The Poems of A. C. Benson

'Twas at Ferrara, in a palace court,—
The shafts methought of that vast colonnade
Too slim and slight to bear the incumbent mass
Of plinth and ashlar, and the luscious wreaths
Of fruit and foliage looped from knob to knob—
But that I hardly noted: 'twas a bird,
A monstrous bird, the tyrant of the crag,
With gilded claws and beak—a yellower fire
Flamed in his eye—that dragged a gilded chain
And ponderous ball, and loathed his servitude.
And once he raised himself with urgent wings
Winnowing the drowsy air, and grasped the frieze
With shrieking claws—but soon the swinging weight
Thrust him, all glaring, to the dust again,
So that he fiercely beat his prisoned wings,
And bit the unyielding metal, vexed at heart;—

I could have wept to hear the portress laugh.

And I of late, raising these weary eyes,
That taint the radiant beam with motes that flit
Across my vision, thick as summer flies,
Have seemed to see the baffled gaze, the glance
That sad bird cast about him, as he stared,
And snuffed the fragrant enervated air.
So strange a heaviness has grown of late
About me, from the hour when glimmering dawn
Peers through my latticed panes, and from the court
The wholesome sounds smite the distempered brain
With most unmanning horror, clutch the heart
In difficult panic, thick with labouring sighs;
Then in that shadow-land the dreaming mind—
Like some new fly with crumpled wings undried,
Breathless and dizzy from her unborn trance,—
Retraces step by step her backward road,
Down to the gates of nothing; dips her brush
To dash with radiant dyes what might have been,
But smears what is, and what is yet to be,
In most portentous dimness.

First I see
My mother, tender, careful, hard beset
With sordid fears and fierce unloving words,
And almost maddened with the faltering touch
Of all those baby hands about her breast,
That clung a moment and unclasped again,
And were not: yet to me, sad heir, bequeathed
The intolerable legacy of love,—

Dumb love, that dares not own itself enthralled,
Creep to the dear confessional of fate,
But from some piteous instinct, hangs amazed,
And slips into the silent throng again.

Next, I remember how, a puny child,
I drowsed and fretted o'er the outlandish task,
Hard haunting names and misbegotten words,
Like barbarous arms and shells from over sea,—
Till all at once, as men, that pierce a well
And batter, dizzied with their own hot breath,
Drill through some cool and limpid reservoir,
And hear the din of waters breaking out,
Cooled through old years in green unnoted caves,
So, as I fumed, I was at once aware
Of magic hands that beckoned, robes that waved,
As though some pompous multitude swept by;
As Hermes drove to regions vexed and dim
The helpless ghosts, so Virgil waved his wand,
And faces grew upon the hollow air,
The snarling trumpets, and the noise of war.

And once, but once, since that wild thunder-stroke,
The voice of waters, deep, ineffable,
Hath thrilled my heart, when Ossian, shaggy-haired,
And veiled in flying rack of ragged cloud,
Swept from the Northern wild, and smote his harp
With such a stormy elemental rage,
It made me mad,—he with such yearning deep,
With such unconscious savage nakedness,

Out of the world's youth, impotent, half-beast,
Half-hero, leaned and cried upon the air.

My sober manhood gained, not apt for jest
Or loud uproarious revel, such a maze
Of intertwined and tortuous passages,
By which mankind wind backward to the dim
And wailing Chaos, to the feet of God,
Yawned vague before me, that I hastened on,
And so, through many a dim and dreaming day,
Wandered alone in labyrinthine glooms,
And trackless wastes, with sight of giant souls,
Whose robes I seemed to touch, and see their brows
Contracted grim, and hear their muttered speech:
Bishops and earls, tyrants and orators,
Hugh with caressing gestures, Hereward
With lion's mane, Morcar and Waltheof,
Edward Confessor with his maiden flush,
And Alfred, with a demon at his brain
And clouded eyes at council; Alcuin
And stately Charlemagne; the pomp of Rome,—
Pale Nero softly smiling, Cato stern,
Imperial Cæsar with his haggard brow,
And Sulla with the blotched and seamy face;
Or Alexander flashed, a meteor light,
In sudden radiance; Alcibiades
Divinely insolent, and Socrates
Battered and bruised in some prodigious strife.
All these I saw, and lingered, glad at heart,
In stately harbourage of gardens cool,
By splashing fountains, leafy colonnades,

White temples, bosomed deep in swelling woods,
Where slender statues seemed to tread on air.

And lastly, wearied of that bright young world
Of eager glances, laughing certainty,
I turned away, and drove my plough afield
In tangled wastes, Bengala and Cathay,
And stumbled through the tombs of nameless kings,
Old dynasties, and fierce outlandish saints,
Gods, demigods, till like a river vast
From cold Siberian hills, the stream of time,
By haggard capes and icy promontories,
Weltered and widened to a shapeless sea.

