I consider that writing good poetry, like any form of art, depends on two major factors – the quality of the communication itself, and the technical skill with which the parts are put together.

This article discusses technical points only.  But these are often overlooked, and when you put them to use, you can actually take a mediocre poem and turn it into a masterpiece.  I’ve seen it happen many times.

Here are five ways to write better poetry:

1.  Poetry flows better when it has a rhythm. Try to write poetry in such a way that the syllables match up where there should.

For example, if the first line of each verse has 5 syllables and the second line of each verse has 7 syllables, keep that beat.  Try to avoid omitting a syllable or adding an extra syllable if you can.

Here is an example from a poem I wrote (called Dust in the Earth):

Yours is the voice of the enemy -
Cold is your clutch on my soul.
Strange are the words pouring emptily -
Telling me why you should go.

Line 1 – 9 syllables
Line 2 – 7 syllables
Line 3 – 9 syllables
Line 4 – 7 syllables

Different poems will have different patterns.  But (other than free verse) each poem has some pattern.  The point is to follow the pattern of that particular poem.

Sometimes you can get away with extra syllables, when you can “swallow” the extras and not disturb the beat.

I sometimes break the above rule myself, but I try not to do this if it will interrupt the rhythm and general “beat” of the poem.  The key is to see if the poem still flows.

This applies to the  other points I will list out in this article as well – read the poem back to yourself and see if it flows.  Does it sound rhythmic, like music?  Does it sound professional?  Or does it sound amateur, or choppy?

2.  Finger counting – you can literally count syllables with your fingers as you compose your lines, to make sure that you keep your rhythm, as in #1 above.  When writing the poem I referred to above, I actually was counting the beats of each line on my fingers, to make sure they matched up.

More than once I have encountered a poet who had great concepts, but was lacking rhythm in their poetry.  By simply counting the beats of each line with their fingers, and correcting the lines where necessary (by using a slightly different choice of words, for example) they turned their amateur poems into great pieces with emotional impact.  All I had explained to them was the simple “finger counting” technique that I use when I compose my lines.

3.  Rhyming poetry flows better - There are many people who swear by free verse, and free verse can be good.  But too many people use free verse as an excuse to be lazy.  I have also seen it used as a cover-up for plain lack of talent.  Something like …

I like to go to the ocean …

It’s so nice.

The ocean.

The pretty ocean.

“Ah, yeah,” the person will say.  “That’s free verse!  Modern poetry!”

Okay, I may be exaggerating a bit, but I have seen some pretty awful stuff.

The greatest poems in history have had rhythm and rhyme (not to mention, meaning), as have the greatest songs.

There is a reason for this.  Rhymes flow.  Rhymes are catchy and have a musical quality to them.  They are (not fully, but to a large degree) what makes something a song or a poem, as opposed to an ordinary piece of prose.

4.  Match your accents – Sometimes your “syllable counts” match up fine but the emphasis falls on different syllables throughout the lines, in such a way as to break the rhythm.

Imagine if I had written the above verse as follows (instead of how it is written above):

Yours is the voice of the enemy -
Your clutch on my soul is cold.
Strange are the words pouring emptily -
Telling me why you should go.

Notice that in both versions, the syllable count is the same.  But in the second version, the rhythm is thrown off.  Because the accents fall in different places.

To illustrate, I will capitalize on the words that have the most emphasis when speaking these lines (obviously you don’t “yell” these words, but you do say them with a bit more emphasis than the others):

Example 1:

YOURS is the VOICE of the enemy -
COLD is your CLUTCH on my soul.

Example 2:

YOURS is the VOICE of the enemy -
Your CLUTCH on my soul is COLD.

In example 1, the accent falls on the first and fourth syllable of each line.  So it flows.

In example 2, the accents don’t “match” and the rhythm is thrown off.

5.  Repetition

Repetition and pattern is one of the things that makes poetry powerful.  Besides the repetition of rhythms, accents, syllables, and rhyme, one can also use other types of repetition.

For example, in some cases, one can repeat the same sound at the beginning of a series of words.

Here is an example from a poem I wrote many years ago, called Magic:

Sometimes I sleep while the nations roll round,
Mimicking bravery, muffling the sound
Of unspeakable slavery…
Sometimes I weep as the voice in the sky
Whispers the reasons I ought not to die,
Murmurs of treason,
And fades to a sigh.

It is subtle here, but I intentionally used two words beginning with the letter “s” in the first line, and two words beginning with “m” in the second line.

Here is another example where I did this, with a few words in the first line (from a poem called Treason):

Since the sadly silent lives
Of faded men, your voice revives.

I used the repetition of the “s” sound in the first line, to make the poem flow a bit more there.

I hope the above rules will be of use to you.  I have known people who were able to put some of the above steps into application very easily, and improve the quality of their poetry immensely by just thinking with some of these points.  They might work for you as well.

uks68brjv3

The Works of Lord Byron – Poetry Volume 4

uks68brjv3

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ballads, by Horatio Alger, Jr.

#10 in our series by Horatio Alger, Jr.

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Ballads

by Horatio Alger, Jr.

October, 1999 [Etext #1919]

Contents.

BALLADS.
Grand’ther Baldwin’s Thanksgiving
St. Nicholas
Barbara’s Courtship
The Confession
Rose in the Garden
Phoebe’s Wooing
The Lost Heart
John Maynard
Friar Anselmo

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.
In the Church at Stratford-on-Avon
Mrs. Browning’s Grave at Florence
My Castle
Apple-Blossoms
Summer Hours
June
Little Charlie
The Whippoorwill and I
Carving a Name

IN TIME OF WAR.
Gone to the War
Where is my Boy To-night?
A Soldier’s Valentine
Last Words
Song of the Croaker
King Cotton
Out of Egypt
The Price of Victory

HARVARD ODES.
I. Fair Harvard, Dear Guide of Our Youth’s Golden Days
II. As We Meet in Thy Name, Alma Mater, Tonight
III. Fair Harvard, The Months Have Accomplished Their Round
IV. there’s a Fountain of Fable, Whose Magical Power

OCCASIONAL ODES.
Bi-Centennial Ode
For the Consecration of a Cemetery

BALLADS.

GRAND’THER BALDWIN’S THANKSGIVING

UNDERNEATH protected branches, from the highway just aloof;
Stands the house of Grand’ther Baldwin, with its gently sloping roof.

Square of shape and solid-timbered, it was standing, I have heard,
In the days of Whig and Tory, under royal George the Third.

Many a time, I well remember, I have gazed with Childish awe
At the bullet-hole remaining in the sturdy oaken door,

Turning round half-apprehensive (recking not how time had fled)
Of the lurking, savage foeman from whose musket it was sped..

Not far off, the barn, plethoric with the autumn’s harvest spoils,
Holds the farmer’s well-earned trophies–the guerdon of his toils;

Filled the lofts with hay, sweet-scented, ravished from the meadows green,
While beneath are stalled the cattle, with their quiet, drowsy mien.

Deep and spacious are the grain-bins, brimming o’er with nature’s gold;
Here are piles of yellow pumpkins on the barn-floor loosely rolled.

Just below in deep recesses, safe from wintry frost chill,
There are heaps of ruddy apples from the orchard the hill.

Many a year has Grand’ther Baldwin in the old house dwelt in peace,
As his hair each year grew whiter, he has seen his herds increase.

Sturdy sons and comely daughters, growing up from childish plays,
One by one have met life’s duties, and gone forth their several ways.

Hushed the voice of childish laughter, hushed is childhood’s merry tone,
the fireside Grand’ther Baldwin and his good wife sit alone.

Turning round half-apprehensive (recking not how time had fled)
Of the lurking savage foeman from whose musket it was sped.

Not far off, the barn, plethoric with the autumn harvest spoils,
Holds the farmer’s well-earned trophies–the guerdon of his toils;

Filled the lofts with hay, sweet-scented, ravished from the meadows green,
While beneath are stalled the cattle, with their quiet drowsy mien.

Deep and spacious are the grain-bins, brimming o’er with nature’s gold;
Here are piles of yellow pumpkins on the barn-floor loosely rolled.

Just below in deep recesses, safe from wintry frost and chill,
There are heaps of ruddy apples from the orchard on the hill.

Many a year has Grand’ther Baldwin in the old house dwelt in peace,
As his hair each year grew whiter, he has seen his herds increase.

Sturdy sons and comely daughters, growing up from childish plays,
One by one have met life’s duties, and gone forth their several ways.

Hushed the voice of childish laughter, hushed is childhood’s merry tone,
By the fireside Grand’ther Baldwin and his good wife sit alone.

Yet once within the twelvemonth, when the days are short and drear,
And chill winds chant the requiem of the slowly fading year,

When the autumn work is over, and the harvest gathered in,
Once again the old house echoes to a long unwonted din.

Logs of hickory blaze and crackle in the fireplace huge anti high,
Curling wreaths of smoke mount upward to the gray November sky.

Ruddy lads and smiling lasses, just let loose from schooldom’s cares,
Patter, patter, race and clatter, up and down the great hall stairs.

All the boys shall hold high revel; all the girls shall have their way,-
That’s the law at Grand’ther Baldwin’s upon each Thanksgiving Day.

From from the parlor’s sacred precincts, hark! a madder uproar yet;
Roguish Charlie’s playing stage-coach, and the stage-coach has upset!

Joe, black-eyed and laughter-loving, Grand’ther’s specs his nose across,
Gravely winks at brother Willie, who is gayly playing horse.

Grandma’s face is fairly radiant; Grand’ther knows not how to frown,
though the children, in their frolic, turn the old house upside down.

For the boys may hold high revel, and the girls must have their way;
That’s the law at Grand’ther Baldwin’s upon each Thanksgiving Day.

But the dinner–ah! the dinner–words are feeble to portray
What a culinary triumph is achieved Thanksgiving Day!

Fairly groans the board with dainties, but the turkey rules the roast,
Aldermanic at the outset, at the last a fleshless ghost.

Then the richness of the pudding, and the flavor of the pie,
When you’ve dined at Grandma Baldwin’s you will know as well as I.

When, at length, the feast was ended, Grand’ther Baldwin bent his head,
And, amid the solemn silence, with a reverent voice, he said:–

“Now unto God, the Gracious One, we thanks and homage pay,
Who guardeth us, and guideth us, and loveth us always!

“He scatters blessings in our paths, He giveth us increase,
He crowns us with His kindnesses, and granteth us His peace.

“Unto himself, our wandering feet, we pray that He may draw,
And may we strive, with faithful hearts, to keep His holy law!”

His simple words in silence died: a moment’s hush. And then
From all the listening hearts there rose a solemn-voiced Amen !

ST. NICHOLAS.

In the far-off Polar seas,
Far beyond the Hebrides,
Where the icebergs, towering high,
Seem to pierce the wintry sky,
And the fur-clad Esquimaux
Glides in sledges o’er the snow,
Dwells St. Nick, the merry wight,
Patron saint of Christmas night.

Solid walls of massive ice,
Bearing many a quaint device,
Flanked by graceful turrets twain,
Clear as clearest porcelain,
Bearing at a lofty height
Christ’s pure cross in simple white,
Carven with surpassing art
From an iceberg’s crystal heart.

Here St. Nick, in royal state,
Dwells, until December late
Clips the days at either end,
And the nights at each extend;
Then, with his attendant sprites,
Scours the earth on wintry nights,
Bringing home, in well-filled hands,
Children’s gifts from many lands.

Here are whistles, tops and toys,
Meant to gladden little boys;
Skates and sleds that soon will glide
O’er the ice or steep hill-side.
Here are dolls with flaxen curls,
Sure to charm the little girls;
Christmas books, with pictures gay,
For this welcome holiday.

In the court the reindeer wait;
Filled the sledge with costly freight.
As the first faint shadow falls,
Promptly from his icy halls
Steps St. Nick, and grasps the rein:
And afar, in measured time,
Sounds the sleigh-bells’ silver chime.

Like an arrow from the bow
Speed the reindeer o’er the snow.
Onward! Now the loaded sleigh
Skirts the shores of Hudson’s Bay.
Onward, till the stunted tree
Gains a loftier majesty,
And the curling smoke-wreaths rise
Under less inclement skies.

Built upon a hill-side steep
Lies a city wrapt in sleep.
Up and down the lonely street
Sleepy watchmen pace their beat.
Little heeds them Santa Claus;
Not for him are human laws.
With a leap he leaves the ground,
Scales the chimney at a bound.

Five small stockings hang below;
Five small stockings in a row.
From his pocket blithe St. Nick
Fills the waiting stockings quick;
Some with sweetmeats, some with toys,
Gifts for girls, and gifts for boys,
Mounts the chimney like a bird,
And the bells are once more heard.

Santa Claus! Good Christmas saint,
In whose heart no selfish taint

Findeth place, some homes there be
Where no stockings wait for thee,
Homes where sad young faces wear
Painful marks of Want and Care,
And the Christmas morning brings
No fair hope of better things.

Can you not some crumbs bestow
On these Children steeped in woe;
Steal a single look of care
Which their sad young faces wear;
From your overflowing store
Give to them whose hearts are sore?
No sad eyes should greet the morn
When the infant Christ was born.

BARBARA’S COURTSHIP.

‘Tis just three months and eke a day,
Since in the meadows, raking hay,
On looking up I chanced to see
The manor’s lord, young Arnold Lee,
With a loose hand on the rein,
Riding slowly down the lane.
As I gazed with earnest look
On his face as on a book,
As if conscious of the gaze,
Suddenly he turned the rays
Of his brilliant eyes on me.
Then I looked down hastily,
While my heart, like caged bird,
Fluttered till it might be heard.
Foolish, foolish Barbara!

We had never met before,
He had been so long away,
Visiting some foreign shore,
I have heard my father say.
What in truth was he to me,
Rich and handsome Arnold Lee?
Fate had placed us far apart;
Why, then, did my restless heart
Flutter when his careless glance
Fell on me by merest chance?
Foolish, foolish Barbara!

There are faces–are there not?-
That can never be forgot.
Looks that seen but once impress
With peculiar vividness.
So it was with Arnold Lee.
Why it was I cannot say
That, through all the livelong day
He seemed ever near to me.
While I raked, as in a dream,
Now the same place o’er and o’er,
Till my little sister chid,
And with full eyes opened wide,
Much in wonder, gently cried,
“Why, what ails thee, Barbara?”

I am in the fields again;
‘Tis a pleasant day in June,
All the songsters are in tune,
Pouring out their matin hymn.
All at once a conscious thrill
Led me, half against my will,
To look up. Abashed I see
His dark eyes full fixed on me.
What he said I do not know,
But his voice was soft and low,
As he spoke in careless chat,
Now of this and now of that,
While the murmurous waves of sound
Wafted me a bliss profound.
Foolish, foolish Barbara!

Am I waking? Scarce I know
If I wake or if I dream,
So unreal all things seem;
Yet I could not well forego
This sweet dream, if dream it be,
That has brought such joy to me.
He has told me that he loves me,-
He in rank so far above me;
And when I, with cheeks aglow,
Told him that it was not meet
He should wed with one so low,
He should wed with one so low,
Then he said, in accents sweet,
“Far be thoughts of rank or pelf;
Dear, I love thee for thyself!”
Happy, happy Barbara!

THE CONFESSION.

I am glad that you have come,
Arthur, from the dusty town;
You must throw aside your cares,
And relax your legal frown.
Coke and Littleton, avaunt!
You have ruled him through the day;
In this quiet, sylvan haunt,
Be content to yield your sway.

It is pleasant, is it not,
Sitting here beneath the trees,
While the restless wind above
Ripples over leafy seas?

Often, when the twilight falls,
In the shadow, quite alone,
I have sat till starlight came,
Listening to its monotone.
Yet not always quite alone,–
Brother, let me take the place
Just behind you now the moon
Shines no longer in my face.

It is near two months ago
Since I met him, as I think,
By God’s mercy, when my horse
Trembled on the river’s brink.
I had fallen, but his arm
Firmly seized the bridle-rein,
And, with one decided grasp,
Drew me back to life again.
I was grateful and essayed
Fitting words my thanks to speak.
Arthur, when the heart feels most,
Words, I think, are oftenest weak.

So I stammered and I fear,
What I said had little grace
But I knew he understood,
By the smile upon his face.
There are faces–his was such–
That are sealed when in repose;
Only when a smile floods out,
All the soul in beauty glows.
With that smile I grew content,
And my heart grew strangely calm,
As with trustful step I walked,
My arm resting on his arm.

Brother, turn your face away,
So, dear, I can tell you best
All that followed; but be sure
You are looking to the west.
Arthur, I have seen him since,
Nearly every day, until
If I lose him, all my life
Would grow wan, and dark, and chill.
Brother, this my love impute
Not to me for maiden-shame;
He has sought me for his wife,
He would crown me with his name.
Only yesterday he said
That my love his life would bless:
Would I grant it? Arthur, dear,
Was I wrong in saying “Yes”?

ROSE IN THE GARDEN.

THIRTY years have come and gone,
Melting away like Southern Snows,
Since, in the light of a summer’s night,
I went to the garden to seek my Rose.

Mine! Do you hear it, silver moon,
Flooding my heart with your mellow shine?
Mine! Be witness, ye distant stars,
Looking on me with eyes divine!

Tell me, tell me, wandering winds,
Whisper it, if you may not speak–
Did you ever, in all your round,
Fan a lovelier brow or cheek?

Long I nursed in my heart the love,
Love which felt, but dared not tell,
Till, I scarcely know how or when–
It found wild words,- and all was well!

I can hear her sweet voice even now–
It makes my pulses leap and thrill–
“I owe you more than I well can pay;
You may take me, Robert, if you will!”

One pleasant summer night,
the garden walks alone,
Looking about with restless eyes,
Wondering whither my Rose had flown,

Till, from a leafy arbor near,
There came to my ears the sound of speech.
Who can be with Rose to night?
Let me hide me under the beach.

It must be one of her female friends,
Talking with her in the gloaming gray;
Perchance–I thought–they may speak of me;
Let me listen to what they say.

This I said with a careless smile,
And a joyous heart that was free from fears;
Little I dreamed that the words I heard
Would weigh on my heavy heart for years.

“Rose, my Rose! for your heart is mine,”
I heard in a low voice, passion-fraught,
“In the sight of Heaven we are truly one;
Why will you cast me away for naught?

“Will you give your hand where your heart goes not
To a man who is grave and stern and old;
And whose love compared with my passion-heat,
As the snow of the frozen North, is cold?”

And Rose–I could feel her cheek grow pale–
Her voice was tremulous, then grew strong–
“Richard,” she said, “your words are wild,
And you do my guardian bitter wrong.

“Did you never hear how, years gone by,” –
She spoke in a tremulous undertone–
“Bereft of friends, o’er the world’s highways,
I wandered forth as a child alone?

“He opened to me his home and heart–
He whom you call so stern and cold–
And my grateful heart I may well bestow
On him for his kindness manifold.”

“Rose,” he said, in a saddened tone,
“I thank him for all he has done for thee;
He has acted nobly–I did him wrong–
But is there no voice in your heart for me?”

And Rose–she trembled–I felt it all;
I heard her quick breath come and go;
Her voice was broken; she only said,
“Have pity, Richard, and let me go!”

And then–Heaven gave me strength, I think–
I stood before them calm and still;
You might have thought my tranquil breast
Had never known one passion-thrill.

And they alternate flushed and paled;
Rose tottered, and I feared would fall;
I caught her in supporting arms,
And whispered, “Rose, I heard it all.

“I had a dream, but it is passed,
That we might journey, hand in hand
Along the rugged steeps of life,
Until we reached God’s promised land.

“This was my dream; — ’tis over now;–
Thank Heaven, it is not yet too late!
I pray no selfish act of mine
May keep two young hearts separate.”

I placed her passive hand in his-
With how much pain God only knows–
And blessing him for her sweet sake,
I left him standing with my Rose!

PHOEBE’S WOOING.

“PHOEBE! Phoebe! Where is the chit?
When I want her most she’s out of the way.
Child, you’re running a long account
Up, to be squared on Judgment-day.

“Where have you been? and what have you there?”
“To the pasture for buttercups wet with dew.”
“My patience! I think you are out of your wits;
I wonder what good will buttercups do?

“There’s pennyroyal you might have got,-
It might have been useful to you or me,
But I never heard, in all my life,
Of buttercup cordial or buttercup tea.

“I want you to stay and mind the bread,
I’ve just put two loaves in the oven to bake;
When they are clone take them carefully out,
And put in their place this loaf of cake,

“While I run over to Widow Brown’s;
Her son, from the mines, has just got back.
I don’t believe he’s a cent in his purse,
Young men are so shiftless now, alack!

“It was very different when I was young;
Young men were prudent, and girls were wise;
You wouldn’t catch them gadding about
Like so many idle butterflies.”

So bustled and scolded the worthy dame,
Until she had passed the outer sill,
To do her justice, it seldom chanced
That her hands were idle, or tongue was still.

So Phoebe gathered her knitting up,
And sat her down in the chimney niche;
But her mind was on other thoughts intent,
And here and there she dropped a stitch.

The yellow kitten purred on the hearth,
While the kitchen clock, with its frame of oak,
In the corner stood, like a sentinel,
And challenged time with its measured stroke.

But Phoebe’s mind was on none of these:
The bread in the oven, her good aunt’s frown,
And the scene before her faded away,
And blended with thoughts of Reuben Brown:

How they walked together on summer days,
Or bravely faced the winter’s chill,
And chatted merrily all the way
To the little school-house on Sligo Hill.

How both grew older, and school-days passed,
When he was a youth, and a maiden she;
How often she went with Reuben Brown
To the rustic dance or the social bee.

The warm flush deepened on Phoebe’s cheek,
And she breathed a low, half-conscious sigh;
Ah, well-a-day! they were happy times,
But he has forgotten, and so must I.”

So Phoebe gathered her knitting up,
Which, while she was thinking, had fallen down,
When her quick ear caught a strange footfall,
And there in the doorway stood Reuben Brown,

With the same frank, handsome face she knew,
A smile as bright, and an eye as black–
“Phoebe,” he said, “I have wandered far;
Are you glad to see your playmate back?”

The kitten still purred on the kitchen hearth,
And the ancient clock, with its frame of oak,
In the corner stood, like a sentinel,
And challenged time with its measured stroke.

A pleased light shone in the maiden’s eyes;
Ah, love, young love, it is very sweet!
Reuben had gone, but she sat quite still,
And the knitting lay untouched at her feet.

Just then the dame came bustling in,
And went to the oven without ado.
“Why, Phoebe, child, what have you done?
The bread is baked as black as my shoe!”

And Phoebe started, and blushed for shame,
Took up her knitting and dropped it down;
And when her aunt said, “What ails you, child?”
She hastily answered, “Reuben Brown.”

Ah, love! young love! it is very sweet,
In field, or hamlet, or crowded mart;
But it burns with the brightest, purest flame
In the hidden depths of a young maid’s heart.

THE LOST HEART.

One golden summer day,
Along the forest-way,
Young Colin passed with blithesome steps alert.

His locks with careless grace
Rimmed round his handsome face
And drifted outward on the airy surge.

So blithe of heart was he,
He hummed a melody,
And all the birds were hushed to hear him sing.

Across his shoulders flung
His bow and baldric hung:
So, in true huntsman’s guise, he threads the wood.

The sun mounts up the sky,
The air moves sluggishly,
And reeks with summer heat in every pore.

His limbs begin to tire,
Slumbers his youthful fire;
He sinks upon a violet-bed to rest.

The soft winds go and come
With low and drowsy hum,
And ope for him the ivory gate of dreams.

Beneath the forest-shade
There trips a woodland maid,
And marks with startled eye the sleeping youth.

At first she thought to fly,
Then, timid, drawing nigh,
She gazed in wonder on his fair young face.

When swiftly stooping down
Upon his locks so brown
She lightly pressed her lips, and blushing fled.

When Colin woke from sleep,
From slumbers calm and deep,
He felt- he knew not how- his heart had flown.

And so, with anxious care,
He wandered here and there,
But could not find his lost heart anywhere.

Then he, with air distraught,
And brow of anxious thought,
Went out into the world beyond the wood.

Of each that passed him by,
He queried anxiously,
“I prithee, hast thou seen a heart astray?”

Some stared and hurried on,
While others said in scorn.
Your heart has gone in search of your lost wits”

The day is wearing fast,
Young Colin comes at last
To where a cottage stood embowered in trees.

He looks within, and there
He sees a maiden fair,
Who sings low songs the while she plies her wheel.

“I prithee, maiden bright,”–
She turns as quick as light,
And straight a warm flush crimsons all her face.

She, much abashed, looks down,
For on his locks so brown
She seems to see the marks her lips have made.

Whereby she stands confest;
What need to tell the rest?
He said, “I think, fair maid, you have my heart.

“Nay, do not give it back,
I shall not feel the lack,
If thou wilt give to me thine own therefor.”

JOHN MAYNARD.

‘Twas on Lake Erie’s broad expanse
One bright midsummer day,
The gallant steamer Ocean Queen
Swept proudly on her way.
Bright faces clustered on the deck,
Or, leaning o’er the side,
Watched carelessly the feathery foam
That flecked the rippling tide.

Ah, who beneath that cloudless sky,
That smiling bends serene,
Could dream that danger awful, vast,
Impended o’er the scene,-
Could dream that ere an hour had sped
That frame of sturdy oak
Would sink beneath the lake’s blue waves,
Blackened with fire and smoke?

A seaman sought the captain’s side,
A moment whispered low;
The captain’s swarthy face grew pale;
He hurried down below.
Alas, too late! Though quick, and sharp,
And clear his orders came,
No human efforts could avail
To quench the insidious flame.

The bad news quickly reached the deck,
It sped from lip to lip,
And ghastly Faces everywhere
Looked from the doomed ship.
“Is there no hope–no chance of life?”
A hundred lips implore,
“But one,” the captain made reply,
“To run the ship on shore.”

A sailor, whose heroic soul
That hour should yet reveal,
By name John Maynard, eastern-born,
Stood calmly at the wheel.
“Head her south-east!” the captain shouts,
Above the smothered roar,–
“Head her south-east without delay!
Make for the nearest shore!”

No terror pales the helmsman’s cheek,
Or clouds his dauntless eye,
As, in a sailor’s measured tone,
His voice responds, “Ay! ay!”
Three hundred souls, the steamer’s freight,
Crowd forward wild with fear,
While at the stern the dreaded flames
Above the deck appear.

John Maynard watched the nearing flames,
But still with steady hand
He grasped the wheel, and steadfastly
He steered the ship to land.
“John Maynard, can you still hold out?”
He heard the captain cry;
A voice from out the stifling smoke
Faintly responds, “Ay! ay!”

But half a mile! a hundred hands
Stretch eagerly to shore.
But half a mile! That distance sped
Peril shall all be o’er.
But half a mile ! Yet stay, the flames
No longer slowly creep,
But gather round that helmsman bold,
With fierce, impetuous sweep.

“John Maynard!” with an anxious voice
The captain cries once more,
“Stand by the wheel five minutes yet,
And we shall reach the shore.”
Through flame and smoke that dauntless heart
Responded firmly still,
Unawed, though face to face with death,-
“With God’s good help I will!”

The flames approach with giant strides,
They scorch his hand and brow;
One arm, disabled, seeks his side,
Ah! he is conquered now!
But no, his teeth are firmly set,
He crushes down his pain,
His knee upon the stanchion pressed,
He guides the ship again.

One moment yet! one moment yet!
Brave heart, thy task is o’er,
The pebbles grate beneath the keel.
The steamer touches shore.
Three hundred grateful voice rise
In praise to God that he
Hath saved them from the fearful fire,
And from the engulphing sea.

But where is he, that helmsman bold?
The captain saw him reel,-
His nerveless hands released their task,
He sank beside the wheel.
The wave received his lifeless corpse,
Blackened with smoke and fire.
God rest him! Never hero had
A nobler funeral pyre!

FRIAR ANSELM0.

Friar Anselmo (God’s grace may he win!)
Committed one sad day a deadly sin;

Which being done he drew back, self-abhorred,
From the rebuking presence of the Lord,

And, kneeling down, besought, with bitter cry,
Since life was worthless grown, that he might die.

All night he knelt, and, when the morning broke,
In patience still he waits death’s fatal stroke.

When all at once a cry of sharp distress
Aroused Anselmo from his wretchedness;

And, looking from the convent window high,
He saw a wounded traveller gasping lie

Just underneath, who, bruised and stricken sore,
Had crawled for aid unto the convent door.

The friar’s heart with deep compassion stirred,
When the poor wretch’s groans for help were heard

With gentle hands, and touched with love divine,
He bathed his wounds, and poured in oil and wine.

With tender foresight cared for all his needs,–
A blessed ministry of noble deeds.

In such devotion passed seven days. At length
The poor wayfarer gained his wonted strength.

With grateful thanks he left the convent walls,
And once again on death Anselmo calls.

When, lo! his cell was filled with sudden light,
And on the wall he saw an angel write,

(An angel in whose likeness he could trace,
More noble grown, the traveller’s form and face),

“Courage, Anselmo, though thy sin be great,
God grants thee life that thou may’st expiate.

“Thy guilty stains shall be washed white again,
By noble service done thy fellow-men.

“His soul draws nearest unto God above,
Who to his brother ministers in love.”

Meekly Anselmo rose, and, after prayer,
His soul was lightened of its past despair.

Henceforth he strove, obeying God’s high will,
His heaven-appointed mission to fulfil.

And many a soul, oppressed with pain and grief,
Owed to the friar solace and relief.

———————

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

———————

THE CHURCH AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

One autumn day, when hedges yet were green,
And thick-branched trees diffused a leafy gloom,
Hard by where Avon rolls its silvery tide,
I stood in silent thought by Shakspeare’s tomb.

O happy church, beneath whose marble floor
His ashes lie who so enriched mankind;
The many-sided Shakespeare, rare of soul,
And dowered with an all-embracing mind.

Through the stained windows rays of sunshine fall
In softened glory on the chancel floor;
While I, a pilgrim from across the sea,
stand with bare head in reverential awe.

Churches there are within whose gloomy vaults
Repose the bones of those that once were kings;
Their power has passed, and what remains but clay?
While in his grave our Shakspeare lives and sings.

