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Title: The White Sail - and Other Poems
Author: Guiney, Louise Imogen
Language: English
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THE WHITE SAIL
And Other Poems
THE WHITE SAIL
AND OTHER POEMS. BY
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
[Illustration: colophon]
TICKNOR & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS, BOSTON
_Copyright, 1887_,
BY TICKNOR AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved._
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.
_A SALUTE by night, than night’s own heart-beat stiller,
From the dying to the living. Keats! I lay
Here against thy moonlit, storm-unshaken pillar,
My garland of a day._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE WHITE SAIL 11
Legends.
TARPEIA 35
THE CALIPH AND THE BEGGAR 40
THE RISE OF THE TIDE 44
CHALUZ CASTLE 48
THE WOOING PINE 51
THE SERPENT’S CROWN 57
MOUSTACHE 62
RANIERI 65
SAINT CADOC’S BELL 68
A CHOUAN 76
Lyrics.
YOUTH 83
THE LAST FAUN 85
KNIGHTS OF WEATHER 87
DAYBREAK 90
ON SOME OLD MUSIC 91
LATE PEACE 94
TO A YOUNG POET 97
DE MORTUIS 98
DOWN STREAM 99
THE INDIAN PIPE 103
BROOK FARM 105
‘MY TIMES ARE IN THY HANDS’ 107
GARDEN CHIDINGS 108
FRÉDÉRIC OZANAM 109
BANKRUPT 110
A REASON FOR SILENCE 112
TEMPTATION 113
FOR A CHILD 115
AGLAUS 116
AN AUDITOR 118
THE WATER-TEXT 119
CYCLAMEN 120
A PASSING SONG 124
IN TIME 125
THE WILD RIDE 126
THE LIGHT OF THE HOUSE 128
A LAST WORD ON SHELLEY 129
IMMUNITY 130
PAULA’S EPITAPH 131
JOHN BROWN: A PARADOX 132
Sonnets.
APRIL DESIRE 137
TWOFOLD SERVICE 138
IN THE GYMNASIUM 139
A SALUTATION 140
AT A SYMPHONY 141
SLEEP 142
THE ATONING YESTERDAY 143
‘RUSSIA UNDER THE CZARS’ 144
FOUR SONNETS FROM ‘LA VITA NUOVA’ 145
THE WHITE SAIL.
HIGH on the lone and wave-scarred porphyry,
The promontoried porch of Attica,
Past evenfall, sat he whose reverend hair
Down-glittered with the breaker’s volleying foam
Visioned before him in the level dark:
Ægeus, of wronged Pandion heir, and king.
And round about his knees, and at his feet,
In saffrons and sad greens alone bedight,
Sat, clustered in dim wayward sidelong groups
Sheer to the ocean’s edge, those liegemen fond
Who with him wished and wept. As thro’ the hours
Of ebbing autumn, on a northward hill,
Lies summer’s russet ruined panoply,
Knotted and heaped by the fantastic winds
Hap-hazard, while the first adventuring snow
Globes itself on the summit; so they clung
Secure among the rangèd crevices,
Month after month, and wakeful night on night
Vigilant; ever neighbored and o’ertopped
With that white presence, and the boding sky.
And Ægeus prayed: ‘O give me back but him!
My desert palm, my moorland mid-day fount,
My leopard-foot, in equal tameless grace
Swaying suavely down cool garden-paths
Or into battle’s maw: my lad of Athens!
With bronze and tangly curls a-toss, to show
Infancy’s golden-silken underglow;
The glad eye dusking blue, as is the sea
Ere fiery sunset tricks it; and the lashes
In one close sombre file against his cheek,
Enphalanxed in perpetual trail and droop,
Wherethro’ gleams laughter as thro’ sorrow’s pale.
And anger’s self doth tremble maidenly;
The massy throat; the nostril mobile, smooth;
The breast full-orbed with arduous large pride,
As I so oft have marked, when from the chase,
The witness-dropping knife swung with the bow,
Heading the burdened company, he came,
Aye vermeil with the wholesome wind, outwrestler
Of storms and perils all. High-mettled Theseus!
Keystone of greatness, bond of expectation,
Stay of this realm! in his strong-sinewed beauty
Dear unto men as Tanais bright-sanded
Whose flood harmonious lapses on the ear,
And makes for hearts yoke-wearied, thither roaming,
Thrice feastful holiday. Ah, righteous gods!
Forasmuch as I love him and await him,
Who from my youth have been your servitor,
Yield my old age its boon of vindication:
Haven the happy ship here, ere I die.’
Still heedlessly the hushed moon bent her bow
Over the unshorn forest oakenry
And the dense gladiate leaves of Thoræ’s pine:
The cold and incommunicable moon,
Waxing and waning thro’ the barren time
That brought not Theseus’ self, nor of him sign,
Nor any waif of rumor out of Crete,
Whereto, a year nigh gone, the ship had sped
Forlorn; her decks enshrouded in plucked yew
Strewn to the mizzen; and her oary props
And halyards all with blossomed myrtle twined,
And every sail dark as from looms of hell,
In token of the universal dole.
And on her heavèd anchor and spurred keel
Cheers none, but protest, moans, and ire attended,
When from the quay, in melancholy weather
Forward she sobbed on black unwilling wing.
But ere that going drear, one foot ashore,
Theseus with his mild comrades hand in hand,--
The seven maids and boys to bondage sealed,
Lifted his head, and met his father’s eyes,
And out of morning ardor made this oath:
‘My people, stand not for our sakes in tears!
No shape of ill shall daunt me; I will strike
And overcome, Heaven’s favor for my shield.
And when engirt with conquest I return
(Or never else hies Theseus hitherward),
That ye may read my heart while yet at sea,
And know indeed that fate hath used me fair,
That these your lambs I shepherd and lead home,
Lo, I will set upon the central mast
The sky-sail white! white to the hollowing breeze,
White to that fierce and alien coast, and white
To your espial, from the horizon’s brink
Unto the moored fulfilment of your joy.
Watch: you that keep your faith and love in me.’
And they believed and watched, albeit with dread,
Steadfastly without plaint, to soothe the king,
Who, taciturn and close-engarmented,
From his nocturnal towered station leaned
Pining against the unresponsive tide.
And thro’ his brain, with hum processional,
Wheeled memories of Theseus, deeds of Theseus,
The race he won of yore, the song he sang;
His truth, his eloquence, his April moods,
And all his championship of trodden tribes,
Since first he lit on Athens, like a star.
For Ægeus, to the low-voiced Meta wed,
Thereafter to Rhexenor’s daughter spouse,
Childless, and by his brethren’s guile deposed,
Led by a last mysterious oracle,
Once, exiled, to Trœzene wandered down;
And there, accorded Aphrodite’s grace,
To whom the sacrificial smoke he raised,
Atonement and conciliation sweet,
Begot to Greece her hero; and straightway
Bereavèd Æthra, of old Pelops’ race
Forsook, by destined rumor summoned home.
But with the auroral kiss of parting, he
In the spring sunshine, on the mellow shore
Laid his huge blade beneath a caverned rock,
And both the jewelled sandals from his feet,
With lofty exhortation: ‘Bid my son,
When he, with strength inherited of mine
Can heave this boulder, take the sword and shoon,
And claim in Athens me his sire. Farewell!’
And Æthra bided, dreaming, at the court,
Till from her knee laughed back her own blue eyes.
And the young boy, loosed in sun-dappled groves,
Defiant, chased the droning harvest-fly,
Or nicked pomegranates with his ruddy thumb
Ripe from the bough; nor would his mother chide,
But with strange awe hang o’er him worshipping,
As one that turns with passionate-praying lips
East to the Delian shrine he shall not see:
Save once, when he a turtle-pigeon pent
In wicker-work of some swart soldier’s skill,
With lisping promise aye to nourish it;
And stroked his plaining bird for one long day,
But on the morrow ceased his fostering,
And left his captive caged, the tiny gourd
Of water unreplenished. Then the child
Bewailed his darling, lying stiff and mute;
And Æthra held his innocent hand in hers
With solemn lessoning; for she foresaw
Remorse, and irremediable ache,
And ruin, following him whose manhood swerves
To the eased byways of forgetfulness.
She, his hot brows caressing, so besought
The weeping prince: ‘If thou, O little son!
Wilt lay hereafter duties on thyself,
Stand mindful of them; all thy vows observe.
Be a trust broken but a small, small thing,
Its possible shadow slaves this world in woe.’
And ere the dial veered, did Æthra speak
His vanished father’s name and gave the charge,
And led him to the rock, and in him fired
The aspirations of his godlike race.
Lost quite to former pastimes, thenceforth he
Brooded on her sweet chronicle; and oft
Burst thro’ arcades and vaporous aisles of dawn,
And stood, flushed in the rubious dimpling light,
Straining his thews at sunrise, to cajole
The granite treasurer of those tokens twain:
With his young heel intrenched in faithless sand,
His cloud of yellow hair hanging before,
Tugged at the flint; or pressed his forward knee
With obdurate sieges, into its hard side;
Anon, with restful rosy stretch of limb,
Plunged to the onset, hound-like, on all fours,
Beating a moated way about that place
Where the grim guardian held a fixèd foot;
And ever, noon on noon, with petulant tears,
Stole back, o’ervanquished, to his quiet nooks.
There would he woo his mother’s frequent tale,
And urge her gentle prophecy, that he
The kinsman of great Herakles, should too
Rise, mighty, and o’er earth’s fell odds prevail.
Wherefore, at waking-time, he plucked up heart
To wrestle with the pitiless rock anew,
Season on season, patient. And behold,
When the tenth summer’s delicate keen dews
Died from his shoreward path, at last befell
One sure petrean tremor, one weird shock
At his tense vigor; and ere twilight failed,
Clean to the sea’s verge rolled that doughty bulk!
And Theseus, in his full inheritance,
In the superb meridian of his youth,
Sandalled, the great hilt hard against his breast,
Climbed to his mother’s bower. Æthra laid
Her lips to his warm cygnet neck, and swooned,
Thereby apprised the destined hour had come,
And having sped her boy upon his quest,
Drooped, like a sun-void lily, and so died.
Then radiant Theseus, journeying overland,
All robber-plagues infesting those still glens
Physicianed, and redeemed all realms distressed.
Phæa, prodigious Crommyonian shape,
Apt Cercyon of Arcadia, he slew;
And of his dominant valor overcame
The smith-god’s son, who with the mortal mace
Beleaguered travellers in Epidaur;
Unburied martyrs fitly to avenge,
He harsh Procrustes bedded; limb from limb
Rent the Pine-bender on recoiling boughs;
And him that thrust the lavers of his feet
Headlong in chasms, Theseus likewise served
By dint of hospitable precedent;
Wide Marathonia’s lordly bull he led,
Engarlanded with hyacinth and rose,
To the knife’s edge at bland Apollo’s shrine;
Last, guided to a grove sabbatical,
Knelt to the chanting white Phytalidæ,
And in their midst was chrismed, and purified
From all the bloodshed of his troublous path.
