AUTUMN VOICES:
SONNETS AND LYRICS (1883)
I.
SEVEN YEARS AGO
In this same spot seven years ago the love-god found me
And with a wayward wreath of trivial sweet flowers crowned me,—
Seven wild long years ago.
In this same spot to-day a tender new love finds me
And here again the sweet and wayward love-god binds me
(Though love's bonds melt like snow!)
Ah! ever so it is. For ever and for ever
The love-god haunts our steps, and yet his chains are never
Abiding and supreme.
Love's breath is as the breath of summer's countless roses:
Yet when the sweet long month of sunlit gardens closes
All rose-scent is a dream.
Seven years and then a love; and then it may be another;
Till the last strange-eyed love who hath for very brother
The dark-eyed god of death.
Seven years! That love should last so long is surely stranger
Than that, in spite of past love-pain and passionate danger,
A new love should draw breath.
Dark eyes my new love hath. Dark eyes and full of dreaming
Mine old love had. New dreams and very sweet are gleaming
In this girl's eyes to-day.—
Ah! twenty years ago the wanton wild sea-surges
Laughed as to-day. The wind to-day with wet wings urges
The white forgetful spray.
Star passes star. Yet each gave birth to love and glory.—
The very locks of Time grow scantier now and hoary.
Yet, when Time's hair was gold
And when Time's limbs were young, Love laughed amid the flowers
And sang amid the woods, and frolicked through the bowers,
And still Love is not old.
Where Nero walked, to-day the Roman maiden tarries
And puts aside the flowers her sunburnt soft hand carries
And gazes down the street.
The walls that oft of old watched old-world deeds with tragic
Mute eyes, see still the deeds of love, and hear the magic
Strange echo of love's feet.
So it goes on.—To-day thine eyes are dark and tender.
But, seven years hence, who knows what starry love and splendour
Of passion they may see?
The love that flies is sweet. The love that stays is sweeter.
But both have ready wings, and every love is fleeter
Than its own ecstasy.
The very stars are winged. Their bright plumes flutter o'er us:
They flaunt their golden shields and golden spears before us:
But these too fade and fall.—
Love is the key of life. A woman's kiss containeth
The secret power whereby strong history's grim god reigneth.
“Mysteries?”—The kiss of woman solveth all.
II.
TO ------ AND P. B. M.
To thee, fair love of mine, I used to read my verses.
But now of all Time's blows by far the bitterest curse is
That thou art far away.
But still God sends a friend. Thanks past all thanks I owe him,
Who has given his kindly heed to many a song and poem
By many a night and day.
Love, thou didst wear a crown of many-coloured flowers:
But he has gathered bays from the immortal bowers
Where song's god reigns supreme.
I thank God from my heart that I have had two hearers:
If these, and these alone, for joy's and sorrow's sharers,
My life, though dreary, is not all a dream.
III.
ON READING “WIND-VOICES,” BY PHILIP BOURKE MARSTON
“Wind-voices!” Yes: the wind's own voice is here,
The voice of every wind;—the voice that goes
Straight to the soft heart of the listening rose;
The voice that makes the seamen quake for fear
When the grim angry white-lipped reefs rise sheer
To leeward; and the voice that love's heart knows
When on the summer breeze a whisper grows
Yet more intense, more passionately clear.
Here is the thunder of the wind at sea,
And echo of the voice of passion's storm,
And loving message of the gentle warm
West Wind,—and here the North Wind's revelry:
And here the voice that makes the midnight strong
With love's despair transfigured into song.
IV.
TO P. B. M.
When the sweet golden unforeseen surprise
Of the eternal morning on thee breaks
And sudden ripples from the large light-lakes
Flood with swift brilliance thine awaking eyes,—
When the old weary dream of sorrow dies
For ever, and thy soul its pathway takes
Through regions where the heart of poet aches
No longer, nor the heart of lover sighs:—
Then, women thou hast loved will first await
Thy coming; I will stand aside for these.
But when their forms have passed outside the gate
To greet thee on the outer terraces,
That foremost greeting finished, then let none
Than my soul sooner, see thee see the sun.
V.
------ “Waits till the ship already in sight be free
To bear him back to his far natal shore,—
Back through the darkness and the awful sea.”
—Philip Bourke Marston
Yes, this is our reward.—Not life's fair dreams,
But the new-wakened and majestic sense
That after silent years of pain intense
Light, marvellous light, behind the hill-top gleams.
Not by life's pleasant blossom-bordered streams
To find our long-delayed large recompence,
But in soul-thrilling joy that through the dense
Dark worldly clogging air with golden beams
Darts on a sudden downward:—the wild hope
That not much longer shall this pain endure,—
This agony of fierce desire to cope
With all love's foes in wrestle close and sure;
That Fate shall free, ere long, our long-leashed breath
For the great charge along the slopes of death.
VI.
TO P. B. M.
IN MID-STREAM
Not to the placid heights of middle age
Let you and me with loitering steps ascend.
Nay, let us perish in the strife, O friend,
Where round the standard most the war-waves rage
If this be life—to move from stage to stage
And watch life's passion dwindle till the end
And slowly all our power of love expend,
Life then is poorer for each added page.
Nay! If our love and passion may not grow
And all the fire within our spirits gleam
With steadier, stronger, and diviner glow
Daily, mere living is a soulless dream.—
Love ever. Perish, if it must be so.
But perish buffeting the sweet mid-stream.
VII.
