.

1894

THE SOVEREIGN POET

He sits above the clang and dust of Time,
With the world's secret trembling on his lip.
He asks not converse or companionship
In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb.

221

The undelivered tidings in his breast
Suffer him not to rest.
He sees afar the immemorable throng
And binds the scattered ages with a song.

The glorious riddle of his rhythmic breath,
His might, his spell, we know not what they be:
We only feel, whate'er he uttereth,
This savours not of death,
This hath a relish of eternity.

1894

LEAVETAKING

Pass, thou wild light,
Wild light on peaks that so
Grieve to let go
The day.
Lovely thy tarrying, lovely too is night:
Pass thou away.

Pass, thou wild heart,
Wild heart of youth that still
Hast half a will
To stay.
I grow too old a comrade, let us part.
Pass thou away.

1905

A RIDDLE OF THE THAMES

At windows that from Westminster
Look southward to the Lollard's Tower,
She sat, my lovely friend. A blur
Of gilded mist—('twas morn's first hour)—
Made vague the world: and in the gleam
Shivered the half-awakened stream.

222

Through tinted vapour looming large,
Ambiguous shapes obscurely rode.
She gazed where many a laden barge
Like some dim-moving saurian showed.
And 'midst them, lo! two swans appeared,
And o'er the waters proudly steered.

Two stately swans! What did they there?
Whence came they? Whither would they go?
Think of them—things so faultless fair—
Mid the black shipping down below!
On, through the rose and gold, they passed,
And melted in the morn at last.

Ah, can it be, that they had come,
Where Thames in sullied glory flows,
Fugitive rebels, tired of some
Secluded lake's ornate repose,
Eager to taste the life that pours
Its muddier wave 'twixt mightier shores?

We ne'er shall know: our wonderment
No barren certitude shall mar.
They left behind them, as they went,
A dream than knowledge ampler far;
And from our world they sailed away
Into some visionary day.

1894

THOUGHTS

[_]

[On revisiting a centre of commerce where a vast cathedral church is being erected.]

City of merchants, lords of trade and gold,
Traffickers great as they that bought and sold
When ships of Tarshish came to Tyre of old;

223

City of festering streets by Misery trod,
Where half-fed half-clad children swarm unshod,
While thou dost rear thy splendid fane to God;

O rich in fruits and grains and oils and ores,
And all things that the feastful Earth outpours,
Yet lacking leechcraft for thy leprous sores!

Heal thee betimes, and cleanse thee, lest in ire
He whom thou mock'st with pomp of arch and spire
Come on thee sleeping, with a scythe of fire.

Let nave and transept rest awhile; but when
Thou hast done His work who lived and died for men,
Then build His temple on high—not, not till then.

ELUSION

Where shall I find thee, Joy? by what great marge
With the strong seas exulting? on what peaks
Rapt? or astray within what forest bourn,
Among the tangled and dim silences,
Thy light hands parting the resilient boughs?

Hast thou no answer? ... Nay, except thou spring
In mine own heart uncalled, though I go forth
And tease the waves for news of thee, and make
Importunate inquisition of the woods
If thou didst pass that way, I shall but find
The brief print of thy footfall on sere leaves
Or the salt brink, and woo thy touch in vain.

1897

224

ENGLAND AND HER DOMINIONS

She stands a thousand-wintered tree,
By countless morns impearled;
Her broad roots coil beneath the sea,
Her branches sweep the world;
Her seeds, by careless winds conveyed,
Clothe the remotest strand
With forests from her scatterings made
New nations fostered in her shade,
And linking land with land.

O ye by wandering tempest sown
'Neath every alien star,
Forget not whence the breath was blown
That wafted you afar!
For ye are still her ancient seed
On younger soil let fall—
Children of Britain's island-breed,
To whom the Mother in her need
Perchance may one day call.

1890

ON THE DEATH OF EDWARD VII

Honour the happy dead with sober praise,
Who living would have scorned the fulsome phrase
Meet for the languorous Orient's jewelled ear;—
This was the English King, that loved the English ways!
A man not too remote, or too august,
For other mortal children of the dust
To know and to draw near.
Born with a nature that demanded joy,
He took full draughts of life, nor did the vintage cloy;

225

But when she passed from vision, who so long
Had sat aloft—alone—
On the steep heights of an Imperial throne,
Then rose he large and strong,
Then spake his voice with new and grander tone,
Then, called to rule the State
Which he had only served,
He saw clear Duty plain, nor from that highway swerved,
And, unappalled by his majestic fate,
Pretended not to greatness, yet was great.

1910

THE FAITHLESS AND THE CONSTANT

Thou who at will canst fling
Thine insolent alms or bid me pine defrauded,—
Compared to Sorrow thou'rt a shallow thing,
Joy, the much lauded.

Ah, with pale promise, thou
Awhile perhaps mayst hoodwink and deceive me,
But it is Sorrow that hath kept her vow
Never to leave me.

1921

THE FATAL PRAYER

“I vanquish,” said the youthful King,
“My foes on every field;
Yet, ye strong Gods, to one vain thing
How helplessly I yield!

“Behold me fall'n a slave each hour
To some dark long-lashed eye!
Oh, grant me, Kings of Heaven, the power
That sorcery to defy.”

226

They heard; and from their ruthless height
The dreadful gift was thrown—
The armour against Beauty's might
Worn by the blind alone.

WORDSWORTH'S GRAVE

As the date of the first appearance of this poem is often misstated as 1890, it may be worth while to record that Wordsworth's Grave was begun at Rydal in May 1884, finished rather more than three years later, and first published in the National Review for September 1887.

I

The old rude church, with bare, bald tower, is here;
Beneath its shadow high-born Rotha flows;
Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near,
And with cool murmur lulling his repose.

Rotha, remembering well who slumbers near.
His hills, his lakes, his streams are with him yet.
Surely the heart that read her own heart clear
Nature forgets not soon: 'tis we forget.

We that with vagrant soul his fixity
Have slighted; faithless, done his deep faith wrong;
Left him for poorer loves, and bowed the knee
To misbegotten strange new gods of song.

Yet, led by hollow ghost or beckoning elf
Far from her homestead to the desert bourn,
The vagrant soul returning to herself
Wearily wise, must needs to him return.

To him and to the powers that with him dwell:—
Inflowings that divulged not whence they came;
And that secluded Spirit unknowable,
The mystery we make darker with a name;

The Somewhat which we name but cannot know,
Ev'n as we name a star and only see
His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
And ever hide him, and which are not he.

227

II

Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave!
When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then?
To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave,
The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men?

Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine;
Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view;
Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine;
Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.

What hadst thou that could make so large amends
For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed,
Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends?—
Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest.

From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze,
From Byron's tempest-anger, tempest-mirth,
Men turned to thee and found—not blast and blaze,
Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth.

Nor peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower,
There in white languors to decline and cease;
But peace whose names are also rapture, power,
Clear sight, and love: for these are parts of peace.

III

I hear it vouched the Muse is with us still;—
If less divinely frenzied than of yore,
In lieu of feelings she has wondrous skill
To simulate emotion felt no more.

Not such the authentic Presence pure, that made
This valley vocal in the great days gone!—
In his great days, while yet the spring-time played
About him, and the mighty morning shone.

228

No word-mosaic artificer, he sang
A lofty song of lowly weal and dole.
Right from the heart, right to the heart it sprang,
Or from the soul leapt instant to the soul.

He felt the charm of childhood, grace of youth,
Grandeur of age, insisting to be sung.
The impassioned argument was simple truth
Half-wondering at its own melodious tongue.

Impassioned? ay, to the song's ecstatic core!
But far removed were clangour, storm, and feud;
For plenteous health was his, exceeding store
Of joy, and an impassioned quietude.

IV

A hundred years ere he to manhood came,
Song from celestial heights had wandered down,
Put off her robe of sunlight, dew, and flame,
And donned a modish dress to charm the Town.

Thenceforth she but festooned the porch of things;
Apt at life's lore, incurious what life meant.
Dextrous of hand, she struck her lute's few strings;
Ignobly perfect, barrenly content.

Unflushed with ardour and unblanched with awe,
Her lips in profitless derision curled,
She saw with dull emotion—if she saw—
The vision of the glory of the world.

The human masque she watched, with dreamless eyes
In whose clear shallows lurked no trembling shade:
The stars, unkenned by her, might set and rise,
Unmarked by her, the daisies bloom and fade.

229

The age grew sated with her sterile wit.
Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne.
Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it,
And craved a living voice, a natural tone.