On to the gate of Athens Theseus strode,
Docile to Æthra’s warning, that unnamed,
And with strict privacy, he should seek his sire;
For fifty jealous sons of Pallas held
The city’s sovereignty; and overruled
Their father’s childless brother, Ægeus old:
The agile, able, proud Pallantidæ,
Whose wrath would rise against the tardy heir,
Tumultuous, and encompass Greece in war.
Therefore, unheralded, with wary step,
Chancing upon an open banquet-hall,
Preceded of his fame, came brave-arrayed
The stranger hero, but erewhile a boy;
And straight, along the heaped board glancing down,
Evil Medea, on her harmful track
From Corinth unto Colchis, intercepted.
This was Medea of the Fleecemen, late
Her tender brother’s slayer, whose vile spells
Had promised Ægeus princes of his blood.
Stole from him, at the beck of that mock moon,
Honor, the flood august of all his life:
For he, distrustful of the oracles,
Inasmuch as Trœzene flowered no hope,
Now in the season of his utmost need,
Subservient to the sorceress and her whims,
Blasphemed, in slackened faith, and clave to her;
And strangling conscience, made his thraldom fine
With golden incident and public pomp,
Holding by night most sumptuous festival,
Feasting beside her, restless and unthroned.
Now Theseus knew that wily woman’s face,
Who, reading her arraignment in his eyes,
Shrank close to Ægeus, voluble with fear,
And urged within his palm a carven bowl,
That he should bid the young wayfarer drain
Health to Medea! in one envenomed draught:
Which Theseus heard, alert, past harp and bell,
Past intervening hubbub of rich mirth,
And sprang to cower the temptress with a word.
But at the instant, sprang her minions too,
And riot and upbraidings dire began,
Conflict, and scorn, and drunken challenging.
Then leaped quicksilvered Theseus thro’ the fray,
With love’s suspicion kindling in his veins,
And gained that space before the startled host
Whence from her couch Medea shrieked away:
Limned beautiful and clear from front to feet,
Shod with the shoon Ægean; and his arm
Sabred with the one sword that Ægeus knew!
Who, blanching ’neath roused memory’s ebb and flow,
Among the wrangling merry-makers all,
Clarioned ‘My own!’ and strained him to his breast.
Theseus, in those fresh days of his return,
Tarried not idle; but with warlike haste
Bore down on the usurping lords of state,
Juniors and kin of his discrownèd sire;
Them, ere the morrow dwindled, he beheld
Scattered as chaff from off the threshing-floor,
And Ægeus, o’er the wreckage of their reign
Exalted, with calm brows indiademed.
Then was the sacred and sequestered prime
Of liberation, benison, and peace;
When the round heaven, in summer’s ministrance
Rolled on its choral axle; till, at end
Like to a cloudlet that assails the blue,
Comely and yet with rains ingerminate,
Minos the Cretan unto Athens sent
His nimble princeling. In a fortnight’s span,
The island lad, competing in the games,
Won fairly; whereupon the envious mob
Made rude revolt, and took upon itself
The barbarous dishonor of his death.
And vengeful Minos sailed, and razed the town,
Laying the bitter forfeit in this wise:
‘Athens shall yearly proffer unto me
Her virgin tribute of patrician seed,
Seven youths, and maidens seven, as by lot,
Wherewith to feed the ravenous Minotaur.’
Athens the peerless bowed her ashen head.
So dragged the dreadful twelvemonth thro’ the realm,
Aye of its dearest blood depopulate,
And losing grasp on life. The fourth weak year,
Youngest of all departed, full thirteen
Faltered aboard the deck calamitous;
And with them Theseus, best-belovèd Theseus,
The king’s sole-born, whom last the doom befell.
But as no sister-galley e’er set out
To dolorous ports predestined, in due lapse
Returning with her steersman, went this ship,
Not hopeless; now her bravest made his vaunt
To thread the maze Dædalian, and destroy
The pampered monster, holding harm at bay
From the frail flock of Athens; and to flash
Homeward, to chime of oar-compellèd waves,
Signalling with the white exultant sail!
‘So that I live, this thing,’ he said, ‘is sworn:
Watch! you that keep your faith and love in me.’
Such tales of Theseus’ youth his father’s mind
Rehearsed, while at his vigil in the night,
Deep pondering on each noble circumstance,
As a man shifteth, thro’ an idle hour,
Anon with hand in light, anon in shade,
The lustres of his one memorial gem.
And oft the king, with a foreboding throe
Called, urging eld’s unserviceable sight:
‘Shines the white sail yet?’ Spake the murmurous ring:
‘Nay; but fantastic clouds low-wandering on.’
Then the fond voice of Ægeus, askingly:
‘Alcamenes! yield my sad heart a song.’
Rose kind Alcamenes, who from his birth
The king had cherished, from a mossy seat,
The anxious faces turned his happy way;
And with his pose quiescent, lyre in arm,
Breathed forth a simple ditty, sweet-sustained
Against the diapason of the sea.
‘Thy voice is like the moon, revealed by stealthy paces,
Thy silver-margined voice like the ample moon and free:
Ah, beautiful! ah, mighty! the stars fall on their faces,
The warring world is silent, for love and awe of thee.
‘My soul is but a sailor, to whom thy wonder-singing
Is anchorage, and haven, and unimagined day!
And who, in angry ocean, to thine enchantment clinging,
Forgets the helm for rapture, and drifts to doom away.’
But the king hid his brow in both wan hands,
Sighing: ‘That song at her beguiling feet,
Out of my brief enslavement, did I make
The year that Theseus on our revels stole.
It sears me like a brand with fires o’erpast:
Be silent, my Alcamenes! spare it me.
Thou rather, Theron, sing! Engird my pain
With some thrice-gallant catch, some madrigal
That sets the dull blood dancing.’ Theron smiled,
Masking suspense (for he was Theseus’ friend),
Half-prone beneath his damask cloak, with chin
Hand-propped; and fixed his dark eyes on the king,
In trolling of an agitated lay.
‘I drowse in the grass, to the crickets’ elfin strings,
With boughs and the sun about, with bowl and book,
At the flood-tide of my youth, in the pearl of springs,
Cydippe’s hand in my hair.... Ah, horrible thrill!
Once I was rash, once I was wrong. Quick, look,
My heart! in thy tremor, over the herded hill,
In clefts of the moss, in swirls of the sliding brook:
Somewhere the Vengeance lurks to defile and kill!
My arrow back to me somewhere hisses and sings,
Aye, justly; aye, bitterly, justly. Steady, heart! there.
See, I laugh as I lie: on the brink of the jar yet clings
Sweet foam; and I kiss Cydippe’s hand thro’ my hair.’
Again, with swift uneasy gesturing
Turned Ægeus, chiding, and protested ere
The whipped-up courage of that roundel’s close:
‘Cease, Theron! this is but an ominous song,
A song of retribution.’ For he thought:
‘So retribution dogs my bruisèd age;
Still, still Medea’s soft and deadly name
Stings all the leafy splendor of my life,
And daunts the morrow’s bud. And if there be
A reckoning I must pay for follies past,
Must it be--O not that, not now, not here!’
And drawing to his height, he cried: ‘The sail?
Comes the sail from the south?’ They chorused ‘Naught
Save argent flutterings of the shoreward gull.’
And Ægeus, craving solace, urged once more:
‘Rhodalus! sing thou what shall heal my soul,
In numbers honey-clear.’ Now Rhodalus
The poet, too, was loyal sentinel;
A fiery patriot, wont to domineer
The moods of Athens; very potent he,
And flexile-throated as the nightingale.
With all his fingers knit about his knee,
And head against a hoary pillar raised,
Dream-locked, upon the lowest sprayey ledge,
Riddling the unintelligible space,--
Void thrones, and filmy wakes of fugitives,
And interstellar agonies of midnight;
To him the king’s voice throbbed a second time:
‘Rhodalus! sing thou what shall heal my soul.’
Who, grave with poesy’s most candid mien,
Answered the summons softly: ‘Sire, I cannot.
The music of my brothers is amiss,
So mine would be. Our strings are jangled, wrested
From their discreet and silvern vassalage,
Snapped quite with languishment for Theseus’ sake.
I cannot sing. But O you holy stars!
Stretching to us your tendrils of high glory;
Tacit compellers of our wayward spirits;
You domèd guardians of this tear-bound earth,
You rich-wrought visions, charioted thousands
Hale rank on rank, thro’ warless cities riding!
Young semispheric moon, O burning Seven,
Hesper and Phosphor! blue hour-measuring orbs
That elsewhere look on Theseus! Speed his pinnace,
Bide thro’ the watches with us; shine; exhale not!’
And the dense quiet bound them.
Cautiously,
In his far corner, one behind the king
At the dumb bursting-point of that weird hush,
With nervous finger twitched his neighbor’s sleeve,
And strove to whisper him with palsied tongue,
And straight relaxed, and smiled; but new-convinced
Towards twilight’s gracious advent, crept in awe
With arm extended, to his fellow’s side;
And the two thrilled alike, immovable,
Each palm down-roofed above the frantic eye,
Froze at their posts: which eager Theron marked,
Piloting his keen sight across the main,
And smote his bosom with quick-smothered groan,
And, breathless, gazed and gazed. By twos and threes
The apprehensive company dropped aghast
Out on the reeling ragged precipice
Sparkled and shelled with the oncoming tide:
Till Ægeus, slow-divining dupe of hope,
Awoke, and knelt him down against his throne,
Faint with thanksgiving. And the moments creaked
In gyral passage, like Ixion’s wheel,
Spoke on accursèd spoke, portending woe.
But he, athwart his lonely pinnacle
Called like a ghost from walled eternity:
‘What of the sail? What cheer?’ Their lips congealed
Nothing replied. The cruel hour rolled on.
Intolerable arid east-blown wave
Vaulting on wave thro’ all her caverns loud,
Far upon Oliaros boomed the sea.
Then bearded Rhodalus, compassionate,
Spied leaning o’er the crags the frenzied king,
Rending his garment to the paling moon;
And yet evasive of those pleading eyes,
Knotting his arms against his breast, downcast,
Adjured him: ‘O most reverend, O most dear!
The heart of life is rotten; prayer is vain.
Stay up thy soul: for lo! the sail is black.’
And all the trancèd host burst into moan.
Old Ægeus, like a dreamer, muttered ‘Aye,’
Passive; and from his brain the fever fell,
And more than Zeus himself, he things unseen
Saw, and to unheard choirings lent his ear.
Theseus, truth-speaking, vowed the sky-sail white;
The sail was black: therefore was Theseus dead
In untriumphant state; his comrades, dead;
Dead, the emprise of Greece; her dynasty
Ungendered, dead; the very gods were dead!
