A pageant of poets and other poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Now ends our second age of sovereign song;
The final voice is hushed, the concord dies.
The latest lingerer of the vanished throng
Fades in unanswering skies,
Yet is not lost for long.
New, bird-like notes are fluting in the woods;
Strange tribes of carolling echoes trill
Round the rough slopes of glade and hill;
The winds entrap more subtle harmonies,
And in the strenuous throats of caves and floods
A wild, ecstatic music swells and cries.
In the deep night of Time, its count full-told,
A radiant galaxy of stars afire
Burns through the blackness, scintillant with gold,
Shaped in the likeness of the Song-god's lyre.

2

Deep in a fastness of the Sussex Downs,
Embowered in moss-grown oaks and laurelled ways,
Far from the dusty roads and smoke of towns,
A greensward hides within a woodland maze.
Therein a stone, grey-lichened altar stands
From immemorial days,
Whence sprang of old a sacrificial flame
Fed by a bronze-haired Sibyl's hands
In years of long forgotten fame.
Its carven shaft is girt by laurel bands
Twined by some hidden folk ye may not tell

Save from the goat-foot tracks that dint the sands
About yon bubbling well,
And to the apprehending mind declare
That still the Fauns, if not the Gods, are there.

3

Avow, ye Fauns, to whom our fathers reared
This altar in the glade!
To Pan, the Earth-god with the goatish beard,
Protector of their flocks and kine,
Or ruddy Bacchus for his gift of wine,
Or Dian, the disdainful, moon-cold Maid?—
Nay, to the God of sunshine, dawn, and song—
The young Apollo, beating back the Night,—
These laurel wreaths belong—
The thin flame kindled with his arrows' flight.
Oft round the vapours of the Tripod reeled
A Pythoness, raving of future ills;
And twice or thrice the cowering Fauns, concealed,
Saw in a blinding flash the God revealed
With lyre and loose-strung bow,
And all night long about the entrancéd hills
Heard the magnetic gusts of music blow.

4

Lured onward through the flush of April lanes
And paths by lamps of daffodils defined,
I came when the clear light of evening wanes,
Following faint murmurs born of string and reed,
Through tangled growths inextricably twined,
On that enchanted mead.

How still and void it seemed—no twig that stirred,
Rustle of leaf or sudden flitter of wings,
Movement or sound o'erheard,
Yet on me stole a sense of watching Things,—
Keen sentinels that stood
Alert within the wood
And cast swift webs in all its openings.
Then a thin mist of silver, luminous smoke
Forth from the altar broke
And snared me with its creeping somnolence,
Till at its base I swooned, yet dreamed or knew
That uncouth forest-creatures bore me thence
Within a pale of frondage screened from view.

5

Next surged anear the erst receding tune
With flutes and hautboys swelling, till the strain
Upborne with reedy voices, rent the noon
Of a new day with passionate refrain.
Then swooped a blinding radiance from the sky
Till the God gleamed apparent and drew nigh,
And his winged feet alighting starred the sward
With hyacinthine blooms that hailed their lord.
Around the laurelled margent of the glade,
Upholding new-peeled wands, with filleted brows,
The singing bands of boys and virgins ranged
In rainbow-coloured vesture, counter-changed
Wherever lambent beams of godhood strayed.
Thrust deep into the tangle of the wood,
A path of Triumph under feathery boughs
Ran down from where Apollo stood.
Mounting thereon with eyes serene and clear,
Eyes that outdared the sun and pierced the shade,
The lords of song drew near
To greet the lord of singers, unafraid.

THE PAGEANT

6
W. S. LANDOR

Foremost was Landor found,
His leonine mien with Attic charm subdued,
Supreme in sculptured verse, and radiant prose
Encroaching on its sister's narrower bound;
In every clime and scene his gathering ground—
City and camp and cloistral solitude;
His range the world, a cameo, or a rose.
He held a mirror to all mood and thought,
And, ere it fled, each swift reflection caught
Of poet, statesman, courtesan, and sage.
The art of Life, the life of Art, he scanned
And moulded as the potter to his hand:—
The life of Athens in its golden age:—
Of Tuscan gardens, under rambling bines
Repeopled with Boccaccio's Florentines:—
Of Arden before Shakespeare stormed the stage.

7
R. SOUTHEY

Then followed him who sang,
Mid Greta's murmurings, of Domdaniel caves
Sunk in the spellbound waves;—
Madoc who earliest past unfurrowed seas
On virgin shores with the Red Dragon sprang;
And wondrous lays of grim Mythologies
Spun on the shuttle of Kehama's curse:
Who dowered the heroes of his cosmic verse
With the inherent virtues of his soul—
Faith, valour, fortitude, and self-control:
Who first, since Dryden, caught the laurel spray
From dull, belittling foreheads, smirched and torn,
And, shredding its long shrivelled leaves away,
Revived it in the fountains of the Morn.

8
S. T. COLERIDGE

The Dreamer next behold,
Coleridge, with introspective gaze sublime,
Whose ripe imaginings,
Within one matchless English summer-time,
Burst in a triple flower of flame and gold,
Unfurling splendid petals fold from fold,
Vivid with hues of stormy sunsettings
And sea-snakes' burnished scales,
And darting stamens palpitant like wings
Into the dazzled air,
Yet fading under Evening's falling veils
To phosphorescent flowers unearthly fair,
And by the moonlight blanched to phantom things.
So leapt his soul aflare,
But from that prodigality of bloom
Recoiled with flameless lamp burnt out and bare
Of song, as one whom his own thoughts consume.

9
W. WORDSWORTH

Then Wordsworth passed with Nature-reading eyes,
The ‘Visionary Gleam’ at last assured.
Suckled and reared at mothering mountain breasts
And cradled mid their drifting lullabies,
The fells and streams grew playmates to the child—
His intimate touch endured,
And bared their secrets to his high behests
Or gay endearments as he roamed the wild.
Then, in the flush of manhood's conquering pride,
He thrust their final, reticent mask aside,
And saw within, in fitful, fleeting gleams—
As through a furnace grate
Opening and closing on its fiery spate—
The incandescent caverns of the Earth
Where the unborn and spent millenniums wait,
And ravished thence hidden, immortal dreams
Of life beyond the bounds of death and birth.

10
SIR WALTER SCOTT

Up the long path of Fame
See Scott advance, pure clarion of the band,
Supremest bearer of his Country's name,
Rekindling the deserted Border-land
With sudden gleam of spears and hurtling swords
Glinting behind bare crags or tufts of fern:
Gay pennons streaming up the winding glen;
Sacked towers aglow with lurid cores of flame,
Or broken armies trampling through the fords,
Shedding a trail of writhing steeds and men
From stricken fields—Flodden or Bannockburn.
Above the placid breasts of mountain lakes
The pibroch swells; lights kindle on the shore;
The Fiery Cross its blinding pathway breaks,
And the wild Clansmen toss the torch of war.

