POEMS
——
EDWARD DOWDEN

POEMS

BY
EDWARD DOWDEN

MCMXIV. J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
LONDON AND TORONTO

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Goethe says in a little poem[A] that “Poems are stained glass windows”—“Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben”—to be seen aright not from the “market-place” but only from the interior of the church, “die heilige Kapelle”: and that “der Herr Philister” (equivalent for “indolent Reviewer”) glances at them from without and gets out of temper because he finds them unintelligible from his “market-place” standpoint. This comparison is a pretty conceit, and holds good as a half truth—but not more than a half: for while the artist who paints his “church windows” needs only to make them beautiful from within, the maker of poems must so shape and colour his work that its outer side—the technical, towards the “market-place” of the public—shall have no lack of beauty, though differing from the beauty visible from the spiritual interior.

[A] “Sechzehn Parabeln,” Gedichte, Leoper’s edition (p. 180) of Goethe’s Gedichte.

The old volume of Edward Dowden’s Poems of 1876, which is now reprinted with additions, has been, to a limited extent, long before the public—seen from the “market-place” by general critics, who, for the most part, approved the outer side of the “painted windows,” and seen perhaps from within by some few like-minded readers, who, though no definite door was opened into “die heilige Kapelle,” somehow entered in.

But a great many people, to whom the author’s prose works are well known, have never even heard that he had written poetry. This is due in a measure to the fact that the published book of poems only got into circulation by its first small edition. Its second edition found a silent apotheosis in flame at a great fire at the publisher’s in London, in which nearly the whole of it perished.

Edward Dowden’s chief work has been as a prose writer. That fact remains—yet it is accidental rather than essential. In the early seventies he felt the urge very strongly towards making verse his vocation in life, and he probably would have yielded to it, but for the necessity to be bread-winner for a much-loved household. Poetry is a ware of small commercial value, as most poets—at least for a long space of their lives—have known, and prose, for even a young writer of promise, held out prospects of bread for immediate eating. Hence to prose he turned, and on that road went his way, and whether the accidental circumstances that determined his course at the parting of the ways wrought loss or gain for our literature, who can say?

But he never wholly abandoned verse, and all through his life, even to the very end, he would fitfully, from time to time, utter in it a part of himself which never found complete issue in prose and which was his most real self.

Perhaps the nearest approaches to his utterance in poetry occurred sometimes in his College lecturing, when in the midst of a written discourse he would interrupt it and stop and liberate his heart in a little rush of words—out of the depths, accompanied by that familiar gesture of his hands which always came to him when emotionally stirred in speaking. Some of his students have told me that they usually found those little extempore bits in a lecture by far the most illuminated and inspiring parts of it, especially as it was then that his voice, always musical in no common degree, vibrated, and acquired a richer tone.

In his prose writings in general he seemed to curb and restrain himself. That he did so was by no means an evil, for the habitual retinence in his style gave to the little rare outbreaks of emotion the quality of charm that we find in a tender flower growing out of a solid stone wall unexpectedly.

Not infrequently a sort of hard irony was employed by him, as restraint on enthusiasm, with occasional loosening of the curb.

In Edward Dowden’s soul there seemed to be capacities which might, under other circumstances, have made him more than a minor poet. His was a more than usually rich, sensuous nature. This, combined with absolute purity—the purity not of ice and snow, but of fire. And, superadded, was an unlimited capacity for sternness—that quality which, as salt, acts as preservative of all human ardours. He came from his Maker, fashioned out of the stuff whereof are made saints, patriots, martyrs, and the great lovers in the world. His work as a scholar never obliterated anything of this in him. By this, his erudition gained richness—the richness of vital blood. It was as no anæmic recluse that he dwelt amongst his book-shelves, and hence no Faust-like weariness of intellectual satiety ever came to him, no sense of being “beschränkt mit diesem Bücherhauf” in his surroundings of his library (which latterly had grown to some twenty-four thousand volumes). He lived in company with these in a twofold way, keenly and accurately grasping all their textual details, and at the same time valuing them for the sake, chiefly, of spiritual converse with the writers.

Besides the spiritual converse he gained thus, he found, as a book-lover, a fertile source of recreation in the collecting of literary rarities, old books, MSS. and curiosities. In this he felt the keen zest of a sportsman. This was his shooting on the moors, his fishing in the rivers. No living creature ever lost its life for his amusement, but in this innocuous play he found unfailing pleasure, and many a piece of luck he had with his gun or rod in hitting some rare bird, or landing some big prize of a fish out of old booksellers’ catalogues or the “carts” in the back streets.

His physical nature was fully and strongly developed, and it is out of strong physical instincts that strong spiritual instincts often grow—the boundary line between them being undefined.

His one athletic exercise—swimming—was to him a joy of no common sort. He gave himself to the sea with an eagerness of body, soul and spirit, breasting the bright waters exultingly on many a summer’s day on some West of Ireland or Cornish shore, revelling in the sea’s life and in his own.

And akin to that, in the sensuous, spiritual region of the soul, was his feeling for all External Nature, his deep delight in the coming of each new Spring—its blackthorn blossoms, its hazel and willow catkins, its daffodils—and his response, as the year went on in its procession, to the glory of the furze and heather glow and to all Earth’s sounds and silences.

And of a like sort was his enjoyment of music which had the depth of a passion.

Very possibly, if his lot had been cast in early Christian or mediæval times, all these impulses towards the joy and beauty of the earth might have been sternly crushed out by the moral forces of his character.

Looking at a picture of St. Jerome one day—not unlike E. D. in feature—I said to him, “There’s what you would have been if you had lived in those times.” (The saint is depicted there as lean, emaciated and woefully dirty!).

It was well for Edward Dowden that he was laid hold of in his early life by that great non-ascetic soul, William Wordsworth. He was initiated into the inner secret of Wordsworth. He had experience of the Wordsworthian ecstasy—that ecstasy which comes, if at all, straight as a gift from God, and is not to be taught by the teaching of the scribes.

Through kinship a man who is born potentially a poet comes first into relation with poets, and with E. Dowden’s sensuousness of capacities it was natural that he should be in his early years attracted to Keats, to the long, deep, rich dwelling of his verse on the vision and the sounds of Nature. It was not until he had advanced some way towards middle life that he came into vital contact with Shelley. He had felt aloof from him; but the attraction, when once owned, became very powerful, and he yielded to the delight of the swift motion of the Shelleyan utterances.

He always recognized Robert Browning’s greatness profoundly, and responded to all his best truths, especially as regards the relation, in love, of Man and Woman, but he never became pledged to an all-round Browning worship; his admiration had no discipleship in it.

For Walt Whitman, with whom a personal friendship, strong on both sides, was formed, he felt the cordial reverence due to the giver of what he reckoned as a gift of immense value. While condemning whatever was unreticent in Leaves of Grass, he at the same time saw there the great flood of spirituality available as a force for emancipation of our hearts from pressure of sordidnesses in the world.

It is somewhat remarkable that with all his trend towards the great spiritual and mystical forces in literature he was all along never without a keen appreciation of the writers who brought mundane shrewdness and wisdom. The first book he bought for himself in childhood with the hoarded savings of his pocket-money was Bacon’s Essays, with which as a small boy he became very familiar. And all through his life he sought with unfailing pleasure the companionship of Jane Austen again and again. And amongst the books which he himself made, it was perhaps his Montaigne that gave him, in the process of making, the delicatest satisfaction—the satisfaction of witnessing and analysing the dexterous play of human intellect and character on low levels.

His attraction to Goethe—very dominant with him in middle life—came, I imagine, from the fact that he saw in that mightiest of the Teutons two diverse qualities in operation—the measureless intellectual spirituality and the vast common-sense of mundane wisdom.

In this attraction there was also the element of the magnetism which draws together opposites—not less forcible than the attraction between affinities.

As regards the moral nature, his own was as far as the North Pole is from the South from that of the great sage of Weimar, whose serenely-wise beneficence contained no potentialities of sainthood, martyrdom or absolute human love. He sought gain from Goethe just because of that unlikeness to what was in himself.

At one period of his literary work he was intending to make as his “opus magnus” a full study of Goethe’s life and works, and with that intent he carried on a course of reading, and laid in a great equipment of workman’s tools—Goethe books in German, French and English. From this project he was turned aside by a call to write the life of Shelley—a long and difficult task. But he never lost sight of Goethe. In one of the later years of his life, as recreation in a summer’s holiday in Cornwall, he translated the whole of the “West-Eastern Divan” into English verse, and previously, from time to time, isolated essays on Goethe themes appeared amongst his prose writings. And yet it is not unlikely that even if the task of Shelley’s biography had not intervened, no complete study, such as he had at first planned, might have been ever accomplished by him on Goethe, for with experience there came to him a growing conviction that his best work in criticism could only be done in dealing with what was written in his mother-tongue.

Some of Edward Dowden’s friends, Nationalist and Unionist both, have felt regret that he, the gentle scholar, gave such large share of his energies to the strife of politics, as if force were subtracted thereby from his work in Literature. They are mistaken. The output of energy thus given came back to the giver, reinforcing his prose writing with a mundane vigour and virility, exceeding what it might have had if he had kept himself aloof from the affairs of the nation.

Yet, strangely enough, between his politics and his poetry there was a water-tight wall of separation. Other men, to take scattered instances, Kipling, Wordsworth, Milton, fused in various ways their political feeling and their poetical. This Edward Dowden never attempted. I cannot analyse the “why.”

Confining myself to some points which seem left out of sight in most of the admirably appreciative obituary notices in last April’s newspapers, I have tried to say here, in a fragmentary way, a few things about a man of whom many things—infinitely many—might be said without exhausting the total. He was himself at the same time many and one. He had multiform aspects—interests very diverse—and yet life was for him in no wise “patchy and scrappy,” but had unity throughout.

In Shakespeare, whose faithful scholar he was, there are diversities: and yet, do we not image Shakespeare to our minds as one and a whole?

In the volumes now issued by Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons is contained all the verse that the author left available for publication, with the exception of a sequence of a hundred and one lyrics (which by desire is separately published under the somewhat transparent disguise of editorship). That little sequence, named A Woman’s Reliquary, is his latest work in verse. Much in it re-echoes sounds that can be heard in his old poems of the early seventies.

E. D. D.

September 1913.

THE WANDERER

I cast my anchor nowhere (the waves whirled
My anchor from me); East and West are one
To me; against no winds are my sails furled;
—Merely my planet anchors to the Sun.

