 | Vigil and vision |  |
107
VII. THE SILVER AGE.
109
THE SILVER AGE.
1
THE memories of the Age of Gold,The age of innocence and glee,
Of primal peace and purity,
Whereof whilom the poets told,
Wellnigh within our hearts are cold:
No more of its return dream we
Nor that Life ever young might be
Can we conceive, that now is old.
Yet, at threescore, a purer page
Of life we reach, a stiller shore,
Where Passion's storms no longer rage
And peace, at last, we have once more:
If not the Golden, at threescore
We have, at least, the Silver Age.
2
To tell again the tale of things long told,To tread in thought the over-travelled ways,
To shrink with shame to think in bygone days
How oft night's treasure in the dawn-light cold
To nought hath shrivelled, even as elfin gold,
Life's sombre fairy-tale with sad amaze
To overread by hope's declining rays,
These are the occupations of the old.
Yet that there is in eld which doth console
For all that life must leave and lose with youth,
The end of hopeless hoping, the surcease
Of strife and stress, the clearer air of truth,
That floods the heart, the sunset in the soul,
That on life's passing sheds its light of peace.
110
3
In my hot youth, no flowers beneath our skiesOf daily life and use would serve my turn,
No bluebells nodding in the golden fern,
No violets purple as my lady's eyes,
No roses ruddy as her lips: the prize
For which I longed by earthly mead or burn
Was not to seek, but in the fields etern
It flow'red, the asphodel of Paradise.
But, now that youth is past and age draws on
And the hot blood grows cool for Time's relent,
No more I sigh for blossoms in no land
That ever blew on which the sunlight shone,
But make my shift with that I have in hand,
The flow'rage of the plant of Sad Content.
4
Oft do men say, when age hath given them pause,Lapsed life still willing Time to them restore,
“Had age youth's ableness, youth age's lore!”
Of all the idle Will-begotten saws
Surely the idlest! By the eternal laws,
Fools, were life given you to live once more,
That would you do which you have done before,
For that the effect ensueth still the cause.
Youth is to eld and unto youth is age
As Spring to Winter and to Winter Spring.
Wrote not the Winter pause upon the page,
The world were burned away with blossoming.
So after Life comes Death, its seeding-stage,
The darkling half of its unending ring.
111
5
In my young days I loved the winter-cold:The laggard mornings and the languid rays
Of the pale sun, well nigh too weak the haze
To pierce, were dearer to me than the bold
Upmounting dawns of June and the fierce gold
That overflooded all the August ways:
To me the long, still nights, the darkling days
A tale of dreamful peace and mystery told.
But now, youth gone, I languish for the sun,
Like my old hound, that loves at length to lie
And bask and feel the blesséd fluid heat
Through all his age-chilled veins and arteries run,
Ere yet the harbingers of death drawn nigh
To the faint heart creep up from the cold feet.
OCULO RETORTO.
IF I might turn the river of the yearsBack to its fountain-head and at the spring
Of the Prime Cause drink life's requickening,
I would not seek from the consenting spheres
Lost youth, with all its idle smiles and tears,
Nor with dead Love prevail again to sing
His syren songs of sempiternal Spring,
Nor crave return of manhood's hopes and fears.
I would but ask to draw yet once again
The full fresh breath of frank and fearless life,
To feel once more, now time is on the wane,
Unmarred by any sense of doubt or strife,
The innocent, the ignorant disdain,
The child-unconsciousness of joy and pain.
112
ET EGO ------
THOUGH long ago it is, God wot,Since I at Cupid's altars knelt,
I, too in Arcady have dwelt
And shared whilere the lover's lot;
Nor, though the blood no more is hot
Within my veins, that I have smelt
Its roses and its breezes felt
Yet in my dreams have I forgot.
Nay, in this life of every day,
Anon, the old Elysian strain
Makes for a breathing-space its way
The mists of eld and usance through
And I in Arcady am fain
Awhile to live and love anew.
LUCUS DEORUM.
1
TO those who live, as I have lived, alone,With birds and music mated, books and flowers,
By their own heart-beats all the changing hours,
Rain and shine, measuring, strange things are shown;
Their ears to many an other-worldly tone
Resound, and touched by the supernal powers,
Their eyes o'erlook this shadow-world of ours
Into the spheres beyond, the ways unknown:
Their hopes possess another world than this
Dull orb of day and night; in wake and dream,
Their hands lay hold on the Invisible;
Thought wings with them the ultimate abyss,
That lies to thitherward the icy stream,
And opens Heaven to their gaze and Hell.
113
2
Yet more of Heaven than Hell, to Love the praise!Their dreams: though by the inexorable Fates,
Unfriended, lacking of their spirit's mates,
Foredoomed to fare this round of nights and days,
The yearning in their souls, from dull dismays
Of common lusts removed and common hates,
Hath drawn Love down from utter Heaven's gates,
To walk with them the weary worldly ways.
So, in his hand, across Life's sorry stage
They pass, unspotted of the paltry age,
And by his guidance, for their spirits' food
Seeking the fair, the wise, the true, the good,
Dwell, with the souls of hero, prophet, sage,
In a Gods' grove of sacred solitude.
PORTO INVENTO.