And he alive, alive? a wind-worn leaf
All winter gibbeted upon that bough
Whence the last fruit was reft? O mockery!
Inert, of his own broken heart impelled,
From the steep, solitary trysting-place,
King Ægeus, like a stone, dropped in the sea.
A wraith of smoke, fast-driven against a flame,
Yon by the crimsoning east the dark ship moved,
Her herald noises strangely borne ashore:
‘Joy, joy!’ and interlinked: ‘O joy, O joy,
Athens our mother! joy to all thy gates!’
And thunderous firm acclaim of minstrelsy,
Laughter, and antheming, and salvos wild
Outran the racing prow. But mute they lay,
The blinded watchers, spent beyond desire,
Wounded beyond this wonder’s balsaming.
Yet ever, thro’ the trembling lovely light,
Known voice on voice re-echoed, face on face
Uprose in resurrection. They were safe,
And Athens, hark! from her long thraldom free!
And Theseus, victor, sang and sailed with them,
The pale unsistered Phædra for his bride,
For whom was constant Ariadne cast
On Naxos, where a god did comfort her.
Theseus! who when his bark the shallows grazed,
Leaped in the gentle waves for boyish glee,
Gained the thronged highway, crossed it at a bound,
Scaling the cliffs; and stood among them there,
Clausus, and his dear Theron, and the rest,
Nodding upon the clamorous crowd below;
But they, as soon, had turned them blunt away,
In hot resentment of that false one. He,
O’erbrimming with frank welcomes, in dismay,
Stricken with sight of unresponsive hands,
Scenting disaster, reining up his tongue,
Asked sharply for the king.
He understood
After mad struggle and bewilderment,
And gloomy gazing on the absent deeps.
Down on the penitential rock he sank,
All his fair body palpitant with shame,
Syllabing agony: ‘Ægeus, Ægeus! ah,
Glory of Hellas! dead for trust in me.
Life-giver, irrecoverable friend,
My father! ah, ah, loving father mine,
Ah, dear my father!... I forgot the sail.’
And the great morn burst. On a hundred hills
The marigold unbarred her casement bright.
LEGENDS
TARPEIA.
WOE: lightly to part with one’s soul as the sea with its foam!
Woe to Tarpeia, Tarpeia, daughter of Rome!
Lo, now it was night, with the moon looking chill as she went:
It was morn when the innocent stranger strayed into the tent.
The hostile Sabini were pleased, as one meshing a bird;
She sang for them there in the ambush: they smiled as they heard.
Her sombre hair purpled in gleams, as she leaned to the light;
All day she had idled and feasted, and now it was night.
The chief sat apart, heavy-browed, brooding elbow on knee;
The armlets he wore were thrice royal, and wondrous to see:
Exquisite artifice, whorls of barbaric design,
Frost’s fixèd mimicry; orbic imaginings fine
In sevenfold coils: and in orient glimmer from them,
The variform voluble swinging of gem upon gem.
And the glory thereof sent fever and fire to her eye.
‘I had never such trinkets!’ she sighed,--like a lute was her sigh.
‘Were they mine at the plea, were they mine for the token, all told,
Now the citadel sleeps, now my father the keeper is old,
‘If I go by the way that I know, and thou followest hard,
If yet at the touch of Tarpeia the gates be unbarred?’
The chief trembled sharply for joy, then drew rein on his soul:
‘Of all this arm beareth I swear I will cede thee the whole.’
And up from the nooks of the camp, with hoarse plaudit outdealt,
The bearded Sabini glanced hotly, and vowed as they knelt,
Bare-stretching the wrists that bore also the glowing great boon:
‘Yea! surely as over us shineth the lurid low moon,
‘Not alone of our lord, but of each of us take what he hath!
Too poor is the guerdon, if thou wilt but show us the path.’
Her nostril upraised, like a fawn’s on the arrowy air,
She sped; in a serpentine gleam to the precipice stair,
They climbed in her traces, they closed on their evil swift star:
She bent to the latches, and swung the huge portal ajar.
Repulsed where they passed her, half-tearful for wounded belief,
‘The bracelets!’ she pleaded. Then faced her the leonine chief,
And answered her: ‘Even as I promised, maid-merchant, I do.’
Down from his dark shoulder the baubles he sullenly drew.
‘This left arm shall nothing begrudge thee. Accept. Find it sweet.
Give, too, O my brothers!’ The jewels he flung at her feet,
The jewels hard, heavy; she stooped to them, flushing with dread,
But the shield he flung after: it clanged on her beautiful head.
Like the Apennine bells when the villagers’ warnings begin,
Athwart the first lull broke the ominous din upon din;
With a ‘Hail, benefactress!’ upon her they heaped in their zeal
Death: agate and iron; death: chrysoprase, beryl and steel.
’Neath the outcry of scorn, ’neath the sinewy tension and hurl,
The moaning died slowly, and still they massed over the girl
A mountain of shields! and the gemmy bright tangle in links,
A torrent-like gush, pouring out on the grass from the chinks,
Pyramidal gold! the sumptuous monument won
By the deed they had loved her for, doing, and loathed her for, done.
Such was the wage that they paid her, such the acclaim:
All Rome was aroused with the thunder that buried her shame.
On surged the Sabini to battle. O you that aspire!
Tarpeia the traitor had fill of her woman’s desire.
Woe: lightly to part with one’s soul as the sea with its foam!
Woe to Tarpeia, Tarpeia, daughter of Rome!
THE CALIPH AND THE BEGGAR.
I.
SCORNER of the pleading faces,
In the first year of his reign,
From the lean crowd and its traces
Down the open orchard-lane
Walked young Mahmoud in his glory,
In his pomp and his disdain
And beyond all oratory,
Music’s sweetness, ocean’s might,
Fell a voice from branches hoary:
‘He whose heart is at life’s height,
Who has wisdom, love, and riches,
Islam’s greatest, dies this night.’
And he crossed the rampart ditches
Blinded, and confused, and slow;
High in palaced nooks and niches
Clanged his fathers’ shields a-row;
And their turrets triple-jointed
Shook with tempests of his woe.
Long past midnight, disanointed,
Prone upon his breast he lay,
Warring on that hour appointed:
But behold! at break of day,--
As if heaven itself had spoken,--
Blown across the bannered bay,
Over mart and mosque outbroken,
Came the silver-solemn chime
For some parted spirit’s token!
Mahmoud, with free breath sublime,
Summoned one whose snow-locks heaving
Made the vision of hoar Time;
And the red tides of thanksgiving
On his lifted brow, he said:
‘In my city of the living,
Which, proclaimed of bells, is dead?’
And the gray beard answered: ‘Master,
One who yesternight for bread
At thy gateway’s bronze pilaster
Begged in vain: blind Selim, he,
Victim of the old disaster.’
And the vassal suddenly
Looked on his hard lord with wonder,
For those tears were strange to see.
II.
Yet again, where boughs asunder
Held the wavy orchard-tent,
Sun-empurpled clusters under
In changed mood the Caliph went;
And anew heard sounds upgather,
(Chidings with caressings blent,
As the voice once of his father):
‘Haughty heart! not thou wert wise,
Rich, belovèd; Selim, rather,
‘Islam’s prince in Allah’s eyes!
Even the meek, in his great station,
Freehold had of Paradise.’
III.
When the plague-wind’s desolation
Pierced Bassora’s burning wall,
Circled with a kneeling nation
Whom his mercies held in thrall,
Died the Caliph, whispering tender
Counsel to his liegemen tall:
‘One last service, children! render
Me, whose pride the Lord forgave:
Not by our supreme Defender,
‘Not beside the holy wave,
Not in places where my race is
Lay me! but in Selim’s grave.’
THE RISE OF THE TIDE.
A FISHERMAN gray, one night of yore,
His nets upgathered, plied the oar,
Right merrily heading for a haven,
While summer winds blew blithe before.
He sat beneath his pennon white;
His arms were brown, his eye was bright;
Twice twenty years his breast had carried
A ribbon from Lepanto’s fight.
A cove he spied at sunset’s edge,
With pleasant trees and margin-sedge;
And barefoot went by stakes down-driven
Thro’ shallows wading from the ledge,
The boat drawn after; but behold!
A check fell on his venture bold:
He stood imprisoned, vainly leading
The ropes in whitening fingers old.
Within that black and marshy sound
His weight had sunken; he was bound
Knee-deep! and as he beat and struggled,
The mocking ripples danced around.
Long since the wood-thrush ceased her song;
The summer wind grew fierce and strong;
The shuddering moon went into hiding;
Down came the storm to wreak him wrong.
Against the prow he leaned his chin,
Thinking of all his strength had been;
Then turned, and laughed with courage steady:
‘O ho! what straits we twain are in!’
And strove anew, unterrified,
But lastly, wearied wholly, cried
For succor, since his laden wherry
Rocked ever on the coming tide.
* * * * *
‘I hear a cry of anguish sore!’
But straight his love had barred the door:
‘Bide here; the night bodes naught but danger.’
Loud beat the waves along the shore.
A bedded child made soft behest:
‘So loud the voice I cannot rest.’
‘It is the rain, dear, in the garden.’
The cruel water binds his breast.
‘A lamp, a lamp! some traveller’s lost!’
But thro’ the tavern roared the host:
‘Nay, only thunder rude and heavy.’
Close to his lips the foam is tossed.
‘O listen well, my liege and king!
Hark from gay halls this grievous thing!’
‘Strange how the wild wind drowns our music!’
About his head the eddies swing.
At stroke of three the abbot meek
Moved out among his flock to speak
This word, with tears of doubt and wonder:
‘I had a dream; come forth and seek.’
With torch and flagon, forth they sped:
The fisher glared from the harbor-bed!
The tide, from his white hair down-fallen,
All kindly ebbed, now he was dead.
Lepanto’s star shone fast and good;
The sea-kelp wrapped him like a hood;
His arms were stretched in woe to heaven;
The boat had drifted: so he stood.
The Unavenged he seemed to be!
Then fell each monk upon his knee:
‘Lord Christ!’ the abbot sang, awe-stricken:
‘Rest my old rival’s soul!’ sang he.
CHALUZ CASTLE.
THERE sped, at hint of treasure
Dug from the garden-mould,
Word to the doughty vassal:
‘Thy sovereign claims the gold!’
‘Nay, Richard, come and wrest it!’
Said Vidomar the bold.
Uprose the Lionhearted,
He locked his armor on:
And over seas that morrow
Around his gonfalon,
The crash and hiss of battle
Blazed up, and mocked the sun.
King Richard led his bowmen
By Chaluz dark and high;
Like rain and rack they followed
His flashing storm-blue eye:
Forth peered Bertrand de Gourdon
From the turret stair thereby.
Thro’ morris-pikes and halberds
The king rode out and in,
His horse in gaudy trappings,
His sabre drawn and thin:
Down knelt Bertrand de Gourdon
His strongbow at his chin.
O shrill that arrow quivered!