For none the less, though song was but half true,
The world lay common, one abounding theme.
May joyed and wept, and fate was ever new,
And love was sweet, life real, death no dream.

In sad, stern verse the rugged scholar-sage
Bemoaned his toil unvalued, youth uncheered.
His numbers wore the vesture of the age,
But, 'neath it beating, the great heart was heard.

From dewy pastures, uplands sweet with thyme,
A virgin breeze freshened the jaded day.
It wafted Collins' lonely vesper-chime,
It breathed abroad the frugal note of Gray.

It fluttered here and there, nor swept in vain
The dusty haunts where futile echoes dwell,—
Then, in a cadence soft as summer rain,
And sad from Auburn voiceless, drooped and fell.

It drooped and fell, and one 'neath northern skies,
With southern heart, who tilled his father's field,
Found Poesy a-dying, bade her rise
And touch quick Nature's hem and go forth healed.

On life's broad plain the ploughman's conquering share
Upturned the fallow lands of truth anew,
And o'er the formal garden's trim parterre
The peasant's team a ruthless furrow drew.

230

Bright was his going forth, but clouds ere long
Whelmed him; in gloom his radiance set, and those
Twin morning stars of the new century's song,
Those morning stars that sang together, rose.

In elvish speech the Dreamer told his tale
Of marvellous oceans swept by fateful wings.—
The Seër strayed not from earth's human pale,
But the mysterious face of common things

He mirrored as the moon in Rydal Mere
Is mirrored, when the breathless night hangs blue:
Strangely remote she seems and wondrous near,
And by some nameless difference born anew.

V

Peace—peace—and rest! Ah, how the lyre is loth,
Or powerless now, to give what all men seek!
Either it deadens with ignoble sloth
Or deafens with shrill tumult, loudly weak.

Where is the singer whose large notes and clear
Can heal, and arm, and plenish, and sustain?
Lo, one with empty music floods the ear,
And one, the heart refreshing, tires the brain.

And idly tuneful, the loquacious throng
Flutter and twitter, prodigal of time,
And little masters make a toy of song
Till grave men weary of the sound of rhyme.

And some go prankt in faded antique dress,
Abhorring to be hale and glad and free;
And some parade a conscious naturalness,
The scholar's not the child's simplicity.

231

Enough;—and wisest who from words forbear.
The gentle river rails not as it glides;
And suave and charitable, the winsome air
Chides not at all, or only him who chides.

VI

Nature! we storm thine ear with choric notes.
Thou answerest through the calm great nights and days,
“Laud me who will: not tuneless are your throats;
Yet if ye paused I should not miss the praise.”

We falter, half-rebuked, and sing again.
We chant thy desertness and haggard gloom,
Or with thy splendid wrath inflate the strain,
Or touch it with thy colour and perfume.

One, his melodious blood aflame for thee,
Wooed with fierce lust, his hot heart world-defiled.
One, with the upward eye of infancy,
Looked in thy face, and felt himself thy child.

Thee he approached without distrust or dread—
Beheld thee throned, an awesome queen, above—
Climbed to thy lap and merely laid his head
Against thy warm wild heart of mother-love.

He heard that vast heart beating—thou didst press
Thy child so close, and lov'dst him unaware.
Thy beauty gladdened him; yet he scarce less
Had loved thee, had he never found thee fair!

For thou wast not as legendary lands
To which with curious eyes and ears we roam.
Nor wast thou as a fane mid solemn sands,
Where pilgrims halt at evening. Thou wast home.

232

And here, at home, still bides he; but he sleeps;
Not to be wakened even at thy word;
Though we, vague dreamers, dream he somewhere keeps
An ear still open to thy voice still heard—

Thy voice, as heretofore, about him blown,
For ever blown about his silence now;
Thy voice, though deeper, yet so like his own
That almost, when he sang, we deemed 'twas thou!

Behind Helm Crag and Silver Howe the sheen
Of the retreating day is less and less.
Soon will the lordlier summits, here unseen,
Gather the night about their nakedness.

The half-heard bleat of sheep comes from the hill.
Faint sounds of childish play are in the air.
The river murmurs past. All else is still.
The very graves seem stiller than they were.

Afar though nation be on nation hurled,
And life with toil and ancient pain depressed,
Here one may scarce believe the whole wide world
Is not at peace, and all man's heart at rest.

Rest! 'twas the gift he gave; and peace! the shade
He spread, for spirits fevered with the sun.
To him his bounties are come back—here laid
In rest, in peace, his labour nobly done.

1884-87

233

THE STONES OF STANTON DREW

Bland was the Morn, no fault or flaw
Sullying her sheen and hue,
When, mid the April fields, I saw
The Stones of Stanton Drew.

Clear-hearted in the golden air
The eternal lyrist flew;
But dark and full of silence were
The Stones of Stanton Drew.

Isled and estranged from every mood
Of all that lived and grew,
Deep in forgotten Time they stood—
The Stones of Stanton Drew.

How many ages have gone by
Since last a mortal knew
Who set you there, and when, and why,
O Stones of Stanton Drew?

All sunlit was the Earth I trod,
The Heaven was frankest blue;
But secret as the dreams of God
The Stones of Stanton Drew.

1907

VITA NUOVA

Long hath she slept, forgetful of delight:
At last, at last, the enchanted princess, Earth,
Claimed with a kiss by Spring the adventurer,
In slumber knows the destined lips, and thrilled
Through all the deeps of her unageing heart
With passionate necessity of joy,
Wakens, and yields her loveliness to love.

234

O ancient streams, O far-descended woods
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls;
O hills and valleys that adorn yourselves
In solemn jubilation; winds and clouds,
Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasped,
And all exuberant creatures that acclaim
The Earth's divine renewal: lo, I too
With yours would mingle somewhat of glad song.
I too have come through wintry terrors—yea,
Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul
Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring,
Me also, dimly with new life hath touched,
And with regenerate hope, the salt of life;
And I would dedicate these thankful tears
To whatsoever Power beneficent,
Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his thought,
Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth
Into the gracious air and vernal morn,
And suffers me to know my spirit a note
Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream
And voiceful mountain—nay, a string, how jarred
And all but broken! of that lyre of life
Whereon himself, the master harp-player,
Resolving all its mortal dissonance
To one immortal and most perfect strain,
Harps without pause, building with song the world.

1893

EUROPE AT THE PLAY

Olanguid audience, met to see
The last act of the tragedy
On that terrific stage afar,
Where burning towns the footlights are—
O listless Europe, day by day
Callously sitting out the play!

235

So sat, with loveless count'nance cold,
Round the arena, Rome of old.
Pain, and the ebb of life's red tide,
So, with a calm regard, she eyed,
Her gorgeous vesture, million-pearled,
Splashed with the blood of half the world.
High was her glory's noon: as yet
She had not dreamed her sun could set!
As yet she had not dreamed how soon
Shadows should vex her glory's noon.
Another's pangs she counted nought;
Of human hearts she took no thought;
But in dread nightfall, vengeance vast
Whetted its hungry scythe at last.

Perchance in tempest and in blight,
On Europe, too, shall fall the night!
She sees the victim overborne,
By worse than ravening lions torn.
She sees, she hears, with soul unstirred,
And lifts no hand, and speaks no word,
But vaunts a brow like theirs who deem
Men's wrongs a phrase, men's rights a dream.
Yet haply she shall learn, too late,
In some blind hurricane of Fate,
How fierily alive the things
She held as fool's imaginings,
And, though circuitous and obscure,
The feet of Nemesis how sure.

1897

236

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

I

By cliff and chine, and hollow-nestling wood
Thrilled with the poignant savour of the sea,
All in the crisp light of a wintry morn,
We walked, my friend and I, preceded still
By one whose silken and voluminous suit,
His courtly ruff, snow-pure mid golden tan,
His grandly feathered legs slenderly strong,
The broad and flowing billow of his breast,
His delicate ears and superfine long nose,
With that last triumph, his distinguished tail,
In their collective glory spoke his race
The flower of Collie aristocracy.
Yet, from his traits, how absent that reserve,
That stillness on a base of power, which marks,
In men and mastiffs, the selectly sprung!
For after all, his high-life attributes,
His trick of doing nothing with an air,
His salon manners and society smile,
Were but skin-deep, factitious, and you saw
The bustling despot of the mountain flock,
And pastoral dog-of-all-work, underlie
The fashionable modern lady's pet—
Industrial impulses bereft of scope,
Duty and discipline denied an aim,
Ancestral energy and strenuousness
In graceful trifling frittered all away.
Witness the depth of his concern and zeal
About minutest issues: shall we take
This path or that?—it matters not a straw—
But just a moment unresolved we stand,
And all his personality, from ears
To tip of tail, is interrogative;

237

And when from pure indifference we decide,
How he vociferates! how he bounds ahead!
With what enthusiasm he ratifies,
Applauds, acclaims our choice 'twixt right and left,
As though some hoary problem over which
The world had puckered immemorial brows,
Were solved at last, and all life launched anew!

