ALCYONE

by
ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN

OTTAWA
JAMES OGILVY
1899

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty

TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
HIMSELF A POET
WHO FIRST INSTRUCTED ME
IN THE ART
OF VERSE.

CONTENTS

[ALCYONE]

In the silent depth of space,

Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,

Glittering with a silver flame

Through eternity,

Rolls a great and burning star,

With a noble name,

Alcyone!

In the glorious chart of heaven

It is marked the first of seven;

'Tis a Pleiad:

And a hundred years of earth

With their long-forgotten deeds have come and gone,

Since that tiny point of light,

Once a splendour fierce and bright,

Had its birth

In the star we gaze upon.

It has travelled all that time—

Thought has not a swifter flight—

Through a region where no faintest gust

Of life comes ever, but the power of night

Dwells stupendous and sublime,

Limitless and void and lonely,

A region mute with age, and peopled only

With the dead and ruined dust

Of worlds that lived eternities ago.

Man! when thou dost think of this,

And what our earth and its existence is,

The half-blind toils since life began,

The little aims, the little span,

With what passion and what pride,

And what hunger fierce and wide,

Thou dost break beyond it all,

Seeking for the spirit unconfined

In the clear abyss of mind

A shelter and a peace majestical.

For what is life to thee,

Turning toward the primal light,

With that stern and silent face,

If thou canst not be

Something radiant and august as night,

Something wide as space?

Therefore with a love and gratitude divine

Thou shalt cherish in thine heart for sign

A vision of the great and burning star,

Immeasurably old, immeasurably far,

Surging forth its silver flame

Through eternity;

And thine inner heart shall ring and cry

With the music strange and high,

The grandeur of its name

Alcyone!

[IN MARCH]

The sun falls warm: the southern winds awake:

The air seethes upward with a steamy shiver:

Each dip of the road is now a crystal lake,

And every rut a little dancing river.

Through great soft clouds that sunder overhead

The deep sky breaks as pearly blue as summer:

Out of a cleft beside the river's bed

Flaps the black crow, the first demure newcomer.

The last seared drifts are eating fast away

With glassy tinkle into glittering laces:

Dogs lie asleep, and little children play

With tops and marbles in the sunbare places;

And I that stroll with many a thoughtful pause

Almost forget that winter ever was.

[THE CITY OF THE END OF THINGS]

Beside the pounding cataracts

Of midnight streams unknown to us

'Tis builded in the leafless tracts

And valleys huge of Tartarus.

Lurid and lofty and vast it seems;

It hath no rounded name that rings,

But I have heard it called in dreams

The City of the End of Things.

Its roofs and iron towers have grown

None knoweth how high within the night,

But in its murky streets far down

A flaming terrible and bright

Shakes all the stalking shadows there,

Across the walls, across the floors,

And shifts upon the upper air

From out a thousand furnace doors;

And all the while an awful sound

Keeps roaring on continually,

And crashes in the ceaseless round

Of a gigantic harmony.

Through its grim depths re-echoing

And all its weary height of walls,

With measured roar and iron ring,

The inhuman music lifts and falls.

Where no thing rests and no man is,

And only fire and night hold sway;

The beat, the thunder and the hiss

Cease not, and change not, night nor day.

And moving at unheard commands,

The abysses and vast fires between,

Flit figures that with clanking hands

Obey a hideous routine;

They are not flesh, they are not bone,

They see not with the human eye,

And from their iron lips is blown

A dreadful and monotonous cry;

And whoso of our mortal race

Should find that city unaware,

Lean Death would smite him face to face,

And blanch him with its venomed air:

Or caught by the terrific spell,

Each thread of memory snapt and cut,

His soul would shrivel and its shell

Go rattling like an empty nut.

It was not always so, but once,

In days that no man thinks upon,

Fair voices echoed from its stones,

The light above it leaped and shone:

Once there were multitudes of men,

That built that city in their pride,

Until its might was made, and then

They withered age by age and died.

But now of that prodigious race,

Three only in an iron tower,

Set like carved idols face to face,

Remain the masters of its power;

And at the city gate a fourth,

Gigantic and with dreadful eyes,

Sits looking toward the lightless north,

Beyond the reach of memories;

Fast rooted to the lurid floor,

A bulk that never moves a jot,

In his pale body dwells no more,

Or mind, or soul,—an idiot!

But sometime in the end those three

Shall perish and their hands be still,

And with the master's touch shall flee

Their incommunicable skill.

A stillness absolute as death

Along the slacking wheels shall lie,

And, flagging at a single breath,

The fires shall moulder out and die.

The roar shall vanish at its height,

And over that tremendous town

The silence of eternal night

Shall gather close and settle down.

All its grim grandeur, tower and hall,

Shall be abandoned utterly,

And into rust and dust shall fall

From century to century;

Nor ever living thing shall grow,

Or trunk of tree, or blade of grass;

No drop shall fall, no wind shall blow,

Nor sound of any foot shall pass:

Alone of its accursèd state,

One thing the hand of Time shall spare,

For the grim Idiot at the gate

Is deathless and eternal there.