THE FOUNTAIN
(An Introduction To the Sonnets)

Hush, let the fountain murmur dim
Melodious secrets; stir no limb,
But lie along the marge and wait,
Till deep and pregnant as with fate,
Fine as a star-beam, crystal-clear,
Each ripple grows upon the ear.
This is that fountain seldom seen
By mortal wanderer,—Hippocrene,—
Where the virgins three times three,
Thy singing brood, Mnemosyne,
Loosen’d the girdle, and with grave
Pure joy their faultless bodies gave
To sacred pleasure of the wave.
Listen! the lapsing waters tell
The urgence uncontrollable
Which makes the trouble of their breast,
And bears them onward with no rest
To ampler skies and some grey plain
Sad with the tumbling of the main.
But see, a sidelong eddy slips
Back into the soft eclipse
Of day, while careless fate allows,
Darkling beneath still olive boughs;
Then with chuckle liquid sweet
Coils within its shy retreat;
This is mine, no wave of might,
But pure and live with glimmering light;
I dare not follow that broad flood
Of Poesy, whose lustihood
Nourishes mighty lands, and makes
Resounding music for their sakes;
I lie beside the well-head clear
With musing joy, with tender fear,
And choose for half a day to lean
Thus on my elbow where the green
Margin-grass and silver-white
Starry buds, the wind’s delight,
Thirsting steer, nor goat-hoof rude
Of the branch-sundering Satyr brood
Has ever pashed; now, now, I stoop,
And in hand-hollow dare to scoop
This scantling from the delicate stream;
It lies as quiet as a dream,
And lustrous in my curvèd hand.
Were it a crime if this were drain’d
By lips which met the noonday blue
Fiery and emptied of its dew?
Crown me with small white marish-flowers!
To the good Dæmon, and the Powers
Of this fair haunt I offer up
In unprofanèd lily-cup
Libations; still remains for me
A bird’s drink of clear Poesy;
Yet not as light bird comes and dips
A pert bill, but with reverent lips
I drain this slender trembling tide;
O sweet the coolness at my side,
And, lying back, to slowly pry
For spaces of the upper sky
Radiant ’twixt woven olive leaves;
And, last, while some fair show deceives
The closing eyes, to find a sleep
As full of healing and as deep
As on toil-worn Odysseus lay
Surge-swept to his Ionian bay.

IN THE GALLERIES

I. THE APOLLO BELVEDERE

Radiance invincible! Is that the brow
Which gleamed on Python while thy arrow sped?
Are those the lips for Hyacinthus dead
That grieved? Wherefore a God indeed art thou:
For all we toil with ill, and the hours bow
And break us, and at best when we have bled,
And are much marred, perchance propitiated
A little doubtful victory they allow:
We sorrow, and thenceforth the lip retains
A shade, and the eyes shine and wonder less.
O joyous Slayer of evil things! O great
And splendid Victor! God, whom no soil stains
Of passion or doubt, of grief or languidness,
—Even to worship thee I come too late.

II. THE VENUS OF MELOS

Goddess, or woman nobler than the God,
No eyes a-gaze upon Ægean seas
Shifting and circling past their Cyclades
Saw thee. The Earth, the gracious Earth, wastrod
First by thy feet, while round thee lay her broad
Calm harvests, and great kine, and shadowing trees,
And flowers like queens, and a full year’s increase,
Clusters, ripe berry, and the bursting pod.
So thy victorious fairness, unallied
To bitter things or barren, doth bestow
And not exact; so thou art calm and wise;
Thy large allurement saves; a man may grow
Like Plutarch’s men by standing at thy side,
And walk thenceforward with clear-visioned eyes!

III. ANTINOUS CROWNED AS BACCHUS

(In the British Museum)

Who crowned thy forehead with the ivy wreath
And clustered berries burdening the hair?
Who gave thee godhood, and dim rites? Beware
O beautiful, who breathest mortal breath,
Thou delicate flame great gloom environeth!
The gods are free, and drink a stainless air,
And lightly on calm shoulders they upbear
A weight of joy eternal, nor can Death
Cast o’er their sleep the shadow of her shrine.
O thou confessed too mortal by the o’er-fraught
Crowned forehead, must thy drooped eyes ever see
The glut of pleasure, those pale lips of thine
Still suck a bitter-sweet satiety,
Thy soul descend through cloudy realms of thought?

IV. LEONARDO’S “MONNA LISA”

Make thyself known, Sibyl, or let despair
Of knowing thee be absolute; I wait
Hour-long and waste a soul. What word of fate
Hides ’twixt the lips which smile and still forbear?
Secret perfection! Mystery too fair!
Tangle the sense no more lest I should hate
Thy delicate tyranny, the inviolate
Poise of thy folded hands, thy fallen hair.
Nay, nay,—I wrong thee with rough words; still be
Serene, victorious, inaccessible;
Still smile but speak not; lightest irony
Lurk ever ’neath thine eyelids’ shadow; still
O’ertop our knowledge; Sphinx of Italy
Allure us and reject us at thy will!

V. ST LUKE PAINTING THE VIRGIN

(By Van der Weyden)

It was Luke’s will; and she, the mother-maid,
Would not gainsay; to please him pleased her best;
See, here she sits with dovelike heart at rest
Brooding, and smoothest brow; the babe is laid
On lap and arm, glad for the unarrayed
And swatheless limbs he stretches; lightly pressed
By soft maternal fingers the full breast
Seeks him, while half a sidelong glance is stayed
By her own bosom and half passes down
To reach the boy. Through doors and window-frame
Bright airs flow in; a river tranquilly
Washes the small, glad Netherlandish town.
Innocent calm! no token here of shame,
A pierced heart, sunless heaven, and Calvary.

ON THE HEIGHTS

Here are the needs of manhood satisfied!
Sane breath, an amplitude for soul and sense,
The noonday silence of the summer hills,
And this embracing solitude; o’er all
The sky unsearchable, which lays its claim,—
A large redemption not to be annulled,—
Upon the heart; and far below, the sea
Breaking and breaking, smoothly, silently.
What need I any further? Now once more
My arrested life begins, and I am man
Complete with eye, heart, brain, and that within
Which is the centre and the light of being;
O dull! who morning after morning chose
Never to climb these gorse and heather slopes
Cairn-crowned, but last within one seaward nook
Wasted my soul on the ambiguous speech
And slow eye-mesmerism of rolling waves,
Courting oblivion of the heart. True life
That was not which possessed me while I lay
Prone on the perilous edge, mere eye and ear,
Staring upon the bright monotony,
Having let slide all force from me, each thought
Yield to the vision of the gleaming blank,
Each nerve of motion and of sense grow numb,
Till to the bland persuasion of some breeze,
Which played across my forehead and my hair,
The lost volition would efface itself,
And I was mingled wholly in the sound
Of tumbling billow and upjetting surge,
Long reluctation, welter and refluent moan,
And the reverberating tumultuousness
’Mid shelf and hollow and angle black with spray.
Yet under all oblivion there remained
A sense of some frustration, a pale dream
Of Nature mocking man, and drawing down,
As streams draw down the dust of gold, his will,
His thought and passion to enrich herself
The insatiable devourer.

Welcome earth,
My natural heritage! and this soft turf,
These rocks which no insidious ocean saps,
But the wide air flows over, and the sun
Illumines. Take me, Mother, to thy breast,
Gather me close in tender, sustinent arms,
Lay bare thy bosom’s sweetness and its strength
That I may drink vigour and joy and love.
Oh, infinite composure of the hills!
Thou large simplicity of this fair world,
Candour and calmness, with no mockery,
No soft frustration, flattering sigh or smile
Which masks a tyrannous purpose; and ye Powers
Of these sky-circled heights, and Presences
Awful and strict, I find you favourable,
Who seek not to exclude me or to slay,
Rather accept my being, take me up
Into your silence and your peace. Therefore
By him whom ye reject not, gracious Ones,
Pure vows are made that haply he will be
Not all unworthy of the world; he casts
Forth from him, never to resume again,
Veiled nameless things, frauds of the unfilled heart,
Fantastic pleasures, delicate sadnesses,
The lurid, and the curious, and the occult,
Coward sleights and shifts, the manners of the slave,
And long unnatural uses of dim life.
Hence with you! Robes of angels touch these heights
Blown by pure winds and I lay hold upon them.

Here is a perfect bell of purple heath,
Made for the sky to gaze at reverently,
As faultless as itself, and holding light,
Glad air and silence in its slender dome;
Small, but a needful moment in the sum
Of God’s full joy—the abyss of ecstasy
O’er which we hang as the bright bow of foam
Above the never-filled receptacle
Hangs seven-hued where the endless cataract leaps.

O now I guess why you have summoned me,
Headlands and heights, to your companionship;
Confess that I this day am needful to you!
The heavens were loaded with great light, the winds
Brought you calm summer from a hundred fields,
All night the stars had pricked you to desire,
The imminent joy at its full season flowered,
There was a consummation, the broad wave
Toppled and fell. And had ye voice for this?
Sufficient song to unburden the urged breast?
A pastoral pipe to play? a lyre to touch?
The brightening glory of the heath and gorse
Could not appease your passion, nor the cry
Of this wild bird that flits from bush to bush.
Me therefore you required, a voice for song,
A pastoral pipe to play, a lyre to touch,
I recognize your bliss to find me here;
The sky at morning when the sun upleaps
Demands her atom of intense melody,
Her point of quivering passion and delight,
And will not let the lark’s heart be at ease.
Take me, the brain with various, subtile fold,
The breast that knows swift joy, the vocal lips;
I yield you here the cunning instrument
Between your knees; now let the plectrum fall!

“LA RÉVÉLATION PAR LE DÉSERT”

“Toujours le désert se montre à l’horizon, quand vous prononcez le nom de Jéhovah.”
Edgar Quinet.

Beyond the places haunted by the feet
Of thoughts and swift desires, and where the eyes
Of wing’d imaginings are wild, and dreams
Glide by on noiseless plumes, beyond the dim
Veiled sisterhood of ever-circling mists,
Who dip their urns in those enchanted meres
Where all thought fails, and every ardour dies,
And through the vapour dead looms a low moon,
Beyond the fountains of the dawn, beyond
The white home of the morning star, lies spread
A desert lifeless, bright, illimitable,
The world’s confine, o’er which no sighing goes
From weary winds of Time.