11
LORD BYRON

Breaking the prison of an alien star
Like thine own rebel angels, earthward drawn
Toward signal flares of Dawn,
Byron, thy wild, dissentient spirit fell,
On tempest-buffeted pinions tossed afar,
With spheral music chiming in its bell:
Yet found no refuge from the shadowing bolt
In Passion's arms, or any languorous shade,
Nor banished from the riot of its revolt
Thought of the heaven wherefrom its flight had strayed.
Yet for the ransom paid
Of life, Apollo, that thy Greece might rise
Freed from the Moslem chain,
Accept the sacrifice,
Accept the varying strain
Though to the Night its strenuous chants belong—
Though to the Night its pain,—
Though to the Night the travail of its cries:
Accept the lone, unconquerable song!

12
P. B. SHELLEY

And thou too, truant from the ranks of light,
Capturing in Shelley's soul thy transient home
As refuge from the phantoms of the night—
Near kinsman of the flower-drift and the foam
And fragile beings fugitive from sight
Haunting the hills, the forests, and the sea
About the Ægean isles and Italy,—
Suffused with thee, in his rare brain awoke
Vision and insight beyond mortal ken
Of elemental tragedies and woes;
Prometheus strangling in the Eternal yoke
Up the Caucasian, lightning-smitten glen,
Fast in his torments' throes;
Laon upon his column, and the crime
Of that abhorrent sire, accursed of Time.
Thine too the ultimate waft, the culminant sweep
Of rapture up the steep
Of the cloud-rack, revelling with winds and birds;
Till winds and waters noosed thee, drowned with sleep,
And quenched his flaming heart and springing words.

13
JOHN KEATS

Not writ in water only, but in fire
Across the climbing parapets of cloud
That mask our English skies,
Proud mid the nobly proud,
Keats, glow thy name's immortal; thine the lyre
Strung at the curved mouth of an ocean shell
Alluring there the sea-winds' wandering sighs,
The waves' antiphonies,
Whence issuing at thy will, or low or loud,
The soul of Beauty snares men with her spell.
Though thou unto the elder gods art gone,—
Unthroned, discarded,—in their starless vale
Shining among them like Hyperion,
On thee hath Time no hold, so earthly frail,
For, Adonais, on the surgent crest
Of song, the grief and glory of thee are blown
Through heaven in strains as soaring as thine own.
Still thy receding voice the nightingale,
Deep in the brooding thicket's shadowy nest,
Remembers in each midnight of its June;
Whenever Art revives the harmonies
Of Attic life and grace on plinth or frieze
Thine are the unageing lips that flute the tune.

14
ROBERT BROWNING

The poet of the towering intellect
Lit late upon his fame, but doth abide
On the sheer crag with vivid mosses flecked
Whereby the kestrel's wafting pinions ride,—
Not further from the greatest than one stride.
He, even as Cleon in his island shrine,
From every Art its quintessence distilled;
Then in the seething caldron of his thought,
Turbid from grim endeavour half-fulfilled,
With each infusion wrought
The miracle of water turned to wine,
Sealed in its flask, matured, and clarified.
He too, within the brain's voluted coil
Appraised each duct and fibre that impel
Men toward the heaven or hell
They fashion out of life with endless toil;
Following the devious tracks by which they wind
Toward ends foredoomed and unescapable;
Lord of the analytics of the Mind.

15
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

Yet not alone he stands; his arms embrace
A weakling woman with a seraph's face
And love and pity in her tender eyes;
Dowered with rare dreams wherewith the gods endue
Heroic souls in tremulous ecstasies:
Whose spirit's frail, declining tenement
The immitigable music eddying through
Left torrent-swept and spent.
First, thin and sweet her virginal singing rang
As that of any sprite or summer bird
Lilting, at dawn, of Elemental things,
Yet soon with sadness blent;
By her own handsel of pain made free as air
Of all the zones of anguish and despair.
Then Love flew nigh and brushed her with his wings,
And twined her maiden bower
With the late glories of the Passion-flower,
And from her heart that chant of passion sprang
Which left the world no lovelier afterword
But gave her brow the doubled aureole
Of Browning's wife and Shelley's sister-soul.

16
LORD TENNYSON

Master, within the Palace of thine Art,
Built to the incantations of thy brain
And poised in air upon a golden chain,
A hundred radiant chambers hoard thy dreams.
In one, the spell-bound maid's arrested heart
Thrills to the step that tip-toes on the floors
Bringing her ecstasy of life again.
Here old Ulysses stems the ocean streams,
Trimming his tattered sail toward fabulous shores
With the thin remnant of his storm-tossed crew,
And constant in the grapple of the oars,
To seek “the great Achilles whom they knew”.
There drifts the dead Elaine with her dumb guard
Up the slow tide, a flower by Fortune marred.
Here, lost in muted cloisters, Guinevere
Prays on while Arthur spurs to his last fight:
Beyond the reed-beds of the wailing mere
The sword Excalibur is caught from sight.
And fleet and hushed the fugitive phantoms throng,
Snared in the meshes of thy magic song,
As through dissolving halls of dream we grope
To those twin shrines, lit with no earthly light,
Where Galahad clasps the handles of the Grail,
And thy lone craft, without an oar or sail,
Drifts out upon the tideway of the night,
Toward the dim beacon of a far-seen hope.

17
MATTHEW ARNOLD

Arnold, clear voice of melancholy doubt,
Wedded to thought and word serene as rills
Brimming a Vestal's well down beds of sand,
Perchance even now thou haunt'st the Cumner hills
Unvexed in dreams by the Philistian rout,
With Thyrsis' self redeemed from Arno's strand,
And that lone Scholar for thy company,
Heedless of faint-heard chimes in Oxford towers
Beneath thy trysting tree,
Unconscious of the burdens of the hours,
In ghostly evening gardens gathering
For Proserpine the pale, faint blooms of Spring.
Far from the sorrowful dirges of the sea
In Faith's extremity,
And wind-bleached mountain passes grey with dole,
Where not a root may cling
As anchor for the soul,
Let the great winds to the great tides go down:
The anguish of the world has passed from thee;
Thou hast achieved thy crown.

18
D. G. ROSSETTI

Painter and poet, betwixt whose easel and page
Flits to and fro one mirrored, sensuous face—
Hers who resigned thee from the grave's embrace
Thy heart of hoarded melody and flame,—
Back-straying wanderer from that earlier age
Glorious with Dante's and Giotto's fame,
When Art, reborn, drank at the fount of Truth,
How hast thou lit our frigid Northern tongue
With palpitating songs of love and ruth
As when that Art was young!
Of love that deems the world upon its knees
For one enraptured hour, then stills its breath,
Shuddering beneath the swooping wings of Death,
And rakes thenceforth the dust of memories:
Of love, by lust or treachery overthrown:
Of love, turned hate, that works by sorcerers' charms
To wreck the thing erst cherished in its arms:
Of love that cannot make its heaven alone.