And fierce and awful broke
Acclaim in billowy thunder
From all the foreign folk,
At mighty Richard fallen
Beneath a foreign oak!
Then leaped his English barons,
Converging from afar,
And loosed the flood of slaughter
To the gates of Vidomar;
And seized Bertrand de Gourdon,
As clouds enmesh a star.
They brought the bright-cheeked archer
Who scoffed not, neither feared,
To the tent ringed in with faces
That menaced in their beard;
But the king’s face lay before him
In the lamplight semisphered.
The king’s self, stern and pallid
Gazed on the lad that day,
And as if dreams were on him
Besought him gently: ‘Say,
Bertrand de Gourdon! wherefore
Thou tak’st my life away?’
‘To venge my martyr-father,
My foster-brethren three:
In the name of thy dead foemen
This thing I did to thee!’
And Richard perished, sighing:
‘Forgive him. Set him free!’
Alas for that late loving
By seneschals betrayed!
While yet upon his lashes
The holy tear delayed,
They bound Bertrand de Gourdon,
They slew him in the glade.
Alas for noble spirits
Whom fates perverse befall!
Whence David in his beauty
Gave healing unto Saul,
The jeering wind beats ever
On Chaluz castle wall.
THE WOOING PINE.
THERE was a lady, starshine in her look,
Of lineage fierce, yet tremulous and kind
As the field-gossamer, that down the wind
Floats gleamingly from some enthistled nook;
And wayward as her beauty was her mind
That evermore bright errant journeys took.
Her father’s houndish lords she moved among,
From feud and uproar dewily distraught;
Winnowed her harp of its least pain; and brought
Delight’s full freshet to a beggar’s tongue,
Or spun amid her maids with chapel-thought
That on a crystal pivot burned and swung.
But night on night, an exile from sleek rest,
She nestled warm before her hearth-fire low,
To watch its little wind-born planets go
Orbing; and from the martyr-oak’s charred breast,
In spirit-blue flame, in quintuple wild glow,
The tossing leaves prolong their summer zest.
And ailingly, she needs must often sigh,
Perplexèd out of her rich wonted glee,
Whereof some unseen warder kept the key,
And quell the dark defiance of her eye
In patience, as a torch dips in the sea.
And so, in brooding, went the white days by.
Unto the horsemen brave in war’s array
She waved no token from her latticed house,
Nor yet of princelings bare upon her brows
Love’s salutation; but from such as they
Turned, as a shy brook wheels from jutting boughs,
And in a sidelong glimmer sobs away
Her sealèd sense beheld no man, nor heard,
Nor lent its troth to any mortal bond,
But lived heart-full of vital light beyond,
And with miraculous tides of being stirred,
Lingering tho’ eager, till the forest fond
Winged to its own pure peace this homing bird.
For, sad with rains of unrevealed desire,
And heavy with predestined glory’s beam,
She to the water-girdled wood’s extreme
Stole from her suitors’ pleas, her father’s ire,
Far from their brambly ways to sit and dream,
And make sweet plaint, in daylight’s dying fire;
When, one with lilt of her own veins, there rose
Across remote and jasmine-pillared space,
A voice of so persuasive, piteous grace
That all her globèd sorrow did unclose
To fragrant helpfulness in that still place,
And sought, in tears, the breather of such woes.
And peering, of the level-shafted sun
Evasive, listening from a mossy knoll,
To kindling quiet sank her gentle soul,
In awe at some high venture to be done,
As when outpeals from Fame’s coercive pole,
Too soon, on ears too weak, her clarion.
Burst in the golden air a wide and deep
Torrent of harmony, that with clang and shock
Might wreck a pinnace on an Afric rock,
And on the ruin foamily o’erheap
Bright reparation: ’twas a strength to mock
Itself with swoons, and idle sobs, and sleep.
A splendor-hoary pine, of kingliest cheer,
Enrooted ’neath her thrilling footfall, stood;
Suffused with youth and gracious hardihood,
Sown of the wind from heaven’s memorial sphere,
With the red might of centuries in his blood,
Unscarred and straight against the battling year,
From whose great heart those noble accents flowed,
And from the melancholy arms outspread
Whereon the aching winter long had snowed:
‘Come, sister! spouse! whom Love hath strangely led
From bondage, come!’ And her most blessèd head
She laid upon his breast as her abode.
O wonderful to hearing, touch, and gaze!
This was of soul’s unrest and spirit’s scar
Solving and healing; this the late full star
Superillumining the hither ways,
And the old blind allegiance set ajar
Like a dark door, against its flooded rays.
All intertangled fell their dusky hair
In tender twilight’s bowery recess;
And that fair bride of her heart-heaviness
Was disenthralled in love’s Lethean air,
Where orchids hung upon the wind’s caress,
And the first tawny lily made her lair.
Dear minions served them in the covert green:
The squirrel coy, the beetle in his mail,
The moth, the bee, the throbbing nightingale,
And the gaunt wolf, their vassal; to them e’en
The widowed serpent, on her vengeful trail,
Upcast an iridescent eye serene.
The last tired envoy from the realm bereaved
Blew at the drawbridge, riding castlewards;
The fisher-folk along the beachen shards
Pierced, calling, the cool thickets silvern leaved;
And grandams meagre, and road-roaming bards
Shared her sad theme, for whom men vainly grieved.
But lad and lass, with parted mouth a-bloom,
Who strayed thereby in April’s misty prime,
A vision freshening to the after-time
Caught thro’ the rifts of uninvaded gloom,--
A maiden, honey-lipped as Tuscan rhyme,
And her young hunter, with his sombre plume.
For dynasties tho’ passing-bells be tolled,
Theirs is the midmost ecstasy of June,
Her music, her imperishable moon;
While Time, that elsewhere is so rough and cold,
Like a soft child, flower-plucking all forenoon,
Gathers the ages from this garden old.
Calm housemates with them in their forest lone
Do Freedom, Innocence and Joy, abide:
And aye as one who into Heaven hath died
Thro’ mortal aisleways of melodious moan,
The boatman sees, at dusk, from Arno’s tide,
The Everlasting Lover with his own!
THE SERPENT’S CROWN.
SAID he:
‘O diligent rover! browned under many a heaven,
Treasure and trophy you carry, spoils from the east and the west;
Yet I fear that you passed it over, the chief clime out of the seven,
My wonder-land and my island, where the chance of a knight is best.
‘There from the black mid-forest, past hemlock guards in waiting
(Heard you not of the legend?), when the wide sun winks at noon,
On the rock-ways sharpest, hoarest, warily undulating,
A star-dappled serpent hurries, with the odorous grace of June.
‘Over her human forehead, reared among glens abysmal,
Glitters a crown gold-gossamer; only a moment’s arc
Crosses the creature torrid, flexile, palpitant, prismal,
Then breaks on the earth, a terror spiralling into the dark.
‘Every to-day and to-morrow, as the foreign old belfries tremble
With the hammer-hard heels of noon, just that instant, nor more nor less,
In the blue witch-reptile’s furrow her shape stands to dissemble,
And the barbed tongue tempts and entices, and the fire-eyes acquiesce.
‘Once she was a wily woman, whose glory the gods have finished,
Whose handicraft still is ruin, whose glee is to snare and kill,
Defier of spearman and bowman, her empery undiminished;
But whoso can overcome her, shall bend the world to his will!
‘Therefore the knights importune to spur thro’ the jungles fruity,
Many a lad and a hunter and a dreamer there ventureth;
For the king tends power and fortune to the slayer of that demon-beauty,
And awards him her crown thrice-charmèd whose captor can outwit Death,
‘Aye, ride above storm and censure, and lord it o’er time and distance,
In the maddening-sweet assurance of bliss like a rose-rain shed,
All for a wood-path venture, a gallant alert resistance,
And a stroke of the steel in circle about that exquisite head!
‘A task for your young drilled muscle!’
But the other, in soft derision
Answered him:
‘Oh, I had once some wild schemes under my hat:
Some thrill for this same snake-tussle, and the heirdom of life Elysian,
Long peace, long loving, long praises: but I’ve kindled
and cooled on that!
‘Ten years have I been a ranger, I have hewn all dread to the centre;
I have learned to sift out values; my soul is at rest and free.
If that be your boon for danger, on a dull safe youth to enter,
Tho’ some may covet the guerdon, ’tis a poor enough thing to me.
‘I choose, might I come and return so, to a cause, a friend and a foeman
Staunch, to endure for the rest but as a moth, or a marigold!
Let the philosophers yearn so, the king bribe squire and yeoman!
Not for my lease immortal the serpent shall be cajoled.
‘To strike her down avenges her slain; but is evil ended?
The fashion dies; the function abides, and has fresher scope.
What is to be won? He cringes who would seize, were the choice extended,
For the risk elsewhere of living, here only survival’s hope!
‘I would keep my lot mine purely, cast in with men’s forever;
Their transient tempest sooner than these Sybaritic calms;
Tho’ against the cobra, surely, I would pit my soul’s endeavor,
Her crown and its lonely meaning I would scorn to take in alms.
‘Rather than ease unshaken, durance that sloth unhallows,
Once and for all, in honor, an end: what’s the forfeit crown
If the chance of my short term taken run plump on the axe or the gallows,
So one brother’s fetter be loosened, or one tyrant trampled down?
‘Why, see! this diadem’s pleasure a Turk might sigh to inherit,--
Heart-beats thrumming; a torpid and solitary cheer;
No call to arms, no measure of progress! Well, let him wear it
Unquestioned ... I spurned the bauble when I killed your snake
last year.’
MOUSTACHE.
A FRIENDLESS pup that heard the fife
Sprang to the column thro’ the clearing,
And on to Switzerland and strife
Went grenadiering.
Much he endured, and much he dared
The long hot doomsday of the nations:
He wore a trooper’s scars; he shared
A trooper’s rations;
Warned pickets, seized the Austrian spies,
Bore the despatches; thro’ the forces
From fallen riders, prompt and wise,
Led back the horses;
Served round the tents or in the van,
Quick-witted, tireless as a treadle:
‘This private wins,’ said Marshal Lannes,
‘Ribbon and medal.’
(‘Moustache, a brave French dog,’ it lay
Graven on silver, like a scholar’s;
‘Who lost a leg on Jena day,
But saved the colors!’)
At Saragossa he was slain;
They buried him, and fired a volley:
End of Moustache. Nay, that were strain
Too melancholy.
His immortality was won,
His most of rapture came to bless him,
When, plumed and proud, Napoleon
Stooped to caress him.
His Emperor’s hand upon his head!
How, since, shall lesser honors suit him?
Yet ever, in that army’s stead,
Love will salute him.
And since not every cause enrolls
Such little, fond, sagacious henchmen,
Write this dog’s moral on your scrolls,
Soldiers and Frenchmen!
As law is law, can be no waste
Of faithfulness, of worth and beauty;
Lord of all time the slave is placed
Who doth his duty.