I sat me down
Upon a red stone flung on the red sand,
In length as great as some sarcophagus
Which holds a king, but scribbled with no runes,
Bald, and unstained by lichen or grey moss.
Save me no living thing in that red land
Showed under heaven; no furtive lizard slipped,
No desert weed pushed upward the tough spine
Or hairy lump, no slow bird was a spot
Of moving black on the deserted air,
Or stationary shrilled his tuneless cry;
No shadow stirr’d, nor luminous haze uprose,
Quivering against the blanched blue of the marge.
I sat unbonneted, and my throat baked,
And my tongue loll’d dogwise. Red sand below,
And one unlidded eye above—mere God
Blazing from marge to marge. I did not pray,
My heart was as a cinder in my breast,
And with both hands I held my head which throbbed.
I, who had sought for God, had followed God
Through the fair world which stings with sharp desire
For him of whom its hints and whisperings are,
Its gleams and tingling moments of the night,
I, who in flower, and wave, and mountain-wind,
And song of bird, and man’s diviner heart
Had owned the present Deity, yet strove
For naked access to his inmost shrine,—
Now found God doubtless, for he filled the heaven
Like brass, he breathed upon the air like fire.
But I, a speck ’twixt the strown sand and sky,
Being yet an atom of pure and living will,
And perdurable as any God of brass,
With all my soul, with all my mind and strength
Hated this God. O, for a little cloud
No bigger than a man’s hand on the rim,
To rise with rain and thunder in its womb,
And blot God out! But no such cloud would come.
I felt my brain on fire, heard each pulse tick;
It was a God to make a man stark mad;
I rose with neck out-thrust, and nodding head,
While with dry chaps I could not choose but laugh;
Ha, ha, ha, ha, across the air it rang,
No sweeter than the barking of a dog,
Hard as the echo from an iron cliff;
It must have buffeted the heaven; I ceased,
I looked to see from the mid sky an arm,
And one sweep of the scimitar; I stood;
And when the minute passed with no event,
No doomsman’s stroke, no sundering soul and flesh,
When silence dropt its heavy fold on fold,
And God lay yet inert in heaven, or scorn’d
His rebel antic-sized, grotesque,—I swooned.

Now when the sense returned my lips were wet,
And cheeks and chin were wet, with a dank dew,
Acrid and icy, and one shadow huge
Hung over me blue-black, while all around
The fierce light glared. O joy, a living thing,
Emperor of this red domain of sand,
A giant snake! One fold, one massy wreath
Arched over me; a man’s expanded arms
Could not embrace the girth of this great lord
In his least part, and low upon the sand
His small head lay, wrinkled, a flaccid bag,
Set with two jewels of green fire, the eyes
That had not slept since making of the world.
Whence grew I bold to gaze into such eyes?
Thus gazing each conceived the other’s thought,
Aware how each read each; the Serpent mused,
“Are all the giants dead, a long time dead,
Born of the broad-hipped women, grave and tall,
In whom God’s sons poured a celestial seed?
A long time dead, whose great deeds filled the earth
With clamour as of beaten shields, all dead,
And Cush and Canaan, Mizraim and Phut,
And the boy Nimrod storming through large lands
Like earthquake through tower’d cities, these depart,
And what remains? Behold, the elvish thing
We raised from out his swoon, this now is man.
The pretty vermin! helpless to conceive
Of great, pure, simple sin, and vast revolt;
The world escapes from deluge these new days,
We build no Babels with the Shinar slime;
What would this thin-legged grasshopper with us,
The Dread Ones? Rather let him skip, and chirp
Hymns in his smooth grass to his novel God,
‘The Father’; here no bland paternity
He meets, but visible Might blocks the broad sky,
My great Co-mate, the Ancient. Hence! avoid!
What wouldst thou prying on our solitude?
For thee my sly small cousin may suffice,
And sly small bites about the heart and groin;
Hence to his haunt! Yet ere thou dost depart
I mark thee with my sign.”

A vibrant tongue
Had in a moment pricked upon my brow
The mystic mark of brotherhood, Cain’s brand,
But when I read within his eyes the words
“Hence” and “avoid,” dim horror seized on me,
And rising, with both arms stretched forth, and head
Bowed earthward, and not turning once I ran;
And what things saw me as I raced by them,
What hands plucked at my dress, what light wings brushed
My face, what waters in my hearing seethed,
I know not, till I reached familiar lands,
And saw grey clouds slow gathering for the night,
Above sweet fields, whence the June mowers strolled
Homewards with girls who chatted down the lane.

Is this the secret lying round the world?
A Dread One watching with unlidded eye
Slow century after century from his heaven,
And that great lord, the worm of the red plain,
Cold in mid sun, strenuous, untameable,
Coiling his solitary strength along
Slow century after century, conscious each
How in the life of his Arch-enemy
He lives, how ruin of one confounds the pair,—
Is this the eternal dual mystery?
One Source of being, Light, or Love, or Lord,
Whose shadow is the brightness of the world,
Still let thy dawns and twilights glimmer pure
In flow perpetual from hill to hill,
Still bathe us in thy tides of day and night;
Wash me at will a weed in thy free wave,
Drenched in the sun and air and surge of Thee.

THE MORNING STAR

I

Backward betwixt the gates of steepest heaven,
Faint from the insupportable advance
Of light confederate in the East, is driven

The starry chivalry, and helm and lance,
Which held keen ward upon the shadowy plain,
Yield to the stress and stern predominance

Of Day; no wanderer morning-moon awane
Floats through dishevelled clouds, exanimate,
In disarray, with gaze of weariest pain;

O thou, sole Splendour, sprung to vindicate
Night’s ancient fame, thou in dread strife serene,
With back-blown locks, joyous yet desperate

Flamest; from whose pure ardour Earth doth win
High passionate pangs, thou radiant paladin.

II

Nay; strife must cease in song: far-sent and clear
Piercing the silence of this summer morn
I hear thy swan-song rapturous; I hear

Life’s ecstasy; sharp cries of flames which burn
With palpitating joy, intense and pure,
From altars of the universe, and yearn

In eager spires; and under these the sure
Strong ecstasy of Death, in phrase too deep
For thought, too bright for dim investiture.

Of mortal words, and sinking more than sleep
Down holier places of the soul’s delight;
Cry, through the quickening dawn, to us who creep

’Mid dreams and dews of the dividing night,
Thou searcher of the darkness and the light.

III

I seek thee, and thou art not; for the sky
Has drawn thee in upon her breast to be
A hidden talisman, while light soars high,

Virtuous to make wide heaven’s tranquillity
More tranquil, and her steadfast truth more true,
Yea even her overbowed infinity.

Of tenderness, when o’er wet woods the blue
Shows past white edges of a sundering cloud,
More infinitely tender. Day is new,

Night ended; how the hills are overflowed
With spaciousness of splendour, and each tree
Is touched; only not yet the lark is loud,

Since viewless still o’er city and plain and sea
Vibrates thy spirit-wingèd ecstasy.

A CHILD’S NOONDAY SLEEP

Because you sleep, my child, with breathing light
As heave of the June sea,
Because your lips soft petals dewy-bright
Dispart so tenderly;

Because the slumbrous warmth is on your cheek
Up from the hushed heart sent,
And in this midmost noon when winds are weak
No cloud lies more content;

Because nor song of bird, nor lamb’s keen call
May reach you sunken deep,
Because your lifted arm I thus let fall
Heavy with perfect sleep;

Because all will is drawn from you, all power,
And Nature through dark roots
Will hold and nourish you for one sweet hour
Amid her flowers and fruits;

Therefore though tempests gather, and the gale
Through autumn skies will roar,
Though Earth send up to heaven the ancient wail
Heard by dead Gods of yore;

Though spectral faiths contend, and for her course
The soul confused must try,
While through the whirl of atoms and of force
Looms an abandoned sky;

Yet, know I, Peace abides, of earth’s wild things
Centre, and ruling thence;
Behold, a spirit folds her budded wings
In confident innocence.

IN THE GARDEN

I. THE GARDEN

Past the town’s clamour is a garden full
Of loneness and old greenery; at noon
When birds are hushed, save one dim cushat’s croon,
A ripen’d silence hangs beneath the cool
Great branches; basking roses dream and drop
A petal, and dream still; and summer’s boon
Of mellow grasses, to be levelled soon
By a dew-drenchèd scythe, will hardly stop
At the uprunning mounds of chestnut trees.
Still let me muse in this rich haunt by day,
And know all night in dusky placidness
It lies beneath the summer, while great ease
Broods in the leaves, and every light wind’s stress
Lifts a faint odour down the verdurous way.

II. VISIONS

Here I am slave of visions. When noon heat
Strikes the red walls, and their environ’d air
Lies steep’d in sun; when not a creature dare
Affront the fervour, from my dim retreat
Where woof of leaves embowers a beechen seat,
With chin on palm, and wide-set eyes I stare,
Beyond the liquid quiver and the glare,
Upon fair shapes that move on silent feet.
Those Three strait-robed, and speechless as they pass,
Come often, touch the lute, nor heed me more
Than birds or shadows heed; that naked child
Is dove-like Psyche slumbering in deep grass;
Sleep, sleep,—he heeds thee not, you Sylvan wild
Munching the russet apple to its core.

III. AN INTERIOR

The grass around my limbs is deep and sweet;
Yonder the house has lost its shadow wholly,
The blinds are dropped, and softly now and slowly
The day flows in and floats; a calm retreat
Of tempered light where fair things fair things meet;
White busts and marble Dian make it holy,
Within a niche hangs Dürer’s Melancholy
Brooding; and, should you enter, there will greet
Your sense with vague allurement effluence faint
Of one magnolia bloom; fair fingers draw
From the piano Chopin’s heart-complaint;
Alone, white-robed she sits; a fierce macaw
On the verandah, proud of plume and paint,
Screams, insolent despot, showing beak and claw.

IV. THE SINGER

“That was the thrush’s last good-night,” I thought,
And heard the soft descent of summer rain
In the drooped garden leaves; but hush! again
The perfect iterance,—freer than unsought
Odours of violets dim in woodland ways,
Deeper than coilèd waters laid a-dream
Below mossed ledges of a shadowy stream,
And faultless as blown roses in June days.
Full-throated singer! art thou thus anew
Voiceful to hear how round thyself alone
The enrichèd silence drops for thy delight
More soft than snow, more sweet than honey-dew?
Now cease: the last faint western streak is gone,
Stir not the blissful quiet of the night.

V. A SUMMER MOON

Queen-moon of this enchanted summer night,
One virgin slave companioning thee,—I lie
Vacant to thy possession as this sky
Conquered and calmed by thy rejoicing might;
Swim down through my heart’s deep, thou dewy bright
Wanderer of heaven, till thought must faint and die,
And I am made all thine inseparably,
Resolved into the dream of thy delight.
Ah no! the place is common for her feet,
Not here, not here,—beyond the amber mist,
And breadths of dusky pine, and shining lawn,
And unstirred lake, and gleaming belts of wheat,
She comes upon her Latmos, and has kissed
The sidelong face of blind Endymion.

VI. A PEACH

If any sense in mortal dust remains
When mine has been refined from flower to flower,
Won from the sun all colours, drunk the shower
And delicate winy dews, and gained the gains
Which elves who sleep in airy bells, a-swing
Through half a summer day, for love bestow,
Then in some warm old garden let me grow
To such a perfect, lush, ambrosian thing
As this. Upon a southward-facing wall
I bask, and feel my juices dimly fed
And mellowing, while my bloom comes golden grey:
Keep the wasps from me! but before I fall
Pluck me, white fingers, and o’er two ripe-red
Girl lips O let me richly swoon away!