Kings were his puppets, kingdoms but his stage,–
Faint shadows they without his plastic art,–
He waves his wand, and lo! they live again,
And in his world perform their mimic part.

Born in the purple, his imperial soul
Sits crowned and sceptred in the realms of mind.
Kingdoms may fall, and crumble to decay,
Time but confirms his empire o’er mankind.

MRS. BROWNING’S GRAVE AT FLORENCE.

FLORENCE wears an added grace,
All her earlier honors crowning;
Dante’s birthplace, Art’s fair home,
Holds the dust of Barrett Browning.

Guardian of the noble dead
That beneath thy soil lie sleeping,
England, with full heart, commends
This new treasure to thy keeping.

Take her, she is half thine own;
In her verses’ rich outpouring,
Breathes the warm Italian heart,
Yearning for the land’s restoring.

From thy skies her poet-heart
Caught a fresher inspiration,
And her soul obtained new strength,
With her bodily translation.

Freely take what thou hast given,
Less her verses’ rhythmic beauty,
Than the stirring notes that called
Trumpet-like thy sons to duty.

Rarest of exotic flowers
In thy native chaplet twining,
To the temple of thy great
Add her–she is worth enshrining.

MY CASTLE.

I have a beautiful castle,
With towers and battlements fair;
And many a banner, with gay device,
Floats in the outer air.

The walls are of solid silver;
The towers are of massive gold;
And the lights that stream from the windows
A royal scene unfold.

Ah! could you but enter my castle
With its pomp of regal sheen,
You would say that it far surpasses
The palace of Aladeen.

Could you but enter as I do,
And pace through the vaulted hall,
And mark the stately columns,
And the pictures on the wall;

With the costly gems about them,
That send their light afar,
With a chaste and softened splendor
Like the light of a distant star!

And where is this wonderful castle,
With its rich emblazonings,
Whose pomp so far surpasses
The homes of the greatest kings?

Come out with me at morning
And lie in the meadow-grass,
And lift your eyes to the ether blue,
And you will see it pass.

There! can you not see the battlements;
And the turrets stately and high,
Whose lofty summits are tipped with clouds,
And lost in the arching sky?

Dear friend, you are only dreaming,
Your castle so stately and fair
Is only a fanciful structure,–
A castle in the air.

Perchance you are right. I know not
If a phantom it may be;
But yet, in my inmost heart, I feel
That it lives, and lives for me.

For when clouds and darkness are round me,
And my heart is heavy with care,
I steal me away from the noisy crowd,
To dwell in my castle fair.

There are servants to do my bidding;
There are servants to heed my call;
And I, with a master’s air of pride,
May pace through the vaulted hall.

And I envy not the monarchs
With cities under their sway;
For am I not, in my own right,
A monarch as proud as they?

What matter, then, if to others
My castle a phantom may be,
Since I feel, in the depths of my own heart,
That it is not so to me?

APPLE-BLOSSOMS.

I sit in the shadow of apple-boughs,
In the fragrant orchard close,
And around me floats the scented air,
With its wave-like tidal flows.
I close my eyes in a dreamy bliss,
And call no king my peer;
For is not this the rare, sweet time,
The blossoming time of the year?

I lie on a couch of downy grass,
With delicate blossoms strewn,
And I feel the throb of Nature’s heart
Responsive to my own.
Oh, the world is fair, and God is good,
That maketh life so dear;
For is not this the rare, sweet time,
The blossoming time of the year?

I can see, through the rifts of the apple-boughs,
The delicate blue of the sky,
And the changing clouds with their marvellous tints
That drift so lazily by.
And strange, sweet thoughts sing through my brain,
And Heaven, it seemeth near;
Oh, is it not a rare, sweet time,
The blossoming time of the year?

SUMMER HOURS.

It is the year’s high noon,
The earth sweet incense yields,
And o’er the fresh, green fields
Bends the clear sky of June.

I leave the crowded streets,
The hum of busy life,
Its clamor and its strife,
To breathe thy perfumed sweets.

O rare and golden hours!
The bird’s melodious song,
Wavelike, is borne along
Upon a strand of flowers.

I wander far away,
Where, through the forest trees,
Sports the cool summer breeze,
In wild and wanton play.

A patriarchal elm
Its stately form uprears,
Which twice a hundred years
Has ruled this woodland realm.

I sit beneath its shade,
And watch, with careless eye,
The brook that babbles by,
And cools the leafy glade.

In truth I wonder not,
That in the ancient days
The temples of God’s praise
Were grove and leafy grot.

The noblest ever planned,
With quaint device and rare,
By man, can ill compare
With these from God’s own hand.

Pilgrim with way-worn feet,
Who, treading life’s dull round,
No true repose hast found,
Come to this green retreat.

For bird, and flower, and tree,
Green fields, and woodland wild,
Shall bear, with voices mild,
Sweet messages to thee.

JUNE.

Throw open wide your golden gates,
O poet-landed month of June,
And waft me, on your spicy breath,
The melody of birds in tune.

O fairest palace of the three,
Wherein Queen Summer holdeth sway,
I gaze upon your leafy courts
From out the vestibule of May.

I fain would tread your garden walks,
Or in your shady bowers recline;
Then open wide your golden gates,
And make them mine, and make them mine.

LITTLE CHARLIE.

A VIOLET grew by the river-side,
And gladdened all hearts with its bloom;
While over the fields, on the scented air,
It breathed a rich perfume.
But the clouds grew dark in the angry sky,
And its portals were opened wide;
And the heavy rain beat down the flower
That grew by the river-side.

Not far away in a pleasant home,
There lived a little boy,
Whose cheerful face and childish grace
Filled every heart with joy.
He wandered one day to the river’s verge,
With no one near to save;
And the heart that we loved with a boundless love
Was stilled in the restless wave.

The sky grew dark to our tearful eyes,
And we bade farewell to joy;
For our hearts were bound by a sorrowful tie
To the grave of the little boy.
The birds still sing in the leafy tree
That shadows the open door;
We heed them not, for we think of the voice
That we shall hear no more.

We think of him at eventide,
And gaze on his vacant chair
With a longing heart that will scarce believe
That Charlie is not there.
We seem to hear his ringing laugh,
And his bounding step at the door;
But, alas! there comes the sorrowful thought,
We shall never hear them more!

We shall walk sometimes to his little grave,
In the pleasant summer hours;
We will speak his name in a softened voice,
And cover his grave with flowers;
We will think of him in his heavenly home,–
In his heavenly home so fair;
And we will trust with a hopeful trust
That we shall meet him there.

THE WHIPPOORWILL AND I.

IN the hushed hours of night, when the air quite still,
I hear the strange cry of the lone whippoorwill,
Who Chants, without ceasing, that wonderful trill,
Of which the sole burden is still, “Whip-poor-Will.”

And why should I whip him? Strange visitant,
Has he been playing truant this long summer day?
I listened a moment; more clear and more shrill
Rang the voice of the bird, as he cried, “Whip-poor-Will.”

But what has poor Will done? I ask you once more;
I’ll whip him, don’t fear, if you’ll tell me what for.
I paused for an answer; o’er valley and hill
Rang the voice of the bird, as he cried, “Whip-poor-Will.”

Has he come to your dwelling, by night or by day,
And snatched the young birds from their warm nest away?
I paused for an answer; o’er valley and hill
Rang the voice of the bird, as he cried, “Whip-poor-Will.”

Well, well, I can hear you, don’t have any fears,
I can hear what is constantly dinned in my ears.
The obstinate bird, with his wonderful trill,
Still made but one answer, and that, “Whip-poor-Will.”

But what HAS poor Will done? I prithee explain;
I’m out of all patience, don’t mock me again.
The obstinate bird, with his wonderful trill,
Still made the same answer, and that, “Whip-poor-Will.”

Well, have your own way, then; but if you won’t tell,
I’ll shut down the window, and bid you farewell;
But of one thing be sure, I won’t whip him until
You give me some reason for whipping poor Will.

I listened a moment, as if for reply,
But nothing was heard but the bird’s mocking cry.
I caught the faint echo from valley and hill;
It breathed the same burden, that strange “Whip-poor-Will.”

CARVING A NAME.

I wrote my name upon the sand,
And trusted it would stand for aye;
But, soon, alas! the refluent sea
Had washed my feeble lines away.

I carved my name upon the wood,
And, after years, returned again;
I missed the shadow of the tree
That stretched of old upon the plain.

To solid marble next, my name
I gave as a perpetual trust;
An earthquake rent it to its base,
And now it lies, o’erlaid with dust.

All these have failed. In wiser mood
I turn and ask myself, “What then?”
If I would have my name endure,
I’ll write it on the hearts of men,

In characters of living light,
Of kindly deeds and actions wrought.
And these, beyond the touch of time,
Shall live immortal as my thought.

————————–

IN TIME OF WAR.

————————–

GONE TO THE WAR.

My Charlie has gone to the war,
My Charlie so brave and tall;
He left his plough in the furrow,
And flew at his country’s call.
May God in safety keep him,–
My precious boy–my all!

My heart is pining to see him;
I miss him every day;
My heart is weary with waiting,
And sick of the long delay,–
But I know his country needs him,
And I could not bid him stay.

I remember how his face flushed,
And how his color came,
When the flash from the guns of Sumter
Lit the whole land with flame,
And darkened our country’s banner
With the crimson hue of shame.

“Mother,” he said, then faltered,–
I felt his mute appeal;
I paused– if you are a mother,
You know what mothers feel,
When called to yield their dear ones
To the cruel bullet and steel.

My heart stood still for a moment,
Struck with a mighty woe;
A faint as of death came o’er me,
I am a mother, you know,
But I sternly checked my weakness,
And firmly bade him “Go.”

Wherever the fight is fiercest
I know that my boy will be;
Wherever the need is sorest
Of the stout arms of the free.
May he prove as true to his country
As he has been true to me.

My home is lonely without him,
My hearth bereft of joy,
The thought of him who has left me
My constant sad employ;
But God has been good to the mother,–
She shall not blush for her boy.

WHERE IS MY BOY TO-NIGHT?

When the clouds in the Western sky
Flush red with the setting sun,–
When the veil of twilight falls,
And the busy day is done,–
I sit and watch the clouds,
With their crimson hues alight,
And ponder with anxious heart,
Oh, where is my boy to-night?

It is just a year to-day
Since he bade me a gay good-by,
To march where banners float,
And the deadly missiles fly.
As I marked his martial step
I felt my color rise
With all a mother’s pride,
And my heart was in my eyes.

There’s a little room close by,
Where I often used to creep
In the hush of the summer night
To watch my boy asleep.
But he who used to rest
Beneath the spread so white
Is far away from me now,–
Oh, where is my boy to-night?

Perchance in the gathering night,
With slow and weary feet,
By the light of Southern stars,
He paces his lonely beat.
Does he think of the mother’s heart
That will never cease to yearn,
As only a mother’s can,
For her absent boy’s return?

Oh, where is my boy to-night?
I cannot answer where,
But I know, wherever he is,
He is under our Father’s care.
May He guard, and guide, and bless
My boy, wherever he be,
And bring him back at length
To bless and to comfort me.

May God bless all our boys
By the camp-fire’s ruddy glow,
Or when in the deadly fight
They front the embattled foe;
And comfort each mother’s heart,
As she sits in the fading light,
And ponders with anxious heart–
Oh, where is my boy to-night?

A SOLDIER’S VALENTINE.

Just from the sentry’s tramp
(I must take it again at ten),
I have laid my musket down,
And seized instead my pen;
For, pacing my lonely round
In the chilly twilight gray,
The thought, dear Mary, came,
That this is St. Valentine’s Day.

And with the thought there came
A glimpse of the happy time
When a school-boy’s first attempt
I sent you, in borrowed rhyme,
On a gilt-edged sheet, embossed
With many a quaint design,
And signed, in school-boy hand,
“Your loving Valentine.”

The years have come and gone,–
Have flown, I know not where, –
And the school-boy’s merry face
Is grave with manhood’s care;
But the heart of the man still beats
At the well-remembered name,
And on this St. Valentine’s Day
His choice is still the same.

There was a time– ah, well!
Think not that I repine
When I dreamed this happy day
Would smile on you as mine;
But I heard my country’s call;
I knew her need was sore.
Thank God, no selfish thought
Withheld me from the war.

But when the dear old flag
Shall float in its ancient pride,
When the twain shall be made one,
And feuds no more divide,–
I will lay my musket down,
My martial garb resign,
And turn my joyous feet
Toward home and Valentine.

LAST WORDS.

“DEAR Charlie,” breathed a soldier,
“O comrade true and tried,
Who in the heat of battle
Pressed closely to my side;
I feel that I am stricken,
My life is ebbing fast;
I fain would have you with me,
Dear Charlie, till the last.

“It seems so sudden, Charlie,
To think to-morrow’s sun
Will look upon me lifeless,
And I not twenty-one!
I little dreamed this morning,
Twould bring my last campaign;
God’s ways are not as our ways,
And I will not complain.

“There’s one at home, dear Charlie,
Will mourn for me when dead,
Whose heart–it is a mother’s–
Can scarce be comforted.
You’ll write and tell her, Charlie,
With my dear love, that I
Fought bravely as a soldier should,
And died as he should die.

“And you will tell her, Charlie,
She must not grieve too much,
Our country claims our young lives,
For she has need of such.
And where is he would falter,
Or turn ignobly back,
When Duty’s voice cries ‘Forward,’
And Honor lights the track ?

“And there’s another, Charlie
(His voice became more low),
When thoughts of HER come o’er me,
It makes it hard to go.
This locket in my bosom,
She gave me just before
I left my native village
For the fearful scenes of war.

“Give her this message, Charlie,
Sent with my dying breath,
To her and to my banner
I’m ‘faithful unto death.’
And if, in that far country
Which I am going to,
Our earthly ties may enter,
I’ll there my love renew.

“Come nearer, closer, Charlie,
My head I fain would rest,
It must be for the last time,
Upon your faithful breast.
Dear friend, I cannot tell you
How in my heart I feel
The depth of your devotion,
Your friendship strong as steel.

“We’ve watched and camped together
In sunshine and in rain;
We’ve shared the toils and perils
Of more than one campaign;
And when my tired feet faltered,
Beneath the noontide heat,
Your words sustained my courage,
Gave new strength to my feet.

“And once,– ’twas at Antietam,–
Pressed hard by thronging foes,
I almost sank exhausted
Beneath their cruel blows,–
When you, dear friend, undaunted,
With headlong courage threw
Your heart into the contest,
And safely brought me through.

“My words are weak, dear Charlie,
My breath is growing scant;
Your hand upon my heart there,
Can you not hear me pant?
Your thoughts I know will wander
Sometimes to where I lie–
How dark it grows! True comrade
And faithful friend, good-by!”

A moment, and he lay there
A statue, pale and calm.
His youthful head reclining
Upon his comrade’s arm.
His limbs upon the greensward
Were stretched in careless grace,
And by the fitful moon was seen
A smile upon his face.

SONG OF THE CROAKER. *

* Written by request for the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair.

An old frog lived in a dismal swamp,
In a dismal kind of way;
And all that he did, whatever befell,
Was to croak the livelong day.
Croak, croak, croak,
When darkness filled the air,
And croak, croak, croak,
When the skies were bright and fair.

“Good Master Frog, a battle is fought,
And the foeman’s power is broke.”
But he only turned a greener hue,
And answered with a croak.
Croak, croak, croak,
When the clouds are dark and dun,
And croak, croak, croak,
In the blaze of the noontide sun.

“Good Master Frog, the forces of right
Are driving the hosts of wrong.”
But he gave his head an ominous shake,
And croaked out, “Nous verrons!”
Croak, croak, croak,
Till the heart is full of gloom,
And croak, croak, croak,
Till the world seems but a tomb.

To poison the cup of life,
By always dreading the worst.
Is to make of the earth a dungeon damp,
And the happiest life accursed.
Croak, croak, croak,
When the noontide sun rides high,
And croak, croak, croak,
Lest the night come by and by.

Farewell to the dismal frog;
Let him croak as loud as he may,
He cannot blot the sun from heaven,
Nor hinder the march of day,
Though he croak, croak, croak,
Till the heart is full of gloom,
And croak, croak, croak,
Till the world seems but a tomb.

KING COTTON.

KING COTTON looks from his window
Towards the westering sun,
And he marks, with an anguished horror,
That his race is almost run.

His form is thin and shrunken;
His cheek is pale and wan;
And the lines of care on his furrowed brow
Are dread to look upon.

But yesterday a monarch,
In the flush of his pomp and pride,
And, not content with his own broad lands,
He would rule the world beside.

He built him a stately palace,
With gold from beyond the sea;
And he laid with care the corner-stone,
And he called it Slavery:

He summoned an army with banners,
To keep his foes at bay;
And, gazing with pride on his palace walls,
He said, “They will stand for aye!”

But the palace walls are shrunken,
And partly overthrown,
And the storms of war, in their violence,
Have loosened the corner-stone.

Now Famine stalks through the palace halls,
With her gaunt and pallid train;
You can hear the cries of famished men,
As they cry for bread in vain.

The king can see, from his palace walls.
A land by his pride betrayed;
Thousands of mothers and wives bereft.
Thousands of graves new-made.

And he seems to see, in the lowering sky,
The shape of a flaming sword;
Whereon he reads, with a sinking heart,
The anger of the Lord.

God speed the time when the guilty king
Shall be hurled from his blood-stained throne;
And the palace of Wrong shall crumble to dust,
With its boasted corner-stone.

A temple of Freedom shall rise instead,
On the desecrated site:
And within its shelter alike shall stand
The black man and the white.

OUT OF EGYPT.

To Egypt’s king, who ruled beside
The reedy river’s flow,
Came God’s command, “Release, O king,
And let my people go.”

The king’s proud heart grew hard apace;
He marked the suppliant throng,
And said, “Nay, they must here abide;
The weak must serve the strong.”

Straightway the Lord stretched forth his hand,
And every stream ran blood;
The river swept towards the sea–
A full ensanguined flood.

The haughty king beheld the land,
By plagues afflicted sore,
But, as God’s wonders multiplied,
Hardened his heart the more;

Until the angel of the Lord
Came on the wings of Night,
And smote first-born of man and beast,
In his destructive flight.

Throughout all Egypt, not a house
Was spared this crowning woe.
Then broke the tyrant’s stubborn will;
He bade the people go.

They gathered up their flocks and herds,
Rejoicing to be free;
And, going forth, a mighty host,
Encamped beside the sea.

Then Pharaoh’s heart repented him;
He called a mighty force,
And swiftly followed on their track,
With chariot and with horse.

Then Israel’s host were sore afraid;
But God was on their side,
And, lo! for them a way is cleft,
The Red-sea waves divide.

At God’s command the restless waves
Obey the prophet’s rod;
And, through the middle of the sea,
The people marched dry-shod.

But, when the spoilers, following close,
Would hinder Israel’s flight,
The waters to their course return,
The parted waves unite,

And Pharaoh’s host is swept away,
The chariots and the horse;
And not a man is left alive
Of all that mighty force.

So in these days God looks from heaven,
And marks his servants’ woe;
Hear ye his voice: “Break every yoke,
And let my people go!”

For them the Red-sea waves divide,
The streams with crimson flow;
Therefore we mourn for our first-born;–
Then let the people go.

They are not weak whom God befriends,
He makes their cause His own;
And they who fight against God’s might
Shall surely be o’erthrown.

THE PRICE OF VICTORY.

“A VICTORY! –a victory!”
Is flashed across the wires;
Speed, speed the news from State to State,
Light up the signal fires!
Let all the bells from all the towers
A joyous peal ring out;
We’ve gained a glorious victory,
And put the foe to rout!

A mother heard the chiming bells;
Her joy was mixed with pain.
“Pray God,” she said, “my gallant boy
Be not among the slain!”
Alas for her! that very hour
Outstretched in death he lay,
The color from his fair, young face
Had scarcely passed away.

His nerveless hand still grasped the sword.
He never more might wield,
His eyes were sealed in dreamless sleep
Upon that bloody field.
The chestnut curls his mother oft
Had stroked in fondest pride,
Neglected hung ia clotted locks,
With deepest crimson dyed.

Ah! many a mother’s heart shall ache,
And bleed with anguish sore,
When tidings come of him who marched
So blithely forth to war.
Oh! sad for them, the stricken down
In manhood’s early dawn,
And sadder yet for loving hearts.
God comfort them that mourn!

Yes, victory has a fearful price
Our hearts may shrink to pay,
And tears will mingle with the joy
That greets a glorious day.
But he who dies in freedom’s cause,
We cannot count him lost;
A battle won for truth and right
Is worth the blood it cost!

O mothers! count it something gained
That they, for whom you mourn,
Bequeath fair Freedom’s heritage
To millions yet unborn;–
And better than a thousand years
Of base, ignoble breath,
A patriot’s fragrant memory,
A hero’s early death!

——————————-

HARVARD ODES.

——————————-

(SUNG AT ANNUAL DINNERS OF THE HARVARD CLUB

OF New York. NEW YORK.)

HARVARD ODES.

I.

(Feb. 23, 1869.)

Fair Harvard, dear guide of our youth’s golden days;
At thy name all our hearts own a thrill,
We turn from life’s .highways, its business, its cares,
We are boys in thy tutelage still.
And the warm blood of youth to our veins, as of yore,
Returns with impetuous flow,
Reviving the scenes and the hopes that were ours
In the vanished, but sweet Long Ago.

Once more through thy walks, Alma Mater, we tread,
And we dream youth’s fair dreams once again,
We are heroes in fight for the Just and the Right,
We are knights without fear, without stain;
Its doors in fair prospect the world opens wide,
Its prizes seem easy to win,–
We are strong in our faith, we are bold in our might,
And we long for the race to begin.

Though dimmed are our hopes, and our visions are fled,
Our dreams were but dreams, it is true;
Dust-stained from the contest we gather to-night,
The sweet dreams of youth to renew.
Enough for to-morrow the cares it shall bring,
We are boys, we are brothers, to-night;
And our hearts, warm with love, Alma Mater, to thee,
Shall in loyal devotion unite.

II.

(Feb. 11, 1870.)

As we meet in thy name, Alma Mater, to-night,
All our hearts and our hopes are as one,
And love for the mother that nurtured his youth
Beats high in the breast of each son.
The sweet chords of Memory bridge o’er the Past,
The years fade away like a dream,
By the banks of Cephissus, beneath the green trees,
We tread thy fair walks, Academe.

The heights of Hymettus that bound the near view
Fill the air with an odor as sweet
As the beautiful clusters of sun-tinted grapes
From the vineyards that lie at our feet.
O realm of enchantment, O Wonderful land,
Where the gods hold high converse with men,
Come out from the dusk of past ages once more,
And live in our fancy again.

Let us drink to the Past as our glasses we lift,
Let eye speak to eye, heart to heart,
Let the bonds of sweet fellowship bind each to each,
In the hours that remain ere we part.
And thou, Alma Mater, grown fairer with age,
Let us echo the blessing that fell
From thy motherly lips, as we stood at thy side,
And thou bad’st us God-speed and Farewell.

III.

(Feb. 21, 1872.)

Fair Harvard, the months have accomplished their round
And a year stands full-orbed and complete,
Since last at thy summons, with dutiful hearts,
Thy children sat here at thy feet.
Since last in thy presence, grown youthful once more,
We drank to the past and its joys,
Shaking off every care that encumbered our years,
And dreamed that again we were boys.

To-night once again in thy presence we meet
In the freshness and flush of life’s spring;
We wait but thy blessing, we ask but thy smile,
As our sails to the free air we fling.
The winds breathe auspicious that waft us along,
The sky, undisturbed, smiles serene,
Hope stands at the prow, and the waters gleam bright
With sparkles of silvery sheen.

And thy voice, Alma Mater, so potent and sweet,
Still sounds in our ears as of yore,
And thy motherly counsel we hear, wisdom-fraught,
As we push our frail barks from the shore.
From the foam-crested waves of the mountainous sea
As backward our glances we strain,
We see the dear face of our mother benign,
And bless her again and again.

IV.

(Feb. 21, 1873.)

There’s a fountain of Fable whose magical power
Time’s ravages all could repair,
And replace the bowed form and the tottering step,
The wrinkles and silvery hair,
By the brown flowing locks and the graces of youth,
Its footstep elastic and light,
Could mantle the cheek with its long-vanished bloom
And make the dull eye keen and bright.

‘Tis only a fable–a beautiful dream,
But the fable, the dream, shall come true,
As thy sons, Alma Mater, assemble to-night
The joys of past years to renew.
Our eyes shall grow bright with their old wonted light,
Our spirits untrammelled by care,
And the Goddess of Hope, with her fresh rainbow tints,
Shall paint every prospect more fair.

How sweet were the friendships we formed in thy halls!
How strong were the tendrils that bound
Our hearts to the mother whose provident care
Encompassed her children around!
Now strong in our manhood we cherish her still;
And if by misfortune brought low,
Our strength shall support her, our arms bear her up,
And sustain her through weal and through woe.

———————————

OCCASIONAL ODES.

———————————

BI-CENTENNIAL ODE.*

(June 13, 1860.)

* Sung at the bi-centennial celebration of the incorporation of Marlboro, Mass.

From the door of the homestead the mother looks forth,
With a glance half of hope, half of fear,
For the clock in the corner now points to the hour
When the children she loves should appear.
For have they not promised, whatever betide,
On this their dear mother’s birthday,
To gather once more round the family board,
Their dutiful service to pay?

From the East and the West, from the North and the South,
In communion and intercourse sweet,
Her children have come, on this festival day,
To sit, as of old, at her feet.
And our mother,– God bless her benevolent face!–
How her heart thrills with motherly joys,
As she stands at the portal, with arms opened wide,
To welcome her girls and her boys.

And yet, when the first joyful greetings are o’er,
When the words of her welcome are said:
A shadow creeps over her motherly face,
As she silently thinks of the dead,
Of the children whose voices once rang through her fields,
Who shared all her hopes and alarms,
Till, tired with the burden and heat of the day,
They have fallen asleep in her arms.

They have gone from our midst, but their labors abide
On the fields where they prayerfully wrought;
They scattered the seed, but the harvest is ours,
By their toil and self-sacrifice bought.
As we scan the fair scene that once greeted their eyes,
As we tread the same paths which they trod,
Let us tenderly think of our elders by birth,
Who have gone to their rest, and their God.

God bless the old homestead! some linger there still,
In the haunts which their childhood has known,
While others have wandered to places remote,
And planted new homes of their own;
But Time cannot weaken the ties Love creates,
Nor absence, nor distance, impede
The filial devotion which thrills all our hearts,
As we bid our old mother God-speed.

FOR THE CONSECRATION OF A CEMETERY.

This verdant field that smiles to Heaven
In Nature’s bright array,
From common uses set apart,
We consecrate to-day.

“God’s Acre” be it fitly called,
For when, beneath the sod,
We lay the dead with reverent hands,
We yield them back to God.

And His great love, so freely given,
Shall speak in clearer tones,
When, pacing through these hallowed walks,
We read memorial stones.

Here let the sunshine softly fall,
And gently drop the rain,
And Nature’s countless harmonies
Blend one accordant strain;

That they who seek this sacred place,
In mourning solitude,
In all this gracious company
May have their faith renewed.

So, lifted to serener heights,
And purified from dross,
Their trustful hearts shall rest on God,
And profit by their loss.

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ballads, by Horatio Alger, Jr.

 
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Project Gutenberg’s A Lover’s Diary, (Poetry) Complete, by Gilbert Parker

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Title: A Lover’s Diary, (Poetry) Complete

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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LOVER’S DIARY, (POETRY) COMPLETE ***

Produced by David Widger

A LOVER’S DIARY, Complete

By Gilbert Parker

CONTENTS

Volume 1.
THE VISION
ABOVE THE DIN
LOVE’S COURAGE
LOVE’S LANGUAGE
ASPIRATION
THE MEETING
THE NEST
PISGAH
LOVE IS ENOUGH
AT THE PLAY
SO CALM THE WORLD
THE WELCOME
THE SHRINE
THE TORCH
IN ARMOUR
IN THEE MY ART
DENIAL
TESTAMENT
CAPTIVITY
O MYSTIC WINGS
WAS IT THY FACE?
A WOMAN’S HAND
ONE FACE I SEE
MOTHER
WHEN FIRST I SAW THEE
THE FATES LAUGH
AS ONE WHO WAITETH
THE SEALING
THE PLEDGE
LOVE’S TRIBUTARIES
THE CHOICE
RECOGNITION
THE WAY OF DREAMS
THE ACCOLADE
FALLEN IDOLS
TENNYSON
THE ANOINTED

Volume 2.
DREAMS
THE BRIDE
THE WRAITH
SURRENDER
THE CITADEL
MALFEASANCE
ANNUNCIATION
VANISHED DREAMS
INTO THY LAND
DIVIDED
WE MUST LIVE ON
YET LIFE IS SWEET
LOST FOOTSTEPS
THE CLOSED DOOR
THE CHALICE
MIO DESTINO
I HAVE BEHELD
TOO SOON AWAY
THE TREASURE
DAHIN
LOVE’S USURY
THE DECREE
‘TIS MORNING NOW
SACRIFICE
SHINE ON
SO, THOU ART GONE
THE THOUSAND THINGS
ONES
THE SEA
THE CHART
REVEALING
OVERCOMING
WHITHER NOW
ARARAT
AS LIGHT LEAPS UP
THE DARKENED WAY
REUNITED
SONG WAS GONE FROM ME
GOOD WAS THE FIGHT
UNCHANGED
ABSOLVO TE
BENEDICTUS
THE MESSAGE
UNAVAILING
YOU SHALL LIVE ON
“VEX NOT THIS GHOST”
THE MEMORY
THE PASSING
ENVOY

INTRODUCTION

‘A Lover’s Diary’ has not the same modest history as ‘Embers’. As far
back as 1894 it was given to the public without any apology or excuse,
but I have been apologising for it ever since, in one way–without avail.
I wished that at least one-fifth of it had not been published; but my
apology was never heard till now as I withdraw from this edition of A
Lover’s Diary some twenty-five sonnets representing fully one-fifth of
the original edition. As it now stands the faint thread of narrative is
more distinct, and redundancy of sentiment and words is modified to some
extent at any rate. Such material story as there is, apart from the
spiritual history embodied in the sonnets, seems more visible now, and
the reader has a clearer revelation of a young, aspiring, candid mind
shadowed by stern conventions of thought, dogma, and formula, but
breaking loose from the environment which smothered it. The price it
pays for the revelation is a hopeless love informed by temptation, but
lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the
inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished
and the toll of the journey of understanding paid.