These and a thousand tricks and ways and traits
I noted as of Demos at their root,
And foreign to the staid, conservative,
Came-over-with-the-Conqueror type of mind.
And then, his nature, how impressionable,
How quickly moved to Collie mirth or woe,
Elated or dejected at a word!
And how unlike your genuine Vere de Vere's
Frigid, indifferent, half-ignoring glance
At everything outside the sacred pale
Of things De Veres have sanctioned from the Flood,
The unweariable curiosity
And universal open-mindedness
Of that all-testing, all-inquisitive nose!

II

So, to my friend's house, back we strolled; and there—
We loitering in the garden—from her post
Of purview at a window, languidly
A great Angora watched his Collieship,
And throned in monumental calm, surveyed
His effervescence, volatility,
Clamour on slight occasion, fussiness,
Herself immobile, imperturbable,
Like one whose vision seeks the Immanent
Behind these symbols and appearances,
The face within this transitory mask.

238

And as her eyes with indolent regard
Viewed his upbubblings of ebullient life,
She seemed the Orient Spirit incarnate, lost
In contemplation of the Western Soul!
Ev'n so, methought, the genius of the East,
Reposeful, patient, undemonstrative,
Luxurious, enigmatically sage,
Dispassionately cruel, might look down
On all the fever of the Occident;—
The brooding mother of the unfilial world,
Recumbent on her own antiquity,
Aloof from our mutations and unrest,
Alien to our achievements and desires,
Too proud alike for protest or assent
When new thoughts thunder at her massy door;—
Another brain dreaming another dream,
Another heart recalling other loves;
Too grey and grave for our adventurous hopes,
For our precipitate pleasures too august,
And in still majesty, with silent tongue,
Refraining her illimitable scorn.

1893

THE MOSSGROWN PORCHES

When, as of old in Rome's imperial world,
Fair, conquered gods are from their temples hurled,
And some rude, vehement Peter puts to flight
Some serene Phœbus, lord of lore and light;
In wastes and wilds, by fount and caverned hill,
Secretly, furtively, are worshipped still,
With the sad zeal of vainly pious knees,
The ancient, the deposed divinities,
Heaven's outcasts, the great exiles of the sky,
Once mighty to do all things, save to die.

239

So, though in Kingdoms of the Lyre to-day
I see the new faiths push the old away—
See the hot hierophants of each strange shrine
Offer oblation to all gods but mine—
Yet, mid a revel of change, unchanged I turn
To the lorn haunts where older altars burn,
And seek, companioned by the lessening few
Whose faith is as mine own, the gods I knew;
Nor ever doubt, that among wondering men
These deathless will in triumph come again,
As sure as the droop'd year's remounting curve,
And reign anew, when I no more shall serve.

1915

THE TEST OF THE BARDS

Friend, wouldst thou put thy poets to the proof,
Read them where rolls the moorland, or the main!
Not light will be their ordeal, thus to stand
Pitted against the huge things of the earth,
And tested hard, by the all-searching sky.
Then, if indeed they bear their trial unshamed,
Grudge not the glory, the often bitter glory,
The coveted uncovetable crown,
Which they with toil and battle and wounds did earn.

1924

THE SEVERERS

I

In a crease of the forehead of Antrim, where Time has written on stone
The tale of the endless debate of the obstinate land and sea—
Those heirs of magnificent discord, that just for a season agree
To compose their thunderous quarrel, but ever at heart are prone
To harp on it night and day in a moody undertone,

240

And presently mutter a word that is dark with wrath and bale,
And rouse from counterfeit sleep their fell vendetta, and so
Return to the naked hate they were born in long ago,
Reopen the wrangle of ages, resume the dear dispute,
The controversy eternal that bears but death for fruit,
As well from of old these haughty, implacable brawlers know;—
In a crease of the forehead of Antrim, where Time has written that tale,
I have found me a place that surely is musing on ancient woe,
And remembers in dreams the tread of the midnight foot of Doom:
A place where even the candours of noon seem sinister things:
And there I have heard the ocean recitative roll and boom,
The monotonous ocean soliloquy rumble morose and low;
The obscure beginnings of storm, like a rustle of huddled wings;
The stroke of the great sea-hammer, awaking with blow on blow
In the cavernous land such outcry as iron from iron wrings;
The clang of the shock of the waters that butted with taurine roar
Against fallen Dunseveric, once the abode of vengeful Kings;
And the blind, mad panic in heaven when eastward the hurricane tore
By the marge where lorn Templastra dejected ponders, and o'er
That fantasy, wild Ballintoy, on the steeps in the lee of Bengore.

241

II

The Earth is watching and brooding; the skies are empty of speech.
I will learn, of whatever is wordless, whatever it has to teach.
The spent tide flags and recoils. Like gifts unused and waste
Is the many-tinted seaweed that strews the Atlantic beach.
I will climb the track to westward, where bards of old have paced,
Whose songs are asleep by cromlech and menhir and haunted mound.
I will follow the path that leads to the Way of the Giants, around
By the Amphitheatre vast, with its tiers of cliff, where rise
The column'd shafts of basalt like organ-pipes to the skies,
Outrolling a fugal silence, involved, impassioned, profound.
'Tis the path that gropes and crawls on the lean rock's wasted side,
Where nightly the Giant's Loom by invisible hands is plied.
And east and west are the caverns, their dark roofs arched and groined,
The chambers and vaulted dungeons and monstrous crypts of the sea:
And pillars, fallen and prostrate, from mighty facades disjoined—
Released, but in utter abjection, unbound, but vainly free;
And desolate ruined holds of many a chief and King;

242

And the mastersong of disunion that earth and ocean sing;
And large and bold on the headlands the manuscript of Time;
And coiled with the roots of the world, where Life thrusts up like a tree,
The Powers that rive and sunder, unmoved by appeal or plea;
The Powers that shatter with discord what else were a golden chime;
The Estranging Ones, the dividers, the hewers in twain from the prime;
The Unmakers and Destroyers, whatever their names may be.

1917

A PRELUDE

The mighty poets from their flowing store
Scatter like casual alms the careless ore;
Through throngs of men their lonesome way they go,
Let fall their costly thoughts, nor seem to know.

Not mine, not mine the showering hand, that strews
The prodigal largesse of a stintless Muse!
Wayward and fickle and seldom tarrying long,
Capriciously she touches me to song—
Then leaves me to lament her flight in vain,
And wonder will she ever come again.

ON BEING STYLED UNPATRIOTIC

Friend, call me what you will: no jot care I:
I that shall stand for England till I die.
England! The England that rejoiced to see
Hellas unbound, Italia one and free;
The England that had tears for Poland's doom,

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And in her heart for all the world made room;
The England from whose side I have not swerved;
The immortal England whom I, too, have served,
Accounting her all living lands above,
In Justice, and in Mercy, and in Love.

1899

THE UNWRITTEN PACT

Love's great Goddess, ocean-born,
Spake to Pan, the Wood-God wise.
In her hair was all the Morn;
All the Sea was in her eyes.

“Mighty Melodist, let us twain
Earth's dominion 'twixt us part—
Thou on her cool breast to reign,
I within her burning heart.”

So her secret court she holds,
Deep and strange 'neath glamorous Hill—
He, in vales and woods and wolds,
Piping his wild music still.

TAVERN SONG

I

When winterly weather doth pierce to the skin,
Then hey! for a bottle of wine from the bin;
And hey! for a tankard, and ho! for a tankard,
Sing ho! for a tankard of ale at the inn.
It's hey! for a bottle, it's ho! for a bottle,
Sing ho! for a bottle of wine from the bin;
And it's hey! for a tankard, it's ho! for a tankard,
Sing ho! for a tankard of ale at the inn.

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II

The squire's at the Hall with his kith and his kin;
He'll drink like a hero till daylight begin,
With hey! for a bottle, with ho! for a bottle,
A mellow old bottle of wine from the bin.
Sing hey! for a bottle, a mellow old bottle,
Sing ho! for a bottle of wine from the bin,
And sing hey! for a tankard, a right flowing tankard,
Sing ho! for a tankard of ale at the inn.

