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ix
DEDICATION To TUSITALA IN VAILIMA
I
Clearest voice in Britain's chorus,
Tusitala!
Years ago, years four and twenty,
Grey the cloudland drifted o'er us,
When these ears first heard you talking,
When these eyes first saw you smiling.
Tusitala!
Years ago, years four and twenty,
Grey the cloudland drifted o'er us,
When these ears first heard you talking,
When these eyes first saw you smiling.
Years of famine, years of plenty,
Years of beckoning and beguiling,
Years of yielding, shifting, baulking,—
When the good ship “Clansman” bore us
Round the spits of Tobermory,
Glens of Voulin like a vision,
Crags of Knoidart, huge and hoary,—
We had laughed in light derision,
Had they told us, told the daring
Tusitala,
What the years' pale hands were bearing,—
Years in stately, dim division.
Years of beckoning and beguiling,
Years of yielding, shifting, baulking,—
When the good ship “Clansman” bore us
Round the spits of Tobermory,
Glens of Voulin like a vision,
x
We had laughed in light derision,
Had they told us, told the daring
Tusitala,
What the years' pale hands were bearing,—
Years in stately, dim division.
II
Now the skies are pure above you,Tusitala;
Feather'd trees bow down to love you;
Perfum'd winds from shining waters
Stir the sanguine-leav'd hibiscus
That your kingdom's dusk-ey'd daughters
Weave about their shining tresses;
Dew-fed guavas drop their viscous
Honey at the sun's caresses,
Where eternal summer blesses
Your ethereal musky highlands;—
Ah! but does your heart remember,
Tusitala,
Westward in our Scotch September,
Blue against the pale sun's ember,—
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Barren granite-snouted nesses,
Plunging in the dull'd Atlantic,
Where beyond Tiree one guesses
At the full tide, loud and frantic?
III
By strange pathways God hath brought you,Tusitala,
In strange webs of fortune caught you,
Led you by strange moods and measures
To this paradise of pleasures!
And the body-guard that sought you
To conduct you home to glory,—
Dark the oriflammes they carried,
In the mist their cohort tarried,—
They were Languor, Pain, and Sorrow,
Tusitala!
Scarcely we endured their story
Trailing on from morn to morrow,
Such the devious road they led you,
Such the error, such the vastness,
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Under exile bow'd and banish'd,
Lost, like Moses in the fastness,
Till we almost deem'd you vanish'd.
IV
Vanish'd? ay, that's still the trouble,Tusitala!
Though your tropic isle rejoices,
'Tis to us an Isle of Voices
Hollow like the elfin double
Cry of disembodied echoes,
Or an owlet's wicked laughter,
Or the cold and hornèd gecko's
Croaking from a ruined rafter,—
Voices these of things existing,
Yet incessantly resisting
Eyes and hands that follow after;
You are circled, as by magic,
In a surf-built palmy bubble,
Tusitala;
Fate hath chosen, but the choice is
Half delectable, half tragic,
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And we greet you back, enchanted,
But reply's no sooner granted,
Than the rifted cloud-land closes.
September 1984.
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