No virtue fades to thin romance
But Heaven to use eternal moulds it:
Mark! Some firm pillar of new France,
Moustache upholds it.
RANIERI.
TO the lute Ranieri played,
Once beneath the jasmine shade
In a June-bright bower imprisoned,
Many a Pisan beauty listened,
Velvet-eyed, with head propped under
Her gold hair’s uncoifed wonder;
Like the rich sun-blooded roses
Whom the wind o’ertakes in poses
Of some marble-still delight,
On the dewy verge of night.
‘Merrily and loud sang he,
With the fairest at his knee,
Sky-ringed in that garden nest!
Who, save sorcerers, had guessed
Whither sylph and minstrel came
From the awful Archer’s aim?
Or that, glossy-pined below,
Lay the city in her woe,
For her sins, as it was written,
Desolate and fever-smitten?
‘Apt Ranieri was, and young,
Love’s persuasion on his tongue;
And his high-erected glance,
Softened into dalliance,
Laughed along its haughty level:
Foremost in all skill and revel,
Steeled against the laws that seemed
Monkish figments idly dreamed,
Early dipping his wild wing
In the pools of rioting,
With the moaning world shut out,
With the damosels about;
Crimson-girdled, in the sun
Regnant, as if he were one
For whom Death himself was mute;--
So he sat, and twanged his lute.’
(Placid, in her novice veil,
Sister Claudia told the tale.)
‘When, across the air of June,
Like a mist half-risen at noon,
Or a fragrance barely noted,
A Judæan Vision floated!
Who, midway of music’s burst,
Pleadingly, as if athirst,
Long athirst, and long unsated,
Sighed: “Ranieri!” sighed and waited.
‘Ah, the Prodigal that heard
Fell to ashes at the word!
But with broken murmurings
Putting by the wreathèd strings,--
From the safe and craven places,
From the fond, bewildered faces,
Trembling with the rush of thought,
With contrition overwrought,
At a royal gesture, down
Straight to the dismantled town;
Girt with justice, chaste and tender,
To all risks himself to render,
Of all sorrows rude and froward
To be prop and cure henceforward;
By no lapse of irksome duty
Swerving from the Only Beauty,
By no olden lure enticed;--
Saint Ranieri followed Christ!’
(Said the little nun: ‘Amen:
Christ who calleth, now as then.’)
SAINT CADOC’S BELL.
I.
SAILOR! with wonder thou hearest me,
Moored where the roots of thine anchors be,
Tolling and wailing, bursting and failing, afar in the heart of the sea.
A bell was I of Pagan lands
Forged and welded in might and beauty,
But captured by Christian chivalry,
And set in a belfry by godly hands,
With chrisms and benedictions three,
For a fourfold consecrated duty:
To summon to pray, to peal for the fray,
To measure the hours, to moan for the dead;
To moan for the dead, ah me! ah me!
Where the wild gold parasites suck and spread,
Where the sea-flower rears her dreamy head;
In the grots of immortality
The cool weird singing mermaids dwell in;
In the still city, with its empurpled air
Shaken upon the eye from bastions fair
Of coral, and pearl, and unbought jasper’s glisten,
I toll and wail, I burst and fail, ah, listen!
I, the holy bell, the gift of the Lord Llewellyn,
Now the keel of a Cornish ship looms over my prison,
Call from the underworld in mine old despair.
II.
They brought me in my virgin fame
To the carven minster wonder-high,
Close to the glorious sun and sky,
With song, and jubilee, and acclaim:
The fountains brimming with wine sprayed out on the crowd;
In the chapel-porches the viols and harps clanged loud,
And the slim maids danced a solemn measure, ever and aye the same,
Singing: ‘Behold, we hang our bell in
The freedom of spring, in the golden weather,
The gift of the Lord Llewellyn,
Redeemed from heathenry and strange shame,
The lion-strong bell, for our service at last led hither,
Flower-woven, caressed, and in Christ made willing and tame.’
But ere the pleased stir of the people had died,
Llewellyn, fresh home from the wars, with his soldierly stride
Climbed, bearded and splendid in mail, and his only young child
Held up from his shoulder in sight of them all; till they cried
Peal on peal of delight when the rosy babe turned, and her lip
Laid sweetly upon me in benison mild.
Yea, sailor! and thou that hearest my voice from thy ship,
Thou knowest my sorrow’s beginning, thou knowest, ah me!
Whence my tolling and wailing, my breaking and failing, afar
in the heart of the sea.
III.
I served the Lord ten years and a day,
In Saint Cadoc’s church by the surging bay;
And housed with the gathering webs and must,
’Mid whirring of velvety wings outside,
In calm and in wind, brooding over the tide,
And the bright massed roofs, and the crags’ array,
My strong life, innocent and just,
Fell of a sudden to ashes and dust,
And on my neck hotly the demon laid the bare rod of his sway!
How it befell, I know not yet,
(Sailor, with wonder thou hearest me),
Save that a passionate sharp regret,
An exile’s longing, o’ermastered not,
Seared thought like a pestilential spot,
And sent my day-dreams traitorously
Back to the place where my life began,
To the long blue mornings, blown and wet,
To the pyre by the sacred rivulet,
And the chanting Cappadocian.
No more a Christian bell was I!
For all became, which seemed so good,
Vile thraldom, in my bitter mood
That thrust the old conformance by.
Sullen and harsh, to the acolyte
I answered of a Sabbath night,
And sprang on the organ’s withdrawing peal
To shatter its pomp, like a charge of steel.
The good monks puzzled and prayed, I trow:
But against their Heaven I set my brow.
IV.
To me, by the ancient, triple-roped,
Lone, tortuous stair, whereby I made
A tingling silence, a heavy concentric shade,
The twelve-years’ child of the Lord Llewellyn groped:
With May-wreaths laden, the loving strange child came!
And my pulses that throbbed at sight of her, ten years gone,
Chilled and recoiled at her delicate finger-touch, guessing
Along my brazen-wrought margin, the laud and the blessing
Traced, thro’ the vine, thro’ the tangle of star and of sun,
By her dead father’s name, by Llewellyn’s magnificent name.
And even as she stood in the dark, the doom and the horror rushed on me;
(I had weakened my soul, and they won me!)
I felt the desire at my vitals, the unbearable joy that is pain:
With one mad tigerish spring against the dim rafter,
I smote the sweet child in my rage, I smote her with laughter,
And a sound like the rain
Whirled east on the casement, died after:
And I knew that the life in her brain
I had quenched at the stroke, and flung even my darling of yore
Down the resonant, tottering stair, down, down to the centuried door!
Then the swift hurricane,
The clamoring army thronged up from below, my
allegiance to claim!
Lean goblins, brown-flecked like a toad, the gnomic horned ghosts,
Imps flickering, quarry-sprites grim, all the din of the dolorous hosts,
All the glory and glee of the cursèd hissed round me and round,
as a flame.
And they loosened my hold from the tower, and my hope from the hem
Of the garment of Him who could save, as they jeered! and with speed
Crashed down past the rocks and the wrecks; and the horrible deed
Was done. I was theirs; and I gave up my spirit to them.
V.
In a mossy minaret
Fathoms under, I am set.
All the sea-shapes undulating
At my gates forlorn are waiting,
All the dreary faint-eyed people
Watch me in my hollow steeple,
While the glass-clear city heaves
Oft beneath its earthy eaves.
So in sorrow, sorrow, sorrow
Yestereven and to-morrow,
Thro’ the æons, in a cell
Hangs Saint Cadoc’s loveless bell,
Orbèd, like a mortal’s tear,
On the moony atmosphere,
Bearing, the refrain of time,
Memory, and unrest, and crime.
Thou that hast the world sublime!
I that was free, I am lost, I am damned, I am here!
And whenever a child among men by a blow is dead,
Docile for aye from the deeps must I lift my head,
And from the heathen heart of me that breaks,
The unextinguishable music wakes,
Naught availing, naught deterred.
And the sailor heareth me,
Even as thou, alas! hast heard,
Fallen in awe upon thy knee,
Tolling and wailing, bursting and failing, afar in the ominous sea.
A CHOUAN.
FROM the school-porch at Vannes
Weaponed, the children ran;
One little voice began,
Lark-like ascended:
‘Treason is on the wing,
Black vows, and menacing:
March, boys! God save the King!’
Allio ended.
Singing, with sunny head,
Battleward straight he led,
Stones for his captain’s bed,
Herbs for his diet:
He and his legion brave,
Trouble enough they gave!
Ere the Blues’ bullets drave
Them into quiet.
Spared, with a few as bold,
Once the storm over-rolled,
Allio, twelve years old,
Crept from the clamor;
Came, when the days were brief,
To the old desk in grief,
Thumbing anew the leaf
Of the old grammar.
Kings out!... rang the chime,
Kings in!... answered Time.
In his ignoring clime,
Silent, he studied;
Till, ere his youth was done,
For him, the chosen one,
Shepherd disclaimed of none,
Aaron’s rod budded.
Long, in unbroken round,
Peace on his paths he found;
Saw the glad Breton ground
Husbanded, quarried:
Blessed it, the record saith,
All the years he had breath,
Till the dim eightieth
Snowed on his forehead.
President!... Emperor!...
President!... On the floor
Spake a sharp Senator
Widening his ranges:
‘From Paris I impeach
Vannes for disloyal speech;
Send thither troops to teach,
How the world changes!’
Down on the peasants then
Rode the Republic’s men,
Trampling the corn again,
Miring the flowers;
Hewed thro’ the rebels nigh,
Scoffed at the women’s cry,
Set the tricolor high
On the church towers.
Pale in his cot that day,
Dying, the pastor lay,
Where still his eye could stray
Up valleys gleaming;
Watchers were at his side;
Prayer unto prayer replied:
Hush! what was that he spied,
Pinnacle-streaming?
(Nothing was he aware
In his deaf Breton air,--
So gray traditions there
Throve unforgotten,--
That, by a final chance,
Kings all were led a dance;
Long since, in fickle France,
Sceptres were rotten!)
Sprang the old lion, still
Live with prodigious will,
To his stone casement-sill;
Foolish and true one!
Snatched up the blade he bore,
Rough with its rust of yore,
Kissed it, a saint no more--
Only a Chouan!
Barred from the charging mass
In the choked market-pass,
All he could do, alas!
Now, was to clang it:
Nay, more:--‘God save the King!’
With a last clarion ring,
Shot ere he ceased to sing,
Allio sang it.
LYRICS
YOUTH.
LET us hymn thee for our silent brothers,
Freely as the wild impellent wind blows,
Briefly, rudely, in the smoky pauses
Of a battle, in the stress and scourging
Of the sail apast thy heavenly margin;
Let us hymn thee, while the gallant pulses
In high heart and limbs one kingliest instant,
Boom and flash thy name and their allegiance;
‘Once, and for one only,’ let us hymn thee,
O Delight, O Sunrise, O sole Answer,
Empery unbought, supreme Adventure,
Youth, ah, Youth! all men’s desire and sorrow.