III

The parson, God bless him, he says it's no sin,
When winterly weather hath made the blood thin,
To toss off a tankard, to toss off a tankard,
To toss off a tankard of ale at the inn.
So it's hey! for a bottle, a bottle, a bottle,
It's ho! for a bottle of wine from the bin,
And it's hey! for a tankard, a heart-easing tankard,
It's ho! for a tankard of ale at the inn.

IV

For duns and the devil he cares not a pin
Who is rich in a bottle of wine from his bin,
And the cream of all wisdom is quaffed from a tankard,
A heart-easing tankard of ale at the inn.
Then hey! for a bottle, a mellow old bottle,
Then ho! for a bottle of wine from the bin,
And hey! for a tankard, a fair foaming tankard,
And ho! for a tankard of ale at the inn.

V

The lads must have lasses and woo them, and win,
And the business of wives is to bake and to spin,

245

But men love a tankard, but men love a tankard,
But men love a tankard of ale at the inn.
Then hey! for a bottle, then ho! for a bottle,
Sing ho! for a bottle of wine from the bin,
And it's hey! for a tankard, a tankard, a tankard,
And ho! for a tankard of ale at the inn.

LAKELAND ONCE MORE

Region of meres that around them behold their mothers, the mountains;
Land of the laughter of becks, heard on the laughterless tarn;
Haunt of the vagrant dream that refuses to perish in exile;
Haunt of this vagabond heart, Cumbrian valleys and fells:
You were its earliest passion, and when shall its constancy falter?
Ah, when Helvellyn is low! Ah, when Winander is dry!

Long was it mine to abide where Nature prattled a language
Homely of fashion and birth, prose of the hedges and lanes.
Here she speaks to the spirit in lofty and resonant numbers,
Lyrical, magical tones, silences great as her song.
Time hath scattered his gifts, and Death hath taken his tribute;
Summits afar have I hailed; visited shores of renown;
Watched the delight of the wave as it sports at the feet of Tintagel;
Heard the upthundering tide harass Tantallon in vain;

246

Greeted the step of the Dawn upon Mediterranean waters;
Seen the bejewelled Night mirrored in Como's deeps.
Yet unto you I return, O land with remembrances peopled;
Land where years that are dead meet me as if from the grave;
Meet me in blossomy dells, or aloft amid peaks that yonder
Seem, when the world lies hushed, standing at watch with the stars.

THE FIGHT IN THE BIGHT

[_]

[The naval action in the Bight of Heligoland, August 28, 1914.]

Had I that fabled herb
Which brought to life the dead,
Whom would I dare disturb
In his eternal bed?
Great Grenville would I wake,
And with glad tidings make
The storm-rocked soul of Drake
Heave up a glorying head.

As rose the misty sun
Our men the North Sea scanned,
And soon each listening gun
Felt there were foes at hand,
And longed to bid its throat
Sound out for all afloat
The world-awakening note
The world can understand.

Then did the far-thrilled Main
Full suddenly hear with glee

247

Our cannon speaking plain
The speech that keeps us free,
And crippling on yon tide
Four warships in their pride,
While one, with shattered side,
Fled blazing down the sea.

Sleep on, O Drake, sleep well,
In days not wholly dire!
Grenville, whom nought could quell,
Unquenched is still thy fire!
And thou that had'st no peer,
Nelson, thou need'st not fear.
Thy sons and heirs are here,
Nor will they shame their sire.

1914

THE HARMONISTS

Bach, with his coils on wondrous shuttles woven,
Companioned oft my youth; and oft this soul
By Schubert's heartdeep tones was inly cloven;
And with the world itself I now condole,
Hearing Man's masterpiece of Dissonance roll
From the same mighty breast that nursed Beethoven.

1917

THE LOST SOULS

Of all great legends from Germania's loom,
Mightiest are these to haunt and harrow and thrill:
Tannhaüser's Sin accurst; his hopeless doom;
And Faust's dread bargain with the Spirit of Ill.
Each cuts like ice-wind, and each burns like coal,
For each is the wild tale of a Lost Soul.

248

Massive, deep-visioned, deep-voiced Allemaine,
Whose Music seizes Heaven and searches Hell—
Thou of the luminous and the mastering brain—
Guard thou thy soil but guard thy soul as well,
Lest it be said thy destiny was of old
In these thine own immortal dreams foretold.

THE SOUL OF ROUGET DE LISLE

[_]

[Who gave us the Marseillaise.]

Their arms shall conquer—to victory led
By a voice like a trumpet's peal;
For a great Ghost marches at their head—
The Soul of Rouget de Lisle.

He gave them the Song that cannot die
Till the world's heart cease to feel;
And they go into battle captain'd by
The soul of Rouget de Lisle.

Not for the first time—not for the last—
Does an enemy waver and reel
Before the eternal clarion blast
From the Soul of Rouget de Lisle.

For this is the Song shall break the power
That bids men grovel and kneel—
The Song that was born of a mighty hour
In the Soul of Rouget de Lisle.

And its music fires the booming gun
And edges the gleaming steel,
For the Soul of France herself is one
With the Soul of Rouget de Lisle.

249

TO HENRY C. MONTGOMERY, OF BALLYHACKAMORE

[_]

[Written near Windermere at Christmas 1917.]

Good friend and true, who, for the gifts and knowledge
That stead you well amid the clang and strife,
Are less in debt to yonder younger College
Than to the University of Life.

Take, at this time that opens the heart's fountains,
Take, at this Yuletide, from across the seas,
The greetings of the meres and of the mountains,
And of your friends who are the guests of these.

Nay, ere my rhyme, that must not halt or tarry,
Flits through the snowstorm like a batteed dove,
My little firstborn daughter bids it carry,
To her big, bearded playfellow, her love.

Wild roars the blizzard. Wilder tempest rages
In Man's fierce breast, and hides from the world's eyes
The truthtellers and lightgivers and sages
That live when hatred and when fury dies.

In this ill day, what good wish shall I send you?
Vain, when our fate yet hangs in quivering doubt,
To ask that all felicity attend you,
And bid you to forget the woe without!

I can but pray that in some happier morrow,
You, and we also, gazing from afar,
May look back on this vast, life-blinding sorrow
As on the occultation of a star—

250

A fixed star, briefly hidden by the passing
Of a reposeless orb of blood-red glow:
Then bursting forth, where Night's bright hosts were massing,
To pour its glory undimmed, as long ago.

THE BATTLEFIELDS OF THE FUTURE

Though gone the ancient gear of War—though men
Fight not with axe, and mace, and clanging targe—
Still does the ancient war-rage goad them, when
The bugles sound a charge.

To that primæval passion may we yet
Give ampler range, in fields of vaster marge!
'Gainst War itself, when this war passes, let
Our bugles sound a charge.

1918

BEHOLD!

O thou that with a gesture canst control
All seas that roll;
O Thou that with a whisper canst assuage
All winds that rage:
Behold how softer than the human breast
The wild bird's nest!
Behold how calmer than the world of men
The wild beast's den!

March 1918

THE YELLOW PANSY

“There's pansies—that's for thoughts.” Shakespeare

Winter had swooped, a lean and hungry hawk;
It seemed an age since summer was entombed;
Yet in our garden, on its frozen stalk,
A yellow pansy bloomed.

251

'Twas Nature saying by trope and metaphor:
“Behold, when empire against empire strives,
Though all else perish, ground 'neath iron war,
The golden thought survives.”

ODE IN THE DAY OF TRANSITION

I

Song, from thy wealth, far passing richest guess,
Give us the things we are poor in, not the things
Life spawns for ever with a rank excess.
Thou that canst fiercely bless,
Take us to founts of power, the unchoked springs
Of the world's wondrousness.
We need thy boons. We are shaken with storms of fate.
And now, while we await
The all-calm sky To-morrow never brings,
The tempest and long thunder of Yesterday
Have not quite trailed away
The last fringe of the midnight of their wings.
War smote us hard, and the hard blows of peace
Buffet our laden shoulders without cease.
And busy is hate, whose wanton sickle cuts
Our ripening hopes untimely evermore:
And diligent is the furtive hand that shuts
On Truth an iron door.
Nor rest they oft, being troublously awake
Throughout the Earth, who, in a blear light, stir
The Cauldrons of Confusion, whence are borne
Hither and thither the sick fumes that make
Void minds their dwelling, and blur
The countenance of the morn.
And from that region whose slow waters roam
To land-locked seas, or wed the Arctic foam—

252

From that huge cradle and grave of Czars, where rose
The towers of tyranny o'er a people's woes—
Comes a hoarse sound upon the east wind flung,
The voice of that strange child whom Havoc bore,
But who from old Despairs is likewise sprung:
Their baleful daughter, joyless, yet how young!—
Sitting as one becrowned
On a vast burial mound,
That hides the undirged, mown in the whirlwind's roar,
When, with blind Hates hemmed round,
Pity no longer dared to have a tongue.