VII. EARLY AUTUMN

If while I sit flatter’d by this warm sun
Death came to me, and kissed my mouth and brow,
And eyelids which the warm light hovers through,
I should not count it strange. Being half won
By hours that with a tender sadness run,
Who would not softly lean to lips which woo
In the Earth’s grave speech? Nor could it aught undo
Of Nature’s calm observances begun
Still to be here the idle autumn day.
Pale leaves would circle down, and lie unstirr’d
Where’er they fell; the tired wind hither call
Her gentle fellows; shining beetles stray
Up their green courts; and only yon shy bird
A little bolder grow ere evenfall.

VIII. LATER AUTUMN

This is the year’s despair: some wind last night
Utter’d too soon the irrevocable word,
And the leaves heard it, and the low clouds heard;
So a wan morning dawned of sterile light;
Flowers drooped, or showed a startled face and white;
The cattle cowered, and one disconsolate bird
Chirped a weak note; last came this mist and blurred
The hills, and fed upon the fields like blight.
Ah, why so swift despair! There yet will be
Warm noons, the honey’d leavings of the year,
Hours of rich musing, ripest autumn’s core,
And late-heaped fruit, and falling hedge-berry,
Blossoms in cottage-crofts, and yet, once more,
A song, not less than June’s, fervent and clear.

THE HEROINES

HELENA
(Tenth year of Troy-Siege)

She stood upon the wall of windy Troy,
And lifted high both arms, and cried aloud
With no man near:—
“Troy-town and glory of Greece
Strive, let the flame aspire, and pride of life
Glow to white heat! Great lords be strong, rejoice,
Lament, know victory, know defeat—then die;
Fair is the living many-coloured play
Of hates and loves, and fair it is to cease,
To cease from these and all Earth’s comely things.
I, Helena, impatient of a couch
Dim-scented, and dark eyes my face had fed,
And soft captivity of circling arms,
Come forth to shed my spirit on you, a wind
And sunlight of commingling life and death.
City and tented plain behold who stands
Betwixt you! Seems she worth a play of swords,
And glad expense of rival hopes and hates?
Have the Gods given a prize which may content,
Who set your games afoot,—no fictile vase,
But a sufficient goblet of great gold,
Embossed with heroes, filled with perfumed wine?
How! doubt ye? Thus I draw the robe aside
And bare the breasts of Helen.

Yesterday
A mortal maiden I beheld, the light
Tender within her eyes, laying white arms
Around her sire’s mailed breast, and heard her chide
Because his cheek was blood-splashed,—I beheld
And did not wish me her. O, not for this
A God’s blood thronged within my mother’s veins!
For no such tender purpose rose the swan
With ruffled plumes, and hissing in his joy
Flashed up the stream, and held with heavy wings
Leda, and curved the neck to reach her lips,
And stayed, nor left her lightly. It is well
To have quickened into glory one supreme,
Swift hour, the century’s fiery-hearted bloom,
Which falls,—to stand a splendour paramount,
A beacon of high hearts and fates of men,
A flame blown round by clear, contending winds,
Which gladden in the contest and wax strong.
Cities of Greece, fair islands, and Troy town,
Accept a woman’s service; these my hands
Hold not the distaff, ply not at the loom;
I store from year to year no well-wrought web
For daughter’s dowry; wide the web I make,
Fine-tissued, costly as the Gods desire,
Shot with a gleaming woof of lives and deaths,
Inwrought with colours flowerlike, piteous, strange.
Oblivion yields before me: ye winged years
Which make escape from darkness, the red light
Of a wild dawn upon your plumes, I stand
The mother of the stars and winds of heaven,
Your eastern Eos; cry across the storm!
Through me man’s heart grows wider; little town
Asleep in silent sunshine and smooth air,
While babe grew man beneath your girdling towers,
Wake, wonder, lift the eager head alert,
Snake-like, and swift to strike, while altar-flame
Rises for plighted faith with neighbour town
That slept upon the mountain-shelf, and showed
A small white temple in the morning sun.
Oh, ever one way tending you keen prows
Which shear the shadowy waves when stars are faint
And break with emulous cries unto the dawn,
I gaze and draw you onward; splendid names
Lurk in you, and high deeds, and unachieved
Virtues, and house-o’erwhelming crimes, while life
Leaps in sharp flame ere all be ashes grey.
Thus have I willed it ever since the hour
When that great lord, the one man worshipful,
Whose hands had haled the fierce Hippolyta
Lightly from out her throng of martial maids,
Would grace his triumph, strengthen his large joy
With splendour of the swan-begotten child,
Nor asked a ten years’ siege to make acquist
Of all her virgin store. No dream that was,—
The moonlight in the woods, our singing stream,
Eurotas, the sleek panther at my feet,
And on my heart a hero’s strong right hand.
O draught of love immortal! Dastard world
Too poor for great exchange of soul, too poor
For equal lives made glorious! O too poor
For Theseus and for Helena!

Yet now
It yields once more a brightness, if no love;
Around me flash the tides, and in my ears
A dangerous melody and piercing-clear
Sing the twin siren-sisters, Death and Life;
I rise and gird my spirit for the close.

Last night Cassandra cried ‘Ruin, ruin, and ruin!’
I mocked her not, nor disbelieved; the gloom
Gathers, and twilight takes the unwary world.
Hold me, ye Gods, a torch across the night,
With one long flare blown back o’er tower and town,
Till the last things of Troy complete themselves:
—Then blackness, and the grey dust of a heart.”

ATALANTA

“Milanion, seven years ago this day
You overcame me by a golden fraud,
Traitor, and see I crown your cup with flowers,
With violets and white sorrel from dim haunts,—
A fair libation—ask you to what God?
To Artemis, to Artemis my Queen.

Not by my will did you escape the spear
Though piteous I might be for your glad life,
Husband, and for your foolish love: the Gods
Who heard your vows had care of you: I stooped
Half toward the beauty of the shining thing
Through some blind motion of an instant joy,—
As when our babe reached arms to pluck the moon
A great, round fruit between dark apple-boughs,—
And half, marking your wile, to fling away
Needless advantage, conquer carelessly,
And pass the goal with one light finger-touch
Just while you leaned forth the bent body’s length
To reach it. Could I guess I strove with three,
With Aphrodite, Eros, and the third—
Milanion? There upon the maple-post
Your right hand rested: the event had sprung
Complete from darkness, and possessed the world
Ere yet conceived: upon the edge of doom
I stood with foot arrested and blind heart,
Aware of nought save some unmastered fate
And reddening neck and brow. I heard you cry
‘Judgment, both umpires!’ saw you stand erect,
Panting, and with a face so glad, so great
It shone through all my dull bewilderment
A beautiful uncomprehended joy,
One perfect thing and bright in a strange world.
But when I looked to see my father shamed,
A-choke with rage and words of proper scorn,
He nodded, and the beard upon his breast
Pulled twice or thrice, well-pleased, and laughed aloud,
And while the wrinkles gathered round his eyes
Cried ‘Girl, well done! My brother’s son retain
Shrewd head upon your shoulders! Maidens ho!
A veil for Atalanta, and a zone
Male fingers may unclasp! Lead home the bride,
Prepare the nuptial chamber!’ At his word
My life turned round: too great the shame had grown
With all men leagued to mock me. Could I stay,
Confront the vulgar gladness of the world
At high emprise defeated, a free life
Tethered, light dimmed, a virtue singular
Subdued to ways of common use and wont?
Must I become the men’s familiar jest,
The comment of the matron-guild? I turned,
I sought the woods, sought silence, solitude,
Green depths divine, where the soft-footed ounce
Lurks, and the light deer comes and drinks and goes,
Familiar paths in which the mind might gain
Footing, and haply from a vantage-ground
Drive this new fate an arm’s-length, hand’s-breadth off
A little while, till certitude of sight
And strength returned.

At evening I went back,
Walked past the idle groups at gossipry,
Sought you, and laid my hand upon your wrist,
Drew you apart, and with no shaken voice
Spoke, while the swift, hard strokes my heart out-beat
Seemed growing audible, ‘Milanion,
I am your wife for freedom and fair deeds:
Choose: am I such an one a man could love?
What need you? Some soft song to soothe your life,
Or a clear cry at daybreak?’ And I ceased.
How deemed you that first moment? That the Gods
Had changed my heart? That I since morn had grown
Haunter of Aphrodite’s golden shrine,
Had kneeled before the victress, vowed my vow,
Besought her pardon, ‘Aphrodite, grace!
Accept the rueful Atalanta’s gifts,
Rose wreaths and snow-white doves’?

In the dim woods
There is a sacred place, a solitude
Within their solitude, a heart of strength
Within their strength. The rocks are heaped around
A goblet of great waters ever fed
By one swift stream which flings itself in air
With all the madness, mirth and melody
Of twenty rivulets gathered in the hills
Where might escapes in gladness. Here the trees
Strike deeper roots into the heart of earth,
And hold more high communion with the heavens;
Here in the hush of noon the silence broods
More full of vague divinity; the light
Slow-changing and the shadows as they shift
Seem characters of some inscrutable law,
And one who lingers long will almost hope
The secret of the world may be surprised
Ere he depart. It is a haunt beloved
Of Artemis, the echoing rocks have heard
Her laughter and her lore, and the brown stream
Flashed, smitten by the splendour of her limbs.
Hither I came; here turned, and dared confront
Pursuing thoughts; here held my life at gaze,
If ruined at least to clear loose wrack away,
Study its lines of bare dismantlement,
And shape a strict despair. With fixed hard lips,
Dry-eyed, I set my face against the stream
To deal with fate; the play of woven light
Gleaming and glancing on the rippled flood
Grew to a tyranny; and one visioned face
Would glide into the circle of my sight,
Would glide and pass away, so glad, so great
The imminent joy it brought seemed charged with fear.
I rose, and paced from trunk to trunk, brief track
This way and that; at least my will maintained
Her law upon my limbs; they needs must turn
At the appointed limit. A keen cry
Rose from my heart—‘Toils of the world grow strong,
‘Yield strength, yield strength to rend them to my hands;
‘Be thou apparent, Queen! in dubious ways
‘Lo my feet fail; cry down the forest glade,
‘Pierce with thy voice the tangle and dark boughs,
‘Call, and I follow thee.’

What things made up
Memorial for the Presence of the place
Thenceforth to hold? Only the torrent’s leap
Endlessly vibrating, monotonous rhythm
Of the swift footstep pacing to and fro,
Only a soul’s reiterated cry
Under the calm, controlling, ancient trees,
And tutelary ward and watch of heaven
Felt through steep inlets which the upper airs
Blew wider.