Yet to what purpose all this waste of years?
These vast abandoned schemes, these hopeless hopes?
I know not: save it were to warm and soothe
The shuddering soul, that fills its prison walls,
When blank and bare, with scrawls of boding fate,
And filmy shapes and dreary fantasies,
Yet pleased perchance — I bare my inmost thought!—
With shadowy fame, that like a royal cloak
Hung loose, and masked my wasted, naked frame.
And, while I scorned the crowd, yet pleased to note
That I was noted,—ah the sorry thought!—
When idle babblers hushed their vacant talk
To gaze at me, and whisper I was one
Who held deep converse with the secret muse.
It pleased me, ay it pleased, to wrest respect

For me, the scrivener's son, from ancient names,
Effete inheritors of sires, whose deeds
Are stamped and blazoned on the storied page;—
For witness ye:—beside our garden-end,
Behind the leafy butts, where Ridley loved
To walk, and con the scripture o'er and o'er,—
The hollow vaulted sphere of plaster, daubed
To show the posture of the firmament
To gazers, wondering at the measured chinks,
The levers and the wheels, who briskly praise
Our learned eccentric's ingenuities
Agape, yet never wondered at the stars,
Or stayed to gaze upon the enormous night.

O Earth, farewell, my Earth, whom I have loved
More like a patient lover than a child,
O leafy aisles, and winding rushy glades,
Deep forest dingles, where I loved to lie
Sequestered, while the sun wheeled overhead,
And westering tinged the glimmering boles with fire;—
The ragged raincloud beating from the West,
The pure and spacious morning:—I have watched
With faithful heart, and fond obsequious eye,
The sweep of punctual seasons, when the spring
Enlaced the privet hedge with tender spears,

And sudden greenness leapt from bush to bush,
When swelled the peach, when bulged the buxom plum,
When birds were mute, or fluted shrill and high,
What time the figtree furled her leafy claw,
And yellowing planetrees dangled velvet balls.

Ay, in pursuit of some unheeded spirit,
My weary foot in trackless solitudes
Has threaded slow, by high and heathery moors,
Through passes, where the dripping ledges lean
Together, and the writhing rowan clings,
And shows her fretted leaf against the sky,
Up to the brows of white and haggard rocks,
And shoots of stone, and caves, where clammy drops
Distil in horror from flinty the brows
Of mountains, monstrous fantasies of God.

All these I would have sung, but dim constraint
Pressed close my stammering lips and trembling tongue;
It needs some ready singer, some young heart
To throw a sacred sunshine of its own
On these dark haunts, and read the riddle right
Of monstrous laws, that work their purpose out
For trembling man, unheeding how they crush
A thousand hopes, so one sure step be gained,
One soul set higher on the stairs of God.
Not I, who scarce, through sad laborious days,
Can write, and blot, and write the languid verse,
Erase the erring strophe, gild the rhyme,

Set and reset the curious epithet,
And prune the rich parenthesis away;
Then thrust, but with a secret tenderness,
As erring maidens clasp their babes of shame,
My puny, piteous weakling from the doors.

And you, my friends, whose souls are knit with mine,
I would not linger late, and make parade
Of ceremonious weakness, fond adieux,
With grave-eyed piteous faces round my bed;
For some are passed beyond the life I know,
Who smile and beckon me in sudden dreams
With most unearthly radiance; some forget
The gracious years, or flourish, whirled away
On fuller tides; Horace, the ailing lord
Of plaster palaces and hollow groves,
Absorbed in half-a-hundred tiny arts,
Master of none; who cannot learn to merge
The fretful patron in the equal friend;—
The plump precentor, with his tragedies
And pompous odes, that tune their notes from mine
Yet droop and wither to a sickly end.
And last and dearest, he who flashed across
My wintry gloom, a sweet and vivid ray,

Flashed from a land of ancient mountainous snows,
Himself more pure, and charmed me from myself,
Out of my shadowy cave of bitter thoughts,
To that forgotten sunshine—seized my hands
With laughing hands, and drew from me my store
Of hoarded learning, while I learnt from him,
From those pure eyes so sweetly raised to mine,
By youthful jest and petulant questioning,
To stablish and repair my ancient faith
In gracious love and sweet humanities,
That in my sunless gloom had half decayed.

Farewell, beloved; child of my heart, farewell!
And ere the dark stream thrust me from the shore,
Know that these failing lips at last pronounced
A thousand blessings on my tender child.

And now once more, before the dizzy will
Relax her tremulous grip, ere nerve and limb
Prove traitor to the faint and failing brain,
I will look forth upon the spacious heaven,
Will mount the battlemented tower, and see
League upon league the interminable fen
Ripple his steely waters to the wind,
Glint in the horizon, break in reedy waves
On wooded islands crowned with byre and barn,
Where all day long the goodman biding hears

No sound save clack of waters, or the drum
Of bittern, or the curlew's whistle faint,
Or scream of ruffs, that stamp the marge to mire,
Or booming of a culver down the marsh,
Or grave entreating bells, that ring the folk
To sermon, in the pauses of the wind.

But I, beyond the fen, the holy towers,
Beyond the sluggish sea that laps the ooze
With melancholy murmur, hear a cry
That calls me, and is answered by the lapse
Of pulses throbbing faint, intimate pangs
Abhorred; as old dismantled priories,
That seem to doze across the summer fields,
Yet slip, dismembered by the intruding frost,
That cracks their hoary bones, and as they muse,
With sudden start and shock portend decay.

Dr. Roger Long, Master of Pembroke and Lowndean Professor of Astronomy (d. 1770), a learned and eccentric man, constructed a species of orrery or celestial sphere in a domed building in the corner of the inner court of Pembroke.

Horace Walpole.

William Mason, Precentor of York, and an indifferent poet.

Charles Victor de Bonstetten.

University of Virginia Library

THOMAS GRAY