19
WILLIAM MORRIS

Adown Epicurean garden paths,
Fresh with keen scents, with unsunned dewfall wet,
We follow thee, new Chaucer of our time,
By meadows where the scythe gleams through the swathes,
While garrulous elders in the shadows met
Recount their haunting legends of the Prime,
And Sagas, smitten through with Berserk wraths;
Or in a mist of unforbidden tears
Breathe forth the sorrowful mandate of the years:—

Glean in this fleeting aftermath of day
What tender joys we may.
No profit shall we reap from all our toil.
But once we live and all too soon we die;
Live now; the night is nigh;
Vain is our labour, vain the wild turmoil,
The thrashing of the seas, the endless strife:
Death ends the pain, the song;
Wipes out alike the memory and the wrong,
The dream, the deed; hoard what is left of life!

Not so; the palaces of Song endure:
When Time hath set his fluttering captive free,
There reigns the soul, remote, intact, secure,
In its own fabric of Eternity.

A. C. SWINBURNE

20

Captain of rhythm and sound,
Fusing our stubborn tongue in silver rain
And fashioning it again
In measures such as poet never wound
From any gulf of cloud or air or wave,—
Latest and loveliest of the singing clan
And last-born brother of the nightingales
Who set their watch till dawn about thy grave,
Didst thou then once, within some creek or cave
Ensnare and bind the Sirens or old Pan,
Or toss the Thyrsus round the midnight vales
While to thy soul their effluent music ran?
Or on Apollo's thunder-riven height,
Enswathed in lambent fire,
Didst thou throughout an unforgotten night
Allure to thee the music of his lyre?—
Nay, in an island-cavern far from these,
Round which the roaring stream of the world divides,
Rather some lonely Oceanides
Fostered thy childhood mid the clangorous tides;
Wherefore the freedom of the seas grew thine,
And scot and tithe from every vagrant tone
Leaping along the pathways of the brine
Or through its trumpets blown.

21

Yet since thy virgin arrow found the gold
First on the target set by Sophocles,
Didst thou, then, borne from that wave-guarded fold
Across thy sister seas

By wandering pirates and in Athens sold,
Chant in the thunder of his tragedies
And die of plague upon Aspasia's knees?
Then in thy next transmuted mortal day,
Brooding upon the inexorable Power
That shapes and shatters life like sculptor's clay,
Burst thine arrested thought in one resplendent flower.
Still let the vowed Arcadian huntress stand
Slipping the leash of the hounds with slim, cool hand
On the man-slaying boar, at last undone;
And let the wretched mother avenge again
Upon her son her brothers stricken and slain,
Meleager's life wane with the wasting brand
And all the appointed web of Fate be spun.

22

Thy songs were of dead Queens,—
And gleaming out of mouldering Pyramids,
And frescoed caverns sealed in lost ravines
Anigh Damascus, Thebes, or Babylon,
Flash ruining harlot faces sweet or stern,
Darting once more, 'neath antimonied lids
Which the embalmers' eyes last gazed upon,
Rekindling rays wherein old passions burn.
And still therein shall Yseult's memory live
So long as Cornish water swirls and sags
About Tintagel's crags,
And over her haven of sleep
Seethes wandering, starred with foam-bells fugitive,
Or a low bark drives landward from the deep.
And evermore thy spacious trilogy
Enshrines that image of the World's Desire

Whose love consumed her lovers, fierce as fire,
And blazed her passage as a lightning blast
Its trail of sovereignty,—
Than very Death more dire,—
Yet broken by a woman at the last.

23

Though on thee oftener than thy peers there fell
The trance of vision, holding thee apart,
Untouched by the familiar human spell
And magic of the heart,
Yet ere its wane thy passionate pity yearned
Godlike above men's dramas of despair,
As when it shone on Yolande stricken and spurned,
Banned with the outcast's bell,
And white with leprous ash on skin and hair,
Whom the poor clerk forsook not in her hell
But for love's sake its torments leapt to share.
And still thy songs grow tenderer when they house
Like rose-leaves round the nest
Where Infancy's serene, unsmiling brows
Recapture their lost heavens of dreamful rest.

24

Hadst thou but lived to hear the battle cry
That thrilled our virgin coasts but yesterday,—
To see men's bird-winged fleets assail the sky,
Grim snakes of Death threading the waters grey
And striking undersea their shuddering prey,—
To see once more thy France, thine Italy,
Thine Italy grown one, thy reborn France,

Safe-issued from the tempests of their Dawn,
At death-grips with the seething dragon-spawn
Of ancient foes, bent on world-dominance,—
How had thy voice on Alp and Apennine,
And all the frothing crests of all the seas
Where England fought and smote their enemies
In Freedom's name, rung out in chant divine
To whip the laggard, brace the doubtful knees,
And from the gassed trench spur the avenging
Line!
Ah, wheresoever thou brood'st above thy lyre,
In what faint land of darkness or desire,
How must thou bloom in rapturous song to know
Song still breeds flame to set a realm on fire,
And thy heart throb to greet d'Annunzio!

25

Hail and farewell, whom to the dolorous turning
And stairway to the Dark the years have drawn.
For us or thee what dun or lurid dawn,
Or dreamless night devoid of tears and yearning
Remains, we know not: thou hast found the key
To the shut door of all that mystery—
Entered and seen what shadows lurk behind,
Unless indeed it prove, as thou hast said,
That Death sets term to Sense and thought and learning,
And dust of poppies seals each weary head,
Fanned by the soughing, intermittent wind
That swoons about the garden of the dead.
Yet here at least thy fame and praise shall linger
And live—thy Wraith swing out on every tide
Of heaving spume our samphired capes deride,
Lifting past laurelled brows a warning finger

Amid the rainbows arched above the waters,
Lest aught should frighten Nereus' singing daughters,
Or swaying with the tideway's rocking bell
Where the ships quiver and skim the ruining shoal:—
Though henceforth mellower concords haunt the shell,
Or thrill the winds' citole,
Yet no new strain of thine, the Master-Singer,
The oracular priest of song, shall ever swell
The clarion pierced and dumb, and re-express thy Soul.
Hail and—alas—Farewell!

26
L'ENVOI

Now my frail raft of dream, adrift so long,
Regains its creek, unships its fragile mast
And floats into the shade,
Borne inward on the tide of surgent song
From the bright ranks still marshalled in the glade,
Of which this echo only lingers last:—

These are of them who count a God for friend;
Who, standing in their lot, abide the End.
Wherefore about the altar of their God
Shall they too serve with that anointed choir
Who, in the lone, diverging paths they trod,
Redeemed his earth-strewn jewels from the mire,
And singing as they came,
Reset them in their carcanets of flame.
Last of the Mighty, to their ranks ascend!