On the grass at last I lay
Seized by a peace divine, I know not how;
Passive, yet never so possessed of power,
Strong, yet content to feel not use my strength
Sustained a babe upon the breasts of life
Yet armed with adult will, a shining spear.
O strong deliverance of the larger law
Which strove not with the less! impetuous youth
Caught up in ampler force of womanhood!
Co-operant ardours of joined lives! the calls
Of heart to heart in chase of strenuous deeds!
Virgin and wedded freedom not disjoined,
And loyal married service to my Queen!

Husband, have lesser gains these seven good years
Been yours because you chose no gracious maid
Whose hands had woven in the women’s room
Many fair garments, while her dreaming heart
Had prescience of the bridal; one whose claims,
Tender exactions feminine, had pleased
Fond husband, one whose gentle gifts had pleased,
Soft playful touches, little amorous words,
Untutored thoughts that widened up toward yours,
With trustful homage of uplifted eyes,
And sweetest sorrows lightly comforted?
Have we two challenged each the other’s heart
Too highly? Have our joys been all too large,
No gleaming gems on finger or on neck
A man may turn and touch caressingly,
But ampler than this heaven we stand beneath—
Wide wings of Presences august? Our lives,
Were it not better they had stood apart
A little space, letting the sweet sense grow
Of distance bridged by love? Had that full calm,—
I may not question since you call it true,—
Found in some rightness of a woman’s will,
Been gladder through perturbing touch of doubt,
By brief unrest made exquisitely aware
Of all its dear possession? Have our eyes
Met with too calm directness—soul to soul
Turned with the unerroneous long regard,
Until no stuff remains for dreams to weave,
Nought but unmeasured faithfulness, clear depths
Pierced by the sun, and yielding to the eye
Which searches, yet not fathoms? Did my lips
Lay on your lips too great a pledge of love
With awe too rapturous? Teach me how I fail,
Recount what things your life has missed through me,
Appease me with new needs; my strength is weak
Trembling toward perfect service.”

In her eyes
Tears stood and utterance ceased. Wondering the boy
Parthenopœus stopped his play and gazed.

EUROPA

“He stood with head erect fronting the herd;
At the first sight of him I knew the God
And had no fear. The grass is sweet and long
Up the east land backed by a pale blue heaven:
Grey, shining gravel shelves toward the sea
Which sang and sparkled; between these he stood,
Beautiful, with imperious head, firm foot,
And eyes resolved on present victory,
Which swerved not from the full acquist of joy,
Calmly triumphant. Did I see at all
The creamy hide, deep dewlap, little horns,
Or hear the girls describe them? I beheld
Zeus, and the law of my completed life.
Therefore the ravishment of some great calm
Possessed me, and I could not basely start
Or scream; if there was terror in my breast
It was to see the inevitable bliss
In prone descent from heaven; apart I lived
Held in some solitude, intense and clear,
Even while amid the frolic girls I stooped
And praised the flowers we gathered, they and I,
Pink-streaked convolvulus the warm sand bears,
Orchids, dark poppies with the crumpled leaf,
And reeds and giant rushes from a pond
Where the blue dragon-fly shimmers and shifts.
All these were notes of music, harmonies
Fashioned to underlie a resonant song,
Which sang how no more days of flower-culling
Little Europa must desire; henceforth
The large needs of the world resumed her life,
So her least joy must be no trivial thing,
But ordered as the motion of the stars,
Or grand incline of sun-flower to the sun.

By this the God was near; my soul waxed strong,
And wider orbed the vision of the world
As fate drew nigh. He stooped, all gentleness,
Inviting touches of the tender hands,
And wore the wreaths they twisted round his horns
In lordly-playful wise, me all this while
Summoning by great mandates at my heart,
Which silenced every less authentic call,
Away, away, from girlhood, home, sweet friends,
The daily dictates of my mother’s will,
Agenor’s cherishing hand, and all the ways
Of the calm household. I would fain have felt
Some ruth to part from these, the tender ties
Severing with thrills of passion. Can I blame
My heart for light surrender of things dear,
And hardness of a little selfish soul?
Nay: the decree of joy was over me,
There was the altar, I, the sacrifice
Foredoomed to life, not death; the victim bound
Looked for the stroke, the world’s one fact for her,
The blissful consummation: straight to this
Her course had tended from the hour of birth.
Even till this careless morn of maidenhood
A sudden splendour changed to life’s high noon:
For this my mother taught me gracious things,
My father’s thoughts had dealt with me, for this
The least flower blossomed, the least cloud went by,
All things conspired for this; the glad event
Summed my full past and held it, as the fruit
Holds the fair sequence of the bud and flower
In soft matureness.

Now he bent the knee;
I never doubted of my part to do,
Nor lingered idly, since to veil command
In tender invitation pleased my lord;
I sat, and round his neck one arm I laid
Beyond all chance secure. Whether my weight
Or the soft pressure of the encircling arm
Quickened in him some unexpected bliss
I know not, but his flight was one steep rush.
O uncontrollable and joyous rage!
O splendour of the multitudinous sea!
Swift foam about my feet, the eager stroke
Of the strong swimmer, new sea-creatures brave,
And uproar of blown conch, and shouting lips
Under the open heaven; till Crete rose fair
With steadfast shining peak, and promontories.

Shed not a leaf, O plane-tree, not a leaf,
Let sacred shadow, and slumbrous sound remain
Alway, where Zeus looked down upon his bride.”

ANDROMEDA

“This is my joy—that when my soul had wrought
Her single victory over fate and fear,
He came, who was deliverance. At the first,
Though the rough-bearded fellows bruised my wrists
Holding them backwards while they drove the bolts,
And stared around my body, workman-like,
I did not argue nor bewail; but when
The flash and dip of equal oars had passed,
And I was left a thing for sky and sea
To encircle, gaze on, wonder at, not save—
The clear resolve which I had grasped and held,
Slipped as a dew-drop slips from some flower-cup
O’erweighted, and I longed to cry aloud
One sharp, great cry, and scatter the fixed will,
In fond self-pity. Have you watched night-long,
Above a face from which the life recedes,
And seen death set his seal before the dawn?
You do not shriek and clasp the hands, but just
When morning finds the world once more all good
And ready for wave’s leap and swallow’s flight,
There comes a drift from undiscovered flowers,
A drone of sailing bee, a dance of light
Among the awakened leaves, a touch, a tang,
A nameless nothing, and the world turns round,
And the full soul runs over, and tears flow,
And it is seen a piteous thing to die.
So fared it there with me; the ripple ran
Crisp to my feet; the tufted sea-pink bloomed
From a cleft rock, I saw the insects drop
From blossom into blossom; and the wide
Intolerable splendour of the sea,
Calm in a liquid hush of summer morn,
Girdled me, and no cloud relieved the sky.
I had refused to drink the proffered wine
Before they bound me, and my strength was less
Than needful: yet the cry escaped not, yet
My purpose had not fallen abroad in ruin;
Only the perfect knowledge I had won
Of things which fate decreed deserted me,
The vision I had held of life and death
Was blurred by some vague mist of piteousness,
Nor could I lean upon a steadfast will.
Therefore I closed both eyes resolved to search
Backwards across the abysm, and find Death there,
And hold him with my hand, and scan his face
By my own choice, and read his strict intent
On lip and brow,—not hunted to his feet
And cowering slavewise; ‘Death,’ I whispered, ‘Death,’
Calling him whom I needed: and he came.

Wherefore record the travail of the soul
Through darkness to grey light, the cloudy war,
The austere calm, the bitter victory?
It seemed that I had mastered fate, and held,
Still with shut eyes, the passion of my heart
Compressed, and cast the election of my will
Into that scale made heavy with the woe
Of all the world, and fair relinquished lives.
Suddenly the broad sea was vibrated,
And the air shaken with confused noise
Not like the steadfast plash and creak of oars,
And higher on my foot the ripple slid.
The monster was abroad beneath the sun.
This therefore was the moment—could my soul
Sustain her trial? And the soul replied
A swift, sure ‘Yes’: yet must I look forth once,
Confront my anguish, nor drop blindly down
From horror into horror: and I looked—
O thou deliverance, thou bright victory
I saw thee, and was saved! The middle air
Was cleft by thy impatience of revenge,
Thy zeal to render freedom to things bound:
The conquest sitting on thy brow, the joy
Of thy unerring flight became to me
Nowise mere hope, but full enfranchisement.
A sculptor of the isles has carved the deed
Upon a temple’s frieze; the maiden chained
Lifts one free arm across her eyes to hide
The terror of the moment, and her head
Sideways averted writhes the slender neck:
While with a careless grace in flying curve,
And glad like Hermes in his aery poise,
Toward the gaping throat a youth extends
The sword held lightly. When to sacrifice
I pass at morn with my tall Sthenelos,
I smile, but do not speak. No! when my gaze
First met him I was saved; because the world
Could hold so brave a creature I was free:
Here one had come with not my father’s eyes
Which darkened to the clamour of the crowd,
And gave a grieved assent; not with the eyes
Of anguish-stricken Cassiopeia, dry
And staring as I passed her to the boat.
Was not the beauty of his strength and youth
Warrant for many good things in the world
Which could not be so poor while nourishing him?
What faithlessness of heart could countervail
The witness of that brow? What dastard chains?
Did he not testify of sovereign powers
O’ermatching evil, awful charities
Which save and slay, the terror of clear joy,
Unquenchable intolerance of ill,
Order subduing chaos, beauty pledged
To conquest of all foul deformities?
And was there need to turn my head aside,
I, who had one sole thing to do, no more,
To watch the deed? I know the careless grace
My Perseus wears in manage of the steed,
Or shooting the swift disc: not such the mode
Of that victorious moment of descent
When the large tranquil might his soul contains
Was gathered for a swift abolishment
Of proud brute-tyranny. He seemed in air
A shining spear which hisses in its speed
And smites through boss and breastplate. Did he see
Andromeda, who never glanced at her
But set his face against the evil thing?
I know not; yet one truth I may not doubt
How ere the wallowing monster blind and vast
Turned a white belly to the sun, he stood
Beside me with some word of comfort strong
Nourishing the heart like choral harmonies.
O this was then my joy, that I could give
A soul not saved from wretched female fright,
Or anarchy of self-abandoned will,
But one which had achieved deliverance,
And wrought with shaping hands among the stuff
Which fate presented. Had I shrunk from Death?
Might I not therefore unashamed accept—
In a calm wonder of unfaltering joy—
Life, the fair gift he laid before my feet?
Somewhat a partner of his deed I seemed;
His equal? Nay, yet upright at his side
Scarce lower by a head and helmet’s height
Touching my Perseus’ shoulder.

He has wrought
Great deeds. Athena loves to honour him;
And I have borne him sons. Look, yonder goes
Lifting the bow, Eleios, the last-born.”