II

Therefore, O Song, beholding all the ill
That scatters wide its plague-seed to pollute
This faltering morrow of the battle-gloom,
We in whose ears the sound of tumult shrill
Was idle at times as a remote dispute
That seems the clash of shadows; we to whom
Ages whose last words were of feuds and spoils
Bequeathed a monstrous ravelment unblest,
Which we must needs hand on (O dire bequest)
Curst with new knots and coils;
We that from War now earn such acrid fruit,
And from bleak triumph the wan flower whose doom
Is to lack nought but scent and colour and bloom;
We whom the wrangle we call peace embroils
With dissonance never mute;
We ask that thou, whose torch the gross murk foils
But for a season—we ask that thou fulfil,
In this hurt day, that still
Bears on its bosom fewer flowers than scars,
One errand, amid such gods as wax or wane,
One service, thy least vain,
To us fond flutterers 'twixt delight and pain.

253

While Chance with crude touch mars
The yet brave shape of Life—nay, till Life's toils,
And the sweet fraudulence of its dreams, be o'er;
Till all the base or noble dreamers must
Accept without disdain
The equality and fraternity of the dust,
Where in like quiet are lulled the note that jars
And the pure music faultless to its core,—
Till then, great Mother, as oft-times heretofore,
Through all our clamour and blare and greed and lust,
Remind us of the stars.

1926

THE MAN WHO SAW

This poem appeared first in a provincial newspaper on February 3, 1917, and reappeared as part of a volume a few months afterwards. No word in it has been altered since its first publication, and I feel that it does justice, and not a jot or tittle more than justice, to the statesman who, whatever degree of wisdom he may or may not have shown in other matters—a question which I feel no special obligation to discuss —did at all events, in the supreme crisis of Britain's fate, render her the not inconsiderable service of saving her from destruction.

The master weavers at the enchanted loom
Of Legend, weaving long ago those tales
Through which there wanders the grey thread of truth,
Lost in the gorgeous arras of romance,
Tell how King Vortigern resolved to build
A Tower of Safety, mid the solitudes
That are the hem of the great druid robe
Of Snowdon, Mount of Eagles. So each day
The builders laboured, marrying stone to stone;
But ever in the night an adversary,
Invisible as malevolent, cancelled those
Cold nuptials, and with impish wanton rage
Shattered the walls. And thither, from beyond
That congress of grave mountains, met like seers
And bards august, though in a rivalry
Of silence rather than of song—from where
The vales are not so tranced with awe, nor yet
So far below the hilltops as to feel
Aching estrangement—fortune one day brought
A youth whose very brow was a command.

254

His name of Merlin had not clambered then
To fearsome greatness, like a dusky star;
Yet ev'n thus early his subduing eyes
Seemed to have known all things in life but tears;
And standing where wrecked hopes bestrewed the ground,
He said to them whose toil was shards and dust:
“Go search beneath your tower's foundations; there
Are the Unbuilders, busy while you build;
The Undoers are there.” And every man obeyed.
And digging deep, they found a hollow abysm,
Where waters gnawed the ribs of the Earth, and sapped
Her sinews, till her frame tottered infirm;
Where also monsters heaved their tumid bulk
In ancient ambush, and with tremors vast
Palsied those ramparts as they yearned to rise:
Blind dragon shapes, of blindest darkness born,
That save in darkness could not live an hour,
And, touched by Light, made their dull moan, and died.

Such is the tale, which one, who chronicled
Old shadowy wars in sanctuaries of peace,
Found amid crumbled pomps, the hushed domain
Of mildew, and the empire of the moth,
Nigh on eight hundred years ago. And now,
Out of that land where Snowdon night by night
Receives the confidences of lonesome stars,
And where Carnarvon's ruthless battlements
Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,
There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist,
And brother to the twilight, but a man
Who in a time terrifically real
Is real as the time; formed for the time;
Not much beholden to the munificent Past,
In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour;

255

No faggot of perfections, angel or saint,
Created faultless and intolerable;
No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses;
But eminently a man to stir and spur
Men, to afflict them with benign alarm,
Harass their sluggish and uneager blood,
Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal;
A man with something of the cragginess
Of his own mountains, something of the force
That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams.

And he too comes to bid the builders probe
Deep underneath the Tower of Safety, lest
A pit lie cavernous and covert there,
A long baulked, ravening emptiness, a grave
That famishes for its expected food.
Nay, in his hands he takes the delver's spade,
Lays bare the hollow, o'er which to build at all
Were to build woe and ruin, and 'stablishes
A mightier tower, bastioned so broad and firm,
In life, in manhood, and in womanhood,
Founded upon so massy a human rock,
And with such living bulwarks against them
Who first poured death from where the lark strews bliss,
That when, at last, ours shall be Triumph, though
Triumph perhaps too weary to rejoice,
Save with a mournful jubilation—when
Hate shall reel back from these embattled walls,
And having spent so long its hurtling bolts
With such poor thrift, shall stand before the stars
Bankrupt of thunder—then indeed shall Time
Add yet another name to those the world
Salutes with an obeisance of the soul:
The name of him, the man of Celtic blood,
Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice,

256

Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith
To save the Saxon: the man all eye and hand,
The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and held.
Then shall each morrow with its yesterday
Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him,
Who found us lulled and blindfold by the verge
Of fathomless perdition and haled us back.
And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech,
Crowning his deed with not less homage, here
On English ground, than yonder whence he rose:
Yonder where crash the cataracts through the chasms
And unto the dark tempests the dark hills
Offer their stubborn sides all gored, but keep
A heart invincible and impregnable;
While with long arm and piercing spear the sea
Thrusts far into the valleys, that of old
Heard the twin raptures of the harp and sword,
The heroic strife, and the heroic strings,
Amid the battling torrents, and beneath
The happier peaks that without strife prevail.

1917

THIS BRINE-BEGIRT HOME

Here, scorning easeful fame,
Oft-times did hearts of flame
Rise great and grand.
Here let such hearts as they,
Fighting their sleepless way,
Sound forth these words to-day,
God save this land.

War's ghastly scowl is gone;
Peace, like a star, hath shone;
Hope dwells at hand.
Now, from returning strife—
Rage that so long was rife—
Wild woe that palsied life—
God save this land.

257

Save us from acts whereby,
'Neath yonder brooding sky,
Hate's fires are fanned.
Yea, and from words wherein
Turmoils accurst begin,
And from dark Treason's kin,
God save this land.

No more, mid cold disdain,
Mind speaks to Mind in vain,
O'er gulfs unspanned.
Barriers no longer rise,
Hiding fair Truth with lies;
Sing, then, in concord wise,
God bless this land.

God save this ancient Power,
Founded in far-off hour,
Steadfast to stand.
She that was gored and torn,
Clasps now the healing Morn.
O, through all days unborn,
God save this land.

RETRIBUTION

We shape our deeds and then are shapen by them.
To some frail heart a cruel gift we bring,
Turn from our acts away, and think to fly them:
Ah, theirs the stronger wing!

They come upon our peace with sound of weeping,
They find us though we hide in clefts and caves.
They are with us waking, they are with us sleeping,
And rend us in our graves.

258

ORMAZD AND AHRIMAN

I

With reference to the name Ormazd, it seems proper to say here that in choosing this form of the word rather than any of its perhaps more familiar variants my choice (sanctioned, I believe, by the most modern scholarship, at any rate in France) has been dictated mainly by considerations of sound.

II

When this poem was first published, under the title of The Superhuman Antagonists, in 1919, several critics paid it the perhaps flattering but certainly undeserved compliment of supposing that the story it tells was an actual Persian myth, despite what I imagined to be my very explicit statement to the contrary in the original preface. My obligations to ancient Persian mythology are simply these: that I have used as the
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machinery of my brief epic the Zoroastrian dualism on which that mythology rests, and have taken as the personages of my narrative some of the gods who in the Zend Avesta are pictured as ruling the world. The story itself which I have woven around these personages owes nothing whatever to any recorded fount of legend or fable, but is solely my own invention, the child of my own brain.