Then song and vision faded and were past.

Waking, aloft a waxen moon rode high
Amid the still battalions of the sky.
About me, drowsy odours of the Spring:
A sense of uncouth watchers vanishing.

LEAVES FROM VALLOMBROSA

DO WE BELIEVE?

(February 1912)

Do we believe?—Men asked in Galilee
The question nigh two thousand years ago,
When lived the Christ for all to hear and see.
A hundred answered, Yes—a million, No,

And killed Him. From His rock-hewn tomb there came
A counter-stroke—the o'erwhelming miracle.
Henceforth on Earth the Eden sword of flame
Drives toward the wide-swung gates of Heaven or Hell

The mortal myriads who believe and live,
Or doubt and, dying, char in quenchless fires.
No rat-hole harbours any fugitive:—
Believe or perish—thus High God requires!

Do we believe?—Still his world-tortured Race
Affirms in thunderous chant its God is One.
In His own land still—by Mohammed's grace—
The Cross beside the Crescent fronts the Sun.

The Muezzin on his mist-hid tower withdrawn,
The Sheik amid the sand-hills' glimmering sheen,
In adoration, up the stair of dawn
Speeds not for Thee his cry, O Nazarene!

Above the brooding wisdom of the East
Where stirs the wind that makes Thy presence known?
Since Islam rose, there leaps no flame released—
No flicker ere a thunderbolt is thrown.

Do we believe?—Full half the world replies
“We know Thee not!” Its stars their courses keep.
The night of ages lingers in its skies:
No dawn-streak reddens o'er that field of sleep.

Nay, 'tis the West installed the Creed divine.
There, in thronged fanes, the Centuries knelt to pray,
And ate and drank their God in bread and wine.
Built from their crumbling dust, behold Today!

Still spring the belfry-voices up the sky;
Still throb reverberant aisles with rapturous sound.
Soars Faith on fervid wings, or doth she lie,
Drowsy or drugged, in shackles underground?

Rather her wings are cramped; they thrash the air
In low, concentric circles traced in vain.
The Pharisaic fillets still are there;
Impulse and Inspiration only wane.

Do we believe?—What answers Christendom?
Through Courts and Senates drifts a tainted breath.
In World concerns, the Nations' souls are numb,
Or cataleptic, simulating death.

The Master-word ‘Expansion’ vindicates
The timed offence, the instant act long-planned,
That launches ‘Patriot’ armies through the gates
Of conquest on some rich, defenceless land;

Begirt with hosts embattled, Force is lord,
Grips what it covets with a fist of mail.
Rights shrivel in the lightnings of its sword,
And the last Dreadnought turns the loaded scale,

Till the first air-fleets men have taught to soar
Shed new Olympian bolts on sky and sea.
Ask him, who, breathing peace and breeding war,
Poises Germania's menacing destiny,

Until the chance shall fall, the auspicious hour,
To trample down old realms and reign alone,
Building the blood-drenched fabric of his power
Out of the sherds of Empires overthrown.

Do we believe?—Ask them who fain would slit
Her pockets while they snatch the Church's crown—
Papist and Puritan grotesquely knit,
Lords of the hour, to drag her splendours down.

Ask them who, luring votes with painted lies,
Infect the crowd with subtle poison-fangs;
Whose consciences, in thrall to Party cries,
Cringe to the word of the Whip, like slaves in gangs.

Ask them whose ruthless wills, annealed in pain,
Graft cancerous growths on sentient, quivering life,
And celebrate, a thousand times in vain,
The ghastly sacrament of lens and knife.

Lord of the heights and depths, of flame and frost,—
Of winds that, ebbing past all stars in sight,
Break next on world in utter distance lost,
Poised on immeasurable spires of light,—

Of comets in prodigious orbits chained,
Scattering the dust of life in wastes unsown,—
Of sovereign spheres in shining ranks ordained
Above whose dominance Thou brood'st alone,—

What then is Man that Thou wert mindful of him
So to divide Thy Godhood—as is said—
As to be born his son, live with and love him,
Die by his hand, and drive for all his dead

A roadway out of Death's unfractured hold?
Do we believe?—If Life and conduct shew
The fruit of such a Faith, still, as of old,
The hundreds answer, Yes—the millions, No!

TO THE VANISHED MUSE

Why hast thou fled into thy secret isle,
Dear Muse of Song, whom oft of old I found
Loitering by any copse or wayside stile
On Youth's enchanted ground?
Now, though I search along the moss-grown wall,
And beat the brake through which each streamlet flows,
I find thee not, nor hear thy honey call
In dusk of dreams, nor start to know thee close,
Brushing my window with a drowsy rose.
Thus once it was—not now. What have I done
To thee or left undone, that thou should'st fade
Out of my ken like glint of fairy gold—
A shadow from the pathway of the sun—
A rustle from the umbrage of the glade—
Is it that thou art false since I am old?

Well mayst thou shun, Parnassian-born, to mate
The clarity and magic of thy strain
With halting measures half-articulate,
And threnodies of pain,
Thou rider of the rainbow and the wave,
Voice of the winds and mountain solitudes,
And tutor to the nightingales who rave
Beside their sombre eggs and tawny broods
Their hearts out in the midnight of the woods.
Yet, since thy fingers once caressed my hand,
Then, beckoning ever, lured me down the track
Thy footsteps followed on the darkening wold
Toward the dim confines of this tragic land,
Whence no path leadeth through or turneth back,
Should'st thou forsake me now that I am old?

Old, and thy smiles are all for Youth's disport
Who hath the steeds of Morning at his call
To scour the world, yet fills his amorous Court
With masks of Carnival,
Battles of blossoms, pageantry and wine,
Jongleurs and Mimes who troll lascivious lays,
While emulous harlots round their temples twine
Bespattered chaplets of Apollo's bays.
Ah then, Farewell, if such command thy praise—
If thou art won by tawdry boys like these:
Henceforth toward other shrines my steps shall wend
Leaving thy secret altar mute and cold,
Seeking a woodland cell and hermit's frieze
Wherein to move some queen of tears to spend
Her frigid alms upon me, being old.

Listen! Is that the carol of a bird
Cradling in air, frenzied with wind and light,
Who, on his nest, in ecstasy unblurred
Dreamed of his song all night?—
Nay, 'tis the Muse returns; at last she comes,
Waking the brimming laughter of the wells.
Midsummer-dors sail out and thrash their drums;
Tip-toe campanulas rock their peals of bells
And ringdoves croon delirious in the dells.
Mad hedgerows burst with roses; poppies spring
To flame in the last pathway of the plough;
Staid sheep-bells riot round the mountain fold;
Larks leave their sedges on more vibrant wing;
New, vivid mosses splash the sapless bough,
And I, to-day, forget that I am old.