The six sonnets in italics, beginning with ‘The Bride’, and ending with
‘Annunciation’, have nothing to do with the story further than to show
two phases of the youth’s mind before it was shaken by speculation,
plunged into the sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had
found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character,
and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual
sense. These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age,
and the sonnet sequence of ‘A Lover’s Diary’ was begun when I was
twenty-three. They were continued over seven years in varying quantity.
Sometimes two or three were written in a week, and then no more would be
written for several weeks or maybe months, and it is clearly to be seen
from the text, from the change in style, and above all in the nature of
the thought that between ‘The Darkened Way’, which ends one epoch, and
‘Reunited’, which begins another and the last epoch, were intervening
years.

The sonnet which begins the book and particularly that which ends the
book have been very widely quoted, and ‘Envoy’ has been set to music by
more than one celebrated musician. Whatever the monotony of a sonnet
sequence (and it is a form which I should not have chosen if I had been
older and wiser) there has been a continuous, if limited, demand for the
little book. As Edmund Clarence Stedman said in a review, it was a book
which had to be written. It was an impulse, a vision, and a revealing,
and, in his own words in a letter to me, “It was to be done whether you
willed it or no, and there it is a truthful thing of which you shall be
glad in spite of what you say.”

These last words of the great critic were in response to the sudden
repentance and despair I felt after Messrs. Stone and Kimball had
published the book in exquisite form with a beautiful frontispiece by
Will H. Low. In any case, it is now too late to try and disabuse the
minds of those who care for the little piece of artistry, and since 1894,
when it was published, I have matured sufficiently in life’s academy not
to be too unduly sensitive either as to the merit or demerit of my work.
There is, after all, an unlovable kind of vanity in acute self-criticism
–as though it mattered deeply to the world whether one ever wrote
anything; or, having written, as though it mattered to the world enough
to stir it in its course by one vibration. The world has drunk deep of
wonderful literature, and all that I can do is make a small brew with a
little flavour of my own; but it still could get on very well indeed with
the old staple and matured vintages were I never to write at all.

The King–Whence art thou, sir?

Gilfaron–My Lord, I know not well.
Indeed, I am a townsman of the world.
For once my mother told me that she saw
The Angel of the Cross Roads lead me out,
And point to every corner of the sky,
And say, “Thy feet shall follow in the trail
Of every tribe; and thou shalt pitch thy tent
Wherever thou shalt see a human face
Which hath thereon the alphabet of life;
Yea, thou shalt spell it out e’en as a child:
And therein wisdom find.”

The King–Art thou wise?

Gilfaron–Only according to the Signs.

The King–What signs?

Gilfaron–The first–the language of the Garden, sire,
When man spoke with the naked searching thought,
Unlacquered of the world.

The King–Speak so forthwith; come, show us to be wise.

Gilfaron–The Angel of the Cross Roads to me said:
“And wisdom comes by looking eye to eye,
Each seeing his own soul as in a glass;
For ye shall find the Lodges of the Wise,
The farthest Camp of the Delightful Fires,
By marching two by two, not one by one.”

–The King’s Daughter.

THE VISION

As one would stand who saw a sudden light
Flood down the world, and so encompass him
And in that world illumined Seraphim
Brooded above and gladdened to his sight;

So stand I in the flame of one great thought,
That broadens to my soul from where she waits,
Who, yesterday, drew wide the inner gates
Of all my being to the hopes I sought.

Her words come to me like a summer-song,
Blown from the throat of some sweet nightingale;
I stand within her light the whole day long,

And think upon her till the white stars fail:
I lift my head towards all that makes life wise,
And see no farther than my lady’s eyes.

ABOVE THE DIN

Silence sits often on me as I touch
Her presence; I am like a bird that hears
A note diviner than it knows, and fears
To share the larger harmony too much.

My soul leaps up, as to a sudden sound
A long-lost traveller, when, by her grace,
I learn of her life’s sweetness face to face,
And sweep the chords of sympathies profound.

Her regal nature calmly holds its height
Above life’s din, while moving in its maze.
Unworthy thoughts would die within her sight,

And mean deeds creep to darkness from her gaze.
Yet only in my dreams can I set down
The word that gives her nobleness a crown.

LOVE’S COURAGE

Courage have I to face all bitter things,
That start out darkly from the rugged path,
Leading to life’s achievement; not God’s wrath
Would sit so heavy when my lady sings.

I did not know what life meant till I felt
Her hand clasp mine in compact to the end;
Till her dear voice said, “See, I am your friend!”
And at her feet, amazed, my spirit knelt.

And yet I spoke but hoarsely then my thought,
I groped amid a thousand forces there;
Her understanding all my meaning caught,

It was illumined in her atmosphere.
She read it line by line, and then there fell
The curtain on the shrine-and it is well.

LOVE’S LANGUAGE

Just now a wave of perfume floated up
To greet my senses as I broke the seal
Of her short letter; and I still can feel
It stir me as a saint the holy cup.

The missive lies there,–but a few plain words:
A thought about a song, a note of praise,
And social duties such as fill the days
Of women; then a thing that undergirds

The phrases like a psalm: a line that reads–
“I wish that you were coming!” Why, it lies
Upon my heart like blossoms on the skies,

Like breath of balm upon the clover meads.
The perfumed words soothe me into a dream;
My thoughts float to her on the scented stream.

ASPIRATION

None ever climbed to mountain heights of song,
But felt the touch of some good woman’s palm;
None ever reached God’s altitude of calm,
But heard one voice cry, “Follow!” from the throng.

I would not place her as an image high
Above my reach, cold, in some dim recess,
Where never she should feel a warm caress
Of this my hand that serves her till I die.

I would not set her higher than my heart,–
Though she is nobler than I e’er can be;
Because she placed me from the crowd apart,

And with her tenderness she honoured me.
Because of this, I hold me worthier
To be her kinsman, while I worship her.

THE MEETING

O marvel of our nature, that one life
Strikes through the thousand lives that fold it round,
To find another, even as a sound
Sweeps to a song through elemental strife!

Through cycles infinite the forces wait,
Which destiny has set for union here;
No circumstance can warp them from their sphere;
They meet sometime; and this is God and Fate.

And God is Law, and Fate is Law in use,
And we are acted on by some deep cause,
Which sanctifies “I will” and “I refuse,”

When Love speaks–Love, the peaceful end of Laws.
And I, from many conflicts over-past,
Find here Love, Law, and God, at last.

THE NEST

High as the eagle builds his lonely nest
Above the sea, above the paths of man,
And makes the elements his barbican,
That none may break the mother-eagle’s rest;

So build I far above all human eyes
My nest of love; Heaven’s face alone bends down
To give it sunlight, starlight; while is blown
A wind upon it out of Paradise.

None shall affright, no harm may come to her,
Whom I have set there in that lofty home:
Love’s eye is sleepless; I could feel the stir

E’en of God’s cohorts, if they chanced to come.
I am her shield; I would that I might prove
How dear I hold the lady of my love.

WHEN thou makest a voyage to the stars, go thou blindfolded;
and carry not a sword, but the sandals of thy youth.
–Egyptian Proverb.

SEEK thou the Angel of the Cross Roads ere thou goest upon a
journey, and she will give thee wisdom at the Four Corners.
–Egyptian Proverb.

PISGAH
Behold, now, I have touched the highest point
In my existence. When I turn my eyes
Backward to scan my outlived agonies,
I feel God’s finger touch me, to anoint

With this sweet Present the ungenerous Past,
With love the wounds that struck stark in my soul;
With hope life’s aching restlessness and dole;
To show me place to anchor in at last.

Like to a mother bending o’er the bed
Where sleeps, death-silent, one that left her side
Ere he had reached the flow of manhood’s tide,

So stood I by my life whence Life had fled.
But Life came back at Love’s clear trumpet-call,
And at Love’s feet I cast the useless pall.

LOVE IS ENOUGH

It is enough that in this burdened time
The soul sees all its purposes aright.
The rest–what does it matter? Soon the night
Will come to whelm us, then the morning chime.

What does it matter, if but in the way
One hand clasps ours, one heart believes us true;
One understands the work we try to do,
And strives through Love to teach us what to say?

Between me and the chilly outer air
Which blows in from the world, there standeth one
Who draws Love’s curtains closely everywhere,

As God folds down the banners of the sun.
Warm is my place about me, and above
Where was the raven, I behold the dove.

AT THE PLAY

I felt her fan my shoulder touch to-night.
Soft act, faint touch, no meaning did it bear
To any save myself, who felt the air
Of a new feeling cross my soul’s clear sight.

To me what matter that the players played!
They grew upon the instant like the toys
Which dance before the sight of idle boys;
I could not hear the laughter that they made.

Swept was I on that breath her hand had drawn,
Through the dull air, into a mountain-space,
Where shafts of the bright sun-god interlace,

Making the promise of a golden dawn.
And straightway crying, “O my heart, rejoice!”
It found its music in my lady’s voice.

SO CALM THE WORLD

Far up the sky the sunset glamour spreads,
Far off the city lies in golden mist;
The sea grows calm, the waves the sun has kissed
Strike white hands softly ‘gainst the rocky heads.

So calm the world, so still the city lies,
So warm the haze that spreads o’er everything;
And yet where, there, Peace sits as Lord and King,
Havoc will reign when next the sun shall rise.

The wheels pause only for a little space,
And in the pause they gather strength again.
‘Tis but the veil drawn over Labour’s face,

O’er strife, derision, and the sin of men.
My heart with a sweet inner joy o’erflows
To nature’s peace, and a kind silence knows.

THE WELCOME

But see: my lady comes. I hear her feet
Upon the sward; she standeth by my side.
Just such a face Raphael had deified,
If in his day they two had chanced to meet.

And I, tossed by the tide of circumstance,
Lifting weak hands against a host of swords,
Paused suddenly to hear her gentle words
Making powerless the lightnings of mischance.

I, who was but a maker of poor songs,
That one might sing behind his prison bars,
I, who it seemed fate singled out for wrongs–

She smiled on me as smile the nearest stars.
From her deep soul I draw my peace, and thus,
One wreath of rhyme I weave for both of us.

THE SHRINE

Were I but as the master souls who move
In their high place, immortal on the earth,
My song might be a thing to crown her worth,–
‘Tis but a pathway for the feet of Love.

But since she walks where I am fain to sing,
Since she has said, “I listen, O my friend!”
There is a glory lent the song I send,
And I am proud, yes, prouder than a king.

I grow to nobler use beneath her eyes–
Eyes that smile on me so serenely, will
They smile a welcome though my best hope dies,

And greet me at the summit of the hill?
Will she, for whom my heart has built a shrine,
Take from me all that makes this world divine?

THE TORCH

Art’s use what is it but to touch the springs
Of nature? But to hold a torch up for
Humanity in Life’s large corridor,
To guide the feet of peasants and of kings!

What is it but to carry union through
Thoughts alien to thoughts kindred, and to merge
The lines of colour that should not diverge,
And give the sun a window to shine through!

What is it but to make the world have heed
For what its dull eyes else would hardly scan,
To draw in a stark light a shameless deed,

And show the fashion of a kingly man!
To cherish honour, and to smite all shame,
To lend hearts voices, and give thoughts a name!

IN ARMOUR,

But wherein shall Art work? Shall beauty lead
It captive, and set kisses on its mouth?
Shall it be strained unto the breast of youth,
And in a garden live where grows no weed?

Shall it, in dalliance with the flaunting world,
Play but soft airs, sing but sweet-tempered songs?
Veer lightly from the stress of all great wrongs,
And lisp of peace ‘mid battle-flags unfurled?

Shall it but pluck the sleeve of wantonness,
And gently chide the folly of our time?
But wave its golden wand at sin’s duress,

And say, “Ah me! ah me!” to fallow crime?
Nay, Art serves Truth, and Truth with Titan blows,
Strikes fearless at all evil that it knows.

IN THEE MY ART

In thee is all my art; from thee I draw
The substance of my dreams, the waking plan
Of practised thought; I can no measure scan,
But thou work’st in me like eternal law.

If I were rich in goodly title deeds
Of broad estate, won from posterity;
If from decaying Time I snatched a see
Richer than prelates pray for with their beads;

If some should bring before me frankincense,
And make a pleasant fire to greet mine eyes;
If there were given me for recompense

Gifts fairer than a seraph could devise:
I would, my sovereign, kneel to thee and say,
“It all is thine; thou showedst me the way.”

DENIAL

But is it so that I must never kiss
Thee on the brow, or smooth thy silken hair?
Never close down thine eyelids with Love’s prayer,
Or fold my arms about my new-found bliss?

Must I unto the courses of my age
Worship afar, lest haply I profane
The temple that is now my holy fane,
For which my song is given as a gage?

Shall I who cry to all, “Come not within
The bounds where I my lady have enshrined;
I am her cavalier”; shall I not win

One dear caress, the rich exchequer find
Of thy soft cheek? If thou command, my lips
Shall find surcease but at thy fingertips.

TESTAMENT

Why do I love thee? Shall my answer run:
Because that thou hast beauty, noble place,
Because of some sweet glamour in thy face,
And eyes that shame the clear light of the sun?

Shall I exclaim upon thy snow-white hands,
Challenge the world to show a gentler mien,
Call down the seraphs to attest, the sheen
Upon thy brow is borrowed from their lands?

Shall I trace out a map of all thy worth,
Parcel thy virtues, say, “For this and this
I learned to love her; here new charms had birth;

I in this territory caught a bliss”?
Shall I make inventory of thy grace,
And crowd the total into common space?

CAPTIVITY

Nay, lady, though I love thee, I make pause
Before thy question, and know naught to say;
Art cannot teach me to define the way,
Love led me, nor e’en register Love’s cause.

It can but blazon in this verse of mine
What love does for me; what from Love it gains;
What is its quickening; but it refrains
From divination where thy merits shine.

Canst thou, indeed, not tell what wrought in thee
To bring me as a captive to thy feet?
Canst thou not say, “‘Twas this that made decree

Of conquest; here thy soul with mine did meet?”
Or is it that both stand amazed before
The shrine where thou hast blessed and I adore?

O MYSTIC WINGS

O mystic wings, upbear me lightly now,
Beyond life’s faithful labour to a seat
Where I can feel the end of things complete,
Where no hot breath of ill can scorch the brow.

O mystic wings of Art, about thee Truth
Makes atmosphere of purity and power;
‘Tis man’s breath kills the spring’s soft-petaled flower–

Ye give a refuge for the heart of youth.

Ye give a value for all loss in age,
When feebled eyes search for forgotten springs;
Ye fan the breeze that turns the moulded page,

And carry back the soul to ardent things.
Poor payment can I give, but here engage
I thee to be Love’s airy equipage.

WAS IT THY FACE?

Was it thy face I saw when, as a child,
Night after night I watched one quiet star
Shine ‘tween my curtain and the window-bar
Until I slept, and made my sleep more mild?

Was it thy influence outreaching then
To me, o’er untrod years, o’er varying days,
To give me courage, as from phase to phase
Of youth’s desires I passed to deeds of men?

Was it because the star was hid awhile,
That I in blindness wandered from my path;
That I wooed Folly with her mumming smile,

And sought for Lethe in a cup of wrath?
Another hand touched mine with sadness there,
And saved me till I saw thy face appear.

A WOMAN’S HAND

A woman’s hand. Lo, I am thankful now
That with its touch I have walked all my days;
Rising from fateful and forbidden ways,
To find a woman’s hand upon my brow;

Soft as a pad of rose-leaves, and as pure
As upraised palms of angels, seen in dreams:
And soothed by it, to stand as it beseems
A man who strives to conquer and endure.

A woman’s hand!–there is no better thing
Of all things human; it is half divine;
It hath been more to this lame life of mine,

When faith was weakness, and despair was king.
Man more than all men, Thou wast glad to bless
A woman’s sacrifice and tenderness.

ONE FACE I SEE

One face I see by thine whene’er I hold
Converse with things that are or things that were;
Whene’er I seek life’s hidden folds to stir,
And watch the inner to the outer rolled.

Dost thou not know her, O beloved one?
Hast thou not felt her sunshine on thy face?
In me hast thou not learned some signs to trace
Of that dear soul who calleth me her son?

Such as I was that in thy countenance
Found favour, from her it was gathered most.
To my mad youth her gentle surveillance

Was like a watch-fire on a rock-bound coast.
She drew about me motherhood, and thou
Hast with Love’s holy chrism touched my brow.

MOTHER

She gave me courage when I weakly said,
“O see how drifting, derelict, am I!
The tide runs counter, and the wind is high;
I see no channel through the rocks ahead.

My arm is impotent; what worth to trim
The bending sails! Look, I shall quaff a cup
To Fate, while the wild ocean swallows up
The shipwrecked youth, the man who lives in him.”

She said: “But thou hast valour, dear, too much
For such as this; thou hast grave embassy,
Given with thy birth; would’st thou thine honour smutch

With coward failing? Dear son, breast the sea.”
Firm-purposed from that hour, through wind and wave,
I brought my message till thou shelter gave.

WHEN FIRST I SAW THEE

When first I saw thee, lady, straightway came
The thought that somehow, somewhere, destiny,
Through blinding paths of happiness or blame,
Would bend my way of life, my soul to thee.

But then I put it from me: was not I
A wanderer? To-morrow I should be
In other lands-beside another sea;
Nay, you were but a star-gleam in my sky.

And so I came not in your sight awhile,
You gave no thought, and I passed not away;
But like some traveller in a deep defile

I walked in darkness even through the day:
Until at last the hands of Circumstance
Pointed the hour that waked me from my trance.

THE FATES LAUGH

I did not will this thing. I set my face
Towards duty and my art; I was alone.
How knew I thou shouldst roll away the stone
From hopes long buried, by thy tender grace?

What does it matter that we make resolve?
The Fates laugh at us as they sit and spin;
We cannot tell what Good is, or what Sin,
Or why old faiths in mist of pain dissolve.

We only can stand watchful in the way,
Waiting with patient hands on shield and sword,
Ready to meet disaster in the fray,

Till Time has struck the letters of one word–
Word of such high-born worth: triumphant Love,
Give me thy canopy where’er I rove.

AS ONE WHO WAITETH

As one who waiteth for the signet ring
Of his dear sovereign, that his embassy
May have clear passport over land and sea,
And make the subject sacred as his king;

As waits the warrior for a pontiff’s palm,
Upraised in blessing o’er his high emprise;
And bows his mailed forehead prayerful-wise,
Sinking his turbulency in deep calm:

So waited I for one seal to be set
Upon my full commission, for a sign
That should make impotent man’s “I forget,”

And make God’s “I remember” more divine:
Which should command at need the homage of
The armed squadrons of all loyal love.

THE SEALING

But yestermorn my marshalled hopes were held
Upon the verge of august pilgrimage;
To-day I am as birds that leave the cage
To seek green fastnesses they knew of eld;

To-day I am as one who hides his face
Within his golden beaver, and whose hand
Clenches with pride his tried and conquering brand,
Ay, as a hunter mounted for the chase.

For, see: upon my lips I carry now
A touch that speaks reveille to my soul;
I have a dispensation large enow

To enfold the world and circumscribe each pole.
Slow let me speak it: From her lips and brow
I took the gifts she only could endow.

THE PLEDGE

O gifts divine as any ever knew
The noble spirits of an antique time;
As any poets fashion in their rhyme,
Or angels whisper down the shadeless blue!

The priceless gifts of holy confidence,
That speak through quivering lips from heart to heart;
That unto life new energies impart,
And open up the gates of prescience.

O dear my love, I unto thee have given
Pledge that I am thy vassal evermore;
I stand within the zenith of my Heaven,

On either hand a starred eternal shore
I have come nearer to thy greater worth,
For thou hast raised me from the common earth.

LOVE’S TRIBUTARIES

I can say now, “There was the confluence
Of all Love’s tributaries; there the sea
Of Love spread out towards eternity;
And there my coarser touched her finer sense.

Poor though I am in my own sight, I know
That thou hast winnowed, sweet, what best I am;
Upon my restlessness thy ample calm
Hath fallen as on frost-bound earth the snow.

It hideth the harsh furrows that the wheels
Of heavy trials made in Life’s champaign;
Upon its pure unfolding sunshine steals,

And there is promise of the spring again.
Here make I proclamation of my faith,
And poise my fealty o’er the head of Death.”

THE CHOICE

If Death should come to me to-night, and say:
“I weigh thy destiny; behold, I give
One little day with this thy love to live,
Then, my embrace; or, leave her for alway,

And thou shalt walk a full array of years;
Upon thee shall the world’s large honours fall,
And praises clamorous shall make for all
Thy strivings rich amends.” If in my ears

Thou saidst, “I love thee!” I would straightway cry,
“A thousand years upon this barren earth
Is death without her: for that day I die,

And count my life for it of poorest worth.”
Love’s reckoning is too noble to be told
By Time’s slow fingers on its sands of gold.

RECOGNITION

As in a foreign land one threads his way
‘Mid alien scenes, knowing no face he meets;
And, hearing his name spoken, turns and greets
With wondering joy a friend of other days;

As in the pause that comes between the sound
And recognition, all the finer sense
Is swathed in a melodious eloquence,
Which makes his name seem in its sweetness drowned

So stood I, by an atmosphere beguiled
Of glad surprise, when first thy lips let fall
The name I lightly carried when a child,

That I shall rise to at the judgment call.
The music of thy nature folded round
Its barrenness a majesty of sound.

THE WAY OF DREAMS

Since I rose out of child-oblivion
I have walked in a world of many dreams,
And noble souls beside the shining streams
Of fancy have with beckonings led me on.

Their faces oft, mayhap, I could not see,
Only their waving hands and noble forms.
Sometimes there sprang between quick-gathered storms,
But always they came back again to me.

Women with smiling eyes and star-spun hair
Spake gentle things, bade me look back to view
The deeds of the great souls who climbed the stair

Immortal, and for whom God’s manna grew:
Dante, Anacreon, Euripides,
And all who set rich wine upon the lees.

THE ACCOLADE

Men of brave stature came and placed their hands
Upon my head, and, lifting shining swords,
Drew through the air signs mightier than words,
And vanished in the sun upon the sands.

Glimpses I caught of faces that have come
Through crowding ages; whisperings of songs;
And prayers for the redress of human wrongs
From voices that upon the earth are dumb.

They were but shadows, but they lent me joy;
They gave me reverence for all who pace
The world with hands raised, evil to destroy,

Who live but for the honour of their race.
They taught me to strike at no idol raised,
Worshipped a space, then left to be dispraised.

FALLEN IDOLS

Stedfastness, shall we find it, then, at all?
Is it that as the winds blow north and south,
So must be praises from the loud world’s mouth,
Which on its heroes in their glory fall?

Because the voice grows stiller, or the arm
No longer can beat evils back; because
The shoulders sink beneath new-rising cause,
And the fine thought has lost its moving charm;

Because of these shall puny sages shake
Their heads, and haste to mock the failing one,
Who in his strength could make the nations quake;

Prophet like Daniel, King like Solomon!
In this full time we have seen mockers run
About the throne of such as Tennyson.

TENNYSON

Who saith thy hand is weak, King Tennyson?
Who crieth, See, the monarch is grown old,
His sceptre falls? Oh, carpers rude and bold,
You who have fed upon the gracious benison

Scattered unstinted by him, do you now
Dispraise the sweet-strung harp, grown tremulous
‘Neath fingers overworn for all of us?
You cannot tear the laurels from his brow.

He lives above your idle vaunts and fears,
Enthroned where all master souls stand up
In their high place, and fill the golden cup,

God-blest for kings, with wine of endless years,
And greet him one with them. O brotherhood
Of envious dullards, ye are wroth with good.

THE ANOINTED ONES
Why, let them rail! God’s full anointed ones
Have heard the world exclaim, “We know you not.”
They who by their souls’ travailing have brought
Us nearer to the wonder of the suns.

Yet, who can stay the passage of the stars?
Who can prevail against the thunder-sound?
The wire that flashes lightning to the ground
Diverts, but not its potency debars.

So, men may strike quick stabs at Caesar’s worth,–
They only make his life an endless force,
‘Scaped from its penthouse, flashing through the earth,

And ‘whelming those who railed about his Gorse.
Men’s moods disturb not those born truly great:
They know their end; they can afford to wait.

A LOVER’S DIARY

By Gilbert Parker

Volume 2.

CONTENTS:

DREAMS
THE BRIDE
THE WRAITH
SURRENDER
THE CITADEL
MALFEASANCE
ANNUNCIATION
VANISHED DREAMS
INTO THY LAND
DIVIDED
WE MUST LIVE ON
YET LIFE IS SWEET
LOST FOOTSTEPS
THE CLOSED DOOR
THE CHALICE
MIO DESTINO
I HAVE BEHELD
TOO SOON AWAY
THE TREASURE
DAHIN
LOVE’S USURY
THE DECREE
‘TIS MORNING NOW
SACRIFICE
SHINE ON
SO, THOU ART GONE
THE THOUSAND THINGS
ONES
THE SEA
THE CHART
REVEALING
OVERCOMING
WHITHER NOW
ARARAT
AS LIGHT LEAPS UP
THE DARKENED WAY
REUNITED
SONG WAS GONE FROM ME
GOOD WAS THE FIGHT
UNCHANGED
ABSOLVO TE
BENEDICTUS
THE MESSAGE
UNAVAILING
YOU SHALL LIVE ON
“VEX NOT THIS GHOST”
THE MEMORY
THE PASSING
ENVOY

DREAMS

And so life passed. I lived from year to year
With shadows, the strong warders of desire;
I learned through them to seek the golden fire
That hides itself in Song’s bright hemisphere.

Through them I grew full of imaginings,
I made strange pictures, conjured images
From my deep longings; wrote the passages
Of life inwrought with half-glad wonderings.

For who can know a majesty of peace,
That wanders, ever waiting for a voice
To say to him, “Behold, at last surcease

Of thy unrest has come, therefore, rejoice”?
Here set I down some dreams that come again,
Almost forgotten in my higher gain.

THE BRIDE

A ship at sea; a port to anchor in;
Not far a starry light upon the shore.
The sheeted lightning, like a golden door,
Swings to and fro to let earth-angels in.

Most bravely has she sailed o’er every sea,
Withstood the storm-rack, spurned the sullen reef;
Cherished her strength; and held her guerdon fief
To him who saith, “My ship comes back to me!

Behold, I sent her forth a stately thing,
To be my messenger to farthest lands,
To Fortunate Isles, and where the silver sands

Girdle a summer sea; that she might bring
My bride, who wist not that I loved her so–
This is no bitter day for me, I trow!”

THE WRAITH

A ship in port; well-crossed the harbour-bar;
The hawser swung, the grinding helm at rest;
Hands clasping hands, and eyes with eager zest
Seeking the loved, returning from afar.

And he, the master, holding little reck
Of all, save but the idol of his soul,
Seeks not his loving ardour to control.
Mark how he proudly treads the whitened deck!

“My bride, my bride, my lone soul’s best beloved,
Come forth, come forth! Where art thou, Isobel?–
Pallid, and wan! Lord, hath it thus befell

This is but dust; where has the spirit roved?
O death-cold bride! for this, then, have I strove?
O phantom ship, O loveless wraith of Love!”

SURRENDER

A day of sunshine in a land of snow,
And a soft-curtained room, where ruddy flakes
Of fame fall free, in liquid light that slakes
The soft desire of one cold, paleface: lo,

Close-pressed sweet lips, and eyes of violet,
That are filled up as with a sudden fear–
A storm’s prelude upon the expectant mere.
Yet deep behind what never they forget,

Who ever see in life’s chance or mischance.
And he who saw, what could he do but say,
“Fold up the tents; the camp is struck; away!

Vain victor who rides not in rest his lance!”
Beside the hearthstone where the flame-flakes fell,
There lay the cold keys of the citadel.

THE CITADEL

A night wind-swept and bound about with glee
Of Erebus; all light and cheer within;
White restless hands that falter, then begin
To weave a music-voiced fantasy.

And life, and death, and love, and weariness,
And unrequital, thrid the maze of sound;
And one voice saith, “Behold, the lost is found!”
And saith not any more for joyfulness.

Out of the night there comes a wanderer,
Who waits upon the threshold, and is still;
And listens, and bows down his head, until

His grief-drawn breath startles the heart of her.
The victor vanquished, at her feet he fell,
A prisoner in his conquered citadel.

MALFEASANCE

Two of one name; they standing where the sun
Makes shadows in the orchard-bloom of spring;
She holding in her palm a jewelled ring,
He speaking on what evil it had done.

“Raise thy pale face and wondrous eyes to mine;
Let not thy poor lips quiver in such pain;
Too young and blindly thou hast drunk the wine
Crushed from the lees of love. Be strong again.

Trail back thy golden hair from thy broad brow,
And raise thy lily neck like some tall tower,
That recks not any strife nor any hour,

So it but holds its height, heeding not how.
The noblest find their way o’er paths of ire
To the clear summit of God’s full desire.”

ANNUNCIATION

I think in that far time when Gabriel came
And gave short speech to Mary sweet and wise,
That when the faint fear faded from her eyes,
And they were filled up with a sudden flame

Of joy bewildering and wonderment;
With reverence the angel in her palm
Laid one white lily, dewy with the balm
Of the Lord’s garden; saying: “This is sent

For thine espousal, thou the undefiled;
And it shall bloom till all be consummate.”
Lo, then he passed. She, musing where she sate,

Felt all her being moved in manner wondrous mild;
Then, laying ‘gainst her bosom the white flower,
She bowed her head, and said, “It is God’s dower.”

VANISHED DREAMS

Dreams, only dreams. They sprang from loneliness
Of outer life; from innermost desire
To reach the soul that now in golden fire
Of cherished song I pray for and caress.

I wandered through the world with longing gaze,
To find her who was my hope’s parallel,
That to her I might all my gospel tell
Of changeless love, and bid her make appraise.