[THE SONG SPARROW]

Fair little scout, that when the iron year

Changes, and the first fleecy clouds deploy,

Comest with such a sudden burst of joy,

Lifting on winter's doomed and broken rear

That song of silvery triumph blithe and clear;

Not yet quite conscious of the happy glow,

We hungered for some surer touch, and lo!

One morning we awake, and thou art here.

And thousands of frail-stemmed hepaticas,

With their crisp leaves and pure and perfect hues,

Light sleepers, ready for the golden news,

Spring at thy note beside the forest ways—

Next to thy song, the first to deck the hour—

The classic lyrist and the classic flower.

[INTER VIAS]

'Tis a land where no hurricane falls,

But the infinite azure regards

Its waters for ever, its walls

Of granite, its limitless swards;

Where the fens to their innermost pool

With the chorus of May are aring,

And the glades are wind-winnowed and cool

With perpetual spring;

Where folded and half withdrawn

The delicate wind-flowers blow,

And the bloodroot kindles at dawn

Her spiritual taper of snow;

Where the limits are met and spanned

By a waste that no husbandman tills,

And the earth-old pine forests stand

In the hollows of hills.

'Tis the land that our babies behold,

Deep gazing when none are aware;

And the great-hearted seers of old

And the poets have known it, and there

Made halt by the well-heads of truth

On their difficult pilgrimage

From the rose-ruddy gardens of youth

To the summits of age.

Now too, as of old, it is sweet

With a presence remote and serene;

Still its byways are pressed by the feet

Of the mother immortal, its queen:

The huntress whose tresses, flung free,

And her fillets of gold, upon earth,

They only have honour to see

Who are dreamers from birth.

In her calm and her beauty supreme,

They have found her at dawn or at eve,

By the marge of some motionless stream,

Or where shadows rebuild or unweave

In a murmurous alley of pine,

Looking upward in silent surprise,

A figure, slow-moving, divine,

With inscrutable eyes.

[REFUGE]

Where swallows and wheatfields are,

O hamlet brown and still,

O river that shineth far,

By meadow, pier, and mill:

O endless sunsteeped plain,

With forests in dim blue shrouds,

And little wisps of rain,

Falling from far-off clouds:

I come from the choking air

Of passion, doubt, and strife,

With a spirit and mind laid bare

To your healing breadth of life:

O fruitful and sacred ground,

O sunlight and summer sky,

Absorb me and fold me round,

For broken and tired am I.

[APRIL NIGHT]

How deep the April night is in its noon,

The hopeful, solemn, many-murmured night!

The earth lies hushed with expectation; bright

Above the world's dark border burns the moon,

Yellow and large; from forest floorways, strewn

With flowers, and fields that tingle with new birth,

The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth

Comes up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon,

Ah, soon, the teeming triumph! At my feet

The river with its stately sweep and wheel

Moves on slow-motioned, luminous, grey like steel.

From fields far off whose watery hollows gleam,

Aye with blown throats that make the long hours sweet,

The sleepless toads are murmuring in their dream.

[PERSONALITY]

O differing human heart,

Why is it that I tremble when thine eyes,

Thy human eyes and beautiful human speech,

Draw me, and stir within my soul

That subtle ineradicable longing

For tender comradeship?

It is because I cannot all at once,

Through the half-lights and phantom-haunted mists

That separate and enshroud us life from life,

Discern the nearness or the strangeness of thy paths

Nor plumb thy depths.

I am like one that comes alone at night

To a strange stream, and by an unknown ford

Stands, and for a moment yearns and shrinks,

Being ignorant of the water, though so quiet it is,

So softly murmurous,

So silvered by the familiar moon.

[TO MY DAUGHTER]

O little one, daughter, my dearest,

With your smiles and your beautiful curls,

And your laughter, the brightest and clearest,

O gravest and gayest of girls;

With your hands that are softer than roses,

And your lips that are lighter than flowers,

And that innocent brow that discloses

A wisdom more lovely than ours;

With your locks that encumber, or scatter

In a thousand mercurial gleams,

And those feet whose impetuous patter

I hear and remember in dreams;

With your manner of motherly duty,

When you play with your dolls and are wise;

With your wonders of speech, and the beauty

In your little imperious eyes;

When I hear you so silverly ringing

Your welcome from chamber or stair.

When you run to me, kissing and clinging,

So radiant, so rosily fair;

I bend like an ogre above you;

I bury my face in your curls;

I fold you, I clasp you, I love you.

O baby, queen-blossom of girls!

[CHIONE]

Scarcely a breath about the rocky stair

Moved, but the growing tide from verge to verge,

Heaving salt fragrance on the midnight air,

Climbed with a murmurous and fitful surge.

A hoary mist rose up and slowly sheathed