A DREAM IN THE FEN

Boy of the Past whom I knew so well in the Cambridgeshire village
Trailing down from the chalk to the black, low brink of the Fens,
Borne from me, torn from me, you, by the years of battle and pillage,
Why are you vivid tonight in the ray of Life's wandering lens?
Boy of the Past who played and ran in the dyke-girdled meadows
Bright with blooms of the paigles before the grasses were mown,—
Started and fled, lest they stung, from Midsummerdors in the shadows—
Why do you visit me now, so long forgotten, outgrown?

Ah, how it all comes back, framed, like your face, in a glory!
Low you crouch by the hearth, toward the turf-fire's kernel of heat,
Eager to trap the flare to light some wonderful story.
Bleak winds rattle the pane as they stride through the empty street.
Vague-swaying phantoms loom elusive 'twixt roof-tree and rafter;
Long past the curfew you lag, respinning the web of your Prayers;
Banished at last to bed from lighted islands of laughter,
Sleepless you shiver, marooned up pitch-black mountains of stairs.

Cohorts of turbulent rats, returning agog with their plunder,

Trample by centuried runs to granaries under the floor.
Gusts in cavernous chimneys moan and volley in thunder;
Boards creak loud in the passage, clicks the latch on the door;
Booms the clock with the moon-face:—hark—it is only eleven!
Spirits are penned in the church-yard until the midnight shall toll.
Bury your head in the blankets—besiege the slumber of Heaven,
Screened from the terrors of darkness turning to water your soul.

Sudden you leap out of sleep, when the flush of the dawn bedizens,
Bathed in amber and lake, unscalable crests in the sky.
Far o'er the fen burns the Sun on the edge of its empty horizons:
Lone in the world you stand, confronting his sovereign eye.
'Tis for a moment only; beasts in the farm-yard awaken;
Soon the impatient cows will low for the milking-pails:
Horse-gear clanks in the stalls; and now, in the mill forsaken,
The miller trims to the wind of the morn his languorous sails.

Out of their mud-built domes knit to the eaves of your dwelling
Martins, eager for breakfast, dart past your window-sills.

Deep in the dense-hung walls of orchards where ribstons are swelling,
Count twice the eggs in the nests and cluttering, tawny bills.
Rooks are scraping and cawing, lost in the long, black furrows:
High in a cleft of Heaven the kestrel hangs for his prey.
Even the moles have quitted the covered lanes of their burrows,
So catch your pony—with sugar—up-saddle, on, and away!

Canter by green, still droves past barns with their stacks beside them,
Sentried by shivering alders, engirt with osier canes.
Onward the lodes go lagging until the mills bestride them,
Driving their droning waters through sluices out to the drains.—
Just a sigh of the sedge as it yields to the wind's embraces;
Just a sob in the dyke as the water-rat dips to his lair:—
Lo, you are trapped in the magic of silence and infinite spaces!
Time past, high keeper of visions, hath you safe in his snare!

Mists condense and disperse; the world is water about you:
Soham Mere swings out its surges and swallows the Fen.
League-deep thickets of pathless reeds entangle and flout you:

Hark to the scream of the mallard—the cluck of the water-hen!
See—a splash in the channel; that was an osprey diving:
There is the love-sick bittern booming into his reed.
What are those harsh, wild cries? Only the herons wiving,
Or wading out to their larder, sunk in a mile of weed.

Ely, enthroned as a queen, reigns over her island morasses,—
Ripe for the Conqueror's lash would she but crouch to his heel.
See his flotilla of rafts, threading the maze of the passes,
Thronged with his Knights and their Squires, grim in their hauberks of steel,
Chanting the song of Roland, till Hereward's battle-cry breaks them.
Fire is alive in the reeds; they travel in dead men's shoes.
Frantic they leap to doom ere the snaffle of flame overtakes them;
And eels and pike shall strip their armour off in the ooze.

Dreams—all dreams! They have fled, or flit, wan ghosts, in the meadows.
Just a mirage of the Fen, spun out of space as you rode,
Like this mirage in my brain. Your face, too, drowns in the shadows—
Fades from the circle of light, where for an evening it glowed;

Fleets away to the years where I lost it when it was part of me,—
Out of recall, save in dream, until my dreaming be done.
Face of a lonely boy, hidden yet dim in the heart of me:—
Face that was mine in the Past—for, Boy of the Past, we are one!

THE UNDYING PAST

I

Out of the Vast
Man steps, in chains;
Slips, and is past:
Then what remains?—
Heredity:—
More chains to bind
The man to be
To all behind.

II

Are we but blended types, rebred
From the battalions of the Dead,
Back to the days of low degrees
When bald apes, swinging in the trees,
Bandied sharp jibes across the boughs,
As, erst, men in Saint Stephen's House;—
Gabbled in chattering sapience
From the drear ridge of empty brows,
And gave applause and took offence
Mid blindfold play of wit and sense?

Back through the years of flint and bone,
Ere ever loaded bomb was thrown,
When, faithful to his tribal law,
The amorous savage trapped his squaw
And haled her, out of feigned attack,
Far down some lonely forest track,
Where later, flying at his throat,
For all she bore she paid him back,
And burned his hovel or his boat
For screeds less sacred than the Vote.

Back to the days when Gods were thick
As blossoms in the budded quick,
Since each took idols as he chose,
And, unpropitious, gave them blows,
Or burned rare spice about their knees
And wrought them gilded Sanctuaries.
Therefore in no more subtle way,
Their help to gain or wrath appease
And heedless of their feet of clay,
We supplicate our Gods to-day.

Happy the man whose life accords
Least with his ante-natal lords:
Who, in the runnels of his veins,
No secret-seething tide constrains,
Tumultuous with the bursting spores
Of sins that slew his ancestors;
Nor in some strait of desperate dole,
A slave to what his mind abhors,
Down the blind spade-ways of the mole
Senses the tyrants of his soul.

For half a lifetime, chaste and prim,
We rally to the Vesper Hymn,
The cushioned pew, the bread and wine,
The Saints that from the windows shine,
Yet nursing sparks of smouldering ire
That ravined in a Berserk sire:
Then, in some tissue's secret cell,
The breeding plague-spot bursts afire,—
Leaps out, a rage untamable,
And drags us to the gulfs of Hell.

Lusts that men knew and wearied of
Earlier than Rameses and Thoth,
Resurging in a riotous brain
Their grip upon the world maintain.

Red are the roses as of yore
That sway, festooned, by many a door
And shrouding jalousie discreet:
The fruit yet riper than before;
As multitudinous the feet
That enter the forbidden street.