EURYDICE

“Now must this waste of vain desire have end:
Fetter these thoughts which traverse to and fro
The road which has no issue! We are judged.
O wherefore could I not uphold his heart?
Why claimed I not some partnership with him
In the strict test, urging my right of wife?
How have I let him fall? I, knowing thee
My Orpheus, bounteous giver of rich gifts,
Not all inured in practice of the will,
Worthier than I, yet weaker to sustain
An inner certitude against the blank
And silence of the senses; so no more
My heart helps thine, and henceforth there remains
No gift to thee from me, who would give all,
Only the memory of me growing faint
Until I seem a thing incredible,
Some high, sweet dream, which was not, nor could be.
Ay, and in idle fields of asphodel
Must it not be that I shall fade indeed,
No memory of me, but myself; these hands
Ceasing from mastery and use, my thoughts
Losing distinction in the vague, sweet air,
The heart’s swift pulses slackening to the sob
Of the forgetful river, with no deed
Pre-eminent to dare and to achieve,
No joy for climbing to, no clear resolve
From which the soul swerves never, no ill thing
To rid the world of, till I am no more
Eurydice, and shouldst thou at thy time
Descend, and hope to find a helpmate here,
I were grown slavish, like the girls men buy
Soft-bodied, foolish-faced, luxurious-eyed,
And meet to be another thing than wife.

Would that it had been thus: when the song ceased
And laughterless Aidoneus lifted up
The face, and turned his grave persistent eyes
Upon the singer, I had forward stepped
And spoken—‘King! he has wrought well, nor failed,
Who ever heard divine large song like this,
Keener than sunbeam, wider than the air,
And shapely as the mould of faultless fruit?
And now his heart upon the gale of song
Soars with wide wing, and he is strong for flight,
Not strong for treading with the careful foot:
Grant me the naked trial of the will
Divested of all colour, scents and song:
The deed concerns the wife; I claim my share.’
O then because Persephone was by
With shadowed eyes when Orpheus sang of flowers,
He would have yielded. And I stepping forth
From the clear radiance of the singer’s heights,
Made calm through vision of his wider truth,
And strengthened by deep beauty to hold fast
The presences of the invisible things,
Had led the way. I know how in that mood
He leans on me as babe on mother’s breast,
Nor could he choose but let his foot descend
Where mine left lightest pressure; so are passed
The brute three-visaged, and the flowerless ways,
Nor have I turned my head; and now behold
The greyness of remote terrestrial light,
And I step swifter. Does he follow still?
O surely since his will embraces mine
Closer than clinging hand can clasp a hand:
No need to turn and dull with visible proof
The certitude that soul relies on soul!
So speed we to the day; and now we touch
Warm grass, and drink the Sun. O Earth, O Sun,
Not you I need, but Orpheus’ breast, and weep
The gladdest tears that ever woman shed,
And may be weak awhile, and need to know
The sustenance and comfort of his arms.

Self-foolery of dreams; come bitter truth.
Yet he has sung at least a perfect song
While the Gods heard him, and I stood beside
O not applauding, but at last content,
Fearless for him, and calm through perfect joy,
Seeing at length his foot upon the heights
Of highest song, by me discerned from far,
Now suddenly attained in confident
And errorless ascension. Did I ask
The lesser joy, lips’ touch and clasping arms,
Or was not this salvation? For I urged
Always, in jealous service to his art,
‘Now thou hast told their secrets to the trees
Of which they muse through lullèd summer nights;
Thou hast gazed downwards in the formless gulf
Of the brute-mind, and canst control the will
Of snake, and brooding panther fiery-eyed,
And lark in middle heaven: leave these behind!
And let some careless singer of the fields
Set to the shallow sound of cymbal-stroke
The Faun a-dance; some less true-tempered soul,
Which cannot shape to harmony august
The splendour and the tumult of the world,
Inflame to frenzy of delirious rage
The Mœnad’s breast; yea, and the hearts of men,
Smoke of whose fire upcurls from little roofs,
Let singers of the wine-cup and the roast,
The whirling spear, the toy-like chariot-race,
And bickering counsel of contending kings
Delight them: leave thou these; sing thou for Gods.’
And thou hast sung for Gods; and I have heard.

I shall not fade beneath this sunless sky,
Mixed in the wandering, ineffectual tribe;
For these have known no moment when the soul
Stood vindicated, laying sudden hands
On immortality of joy, and love
Which sought not, saw not, knew not, could not know
The instruments of sense; I shall not fade.
Yea, and thy face detains me evermore
Within the realm of light. Love, wherefore blame
Thy heart because it sought me? Could the years’
Whole sum of various fashioned happiness
Exceed the measure of that eager face
Importunate and pure, still lit with song,
Turning from song to comfort of my love,
And thirsty for my presence? We are saved!
Yield Heracles, thou brawn and thews of Zeus,
Yield up thy glory on Thessalian ground,
Competitor of Death in single strife!
The lyre methinks outdoes the club and fist,
And beauty’s ingress the outrageous force
Of tyrant though beneficent; supreme
This feat remains, a memory shaped for Gods.

Nor canst thou wholly lose me from thy life;
Still I am with thee; still my hand keeps thine;
Now I restrain from too intemperate grief
Being a portion of the thoughts that claim
Thy service; now I urge with that good pain
Which wastes and feeds the spirit, a desire
Unending; now I lurk within thy will
As vigour; now am gleaming through the world
As beauty; and if greater thoughts must lay
Their solemn light on thee, outshining mine,
And in some far faint-gleaming hour of Hell
I stand unknown and muffled by the boat
Leaning an eager ear to catch some speech
Of thee, and if some comer tell aloud
How Orpheus who had loved Eurydice
Was summoned by the Gods to fill with joy
And clamour of celestial song the courts
Of bright Olympus,—I, with pang of pride
And pain dissolved in rapture, will return
Appeased, with sense of conquest stern and high.”

But while she spoke, upon a chestnut trunk
Fallen from cliffs of Thracian Rhodope
Sat Orpheus, for he deemed himself alone,
And sang. But bands of wild-eyed women roamed
The hills, whom he had passed with calm disdain.
And now the shrilling Berecynthian pipe
Sounded, blown horn, and frantic female cries:
He ceased from song and looked for the event.

BY THE SEA

I. THE ASSUMPTION

Why would the open sky not be denied
Possession of me, when I sat to-day
Rock-couched, and round my feet the soft slave lay,
My singing Sea, dark-bosom’d, dusky-eyed?
She breathed low mystery of song, she sighed,
And stirred herself, and set lithe limbs to play
In blandishing serpent-wreaths, and would betray
An anklet gleaming, or a swaying side.
Why could she not detain me? Why must I
Devote myself to the dread Heaven, adore
The spacious pureness, the large ardour? why
Sprang forth my heart as though all wanderings
Had end? To what last bliss did I upsoar
Beating on indefatigable wings?

II. THE ARTIST’S WAITING

Tender impatience quickening, quickening;
O heart within me that art grown a sea,
How vexed with longing all thy live waves be,
How broken with desire! A ceaseless wing
O’er every green sea-ridge goes fluttering,
And there are cries and long reluctancy,
Swift ardours, and the clash of waters free,
Fain for the coming of some perfect Thing.
Emerge white Wonder, be thou born a Queen!
Let shine the splendours of thy loveliness
From the brow’s radiance to the equal poise
Of calm, victorious feet; let thy serene
Command go forth; replenish with strong joys
The spaces and the sea-deeps measureless.

III. COUNSELLORS

Who are chief counsellors of me? Who know
My heart’s desire and every secret thing?
Three of one fellowship: the encompassing
Strong Sea, who mindful of Earth’s ancient woe
Still surges on with swift, undaunted flow
That no sad shore should lack his comforting;
And next the serene Sky, whether he ring
With flawless blue a wilderness, or show
Tranced in the Twilight’s arms his fair child-star;
Third of the three, eldest and lordliest,
Love, all whose wings are wide above my head,
Whose eyes are clearer heavens, whose lips have said
Low words more rare than the quired sea-songs are,—
O Love, high things and stern thou counsellest.

IV. EVENING

Light ebbs from off the Earth; the fields are strange,
Dusk, trackless, tenantless; now the mute sky
Resigns itself to Night and Memory,
And no wind will yon sunken clouds derange,
No glory enrapture them; from cot or grange
The rare voice ceases; one long-breathèd sigh,
And steeped in summer sleep the world must lie;
All things are acquiescing in the change.
Hush! while the vaulted hollow of the night
Deepens, what voice is this the sea sends forth,
Disconsolate iterance, a passionless moan?
Ah! now the Day is gone, and tyrannous Light,
And the calm presence of fruit-bearing Earth:
Cry, Sea! it is thy hour; thou art alone.

V. JOY

Spring-tides of Pleasure in the blood, keen thrill
Of eager nerves,—but ended as a dream;
Look! the wind quickens, and the long waves gleam
Shoreward, and all this deep noon hour will fill
Each lone sea-cave with mirth immeasurable,
Huge sport of Ocean’s brood; yet eve’s red sky
Fades o’er spent waters, weltering sullenly,
The dank piled weed, the sand-waste grey and still.
Sad Pleasure in the moon’s control! But Joy
Is stable; is discovered law; the birth
Of dreadful light; life’s one imperative way;
The rigour hid in song; flowers’ strict employ
Which turn to meet their sun; the roll of Earth
Swift and perpetual through the night and day.

VI. OCEAN

More than bare mountains ’neath a naked sky,
Or star-enchanted hollows of the night
When clouds are riven, or the most sacred light
Of summer dawns, art thou a mystery
And awe and terror and delight, O sea!
Our Earth is simple-hearted, sad to-day
Beneath the hush of snow, next morning gay
Because west-winds have promised to the lea
Violets and cuckoo-buds; and sweetly these
Live innocent lives, each flower in its green field,
Joying as children in sun, air, and sleep.
But thou art terrible, with the unrevealed
Burden of dim lamentful prophecies,
And thy lone life is passionate and deep.

VII. NEWS FOR LONDON

Whence may I glean a just return, my friend,
For tidings of your great world hither borne?
What garbs of new opinion men have worn
I wot not, nor what fame world-without-end
Sprouted last night, nor know I to contend
For Irving or the Italian; but forlorn
In this odd angle of the isle from morn
Till eve, nor sow, nor reap, nor get, nor spend.
Yet have I heard the sea-gulls scream for glee
Treading the drenched rock-ridges, and the gale
Hiss over tremulous heath-bells, while the bee
Driven sidelong quested low; and I have seen
The live sea-hollows, and moving mounds grey-green,
And watched the flying foam-bow flush and fail.