Let us hymn thee, we, the passing, dying,
Out of bondage by a vision lifted,
Since by chance sublime, in secret places,
Goddess! we, Aktaion-like, have seen thee.
Tho’ our voice as a spent eagle’s voice is,
Let us hymn thee, while the doom is forging;
Holding, losing, thro’ one first last moment,
One mad moment worth dull life forever,
Triumphing in anguish, let us hymn thee!
Thine, beholden Beauty, thine this heart-break,
Thine, O Hope forsworn! this salutation,
Youth, ah, Youth! all men’s desire and sorrow.
THE LAST FAUN.
HOW hath he stumbled hither, in search of love and praise,
A tardy comer and goer across the world’s highways,
A kind shape from the thicket, a wanderer all his days?
He finds a rocky seat where the moiling town recedes:
The altered shepherds flout him; but O he little heeds!
Incredulous he swings there, and drones upon his reeds.
He stamps his cloven heel, and he laughs adown the wind,
With eye that wanes and waxes at doings of mankind.
Slow, slow creeps the invader upon that happy mind.
The apple breasts his fellow; doves wheel by two and three,
And ever dance in circle the shallops on the sea;
The goats and deer are many; but playmate none hath he,
Nor nymph nor child to follow upon his signals rude;
He smiles: there is no frolic; he snarls: there is no feud.
He feels his poor heart sinking at every interlude.
His shaggy ear and freakish resents the wail and din;
Earth’s rumors chill his veins with their ghostly gliding in;
He aches to slip these tethers, and be where he hath been.
Elsewhere is waking glory, and here the dream, the thrall.
Hush! hear the sunless waters, the wrestling leaves that call!
He lops the grass, and whistles; and while he cheats them all,
Obeys, is gone, gone wholly. From alien air too cold,
The Faun, with garlands flying, with sylvan ditties trolled,
Being homesick, being patient, regains his greenwood old.
KNIGHTS OF WEATHER.
WHEN down the filmy lanes
The too wise sun goes grieving,
A wake of splendor leaving
Upbillowed from the ground;
When at the window-panes
The hooded chestnuts rattle,
And there is clash of battle
New England’s oaks around:
Oh, then we knights of weather,
We birds of sober feather,
Fill up the woods with revel
That summer’s pomp is slain;
And make a mighty shouting
For King October’s outing,
The Saracen October
Astride the hurricane!
When dappled butterflies
Have crept away to cover,
And one persistent plover
Is coaxing from the fen;
When apples show the skies
Their bubbly lush vermilion,
And from a rent pavilion
Laugh down on maids and men:
Oh, then we knights of weather,
We birds of sober feather,
Fill up the woods with revel
That summer’s pomp is slain;
And make a mighty shouting
For King October’s outing,
The Saracen October
Astride the hurricane!
When pricks the winy air;
When o’er the meadows clamber
Cloud-masonries of amber;
When brooks are silver-clear;
When conquering colors dare
The hills and cliffy places,
To hold, with braggart graces,
High wassail of the year:
Oh, then we knights of weather,
We birds of sober feather,
Fill up the woods with revel
That summer’s pomp is slain;
And make a mighty shouting
For King October’s outing,
The Saracen October
Astride the hurricane!
DAYBREAK.
THE young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea.
Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee:
Those glad auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere henceforth on me.
Up with the banners on the height, set every matin bell astir!
The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew’s on phlox and lavender:
Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of morning beats with her.
ON SOME OLD-MUSIC.
TO lie beside a stream, upon the sod
At ease, while weary shepherds homeward plod,
And feel benignly by, as daylight mellows,
The mountains in their weathering period;
Aye so, with silence shod
To lie in depth of grass with man’s meek fellows,
The cattle large and calm, aware of God,
And, keen as if to flesh the spirit sprang,
To hear,--O but to hear that silvern clang
Of young hale melody! and hither rally
The thrill, the aspiration, and the pang
Again, as once it rang
Sovereign and clear thro’ all the Saco valley,
Whose slaves were we that heard, and he that sang!
Happy the spot, the hour, the spanning strain
Precious and far, the rainbow of the rain,
The seal of patience, dark endeavor’s summing,
The heaven-bright close of Pergolese’s pain!
Sighs bid it back in vain,
Nor win its peer, till craftsmen aftercoming
Lost art, lost heart, from shipwrecked years regain.
How, like an angel, it effaced the crime,
The moil and heat of our tempestuous time,
And brought from dewier air, to us who waited,
The breath of peace, the healing breath sublime!
As falls, at midnight’s chime
To an old pilgrim, plodding on belated,
The thought of Love’s remote sunshining prime.
There flits upon the wind’s wing, as we gaze,
Our northern springtime, virgin-green three days;
The racy water shallowing, the glory
Of jonquils strewn, the wafted apple-sprays:
O let it be thy praise,
Child-song too lovely and too transitory!
Thou art as they; thy feet have gone their ways.
O beauty unassailable! O bride
Of memory! while yet thou didst abide
The yester joy was ours, the joy to-morrow,
Life’s brimming whole: and since to earth denied,
Soft ebbed thy dreamy tide,
To us the first, the full, the only sorrow,
Wild as when Abel out of Eden died.
LATE PEACE.
AS a pool beset with lilies
In the May-green copses hid,
Far from wayfarers and wrongers,
Clangors, rumors, disillusions,
Neighbored by the wild-grape only,
By the hemlock’s dreamy host,
By the Rhodian nightingale,
O remote, remote, O lonely!--
So thy life is.
Whence and wherefore is it
Never peace may be co-dweller
With my lakelet
Too belovèd and too sheltered,
That, secure from broil of cities,
From a secret regnant spring
To its own wild depth awaking,
Makes but moaning and resistance,
Undiminishable protest;
Mimicking with pain and fury
Of humanity the struggle;
Fretting, foaming, pacing ever
Round and round its fragrant cloister,
All within itself perplexèd,
Every heart-vein bruised but eager;
And its clear soul, doubt-o’erladen,
’Neath the stirred and floating foulness,
Long abased, long dumb, ah! long?--
So thy life is.
Comes the respite, comes the guerdon;
The perfect truce arrives
In the honey-dropping twilight,
The southwestering pallid sunshine,
The magian clouds a-fire,
The mooring galleon-wind:
At whose spell,
Potent daily,
The lulled water is beguiled
Back to saneness, back to sweetness.
All its arrowy hissing atoms
Gather from the chase forsaken;
The sphered galaxy of bubbles,
Fragments, motes, the lees unrestful,
Disunite, as to heard music,
Like weird dancers, from their wreathings
Each to its cool grotto swaying;
Till there follows, on their fervor,
Depth, and crystal clarity.
So thy life is, so thy life!
Darkling to beatitude,
Shaken in the saving change.
And the spirit made wise, not weary
By the throes that youth endureth,
When old age falls, evening-placid,
On the mystery unriddled,
Yet in empire, yet in honor,
In submission not ignoble,
Glistens to a central quiet,
Leal to the most lovely moon.
TO A YOUNG POET.
SIGH not to be remembered, dear,
Nor for Time’s fickle graces strive;
Vex not thy spirit’s songful cheer
With the sick ardor to survive.
But be content, thou quick bright thing
A while than lasting stars more fair:
A lone high-flashing skylark’s wing
Across obliterating air.
O rich in immortality!
Not thee Fame’s graven stones benight;
But ever, to some world-worn eye,
All Heaven is bluer for thy flight.
DE MORTUIS.
THE skilfullest of mankind!
So praise him, reckoning
By shot in the sea-gull’s wing,
By doubts in boyhood’s mind.
DOWN STREAM.
SCARRED hemlock roots,
Oaks in mail, and willow-shoots
Spring’s first-knighted;
Clinging aspens grouped between,
Slender, misty-green,
Faintly affrighted:
Far hills behind,
Sombre growth, with sunlight lined,
On their edges;
Banks hemmed in with maiden-hair,
And the straight and fair
Phalanx of sedges:
Wee wings and eyes,
Wild blue gemmy dragon-flies,
Fearless rangers;
Drowsy turtles in a tribe
Diving, with a gibe
Muttered at strangers;
Wren, bobolink,
Robin, at the grassy brink;
Great frogs jesting;
And the beetle, for no grief
Half-across his leaf
Sighing and resting;
In the keel’s way,
Unwithdrawing bream at play,
Till from branches
Chestnut-blossoms, loosed aloft,
Graze them with their soft
Full avalanches!
This is very odd!
Boldly sings the river-god:
‘Pilgrim rowing!
From the Hyperborean air
Wherefore, and O where
Should man be going?’
Slave to a dream,
Me no urgings and no theme
Can embolden;
Now no more the oars swing back,
Drip, dip, till black
Waters froth golden.
Musketaquid!
I have loved thee, all unbid,
Earliest, longest;
Thou hast taught me thine own thrift:
Here I sit, and drift
Where the wind’s strongest.
If, furthermore,
There be any pact ashore,
I forget it!
If, upon a busy day
Beauty make delay,
Once over, let it!
Only,--despite
Thee, who wouldst unnerve me quite
Like a craven,--
Best the current be not so,
Heart and I must row
Into our haven!
THE INDIAN PIPE.
(TO R. L. S.)
YOUR bays shall all men bring,
And flowers the children strew you.
Once, as I stood in a thick west wood,
I took from a fissure a precious thing,
The homage whereof be to you!
A thing pearl-pale, yet stung
With fire, as the morning’s beam is;
Hid underground thro’ a solar round,
Hardy and fragile, antique and young,
More exquisite than a dream is.
No rose had so bright birth;
No gem of romance surpassed it,
By a minstrel-knight, for his maid’s delight,
Borne from the moon-burnt marge of the earth,
Where Paynim breakers cast it.
Rude-named, memorial, quaint,
The dews and the darkness mould it:
Scarce twice in an age is our heritage
This glory and mystery without taint.
Dear Stevenson, do you hold it
A text of grace, ah! much
Beyond what the praising throng say:
Only your art is its peer at heart,
Only your touch is a wonder such,
My wild little loving song says!
BROOK FARM.
DOWN the long road bent and brown,
Youth, that dearly loves a vision,
Ventures to the gates Elysian,
As a palmer from the town,
Coming not so late, so far,
Rocks and birches! for your story,
Nor to prate of vanished glory
Where of old was quenched a star;
Where, of old, in lapse of toil,
Time, that has for weeds a dower,
Bade the supersensual flower
Starve in our New England soil.
But to Youth, whose radiant eyes
Shatter mists of grief and daunting,
Lost glad voices still are chanting
’Neath those unremaining skies;
Still the dreams of fellowship
Beat their wings of aspiration;
And a smile of soft elation
Trembles from his haughty lip,
If another dare deride
Hopes heroic snapped and parted,
Disillusion so high-hearted,
All success is mean beside!