I knew that some day I should look within
The ever-deepening distance of her eyes;
For, in my dreams, from veiled Seraphim

Came one, as if in answer to my cries:
And passing near me, pointed down the road
That led me at the last to thy abode.

INTO THY LAND

Into thy land of sunlight I have come,
And live within thy presence, as a ray
Of light lives in the brightness of the day;
And find in thee my heaven and my home.

Yet what am I that thou shouldst ope the gate
Of thy most sweet completeness; and should spend
Rich values of thy life on me thy friend,
For which I have no worthy duplicate!

Nay, lady, I no riches have to give;
I have no name of honour, or the pride
Of place, to priv’lege me to sit beside

Thee in thy kingdom, where thy graces live.
Wilt thou not one day whisper, “You have climbed
Beyond your merits; pray you, fall behind”?

Wish thy friend joy of his journey, but pray in secret
that he have no joy, for then may he return quickly to thee.
–Egyptian Proverb.

DIVIDED

Divided by no act of thine or mine,
Forever parted by a fatal deed,
A fatal feud. Alas! when fathers bleed,
The children shall fulfil the wild design.

A Montague hath killed a Capulet,
A Capulet hath slain a Montague,–
Twin graves, twin sorrows, and oh, mad to-do
Of vengeance! oh, dread entail of regret!

There lie they in their dark, self-chosen graves,
And from them cries Hate’s everlasting ghost,–
“Blood hath been shed, and Love and ye are slaves,

Time wrecks, and freedom drifts upon life’s coast.”
Yet not for us the relish of that doom
Which found a throne upon a Juliet’s tomb.

WE MUST LIVE ON

We must live on; a deeper tragedy:
To see, to touch, to know, and to desire;
To feel in every vein the glorious fire
Of Eden, and to cry, “Oh, to be free!”

To cry, “Oh, wipe the gloomy stain away,
Thou who first raised the sword, Who gave the hilt
Into the hand of man. This blood they spilt–
Our fathers–oh, blot out the bitter day!

Erase the hour from out Thy calendar,
Turn back the hands upon the clock of Time,
Oh, Artificer of destroying War–

Their righteous hate who bore us in our crime!”
“Upon the children!”–’Tis the cold reply
Of Him who makes to those who must not die.

YET LIFE IS SWEET

Yet life is sweet. Thy soul hath breathed along,
Thine eyes have cast their glory on the earth,
Thy foot hath touched it, and thine hour of birth
Didst give a new pulse to the veins of song.

Better to stand amid the toppling towers
Of every valiant hope; a Samson’s dream,
Than the deep indolence of Lethe’s stream,
The loneliness of slow submerging hours.

Better, oh, better thus to see the wreck,
And to have rocked to motion of the spheres;
Better, oh, better to have trod the deck

Of hope, and sailed the unmanageable years–
Ay, better to have paid the price, and known,
Than never felt this tyrannous Alone!

LOST FOOTSTEPS

Upon the disc of Love’s bright planet fell
A darkness yestereve, and from your lips
I heard cold words; then came a swift eclipse
Of joy at meeting on hope’s it-is-well.

And if I spoke with sadness and with fear;
If from your gentle coldness I drew back,
And felt that I had lost the flowery track
That led to peace in Love’s sweet atmosphere:

It was because a woful dread possessed.
My aching heart–the dread some evil star
Had crossed the warm affection in your breast,

Had bade me stand apart from where you are.
The world seemed breaking on my life; I heard
The crash of sorrows in that chiding word.

THE CLOSED DOOR

It is not so, and so for evermore,
That thou and I must live our lives apart;
I with a patient smother at my heart,
And thy hand resting on a closed door?

What couldst thou ever ask me that I should
Not bend me to achieve thy high behest?
What cannot men achieve with lance in rest
Who carry noble valour in their blood?

And some nobility of high emprise,
Lady, couldst thou make possible in me;
If living ‘neath the pureness of thy eyes,

I found the key to inner majesty;
And reaching outward, heart-strong, from thy hand,
Set here and there a beacon in the land.

THE CHALICE

Not by my power alone, but thou and I
Together thinking, working, loving on
Achievement-wards, as all brave souls have gone,
Perchance should find new star-drifts in the sky

That curves above humanity, and set
Some new interpretation on life’s page;
Should serve the strivings of a widening age,
And fashion wisdom from the social fret.

Deep did Time’s lances go; thou pluck’st them forth,
And on my sullen woundings laid the balm
Of thy life’s sweetness. Oh, let my love be worth

The keeping. My head beneath thy palm,
Once more I lift Love’s chalice to thine eyes:
Not till thou blessest me will I arise.

MIO DESTINO

Here, making count, at every step I see
Something in her, like to a hidden thought
Within my life, that long time I had sought,
But never found till her soul spoke to me.

And if she said a thousand times, “I did
Not call thee, thou cam’st seeking; not my voice
Was it thou heard’st; thy love was not my choice!”
I should straightway reply, “That of thee hid,

Even from thyself, lest it should startle thee,
Hath called me, made me slave and king in one;
And when the mists of Time shall rise, and we

Stand forth, it shall be said, Since Time begun
Ye two were called as one from that high hill,
Where the creating Master hath His will.”

I HAVE BEHELD

I have beheld a multitude stand still
In such deep silence that a sudden pain
Struck through the heart in sharing the tense strain,
And all the world seemed bounded by one will.

But when precipitated on the sea
Of human feeling was the incident
That caught their wonder; then the skies were rent
With quivering sound, with passion’s liberty.

So have I stood before this parting day,
With chilly fingers pressed upon my breast,
That my heart burst not fleshen bands away,

And my sharp cry break through my lady’s rest.
I have shut burning eyelids on the sight
Of this dread time that scorches my sad night.

TOO SOON AWAY

Have I then found thee but to lose thee, friend?
But touched thee ere thou vanished from my gaze?
And when my soul is struggling from the maze
Of many conflicts, must our converse end?

Across the empty space that now shall spread
Between us, shall I never go to thee?
Or thou, beloved, never come to me,
Save but to whisper prayers above the dead?

Ah, cruel thought! Shall not Hope’s convoy bear
To thee the reinforcements of my love?
Shall I not on thy white hand drop a tear

Of crowned joy, one day, where thou dost move
In thy place regally; even as now
I place my farewell token on thy brow?

THE TREASURE

And now when from the shore goes out the ship
Wherein is set the treasure that I hold
Closer than miser all his hidden gold,
Dearer than wine Zeus carried to his lip;

My aching heart cries from its pent-up pain,–
“O Love, O Life, O more than life to me,
How can I live without the surety
Of thy sweet presence till we meet again!”

So like a wounded deer I came to thee,
The arrow of mischance piercing my side;
And through thy sorrow-healing ministry

I rose with strength, like giants in their pride.
But now–but now–how shall I stand alone,
Knowing the light, the hope of me is gone?

DAHIN

O brow, so fronted with a stately calm,
O full completeness of true womanhood,
O counsel, pleader for all highest good,
Thou hast upon my sorrow poured thy balm!

Poor soldier he who did not raise his sword,
And, touching with his lips the hilt-cross, swear
In war or peace the livery to wear
Of one that blessed him with her queenly word.

Most base crusader, who at night and morn
Crying Dahin, thought not of her again
From whose sweet power was his knighthood born,

For whom he quells the valiant Saracen.
Shall I not, then, in the tumultuous place
Of my life’s warfare ever seek thy face?

LOVE’S USURY

Here count I over all the gentle deeds
Which thou hast done; here summon I thy words,
Sweeter to me than sweetest song of birds;
That came like grace immortal to my needs.

Love’s usury has reckoned such a sum
Of my indebtedness, that I can make
No lien large enough to overtake
Its value–and before it I am dumb!

Yet, O my gracious, most kind creditor,
I would not owe to thee one item less
We cannot give the sun requital for

Its liberal light; our office is to bless.
If blessings could be compassed by my prayer,
High heaven should set star-gems in thy hair.

THE DECREE

Last night I saw the warm white Southern moon
Sail upward through a smoky amber sea;
Orion stood in silver majesty
Where the gold-girdled sun takes rest at noon.

I slept; I dreamed. Against a sunset sky
I saw thee stand all garmented in white;
With hand stretched to me, and there in thy sight
I went to meet thee; but I heard thee cry:

“We stand apart as sun from shining sun;
Thou hast thy place; there rolleth far and near
A sea between; until life’s all be done

Thou canst not come, nor I go to thee, dear.”
Methought I bowed my head to thy decree,
And donned the mantle of my misery.

‘TIS MORNING NOW

‘Tis morning now, and dreams and fears are gone,
And sleep has calmed the fever in my veins,
And I am strong to drink the cup that drains
The last drop through my lips, and make no moan.

Strength I have borrowed from the outward show
Of spiritual puissance thou dost wear.
Shall I not thy high domination share
Over the shock of feeling? Shall I grow

More fearful than the soldier, when between
The smoke of hostile cannon lies his way;
To carry far the colours of his queen,

While her bright eyes behold him in the fray?
Here do I smile between the warring hosts
Of sad farewells; and reek not what it costs.

SACRIFICE

And O most noble, and yet once again
Most noble spirit, if I ever did
Aught that thy goodness frowns on, be it hid
Forever, and deep-buried. Let the rain

Of coming springs fall on the quiet grave.
Perchance some violets will grow to tell
That I, when uttering this last farewell,
Built up a sacrificial architrave;

That I, who worship thee, have love so great,
To live in the horizon thou may’st set;
To stand but in the shadow of the gate,

Faithful, when coward promptings cry, “Forget.”
Ah, lady, when I gave my heart to thee,
It passed into thy lifelong regency.

SHINE ON

Shine on, O sun! Sing on, O birds of song!
And in her light my heart fashions a tune
Not wholly sad, most like a tender rune
Sung by some knight in days gone overlong,

When he with minstrel eyes in Syrian grove
Looked out towards his England, and then drew
From a sweet instrument a sound that grew
From twilight unto morning of his love.

Go, then, beloved, bearing as you go
These songs that have more sunlight far than cloud;
More summer flowers than dead leaves ‘neath the snow;

That tell of hopes from which you raised the shroud.
My lady, bright benignant star, shine on–

I lift to thee my low Trisagion!

HE that hath pleasant dreams is more fortunate
than one who hath a cup-bearer.
–Egyptian Proverb.

SO, THOU ART GONE

So, thou art gone; and I am left to wear
Thy memory as a golden amulet
Upon my breast, to sing a chansonnette
Of winter tones, when summer time is here.

And yet, my heart arises from the dark,
Where it fell back in silence when you went
To seaward, and a sprite malevolent
Sat laughing in the white sails of thy barque.

‘Twas not moth-wings dashing against the flame,
Burning in love’s areanum; ’twas a cry
Struck from soul-crossing chords, that, separate, frame

Life’s holy calm, or wasting agony.
But now between the warring strings there grows
A space of peace, as ‘tween truce-honoured foes.

THE THOUSAND THINGS

Here one by one come back the thousand things
Which made divinely sweet our intercourse;
Love summons them here straightway to divorce
The heart from melancholy wanderings.

“Here laid she her white hand upon my arm;
To this place came she with slow-gliding grace;
Here smiled she up serenely in my face;
And these sweet notes she sang me for a charm.”

I treasure up her words, and say them o’er
With close-shut eyes; with her again I float
Upon the Loire; I see the gems she wore,

The ruby shining at her queenly throat;
I climb with her again the Pyrenees,
And hear her laughter ringing through the trees.

THE SEA

I in my childhood never saw the sea
Save in my dreams. There it was vast and lone,
Splendid in power, breaking against the stone
Walls of the world in thunder symphony.

From it arose mists growing into mists
Making a cool white curtain for the sun,
And melting mornward when the day was done,
A moving sphere where spirits kept their trysts.

A ceaseless swinging with the swinging earth,
A never-tiring ebbing to and fro,
Trenching eternal fastnesses; a girth

Round mountains in their everlasting snow.
It was a vast emotion, fibre-drawn
From all the elements since the first dawn.

THE CHART

Then came in further years the virgin sight
Of the live sea; the sea that marches down,
With sunny phalanxes and flags of foam,
To match its puissance with earth’s awful might.

Far off the purple mist drew into mist,
As thought melts into endless thought, and round
The rim of the sheer world was heard a sound,
Floating through palpitating amethyst.

And through the varying waste of elements
There passed a sail, which caught the opposing wind,
Triumphant, as an army in its tents

Beholds the foe it, conquering, left behind.
“And Life,” I said,–”Life is but like the sea;
And what shall guide us to our destiny?”

REVEALING

The prescience of dreams struck walls away
From mortal fact, and mortal fact revealed,
With myriad voices, potencies concealed
In the dim birth-place of a coming day.

Even as a blind man’s fingers wander o’er
His harpstrings, led by sound to dreams of sound,
Till in his soul an eloquence profound
Rises above the petulance and roar

Of the great globe: as in a rush of song
From feathered throats, one, in a mighty wood,
‘Mid sweet interpositions moves along

The avenues of some predestined good;
So I, dream-nurtured, standing by the sea,
Made levy on the wonders that should be.

OVERCOMING

And God is good, I said, and Art is good,
And labour hath its rich reward of sleep;
And recompense will come for all who keep
Dishonour’s ill contagion from the blood.

And over us there curves the infinite
Blue heaven as a shield, and at the end
We shall find One who loveth to befriend
E’en those who faint for shame within His sight.

And down the awful passes of the sky
There comes the voice that circumvents the gale;
That makes the avalanche to pass us by,

And saith, “I overcome” to man’s “I fail.”
“And peradventure now,” said I, “the zest
Of all existence waits on His behest.”

WHITHER NOW

But man’s deliverances intervene
Between the soul’s swift speech and God’s high will;
That saith to tempests of the thought, “Be still!”
And in life’s lazaretto maketh clean

The leprous sense. Ah, who can find his way
Among the many altars? Who can call
Out perfect peace from any ritual,
Or shelter find in systems of a day?

As one sees on some ancient urn, upthrown
From out a tomb, records that none may read
With like interpretation, and the stone

Retains its graven fealty to the dead:
So, on the great palimpsest men have writ
Such lines o’ercrossed that none interprets it.

ARARAT

What marvel that the soul of youth should cry,
“Man builds his temples ‘tween me and the face
Of Him whom I would seek; I cannot trace
His purpose in their shadow, nor descry

The wisdom absolute?” What marvel that,
With yearning impotent, ay, impotent
Beyond all measure! his full faith was spent,
And for his soul there rose no Ararat?

Yet out upon the sun-drawn sensate sea
Of elemental pain, there came a word
As if from Him who travelled Galilee,

As fair as any Zion ever heard.
The voice of Love spoke; Love, that writes its name
On Life and Death-and then my lady came.

AS LIGHT LEAPS UP

As light leaps up from star to star, so mounts
Faith from one soul unto another; so
The lower to the higher; till the flow
Of knowledge rises from creation’s founts;

Until from human love we come to know
The august presence of the Love Divine;
And feel the light unutterable shine
Upon half-lights that we were wont to show,

Absorbing them. ‘Tis Love that beckons us
From low desires, from restlessness and sin,
To heights that else we had not reached; and thus

We find the Heaven we dared not hope to win.
How clearer seem designs immortal when
Our lives are fed on Love’s fine regimen

THE DARKENED WAY

“It is no matter;”–thus the noble Dane,
About his heart more ill than one could tell;
Sad augury, that like a funeral bell
Against his soul struck solemn notes of pain.

So ‘gainst the deadly smother he could press
With calm his lofty manhood; interpose
Purpose divine, and at the last disclose
For life’s great shift a regnant readiness.

To-day I bought some matches in the street
From one whose eyes had long since lost their sight.
Trembling with palsy was he to his feet.

“Father,” I said, “how fare you in the night?”
“In body ill, but ’tis no matter, friend,
Strong is my soul to keep me to the end.”

DISTRUST not a woman nor a king–it availeth nothing.
–Egyptian Proverb.

WHEN thou journeyest into the shadows, take not sweetmeats
with thee, but a seed of corn and a bottle of tears and wine;
that thou mayst have a garden in the land whither thou goeat.
–Egyptian Proverb.

REUNITED

Once more, once more! That golden eventide!
Golden within, without all cold and grey,
Slowly you came forth from the troubled day,
Singing my heart–you glided to my side;

You glided in; the same grave, quiet face,
The same deep look, the never-ending light
In your proud eyes, eyes shining through the night,
That night of absence–distance–from your place.

Calm words, slow touch of hand, but, oh, the cry,
The long, long cry of passion and of joy
Within my heart; the star-burst in the sky–

The world–our world–which time may not destroy!
Your world and mine, unutterably sweet:
Dearest, once more, the old song at thy feet.

SONG WAS GONE FROM ME

Dearest, once more! This I could tell and tell
Till life turned drowsy with the ceaseless note;
Dearest, once more! The words throb in my throat,
My heart beats to them like a muffled bell.

Change–Time and Change! O Change and Time, you come
Not knocking at my door, knowing me gone;
Here have I dwelt within my heart alone,
Watching and waiting, while my muse was dumb

Song was gone from me–sweet, I could not sing,
Save as men sing upon the lonely hills;
Under my hand the old chord ceased to ring,

Hushed by the grinding of the high gods’ mills.
Dearest, once more. Those mad mills had their way–
Now is mine hour. To every man his day.

GOOD WAS THE FIGHT

How have I toiled, how have I set my face
Fair to the swords! No man could say I quailed;
Ne’er did I falter; I dare not to have failed,
I dare not to have dropped from out the race.

Good was the fight–good, till a piteous dream
Crept from some direful covert of despair;
Showed me your look, that look so true and fair,
Distant and bleak; for me no more to gleam.

Then was I driven back upon my soul,
Then came dark moments; lady, then I drew
Forth from its place the round unfathomed bowl

Of sorrow, and from it I quaffed to you;
Speaking as men speak who have lost
Their hearts’ last prize–and dare not count the cost.

UNCHANGED

But you are here unchanged. You say not so
In words, but when you placed your hands in mine;
But when I saw the same old glory shine
Within your eyes, I read it; and I know.

And when those hands ran up along my arm,
And rested on my shoulder for a space,
A sacred inquisition in your face,
To read my heart, how could I doubt that charm,

That truth ineffable!–I set my soul
In hazard to a farthing, that you kept
The faith, with pride unspeakable, the whole

Course of those years in which communion slept.
Your soul flamed in your look; you read; I knew
How little worth was I, how heavenly you.

ABSOLVO TE

I read your truth. You read–What did you read?
Did you read all, and, reading all, forgive?
How I–O little dwarf of conscience sieve
My soul; bare all before her bare indeed!

And, looking on the remnant and the waste,
Can you absolve me,–me, the doubter, one
Who challenged what God spent His genius on,
His genius and His pride; so fair, so chaste?

I am ashamed. . . . And when I told my dreams,
Shaken and humble,–”Dear, there was no cause,”
Your words; proud, sorrowful, as it beseems

Such as thou art. There never was a cause
Why you should honour me. Ashamed am I.
And you forgive me, bless me, for reply.

BENEDICTUS

You bless me, then you turn away your head–
“Never again, dear. I have blessed you so,
My lips upon your lips; between must flow
The river–Oh the river!” Thus you said.

The river–Oh the river, and the sun;
Stream that we may not cross, sun that is joy:
Flow as thou must; shine on in full employ–
Shine through her eyes thou; let the river run.

O lady, to your liegeman speak. You say:
“Dream no more dreams; yourself be as am I!”
Your hands clasped to your face, so shutting out the day.

An instant, then to me, your low good-bye–
Good-night, good-bye; and then the social reign,
The lights, the songs, the flowers–and the pain.

THE MESSAGE

“Oh, hush!” you said; “oh, hush!” The twilight hung
Between us and the world; but in your face,
Flooding with warm inner light, the sovereign grace
Of one who rests the brooding trees among–

Of one who steps down from a lofty throne,
Seeking that peace the sceptre cannot call;
And leaving courtier, page, and seneschal,
Goes down the lane of sycamores alone;

And, going, listens to the notes that swell
From golden throats–stories of ardent days,
And lovers in fair vales; and homing bell:

And the sweet theme unbearable, she prays
The song-bird cease! So, on the tale I dare,
Your “hush!” your wistful “hush!” broke like prayer.

UNAVAILING

“Never,” you said, “never this side the grave,
And what shall come hereafter, who may know?
Whether we e’en shall guess the way we go,
Passing beneath Death’s mystic architrave

Silence or song, dumb sleep or cheerful hours?”
O lady, you have questioned, answer too.
You–you to die–silence and gloom for you:
Dead song, dead lights, dead graces, and dead flowers?

It is not so: the foolish trivial end,
The inconsequent paltry Nothing–gone–gone all;
The genius of the ageless Something spend

Itself within this little earthly wall:
The commonplace conception, that we reap
Reward of drudge and ploughman–idle sleep!

YOU SHALL LIVE ON

You shall live on triumphant, you shall take
Your place among the peerless, fearless ones;
And those who loved you here shall tell their sons
To honour every woman for your sake.

And those your Peers shall say, “Others are pure,
Others are noble, others too have vowed,
And for a vow have suffered; but she bowed
Her own soul and another’s to endure.

She smote the being more to her than all,–
Her own soul and the world,–a truth to hold,
Faith with the dead; and hung a heavy pall

‘Tween her and love and life. The world is old,
It hath sent here none queenlier. Of the few,
The royal few is she, martyred and true.”

“VEX NOT THIS GHOST”

Upon the rack of this tough world I hear,
As when Cordelia’s glories all dissever-
“Never–never–never–never–never,–”
That wild moan of the dispossessed Lear.

O world, vex not this ghost, yea, let it pass,
The Spirit of these songs. The fool hath mocked,
The fool our woe upon us hath unlocked
From where the soul holds to our lips the glass,

To see what breath of life. O fool, poor fool,
Well, we have laughed together, you and I.
O fond insulter, in the healing pool

Of your deep poignant raillery I lie.
Let us be grand again, my fool. The throne
Is gone; but see, the coronation stone!

THE MEMORY

Know you where I, my royal fool, was crowned?
A rock within the great Egean? Where
A strong flood hurrieth on Finistere?
Where at the Pole our valiant men were drowned?

Where the soft creamy wash of Indian seas
Spreads palmward? Where the sunset glides to dawn,
No night between? Where all the tides are drawn
To greet their Sun and bathe their Idol’s knees?

Where was I crowned? Dear fool, upon a stone
That standeth where Earth’s arches make but one,
Where all the banners of her soul were flown,

And trumpeted the legions of the sun.
The stone is left: ’tis here against the door
Of throne and kingdom. . . . Pray you, mock no more.

THE PASSING

A time will come when we again shall rail–
Not yet, not yet. The flood comes on apace,
That deep dividing river, and her face
Grows dimmer as it widens–pale, so pale.

Have we not railed and laughed these many days,
Mummers before the lights? Dear fool, your hand
Upon your lips–Oh let us once be grand,
Grand as we were when treading royal ways.

Lo, there she moves beyond the river. Gone–
Gone is the sun-lo, starlight in her eyes.
See, how she standeth silent and alone–

Oh, hush! let us not vex her with our cries.
Proud as of old, unto my throne I go. . . .
Cordelia’s gone…… Hush, draw the curtain–so.

ENVOY

When you and I have played the little hour,
Have seen the tall subaltern Life to Death
Yield up his sword; and, smiling, draw the breath,
The first long breath of freedom; when the flower

Of Recompense has fluttered to our feet,
As to an actor’s; and the curtain down,
We turn to face each other all alone–
Alone, we two, who never yet did meet,

Alone, and absolute, and free: oh, then,
Oh, then, most dear, how shall be told the tale?
Clasped hands, pressed lips, and so clasped hands again;

No words. But as the proud wind fills the sail,
My love to yours shall reach, then one deep moan
Of joy; and then our infinite Alone.

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Title: The Silk-Hat Soldier
And Other Poems in War Time

Author: Richard le Gallienne

Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19313]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE WORKS OF RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

Robert Louis Stevenson: An Elegy, and Other Poems, Mainly Personal.

English Poems. Revised.

Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism.

George Meredith: Some Characteristics.
With a bibliography (much enlarged) by John Lane.

The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance.

The Romance of Zion Chapel.

The Worshipper of the Image: A Tragic Fairy Tale.

Sleeping Beauty and Other Prose Fancies.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
A Paraphrase from Several Literary Translations.
New edition with fifty additional quatrains.
With cover design by Will Bradley.

Retrospective Reviews: A Literary Log.
(New edition.) 2 vols.

Prose Fancies. First series.
With portrait of the author by Wilson Steer.

Prose Fancies. Second series.

Travels in England. New edition.

New Poems.

Attitudes and Avowals. With Some Retrospective Reviews.

The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems.

THE SILK-HAT SOLDIER

AND OTHER POEMS IN WAR TIME

BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

NEW YORK–JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON–JOHN LANE–THE BODLEY HEAD
MCMXV

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY

Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Co.
New York

To His Majesty

ALBERT I.

King of the Belgians

THE HEROIC CAPTAIN OF AN HEROIC PEOPLE

CONTENTS

PAGE

To Belgium 9

The Silk-Hat Soldier 11

The Cry of the Little Peoples 15

The Illusion of War 20

Christmas in War-time 22

“Soldier Going to the War” 29

The Rainbow 30

TO BELGIUM

Our tears, our songs, our laurels–what are these
To thee in thy Gethsemane of loss,
Stretched in thine unimagined agonies
On Hell’s last engine of the Iron Cross.

For such a world as this that thou shouldst die
Is price too vast–yet, Belgium, hadst thou sold
Thyself, O then had fled from out the earth
Honour for ever, and left only Gold.

Nor diest thou–for soon shalt thou awake,
And, lifted high on our victorious shields,
Watch the new sunrise driving for your sons
The hated German shadow from your fields.

“British colonists resident in London volunteer, and
not even silk hats are doffed before training begins”

–New York Times

THE SILK-HAT SOLDIER

I saw him in a picture, and I felt I’d like to cry–
He stood in line,
The man “for mine,”
A tall silk-hatted “guy”–
Right on the call,
Silk hat and all,
He’d hurried to the cry–
For he loves England well enough for England to die.

I’ve seen King Harry’s helmet in the Abbey hanging high–
The one he wore
At Agincourt;
But braver to my eye
That city toff
Too keen to doff
His stove-pipe–bless him–why?
For he loves England well enough for England to die.

And other fellows in that line had come too on the fly,
Their joys and toys,
Brave English boys,
For good and all put by;
O you brave best,
Teach all the rest
How pure the heart and high
When one loves England well enough for England to die.

One threw his cricket-bat aside, one left the ink to dry;
All peace and play
He’s put away,
And bid his love good-bye–
O mother mine!
O sweetheart mine!
No man of yours am I–
If I love not England well enough for England to die.

I guess it strikes a chill somewhere, the bravest won’t deny,
All that you love,
Away to shove,
And set your teeth to die;
But better dead,
When all is said,
Than lapped in peace to lie–
If we love not England well enough for England to die.

THE CRY OF THE LITTLE PEOPLES

The Cry of the Little Peoples went up to God in vain;
The Czech and the Pole, and the Finn, and the Schleswig Dane:

We ask but a little portion of the green, ambitious earth;
Only to sow and sing and reap in the land of our birth.

We ask not coaling stations, nor ports in the China seas,
We leave to the big child-nations such rivalries as these.

We have learned the lesson of Time, and we know three things of worth;
Only to sow and sing and reap in the land of our birth.

O leave us little margins, waste ends of land and sea,
A little grass, and a hill or two, and a shadowing tree;

O leave us our little rivers that sweetly catch the sky,
To drive our mills, and to carry our wood, and to ripple by.

Once long ago, as you, with hollow pursuit of fame,
We filled all the shaking world with the sound of our name,

But now are we glad to rest, our battles and boasting done,
Glad just to sow and sing and reap in our share of the sun.

Of this O will ye rob us,–with a foolish mighty hand,
Add with such cruel sorrow, so small a land to your land?

So might a boy rejoice him to conquer a hive of bees,
Overcome ants in battle,–we are scarcely more mighty than these–

So might a cruel heart hear a nightingale singing alone,
And say, “I am mighty! See how the singing stops with a stone!”

Yea, he were mighty indeed, mighty to crush and to gain;
But the bee and the ant and the bird were the mighty of brain.

And what shall you gain if you take us and bind us and beat us with
thongs,
And drive us to sing underground in a whisper our sad little songs?

Forbid us the very use of our heart’s own nursery tongue–
Is this to be strong, ye nations, is this to be strong?

Your vulgar battles to fight, and your grocery conquests to keep,
For this shall we break our hearts, for this shall our old men weep?

What gain in the day of battle–to the Russ, to the German, what gain,
The Czech, and the Pole, and the Finn, and the Schleswig Dane?

The Cry of the Little Peoples goes up to God in vain,
For the world is given over to the cruel sons of Cain;

The hand that would bless us is weak, and the hand that would break us
is strong,
And the power of pity is nought but the power of a song.

The dreams that our fathers dreamed to-day are laughter and dust,
And nothing at all in the world is left for a man to trust;

Let us hope no more, or dream, or prophesy, or pray,
For the iron world no less will crash on its iron way;

Yea! nothing is left but to watch, with a helpless, pitying eye,
The kind old aims for the world, and the kind old fashions die.

THE ILLUSION OF WAR

War
I abhor,
And yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife, and I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.

Without a soul–save this bright drink
Of heady music, sweet as hell;
And even my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street,
For yonder, yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for human life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes
And my full heart is like to break,
And yet ’tis all embannered lies,
A dream those little drummers make.

O it is wickedness to clothe
Yon hideous grinning thing that stalks
Hidden in music, like a queen
That in a garden of glory walks,
Till good men love the thing they loathe.
Art, thou hast many infamies,
But not an infamy like this;
O snap the fife and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is.