AMONG THE ROCKS

Never can we be strangers, you and I,
Nor quite disown our mysteries of kin,
Grey Sea-rocks, since I sat an hour to-day
Companion of the Ocean and of you.
I, sensitive soft flesh a thorn invades,
The light breath of a rose can win aside,
Flesh fashioned to be hourly tried and thrill’d,
Delighted, tortured, to betray whose ward
The unready heart is ruler, still surprised,
With emissary flushes swift and false,
And tremulous to touches of the stars.
You, spiny ridges of the land, rude backs,
Clawless and wingless, half-created things,
Monsters at ease before the sun and sea,
Untamed, unshrinking, unpersuadable,
My kindred.

For the wide-delivering womb
Which casts abroad a mammoth as a man,
And still conceals the new and better birth,
Bore me and you. Old parents of the Sphinx
What words primeval murmured in my ears
To-day between the lapping of the waves?
What recognitions flashed and disappeared?
What rare faint touches passed of sympathy
From you to me, from me to you? What sense
Of the ancestral things shadowed the heart,
Cloud-like, and with the pleasure of a cloud.
Therefore I know from henceforth that the shrill
Short crying of the sea-lark when his feet
Touch where the wave slips off the shining sand
Pierces you; and the wide and luminous air
Impregnate with sharp sea smells is to you
A passion and allurement; and the sun
At mid-day loads your sense with drowsy warmth,
And in the waver and echo of your caves,
You cherish memories of the billowy chaunt,
And ponder its dim prophecy.

And I,—
Lo here I strike upon the granite too,
Something is here austere and obdurate
As you are, something rugged and untamed.
A strength behind the will. I am not all
The shapely, agile creature named a man,
So artful, with the quick-conceiving brain,
Nerve-network, and the hand to grasp and hold,
Most dexterous of kinds that wage the strife
Of being through the years. I am not all
This creature with the various heart, alive
To curious joys, rare anguish, skilled in shames,
Prides, hatreds, loves, fears, frauds, the heart which turns
A sudden venomous asp, the heart which bleeds
The red, great drops of glad self-sacrifice.
Pierce below these and seek the primal layer!
Behind Apollo loom the Earth-born Ones,
Half-god, half-brute; behind this symmetry,
This versatility of heart and brain
A strength abides, sustaining thought and love,
Untamed, unshrinking, unpersuadable,
At ease before the powers of Earth and Heaven,
Equal to any, of no younger years,
Calm as the greatest, haughty as the best,
Of imprescriptible authority.

Down upon you I sink, and leave myself,
My vain, frail self, and find repose on you,
Prime Force, whether amassed through myriad years
From dear accretions of dead ancestry,
Or ever welling from the source of things
In undulation vast and unperceived,
Down upon you I sink and lose myself!

My child that shouts and races on the sand
Your cry restores me. Have I been with Pan,
Kissing the hoofs of his goat-majesty?
You come, no granite of the nether earth,
Bright sea-flower rather, shining foam that flies,
Yet sweet as blossom of our inland fields.

TO A YEAR

Fly, Year, not backward down blind gulfs of night,
Thick with the swarm of miscreated things:
Forth, flying year, through calms and broader light,
Clear-eyed, strong-bosom’d year, on strenuous wings;
Bearing a song more high-intoned, more holy
Than the wild Swan’s melodious melancholy,
More rapturous than the atom lark outflings.

I follow on slow foot and unsubdued:
Have I not heard thy cry across the wind?
Not seen thee, Slayer of the serpent brood,—
Error, and doubt, and death, and anguish blind?
I follow, I shall know thee by thy plumes
Flame-tipped, when on that morn of conquered tombs,
I praise amidst my years the doom assigned.

A SONG OF THE NEW DAY

The tender Sorrows of the twilight leave me,
And shall I want the fanning of smooth wings?
Shall I not miss sweet sorrows? Will it grieve me
To hear no cooing from soft dove-like things?

Let Evening hear them! O wide Dawn uprisen,
Know me all thine; and ye, whose level flight
Has pierced the drear hours and the cloudy prison,
Cry for the pathless spaces and the light!

SWALLOWS

Wide fields of air left luminous,
Though now the uplands comprehend
How the sun’s loss is ultimate:
The silence grows; but still to us
From yon air-winnowing breasts elate
The tiny shrieks of glee descend.

Deft wings, each moment is resigned
Some touch of day, some pulse of light,
While yet in poised, delicious curve,
Ecstatic doublings down the wind,
Light dash and dip and sidelong swerve,
You try each dainty trick of flight.

Will not your airy glee relent
At all? The aimless frolic cease?
Know ye no touch of quelling pain,
Nor joy’s more strict admonishment,
No tender awe at day-light’s wane,
Ye slaves of delicate caprice?

Hush, once again that cry intense!
High-venturing spirits have your will!
Urge the last freak, prolong your glee,
Keen voyagers, while still the immense
Sea-spaces haunt your memory,
With zests and pangs ineffable.

Not in the sunshine of old woods
Ye won your warrant to be gay
By duteous, sweet observances,
Who dared through darkening solitudes,
And ’mid the hiss of alien seas,
The larger ordinance obey.

MEMORIALS OF TRAVEL

I. COACHING

(In Scotland)

Where have I been this perfect summer day,
—Or fortnight is it, since I rose from bed,
Devour’d that kippered fish, the oatmeal bread,
And mounted to this box? O bowl away
Swift stagers through the dusk, I will not say
“Enough,” nor care where I have been or be,
Nor know one name of hill, or lake, or lea,
Or moor, or glen! Were not the clouds at play
Nameless among the hills, and fair as dreams?
On such a day we must love things not words,
And memory take or leave them as they are.
On such a day! What unimagined streams
Are in the world, how many haunts of birds,
What fields and flowers,—and what an evening Star!

II. IN A MOUNTAIN PASS

(In Scotland)

To what wild blasts of tyrannous harmony
Uprose these rocky walls, mass threatening mass,
Dusk, shapeless shapes, around a desolate pass?
What deep heart of the ancient hills set free
The passion, the desire, the destiny
Of this lost stream? Yon clouds that break and form,
Light vanward squadrons of the joyous storm,
They gather hither from what untrack’d sea?
Primeval kindred! here the mind regains
Its vantage ground against the world; here thought
Wings up the silent waste of air on broad
Undaunted pinion; man’s imperial pains
Are ours, and visiting fears, and joy unsought,
Native resolve, and partnership with God.

III. THE CASTLE

(In Scotland)

The tenderest ripple touched and touched the shore;
The tenderest light was in the western sky;—
Its one soft phrase, closing reluctantly,
The sea articulated o’er and o’er
To comfort all tired things; and one might pore,
Till mere oblivion took the heart and eye,
On that slow-fading, amber radiancy
Past the long levels of the ocean-floor.
A turn,—the castle fronted me, four-square,
Holding its seaward crag, abrupt, intense
Against the west, an apparition bold
Of naked human will; I stood aware,
With sea and sky, of powers unowned of sense,
Presences awful, vast, and uncontrolled.

IV. Άισθητιχή φαντασία

(In Ireland)

The sound is in my ears of mountain streams!
I cannot close my lids but some grey rent
Of wildered rock, some water’s clear descent
In shattering crystal, pine-trees soft as dreams
Waving perpetually, the sudden gleams
Of remote sea, a dear surprise of flowers,
Some grace or wonder of to-day’s long hours
Straightway possesses the moved sense, which teems
With fantasy unbid. O fair, large day!
The unpractised sense brings heavings from a sea
Of life too broad, and yet the billows range,
The elusive footing glides. Come, Sleep, allay
The trouble with thy heaviest balms, and change
These pulsing visions to still Memory.

V. ON THE SEA-CLIFF

(In Ireland)

Ruins of a church with its miraculous well,
O’er which the Christ, a squat-limbed dwarf of stone,
Great-eyed, and huddled on his cross, has known
The sea-mists and the sunshine, stars that fell
And stars that rose, fierce winter’s chronicle,
And centuries of dead summers. From his throne
Fronting the dawn the elf has ruled alone,
And saved this region fair from pagan hell.
Turn! June’s great joy abroad; each bird, flower, stream
Loves life, loves love; wide ocean amorously
Spreads to the sun’s embrace; the dulse-weeds sway,
The glad gulls are afloat. Grey Christ to-day
Our ban on thee! Rise, let the white breasts gleam,
Unvanquished Venus of the northern sea!

VI. ASCETIC NATURE

(In Ireland)

Passion and song, and the adornèd hours
Of floral loveliness, hopes grown most sweet,
And generous patience in the ripening heat,
A mother’s bosom, a bride’s face of flowers
—Knows Nature aught so fair? Witness ye Powers
Which rule the virgin heart of this retreat
To rarer issues, ye who render meet
Earth, purged and pure, for gracious heavenly dowers!
The luminous pale lake, the pearl-grey sky,
The wave that gravely murmurs meek desires,
The abashed yet lit expectance of the whole,
—These and their beauty speak of earthly fires
Long quenched, clear aims, deliberate sanctity,—
O’er the white forehead lo! the aureole.

VII. RELICS

(In Switzerland)

What relic of the dear, dead yesterday
Shall my heart keep? The visionary light
Of dawn? Alas! it is a thing too bright,
God does not give such memories away.
Nor choose I one fair flower of those that sway
To the chill breathing of the waterfall
In rocky angles black with scattering spray,
Fair though no sunbeam lays its coronal
Of light on their pale brows; nor glacier-gleam
I choose, nor eve’s red glamour; ’twas at noon
Resting I found this speedwell, while a stream,
That knew the immemorial inland croon,
Sang in my ears, and lulled me to a dream
Of English meadows, and one perfect June.

VIII. ON THE PIER OF BOULOGNE

(A Reminiscence of 1870)

A venal singer to a thrumming note
Chanted the civic war-song, that red flower
Of melody seized in a sudden hour
By frenzied winds of change, and borne afloat
A live light in the storm; and now by rote
To a cold crowd, while vague and sad the tide
Loomed after sunset and the grey gulls cried,
The verses quavered from a hireling throat.
Wherefore should English eyes their right forbear,
Or droop for smitten France? let the tossed sou,
Before they turn, be quittance for the stare.
O Lady, who, clear-voiced, with impulse true
To lift that cry “To Arms!” alone would dare,
My heart received a golden alms from you!

IX. DOVER

(In a Field)

A joy has met me on this English ground
I looked not for. O gladness, fields still green!
Listen,—the going of a murmurous sound
Along the corn; there is not to be seen
In all the land a single pilèd sheaf
Or line of grain new-fallen, and not a tree
Has felt as yet within its lightest leaf
The year’s despair; nay, Summer saves for me
Her bright, late flowers. O my Summer-time
Named low as lost, I turn, and find you here—
Where else but in our blessed English clime
That lingers o’er the sweet days of the year,
Days of long dreaming under spacious skies
Ere melancholy winds of Autumn rise.

AN AUTUMN SONG

Long Autumn rain;
White mists which choke the vale, and blot the sides
Of the bewildered hills; in all the plain
No field agleam where the gold pageant was,
And silent o’er a tangle of drenched grass
The blackbird glides.