‘MY TIMES ARE IN THY HANDS.’
‘MY times are in Thy hands!’
It rumbles from the sea;
It jingles ever, inland far,
From the reddening rowan-tree.
Let me not sit inert,
Let me not be afraid!
Teach me to dare and to resist
Like the first mortal made,
To whom of fate’s dread strength
No sickening rumors ran;
Who with whatever grim event
Grappled, as man with man.
Seal to my utmost age
What now my youth hath known:
‘My times are in Thy hands,’ O most!
When wholly in my own.
GARDEN CHIDINGS.
THE spring being at her blessed carpentry,
This morning makes a stem, this noon a leaf,
And jewels her sparse greenery with a bud;
Fostress of happy growth is she. But thou,
O too disdainful spirit, or too shy!
Passive dost thou inhabit, like a mole,
The porch elect of darkness; for thy trade
Is underground, a barren industry,
Shivering true ardor on the nether air,
Shaping the thousandth tendril, and all year
Webbing the silver nothings to and fro.
What wonder if the gardener think thee dead,
When every punctual neighbor-root now goes
Adventurously skyward for a flower?
Up, laggard! climb thine inch; thyself fulfil;
Thou only hast no sign, no pageantry,
Save these fine gropings: soon from thy small plot
The seasonable sunshine steals away.
FRÉDÉRIC OZANAM.
UNTO the constant heart whom saints befriend
Afar in peace, what were our gaudy praise?
His course is ended, and his faith is kept.
Honor in silence to that memory! sweet
Equally in the forum of the schools,
And in the sufferer’s hovel. His, threefold,
The lowliness of Isai’s chosen son,
And zeal that fired the warring Macchabee,
About him like a wedding-garment, worn
The day of his acceptance; and we know
That for the sake of some such soul as this,--
So brave, so clean, compassionate and just,
Alert in its most meek security,--
Love beareth yet with all that stains the world.
BANKRUPT.
PAST the cold gates, a wraith without a name,
Sullen and withered, like a thing half-tame
Still for its jungle moaning, came by night,
Before the Judgment’s awful Angel came.
‘Answer, Immortal! at my high decree
Glory or shame shall flood thee as the sea:
What of the power, the skill, the graciousness,
The star-strong soul the Lord hath lent to thee?’
But the lone spectre raised a mournful hand:
‘Call me not that! Release me from this land!
What words are Heaven and Hell? They fall on me
As on a sphere the fooled and slipping sand.
‘Discerning, thou the good mayst yet belie,
By some last test, the sinner sanctify.
My guilt is neutral-safe, like innocence:
No boon nor bane of deathless days gain I,
‘Whose life is hollow shell and broken bowl,
Of all which was its treasury, the whole
Utterly, vilely squandered. O most Just!
Put down thy scales: for I have spent my soul.’
A REASON FOR SILENCE.
YOU sang, you sang! you mountain brook
Scarce by your tangly banks held in,
As running from a rocky nook,
You leaped the world, the sea to win,
Sun-bright past many a foamy crook,
And headlong as a javelin.
Now men do check and still your course
To serve a village enterprise,
And wheelward drive your sullen force,
What wonder, slave! that in no wise
Breaks from you, pooled ’mid reeds and gorse,
The voice you had in Paradise?
TEMPTATION.
I COME where the wry road leads
Thro’ the pines and the alder scents,
Sated of books, with a start,
Sharp on the gang to-day:
Scarce see the Romany steeds,
Scarce hear the flap of the tents,
When hillo! my heart, my heart
Is out of its leash, and away.
Gypsies, gypsies, the whole
Tatterdemalion crew!
Brown and sly and severe
With curious trades in hand.
A string snaps in my soul,
The one high answer due
If an exile chance to hear
The songs of his fatherland.
... To be abroad with the rain,
And at home with the forest hush,
With the crag, and the flower-urn,
And the wan sleek mist upcurled;
To break the lens and the plane,
To burn the pen and the brush,
And, clean and alive, return
Into the old wild world!...
How is it? O wind that bears
The arrow from its mark,
The sea-bird from the sea,
The moth from his midnight lamp,
Fate’s self, thou mocker of prayers!
Whirl up from the mighty dark,
And even so, even me
Blow far from the gypsy camp!
FOR A CHILD.
Schumann’s ‘Erinnerung: Novbr. 4, 1847.’
IN memory of dear Mendelssohn, the loving song I made
Fain would I sing for you, my own, but that I am afraid,
Aye, truly, sore afraid:
For sweet as was its every tone, once freed to mortal ears,
In memory of dear Mendelssohn, the ghostly wand of tears
Would yet be strong to break my song,
Thro’ all these after-years!
AGLAUS.
THE ash hath no perfidious mind;
The open fields are just and kind;
Tho’ loves betray, I hear this way
The feathery step of the faithful wind.
Thorn-apple, bayberry and rose
Around me, talismanic, close:
The frosty flakes, the thunder-quakes,
Are bulwarks twain of my year’s repose.
No struggle, no delight, no moan,
But at my hearthstone I have known!
All thoughts that pass, as in a glass
The gods have bared to me for mine own.
Wisdom, the sought and unpossessed,
Hath of her own will been my guest;
Not smoking feud, but quietude
My heart hath chosen, at her behest.
‘This is of men the happiest man
Who hath his plot Arcadian,’
Apollo cried, my gates beside,
‘Nor ever wanders beyond its span.’
Now, like my sheep, I seek the fold;
My hair is shaken in the cold;
The night is nigh; but ere I die,
Bear witness, brothers! that young and old,
My name I wear without regret:
The Home-Keeper am I, and yet
At every inn my feet have been,
Above all travellers I am set.
Tho’ ocean currents by me purled,
The sails of my desire were furled.
What pilgrims crave, three acres gave;
And I, Aglaus, have seen the world!
AN AUDITOR.
WHY chide me that mutely I listen, ah, jester?
For either thou knowest
Too much, or thou knowest not aught of this aching vexed
planet down-whirling:
Thou knowest?--Thy wit is but fortitude; would’st have me
laugh in its presence?
Thou knowest not?--Laugh I can never, for innocence also is sacred.
THE WATER-TEXT.
WATCHING my river marching overland,
By mighty tides, transfigured and set free,--
My river, lapped in idle-hearted mirth,
Made at a touch a glory to the earth,
And leaving, wheresoever falls his hand,
The balm and benediction of the sea,--
O soon, I know, the hour whereof we dreamed,
The saving hour miraculous, arrives!
When, ere to darkness winds our sordid course,
Some glad, new, potent, consecrating force
Shall speed us, so uplifted, so redeemed,
Along the old worn channel of our lives.
CYCLAMEN.
ON me, thro’ joy’s eclipse, and inward dark,
First fell thy beauty like a star new-lit;
To thee my carol now! albeit no lark
Hath for thy praise a throat too exquisite.
O would that song might fit
These harsh north slopes for thine inhabiting,
Or shelter lend thy loveliest laggard wing,
Thou undefiled estray of earth’s o’ervanished spring!
Here is the sunless clime, the fallen race;
Down our green dingles is no peer of thee:
Why art thou such, dear outcast, who hadst place
With shrine, and bower, and olive-silvery
Peaked islets in mid-sea?
Thou seekest thine Achaian dews in vain,
And osiered nooks jocose, at summer’s wane,
With gossip spirit-fine of chill and widening rain.
Thou wert among Thessalia’s hoofy host,
Their radiant shepherd stroked thee with a sigh;
When falchioned Perseus spied the Æthiop coast,
Unto his love’s sad feet thy cheek was nigh;
And all thy blood beat high
With woodland Rhœcus at the brink of bliss;
Thy leaf the Naiad plucked by Thyamis,
And she, the straying maid, the bride beguiled of Dis.
These, these are gone. The air is wan and cold,
The choric gladness of the woods is fled:
But thou, aye dove-like, rapt in memories old,
Inclinest to the ground thy fragile head,
In ardor and in dread.
Searcher of yesternight! how wilt thou find
In any dolven aisle or cavern blind,
In any ocean-hall, the glory left behind?
June’s butterfly, poised o’er his budded sweet,
Is scarce so quiet-winged, betimes, as thou.
Fail twilight’s thrill, and noonday’s wavy heat
To kiss the fever from thy downcast brow.
Ah, cease that vigil now!
No west nor east thine unhoused vision keeps,
Nor yet in heaven’s pale purpureal deeps
Of worlds unnavigate, the dream of childhood sleeps.
Flower of the joyous realm! thy rivers lave
Their once proud valleys with forgetful moan;
Thy kindred nod on many a trodden grave
Among marmorean altars overthrown;
For thou art left alone,
Alone and dying, duped for love’s extreme:
Hope not! thy Greece is over, as a dream;
Stay not! but follow her down Time’s star-lucent stream.
Less art thou of the earth than of the air,
A frail outshaken splendor of the morn;
Dimmest desire, the softest throb of prayer,
Impels thee out of bondage to thy bourn:
Ere thou art half forlorn,
Farewell, farewell! for from thy golden stem
Thou slippest like a wild enchanter’s gem.
Swift are the garden-ghosts, and swiftest thou of them!
Yea, speed thy freeborn life no doubts debar,
O blossom-breath of that which was delight!
In cooling whirl and undulation far
The wind shall be thy bearer all the night
Thro’ ether trembling-white:
And I that clung with thee, as exiles may
Whose too slight roots in every zephyr sway,
Thy little soul salute along her homeward way!
A PASSING SONG.
WHERE thrums the bee and the honeysuckle hovers,
Gather, golden lasses, to a roundelay;
Dance, dance, yokefellows and lovers,
Headlong down the garden, in the heart of May!
Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.
Dance! what if last year Winnie’s cheek were rounder?
Dance! tho’ that foot, Hal, were nimbler yesterday.
Spread the full sail! for soon the ship must founder;
Flaunt the red rose! soon the canker-worm has sway:
Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.
See the dial shifting, hear the night-birds calling!
Dance, you starry striplings! round the fountain-spray;
With its mellow music out of sunshine falling,
With its precious waters trickling into clay,
Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away!
IN TIME.
HER little dumb child, for whom hope was none
In any mind, she watched from sun to sun,
Until three years her mighty faith had run;
Then, in an agony of love, laid by
The bright head from her breast, and went to lie
’Neath cedarn shadows, and the wintry sky,
Not having, for her long desire and prayer,
One sign from those shut lips, so rosy-fair
It seemed all eloquence must nestle there.
That day, to her near grave, thro’ frost and sleet,
He, following from his toys on truant feet,
Cried: ‘Mother, mother!’ joyous and most sweet.
And as their souls ached in them at the word,
The father lifted his new-wakened bird
With one rapt tear, that now at last she heard!
THE WILD RIDE.
_I HEAR in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, the commotion of sinewy, mane-tossing horses;
All night, from their cells, the importunate tramping and neighing._
Cowards and laggards fall back; but alert to the saddle,
Straight, grim, and abreast, vault our weather-worn, galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the one gracious woman that loves him.