CHRISTMAS IN WAR-TIME

1

This is the year that has no Christmas Day,
Even the little children must be told
That something sad is happening far away–
Or, if you needs must play,
As children must,
Play softly children, underneath your breath!
For over our hearts hangs low the shadow of death,
Those hearts to you mysteriously old,
Grim grown-up hearts that ponder night and day
On the straight lists of broken-hearted dead,
Black narrow lists no tears can wash away,
Reading in which one cries out here and here
And falls into a dream upon a name.
Be happy softly, children, for a woe
Is on us, a great woe for little fame,–
Ah! in the old woods leave the mistletoe,
And leave the holly for another year,
Its berries are too red.

2

And lovers, like to children, will not you
Cease for a little from your kissing mirth,
Thinking of other lovers that must go
Kissed back with fire into the bosom of earth,–
Ah! in the old woods leave the mistletoe,
Be happy, softly, lovers, for you too
Shall be as sad as they another year,
And then for you the holly be berries of blood,
And mistletoe strange berries of bitter tears.
Ah! lovers, leave you your beatitude,
Give your sad eyes and ears
To the far griefs of neighbour and of friend,
To the great loves that find a little end,
Long loves that in a sudden puff of fire
With a wild thought expire.

3

And you, ye merchants, you that eat and cheat,
Gold-seeking hucksters in a noble land,
Think, when you lift the wine up in your hand,
Of a fierce vintage tragically red,
Red wine of the hearts of English soldiers dead,
Who ran to a wild death with laughing feet–
That we may sleep and drink and eat and cheat.
Ah! you brave few that fight for all the rest,
And die with smiling faces strangely blest,
Because you die for England–O to do
Something again for you,
In this great deed to have some little part;
To send so great a message from the heart
Of England that one man shall be as ten,
Hearing how England loves her Englishmen!
Ah! think you that a single gun is fired
We do not hear in England. Ah! we hear,
And mothers go with proud unhappy eyes
That say: It is for England that he dies,
England that does the cruel work of God,
And gives her well beloved to save the world.
For this is death like to a woman desired,
For this the wine-press trod.

4

And you in churches, praying this Christmas morn,
Pray as you never prayed that this may be
The little war that brought the great world peace;
Undazzled with its glorious infamy,
O pray with all your hearts that war may cease,
And who knows but that God may hear the prayer.
So it may come about next Christmas Day
That we shall hear the happy children play
Gladly aloud, unmindful of the dead,
And watch the lovers go
To the old woods to find the mistletoe.
But this year, children, if you needs must play,
Play very softly, underneath your breath;
Be happy softly, lovers, for great Death
Makes England holy with sorrow this Christmas Day;
Yes! in the old woods leave the mistletoe,
And leave the holly for another year–
Its berries are too red.

[Christmas, 1899--Written during the Boer War.]

“SOLDIER GOING TO THE WAR”

Soldier going to the war–
Will you take my heart with you,
So that I may share a little
In the famous things you do?

Soldier going to the war–
If in battle you must fall,
Will you, among all the faces,
See my face the last of all?

Soldier coming from the war–
Who shall bind your sunburnt brow
With the laurel of the hero,
Soldier, soldier–vow for vow!

Soldier coming from the war–
When the street is one wide sea,
Flags and streaming eyes and glory–
Soldier, will you look for me?

THE RAINBOW

“These things are real,” said one, and bade me gaze
On black and mighty shapes of iron and stone,
On murder, on madness, on lust, on towns ablaze,
And on a thing made all of rattling bone:
“What,” said he, “will you bring to match with these?”
“Yea! War is real,” I said, “and real is Death,
A little while–mortal realities;
But Love and Hope draw an immortal breath.”

Think you the storm that wrecks a summer day,
With funeral blackness and with leaping fire
And boiling roar of rain, more real than they
That, when the warring heavens begin to tire,
With tender fingers on the tumult paint;
Spanning the huddled wrack from base to cope
With soft effulgence, like some haloed saint,–
The rainbow bridge eternal that is Hope.

Deem her no phantom born of desperate dreams:
Ere man yet was, ’twas hope that wrought him man;
The blind earth, climbing skyward by her gleams,
Hoped–and the beauty of the world began.
Prophetic of all loveliness to be,
Though God Himself seem from His station hurled,
Still shall the blackest hell look up and see
Hope’s rainbow on the summits of the world.

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Title: Laughable Lyrics

Author: Edward Lear

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LAUGHABLE LYRICS

A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, etc.

by

EDWARD LEAR

Author of the _Book of Nonsense_, _More Nonsense_,
_Nonsense Songs, Stories_, etc., etc.

With all the Original Illustrations

[Illustration]

CONTENTS

LAUGHABLE LYRICS
THE DONG WITH A LUMINOUS NOSE
THE TWO OLD BACHELORS
THE PELICAN CHORUS
THE YONGHY-BONGHY-Bò
THE POBBLE WHO HAS NO TOES
THE NEW VESTMENTS
MR. AND MRS. DISCOBBOLOS
THE QUANGLE WANGLE’S HAT
THE CUMMERBUND
THE AKOND OF SWAT

NONSENSE BOTANY

” ALPHABET, No. 5
” ” No. 6

LAUGHABLE LYRICS.

THE DONG WITH A LUMINOUS NOSE.

[Illustration]

When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
Through the long, long wintry nights;
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore;
When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore,–

Then, through the vast and gloomy dark
There moves what seems a fiery spark,–
A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal-black night,–
A Meteor strange and bright:
Hither and thither the vision strays,
A single lurid light.

Slowly it wanders, pauses, creeps,–
Anon it sparkles, flashes, and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along,–
“The Dong! the Dong!
The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
The Dong! the Dong!
The Dong with a luminous Nose!”

Long years ago
The Dong was happy and gay,
Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl
Who came to those shores one day.
For the Jumblies came in a sieve, they did,–
Landing at eve near the Zemmery Fidd
Where the Oblong Oysters grow,
And the rocks are smooth and gray.
And all the woods and the valleys rang
With the Chorus they daily and nightly sang,–
“_Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve._”

Happily, happily passed those days!
While the cheerful Jumblies staid;
They danced in circlets all night long,
To the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong,
In moonlight, shine, or shade.
For day and night he was always there
By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,
With her sky-blue hands and her sea-green hair;
Till the morning came of that hateful day
When the Jumblies sailed in their sieve away,
And the Dong was left on the cruel shore
Gazing, gazing for evermore,–
Ever keeping his weary eyes on
That pea-green sail on the far horizon,–
Singing the Jumbly Chorus still
As he sate all day on the grassy hill,–
“_Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve_.”

But when the sun was low in the West,
The Dong arose and said,–
“What little sense I once possessed
Has quite gone out of my head!”
And since that day he wanders still
By lake and forest, marsh and hill,
Singing, “O somewhere, in valley or plain,
Might I find my Jumbly Girl again!
For ever I’ll seek by lake and shore
Till I find my Jumbly Girl once more!”

Playing a pipe with silvery squeaks,
Since then his Jumbly Girl he seeks;
And because by night he could not see,
He gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree
On the flowery plain that grows.
And he wove him a wondrous Nose,–
A Nose as strange as a Nose could be!

Of vast proportions and painted red,
And tied with cords to the back of his head.
In a hollow rounded space it ended
With a luminous Lamp within suspended,
All fenced about
With a bandage stout
To prevent the wind from blowing it out;
And with holes all round to send the light
In gleaming rays on the dismal night

And now each night, and all night long,
Over those plains still roams the Dong;
And above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe
You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe,
While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain,
To meet with his Jumbly Girl again;
Lonely and wild, all night he goes,–
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
And all who watch at the midnight hour,
From Hall or Terrace or lofty Tower,
Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright,
Moving along through the dreary night,–
“This is the hour when forth he goes,
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
Yonder, over the plain he goes,–
He goes!
He goes,–
The Dong with a luminous Nose!”

THE TWO OLD BACHELORS.

[Illustration]

Two old Bachelors were living in one house;
One caught a Muffin, the other caught a Mouse.
Said he who caught the Muffin to him who caught the Mouse,–
“This happens just in time! For we’ve nothing in the house,
Save a tiny slice of lemon and a teaspoonful of honey,
And what to do for dinner–since we haven’t any money?
And what can we expect if we haven’t any dinner,
But to lose our teeth and eyelashes and keep on growing thinner?”

Said he who caught the Mouse to him who caught the Muffin,–
“We might cook this little Mouse, if we only had some Stuffin’!
If we had but Sage and Onion we could do extremely well;
But how to get that Stuffin’ it is difficult to tell!”

Those two old Bachelors ran quickly to the town
And asked for Sage and Onion as they wandered up and down;
They borrowed two large Onions, but no Sage was to be found
In the Shops, or in the Market, or in all the Gardens round.

But some one said, “A hill there is, a little to the north,
And to its purpledicular top a narrow way leads forth;
And there among the rugged rocks abides an ancient Sage,–
An earnest Man, who reads all day a most perplexing page.
Climb up, and seize him by the toes,–all studious as he sits,–
And pull him down, and chop him into endless little bits!
Then mix him with your Onion (cut up likewise into Scraps),–
When your Stuffin’ will be ready, and very good–perhaps.”

Those two old Bachelors without loss of time
The nearly purpledicular crags at once began to climb;
And at the top, among the rocks, all seated in a nook,
They saw that Sage a-reading of a most enormous book.

“You earnest Sage!” aloud they cried, “your book you’ve read enough in!
We wish to chop you into bits to mix you into Stuffin’!”

But that old Sage looked calmly up, and with his awful book,
At those two Bachelors’ bald heads a certain aim he took;
And over Crag and precipice they rolled promiscuous down,–
At once they rolled, and never stopped in lane or field or town;
And when they reached their house, they found (besides their want
of Stuffin’),
The Mouse had fled–and, previously, had eaten up the Muffin.

They left their home in silence by the once convivial door;
And from that hour those Bachelors were never heard of more.

[Illustration: Sheet Music--The Pelicans]

[Illustration]

THE PELICAN CHORUS.

King and Queen of the Pelicans we;
No other Birds so grand we see!
None but we have feet like fins!
With lovely leathery throats and chins!
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican Jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still

We live on the Nile. The Nile we love.
By night we sleep on the cliffs above;
By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock walls grow dark and brown,

Where the purple river rolls fast and dim
And the Ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around,
Stamping our feet with a flumpy sound,
Opening our mouths as Pelicans ought;
And this is the song we nightly snort,–
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

Last year came out our Daughter Dell,
And all the Birds received her well.
To do her honor a feast we made
For every bird that can swim or wade,–
Herons and Gulls, and Cormorants black,
Cranes, and Flamingoes with scarlet back,
Plovers and Storks, and Geese in clouds,
Swans and Dilberry Ducks in crowds:
Thousands of Birds in wondrous flight!
They ate and drank and danced all night,
And echoing back from the rocks you heard
Multitude-echoes from Bird and Bird,–
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

Yes, they came; and among the rest
The King of the Cranes all grandly dressed.
Such a lovely tail! Its feathers float
Between the ends of his blue dress-coat;
With pea-green trowsers all so neat,
And a delicate frill to hide his feet
(For though no one speaks of it, every one knows
He has got no webs between his toes).

As soon as he saw our Daughter Dell,
In violent love that Crane King fell,–
On seeing her waddling form so fair,
With a wreath of shrimps in her short white hair.
And before the end of the next long day
Our Dell had given her heart away;
For the King of the Cranes had won that heart
With a Crocodile’s egg and a large fish-tart.
She vowed to marry the King of the Cranes,
Leaving the Nile for stranger plains;
And away they flew in a gathering crowd
Of endless birds in a lengthening cloud.
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

And far away in the twilight sky
We heard them singing a lessening cry,–
Farther and farther, till out of sight,
And we stood alone in the silent night!
Often since, in the nights of June,
We sit on the sand and watch the moon,–

She has gone to the great Gromboolian Plain,
And we probably never shall meet again!
Oft, in the long still nights of June,
We sit on the rocks and watch the moon,–
She dwells by the streams of the Chankly Bore.
And we probably never shall see her more.
Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

[Illustration: Sheet Music--The Yonghy Bonghy Bò]

THE COURTSHIP OF THE YONGHY-BONGHY-BÒ.

[Illustration]

I.

On the Coast of Coromandel
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle,
One old jug without a handle,–
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bò.

II.

Once, among the Bong-trees walking
Where the early pumpkins blow,
To a little heap of stones
Came the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
There he heard a Lady talking,
To some milk-white Hens of Dorking,–
“‘Tis the Lady Jingly Jones!
On that little heap of stones
Sits the Lady Jingly Jones!”
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

III.

“Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!
Sitting where the pumpkins blow,
Will you come and be my wife?”
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
“I am tired of living singly–
On this coast so wild and shingly,–
I’m a-weary of my life;
If you’ll come and be my wife,
Quite serene would be my life!”
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

IV.

“On this Coast of Coromandel
Shrimps and watercresses grow,
Prawns are plentiful and cheap,”
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
“You shall have my chairs and candle,
And my jug without a handle!
Gaze upon the rolling deep
(Fish is plentiful and cheap);
As the sea, my love is deep!”
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

V.

Lady Jingly answered sadly,
And her tears began to flow,–
“Your proposal comes too late,
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!
I would be your wife most gladly!”
(Here she twirled her fingers madly,)
“But in England I’ve a mate!
Yes! you’ve asked me far too late,
For in England I’ve a mate,
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!

VI.

“Mr. Jones (his name is Handel,–
Handel Jones, Esquire, & Co.)
Dorking fowls delights to send,
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!
Keep, oh, keep your chairs and candle,
And your jug without a handle,–
I can merely be your friend!
Should my Jones more Dorkings send,
I will give you three, my friend!
Mr. Yonghy-Bongy-Bò!
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!

VII.

“Though you’ve such a tiny body,
And your head so large doth grow,–
Though your hat may blow away,
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!
Though you’re such a Hoddy Doddy,
Yet I wish that I could modi-
fy the words I needs must say!
Will you please to go away?
That is all I have to say,
Mr. Yongby-Bonghy-Bò!
Mr. Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò!”

VIII.

Down the slippery slopes of Myrtle,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
To the calm and silent sea
Fled the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
There, beyond the Bay of Gurtle,
Lay a large and lively Turtle.
“You’re the Cove,” he said, “for me;
On your back beyond the sea,
Turtle, you shall carry me!”
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

[Illustration]

IX.

Through the silent-roaring ocean
Did the Turtle swiftly go;
Holding fast upon his shell
Rode the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
With a sad primaeval motion
Towards the sunset isles of Boshen
Still the Turtle bore him well.
Holding fast upon his shell,
“Lady Jingly Jones, farewell!”
Sang the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Sang the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

X.

From the Coast of Coromandel
Did that Lady never go;
On that heap of stones she mourns
For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
On that Coast of Coromandel,
In his jug without a handle
Still she weeps, and daily moans;
On that little heap of stones
To her Dorking Hens she moans,
For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
For the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

THE POBBLE WHO HAS NO TOES.

[Illustration]

I.

The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said, “Some day you may lose them all;”
He replied, “Fish fiddle de-dee!”
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink;
For she said, “The World in general knows
There’s nothing so good for a Pobble’s toes!”

II.

The Pobble who has no toes,
Swam across the Bristol Channel;
But before he set out he wrapped his nose
In a piece of scarlet flannel.
For his Aunt Jobiska said, “No harm
Can come to his toes if his nose is warm;
And it’s perfectly known that a Pobble’s toes
Are safe–provided he minds his nose.”

III.

The Pobble swam fast and well,
And when boats or ships came near him,
He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled a bell
So that all the world could hear him.
And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side,–
“He has gone to fish, for his Aunt Jobiska’s
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!”

IV.

But before he touched the shore,–
The shore of the Bristol Channel,
A sea-green Porpoise carried away
His wrapper of scarlet flannel.
And when he came to observe his feet,
Formerly garnished with toes so neat,
His face at once became forlorn
On perceiving that all his toes were gone!

V.

And nobody ever knew,
From that dark day to the present,
Whoso had taken the Pobble’s toes,
In a manner so far from pleasant.
Whether the shrimps or crawfish gray,
Or crafty Mermaids stole them away,
Nobody knew; and nobody knows
How the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!

VI.

The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up
To his Aunt Jobiska’s Park.
And she made him a feast, at his earnest wish,
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish;
And she said, “It’s a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes.”

THE NEW VESTMENTS.

There lived an old man in the Kingdom of Tess,
Who invented a purely original dress;
And when it was perfectly made and complete,
He opened the door and walked into the street.

By way of a hat he’d a loaf of Brown Bread,
In the middle of which he inserted his head;
His Shirt was made up of no end of dead Mice,
The warmth of whose skins was quite fluffy and nice;
His Drawers were of Rabbit-skins, so were his Shoes;
His Stockings were skins, but it is not known whose;
His Waistcoat and Trowsers were made of Pork Chops;
His Buttons were Jujubes and Chocolate Drops;
His Coat was all Pancakes, with Jam for a border,
And a girdle of Biscuits to keep it in order;
And he wore over all, as a screen from bad weather,
A Cloak of green Cabbage-leaves stitched all together.

He had walked a short way, when he heard a great noise,
Of all sorts of Beasticles, Birdlings, and Boys;
And from every long street and dark lane in the town
Beasts, Birdies, and Boys in a tumult rushed down.
Two Cows and a Calf ate his Cabbage-leaf Cloak;
Four Apes seized his Girdle, which vanished like smoke;
Three Kids ate up half of his Pancaky Coat,
And the tails were devour’d by an ancient He Goat;
An army of Dogs in a twinkling tore _up_ his
Pork Waistcoat and Trowsers to give to their Puppies;
And while they were growling, and mumbling the Chops,
Ten Boys prigged the Jujubes and Chocolate Drops.
He tried to run back to his house, but in vain,
For scores of fat Pigs came again and again:
They rushed out of stables and hovels and doors;
They tore off his stockings, his shoes, and his drawers;
And now from the housetops with screechings descend
Striped, spotted, white, black, and gray Cats without end:
They jumped on his shoulders and knocked off his hat,
When Crows, Ducks, and Hens made a mincemeat of that;
They speedily flew at his sleeves in a trice,
And utterly tore up his Shirt of dead Mice;
They swallowed the last of his Shirt with a squall,–
Whereon he ran home with no clothes on at all.

And he said to himself, as he bolted the door,
“I will not wear a similar dress any more,
Any more, any more, any more, never more!”

MR. AND MRS. DISCOBBOLOS.

I.

Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos
Climbed to the top of a wall.
And they sate to watch the sunset sky,
And to hear the Nupiter Piffkin cry,
And the Biscuit Buffalo call.
They took up a roll and some Camomile tea,
And both were as happy as happy could be,
Till Mrs. Discobbolos said,–
“Oh! W! X! Y! Z!
It has just come into my head,
Suppose we should happen to fall!!!!!
Darling Mr. Discobbolos!

II.

“Suppose we should fall down flumpetty,
Just like pieces of stone,
On to the thorns, or into the moat,
What would become of your new green coat?
And might you not break a bone?
It never occurred to me before,
That perhaps we shall never go down any more!”
And Mrs. Discobbolos said,
“Oh! W! X! Y! Z!
What put it into your head
To climb up this wall, my own
Darling Mr. Discobbolos?”

III.

Mr. Discobbolos answered,
“At first it gave me pain,
And I felt my ears turn perfectly pink
When your exclamation made me think
We might never get down again!
But now I believe it is wiser far
To remain for ever just where we are.”
And Mr. Discobbolos said,
“Oh! W! X! Y! Z!
It has just come into my head
We shall never go down again,
Dearest Mrs. Discobbolos!”

IV.

So Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos
Stood up and began to sing,–
“Far away from hurry and strife
Here we will pass the rest of life,
Ding a dong, ding dong, ding!
We want no knives nor forks nor chairs,
No tables nor carpets nor household cares;
From worry of life we’ve fled;
Oh! W! X! Y! Z!
There is no more trouble ahead,
Sorrow or any such thing,
For Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos!”

THE QUANGLE WANGLE’S HAT.

[Illustration]

I.

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side,
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody ever could see the face
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

II.

The Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree,
“Jam, and jelly, and bread
Are the best of food for me!
But the longer I live on this Crumpetty Tree
The plainer than ever it seems to me
That very few people come this way
And that life on the whole is far from gay!”
Said the Quangle Wangle Quee.

III.

But there came to the Crumpetty Tree
Mr. and Mrs. Canary;
And they said, “Did ever you see
Any spot so charmingly airy?
May we build a nest on your lovely Hat?
Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
O please let us come and build a nest
Of whatever material suits you best,
Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”

IV.

And besides, to the Crumpetty Tree
Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;
The Snail and the Bumble-Bee,
The Frog and the Fimble Fowl
(The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg);
And all of them said, “We humbly beg
We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,–
Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”

V.

And the Golden Grouse came there,
And the Pobble who has no toes,
And the small Olympian bear,
And the Dong with a luminous nose.
And the Blue Baboon who played the flute,
And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute,
And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,–
All came and built on the lovely Hat
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

VI.

And the Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree,
“When all these creatures move
What a wonderful noise there’ll be!”
And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon
They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon,
On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree,
And all were as happy as happy could be,
With the Quangle Wangle Quee.

THE CUMMERBUND.
An Indian Poem.

I.

She sate upon her Dobie,
To watch the Evening Star,
And all the Punkahs, as they passed,
Cried, “My! how fair you are!”
Around her bower, with quivering leaves,
The tall Kamsamahs grew,
And Kitmutgars in wild festoons
Hung down from Tchokis blue.

II.

Below her home the river rolled
With soft meloobious sound,
Where golden-finned Chuprassies swam,
In myriads circling round.
Above, on tallest trees remote
Green Ayahs perched alone,
And all night long the Mussak moan’d
Its melancholy tone.

III.

And where the purple Nullahs threw
Their branches far and wide,
And silvery Goreewallahs flew
In silence, side by side,
The little Bheesties’ twittering cry
Rose on the flagrant air,
And oft the angry Jampan howled
Deep in his hateful lair.

IV.

She sate upon her Dobie,
She heard the Nimmak hum,
When all at once a cry arose,
“The Cummerbund is come!”
In vain she fled: with open jaws
The angry monster followed,
And so (before assistance came)
That Lady Fair was swollowed.

V.

They sought in vain for even a bone
Respectfully to bury;
They said, “Hers was a dreadful fate!”
(And Echo answered, “Very.”)
They nailed her Dobie to the wall,
Where last her form was seen,
And underneath they wrote these words,
In yellow, blue, and green:
“Beware, ye Fair! Ye Fair, beware!
Nor sit out late at night,
Lest horrid Cummerbunds should come,
And swollow you outright.”

NOTE.–First published in _Times of India_, Bombay, July, 1874.

THE AKOND OF SWAT.

Who, or why, or which, or _what_, Is the Akond of SWAT?
Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?
Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or chair, or SQUAT,
The Akond of Swat?

Is he wise or foolish, young or old?
Does he drink his soup and his coffee cold, or HOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he sing or whistle, jabber or talk,
And when riding abroad does he gallop or walk, or TROT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he wear a turban, a fez, or a hat?
Does he sleep on a mattress, a bed, or a mat, or a COT,
The Akond of Swat?

When he writes a copy in round-hand size,
Does he cross his T’s and finish his I’s with a DOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Can he write a letter concisely clear
Without a speck or a smudge or smear or BLOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Do his people like him extremely well?
Or do they, whenever they can, rebel, or PLOT,
At the Akond of Swat?

If he catches them then, either old or young,
Does he have them chopped in pieces or hung, or _shot_,
The Akond of Swat?

Do his people prig in the lanes or park?
Or even at times, when days are dark, GAROTTE?
O the Akond of Swat!

Does he study the wants of his own dominion?
Or doesn’t he care for public opinion a JOT,
The Akond of Swat?

To amuse his mind do his people show him
Pictures, or any one’s last new poem, or WHAT,
For the Akond of Swat?

At night if he suddenly screams and wakes,
Do they bring him only a few small cakes, or a LOT,
For the Akond of Swat?

Does he live on turnips, tea, or tripe?
Does he like his shawl to be marked with a stripe, or a DOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like to lie on his back in a boat
Like the lady who lived in that isle remote, SHALLOTT,
The Akond of Swat?

Is he quiet, or always making a fuss?
Is his steward a Swiss or a Swede or a Russ, or a SCOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like to sit by the calm blue wave?
Or to sleep and snore in a dark green cave, or a GROTT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he drink small beer from a silver jug?
Or a bowl? or a glass? or a cup? or a mug? or a POT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he beat his wife with a gold-topped pipe,
When she lets the gooseberries grow too ripe, or ROT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he wear a white tie when he dines with friends,
And tie it neat in a bow with ends, or a KNOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like new cream, and hate mince-pies?
When he looks at the sun does he wink his eyes, or NOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he teach his subjects to roast and bake?
Does he sail about on an inland lake, in a YACHT,
The Akond of Swat?

Some one, or nobody, knows I wot
Who or which or why or what
Is the Akond of Swat!

NOTE.–For the existence of this potentate see Indian newspapers, _passim_.
The proper way to read the verses is to make an immense emphasis on the
monosyllabic rhymes, which indeed ought to be shouted out by a chorus.

* * * * *

NONSENSE BOTANY.

[Illustration: Armchairia Comfortabilis.]

[Illustration: Bassia Palealensis.]

[Illustration: Bubblia Blowpipia.]

[Illustration: Bluebottlia Buzztilentia.]

[Illustration: Crabbia Horrida.]

[Illustration: Smalltoothcombia Domestica.]

[Illustration: Knutmigrata Simplice.]

[Illustration: Tureenia Ladlecum.]

[Illustration: Puffia Leatherbellowsa.]

[Illustration: Queeriflora Babyöides.]

* * * * *

NONSENSE ALPHABETS.

A

[Illustration]

A was an Area Arch
Where washerwomen sat;
They made a lot of lovely starch
To starch Papa’s Cravat.

B

[Illustration]

B was a Bottle blue,
Which was not very small;
Papa he filled it full of beer,
And then he drank it all.

C

[Illustration]

C was Papa’s gray Cat,
Who caught a squeaky Mouse;
She pulled him by his twirly tail
All about the house.

D

[Illustration]

D was Papa’s white Duck,
Who had a curly tail;
One day it ate a great fat frog,
Besides a leetle snail.

E

[Illustration]

E was a little Egg,
Upon the breakfast table;
Papa came in and ate it up
As fast as he was able.

F

[Illustration]

F was a little Fish.
Cook in the river took it
Papa said, “Cook! Cook! bring a dish!
And, Cook! be quick and cook it!”

G

[Illustration]

G was Papa’s new Gun;
He put it in a box;
And then he went and bought a bun,
And walked about the Docks.

H

[Illustration]

H was Papa’s new Hat;
He wore it on his head;
Outside it was completely black,
But inside it was red.

I

[Illustration]

I was an Inkstand new,
Papa he likes to use it;
He keeps it in his pocket now,
For fear that he should lose it.

J

[Illustration]

J was some Apple Jam,
Of which Papa ate part;
But all the rest he took away
And stuffed into a tart.

K

[Illustration]

K was a great new Kite;
Papa he saw it fly
Above a thousand chimney pots,
And all about the sky.

L

[Illustration]

L was a fine new Lamp;
But when the wick was lit,
Papa he said, “This Light ain’t good!
I cannot read a bit!”

M

[Illustration]

M was a dish of mince;
It looked so good to eat!
Papa, he quickly ate it up,
And said, “This is a treat!”

N

[Illustration]

N was a Nut that grew
High up upon a tree;
Papa, who could not reach it, said,
“That’s _much_ too high for me!”

O

[Illustration]

O was an Owl who flew
All in the dark away,
Papa said, “What an owl you are!
Why don’t you fly by day?”

P

[Illustration]

P was a little Pig,
Went out to take a walk;
Papa he said, “If Piggy dead,
He’d all turn into Pork!”

Q

[Illustration]

Q was a Quince that hung
Upon a garden tree;
Papa he brought it with him home,
And ate it with his tea.

R

[Illustration]

R was a Railway Rug
Extremely large and warm;
Papa he wrapped it round his head,
In a most dreadful storm.

S

[Illustration]

S was Papa’s new Stick,
Papa’s new thumping Stick,
To thump extremely wicked boys,
Because it was so thick.

T

[Illustration]

T was a tumbler full
Of Punch all hot and good;
Papa he drank it up, when in
The middle of a wood.

U

[Illustration]

U was a silver urn,
Full of hot scalding water;
Papa said, “If that Urn were mine,
I’d give it to my daughter!”

V

[Illustration]

V was a Villain; once
He stole a piece of beef.
Papa he said, “Oh, dreadful man!
That Villain is a Thief!”

W

[Illustration]

W was a Watch of Gold:
It told the time of day,
So that Papa knew when to come,
And when to go away.

X

[Illustration]

X was King Xerxes, whom
Papa much wished to know;
But this he could not do, because
Xerxes died long ago.

Y

[Illustration]

Y was a Youth, who kicked
And screamed and cried like mad;
Papa he said, “Your conduct is
Abominably bad!”

Z

[Illustration]

Z was a Zebra striped
And streaked with lines of black;
Papa said once, he thought he’d like
A ride upon his back.

ALPHABET, No. 6.

A tumbled down, and hurt his Arm, against a bit of wood,

B said. “My Boy, oh, do not cry; it cannot do you good!”

C said, “A Cup of Coffee hot can’t do you any harm.”

D said, “A Doctor should be fetched, and he would cure the arm.”

E said, “An Egg beat up with milk would quickly make him well.”

F said, “A Fish, if broiled, might cure, if only by the smell.”

G said, “Green Gooseberry fool, the best of cures I hold.”

H said, “His Hat should be kept on, to keep him from the cold.”

I said, “Some Ice upon his head will make him better soon.”

J said, “Some Jam, if spread on bread, or given in a spoon!”

K said, “A Kangaroo is here,–this picture let him see.”

L said, “A Lamp pray keep alight, to make some barley tea.”

M said, “A Mulberry or two might give him satisfaction.”

N said, “Some Nuts, if rolled about, might be a slight attraction.”

O said, “An Owl might make him laugh, if only it would wink.”

P said, “Some Poetry might be read aloud, to make him think.”

Q said, “A Quince I recommend,–a Quince, or else a Quail.”

R said, “Some Rats might make him move, if fastened by their tail.”

S said, “A Song should now be sung, in hopes to make him laugh!”

T said, “A Turnip might avail, if sliced or cut in half!”