THE LIGHT OF BATTLE, AND THE LIGHT OF LOVE
The light of battle and the light that gleams
From woman's eyes—these are the rays divine
That on the passionate heart of manhood shine
And fill life's highways with tempestuous dreams.
The sweetest light of all is that which streams
Along the glistening bayonets' serried line
When, just now, under growth of rose or pine
Love lightened forth:—how close the memory seems!
Love in the heart, and the strong sword in hand:
The old Elizabethan bards loved so.
The heart of manhood has waxed faint and slow
To-day, and blood has left our thin-veined land,
And men have lost the power to understand
How through love's eyes the war-god's glances glow.
VIII.
AN IDEAL POET
Take Marlowe's splendid and impassioned heart,
Full of divine Elizabethan fire:
Take Shelley's tenderness, and Shelley's lyre,
And touch dim heights wherethrough strange starbeams dart:
Take Hugo's sovereign love and sense of Art,
And Musset's sweet insatiable desire,
And Byron's wrath at king and priest and liar—
These diverse gifts to one swift soul impart:—
Then over and above these several powers
Add Christ's own changeless spirit of love for men;
Mix Shelley's love for stars and birds and flowers
With Christ's unfathomed and immortal pain,—
With some such mingling of yet unmixed hours
Shall poets of the future sing and reign.
A HYMN OF IMMORTALITY
I
So many have gone before that now the further valleys
Are far more full of flowers and songs than sunlit alleys
Of earth's green woods forlorn.—
The hills of heaven resound to many a dead love's laughter:—
So many loves have gone! Shall we not hasten after?
So many loves are dead,—dead, or new-born!
II
Oh, surely heaven is full of sweet familiar faces,
And hyacinths are there and ferns from forest-places
That here we know so well!
So many flowers have died, since first the pain of living
Smote through our souls. Our world has been so great at giving.
Heaven must be sumptuous with our pine-woods' smell!
III
So many have gone before! The blossoms of all summers:
The leaves of every spring: the bees, those gay-coat mummers:
The gilded butterflies.—
Our generous earth has given so freely of its splendour
That all the shores of heaven must be fulfilled of tender
Light shed from sunlit and from moonlit skies!
IV
Heaven has the best of us! God steals our fairest faces.
Heaven envies earth, it seems, her passionate embraces,
And even her thymy hills,
And even the banks where bloom the violets pure and lowly
And where the green fern-fronds unwind their tresses slowly,
And even the soft low laughter of our rills.
V
God! is thine heaven devoid of children that thou takest
Ours? Is thine heaven devoid of passion that thou breakest
Our love-cups one by one?
God! is thine heaven devoid of starlight that thou stealest
Each morning all the stars,—of light since thou concealest
After earth's every sunset earth's own sun?
VI
So many have gone before,—bright petals, wings, and faces,—
That flowerless, loveless, dry, the old green flowerful places
Seem dead for evermore.
Yea: heaven it is which holds, as earth held once, our treasures.
We started first from heaven, and now our bark remeasures
The lonely waters to the primal shore.
VII
Earth we have tried: which lay before us like an island
Divine 'mid waters blue and bright with mist-clad highland
Beneath the morning sun.
Earth we have tried; and tried the love-lips of its daughters,
And stooped our lips to drink its silvery running waters:
And now we are weary,—and our task is done.
VIII
Now in the evening glow that falleth strange and solemn
Across the waters grey and lights the last tree-column
On the old isle of Earth,
With hearts too full to speak, with longings unavailing
Towards deathland whence we came, or birthland, we are sailing—
But not now round us rings the morning's mirth.
IX
Not now around us shine the love-looks that we cherished!
How many and many a friend in earth's green vales has perished,
Exploring through the day
The hills and nooks and dells that seemed so fair and harmless.
Full of young strength we came: but strengthless now and armless
We travel backward through the lonely grey.
X
How solemn and how weird, over the silent water,
That far-lit fir-clump gleams! There kissed we an earth-daughter
(How many years ago?)
That far blue lonely hill rang once with shouts so merry
That the birds glanced aside from threatened husk or berry
To wonder what could move man's laughter so!
XI
Beside that hazel-copse shone eyes so sweet and fearless
That for their sake it seemed the whole world must be tearless
For ever and evermore!
Where are those eyes to-day? Ah! not on board our vessel.
Gaze backward, as the keel with onward waves doth wrestle:
Mark you that white stone on the sunless shore?
XII
Within that forest sleeps another and another.
A child within that glade: a grey-haired well-loved mother
Within those garden-walls.
Across the foam-flecked deep their dim eyes seem to glisten:
But dimmer are our eyes, as our strained ears would listen
To every voice whose old soft whisper calls.
XIII
Their spirits have crossed the deep before us. As we follow,
Obscurer grow the earth's green glades and very hollow
Her old love-laughter rings!
Oh not behind,—in front the white hands wait and beckon:—
The welcoming looks upon death's stately shores we reckon
By the tombstones of summers and past springs.
XIV
The earth fades out of sight. We cross the cold grey water,
Almost alone at last.—Flower-son and blossom-daughter,
Flower-wife and mother-flower,
Not these are with us now. They all have passed before us.
For our death-psalm we have the white waves' sobbing chorus:
Salt air and moonlight for our last love-bower.
XV
But oh how full is death, or heaven, of friendly faces!
More full of joyous bloom than ever the old green places
In the earth's old best days were
Are those wan shores whose peaks now just begin to waver
In the wild light of dawn: whence unknown blossom-savour
Floats towards us faintly through the blue night-air.
July, 1883.