It will be fairly obvious that a melioristic conception of the enigmas of life and nature forms the moral background of my poem, and plays the chief part in bringing about its climax; but I take leave to caution my readers against assuming that the meliorist doctrine necessarily represents the author's personal creed. It is a doctrine, I venture to say, which no human mind is truly competent either to accept or deny, the available evidence providing a much too uncertain foundation for either belief or disbelief. It is, however, the most beautiful of man's vain attempts to account for the unaccountable, and I have here adopted it for its æsthetic value and because it was essential to my story. That story is not a tractate or a treatise, but is just what its sub-title proclaims it—a piece of pure fantasy or romance, with the personified forces of Good and Evil as its chief characters, and the infinite universe for its scene of action.

Nevertheless, though I am far from avowing meliorism as my own faith, I cannot conceive how any faith can be of lasting service and support to the human spirit except with this as its keystone or foundation. Indeed I am almost tempted to exclaim—borrowing words in which the voice of the early Milton sounds to my ear curiously like Shakespeare's:

“If this fail,

The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble.”

A Cosmic Romance

Ormazd, the Spirit of Light, the Spirit of Good,
Their father, glorying in his fatherhood—
Maker of Joy, and of all blissful things—
Once, in mid pomp of his world-journeyings
Across the invisible viaducts of Space
That lead from star to star, came face to face
With him from whom all Guilt, all Error known,
All that is misbegotten or misgrown,
Pain without ease, toil without wage or end,
And sin without delight, darkly descend:
Him in whom falsehood and curst greed began:
Evil's great founder, loveless Ahriman.

For he too had roamed forth that day, the sire
Of the world's tears; and bringing spectres dire
To attend him, Hates and Lusts of every hue,
He, as it chanced, with all his retinue,
Far roving from his cavernous abode,
Travelled that selfsame interstellar road,
That crosses the calm vasts, and runs unseen
Through the hushed voids, and spans the deeps serene.
A secret highway, it was made of old,
Long ere the passions of the moon were cold,
Though in no chart of heaven 'tis figured yet:
And on that road the mighty rivals met.

Then did they pause: then did all Good and Ill
Seem for a moment to stand mute and still.
And as a thundercloud, a wandering gloom,
Full of the whirlwind, full of sudden doom,
Might hover, holding back its bolts unflung,
So hovered Ahriman. But apt of tongue,

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Quickly he scabbarded fierce hate in guile,
And hailed bright Ormazd: “Thou benignant Smile,
Mellowing the countenance of Eternity!
Oft on thy works I gazed: on very thee
I gaze at last. O falsely famed to dwell
Withdrawn into thy towering citadel
In most remote austerity of brow!
Ev'n thus did I, too, image thee ere now—
A clifflike, steep Perfection. At this hour,
Seeing thee as thou art, in blandest power
Accessible as Spring and Morning are,
I will unlatch my breast, I will unbar
This heart of mine, I will let leap unpent
The Thought that hungered for enfranchisement,
Prisoned while many an age hath ebbed and gone!
Have I thine ear?” And Ormazd said: “Say on.”

So Ahriman, as one that halts no more,
But with large gesture opes a captive's door,
Thus from his bosom set the bound thought free:
“Ormazd the Radiant! betwixt thee and me
Shared is the world: in its august design
Everything everywhere is thine or mine:
And throned o'er all that can rejoice or mourn,
We are the lords of Life from bourn to bourn.
But so enclasped—nay, through their farthest range
Knotted together in a knot so strange
Are our dominions, each with each entoiled
Even from the prime; so twined, so intercoiled—
Locked in a tanglement so hard to undo—
So wholly intermingled through and through—
Are these our realms; that nowhere within all
Their vastness is one point, however small,
One meanest spot, where thou or I can say:
Here have I absolute and plenary sway,
Complete, unparcelled lordship, kinghood whole;

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Here do I reign, sovereign, supreme, and sole.
Rather have mutual thwartings long made sour
Each cup we drank of! And is this, then, Power—
Can this be rule and governance—to bear
Frustration with a meek brow everywhere,
And unto bafflings without end resign
A patient breast? For such thy wont, and mine.
Ever, O Ormazd, thou art foiled by me;
Ever, O Ormazd, I am baulked by thee;
And everywhere in our domains immense
Is balanced Might but grandiose impotence.

“Behold, then, this my Scheme, in silence nursed,
In secrecy long pondered, and now first,
Under the calm, grave inquest of thine eye,
Bid to stand naked: the one Scheme whereby
Huge discords shall be goldenly resolved,
And fair and foul cease to be intervolved,
While from a heaven uncobwebbed thou shalt see
These ravelled worlds blaze with simplicity,
The accurst embroilments and rank disarray
Wholly thenceforward swept from life away.
For now my Scheme, my slow-nurtured Design,
Shall forthwith to that cloudless gaze of thine
Be bared. But though it proffers wondrous things,
They are no more than rich imaginings
Till thy command shall make them truth, and give
The charter that empowers a dream to live.
Behold my Project, then! Let thee and me
On a world-boundary now at last agree:
A barrier, so devised as to extend,
With neither a beginning nor an end,
Along a line throughout Creation drawn,
Straight as if Nature's self must then be sawn
In bleeding halves; and let this barrier reach—
Being of impalpable fabric—without breach,

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Mid worlds long weary of our clamorous feud,
Upward and downward through infinitude,
Mystically, and therefore, as were meet,
Invisibly; and when 'tis built complete,
All that is on the one side thou shalt make
Thine own for evermore, and I will take
All that is on the other: and thus shall we
Divide with a Divine equality
Betwixt us twain from that time forth the whole
Of Being, and equitably allot its soul
And substance, past contention. Then must these
Rangers of heaven, that with proud scorn of ease
In many a wheeling orbit wander wide,
Quit their old paths for ways as yet untried,
If in their courses they would else transgress
That Confine's subtle ethereal fixedness,
And with disorder beyond remedy mar
Our Scheme. For so must even planet and star
Yield them to change, and to a new-framed sky
Conform, or perish. Meanwhile thou and I
Have but to ordain it, and with lesser sound
Than of the grass breaking from out the ground
There shall be fashioned as by secret hands
That bodiless mystic barrier, till it stands
Ungross as air and unbeheld as thought,
Cleaving a universe thenceforth distraught
No more with our hoarse conflicts, no more shamed
By our crude strifes; and it shall be proclaimed
The everlasting bound, that must alone
Part thy dominions, Ormazd, from mine own.
On that side of the guarded frontier, thine
Shall be the only law; on this side, mine.
And there let all Good dwell, thy consort, here
All Evil live, my spouse. Then without peer
On that side rule thou changeless, I on this:
And if to wield pure sovereignty be bliss,

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Bliss shalt thou have and hold, there reigning! Yea,
There for the first time shalt thou truly sway
Thy princedoms, and with hate be hemmed not round,
And with no harassed and mock crown be crowned.
There for the first time since the birth of things,
Or since the blind and thunderous labourings
Of the unborn world to be brought forth at all,
Shalt thou whose lips have tasted but the gall
Of doubtful empire, slake thee with delight
Of perfect puissance, never-threatened Might—
None to dispute thy throne, nothing to gnaw
At its deep bulwarks—greatness without flaw—
None to make vain thine acts and pluck away
With midnight hand what thou didst plant by day—
None to oppose thee, nothing to impede,
And thou at last for ever lord indeed.”

He ceased, and looked to Ormazd for some sign,
Legible haply in that brow benign,
Or those calm eyes. But nothing there he read;
And the pure lips of Ormazd simply said,
With suchlike thrift in words as let no trace
Of aught that was more inward haunt his face:
“What thou proposest I will duly weigh,
And duly shalt thou have my Yea or Nay.”

“And who shall bear thy word unto mine ear?”
Said Ahriman; “and by what token clear
Am I to know him sent indeed from thee,
Right across desolate immensity?
Where in the world-sweep of thy boundless ken
Shall I await his coming? And O when
Shall I behold him verily at hand,
With thy great message?” Then did Ormazd stand
Silent, the monstrous silence of the sky
Dwarfed by his own. Fathomless was his eye,

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His face the cloister of his thoughts, his head
A still, lone summit. But at length he said:
“No messenger shall bear to thee my word;
Only from mine own mouth shall it be heard.
Where, dost thou ask? Here, where we parley now,
My tongue shall speak it. When, demandest thou?
A hundred thousand years hence, from this hour.”