From the chance-medleys of the womb
Now burgeons what malignant bloom?—
The fierce, destructive Communist,
With bomb, and dagger at his wrist;—
His stealthier sister-petroleuse,
Adept alike with can and fuse,
A poison gas, corroding lime,
Slipped from the sky, like falling dews,—
Building in tragic Pantomime
New Babels on the shoals of Time:—

Far kindred to that Lemnian band
Who killed their men-folk out of hand;
Or them who rent their children's limbs
To the mad throb of Bacchic hymns;
Or later, raised the Rataplan
In Paris, for the Rights of Man;
The Guillotine's dulled blades reset:—
Screaming beside the tumbrils ran,
And, from Saint Antoine's shambles wet,
Shore the crowned curls of Antoinette.

Nay, rather, may not I and you
Unending destinies pursue,
From life to life still onward tossed,
In the vast maze of Being lost;—
Our exits darkened paths between
That double back into the scene
Whereof the earlier memory dies

Like lantern pictures from the screen,
Greeting with unrecalling eyes
Old aspects of the older skies?

Behold the World—an endless Fair,
With clamorous drums and lights aflare
Round booths that teem with monstrous shows
And Stages where the drama flows
Eddying from Farce to Tragedy,
While restless crowds sway surging by
Shouting or dumb but unconcerned.—
A sudden flicker in the sky—
A flamelet from a lamp o'erturned—
A mob wiped out, a city burned!

And all the while across the way,
Fresh clowns buffoon, more Antics play.
But trampled on the eternal round
The puppets from the dust rebound,
Ten thousand times destroyed, renewed,
Or ravished out of desuetude,
Changing in semblance, speech, and name,
The part assigned, the dream pursued,
Yet in their essences the same
Unto the Masters of the Game.

RONDEAUX OF A BIBLIOPHILE

(I)

What long delight the cherished books ensure
Which for a wasting day my shelves immure,
Till, torn apart, I toward the Darkness slide!
In Books of Hours where Pucks and Goblins glide
Empanelled round the lustrous Miniature:—

In Cradle-books that sprang with Types mature
From clumsy Presses vagrant and obscure,
Fast shut with carven clasps in figured hide,
What long delight!

In copper-plates whose gloss and bloom endure,
Cut deep by Hollar, Gravelot or Le Sueur:—
In bindings where the golden trails divide
Round shields of priest or king or harlot's pride:—
In Anonymes that baffle and allure:—
In book-plates on the cover's virgin side,
(Send Fortune, soon, a Pepys or a Hewer,)
What long delight!

(2)

Tout lasse, tout passe; and Ye who line the wall
Will scarce, I think, outstay my funeral.
I see the Country dealers form their ring,—
Londoners will not heed so slight a thing,—
The lots held up, the fateful hammer fall.

There go my first editions, cropped or tall;
The bindings tooled for Prince and Cardinal,
And loved in some long-dead Italian Spring.
Tout lasse, tout passe.

And there my Froissart, Monstrelet, and Hall;
My Regent's Chloe—fold her in a shawl,
So naïve, so nude;—my dwarfs from Pickering,
My Fletcher, Drayton, Crashaw, vanishing.
Rapt loves, whom some new lover shall enthral
And comfort in the shelter of his wing,
God give you joy when I have lost you all.
Tout lasse, tout passe.

A CASE OF RENAISSANCE MEDALS

(1)

My Medals see—perchance, to-morrow, thine—
Long wrapped in silk or choked in travertine:—
Of Malatesta from his robber lair,
And sly Isotta with the coif-bound hair,
And many a Ferrarese and Florentine.

Princes and Popes of Medicean line,
And treacherous Borgias, deft with poisoned wine:
Sixtus and bull-necked Julius, born Rovere:
My Medals—See!

Visconti, with the viper for their sign
And fierce Colonnas, lords of Palestrine;
Estes and Gonzagas, proud but debonnair;
And women roped with pearls or robed in vair,—
Children of days malignant yet divine,
Deaf to all days of triumph and despair,—
But sometimes, gazing out through storm and shine,
My Medals see.

(2)

What have Ye seen?—Rome's sack and overthrow,
Thou, Clement, crouching in Saint Angelo.
Thee, Clement, later, foremost in the race,
Florence, thy fortune's cradle, to efface.
Unbridled wills, immeasurable woe.

Borgia, who tossed thy son to Tiber-flow?
Wert thou at Sinigaglia, first to know
When smooth Cæsare played his sovereign ace?
What have ye seen?

Phantasmal States that shrivel while they grow;
Renaissance and reaction,—spasm and throe
Of birth and death that clutch and interlace;
Pontiffs and Kings that pass in spectral chase;
Spaniard and Frank and Austrian come and go;
Out of the Alpine war-clouds bursting low
The new Italia risen into their place:—
These have Ye seen!

A BALLADE OF VILLON, HIS CAT

(“C'est à mau rat mau chat.”)

I am that cat, nine lives agone,
Who brushed about your shoon, Villon,
And round Montfaucon spat and preyed
While kindred rogues on gibbets swayed
Who erst had drunk and diced, God wot,
In midnight bordels, piping hot,
With itching fingers, prone to grow
Too nigh the breasts of Grosse Margot.

I watched your antics, beryl-eyed,
Then mewed and miawled in amorous pride,
With Gallic Thomases, for miles
Athwart the steep-pitched Paris tiles.
Now all that merry crew, Pardie,
Are clean forgot, save you and me,
And Grosse Margot, this many a day,
Is dust and lime in Paris clay.

But you, François, arch rogue and poet,
And I, your cat—may all men know it—
Let not the Centuries trample down
The memory of our just renown.
Above the world we loom and brood
In splendid, astral solitude,
Intoning our antiphonies
As when we sat on Margot's knees.

L'ENVOI

Throned Imp of Song, in the land of the dead
Do you dream of the laurels that crown your head,
Or ever a tear or thought bestow
On old Greymalkin—or Grosse Margot?

“Gallic Thomases”—The use of this expression seems to indicate a lady cat of English extraction—possibly a straggler from the Army of Occupation which collapsed in 1453.

A BUCCANEER'S LAST CHANTY

(1698)

Say, Bill, pass the—what the—Thinking?—well, I'm blasted!
What in thunder is it now?—
O, the Tropic Seas o' nights and the pathway of the Moon,
And the lines we used to fish with by the lantern in the prow—
That old tune!—
Hell, what a life it was, a torch-flare while it lasted,
But 'twill all be over soon,
For they'll swing us off tomorrow nigh the full height of the mast-head,
To dance on next to nothing, like ripe apples on a bough.

Aye, Bill, in Execution Dock we'll ride at anchor,
Home fröm all the stormy seas,
While the black flag waves flip-flapping at our corpses as they sway
In the wind that blows past Limehouse from the scented Caribbees—
All the way.
There the long-boats lurk in ambush for the ships for which they hanker,
Mid the mangroves round the Bay,
In the snaky creeks of silence, deep as prison-cells and ranker,
Where the Boas and lianas trail in clusters from the trees.