In the heart,—fire,
Fire and clear air and cries of water-springs,
And large, pure winds; all April’s quick desire,
All June’s possession; a most fearless Earth
Drinking great ardours; and the rapturous birth
Of wingèd things.

BURDENS

Are sorrows hard to bear,—the ruin
Of flowers, the rotting of red fruit,
A love’s decease, a life’s undoing,
And summer slain, and song-birds mute,
And skies of snow and bitter air?
These things, you deem, are hard to bear.

But ah, the burden, the delight
Of dreadful joys! Noon opening wide,
Golden and great; the gulfs of night,
Fair deaths, and rent veils cast aside,
Strong soul to strong soul rendered up,
And silence filling like a cup.

SONG
(From “’Tis Pity she’s a Queen.”—A.D. 1610.)

ACT IV. SCENE 2.

The Lady Margaret, with Susan and Lucy; Lady M. at her embroidery frame, singing.

Girls, when I am gone away,
On this bosom strew
Only flowers meek and pale,
And the yew.

Lay these hands down by my side,
Let my face be bare;
Bind a kerchief round the face,
Smooth my hair.

Let my bier be borne at dawn,
Summer grows so sweet,
Deep into the forest green
Where boughs meet.

Then pass away, and let me lie
One long, warm, sweet day
There alone with face upturn’d,
One sweet day.

While the morning light grows broad,
While noon sleepeth sound,
While the evening falls and faints,
While the world goes round.

Susan. Whence had you this song, lady?

L. Mar. Out of the air;
From no one an it be not from the wind
That goes at noonday in the sycamore trees.
—When said the tardy page he would return?

Susan. By twelve, upon this very hour.

L. Mar. Look now,
The sand falls down the glass with even pace,
The shadows lie like yesterday’s. Nothing
Is wrong with the world. You are a part of it,—
I stand within a magic circle charm’d
From reach of anything, shut in from you,
Leagues from my needle, and this frame I touch,
Waiting till doomsday come—
[Knocking heard] The messenger!
Quick, I will wait you here, and hold my heart
Ready for death, or too much ravishment.

[Exeunt both Girls.]
How the little sand-hill slides and slides; how many
Red grains would drop while a man’s keen knife drawn
Across one’s heart let the red life out?

Susan. [returning] Lady!

L. Mar. I know it by your eyes. O do not fear
To tell all punctually: I am carved of stone.

BY THE WINDOW

Still deep into the West I gazed; the light
Clear, spiritual, tranquil as a bird
Wide-winged that soars on the smooth gale and sleeps,
Was it from sun far-set or moon unrisen?
Whether from moon, or sun, or angel’s face
It held my heart from motion, stayed my blood,
Betrayed each rising thought to quiet death
Along the blind charm’d way to nothingness,
Lull’d the last nerve that ached. It was a sky
Made for a man to waste his will upon,
To be received as wiser than all toil,
And much more fair. And what was strife of men?
And what was time?

Then came a certain thing.
Are intimations for the elected soul
Dubious, obscure, of unauthentic power
Since ghostly to the intellectual eye,
Shapeless to thinking? Nay, but are not we
Servile to words and an usurping brain,
Infidels of our own high mysteries,
Until the senses thicken and lose the world,
Until the imprisoned soul forgets to see,
And spreads blind fingers forth to reach the day,
Which once drank light, and fed on angels’ food?

It happened swiftly, came and straight was gone.
One standing on some aery balcony
And looking down upon a swarming crowd
Sees one man beckon to him with finger-tip
While eyes meet eyes; he turns and looks again—
The man is lost, and the crowd sways and swarms.
Shall such an one say “Thus ’tis proved a dream,
And no hand beckoned, no eyes met my own?”
Neither can I say this. There was a hint,
A thrill, a summons faint yet absolute,
Which ran across the West; the sky was touch’d,
And failed not to respond. Does a hand pass
Lightly across your hair? you feel it pass
Not half so heavy as a cobweb’s weight,
Although you never stir; so felt the sky
Not unaware of the Presence, so my soul
Scarce less aware. And if I cannot say
The meaning and monition, words are weak
Which will not paint the small wing of a moth,
Nor bear a subtile odour to the brain,
And much less serve the soul in her large needs.
I cannot tell the meaning, but a change
Was wrought in me; it was not the one man
Who come to the luminous window to gaze forth,
And who moved back into the darkened room
With awe upon his heart and tender hope;
From some deep well of life tears rose; the throng
Of dusty cares, hopes, pleasures, prides fell off,
And from a sacred solitude I gazed
Deep, deep into the liquid eyes of Life.

SUNSETS

Did your eyes watch the mystic sunset splendours
Through evenings of old summers, slow of parting,—
Wistful while loveliest gains and fair surrenders
Hallow’d the West,—till tremulous tears came starting?

Did your soul wing her way on noiseless pinion
Through lucid fields of air, and penetrated
With light and silence roam the wide dominion
Where Day and Dusk embrace,—serene, unmated?

And they are past the shining hours and tender,
And snows are fallen between, and winds are driven?
Nay, for I find across your face the splendour,
And in your wings the central winds of heaven.

They reach me, those lost sunsets. Undivining
Your own high mysteries you pause and ponder;
See, in my eyes the vanished light is shining,
Feel, through what spaces of clear heaven I wander!

OASIS

Let them go by—the heats, the doubts, the strife;
I can sit here and care not for them now,
Dreaming beside the glimmering wave of life
Once more,—I know not how.

There is a murmur in my heart, I hear
Faint, O so faint, some air I used to sing;
It stirs my sense; and odours dim and dear
The meadow-breezes bring.

Just this way did the quiet twilights fade
Over the fields and happy homes of men,
While one bird sang as now, piercing the shade,
Long since,—I know not when.

FOREIGN SPEECH

Ah, do not tell me what they mean,
The tremulous brook, the scarcely stirred
June leaves, the hum of things unseen,
This sovran bird.

Do they say things so deep, and rare,
And perfect? I can only tell
That they are happy, and can bear
Such ignorance well;

Feeding on all things said and sung
From hour to hour in this high wood
Articulate in a strange, sweet tongue
Not understood.

IN THE TWILIGHT

A noise of swarming thoughts,
A muster of dim cares, a foil’d intent,
With plots and plans, and counterplans and plots;
And thus along the city’s edges grey
Unmindful of the darkening autumn day
With a droop’d head I went.

My face rose,—through what spell?—
Not hoping anything from twilight dumb:
One star possessed her heaven. Oh! all grew well
Because of thee, and thy serene estate:
Silence ... I let thy beauty make me great;
What though the black night come.

THE INNER LIFE

I. A DISCIPLE

Master, they argued fast concerning Thee,
Proved what Thou art, denied what Thou art not,
Till brows were on the fret, and eyes grew hot,
And lip and chin were thrust out eagerly;
Then through the temple-door I slipped to free
My soul from secret ache in solitude,
And sought this brook, and by the brookside stood
The world’s Light, and the Light and Life of me.
It is enough, O Master, speak no word!
The stream speaks, and the endurance of the sky
Outpasses speech: I seek not to discern
Even what smiles for me Thy lips have stirred;
Only in Thy hand still let my hand lie,
And let the musing soul within me burn.

II. THEISTS

Who needs God most? That man whose pulses play
With fullest life-blood; he whose foot dare climb
To Joy’s high limit, solitude sublime
Under a sky whose splendour sure must slay
If Godless; he who owns the sovereign sway
Of that small inner voice and still, what time
His whole life urges toward one blissful crime,
And Hell confuses Heaven, and night, the day.
It is he whose faithfulness of love puts by
Time’s anodyne, and that gross palliative,
A Stoic pride, and bears all humanly;
He whose soul grows one long desire to give
Measureless gifts; ah! let him quickly die
Unless he lift frail hands to God and live.

III. SEEKING GOD

I said “I will find God,” and forth I went
To seek Him in the clearness of the sky,
But over me stood unendurably
Only a pitiless, sapphire firmament
Ringing the world,—blank splendour; yet intent
Still to find God, “I will go and seek,” said I,
“His way upon the waters,” and drew nigh
An ocean marge weed-strewn and foam-besprent;
And the waves dashed on idle sand and stone,
And very vacant was the long, blue sea;
But in the evening as I sat alone,
My window open to the vanishing day,
Dear God! I could not choose but kneel and pray
And it sufficed that I was found of Thee.

IV. DARWINISM IN MORALS

High instincts, dim previsions, sacred fears,
—Whence issuing? Are they but the brain’s amassed
Tradition, shapings of a barbarous past,
Remoulded ever by the younger years,
Mixed with fresh clay, and kneaded with new tears?
No more? The dead chief’s ghost a shadow cast
Across the roving clan, and thence at last
Comes God, who in the soul His law uprears?
Is this the whole? Has not the Future powers
To match the Past,—attractions, pulsings, tides,
And voices for purged ears? Is all our light
The glow of ancient sunsets and lost hours?
Advance no banners up heaven’s eastern sides?
Trembles the margin with no portent bright?

V. AWAKENING

With brain o’erworn, with heart a summer clod,
With eye so practised in each form around,—
And all forms mean,—to glance above the ground
Irks it, each day of many days we plod,
Tongue-tied and deaf, along life’s common road.
But suddenly, we know not how, a sound
Of living streams, an odour, a flower crowned
With dew, a lark upspringing from the sod,
And we awake. O joy and deep amaze!
Beneath the everlasting hills we stand,
We hear the voices of the morning seas,
And earnest prophesyings in the land,
While from the open heaven leans forth at gaze
The encompassing great cloud of witnesses.

VI. FISHERS

We by no shining Galilean lake
Have toiled, but long and little fruitfully
In waves of a more old and bitter sea
Our nets we cast; large winds, that sleep and wake
Around the feet of Dawn and Sunset, make
Our spiritual inhuman company,
And formless shadows of water rise and flee
All night around us till the morning break.
Thus our lives wear—shall it be ever thus?
Some idle day, when least we look for grace,
Shall we see stand upon the shore indeed
The visible Master, and the Lord of us,
And leave our nets, nor question of His creed,
Following the Christ within a young man’s face?

VII. COMMUNION

Lord, I have knelt and tried to pray to-night,
But Thy love came upon me like a sleep,
And all desire died out; upon the deep
Of Thy mere love I lay, each thought in light
Dissolving like the sunset clouds, at rest
Each tremulous wish, and my strength weakness, sweet
As a sick boy with soon o’erwearied feet
Finds, yielding him unto his mother’s breast
To weep for weakness there. I could not pray,
But with closed eyes I felt Thy bosom’s love
Beating toward mine, and then I would not move
Till of itself the joy should pass away;
At last my heart found voice,—“Take me, O Lord,
And do with me according to Thy word.”