U said, “An Urn, with water hot, place underneath his chin!”

V said, “I’ll stand upon a chair, and play a Violin!”

W said, “Some Whisky-Whizzgigs fetch, some marbles and a ball!”

X said, “Some double XX ale would be the best of all!”

Y said, “Some Yeast mixed up with salt would make a perfect plaster!”

Z said, “Here is a box of Zinc! Get in, my little master!
We’ll shut you up! We’ll nail you down! We will, my little
master!
We think we’ve all heard quite enough of this your sad
disaster!”

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**The Legal Small Print**

The Project Gutenberg EBook of New Poems, by D. H. Lawrence

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: New Poems

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Release Date: September 22, 2007 [EBook #22726]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NEW POEMS ***

Produced by Lewis Jones

D.H. Lawrence (1918) _New Poems_

NEW POEMS

POEMS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

LOVE POEMS AND OTHERS
AMORES
LOOK, WE HAVE COME THROUGH

FIRST PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1918
NEW EDITION (RESET), AUGUST, 1919

New Poems

By D. H. Lawrence

London: Martin Seeker

TO
AMY LOWELL

THE LONDON AND NORWICH PRESS, LIMITED, LONDON AND NORWICH, ENGLAND

CONTENTS

Apprehension
Coming Awake
From a College Window
Flapper
Birdcage Walk
Letter from Town: The Almond Tree
Flat Suburbs, S.W., in the Morning
Thief in the Night
Letter from Town: On a Grey Evening in March
Suburbs on a Hazy Day
Hyde Park at Night: Clerks
Gipsy
Two-Fold
Under the Oak
Sigh no More
Love Storm
Parliament Hill in the Evening
Piccadilly Circus at Night: Street Walkers
Tarantella
In Church
Piano
Embankment at Night: Charity
Phantasmagoria
Next Morning
Palimpsest of Twilight
Embankment at Night: Outcasts
Winter in the Boulevard
School on the Outskirts
Sickness
Everlasting Flowers
The North Country
Bitterness of Death
Seven Seals
Reading a Letter
Twenty Years Ago
Intime
Two Wives
Heimweh
Débâcle
Narcissus
Autumn Sunshine
On That Day

APPREHENSION

AND all hours long, the town
Roars like a beast in a cave
That is wounded there
And like to drown;
While days rush, wave after wave
On its lair.

An invisible woe unseals
The flood, so it passes beyond
All bounds: the great old city
Recumbent roars as it feels
The foamy paw of the pond
Reach from immensity.

But all that it can do
Now, as the tide rises,
Is to listen and hear the grim
Waves crash like thunder through
The splintered streets, hear noises
Roll hollow in the interim.

COMING AWAKE

WHEN I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the
wall,
The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across,
And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas
In the window, his body black fur, and the sound
of him cross.

There was something I ought to remember: and
yet
I did not remember. Why should I? The run-
ning lights
And the airy primulas, oblivious
Of the impending bee–they were fair enough
sights.

FROM A COLLEGE WINDOW

THE glimmer of the limes, sun-heavy, sleeping,
Goes trembling past me up the College wall.
Below, the lawn, in soft blue shade is keeping,
The daisy-froth quiescent, softly in thrall.

Beyond the leaves that overhang the street,
Along the flagged, clean pavement summer-white,
Passes the world with shadows at their feet
Going left and right.

Remote, although I hear the beggar’s cough,
See the woman’s twinkling fingers tend him a
coin,
I sit absolved, assured I am better off
Beyond a world I never want to join.

FLAPPER

LOVE has crept out of her sealéd heart
As a field-bee, black and amber,
Breaks from the winter-cell, to clamber
Up the warm grass where the sunbeams start.

Mischief has come in her dawning eyes,
And a glint of coloured iris brings
Such as lies along the folded wings
Of the bee before he flies.

Who, with a ruffling, careful breath,
Has opened the wings of the wild young sprite?
Has fluttered her spirit to stumbling flight
In her eyes, as a young bee stumbleth?

Love makes the burden of her voice.
The hum of his heavy, staggering wings
Sets quivering with wisdom the common
things
That she says, and her words rejoice.

BIRDCAGE WALK

WHEN the wind blows her veil
And uncovers her laughter
I cease, I turn pale.
When the wind blows her veil
From the woes I bewail
Of love and hereafter:
When the wind blows her veil
I cease, I turn pale.

LETTER FROM TOWN: THE
ALMOND TREE

YOU promised to send me some violets. Did you
forget?
White ones and blue ones from under the orchard
hedge?
Sweet dark purple, and white ones mixed for a
pledge
Of our early love that hardly has opened yet.

Here there’s an almond tree–you have never seen
Such a one in the north–it flowers on the street,
and I stand
Every day by the fence to look up for the flowers
that expand
At rest in the blue, and wonder at what they mean.

Under the almond tree, the happy lands
Provence, Japan, and Italy repose,
And passing feet are chatter and clapping of
those
Who play around us, country girls clapping their
hands.

You, my love, the foremost, in a flowered gown,
All your unbearable tenderness, you with the
laughter
Startled upon your eyes now so wide with here-
after,
You with loose hands of abandonment hanging
down.

FLAT SUBURBS, S.W., IN THE
MORNING

THE new red houses spring like plants
In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
Its square shadows.

The pink young houses show one side bright
Flatly assuming the sun,
And one side shadow, half in sight,
Half-hiding the pavement-run;

Where hastening creatures pass intent
On their level way,
Threading like ants that can never relent
And have nothing to say.

Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand
At random, desolate twigs,
To testify to a blight on the land
That has stripped their sprigs.

THIEF IN THE NIGHT

LAST night a thief came to me
And struck at me with something dark.
I cried, but no one could hear me,
I lay dumb and stark.

When I awoke this morning
I could find no trace;
Perhaps ’twas a dream of warning,
For I’ve lost my peace.

LETTER FROM TOWN: ON A
GREY EVENING IN MARCH

THE clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly
northward to you,
While north of them all, at the farthest ends,
stands one bright-bosomed, aglance
With fire as it guards the wild north cloud-coasts,
red-fire seas running through
The rocks where ravens flying to windward melt
as a well-shot lance.

You should be out by the orchard, where violets
secretly darken the earth,
Or there in the woods of the twilight, with
northern wind-flowers shaken astir.
Think of me here in the library, trying and trying
a song that is worth
Tears and swords to my heart, arrows no armour
will turn or deter.

You tell me the lambs have come, they lie like
daisies white in the grass
Of the dark-green hills; new calves in shed;
peewits turn after the plough–
It is well for you. For me the navvies work in the
road where I pass
And I want to smite in anger the barren rock of
each waterless brow.

Like the sough of a wind that is caught up high in
the mesh of the budding trees,
A sudden car goes sweeping past, and I strain my
soul to hear
The voice of the furtive triumphant engine as it
rushes past like a breeze,
To hear on its mocking triumphance unwitting
the after-echo of fear.

SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY

O STIFFLY shapen houses that change not,
What conjuror’s cloth was thrown across you,
and raised
To show you thus transfigured, changed,
Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased?

Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong _aqua regia_ now are you steeped?

That you lose the brick-stuff out of you
And hover like a presentment, fading faint
And vanquished, evaporate away
To leave but only the merest possible taint!

HYDE PARK AT NIGHT, BEFORE
THE WAR

_Clerks_.

WE have shut the doors behind us, and the velvet
flowers of night
Lean about us scattering their pollen grains of
golden light.

Now at last we lift our faces, and our faces come
aflower
To the night that takes us willing, liberates us to the
hour.

Now at last the ink and dudgeon passes from our
fervent eyes
And out of the chambered weariness wanders a
spirit abroad on its enterprise.

Not too near and not too far
Out of the stress of the crowd
Music screams as elephants scream
When they lift their trunks and scream aloud
For joy of the night when masters are
Asleep and adream.

So here I hide in the Shalimar
With a wanton princess slender and proud,
And we swoon with kisses, swoon till we seem
Two streaming peacocks gone in a cloud
Of golden dust, with star after star
On our stream.

GIPSY

I, THE man with the red scarf,
Will give thee what I have, this last week’s earn-
ings.
Take them, and buy thee a silver ring
And wed me, to ease my yearnings.

For the rest, when thou art wedded
I’ll wet my brow for thee
With sweat, I’ll enter a house for thy sake,
Thou shalt shut doors on me.

TWO-FOLD

How gorgeous that shock of red lilies, and larkspur
cleaving
All with a flash of blue!–when will she be leaving
Her room, where the night still hangs like a half-
folded bat,
And passion unbearable seethes in the darkness, like
must in a vat.

UNDER THE OAK

You, if you were sensible,
When I tell you the stars flash signals, each one
dreadful,
You would not turn and answer me
“The night is wonderful.”

Even you, if you knew
How this darkness soaks me through and through,
and infuses
Unholy fear in my vapour, you would pause to dis-
tinguish
What hurts, from what amuses.

For I tell you
Beneath this powerful tree, my whole soul’s fluid
Oozes away from me as a sacrifice steam
At the knife of a Druid.

Again I tell you, I bleed, I am bound with withies,
My life runs out.
I tell you my blood runs out on the floor of this oak,
Gout upon gout.

Above me springs the blood-born mistletoe
In the shady smoke.
But who are you, twittering to and fro
Beneath the oak?

What thing better are you, what worse?
What have you to do with the mysteries
Of this ancient place, of my ancient curse?
What place have you in my histories?

SIGH NO MORE

THE cuckoo and the coo-dove’s ceaseless calling,
Calling,
Of a meaningless monotony is palling
All my morning’s pleasure in the sun-fleck-scattered
wood.
May-blossom and blue bird’s-eye flowers falling,
Falling
In a litter through the elm-tree shade are scrawling
Messages of true-love down the dust of the high-
road.
I do not like to hear the gentle grieving,
Grieving
Of the she-dove in the blossom, still believing
Love will yet again return to her and make all good.

When I know that there must ever be deceiving,
Deceiving
Of the mournful constant heart, that while she’s
weaving
Her woes, her lover woos and sings within another
wood.

Oh, boisterous the cuckoo shouts, forestalling,
Stalling
A progress down the intricate enthralling
By-paths where the wanton-headed flowers doff
their hood.

And like a laughter leads me onward, heaving,
Heaving
A sigh among the shadows, thus retrieving
A decent short regret for that which once was very
good.

LOVE STORM

MANY roses in the wind
Are tapping at the window-sash.
A hawk is in the sky; his wings
Slowly begin to plash.

The roses with the west wind rapping
Are torn away, and a splash
Of red goes down the billowing air.

Still hangs the hawk, with the whole sky moving
Past him–only a wing-beat proving
The will that holds him there.

The daisies in the grass are bending,
The hawk has dropped, the wind is spending
All the roses, and unending
Rustle of leaves washes out the rending
Cry of a bird.

A red rose goes on the wind.–Ascending
The hawk his wind-swept way is wending
Easily down the sky. The daisies, sending
Strange white signals, seem intending
To show the place whence the scream was heard.

But, oh, my heart, what birds are piping!
A silver wind is hastily wiping
The face of the youngest rose.

And oh, my heart, cease apprehending!
The hawk is gone, a rose is tapping
The window-sash as the west-wind blows.

Knock, knock, ’tis no more than a red rose rapping,
And fear is a plash of wings.
What, then, if a scarlet rose goes flapping
Down the bright-grey ruin of things!

PARLIAMENT HILL IN THE
EVENING

THE houses fade in a melt of mist
Blotching the thick, soiled air
With reddish places that still resist
The Night’s slow care.

The hopeless, wintry twilight fades,
The city corrodes out of sight
As the body corrodes when death invades
That citadel of delight.

Now verdigris smoulderings softly spread
Through the shroud of the town, as slow
Night-lights hither and thither shed
Their ghastly glow.

PICCADILLY CIRCUS AT NIGHT

_Street-Walkers_.

WHEN into the night the yellow light is roused like
dust above the towns,
Or like a mist the moon has kissed from off a pool in
the midst of the downs,

Our faces flower for a little hour pale and uncertain
along the street,
Daisies that waken all mistaken white-spread in ex-
pectancy to meet

The luminous mist which the poor things wist was
dawn arriving across the sky,
When dawn is far behind the star the dust-lit town
has driven so high.

All the birds are folded in a silent ball of sleep,
All the flowers are faded from the asphalt isle in
the sea,
Only we hard-faced creatures go round and round,
and keep
The shores of this innermost ocean alive and
illusory.

Wanton sparrows that twittered when morning
looked in at their eyes
And the Cyprian’s pavement-roses are gone, and
now it is we
Flowers of illusion who shine in our gauds, make a
Paradise
On the shores of this ceaseless ocean, gay birds of
the town-dark sea.

TARANTELLA

SAD as he sits on the white sea-stone
And the suave sea chuckles, and turns to the moon,
And the moon significant smiles at the cliffs and
the boulders.
He sits like a shade by the flood alone
While I dance a tarantella on the rocks, and the
croon
Of my mockery mocks at him over the waves’
bright shoulders.

What can I do but dance alone,
Dance to the sliding sea and the moon,
For the moon on my breast and the air on my limbs
and the foam on my feet?
For surely this earnest man has none
Of the night in his soul, and none of the tune
Of the waters within him; only the world’s old
wisdom to bleat.

I wish a wild sea-fellow would come down the
glittering shingle,
A soulless neckar, with winking seas in his eyes
And falling waves in his arms, and the lost soul’s kiss
On his lips: I long to be soulless, I tingle
To touch the sea in the last surprise
Of fiery coldness, to be gone in a lost soul’s bliss.

IN CHURCH

IN the choir the boys are singing the hymn.
The morning light on their lips
Moves in silver-moist flashes, in musical trim.

Sudden outside the high window, one crow
Hangs in the air
And lights on a withered oak-tree’s top of woe.

One bird, one blot, folded and still at the top
Of the withered tree!–in the grail
Of crystal heaven falls one full black drop.

Like a soft full drop of darkness it seems to sway
In the tender wine
Of our Sabbath, suffusing our sacred day.

PIANO

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the
tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who
smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter
outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano
our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The
glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a
child for the past.

EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT,
BEFORE THE WAR

_Charity_.

BY the river
In the black wet night as the furtive rain slinks
down,
Dropping and starting from sleep
Alone on a seat
A woman crouches.

I must go back to her.

I want to give her
Some money. Her hand slips out of the breast of
her gown
Asleep. My fingers creep
Carefully over the sweet
Thumb-mound, into the palm’s deep pouches.

So, the gift!

God, how she starts!
And looks at me, and looks in the palm of her hand!
And again at me!
I turn and run
Down the Embankment, run for my life.

But why?–why?

Because of my heart’s
Beating like sobs, I come to myself, and stand
In the street spilled over splendidly
With wet, flat lights. What I’ve done
I know not, my soul is in strife.

The touch was on the quick. I want to forget.

PHANTASMAGORIA

RIGID sleeps the house in darkness, I alone
Like a thing unwarrantable cross the hall
And climb the stairs to find the group of doors
Standing angel-stern and tall.

I want my own room’s shelter. But what is this
Throng of startled beings suddenly thrown
In confusion against my entry? Is it only the trees’
Large shadows from the outside street lamp blown?

Phantom to phantom leaning; strange women weep
Aloud, suddenly on my mind
Startling a fear unspeakable, as the shuddering wind
Breaks and sobs in the blind.

So like to women, tall strange women weeping!
Why continually do they cross the bed?
Why does my soul contract with unnatural fear?
I am listening! Is anything said?

Ever the long black figures swoop by the bed;
They seem to be beckoning, rushing away, and
beckoning.
Whither then, whither, what is it, say
What is the reckoning.

Tall black Bacchae of midnight, why then, why
Do you rush to assail me?
Do I intrude on your rites nocturnal?
What should it avail me?

Is there some great Iacchos of these slopes
Suburban dismal?
Have I profaned some female mystery, orgies
Black and phantasmal?

NEXT MORNING

How have I wandered here to this vaulted room
In the house of life?–the floor was ruffled with gold
Last evening, and she who was softly in bloom,
Glimmered as flowers that in perfume at twilight
unfold

For the flush of the night; whereas now the gloom
Of every dirty, must-besprinkled mould,
And damp old web of misery’s heirloom
Deadens this day’s grey-dropping arras-fold.

And what is this that floats on the undermist
Of the mirror towards the dusty grate, as if feeling
Unsightly its way to the warmth?–this thing with
a list
To the left? this ghost like a candle swealing?

Pale-blurred, with two round black drops, as if it
missed
Itself among everything else, here hungrily stealing
Upon me!–my own reflection!–explicit gist
Of my presence there in the mirror that leans from
the ceiling!

Then will somebody square this shade with the
being I know
I was last night, when my soul rang clear as a bell
And happy as rain in summer? Why should it be
so?
What is there gone against me, why am I in hell?

PALIMPSEST OF TWILIGHT

DARKNESS comes out of the earth
And swallows dip into the pallor of the west;
From the hay comes the clamour of children’s
mirth;
Wanes the old palimpsest.

The night-stock oozes scent,
And a moon-blue moth goes flittering by:
All that the worldly day has meant
Wastes like a lie.

The children have forsaken their play;
A single star in a veil of light
Glimmers: litter of day
Is gone from sight.

EMBANKMENT AT NIGHT,
BEFORE THE WAR

_Outcasts_.

THE night rain, dripping unseen,
Comes endlessly kissing my face and my hands.

The river, slipping between
Lamps, is rayed with golden bands
Half way down its heaving sides;
Revealed where it hides.

Under the bridge
Great electric cars
Sing through, and each with a floor-light racing
along at its side.
Far off, oh, midge after midge
Drifts over the gulf that bars
The night with silence, crossing the lamp-touched
tide.

At Charing Cross, here, beneath the bridge
Sleep in a row the outcasts,
Packed in a line with their heads against the wall.
Their feet, in a broken ridge
Stretch out on the way, and a lout casts
A look as he stands on the edge of this naked stall.

Beasts that sleep will cover
Their faces in their flank; so these
Have huddled rags or limbs on the naked sleep.
Save, as the tram-cars hover
Past with the noise of a breeze
And gleam as of sunshine crossing the low black heap,

Two naked faces are seen
Bare and asleep,
Two pale clots swept and swept by the light of the
cars.
Foam-clots showing between
The long, low tidal-heap,
The mud-weed opening two pale, shadowless stars.

Over the pallor of only two faces
Passes the gallivant beam of the trams;
Shows in only two sad places
The white bare bone of our shams.

A little, bearded man, pale, peaked in sleeping,
With a face like a chickweed flower.
And a heavy woman, sleeping still keeping
Callous and dour.

Over the pallor of only two places
Tossed on the low, black, ruffled heap
Passes the light of the tram as it races
Out of the deep.

Eloquent limbs
In disarray
Sleep-suave limbs of a youth with long, smooth
thighs
Hutched up for warmth; the muddy rims
Of trousers fray
On the thin bare shins of a man who uneasily lies.

The balls of five red toes
As red and dirty, bare
Young birds forsaken and left in a nest of mud–
Newspaper sheets enclose
Some limbs like parcels, and tear
When the sleeper stirs or turns on the ebb of the
flood–

One heaped mound
Of a woman’s knees
As she thrusts them upward under the ruffled skirt–
And a curious dearth of sound
In the presence of these
Wastrels that sleep on the flagstones without any
hurt.

Over two shadowless, shameless faces
Stark on the heap
Travels the light as it tilts in its paces
Gone in one leap.

At the feet of the sleepers, watching,
Stand those that wait
For a place to lie down; and still as they stand,
they sleep,
Wearily catching
The flood’s slow gait
Like men who are drowned, but float erect in the
deep.

Oh, the singing mansions,
Golden-lighted tall
Trams that pass, blown ruddily down the night!
The bridge on its stanchions
Stoops like a pall
To this human blight.

On the outer pavement, slowly,
Theatre people pass,
Holding aloft their umbrellas that flash and are
bright
Like flowers of infernal moly
Over nocturnal grass
Wetly bobbing and drifting away on our sight.

And still by the rotten
Row of shattered feet,
Outcasts keep guard.
Forgotten,
Forgetting, till fate shall delete
One from the ward.

The factories on the Surrey side
Are beautifully laid in black on a gold-grey sky.
The river’s invisible tide
Threads and thrills like ore that is wealth to the eye.

And great gold midges
Cross the chasm
At the bridges
Above intertwined plasm.

WINTER IN THE BOULEVARD

THE frost has settled down upon the trees
And ruthlessly strangled off the fantasies
Of leaves that have gone unnoticed, swept like old
Romantic stories now no more to be told.

The trees down the boulevard stand naked in
thought,
Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught
In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront
Implacable winter’s long, cross-questioning brunt.

Has some hand balanced more leaves in the depths
of the twigs?
Some dim little efforts placed in the threads of the
birch?–
It is only the sparrows, like dead black leaves on
the sprigs,
Sitting huddled against the cerulean, one flesh with
their perch.

The clear, cold sky coldly bethinks itself.
Like vivid thought the air spins bright, and all
Trees, birds, and earth, arrested in the after-thought
Awaiting the sentence out from the welkin brought.

SCHOOL ON THE OUTSKIRTS

How different, in the middle of snows, the great
school rises red!
A red rock silent and shadowless, clung round
with clusters of shouting lads,
Some few dark-cleaving the doorway, souls that
cling as the souls of the dead
In stupor persist at the gates of life, obstinate
dark monads.

This new red rock in a waste of white rises against
the day
With shelter now, and with blandishment, since
the winds have had their way
And laid the desert horrific of silence and snow on
the world of mankind,
School now is the rock in this weary land the winter
burns and makes blind.

SICKNESS

WAVING slowly before me, pushed into the dark,
Unseen my hands explore the silence, drawing the
bark
Of my body slowly behind.

Nothing to meet my fingers but the fleece of night
Invisible blinding my face and my eyes! What if
in their flight
My hands should touch the door!

What if I suddenly stumble, and push the door
Open, and a great grey dawn swirls over my feet,
before
I can draw back!

What if unwitting I set the door of eternity wide
And am swept away in the horrible dawn, am gone
down the tide
Of eternal hereafter!

Catch my hands, my darling, between your breasts.
Take them away from their venture, before fate
wrests
The meaning out of them.

EVERLASTING FLOWERS

WHO do you think stands watching
The snow-tops shining rosy
In heaven, now that the darkness
Takes all but the tallest posy?

Who then sees the two-winged
Boat down there, all alone
And asleep on the snow’s last shadow,
Like a moth on a stone?

The olive-leaves, light as gad-flies,
Have all gone dark, gone black.
And now in the dark my soul to you
Turns back.

To you, my little darling,
To you, out of Italy.
For what is loveliness, my love,
Save you have it with me!

So, there’s an oxen wagon
Comes darkly into sight:
A man with a lantern, swinging
A little light.

What does he see, my darling
Here by the darkened lake?
Here, in the sloping shadow
The mountains make?

He says not a word, but passes,
Staring at what he sees.
What ghost of us both do you think he saw
Under the olive trees?

All the things that are lovely–
The things you never knew–
I wanted to gather them one by one
And bring them to you.

But never now, my darling
Can I gather the mountain-tips
From the twilight like half-shut lilies
To hold to your lips.

And never the two-winged vessel
That sleeps below on the lake
Can I catch like a moth between my hands
For you to take.

But hush, I am not regretting:
It is far more perfect now.
I’ll whisper the ghostly truth to the world
And tell them how

I know you here in the darkness,
How you sit in the throne of my eyes
At peace, and look out of the windows
In glad surprise.

THE NORTH COUNTRY

IN another country, black poplars shake them-
selves over a pond,
And rooks and the rising smoke-waves scatter and
wheel from the works beyond;
The air is dark with north and with sulphur, the
grass is a darker green,
And people darkly invested with purple move
palpable through the scene.

Soundlessly down across the counties, out of the
resonant gloom
That wraps the north in stupor and purple travels
the deep, slow boom
Of the man-life north-imprisoned, shut in the hum
of the purpled steel
As it spins to sleep on its motion, drugged dense in
the sleep of the wheel.

Out of the sleep, from the gloom of motion, sound-
lessly, somnambule
Moans and booms the soul of a people imprisoned,
asleep in the rule
Of the strong machine that runs mesmeric, booming
the spell of its word
Upon them and moving them helpless, mechanic,
their will to its will deferred.

Yet all the while comes the droning inaudible, out
of the violet air,
The moaning of sleep-bound beings in travail that
toil and are will-less there
In the spell-bound north, convulsive now with a
dream near morning, strong
With violent achings heaving to burst the sleep
that is now not long.

BITTERNESS OF DEATH

I

AH, stern, cold man,
How can you lie so relentless hard
While I wash you with weeping water!
Do you set your face against the daughter
Of life? Can you never discard
Your curt pride’s ban?

You masquerader!
How can you shame to act this part
Of unswerving indifference to me?
You want at last, ah me!
To break my heart
Evader!

You know your mouth
Was always sooner to soften
Even than your eyes.
Now shut it lies
Relentless, however often
I kiss it in drouth.

It has no breath
Nor any relaxing. Where,
Where are you, what have you done?
What is this mouth of stone?
How did you dare
Take cover in death!

II

Once you could see,
The white moon show like a breast revealed
By the slipping shawl of stars.
Could see the small stars tremble
As the heart beneath did wield
Systole, diastole.

All the lovely macrocosm
Was woman once to you,
Bride to your groom.
No tree in bloom
But it leaned you a new
White bosom.

And always and ever
Soft as a summering tree
Unfolds from the sky, for your good,
Unfolded womanhood;
Shedding you down as a tree
Sheds its flowers on a river.

I saw your brows
Set like rocks beside a sea of gloom,
And I shed my very soul down into your
thought;
Like flowers I fell, to be caught
On the comforted pool, like bloom
That leaves the boughs.

III

Oh, masquerader,
With a hard face white-enamelled,
What are you now?
Do you care no longer how
My heart is trammelled,
Evader?

Is this you, after all,
Metallic, obdurate
With bowels of steel?
Did you _never_ feel?–
Cold, insensate,
Mechanical!

Ah, no!–you multiform,
You that I loved, you wonderful,
You who darkened and shone,
You were many men in one;
But never this null
This never-warm!

Is this the sum of you?
Is it all nought?
Cold, metal-cold?
Are you all told
Here, iron-wrought?
Is _this_ what’s become of you?

SEVEN SEALS

SINCE this is the last night I keep you home,
Come, I will consecrate you for the journey.

Rather I had you would not go. Nay come,
I will not again reproach you. Lie back
And let me love you a long time ere you go.
For you are sullen-hearted still, and lack
The will to love me. But even so
I will set a seal upon you from my lip,
Will set a guard of honour at each door,
Seal up each channel out of which might slip
Your love for me.

I kiss your mouth. Ah, love,
Could I but seal its ruddy, shining spring
Of passion, parch it up, destroy, remove
Its softly-stirring crimson welling-up
Of kisses! Oh, help me, God! Here at the source
I’d lie for ever drinking and drawing in
Your fountains, as heaven drinks from out their
course
The floods.

I close your ears with kisses
And seal your nostrils; and round your neck you’ll
wear–
Nay, let me work–a delicate chain of kisses.
Like beads they go around, and not one misses
To touch its fellow on either side.

And there
Full mid-between the champaign of your breast
I place a great and burning seal of love
Like a dark rose, a mystery of rest
On the slow bubbling of your rhythmic heart.

Nay, I persist, and very faith shall keep
You integral to me. Each door, each mystic port
Of egress from you I will seal and steep
In perfect chrism.
Now it is done. The mort
Will sound in heaven before it is undone.

But let me finish what I have begun
And shirt you now invulnerable in the mail
Of iron kisses, kisses linked like steel.
Put greaves upon your thighs and knees, and frail
Webbing of steel on your feet. So you shall feel
Ensheathed invulnerable with me, with seven
Great seals upon your outgoings, and woven
Chain of my mystic will wrapped perfectly
Upon you, wrapped in indomitable me.

READING A LETTER

SHE sits on the recreation ground
Under an oak whose yellow buds dot the pale
blue sky.
The young grass twinkles in the wind, and the sound
Of the wind in the knotted buds in a canopy.

So sitting under the knotted canopy
Of the wind, she is lifted and carried away as in
a balloon
Across the insensible void, till she stoops to see
The sandy desert beneath her, the dreary platoon.

She knows the waste all dry beneath her, in one
place
Stirring with earth-coloured life, ever turning and
stirring.
But never the motion has a human face
Nor sound, save intermittent machinery whirring.

And so again, on the recreation ground
She alights a stranger, wondering, unused to the
scene;
Suffering at sight of the children playing around,
Hurt at the chalk-coloured tulips, and the even-
ing-green.

TWENTY YEARS AGO

ROUND the house were lilacs and strawberries
And foal-foots spangling the paths,
And far away on the sand-hills, dewberries
Caught dust from the sea’s long swaths.

Up the wolds the woods were walking,
And nuts fell out of their hair.
At the gate the nets hung, balking
The star-lit rush of a hare.

In the autumn fields, the stubble
Tinkled the music of gleaning.
At a mother’s knees, the trouble
Lost all its meaning.

Yea, what good beginnings
To this sad end!
Have we had our innings?
God forfend!

INTIME

RETURNING, I find her just the same,
At just the same old delicate game.

Still she says: “Nay, loose no flame
To lick me up and do me harm!
Be all yourself!–for oh, the charm
Of your heart of fire in which I look!
Oh, better there than in any book
Glow and enact the dramas and dreams
I love for ever!–there it seems
You are lovelier than life itself, till desire
Comes licking through the bars of your lips
And over my face the stray fire slips,
Leaving a burn and an ugly smart
That will have the oil of illusion. Oh, heart
Of fire and beauty, loose no more
Your reptile flames of lust; ah, store
Your passion in the basket of your soul,
Be all yourself, one bonny, burning coal
That stays with steady joy of its own fire.
But do not seek to take me by desire.
Oh, do not seek to thrust on me your fire!
For in the firing all my porcelain
Of flesh does crackle and shiver and break in pain,
My ivory and marble black with stain,
My veil of sensitive mystery rent in twain,
My altars sullied, I, bereft, remain
A priestess execrable, taken in vain–”

So the refrain
Sings itself over, and so the game
Re-starts itself wherein I am kept
Like a glowing brazier faintly blue of flame
So that the delicate love-adept
Can warm her hands and invite her soul,
Sprinkling incense and salt of words
And kisses pale, and sipping the toll
Of incense-smoke that rises like birds.