Say, Bill, d'ye call to mind the midnight island-beaches
White with stars in the wet sand;

Where the turtles crawled in day-time till we turned them on their backs,
And o' moon-lit nights—they said—the Mermaids swam to land,
Soft as flax:
Or the long, dark paths we threaded through the miles of forest reaches
Where the monkeys cursed in packs,
Like the crowds in Ratcliff Highway, who'll stun us with their screeches
When we drive in state along it like the Dutchman down the Strand?

Aye, Bill, Life frothed its highest when, with sails, like vultures, flopping
From the sack of Panama,
Gold-loaded to the gunnels ploughed back each boisterous rover
To the Bagnios by the Keys in the Isle of Tortuga.
Ah, that's over!
How we drank and diced, the Moidores from our ready pockets dropping,—
Kept our harlot girls in clover!
Gripped in their lithe arms, we dreamed not of the hangman's noose at Wapping,
Nor the Night that blackens round us with one blood-red, shuddering star.

Say, Bill, d'ye ever dream and strike at putrid faces
Spun in eddies round your barque,
Leering in at every porthole, pitching past on surge and spate,
Sure as Death to catch and kiss you, in a nightmare trapped and stark,
Soon or late?

Hell!—can we ever find one in the waste, unsounded Spaces,
Worse than nightly lies in wait?—
Death may rid us of the torment of these leprous, loathed embraces:
Take your leap, Bill, full of courage, high of hope, into the Dark!

A DEAD TERRIER

(Ob. Oct. 1927)

Dear waif from Sirius with thy constant flame
Of loyalty and love, who now art gone,
Approved a terrier void of taint or blame,
Lulled with the poppies of oblivion,
Back to the star where all thy race attain
Felicity, and doze in halcyon dreams
Of old companionships, and, off the chain,
Chase phantom rats by summer banks and streams,
Yet vaguely scenting still an ancient trail
Which hath not wholly faded from thy ken,
Challenging with tense ears and quivering tail
One longed-for footstep from the world of men:—
If it could be, if we should meet once more,
What greetings, raptures, on that happy shore!

SIESTA

Choose a pair of tired eyes:
Lend them sleep more soft than snow;
Then with mist of dreams surprise
Wits that, waking, never know
Rest, nor think of birds upsteering,—
Winds in empty heavens careering,—
Buds that only live to blow.

Stretch a cobweb, fairy spun,
Flecked and crossed with threads of rain
Turned to rainbows by the sun,
At the windows of the brain,
That the visions inward stealing
May be charged with peace and healing,
And efface the ancient pain.

Flatter next the unconscious ear
With the music of a reed,
Which at length the soul may hear
And absorb into her need,
Later, thence the signal taking
For the hour of her awaking,
Rich with pregnant thought and deed.

Must she then desert the shore
Of her deep Elysian ease,
For the thraldom of the oar
And the torment of the seas?—
Of the land of endless leisure,
Void of strife and tears and pleasure
'Tis not Sleep that holds the keys

“LA VIE EST VAINE”

What is man's life?—a transient thing:
A kerchief slipping through a ring,
Or a ring dropping from a hand,
Or water spilled on thirsty sand:
An acorn shredded from the oak:
A puff of cloud, a wisp of smoke:
Wind-ripples on the water's face:
A leaping fish that leaves no trace
Save bubbles bursting in a pool:
A thread unwinding from the spool:
A guttering candle-flame: a spark
From flint and tinder in the dark:
A shadow from a moment's sun:
A dream, a cry—and all is done.

What lies behind or looms before,
What oceans surge on either shore,
What riding-lights there are to guide
Across the welter of the tide,
All men conjecture, no man knows,
Or whence he comes or whither goes,
Or if his shallop sinks or sails,
Or if he steers by fairy tales,
Or if his flimsy keel shall shock
On Summer isle or Loadstone rock.—
What matter? Still one course pursue,
By the Soul's compass steering true;
Stedfast, whatever storm impend;
The goal we cannot set or mend.

DISILLUSIONS

(To youth's illusions, buried long
In a forgotten grave of Song.)

Say these were walls of Jericho
That wavered when the trumpets passed,
But rocked and shattered in the throe
Of Life's immitigable blast;

Yet lost illusions still may hive
In stagnant tissues of the brain,
And phantom gates and bastions strive
To shape and weld themselves again

Out of the sombrous towers of cloud
High-flaming over sunset snow.—
What if Life's barrier-bounds enshroud
Our vanished walls of Jericho?

WHAT OF THE NIGHT

While the deep shadows muster—in which dead faces cluster,—
And swamp Life's lingering daytime, and all its lights go down,
Has Death staged wild surprises before his Curtain rises?
What Play comes next to town?

In worlds of bliss and sorrow shall we but find, tomorrow,
A subtler rarefaction of senses, blunt today,
Wherewith to reap the guerdon, or bear the endless burden
Earned in the ended Play?

Or is the scene not shifted—the Curtain dropped and lifted?—
Back to the life of striving, much care and little ease;
Trapped in the mine, the brickyard, the forge, the trench, the rickyard;
The swift, ship-hunting Seas!

Or will the Past be riven—forgotten and forgiven,—
Asperged from all the passion, the heartbreak, and the pain?
Man in a world new-shriven—from which the Snake is driven—
Be free to start again?

TO F. W. G.

(Died in sleep, Oct. 1929)

Happy are they—the men of temperate mind,
Staunch as the magnet through the years of stress;
Of counsel wise; supreme in faithfulness;
Trusted by all, in tangled ways and blind,—
Beset in perilous straits before, behind,—
To steer by compass true, nor more, nor less,
Though doubting friends or foes may ban or bless;
Unswerved by storm, unswayed by volleying wind.

But happiest they of all—that envied band,
Elect of God—who sink at night to sleep,
His tired children, worn with toil or play,
Nor feel Death's fingers o'er their pulses creep,
But wake with wondering eyes upon the strand
Of radiant seas, in a diviner day.

THE EXILE

(To R. L. S.)

Out of the Golden Gate he sailed afar
Past coral atolls built in worlds of sea
Where giant breakers boom unendingly,
A myriad sea-birds watch a drifting spar,
To beaches framed in palms up ridge and scar
With wilding orchids swung from every tree,—
All life a dream, a perfume, melody,—
Eluding Fate, following his destined star.

Ah, Tusitala, on thy mountain crest,
Lulled by the droning surge round languorous isles,
Strayed exile from the heather to the foam,
Across the void, immeasurable miles
Of land and wave, fluttering in vague unrest,
Doth not thy heart yearn toward the hills of home?

APOLOGIA

I

Poet, leave your lonely height;
Tempests rack the wold;
Shapes of fear bestride the night
And the stars are cold.