THE time is sick with toil and care and sin;Life's arteries are choked with doubt and strife;
In all its ways Will's brambles, thick and rife,
Hinder his feet that fain to peace would win;
The world without is rotten and within.
No drug will serve; the canker of our life
Calls for the mercy of the surgeon's knife;
The case is past the approof of medicine.
But we, our day to evening drawing near,
Time-taught the real from the things that seem
To know, absolved from hope and doubt and fear,
Here in this backwater of thought we dream,
Content to suffer, with unsorrowing eye,
Life's senseless whirl of chances lapse us by.
114
HYPNEROTOMACHIA.
BYTIMES from this my dream I wakeAnd look on life, as it goes by,
Beneath the wondering, pitying sky,
And pity, too, on men I take;
Yea, fain, to ease my spirit's ache,
To venture out with them I sigh
And to the Gods lift hand, that I
May succour them for sorrow's sake.
Alack! In vain to heaven I sue:
What have they, this with that, to do,
The world, with all its troubled streams
Of strife and turmoil, old and new,
Its things that are, its things that seem,
And I, a dreamer with my dream?
LIFE'S SUMMING-UP.
1
“LIFE is too short for question”, quoth the sage;“Laugh and let be!” The saw is simple sooth:
And now, indeed, less worthy wrath than ruth,
All things set down upon the ended page,
I find its record; for the years assuage
The ardent indignation of hot youth.
To-day no more I blame the Fates uncouth
Nor heaven inhospitable accuse: I rail
No longer at the Gods, as knowing they,
For all their pride and pomp of high estate,
Are, even as we creatures of a day,
But bondmen of inexorable Fate,
And once their term accomplished, even as we,
Under the dust of doom must buried be.
115
2
Nor do I rail at life and fellow-men:No more the page accomplished I re-read,
The script of done and undone, stress and need,
Nor overthink the wrongs endured erewhen.
To all which is and was I say “Amen!”
What matters it? The Past is past indeed
And the ripe age's all-atoning reed
With manhood's Now hath overwrit youth's Then.
But this I know, that, life for me once done
And I, work ended, safe in the domain
Back of the Selfless Whole, no Will-to-be
Shall lure me forth to look upon the sun
Nor aught avail with me to wear again
The vesture of this world of vanity.
RE INFECTÂ.
ONE thing I do regret and only one;By token that I feel I'm drawing nigh
The ending of my day and soon must die,
My harvest yet unreaped, my work undone,
The riches of my soul revealed to none:
For poetry like plants is, that deny
To flower their best beneath a frowning sky,
Without their portion due of soil and sun.
So, like Kheyyám, with heart fulfilled I go
Of vain regrets, for that the seed and germ
Of many a fair conceit in me I know,
Which, had Fate smiled and folk been less purblind,
With bloom and fruit had gladdened humankind,
But now must be the portion of the worm.
116
NEARING PORT.
HOPE and sorrow, smiles and sadness,Doubt and surety, glee and dole,
Hast thou fed thy full, my soul:
Grief galore and little gladness,
Goodness hast thou known and badness.
Pause and ponder now the whole,
In the distance since thy goal
Glimmers through Life's maze of madness.
Now thy day is near its ending,
Now thy travel home is tending,
Now Life's night is near its morrow,
Conscience clear and quiet mind,
Duty done, 'spite pain and sorrow,
Nothing else of worth thou'lt find.
MORS JANUA VITÆ.
A lapse into the surgeless sea of Night;Long devious wanderings in the darkling ways;
Some little blinded pause of blank amaze,
Of hands uplifted to the eternal height;
Some little straining of the astonied spright
For thought and cognizance, athwart the haze
Of nothingness, wherewith Death overlays
The deadened sense; and then a flood of light;
A conscience of the at last accomplished goal,
Of Past for ever past, of Present sole,
Without To-be abiding, in a clime
Of peace unchanging, quit of Space and Time,
Of all life's troubles ended for the soul,
Of Self resolved into the Eternal Whole.
117
MORTUIS DILECTIS.
1
YOU all, whom I have loved and who are dead,Leaving me here to face the end alone,
As one, who, in mid-battle, all his own
Sees fall'n, and single, in the setting red,
Stands, with war-wearied, if unbated head,
These, that like flowers in me, unsought, unsown,
By field and garden, street and shore, have blown,
Or in the midnight hours upon my bed,
On your cold ashes, for you loved me well
And your hearts throbbed with mine in hopes and fears,
This wreath I lay of mingling smiles and tears,
A garland not alone of funeral flowers,
In many a variance plucked of sun and showers,
The tale of Love's rememorance to tell.
2
Nay, they are yours: what time they grew in me,Through many a glad and sorry day and night,
Your thought was with me, in the morning-white,
The evening-red; it was your harmony
I hearkened for, your eyes that did o'ersee
The growing line, your voice that bade me write;
And gathered now upon this page of white,
To you alone they dedicate shall be
And those true hearts, that music love and song,
For very song's alone and music's sake,
Nor to the poet reckon it for wrong,
On song-bird fashion music if he make.
As for the others, be they who they may,
They say. What say they? Marry, let them say!
| Vigil and vision | |