The road is thro’ dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
What odds? We are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding!
_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, the commotion of sinewy, mane-tossing horses;
All night, from their cells, the importunate tramping and neighing._
We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil.
Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with Thy troopers that follow.
THE LIGHT OF THE HOUSE.
BEYOND the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live;
You pace the garden-walks secure and sensitive;
You linger on the stair: Love’s lonely pulses leap!
The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep.
Years after, and years after, you keep your heirdom still,
Your winning youth about you, your joyous force and skill,
Unvexed, unapprehended, with waking sense adored;
And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord.
To every quiet inmate, strong in the cheer you brought,
Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought;
And unto whoso knocks, an awe-struck visitor,
The sunshine that was you floods all the open door!
A LAST WORD ON SHELLEY.
EACH ninth hierarchal wave, a league of sound,
To phantom shreds the hostile crags confound,
To wreck on wreck forlorn. The crags remain.
Smile at the storm for our safe poet’s sake!
Not ever this ordainèd world shall break
That mounting, foolish, foam-bright heart again.
IMMUNITY.
LEAF of the deep-leaved holly-tree,
Long spared the weather-god’s disdain,
Have not thy brothers borne for thee
June’s inavertible raging rain?
And they are beautiful and hale,
Those sun-veined revellers; and thou
Still crippled, still afraid and pale,
Sole discord of the singing bough!
PAULA’S EPITAPH.
GO you by with gentle tread.
This was Paula, who is dead:
Eyes dark-lustrous to the look
As a leaf-pavilioned brook,
Voice upon the ear to cling
Sweeter than the cithern-string;
Whose shy spirit, unaware
Loosed into refreshful air,
With it took for talisman,
Climbing past the starry van,
Names to which the heavens do ope,
Candor, Chastity, and Hope.
JOHN BROWN: A PARADOX.
COMPASSIONATE eyes had our brave John Brown,
And a craggy stern forehead, a militant frown;
He, the storm-bow of peace. Give him volley on volley,
The fool who redeemed us once of our folly,
And the smiter that healed us, our right John Brown!
Too vehement, verily, was John Brown!
For waiting is statesmanlike; his the renown
Of the holy rash arm, the equipper and starter
Of freedmen; aye, call him fanatic and martyr:
He can carry both halos, our plain John Brown.
A scandalous stumbling-block was John Brown,
And a jeer; but ah! soon from the terrified town,
In his bleeding track made over hilltop and hollow,
Wise armies and councils were eager to follow,
And the children’s lips chanted our lost John Brown.
Star-led for us, stumbled and groped John Brown,
Star-led, in the awful morasses to drown;
And the trumpet that rang for a nation’s upheaval,
From the thought that was just, thro’ the deed that was evil,
Was blown with the breath of this dumb John Brown!
Bared heads and a pledge unto mad John Brown!
Now the curse is allayed, now the dragon is down,
Now we see, clear enough, looking back at the onset,
Christianity’s flood-tide and Chivalry’s sunset
In the old broken heart of our hanged John Brown!
SONNETS
APRIL DESIRE.
WHILE in these spacious fields is my sojourn,
Needs must I bless the blossomy outbreak
Of earth’s pent beauty, and for old love’s sake
Trembling, the bees’ on-coming chant discern;
Hail the rash hyacinth, the ambushed fern,
High-bannered boughs that green defiance make,
And watch from sheathing ice the brave Spring take
Her broad, bright river-blade. Ah! then, in turn
Long-hushèd forces stir in me; I feel
All the most sharp unrest of the young year;
Fain would my spirit, too, like idling steel
Be snatched from its dull scabbard, for a strife
With cold oppressions! straightway, if not here,
In consummated freedom, ampler life.
TWOFOLD SERVICE.
CHAMPIONS of men with brawny fist and lung,
You righteous! with eyes oped and utterance terse,
Whose greed of energies would fain disperse
Ere any mould be cast, or roundel sung,
Your gentler brothers still at play among
The smirch and jangle of the universe,
Mere fool-blind trespassers for you to curse,
The Sabbath-breakers, the unchristened young;--
Peace! These, too, know: these are as ye employed,
Nor of laborious help and value void,
Living; who, faithful to their fellows’ need,
Fling life away for truth, art, fatherland,
Like a gold largess from a princely hand,
Without one trading thought of heavenly meed.
IN THE GYMNASIUM.
I LEAN against a pillar in the sun,
The sandals loose on mine arrested feet,
While from their paths orbicular the fleet
Slim racers drop like stars. O loveliest one,
Lender of sixfold wings the while I run,
Whose tortoise-lyre saves yet for me its sweet
Cyllenic suasions old, to thy dim seat
Glory and grace! the votive rites are done.
Thy sole rememberer honey hath, nor palm,
Libation none, nor lamb to lead to thee,
Ah, Maia’s son! once god, and once aye-living.
Here stood thy shrine: here chants my heart in calm
Sad as the centralmost weird wave’s at sea,
Hermes! thy last June pæan and thanksgiving.
A SALUTATION.
HIGH-HEARTED Surrey! I do love your ways,
Venturous, frank, romantic, vehement,
All with inviolate honor sealed and blent,
To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier-bays:
I love your youth, your friendships, whims, and frays;
Your strict, sweet verse, with its imperious bent,
Heard as in dreams from some old harper’s tent,
And stirring in the listener’s brain for days.
Good father-poet! if to-night there be
At Framlingham none save the north-wind’s sighs,
No guard but moonlight’s crossed and trailing spears,
Smile yet upon the pilgrim named like me,
Close at your gates, whose fond and weary eyes
Sought not one other down three hundred years!
AT A SYMPHONY.
OH, I would have these tongues oracular
Dip into silence, tease no more, let be!
They madden, like some choral of the free
Gusty and sweet against a prison-bar.
To earth the boast that her gold empires are,
The menace of delicious death to me,
Great Undesign, strong as by God’s decree,
Piercing the heart with beauty from afar!
Music too winning to the sense forlorn!
Of what angelic lineage was she born,
Bred in what rapture?--These her sires and friends:
Censure, Denial, Gloom, and Hunger’s throe.
Praised be the Spirit that thro’ thee, Schubert! so
Wrests evil unto wholly heavenly ends.
SLEEP.
O GLORIOUS tide, O hospitable tide
On whose moon-heaving breast my head hath lain,
Lest I, all eased of wounds and washed of stain
Thro’ holy hours, be yet unsatisfied,
Loose me betimes! for in my soul abide
Urgings of memory; and exile’s pain
Weighs on me, as the spirit of one slain
May throb for the old strife wherein he died.
Often and evermore, across the sea
Of dark and dreams, to fatherlands of day
O speed me! like that outworn king erewhile
From kind Phæacia shoreward borne; for me,
Thy loving healèd Greek, thou too shall lay
Beneath the olive boughs of mine own isle.
THE ATONING YESTERDAY.
YE daffodilian days, whose fallen towers
Shielded our paradisal prime from ill,
Fair past, fair motherhood! let come what will,
We, being yours, defy the anarch powers.
For us the happy tidings fell, in showers
Enjewelling the wind from every hill;
We drained the sun against the winter’s chill;
Our ways were barricadoed in with flowers:
And if from skyey minsters now unhoused,
Earth’s massy workings at the forge we hear,
The black roll of the congregated sea,
And war’s live hoof: O yet, last year, last year
We were the lark-lulled shepherdlings, that drowsed
Grave-deep, at noon, in grass of Arcady!
‘RUSSIA UNDER THE CZARS.’
OF thraldom and the accursèd diadem
In that vast snow-land, shout the passionate tale;
Touch graybeards in the mart, bid braggarts quail,
And rouse the student lone from his old phlegm
To breathe the self-same sacred air with them,
Spirits supreme, our brothers! whose avail
Is sacrifice. Nay, make no woman’s wail:
Rome is re-born! whom kings dare not contemn.
On Neva’s shore-streets tho’ high blood be spent,
There this lorn world’s renascent hopes are meeting:
In camp is Mucius, at the bridge, Horatius;
Regulus walks in gyves, magnificent;
And thence men hear--O sound sublime and gracious!
The unquelled heart of Cæsar’s Brutus beating.
FOUR SONNETS FROM ‘LA VITA NUOVA.’
I.
‘_Io mi sentii svegliar dentro allo core._’
WITHIN my bosom, from long apathy,
Love’s mood of tenderness extreme awoke,
And spying him far off, mine eye bespoke
Love’s self, so joyous scarce it seemèd he,
Crying: ‘Now, verily, pay thy vows to me!’
And bright thro’ every word his smile outbroke.
Then stood we twain, I in my liege lord’s yoke,
Watching the path he came by, soon to see
The Lady Joan and Lady Beatrice
Nearing our very nook, each marvel close
Following her peer, all beauty else above;
And Love said, in a voice like Memory’s:
‘The first is Spring; but she that with her goes,
My counterpart, bears my own name of Love!’
II.
‘_Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare._’
SO chaste, so noble looks that lady mine
Saluting on her way, that tongues of some
Are mute a-tremble, and the eyes that clomb
High as her eyes, abashed, their gaze decline.
Thro’ perils of heard praise she moves benign,
Armored in her own meekness, as if come
Hither from Heaven, to give our Christendom
Even of a miracle the vouch divine.
So with beholders doth her worth avail,
It sheds, thro’ sight, a sweetness on the soul,
(Alas! how told to one that felt it never?)
And from her presence seemeth to exhale
A breath half-solace and of love the whole,
That saith to the bowed spirit ‘Sigh!’ forever.
III.
‘_Era venuta nella mente mia._’
THERE came upon my mind remembrances
Of my lost lady, who for her reward
Is now set safe, by Heaven’s Most Highest Lord,
In kingdoms of the meek, where Mary is.
And Love, whose own are her dear memories,
Called to the sighs in my heart’s wreckage stored:
‘Go!’ whereby outwardly, with one accord,
Not having ever other vent than this,
Plaining athwart my breast they flocked to air,
With speech that, oft recalled, draws unaware
The darkened tears into my mournful eyes;
And those that came in greatest anguish thence
Sang: ‘O most glorious Intelligence!
Thou art one year this day in Paradise.’
IV.
‘_Deh peregrini, che pensosi andate._’
YE pilgrims, who with pensive aspect go
Thinking, perhaps, of bygone things and dear,
Come you from lands so very far from here
As unto us who watch your port would show?
For that you weep not outright, filing slow
Thro’ the mid-highway of this city drear,
You even as gentle stranger-folk appear,
Who of the common sorrow nothing know!
Would you but linger, would you but be told,
Pledge with its thousand sighs my soul doth give
That you, likewise, should travel on heart-broken:
Ah, we have lost our Beatrice! Behold,
What least soever word be of her spoken,
The tears must follow now from all that live.
University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
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