Tread at times the common paths
By the hedgerow side,
Where, between the falling swathes,
Field-mice slip and hide.

Give us flame to warm the hands,
Not to scorch the byre;
'Tis not lightning life demands;—
Friendly, lambent fire.

Make yourself to many men
What you are to one;—
Singing water down the glen:
Radiance of the sun.

Though high Heaven be yours at will,
Prize the country lane;
Let your rainbow ladder still
Clutch of Earth retain.

Thus, among Admetus' hinds
Young Apollo roved;
Carolled with the morning winds;
Saved the queen he loved.

II

I would not sing divorced, by choice,
From all the woodland yields,
Fleeting, a disembodied voice,
In air above the fields.

My heart regards and holds them all;—
The tints of drifting leaves;
The moss and frondage on the wall;
The nest beneath the eaves;

But by the gate on which I swung,
The dells in which I played,
The paths are closed and barbs are strung;
Nature is leased to Trade.

The canker of the quarry scores
The spinney from the hills,
And down the twinkling trout-stream pours
The acid of the mills.

On all the jostling roads that thrust
Toward every jaded town,
There is but space for speed and dust;
Dreamers are trampled down.

Wherefore I hide, perforce, apart
Upon my hill of cloud,
From them who would but spurn my heart
Or toss it to the crowd;—

Content to sing, content to dream
Out of the moil and daze;
Unseen, unheard, far from the stream
And frenzy of the ways;—

Content while here the voices blend
Of rills and woods below,—
The stars shine in, the birds ascend,
The Morning's clarions blow.

WAR TONES

RÉVEILLÉ

(1915)

Britons, awake! Can nothing blast your dream—
This deadly atrophy of will and brain?
Beyond your narrow streak of ocean-stream
The Nightmare of the Centuries looms again.

Splendeur de Dex! What Norman William dared
May Teuton William not again assay?
Huddling like sheep for slaughter, unprepared,
Shall we still loiter when hath dawned “the Day?”

Nay, rather let the vanguard of the flood
Whereon the legend of our Glory rides
Shatter the ramparts of her recreant brood,
And whelm us, like Atlantis, with her tides!

Is there no lash insensate hides to sting?
Must the young Whelps storm home from lands afar
To die for crowds that line a Football ring,
And cravens skulking from the fields of War?

Even thus the infatuate lords of Babylon
Went feasting till the Persian glaives swept home;
Thus in the Circus rang the shouting on
Till Alaric burst the ill-guarded gates of Rome.

Britons, awake! Today the die is cast:
Today at least we grip our destinies—
The peace our Fathers wrung out of the Past.
Tomorrows are too late for Fools to seize!

MARCHING SONG

(1915)

'Tis up and awake and away
As the breath of the dawn blows sweet,
And our bugles forestall the day
In the dusk of the village street;
And the song of the marching files
Rings out as we shatter the miles
That lead at last where the flaming brands
Of battle flash in our foemen's hands.

At windows under the thatch
The children cluster and call,
And fling us roses to catch;
Ruddy with sleep are they all.
But the roses shall redder grow,
And ruddier blood shall flow
From the gaping lips of the wounds of those
We leave to sleep ere the day's stern close.

Morning to noon has sped;
Rearward the shadow runs—
What's that? In the mist ahead
The sullen boom of the guns!
War-clouds brood on the hill.
Hearts up! Stride wary and still.
Steady, lads, steady! There's time to spare
For lots of fighting: We'll soon be there!

'Tis ever to keep the rank
Till the last long mile's bestrode,
And we're smashing in on the flank
At the red, grim mouth of the road,
Where the men of blood shall reel
From the rip of the naked steel—
Their ruthless Junkers writhe in the dust
From the straight, keen spit of the bayonet thrust.

For our tramping feet are shod
With vengeance dour and dire,
And a wind of the wrath of God
Leaps ahead of us like fire,
And a freshet of blood shall rain
On the faces of the slain;
Their bastard eagles on crippled wings
Stream off to hide with their Kaiser-Kings!

IN MEMORIAM R. A. J. WARNEFORD, V.C.

(22nd June 1915)

Warneford, strong, victorious soul, his lonely pathway winging
Sunward past the gate of Death, a flame in air and wind,
Up beyond the storm of war in radiant spirals springing,
Are our voices aught but breath, aught the praise that swells behind?

Twenty years of life, and then one splendid hour of living,
Hurling, mid the songs of Dawn, the War-bird from the sky!
Fame was his and all that men appraise as worth the giving;
But the Gods avenge their vultures; he had slain them—he must die.

Wherefore Fate with sudden thrust tripped him through the portal—
Him who rode the thunderbolt, swooped and smashed the Hun.
Home, to blend with heroes' dust, bring the new Immortal;
Warding him who warded thee, heart of Britain, hold thy son!

Dead he passes to his place, amid the tears of nations,
In his dawn of glory dead, new-struck his dazzling stroke.
Boom above his heedless ears the Battle's salutations;
Twine about his coffined head France's myrtle, England's oak.

LOST FROM THE S.S. “SUSSEX” To T. W. J.

(24th March 1916)

Once in a Thracian forest, legends say,
A herdsman hid, intent with daring eyes
The Dionysiac revels to surprise.
He saw the Fauns, the Satyrs, pass his way,
The monstrous God, the Mænad disarray;
Heard the mad cymbals clashing to the skies.
Then Death leapt at him with a thousand cries,
And tossed him to the leopards for a prey.

Even so, on thee, from thy fair lawns of peace
Lured toward the crater of new worlds in birth,
Sprang Destiny and dragged thee down from sight.
Now lost amid the welter of the Earth,
Or drifting in the eddies of the Seas,
Farewell, thou one more memory of the Night.

DOMINE, QUAMDIU?

(May, 1917)

Last night I dreamed the War was over,
And mute the guns that roared so long:—
The coasts from John O'Groat's to Dover
Reverberant with victorious song.

From every sea the stalwart-hearted
Streamed homeward, shouting to the wind,
Above the thousand wrecks uncharted,
To greet their women, fain and kind.

And crowds besieged them in the Stations,
And cheered and crushed them in the street,
Where, mid a storm of jubilations,
Tramped by their thunderous, marching feet.

After the drum-fire of the Ridges,—
The race with Death on shell-scorched plains,—
The trout-stream spanned with rocking bridges;
The cuckoo challenge down the lanes.

Back out of Khaki into hodden;
Back from the blood-grip to the Game;
The round of peaceful life retrodden,
Yet to be never more the same,

For over them by Hell's red hammer
Battered white-hot, asperged, annealed,
Life broods malignant, stripped of glamour,
With every festering sore revealed.

Only a dream that dare not linger;
Still Death intones his orisons.—
Is there no God can lift a finger
And stop the roaring of the guns?