Yet I’ve forgotten in playing this game,
Things I have known that shall have no name;
Forgetting the place from which I came
I watch her ward away the flame,
Yet warm herself at the fire–then blame
Me that I flicker in the basket;
Me that I glow not with content
To have my substance so subtly spent;
Me that I interrupt her game.
I ought to be proud that she should ask it
Of me to be her fire-opal–.

It is well
Since I am here for so short a spell
Not to interrupt her?–Why should I
Break in by making any reply!

TWO WIVES

I

INTO the shadow-white chamber silts the white
Flux of another dawn. The wind that all night
Long has waited restless, suddenly wafts
A whirl like snow from the plum-trees and the pear,
Till petals heaped between the window-shafts
In a drift die there.

A nurse in white, at the dawning, flower-foamed
pane
Draws down the blinds, whose shadows scarcely
stain
The white rugs on the floor, nor the silent bed
That rides the room like a frozen berg, its crest
Finally ridged with the austere line of the dead
Stretched out at rest.

Less than a year the fourfold feet had pressed
The peaceful floor, when fell the sword on their rest.
Yet soon, too soon, she had him home again
With wounds between them, and suffering like a
guest
That will not go. Now suddenly going, the pain
Leaves an empty breast.

II

A tall woman, with her long white gown aflow
As she strode her limbs amongst it, once more
She hastened towards the room. Did she know
As she listened in silence outside the silent door?
Entering, she saw him in outline, raised on a pyre
Awaiting the fire.

Upraised on the bed, with feet erect as a bow,
Like the prow of a boat, his head laid back like the
stern
Of a ship that stands in a shadowy sea of snow
With frozen rigging, she saw him; she drooped like
a fern
Refolding, she slipped to the floor as a ghost-white
peony slips
When the thread clips.

Soft she lay as a shed flower fallen, nor heard
The ominous entry, nor saw the other love,
The dark, the grave-eyed mistress who thus dared
At such an hour to lay her claim, above
A stricken wife, so sunk in oblivion, bowed
With misery, no more proud.

III

The stranger’s hair was shorn like a lad’s dark poll
And pale her ivory face: her eyes would fail
In silence when she looked: for all the whole
Darkness of failure was in them, without avail.
Dark in indomitable failure, she who had lost
Now claimed the host,

She softly passed the sorrowful flower shed
In blonde and white on the floor, nor even turned
Her head aside, but straight towards the bed
Moved with slow feet, and her eyes’ flame steadily
burned.
She looked at him as he lay with banded cheek,
And she started to speak

Softly: “I knew it would come to this,” she said,
“I knew that some day, soon, I should find you thus.
So I did not fight you. You went your way instead
Of coming mine–and of the two of us
I died the first, I, in the after-life
Am now your wife.”

IV

“‘Twas I whose fingers did draw up the young
Plant of your body: to me you looked e’er sprung
The secret of the moon within your eyes!
My mouth you met before your fine red mouth
Was set to song–and never your song denies
My love, till you went south.”

“‘Twas I who placed the bloom of manhood on
Your youthful smoothness: I fleeced where fleece
was none
Your fervent limbs with flickers and tendrils of new
Knowledge; I set your heart to its stronger beat;
I put my strength upon you, and I threw
My life at your feet.”

“But I whom the years had reared to be your bride,
Who for years was sun for your shivering, shade for
your sweat,
Who for one strange year was as a bride to you–you
set me aside
With all the old, sweet things of our youth;–and
never yet
Have I ceased to grieve that I was not great enough
To defeat your baser stuff.”

V

“But you are given back again to me
Who have kept intact for you your virginity.
Who for the rest of life walk out of care,
Indifferent here of myself, since I am gone
Where you are gone, and you and I out there
Walk now as one.”

“Your widow am I, and only I. I dream
God bows his head and grants me this supreme
Pure look of your last dead face, whence now is gone
The mobility, the panther’s gambolling,
And all your being is given to me, so none
Can mock my struggling.”

“And now at last I kiss your perfect face,
Perfecting now our unfinished, first embrace.
Your young hushed look that then saw God ablaze
In every bush, is given you back, and we
Are met at length to finish our rest of days
In a unity.”

HEIMWEH

FAR-OFF the lily-statues stand white-ranked in the
garden at home.
Would God they were shattered quickly, the cattle
would tread them out in the loam.
I wish the elder trees in flower could suddenly heave,
and burst
The walls of the house, and nettles puff out from
the hearth at which I was nursed.

It stands so still in the hush composed of trees and
inviolate peace,
The home of my fathers, the place that is mine, my
fate and my old increase.
And now that the skies are falling, the world is
spouting in fountains of dirt,
I would give my soul for the homestead to fall with
me, go with me, both in one hurt.

DEBACLE

THE trees in trouble because of autumn,
And scarlet berries falling from the bush,
And all the myriad houseless seeds
Loosing hold in the wind’s insistent push

Moan softly with autumnal parturition,
Poor, obscure fruits extruded out of light
Into the world of shadow, carried down
Between the bitter knees of the after-night.

Bushed in an uncouth ardour, coiled at core
With a knot of life that only bliss can unravel,
Fall all the fruits most bitterly into earth
Bitterly into corrosion bitterly travel.

What is it internecine that is locked,
By very fierceness into a quiescence
Within the rage? We shall not know till it burst
Out of corrosion into new florescence.

Nay, but how tortured is the frightful seed
The spark intense within it, all without
Mordant corrosion gnashing and champing hard
For ruin on the naked small redoubt.

Bitter, to fold the issue, and make no sally;
To have the mystery, but not go forth;
To bear, but retaliate nothing, given to save
The spark in storms of corrosion, as seeds from
the north.

The sharper, more horrid the pressure, the harder
the heart
That saves the blue grain of eternal fire
Within its quick, committed to hold and wait
And suffer unheeding, only forbidden to expire.

NARCISSUS

WHERE the minnows trace
A glinting web quick hid in the gloom of the brook,
When I think of the place
And remember the small lad lying intent to look
Through the shadowy face
At the little fish thread-threading the watery nook–

It seems to me
The woman you are should be nixie, there is a pool
Where we ought to be.
You undine-clear and pearly, soullessly cool
And waterly
The pool for my limbs to fathom, my soul’s last
school.

Narcissus
Ventured so long ago in the deeps of reflection.
Illyssus
Broke the bounds and beyond!–Dim recollection
Of fishes
Soundlessly moving in heaven’s other direction!

Be
Undine towards the waters, moving back;
For me
A pool! Put off the soul you’ve got, oh lack
Your human self immortal; take the watery track.

AUTUMN SUNSHINE

THE sun sets out the autumn crocuses
And fills them up a pouring measure
Of death-producing wine, till treasure
Runs waste down their chalices.

All, all Persephone’s pale cups of mould
Are on the board, are over-filled;
The portion to the gods is spilled;
Now, mortals all, take hold!

The time is now, the wine-cup full and full
Of lambent heaven, a pledging-cup;
Let now all mortal men take up
The drink, and a long, strong pull.

Out of the hell-queen’s cup, the heaven’s pale wine–
Drink then, invisible heroes, drink.
Lips to the vessels, never shrink,
Throats to the heavens incline.

And take within the wine the god’s great oath
By heaven and earth and hellish stream
To break this sick and nauseous dream
We writhe and lust in, both.

Swear, in the pale wine poured from the cups of the
queen
Of hell, to wake and be free
From this nightmare we writhe in,
Break out of this foul has-been.

ON THAT DAY

ON that day
I shall put roses on roses, and cover your grave
With multitude of white roses: and since you were
brave
One bright red ray.

So people, passing under
The ash-trees of the valley-road, will raise
Their eyes and look at the grave on the hill, in
wonder,
Wondering mount, and put the flowers asunder

To see whose praise
Is blazoned here so white and so bloodily red.
Then they will say: “‘Tis long since she is dead,
Who has remembered her after many days?”

And standing there
They will consider how you went your ways
Unnoticed among them, a still queen lost in the
maze
Of this earthly affair.

A queen, they’ll say,
Has slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill.
Sleeps on unknown, unnoticed there, until
Dawns my insurgent day.

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Title: Look! We Have Come Through!

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Release Date: November 7, 2007 [eBook #23394]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH!***

E-text prepared by Lewis Jones

LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH!

by

D. H. LAWRENCE

Published by Chatto & Windus
London MCMXVII

Some of these poems have appeared in
the “English Review” and in “Poetry,”
also in the “Georgian Anthology” and
the “Imagist Anthology”

FOREWORD

THESE poems should not be considered
separately, as so many single pieces. They
are intended as an essential story, or history,
or confession, unfolding one from the other
in organic development, the whole revealing
the intrinsic experience of a man during
the crisis of manhood, when he marries
and comes into himself. The period
covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre
of a man’s life

CONTENTS

MOONRISE
ELEGY
NONENTITY
MARTYR A LA MODE
DON JUAN
THE SEA
HYMN TO PRIAPUS
BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN
FIRST MORNING
“AND OH–
THAT THE MAN I AM MIGHT CEASE TO BE–”
SHE LOOKS BACK
ON THE BALCONY
FROHNLEICHNAM
IN THE DARK
MUTILATION
HUMILIATION
A YOUNG WIFE
GREEN
RIVER ROSES
GLOIRE DE DIJON
ROSES ON THE BREAKFAST TABLE
I AM LIKE A ROSE
ROSE OF ALL THE WORLD
A YOUTH MOWING
QUITE FORSAKEN
FORSAKEN AND FORLORN
FIREFLIES IN THE CORN
A DOE AT EVENING
SONG OF A MAN WHO IS NOT LOVED
SINNERS
MISERY
SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN ITALY
WINTER DAWN
A BAD BEGINNING
WHY DOES SHE WEEP?
GIORNO DEI MORTI
ALL SOULS
LADY WIFE
BOTH SIDES OF THE MEDAL
LOGGERHEADS
DECEMBER NIGHT
NEW YEAR’S EVE
NEW YEAR’S NIGHT
VALENTINE’S NIGHT
BIRTH NIGHT
RABBIT SNARED IN THE NIGHT
PARADISE RE-ENTERED
SPRING MORNING
WEDLOCK
HISTORY
SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS COME THROUGH
ONE WOMAN TO ALL WOMEN
PEOPLE
STREET LAMPS
“SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME”
NEW HEAVEN AND EARTH
ELYSIUM
MANIFESTO
AUTUMN RAIN
FROST FLOWERS
CRAVING FOR SPRING

ARGUMENT

_After much struggling and loss in love and in
the world of man, the protagonist throws in
his lot with a woman who is already married.
Together they go into another country, she
perforce leaving her children behind. The
conflict of love and hate goes on between the
man and the woman, and between these two
and the world around them, till it reaches
some sort of conclusion, they transcend into
some condition of blessedness_

_MOONRISE_

AND who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards
us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

_ELEGY_

THE sun immense and rosy
Must have sunk and become extinct
The night you closed your eyes for ever against me.

Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings
Since then, with fritter of flowers–
Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings.

Still, you left me the nights,
The great dark glittery window,
The bubble hemming this empty existence with
lights.

Still in the vast hollow
Like a breath in a bubble spinning
Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the
bounds like a swallow!

I can look through
The film of the bubble night, to where you are.
Through the film I can almost touch you.

EASTWOOD

_NONENTITY_

THE stars that open and shut
Fall on my shallow breast
Like stars on a pool.

The soft wind, blowing cool
Laps little crest after crest
Of ripples across my breast.

And dark grass under my feet
Seems to dabble in me
Like grass in a brook.

Oh, and it is sweet
To be all these things, not to be
Any more myself.

For look,
I am weary of myself!

_MARTYR À LA MODE_

AH God, life, law, so many names you keep,
You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep
That does inform this various dream of living,
You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving
Us out as dreams, you august Sleep
Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all
time,

The constellations, your great heart, the sun
Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;
Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep
Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams
We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said
I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon

For when at night, from out the full surcharge
Of a day’s experience, sleep does slowly draw
The harvest, the spent action to itself;
Leaves me unburdened to begin again;
At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,
Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands
Complain of what the day has had them do?

Never let it be said I was poltroon
At this my task of living, this my dream,
This me which rises from the dark of sleep
In white flesh robed to drape another dream,
As lightning comes all white and trembling
From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about
One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,
In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,
And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.

If so the Vast, the God, the Sleep that still grows
richer
Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep
Must in my transiency pass all through pain,
Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude
Dull meteorite flash only into light
When tearing through the anguish of this life,
Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn
Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread God
To alter my one speck of doom, when round me
burns
The whole great conflagration of all life,
Lapped like a body close upon a sleep,
Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep
Within the immense and toilsome life-time,
heaved
With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep?

Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh
Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul
That slowly labours in a vast travail,
To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow
That carries moons along, and spare the stress
That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?

When pain and all
And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep
Rising to dream in me a small keen dream
Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent–

CROYDON

_DON JUAN_

IT is Isis the mystery
Must be in love with me.

Here this round ball of earth
Where all the mountains sit
Solemn in groups,
And the bright rivers flit
Round them for girth.

Here the trees and troops
Darken the shining grass,
And many people pass
Plundered from heaven,
Many bright people pass,
Plunder from heaven.

What of the mistresses
What the beloved seven?
–They were but witnesses,
I was just driven.

Where is there peace for me?
Isis the mystery
Must be in love with me.

_THE SEA_

You, you are all unloving, loveless, you;
Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods,
You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even,
Threshing your own passions with no woman for
the threshing-floor,
Finishing your dreams for your own sake only,
Playing your great game around the world, alone,
Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to
cherish,
No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter.

Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase
Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed
young;
You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent,
cold and callous,
Naked of worship, of love or of adornment,
Scorning the panacea even of labour,
Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness
Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life’s
goings,
Sea, only you are free, sophisticated.

You who toil not, you who spin not,
Surely but for you and your like, toiling
Were not worth while, nor spinning worth the
effort!

You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift
Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out;
You who roll the stars like jewels in your palm,
So that they seem to utter themselves aloud;
You who steep from out the days their colour,
Reveal the universal tint that dyes
Their web; who shadow the sun’s great gestures
and expressions
So that he seems a stranger in his passing;
Who voice the dumb night fittingly;
Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to
death with your shadowing.

BOURNEMOUTH

_HYMN TO PRIAPUS_

MY love lies underground
With her face upturned to mine,
And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss
That ended her life and mine.

I dance at the Christmas party
Under the mistletoe
Along with a ripe, slack country lass
Jostling to and fro.

The big, soft country lass,
Like a loose sheaf of wheat
Slipped through my arms on the threshing floor
At my feet.

The warm, soft country lass,
Sweet as an armful of wheat
At threshing-time broken, was broken
For me, and ah, it was sweet!

Now I am going home
Fulfilled and alone,
I see the great Orion standing
Looking down.

He’s the star of my first beloved
Love-making.
The witness of all that bitter-sweet
Heart-aching.

Now he sees this as well,
This last commission.
Nor do I get any look
Of admonition.

He can add the reckoning up
I suppose, between now and then,
Having walked himself in the thorny, difficult
Ways of men.

He has done as I have done
No doubt:
Remembered and forgotten
Turn and about.

My love lies underground
With her face upturned to mine,
And her mouth unclosed in the last long kiss
That ended her life and mine.

She fares in the stark immortal
Fields of death;
I in these goodly, frozen
Fields beneath.

Something in me remembers
And will not forget.
The stream of my life in the darkness
Deathward set!

And something in me has forgotten,
Has ceased to care.
Desire comes up, and contentment
Is debonair.

I, who am worn and careful,
How much do I care?
How is it I grin then, and chuckle
Over despair?

Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient
Grief makes us free
To be faithless and faithful together
As we have to be.

_BALLAD OF A WILFUL WOMAN_

FIRST PART

UPON her plodding palfrey
With a heavy child at her breast
And Joseph holding the bridle
They mount to the last hill-crest.

Dissatisfied and weary
She sees the blade of the sea
Dividing earth and heaven
In a glitter of ecstasy.

Sudden a dark-faced stranger
With his back to the sun, holds out
His arms; so she lights from her palfrey
And turns her round about.

She has given the child to Joseph,
Gone down to the flashing shore;
And Joseph, shading his eyes with his hand,
Stands watching evermore.

SECOND PART

THE sea in the stones is singing,
A woman binds her hair
With yellow, frail sea-poppies,
That shine as her fingers stir.

While a naked man comes swiftly
Like a spurt of white foam rent
From the crest of a falling breaker,
Over the poppies sent.

He puts his surf-wet fingers
Over her startled eyes,
And asks if she sees the land, the land,
The land of her glad surmise.

THIRD PART

AGAIN in her blue, blue mantle
Riding at Joseph’s side,
She says, “I went to Cythera,
And woe betide!”

Her heart is a swinging cradle
That holds the perfect child,
But the shade on her forehead ill becomes
A mother mild.

So on with the slow, mean journey
In the pride of humility;
Till they halt at a cliff on the edge of the land
Over a sullen sea.

While Joseph pitches the sleep-tent
She goes far down to the shore
To where a man in a heaving boat
Waits with a lifted oar.

FOURTH PART

THEY dwelt in a huge, hoarse sea-cave
And looked far down the dark
Where an archway torn and glittering
Shone like a huge sea-spark.

He said: “Do you see the spirits
Crowding the bright doorway?”
He said: “Do you hear them whispering?”
He said: “Do you catch what they say?”

FIFTH PART

THEN Joseph, grey with waiting,
His dark eyes full of pain,
Heard: “I have been to Patmos;
Give me the child again.”

Now on with the hopeless journey
Looking bleak ahead she rode,
And the man and the child of no more account
Than the earth the palfrey trode.

Till a beggar spoke to Joseph,
But looked into her eyes;
So she turned, and said to her husband:
“I give, whoever denies.”

SIXTH PART

SHE gave on the open heather
Beneath bare judgment stars,
And she dreamed of her children and Joseph,
And the isles, and her men, and her scars.

And she woke to distil the berries
The beggar had gathered at night,
Whence he drew the curious liquors
He held in delight.

He gave her no crown of flowers,
No child and no palfrey slow,
Only led her through harsh, hard places
Where strange winds blow.

She follows his restless wanderings
Till night when, by the fire’s red stain,
Her face is bent in the bitter steam
That comes from the flowers of pain.

Then merciless and ruthless
He takes the flame-wild drops
To the town, and tries to sell them
With the market-crops.

So she follows the cruel journey
That ends not anywhere,
And dreams, as she stirs the mixing-pot,
She is brewing hope from despair.

TRIER

_FIRST MORNING_

THE night was a failure
but why not–?

In the darkness
with the pale dawn seething at the window
through the black frame
I could not be free,
not free myself from the past, those others–
and our love was a confusion,
there was a horror,
you recoiled away from me.

Now, in the morning
As we sit in the sunshine on the seat by the little
shrine,
And look at the mountain-walls,
Walls of blue shadow,
And see so near at our feet in the meadow
Myriads of dandelion pappus
Bubbles ravelled in the dark green grass
Held still beneath the sunshine–

It is enough, you are near–
The mountains are balanced,
The dandelion seeds stay half-submerged in the
grass;
You and I together
We hold them proud and blithe
On our love.
They stand upright on our love,
Everything starts from us,
We are the source.

BEUERBERG

_”AND OH–
THAT THE MAN I AM
MIGHT CEASE TO BE–”_

No, now I wish the sunshine would stop,
and the white shining houses, and the gay red
flowers on the balconies
and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed
out
between two valves of darkness;
the darkness falling, the darkness rising, with
muffled sound
obliterating everything.

I wish that whatever props up the walls of light
would fall, and darkness would come hurling
heavily down,
and it would be thick black dark for ever.
Not sleep, which is grey with dreams,
nor death, which quivers with birth,
but heavy, sealing darkness, silence, all immovable.

What is sleep?
It goes over me, like a shadow over a hill,
but it does not alter me, nor help me.
And death would ache still, I am sure;
it would be lambent, uneasy.
I wish it would be completely dark everywhere,
inside me, and out, heavily dark
utterly.

WOLFRATSHAUSEN

_SHE LOOKS BACK_

THE pale bubbles
The lovely pale-gold bubbles of the globe-flowers
In a great swarm clotted and single
Went rolling in the dusk towards the river
To where the sunset hung its wan gold cloths;
And you stood alone, watching them go,
And that mother-love like a demon drew you
from me
Towards England.

Along the road, after nightfall,
Along the glamorous birch-tree avenue
Across the river levels
We went in silence, and you staring to England.

So then there shone within the jungle darkness
Of the long, lush under-grass, a glow-worm’s
sudden
Green lantern of pure light, a little, intense, fusing
triumph,
White and haloed with fire-mist, down in the
tangled darkness.

Then you put your hand in mine again, kissed me,
and we struggled to be together.
And the little electric flashes went with us, in the
grass,
Tiny lighthouses, little souls of lanterns, courage
burst into an explosion of green light
Everywhere down in the grass, where darkness was
ravelled in darkness.

Still, the kiss was a touch of bitterness on my mouth
Like salt, burning in.
And my hand withered in your hand.
For you were straining with a wild heart, back,
back again,
Back to those children you had left behind, to all
the æons of the past.
And I was here in the under-dusk of the Isar.

At home, we leaned in the bedroom window
Of the old Bavarian Gasthaus,
And the frogs in the pool beyond thrilled with
exuberance,
Like a boiling pot the pond crackled with happiness,
Like a rattle a child spins round for joy, the night
rattled
With the extravagance of the frogs,
And you leaned your cheek on mine,
And I suffered it, wanting to sympathise.

At last, as you stood, your white gown falling from
your breasts,
You looked into my eyes, and said: “But this is
joy!”
I acquiesced again.
But the shadow of lying was in your eyes,
The mother in you, fierce as a murderess, glaring
to England,
Yearning towards England, towards your young
children,
Insisting upon your motherhood, devastating.

Still, the joy was there also, you spoke truly,
The joy was not to be driven off so easily;
Stronger than fear or destructive mother-love, it
stood flickering;
The frogs helped also, whirring away.
Yet how I have learned to know that look in your
eyes
Of horrid sorrow!
How I know that glitter of salt, dry, sterile,
sharp, corrosive salt!
Not tears, but white sharp brine
Making hideous your eyes.

I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my
chest, my belly,
Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through
my defenceless nakedness.
I have been thrust into white, sharp crystals,
Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated.

Ah, Lot’s Wife, Lot’s Wife!
The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column
of salt, like a waterspout
That has enveloped me!
Snow of salt, white, burning, eating salt
In which I have writhed.

Lot’s Wife!–Not Wife, but Mother.
I have learned to curse your motherhood,
You pillar of salt accursed.
I have cursed motherhood because of you,
Accursed, base motherhood!

I long for the time to come, when the curse against
you will have gone out of my heart.
But it has not gone yet.
Nevertheless, once, the frogs, the globe-flowers of
Bavaria, the glow-worms
Gave me sweet lymph against the salt-burns,
There is a kindness in the very rain.

Therefore, even in the hour of my deepest, pas-
sionate malediction
I try to remember it is also well between us.
That you are with me in the end.
That you never look quite back; nine-tenths, ah,
more
You look round over your shoulder;
But never quite back.

Nevertheless the curse against you is still in my
heart
Like a deep, deep burn.
The curse against all mothers.
All mothers who fortify themselves in motherhood,
devastating the vision.
They are accursed, and the curse is not taken off
It burns within me like a deep, old burn,
And oh, I wish it was better.

BEUERBERG

_ON THE BALCONY_

IN front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost
ribbon of rainbow;
And between us and it, the thunder;
And down below in the green wheat, the labourers
Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.

You are near to me, and your naked feet in their
sandals,
And through the scent of the balcony’s naked
timber
I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the
limber
Lightning falls from heaven.

Adown the pale-green glacier river floats
A dark boat through the gloom–and whither?
The thunder roars. But still we have each other!
The naked lightnings in the heavens dither
And disappear–what have we but each other?
The boat has gone.

ICKING

_FROHNLEICHNAM_

You have come your way, I have come my way;
You have stepped across your people, carelessly,
hurting them all;
I have stepped across my people, and hurt them
in spite of my care.

But steadily, surely, and notwithstanding
We have come our ways and met at last
Here in this upper room.

Here the balcony
Overhangs the street where the bullock-wagons
slowly
Go by with their loads of green and silver birch-
trees
For the feast of Corpus Christi.

Here from the balcony
We look over the growing wheat, where the jade-
green river
Goes between the pine-woods,
Over and beyond to where the many mountains
Stand in their blueness, flashing with snow and the
morning.

I have done; a quiver of exultation goes through
me, like the first
Breeze of the morning through a narrow white
birch.
You glow at last like the mountain tops when they
catch
Day and make magic in heaven.

At last I can throw away world without end, and
meet you
Unsheathed and naked and narrow and white;
At last you can throw immortality off, and I see you
Glistening with all the moment and all your
beauty.

Shameless and callous I love you;
Out of indifference I love you;
Out of mockery we dance together,
Out of the sunshine into the shadow,
Passing across the shadow into the sunlight,
Out of sunlight to shadow.

As we dance
Your eyes take all of me in as a communication;
As we dance
I see you, ah, in full!
Only to dance together in triumph of being together
Two white ones, sharp, vindicated,
Shining and touching,
Is heaven of our own, sheer with repudiation.

_IN THE DARK_

A BLOTCH of pallor stirs beneath the high
Square picture-dusk, the window of dark sky.

A sound subdued in the darkness: tears!
As if a bird in difficulty up the valley steers.

“Why have you gone to the window? Why don’t
you sleep?
How you have wakened me! But why, why do
you weep?”

_”I am afraid of you, I am afraid, afraid!
There is something in you destroys me–!”_

“You have dreamed and are not awake, come here
to me.”
_”No, I have wakened. It is you, you are cruel to
me!”_

“My dear!”–_”Yes, yes, you are cruel to me. You
cast
A shadow over my breasts that will kill me at last.”_

“Come!”–_”No, I’m a thing of life. I give
You armfuls of sunshine, and you won’t let me live.”_

“Nay, I’m too sleepy!”–_”Ah, you are horrible;
You stand before me like ghosts, like a darkness
upright.”_

“I!”–_”How can you treat me so, and love me?
My feet have no hold, you take the sky from above me.”_

“My dear, the night is soft and eternal, no doubt
You love it!”–_”It is dark, it kills me, I am put out.”_

“My dear, when you cross the street in the sun-
shine, surely
Your own small night goes with you. Why treat
it so poorly?”

_”No, no, I dance in the sun, I’m a thing of life–”_
“Even then it is dark behind you. Turn round,
my wife.”

_”No, how cruel you are, you people the sunshine
With shadows!”_–”With yours I people the
sunshine, yours and mine–”

“In the darkness we all are gone, we are gone
with the trees
And the restless river;–we are lost and gone
with all these.”

_”But I am myself, I have nothing to do with these.”_
“Come back to bed, let us sleep on our mys-
teries.

“Come to me here, and lay your body by mine,
And I will be all the shadow, you the shine.

“Come, you are cold, the night has frightened you.
Hark at the river! It pants as it hurries through

“The pine-woods. How I love them so, in their
mystery of not-to-be.”
_”–But let me be myself, not a river or a tree.”_

“Kiss me! How cold you are!–Your little breasts
Are bubbles of ice. Kiss me!–You know how
it rests

“One to be quenched, to be given up, to be gone
in the dark;
To be blown out, to let night dowse the spark.

“But never mind, my love. Nothing matters,
save sleep;
Save you, and me, and sleep; all the rest will
keep.”

MUTILATION

A THICK mist-sheet lies over the broken wheat.
I walk up to my neck in mist, holding my mouth up.
Across there, a discoloured moon burns itself out.

I hold the night in horror;
I dare not turn round.

To-night I have left her alone.
They would have it I have left her for ever.

Oh my God, how it aches
Where she is cut off from me!

Perhaps she will go back to England.
Perhaps she will go back,
Perhaps we are parted for ever.

If I go on walking through the whole breadth of
Germany
I come to the North Sea, or the Baltic.

Over there is Russia–Austria, Switzerland, France,
in a circle!
I here in the undermist on the Bavarian road.

It aches in me.
What is England or France, far off,
But a name she might take?
I don’t mind this continent stretching, the sea far
away;
It aches in me for her
Like the agony of limbs cut off and aching;
Not even longing,
It is only agony.

A cripple!
Oh God, to be mutilated!
To be a cripple!

And if I never see her again?

I think, if they told me so
I could convulse the heavens with my horror.
I think I could alter the frame of things in my
agony.
I think I could break the System with my heart.
I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break.

She too suffers.
But who could compel her, if she chose me against
them all?
She has not chosen me finally, she suspends her
choice.
Night folk, Tuatha De Danaan, dark Gods, govern
her sleep,
Magnificent ghosts of the darkness, carry off her
decision in sleep,
Leave her no choice, make her lapse me-ward,
make her,
Oh Gods of the living Darkness, powers of Night.

WOLFRATSHAUSEN

_HUMILIATION_

I HAVE been so innerly proud, and so long alone,
Do not leave me, or I shall break.
Do not leave me.

What should I do if you were gone again
So soon?
What should I look for?
Where should I go?
What should I be, I myself,
“I”?
What would it mean, this
I?

Do not leave me.

What should I think of death?
If I died, it would not be you:
It would be simply the same
Lack of you.
The same want, life or death,
Unfulfilment,
The same insanity of space
You not there for me.

Think, I daren’t die
For fear of the lack in death.
And I daren’t live.

Unless there were a morphine or a drug.

I would bear the pain.
But always, strong, unremitting
It would make me not me.
The thing with my body that would go on
living
Would not be me.
Neither life nor death could help.

Think, I couldn’t look towards death
Nor towards the future:
Only not look.
Only myself
Stand still and bind and blind myself.

God, that I have no choice!
That my own fulfilment is up against me
Timelessly!
The burden of self-accomplishment!
The charge of fulfilment!
And God, that she is _necessary!_
_Necessary,_ and I have no choice!

Do not leave me.