To Spirits of heavenly or infernal power,
Such as in ancientness are Time's own peers,
Not longer seem a hundred thousand years,
With their dim-moving pomps of life and death,
Than is to us a moment or a breath.
And the dark ancestor of all things vile
Being well content to wait so brief a while,
The rivals parted, pledged to meet once more,
Soon as those few swift ages should be o'er.
To Night's blind heart returned the Spirit of Ill,
Where gloomed his fastness, whence he roams at will
To mar that Good he may not quite destroy.
And he who fashioned Morn and founded Joy
Betook him to a region of the skies
That from the gaze of men is hidden, and lies
Outside the lore that can bewitch our ears
With the proud epic of the stars' careers.
There did the heavenly traveller halt; and there,
Seeming to rest upbuilt on golden air,
Were vast walls, whiter than in storm the foam
Round fear-struck ships; and many a lustrous dome
Rose as the curving bosom of the swan
Above a still lake rises. There, too, shone
Turrets that, mounting firelike, seemed to be
Ravished and lost in a pure ecstasy,
So high they flamed; while near them, luminous mist,

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Its hues the marriage of the amethyst
And opal, floated as amid the play
Of plashing fountains floats the rain-bowed spray.
And splendour beyond splendour towered, yet all
The glories bounded by that circling wall
Were one miraculous palace that appeared
As if a wizard of the heavens had reared
Its ageless pomps. Never therein had been
Death, or his shadow; and with dazzling sheen,
Gateways through which no evil thing might fare
Blazed around Ormazd as he entered there.
For this was his far dwelling, which decay
Touched not, and tarnish visited not; and they
Who had kept solemn watch and sleepless ward,
Flung wide its portals to receive their lord.

Gorgeous the web of wonder that is spun
Out of the spilth and offcast of the sun;
Glorious the tropic noon's unbridled light;
Glorious the pageant of the arctic night,
That for an hour perchance may half console
The ice-barred voyager hopeless of the Pole.
But nought are all the splendours Earth hath known,
To that which shook, from round the blinding throne
Where Ormazd seated him again on high,
Tempests of radiance to the acclaiming sky.

And now unto his presence did he call
Three lordly minds, illustrious among all
That compassed him as with strong ramparts: three
Not far below himself in majesty,
Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons
Of light and might, his seeing and judging ones,
Also his warlike captains from of old:
To whom he failed not straightway to unfold
Ahriman's Scheme, by which that Prince of Pain
Would carve the labyrinthine world in twain,

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Parting, as with a barrier none might climb,
All Evil from all Good throughout all time;
And Ahriman's whole plea did he rehearse
For such a halving of the universe.
They harkened, on each word and tone intent,
Standing before him proudly reverent,
In silence, till their counsel was besought,
When Vayu was the first to unseal his thought.

“Let me not with a niggard tongue refuse”
('Twas thus he spake) “its just, its rightful dues
To this world-spacious world-remoulding Plan,
Born of the cloud-girt mind of Ahriman.
Under this Scheme, no more might fairest Good,
From the infecting touch and neighbourhood
Of Evil, suffer transformation strange,
Take Evil's hues and into Evil change;
For strict impassable confines being set
'Twixt these that oft in a fell freedom met,
Such woes would cease for ever. And perchance
Evil itself, lacking the sustenance
It sucks from Good—denied its banquetings
Mid the lorn ruins of once blissful things—
Would sicken and fail, pining with countenance wan
For that rich fare it had long feasted on.
But whether Good, shorn of the strength it draws
From hourly battle with Evil's fangs and claws,
And from uncounted clashings, hard to endure
With the huge monster's dragon armature,
Would flourish or fade, richer or poorer grow,
Rise with new fire, or smoulder lulled and low
And in a barren peace at last abide—
Of that, O Ormazd, thou that stood'st beside
Time at his cradling must forejudge, not we:
Thou who didst know from their nativity
Both Good and Evil, seeing their wars begun,
And even won and lost, and lost and won.”

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Reverberant, vibrant, nor less broad and deep
Than the sea's utterance round the cloven steep,
Was his rich-billowing voice, each cadence grave
Being like the lapse of a sonorous wave
When it withdraws down a resounding shore.
And after his last word, there hovered o'er
That council a brief silence, tremulous
As with expectancy, till Rashnu thus
Put it to flight: “One only thing is plain.
Not our advantage, not our weal or gain,
O Ormazd, doth thy foe of foes intend!
What, then, can be his goal, his secret end?
What lurked behind his specious words, when he,
As if by veriest chance encountering thee
Amid the heavens, poured forth the Scheme which thou
Bid'st us consider? Is it that he now
Foresees his empire slowly dwindling, thine
Greatening, and seeks to avert by this design
That gradual droop of power, that piecemeal fall,
And long, inglorious fading, which of all
Dreary vicissitude is the dreariest known,
To one that sits upon a haughty throne?”

So asked the noon-bright Spirit, and when he ceased
To speak, although no tongue replied, at least
Faces made answer; and in speech to the eye
His fellow counsellors there standing nigh
Uttered what seemed not an uncertain Yea.
Then spake outright the lordliest child of day;
He in whom met, and nobly did agree,
Resplendent strength and mastering suavity;
He at whose footfall, when he roamed abroad,
The heavens themselves were stilled and hushed and awed,
Hearing the golden thunder of his tread;

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Great Mithra. “First, let me declare,” he said,
“How full, how perfect is mine own assent
To all that hath from lips more eloquent
Most justly flowed. Like Vayu, loth am I
With a mean stint to grudge and half deny
Fit and due praise to a Project, to a Scheme,
Which, were it proved but a vain-builded dream,
Would none the less reveal, if nought beside,
A dauntless Dreamer: being a vision wide
As the mind's farthest outstretch: wanting not
Its lures, its beckon, its promises of what
Ev'n the all-coveting hand of Hope might well
Have lacked the greed to crave. But truth to tell,
I also must like Rashnu cry Beware!
For it is warrior's wisdom, whensoe'er
A foe seems friendliest, to set double guard,
And at an enemy's gift look long and hard.
Now 'tis exceeding sure, that till we know
Whether thyself, O Ormazd, or thy foe
Already wield o'er life the ampler power,
And in these clangorous worlds at each loud hour
Already govern the more vast domain,
We know not whether 'twere thy loss or gain
To embrace a Project, fix and ratify
Beyond revokement a Design, whereby
The Dark One would in breadth of empire be
Thy changeless Equal everlastingly,
And thine own puissance an arrested tide,
Standing magnificently petrified.
Send therefore to each haunt and dwelling-place
Of Mind—each tenanted orb that rides in Space—
Each populous busy star that sails upbuoyed,
Eager and ardent on the torpid Void—
Send to all seats of life, and through the whole
Compass and circuit of that world of soul
That in a fast enmeshment without end,

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Deep amidst worlds of clay is woven—send
Unseen and noiseless watchers, searchers, spies,
A myriad listening ears, and probing eyes,
And bid them bring thee word from Everywhere
Of how thine enemy's strength and thine compare;
In what sphere thou prevailest; in what zone
And tract of Being his might o'ertops thine own;
What wavering region of vext ebb and flow
Now hails thee paramount and anon thy foe.
In brief, from wheresoever living thing
Abides, let thine intelligencers bring
Knowledge that, summed into one boundless ray,
Shall show forth clear how thou dost stand to-day,
Measured against thine adversary; and so,
In that enormous torchflare, we shall know
Whether 'twill profit thee or him alone,
Who at the heart of darkness hath his throne,
If thou, unto his Scheme consenting, cast
Off and make null and quite tread out the Past,
Bartering this variable and fluctuant sway—
Surge and subsidence, crescence and decay—
For an unchanging Realm, within whose pale
Nowhere shalt thou have reason to bewail
Evil triumphant, and its arms made proud
With trophy and spoil; or to rejoice aloud
At its abjection, and its flight in fear
Before the gleaming of a dawn-tipt spear.”

Such were his words; and now, in speech that fell
From where no shadow of untruth might dwell,
Ormazd's elect and faithful had outpoured
Freely their thought, which in their breasts to hoard
Had been ignoblest service; and the three,
For their oft-proved and spotless fealty,
Received the thanks of that enthroned and crowned

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Benignance. Then, from where the glory around
His presence like the soul of dayspring burned,
They to a thousand radiant tasks returned.