_A YOUNG WIFE_

THE pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.

I walk in fear of you.
The darkness starts up where
You stand, and the night comes through
Your eyes when you look at me.

Ah never before did I see
The shadows that live in the sun!

Now every tall glad tree
Turns round its back to the sun
And looks down on the ground, to see
The shadow it used to shun.

At the foot of each glowing thing
A night lies looking up.

Oh, and I want to sing
And dance, but I can’t lift up
My eyes from the shadows: dark
They lie spilt round the cup.

What is it?–Hark
The faint fine seethe in the air!

Like the seething sound in a shell!
It is death still seething where
The wild-flower shakes its bell
And the sky lark twinkles blue–

The pain of loving you
Is almost more than I can bear.

_GREEN_

THE dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.

ICKING

_RIVER ROSES_

BY the Isar, in the twilight
We were wandering and singing,
By the Isar, in the evening
We climbed the huntsman’s ladder and sat
swinging
In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes,
While river met with river, and the ringing
Of their pale-green glacier water filled the evening.

By the Isar, in the twilight
We found the dark wild roses
Hanging red at the river; and simmering
Frogs were singing, and over the river closes
Was savour of ice and of roses; and glimmering
Fear was abroad. We whispered: “No one
knows us.
Let it be as the snake disposes
Here in this simmering marsh.”

KLOSTER SCHAEFTLARN

_GLOIRE DE DIJON_

WHEN she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.

ICKING

_ROSES ON THE BREAKFAST
TABLE_

JUST a few of the roses we gathered from the Isar
Are fallen, and their mauve-red petals on the
cloth
Float like boats on a river, while other
Roses are ready to fall, reluctant and loth.

She laughs at me across the table, saying
I am beautiful. I look at the rumpled young roses
And suddenly realise, in them as in me,
How lovely the present is that this day discloses.

_I AM LIKE A ROSE_

I AM myself at last; now I achieve
My very self. I, with the wonder mellow,
Full of fine warmth, I issue forth in clear
And single me, perfected from my fellow.

Here I am all myself. No rose-bush heaving
Its limpid sap to culmination, has brought
Itself more sheer and naked out of the green
In stark-clear roses, than I to myself am brought.

_ROSE OF ALL THE WORLD_

I AM here myself; as though this heave of effort
At starting other life, fulfilled my own:
Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a core
Of seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown

By all the blood of the rose-bush into being–
Strange, that the urgent will in me, to set
My mouth on hers in kisses, and so softly
To bring together two strange sparks, beget

Another life from our lives, so should send
The innermost fire of my own dim soul out-
spinning
And whirling in blossom of flame and being upon
me!
That my completion of manhood should be the
beginning

Another life from mine! For so it looks.
The seed is purpose, blossom accident.
The seed is all in all, the blossom lent
To crown the triumph of this new descent.

Is that it, woman? Does it strike you so?
The Great Breath blowing a tiny seed of fire
Fans out your petals for excess of flame,
Till all your being smokes with fine desire?

Or are we kindled, you and I, to be
One rose of wonderment upon the tree
Of perfect life, and is our possible seed
But the residuum of the ecstasy?

How will you have it?–the rose is all in all,
Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall?
The sharp begetting, or the child begot?
Our consummation matters, or does it not?

To me it seems the seed is just left over
From the red rose-flowers’ fiery transience;
Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the
bush
Which burnt just now with marvellous immanence.

Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a rose
Of roses unchidden and purposeless; a rose
For rosiness only, without an ulterior motive;
For me it is more than enough if the flower un-
close.

_A YOUTH MOWING_

THERE are four men mowing down by the Isar;
I can hear the swish of the scythe-strokes, four
Sharp breaths taken: yea, and I
Am sorry for what’s in store.

The first man out of the four that’s mowing
Is mine, I claim him once and for all;
Though it’s sorry I am, on his young feet, knowing
None of the trouble he’s led to stall.

As he sees me bringing the dinner, he lifts
His head as proud as a deer that looks
Shoulder-deep out of the corn; and wipes
His scythe-blade bright, unhooks

The scythe-stone and over the stubble to me.
Lad, thou hast gotten a child in me,
Laddie, a man thou’lt ha’e to be,
Yea, though I’m sorry for thee.

_QUITE FORSAKEN_

WHAT pain, to wake and miss you!
To wake with a tightened heart,
And mouth reaching forward to kiss you!

This then at last is the dawn, and the bell
Clanging at the farm! Such bewilderment
Comes with the sight of the room, I cannot tell.

It is raining. Down the half-obscure road
Four labourers pass with their scythes
Dejectedly;–a huntsman goes by with his load:

A gun, and a bunched-up deer, its four little feet
Clustered dead.–And this is the dawn
For which I wanted the night to retreat!

_FORSAKEN AND FORLORN_

THE house is silent, it is late at night, I am alone.
From the balcony
I can hear the Isar moan,
Can see the white
Rift of the river eerily, between the pines, under
a sky of stone.

Some fireflies drift through the middle air
Tinily.
I wonder where
Ends this darkness that annihilates me.

_FIREFLIES IN THE CORN_

_She speaks._
Look at the little darlings in the corn!
The rye is taller than you, who think yourself
So high and mighty: look how the heads are
borne
Dark and proud on the sky, like a number of
knights
Passing with spears and pennants and manly scorn.

Knights indeed!–much knight I know will ride
With his head held high-serene against the sky!
Limping and following rather at my side
Moaning for me to love him!–Oh darling rye
How I adore you for your simple pride!

And the dear, dear fireflies wafting in between
And over the swaying corn-stalks, just above
All the dark-feathered helmets, like little green
Stars come low and wandering here for love
Of these dark knights, shedding their delicate
sheen!

I thank you I do, you happy creatures, you dears
Riding the air, and carrying all the time
Your little lanterns behind you! Ah, it cheers
My soul to see you settling and trying to
climb
The corn-stalks, tipping with fire the spears.

All over the dim corn’s motion, against the blue
Dark sky of night, a wandering glitter, a
swarm
Of questing brilliant souls going out with their
true
Proud knights to battle! Sweet, how I warm
My poor, my perished soul with the sight of
you!

_A DOE AT EVENING_

As I went through the marshes
a doe sprang out of the corn
and flashed up the hill-side
leaving her fawn.

On the sky-line
she moved round to watch,
she pricked a fine black blotch
on the sky.

I looked at her
and felt her watching;
I became a strange being.
Still, I had my right to be there with her,

Her nimble shadow trotting
along the sky-line, she
put back her fine, level-balanced head.
And I knew her.

Ah yes, being male, is not my head hard-balanced,
antlered?
Are not my haunches light?
Has she not fled on the same wind with me?
Does not my fear cover her fear?

IRSCHENHAUSEN

_SONG OF A MAN WHO IS
NOT LOVED_

THE space of the world is immense, before me and
around me;
If I turn quickly, I am terrified, feeling space
surround me;
Like a man in a boat on very clear, deep water,
space frightens and confounds me.

I see myself isolated in the universe, and wonder
What effect I can have. My hands wave under
The heavens like specks of dust that are floating
asunder.

I hold myself up, and feel a big wind blowing
Me like a gadfly into the dusk, without my know-
ing
Whither or why or even how I am going.

So much there is outside me, so infinitely
Small am I, what matter if minutely
I beat my way, to be lost immediately?

How shall I flatter myself that I can do
Anything in such immensity? I am too
Little to count in the wind that drifts me through.

GLASHÜTTE

_SINNERS_

THE big mountains sit still in the afternoon light
Shadows in their lap;
The bees roll round in the wild-thyme with de-
light.

We sitting here among the cranberries
So still in the gap
Of rock, distilling our memories

Are sinners! Strange! The bee that blunders
Against me goes off with a laugh.
A squirrel cocks his head on the fence, and
wonders

What about sin?–For, it seems
The mountains have
No shadow of us on their snowy forehead of
dreams

As they ought to have. They rise above us
Dreaming
For ever. One even might think that they love us.

_Little red cranberries cheek to cheek,
Two great dragon-flies wrestling;
You, with your forehead nestling
Against me, and bright peak shining to peak–_

There’s a love-song for you!–Ah, if only
There were no teeming
Swarms of mankind in the world, and we were
less lonely!

MAYRHOFEN

_MISERY_

OUT of this oubliette between the mountains
five valleys go, five passes like gates;
three of them black in shadow, two of them bright
with distant sunshine;
and sunshine fills one high valley bed,
green grass shining, and little white houses
like quartz crystals,
little, but distinct a way off.

Why don’t I go?
Why do I crawl about this pot, this oubliette,
stupidly?
Why don’t I go?

But where?
If I come to a pine-wood, I can’t say
Now I am arrived!
What are so many straight trees to me!

STERZING

_SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN
ITALY_

THE man and the maid go side by side
With an interval of space between;
And his hands are awkward and want to hide,
She braves it out since she must be seen.

When some one passes he drops his head
Shading his face in his black felt hat,
While the hard girl hardens; nothing is said,
There is nothing to wonder or cavil at.

Alone on the open road again
With the mountain snows across the lake
Flushing the afternoon, they are uncomfortable,
The loneliness daunts them, their stiff throats
ache.

And he sighs with relief when she parts from him;
Her proud head held in its black silk scarf
Gone under the archway, home, he can join
The men that lounge in a group on the wharf.

His evening is a flame of wine
Among the eager, cordial men.
And she with her women hot and hard
Moves at her ease again.

_She is marked, she is singled out
For the fire:
The brand is upon him, look–you,
Of desire.

They are chosen, ah, they are fated
For the fight!
Champion her, all you women! Men, menfolk
Hold him your light!

Nourish her, train her, harden her
Women all!
Fold him, be good to him, cherish him
Men, ere he fall.

Women, another champion!
This, men, is yours!
Wreathe and enlap and anoint them
Behind separate doors._

GARGNANO

_WINTER DAWN_

GREEN star Sirius
Dribbling over the lake;
The stars have gone so far on their road,
Yet we’re awake!

Without a sound
The new young year comes in
And is half-way over the lake.
We must begin

Again. This love so full
Of hate has hurt us so,
We lie side by side
Moored–but no,

Let me get up
And wash quite clean
Of this hate.–
So green

The great star goes!
I am washed quite clean,
Quite clean of it all.
But e’en

So cold, so cold and clean
Now the hate is gone!
It is all no good,
I am chilled to the bone

Now the hate is gone;
There is nothing left;
I am pure like bone,
Of all feeling bereft.

_A BAD BEGINNING_

THE yellow sun steps over the mountain-top
And falters a few short steps across the lake–
Are you awake?

See, glittering on the milk-blue, morning lake
They are laying the golden racing-track of the
sun;
The day has begun.

The sun is in my eyes, I must get up.
I want to go, there’s a gold road blazes before
My breast–which is so sore.

What?–your throat is bruised, bruised with my
kisses?
Ah, but if I am cruel what then are you?
I am bruised right through.

What if I love you!–This misery
Of your dissatisfaction and misprision
Stupefies me.

Ah yes, your open arms! Ah yes, ah yes,
You would take me to your breast!–But no,
You should come to mine,
It were better so.

Here I am–get up and come to me!
Not as a visitor either, nor a sweet
And winsome child of innocence; nor
As an insolent mistress telling my pulse’s beat.

Come to me like a woman coming home
To the man who is her husband, all the rest
Subordinate to this, that he and she
Are joined together for ever, as is best.

Behind me on the lake I hear the steamer drum-
ming
From Austria. There lies the world, and here
Am I. Which way are you coming?

_WHY DOES SHE WEEP?_

HUSH then
why do you cry?
It’s you and me
the same as before.

If you hear a rustle
it’s only a rabbit
gone back to his hole
in a bustle.

If something stirs in the branches
overhead, it will be a squirrel moving
uneasily, disturbed by the stress
of our loving.

Why should you cry then?
Are you afraid of God
in the dark?

I’m not afraid of God.
Let him come forth.
If he is hiding in the cover
let him come forth.

Now in the cool of the day
it is we who walk in the trees
and call to God “Where art thou?”
And it is he who hides.

Why do you cry?
My heart is bitter.
Let God come forth to justify
himself now.

Why do you cry?
Is it Wehmut, ist dir weh?
Weep then, yea
for the abomination of our old righteousness,

We have done wrong
many times;
but this time we begin to do right.

Weep then, weep
for the abomination of our past righteousness.
God will keep
hidden, he won’t come forth.

_GIORNO DEI MORTI_

ALONG the avenue of cypresses
All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices
Of linen go the chanting choristers,
The priests in gold and black, the villagers. . . .

And all along the path to the cemetery
The round dark heads of men crowd silently,
And black-scarved faces of women-folk, wistfully
Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery.

And at the foot of a grave a father stands
With sunken head, and forgotten, folded hands;
And at the foot of a grave a mother kneels
With pale shut face, nor either hears nor feels

The coming of the chanting choristers
Between the avenue of cypresses,
The silence of the many villagers,
The candle-flames beside the surplices.

_ALL SOULS_

THEY are chanting now the service of All the Dead
And the village folk outside in the burying ground
Listen–except those who strive with their dead,
Reaching out in anguish, yet unable quite to
touch them:
Those villagers isolated at the grave
Where the candles burn in the daylight, and the
painted wreaths
Are propped on end, there, where the mystery
starts.

The naked candles burn on every grave.
On your grave, in England, the weeds grow.

But I am your naked candle burning,
And that is not your grave, in England,
The world is your grave.
And my naked body standing on your grave
Upright towards heaven is burning off to you
Its flame of life, now and always, till the end.

It is my offering to you; every day is All Souls’
Day.

I forget you, have forgotten you.
I am busy only at my burning,
I am busy only at my life.
But my feet are on your grave, planted.
And when I lift my face, it is a flame that goes up
To the other world, where you are now.
But I am not concerned with you.
I have forgotten you.

I am a naked candle burning on your grave.

_LADY WIFE_

AH yes, I know you well, a sojourner
At the hearth;
I know right well the marriage ring you wear,
And what it’s worth.

The angels came to Abraham, and they stayed
In his house awhile;
So you to mine, I imagine; yes, happily
Condescend to be vile.

I see you all the time, you bird-blithe, lovely
Angel in disguise.
I see right well how I ought to be grateful,
Smitten with reverent surprise.

Listen, I have no use
For so rare a visit;
Mine is a common devil’s
Requisite.

Rise up and go, I have no use for you
And your blithe, glad mien.
No angels here, for me no goddesses,
Nor any Queen.

Put ashes on your head, put sackcloth on
And learn to serve.
You have fed me with your sweetness, now I am sick,
As I deserve.

Queens, ladies, angels, women rare,
I have had enough.
Put sackcloth on, be crowned with powdery ash,
Be common stuff.

And serve now woman, serve, as a woman should,
Implicitly.
Since I must serve and struggle with the imminent
Mystery.

Serve then, I tell you, add your strength to mine
Take on this doom.
What are you by yourself, do you think, and what
The mere fruit of your womb?

What is the fruit of your womb then, you mother,
you queen,
When it falls to the ground?
Is it more than the apples of Sodom you scorn so,
the men
Who abound?

Bring forth the sons of your womb then, and put
them
Into the fire
Of Sodom that covers the earth; bring them forth
From the womb of your precious desire.

You woman most holy, you mother, you being
beyond
Question or diminution,
Add yourself up, and your seed, to the nought
Of your last solution.

_BOTH SIDES OF THE MEDAL_

AND because you love me
think you you do not hate me?
Ha, since you love me
to ecstasy
it follows you hate me to ecstasy.

Because when you hear me
go down the road outside the house
you must come to the window to watch me go,
do you think it is pure worship?

Because, when I sit in the room,
here, in my own house,
and you want to enlarge yourself with this friend of
mine,
such a friend as he is,
yet you cannot get beyond your awareness of me
you are held back by my being in the same world
with you,
do you think it is bliss alone?
sheer harmony?

No doubt if I were dead, you must
reach into death after me,
but would not your hate reach even more madly
than your love?
your impassioned, unfinished hate?

Since you have a passion for me,
as I for you,
does not that passion stand in your way like a
Balaam’s ass?
and am I not Balaam’s ass
golden-mouthed occasionally?
But mostly, do you not detest my bray?

Since you are confined in the orbit of me
do you not loathe the confinement?
Is not even the beauty and peace of an orbit
an intolerable prison to you,
as it is to everybody?

But we will learn to submit
each of us to the balanced, eternal orbit
wherein we circle on our fate
in strange conjunction.

What is chaos, my love?
It is not freedom.
A disarray of falling stars coming to nought.

_LOGGERHEADS_

PLEASE yourself how you have it.
Take my words, and fling
Them down on the counter roundly;
See if they ring.

Sift my looks and expressions,
And see what proportion there is
Of sand in my doubtful sugar
Of verities.

Have a real stock-taking
Of my manly breast;
Find out if I’m sound or bankrupt,
Or a poor thing at best.

For I am quite indifferent
To your dubious state,
As to whether you’ve found a fortune
In me, or a flea-bitten fate.

Make a good investigation
Of all that is there,
And then, if it’s worth it, be grateful–
If not then despair.

If despair is our portion
Then let us despair.
Let us make for the weeping willow.
I don’t care.

_DECEMBER NIGHT_

TAKE off your cloak and your hat
And your shoes, and draw up at my hearth
Where never woman sat.

I have made the fire up bright;
Let us leave the rest in the dark
And sit by firelight.

The wine is warm in the hearth;
The flickers come and go.
I will warm your feet with kisses
Until they glow.

_NEW YEAR’S EVE_

THERE are only two things now,
The great black night scooped out
And this fire-glow.

This fire-glow, the core,
And we the two ripe pips
That are held in store.

Listen, the darkness rings
As it circulates round our fire.
Take off your things.

Your shoulders, your bruised throat
Your breasts, your nakedness!
This fiery coat!

As the darkness flickers and dips,
As the firelight falls and leaps
From your feet to your lips!

_NEW YEAR’S NIGHT_

Now you are mine, to-night at last I say it;
You’re a dove I have bought for sacrifice,
And to-night I slay it.

Here in my arms my naked sacrifice!
Death, do you hear, in my arms I am bringing
My offering, bought at great price.

She’s a silvery dove worth more than all I’ve got.
Now I offer her up to the ancient, inexorable God,
Who knows me not.

Look, she’s a wonderful dove, without blemish or
spot!
I sacrifice all in her, my last of the world,
Pride, strength, all the lot.

All, all on the altar! And death swooping down
Like a falcon. ‘Tis God has taken the victim;
I have won my renown.

_VALENTINE’S NIGHT_

You shadow and flame,
You interchange,
You death in the game!

Now I gather you up,
Now I put you back
Like a poppy in its cup.

And so, you are a maid
Again, my darling, but new,
Unafraid.

My love, my blossom, a child
Almost! The flower in the bud
Again, undefiled.

And yet, a woman, knowing
All, good, evil, both
In one blossom blowing.

_BIRTH NIGHT_

THIS fireglow is a red womb
In the night, where you’re folded up
On your doom.

And the ugly, brutal years
Are dissolving out of you,
And the stagnant tears.

I the great vein that leads
From the night to the source of you,
Which the sweet blood feeds.

New phase in the germ of you;
New sunny streams of blood
Washing you through.

You are born again of me.
I, Adam, from the veins of me
The Eve that is to be.

What has been long ago
Grows dimmer, we both forget,
We no longer know.

You are lovely, your face is soft
Like a flower in bud
On a mountain croft.

This is Noël for me.
To-night is a woman born
Of the man in me.

_RABBIT SNARED IN THE NIGHT_

WHY do you spurt and sprottle
like that, bunny?
Why should I want to throttle
you, bunny?

Yes, bunch yourself between
my knees and lie still.
Lie on me with a hot, plumb, live weight,
heavy as a stone, passive,
yet hot, waiting.

What are you waiting for?
What are you waiting for?
What is the hot, plumb weight of your desire on
me?
You have a hot, unthinkable desire of me, bunny.

What is that spark
glittering at me on the unutterable darkness
of your eye, bunny?
The finest splinter of a spark
that you throw off, straight on the tinder of my
nerves!

It sets up a strange fire,
a soft, most unwarrantable burning
a bale-fire mounting, mounting up in me.

‘Tis not of me, bunny.
It was you engendered it,
with that fine, demoniacal spark
you jetted off your eye at me.

_I_ did not want it,
this furnace, this draught-maddened fire
which mounts up my arms
making them swell with turgid, ungovernable
strength.

‘Twas not _I_ that wished it,
that my fingers should turn into these flames
avid and terrible
that they are at this moment.

It must have been _your_ inbreathing, gaping desire
that drew this red gush in me;
I must be reciprocating _your_ vacuous, hideous
passion.

It must be the want in you
that has drawn this terrible draught of white fire
up my veins as up a chimney.

It must be you who desire
this intermingling of the black and monstrous
fingers of Moloch
in the blood-jets of your throat.

Come, you shall have your desire,
since already I am implicated with you
in your strange lust.

_PARADISE RE-ENTERED_

THROUGH the strait gate of passion,
Between the bickering fire
Where flames of fierce love tremble
On the body of fierce desire:

To the intoxication,
The mind, fused down like a bead,
Flees in its agitation
The flames’ stiff speed:

At last to calm incandescence,
Burned clean by remorseless hate,
Now, at the day’s renascence
We approach the gate.

Now, from the darkened spaces
Of fear, and of frightened faces,
Death, in our awful embraces
Approached and passed by;

We near the flame-burnt porches
Where the brands of the angels, like torches
Whirl,–in these perilous marches
Pausing to sigh;

We look back on the withering roses,
The stars, in their sun-dimmed closes,
Where ’twas given us to repose us
Sure on our sanctity;

Beautiful, candid lovers,
Burnt out of our earthy covers,
We might have nestled like plovers
In the fields of eternity.

There, sure in sinless being,
All-seen, and then all-seeing,
In us life unto death agreeing,
We might have lain.

But we storm the angel-guarded
Gates of the long-discarded,
Garden, which God has hoarded
Against our pain.

The Lord of Hosts, and the Devil
Are left on Eternity’s level
Field, and as victors we travel
To Eden home.

Back beyond good and evil
Return we. Eve dishevel
Your hair for the bliss-drenched revel
On our primal loam.

_SPRING MORNING_

AH, through the open door
Is there an almond tree
Aflame with blossom!
–Let us fight no more.

Among the pink and blue
Of the sky and the almond flowers
A sparrow flutters.
–We have come through,

It is really spring!–See,
When he thinks himself alone
How he bullies the flowers.
–Ah, you and me

How happy we’ll be!–See him
He clouts the tufts of flowers
In his impudence.
–But, did you dream

It would be so bitter? Never mind
It is finished, the spring is here.
And we’re going to be summer-happy
And summer-kind.

We have died, we have slain and been slain,
We are not our old selves any more.
I feel new and eager
To start again.

It is gorgeous to live and forget.
And to feel quite new.
See the bird in the flowers?–he’s making
A rare to-do!

He thinks the whole blue sky
Is much less than the bit of blue egg
He’s got in his nest–we’ll be happy
You and I, I and you.

With nothing to fight any more–
In each other, at least.
See, how gorgeous the world is
Outside the door!

SAN GAUDENZIO

_WEDLOCK_

I

COME, my little one, closer up against me,
Creep right up, with your round head pushed in
my breast.

How I love all of you! Do you feel me wrap
you
Up with myself and my warmth, like a flame
round the wick?

And how I am not at all, except a flame that
mounts off you.
Where I touch you, I flame into being;–but is it
me, or you?

That round head pushed in my chest, like a nut
in its socket,
And I the swift bracts that sheathe it: those
breasts, those thighs and knees,

Those shoulders so warm and smooth: I feel
that I
Am a sunlight upon them, that shines them into
being.

But how lovely to be you! Creep closer in, that
I am more.
I spread over you! How lovely, your round head,
your arms,

Your breasts, your knees and feet! I feel that we
Are a bonfire of oneness, me flame flung leaping
round you,
You the core of the fire, crept into me.

II

AND oh, my little one, you whom I enfold,
How quaveringly I depend on you, to keep me
alive,
Like a flame on a wick!

I, the man who enfolds you and holds you close,
How my soul cleaves to your bosom as I clasp you,
The very quick of my being!

Suppose you didn’t want me! I should sink down
Like a light that has no sustenance
And sinks low.

Cherish me, my tiny one, cherish me who enfold
you.
Nourish me, and endue me, I am only of you,
I am your issue.

How full and big like a robust, happy flame
When I enfold you, and you creep into me,
And my life is fierce at its quick
Where it comes off you!

III

MY little one, my big one,
My bird, my brown sparrow in my breast.
My squirrel clutching in to me;
My pigeon, my little one, so warm
So close, breathing so still.

My little one, my big one,
I, who am so fierce and strong, enfolding you,
If you start away from my breast, and leave me,
How suddenly I shall go down into nothing
Like a flame that falls of a sudden.

And you will be before me, tall and towering,
And I shall be wavering uncertain
Like a sunken flame that grasps for support.

IV

BUT now I am full and strong and certain
With you there firm at the core of me
Keeping me.

How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy
For the future! How sure the future is within me;
I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed.

I wonder what it will be,
What will come forth of us.
What flower, my love?

No matter, I am so happy,
I feel like a firm, rich, healthy root,
Rejoicing in what is to come.

How I depend on you utterly
My little one, my big one!
How everything that will be, will not be of me,
Nor of either of us,
But of both of us.

V

AND think, there will something come forth from
us.
We two, folded so small together,
There will something come forth from us.
Children, acts, utterance
Perhaps only happiness.

Perhaps only happiness will come forth from us.
Old sorrow, and new happiness.
Only that one newness.

But that is all I want.
And I am sure of that.
We are sure of that.

VI

AND yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other’s
being we are!

Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I
am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.

And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me.

_HISTORY_

THE listless beauty of the hour
When snow fell on the apple trees
And the wood-ash gathered in the fire
And we faced our first miseries.

Then the sweeping sunshine of noon
When the mountains like chariot cars
Were ranked to blue battle–and you and I
Counted our scars.

And then in a strange, grey hour
We lay mouth to mouth, with your face
Under mine like a star on the lake,
And I covered the earth, and all space.

The silent, drifting hours
Of morn after morn
And night drifting up to the night
Yet no pathway worn.

Your life, and mine, my love
Passing on and on, the hate
Fusing closer and closer with love
Till at length they mate.

THE CEARNE

_SONG OF A MAN WHO HAS
COME THROUGH_

NOT I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry
me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a
winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am
borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through
the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade
inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a
wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder,
we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

_ONE WOMAN TO ALL WOMEN_

I DON’T care whether I am beautiful to you
You other women.
Nothing of me that you see is my own;
A man balances, bone unto bone
Balances, everything thrown
In the scale, you other women.

You may look and say to yourselves, I do
Not show like the rest.
My face may not please you, nor my stature; yet
if you knew
How happy I am, how my heart in the wind rings
true
Like a bell that is chiming, each stroke as a stroke
falls due,
You other women:

You would draw your mirror towards you, you
would wish
To be different.
There’s the beauty you cannot see, myself and
him
Balanced in glorious equilibrium,
The swinging beauty of equilibrium,
You other women.

There’s this other beauty, the way of the stars
You straggling women.
If you knew how I swerve in peace, in the equi-
poise
With the man, if you knew how my flesh enjoys
The swinging bliss no shattering ever destroys
You other women:

You would envy me, you would think me wonder-
ful
Beyond compare;
You would weep to be lapsing on such harmony
As carries me, you would wonder aloud that he
Who is so strange should correspond with me
Everywhere.

You see he is different, he is dangerous,
Without pity or love.
And yet how his separate being liberates me
And gives me peace! You cannot see
How the stars are moving in surety
Exquisite, high above.

We move without knowing, we sleep, and we
travel on,
You other women.
And this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone
In a motion human inhuman, two and one
Encompassed, and many reduced to none,
You other women.

KENSINGTON

_PEOPLE_

THE great gold apples of night
Hang from the street’s long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind’s sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.

_STREET LAMPS_

GOLD, with an innermost speck
Of silver, singing afloat
Beneath the night,
Like balls of thistle-down
Wandering up and down
Over the whispering town
Seeking where to alight!

Slowly, above the street
Above the ebb of feet
Drifting in flight;
Still, in the purple distance
The gold of their strange persistence
As they cross and part and meet
And pass out of sight!

The seed-ball of the sun
Is broken at last, and done
Is the orb of day.
Now to the separate ends
Seed after day-seed wends
A separate way.

No sun will ever rise
Again on the wonted skies
In the midst of the spheres.
The globe of the day, over-ripe,
Is shattered at last beneath the stripe
Of the wind, and its oneness veers
Out myriad-wise.

Seed after seed after seed
Drifts over the town, in its need
To sink and have done;
To settle at last in the dark,
To bury its weary spark
Where the end is begun.

Darkness, and depth of sleep,
Nothing to know or to weep
Where the seed sinks in
To the earth of the under-night
Where all is silent, quite
Still, and the darknesses steep
Out all the sin.

_”SHE SAID AS WELL TO ME”_

SHE said as well to me: “Why are you ashamed?
That little bit of your chest that shows between
the gap of your shirt, why cover it up?
Why shouldn’t your legs and your good strong
thighs
be rough and hairy?–I’m glad they are like
that.
You are shy, you silly, you silly shy thing.
Men are the shyest creatures, they never will come
out of their covers. Like any snake
slipping into its bed of dead leaves, you hurry into
your clothes.
And I love you so! Straight and clean and all of a
piece is the body of a man,
such an instrument, a spade, like a spear, or an
oar,
such a joy to me–”
So she laid her hands and pressed them down my
sides,
so that I began to wonder over myself, and what I
was.

She said to me: “What an instrument, your
body!
single and perfectly distinct from everything else!
What a tool in the hands of the Lord!
Only God could have brought it to its shape.
It feels as if his handgrasp, wearing you
had polished you and hollowed you,
hollowed this groove in your sides, grasped you
under the breasts
and brought you to the very quick of your form,
subtler than an old, soft-worn fiddle-bow.

“When I was a child, I loved my father’s riding-
whip
that he used so often.
I loved to handle it, it seemed like a near part of
him.
So I did his pens, and the jasper seal on his desk.
Something seemed to surge through me when I
touched them.