And Ormazd did as Mithra counselled. First
Recalling hosts that had been long dispersed
On divers errands, diligent spirits and true,
He formed them into bands and squadrons new,
And with new mandate sent them everywhere
Among the speedful, spurring worlds; and there,
Where the dim lifeseed had been sown
In quickened soil, or on waste foam or stone;
Wherever aught had breath, and did beget
Offspring, and wither and die; and chiefliest yet,
Wherever creatures born, not quite in vain,
To a broad estate of pleasure and of pain,
Large hereditaments of bliss and woe—
Wherever such a race, emerging slow,
Had risen in honour and shame and love and lust
Out of the pregnant and parturient dust,
There did those secret emissaries engage
In a profound, a solemn espionage.
None saw them; yet among the quick and dead
Daily they moved, with a reposeless tread,
And they became a presence interwreathed
With all that was; by everything that breathed
Felt like a vague commotion, like a breeze
Furtive in underwoods where forest trees
Stand pensive. And with questing eyes and ears
They, traversing the divers peopled spheres,
Passed to and fro; the mortals dwelling there
Being oft obscurely on a sudden aware
Of something which had opened not their doors,
And had no step that sounded on their floors,
But fainter than a rustle or a sigh
Had glided in, and like a waft gone by.

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And ages came and went, with pauseless pace
And trampling onsweep, till the very face
Of heaven was here and there by slow degrees
Being changed! Young planets, the shy novices
Of Night, appeared beside old palsied ones,
Their joyless kin; while certain fervid suns
Grew senile, and with no more force to spend
Doted decrepit, nearing their lone end:
And sometimes, as from fires that blanch and char,
There fell the ashes of a ruined star.
And still did the unslumbering searchers ply
Their task; and not till they had heard pass by,
Mid voices as of cloud-clad charioteers,
The thunderous wheels of ninety thousand years,
Did they return, and unto Ormazd bring
The heaped fruit of their mighty harvesting.

Then came the lesser, lighter labour—though
This, too, was a prodigious toil—of so
Ordering and setting forth in due array
The piled and boundless-seeming knowledge they
Had reaped, that Ormazd at a glance might see
The range and scope of his own sovereignty,
Measured against the empire of his foe.
And many an age had yet to come and go,
That as it fleeted found that toil's last stage
Still distant: many a shadowy-trailing age,
When Man may in his long slow dawn have been,
And round him forms that mid this haunt terrene
Succeeded stranger shapes, once monstrously
Got of the dalliance of the Earth and Sea.
But the huge labours were at length complete;
The garnered knowledge was in order meet
Ranged and disposed; the task was perfected;
And Ormazd, seeing as in a chart outspread
His own and his fell rival's power, could view

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These with exactness, and now verily knew
Which was the greater: whereupon he cast
Falterings behind him, and stood founded fast
In a resolve that might not change or fade,
Touching the answer that must soon be made,
At the appointed place and destined day,
To Ahriman—the doomful Yea or Nay.

For now that day drew near, and peaklike rose
Out of the plains of time—the day when those
First mighty forefathers of Good and Ill
Must indeed meet once more, and so fulfil
Their mutual pledge, or both for ever stand
Alike forsworn. And ere it loomed at hand,
Ormazd together called, besides the Three
Nighest himself in splendour and majesty,
Thrice three of less renown; and on each one
Bestowing words of cheer and benison,
He to the twelve made known his whole intent.
And at a sign they left him, and he went
From out his lofty-towered abiding-place,
And he looked down o'er the abysm of Space,
He whom its deeps were powerless to appal.
O'er Nothingness, most awesome thing of all,
There looked he down; and halted on its verge,
Somewhat as on a rock above the surge
A fearless swimmer a moment halts, ere he
With headlong leap commits him to the sea.
Then from the towers and courts and domes that glowed
Around his innermost divine abode—
The outskirts of that Light which was his throne—
Ormazd upon the skies went forth alone,
There, for the second time, and for the last,
To meet the Saddener of the World. He passed
By many a massy star, matched with whose girth

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Puny indeed were this our boastful Earth,
And onward without tarrying or delay,
Right across many a planet's ancient way,
His own being no such curving course, he fared.
The ever fevered comet as it flared
With violent inroad through the heavens, and raced
Athwart Creation, he that knew not haste
Serenely in its hot flight overtook
And far outsped. As one that fords a brook
In a mere journey o'er vale and wold, he crossed
The madding meteor torrent, that seemed lost
And aimless, where it chased in dizzy sky
Its own self round the sun. At times his eye
Saw War beside his pathway, cosmic strife
As of a new world crashing into life
Through welter and rage and the loud splintering
Of old worlds' bones. But oft, where breathing thing
Or living voice had never sought to intrude
On the cold, blank, tremendous quietude,
He swept through utter Calms that well might be
Likened to the immense serenity
And infinite composure of the dead:
Kingdoms that Silence hath inherited
From Silence; and mid these he came to where
His adversary awaited him, for there—
With eyes that seemed to ray forth only gloom—
Ahriman tower'd, true to that tryst of doom.

And Ormazd with a soaring voice cried: “Lo,
I am come to pay thee that which I do owe—
Gratitude, gratitude!” A joyful gleam
Lit the drear face of Evil. “Then my Scheme
Hath in thine eyes found favour?” But full soon
The gleam departed, Ormazd saying: “The boon
For which I thank thee and could almost bless
The giver of a gift so measureless,

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Is the new knowledge, full and sure, of how
Thy power and mine compare, and whether thou
Or I be mightier. Unto thee my debt
Is boundless: without thee, not even yet
That knowledge had been mine, and thou hast well
Earned richest thanks.” Ahriman's countenance fell.
“I knew that thou hadst sent forth everywhere
Thy searchers, gatherers, scouts, and spies, and ne'er
Sought I to foil their quest, nor once have laid
Across their path a hindrance.” Ormazd paid
No heed, but unregardful thus spake on:
“O oft did I in yonder ages gone
Toil with misgiving and with doubt, nor knew
Whether 'twas mine own realm or thine that grew
In lasting spaciousness, or whether both
Stood without movement, without change or growth,
Or rise or fall. And even labouring still,
I was as one that climbs an endless hill,
And oft I bore a heavy, a secret load,
And lacked the joy that I myself bestowed.
But now I know that when thou met'st me first,
Thinking to snare me with thy guile accurst,
Already had thy feet begun to slide
Ev'n then from power. Already had the tide
Against thee turned: thenceforth the flow was mine,
Thine the loathed ebb. And though thy sure decline
Was hardly as yet a thing to itself confessed,
Already somewhat below peak and crest
Thou stood'st, and wert each morrow fall'n away
A little—a little—from height of yesterday.”

“Thy words are false,” cried Ahriman, “and thou
Erelong shalt learn that never even now
Have I put forth the full might of mine arm
Against thee; and with tremors of alarm

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Shalt thou look on, hereafter, while I sow
With dreadful largesse the long-hoarded woe.
For whatsoever thou dost most abhor—
Famine and pestilence and hate and war,
And new-minted diseases worse than death—
These in thrice ampler bounty with my breath
Will I strew wide, wherever mortals live
Their life fantastical and fugitive.”

“And from all this,” said Ormazd, “shall pure fruit
Upgrow, and odorously will I transmute
To loveliest bloom thy gifts of deadliest bane.
For now henceforth I wax and thou dost wane,
I broaden and thou shrinkest; and at length,
With ever leaping heart and freshening strength,
Joyous I toil, knowing that day by day
Somewhat art thou for ever feebler; yea,
Knowing as happiest truth that ev'n were I
Not indestructible, but born to die
Like old Gods whom the youthful Gods succeed—
That ev'n if it should be my fate indeed
Thus to the will of conquering Death to bow,
And my chief tasks yet unperformed, and thou
Neither destroyed nor vanquished—none the less
'Stablisht secure in everlastingness
Where this my kingdom, my fair realm of Good;
But thine own realm of Evil, that withstood
So long my assault, and seemed in glory and state
Built above dread of fall, shall soon or late
With pangs of ebbing power, with shudderings vast,
Be o'ertaken and amazed; and haply at last
It shall be broken asunder in ruin extreme,
Scattered as shards and the ashes of a dream,
And thou, or some like heritor of thy throne,
Under its mountainous dust lie hurled and prone.”

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So Ormazd spake. But his terrific foe
In boundless rage was silent, and as though
Somewhat abashed by that pure strength and grace,
Did turn away the tempest of his face.
Out of him rose a twilight dim and dire,
The clouds and column'd vapours of his ire
Spreading their dusk afar. Half hid with these
He stood, while, swirled as in mad vortices
Above him, an innumerable swarm
Of horrors without lineament or form
Circled aloft and blindly eddying spun,
Black as a flight of crows against the sun.
And he, by that foul brood attended, passed
Downward through skies that his mere frown o'ercast,
Betaking him in fury and in shame
Back to those holds of midnight whence he came.

1918-19