The Project Gutenberg eBook of Poems

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Title: Poems

Author: William Ernest Henley

Release date: December 1, 1998 [eBook #1568]

Most recently updated: February 27, 2015

Language: English

Credits: Transcribed from the 1907 David Nutt edition by Diarmuid Pigott with some additional material and proofing by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS ***

Transcribed from the 1907 David Nutt edition by Diarmuid Pigott with some additional material and proofing by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

POEMS

By

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,

Though to itself it only live and die.

SHAKESPEARE

Tenth Impression

LONDON

Published by DAVID NUTT

at the Sign of the Phœnix

IN LONG ACRE

1907

First Edition printed January

1898

Second Edition printed March

1898

Third Edition printed September

1898

Fourth Edition printed January

1900

Fifth Edition printed December

1901

Sixth Impression printed August

1903

Seventh Impression printed February

1904

Eighth Impression printed May

1905

Ninth Impresion printed April

1906

Tenth Impression printed Nov.

1907

Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty

TO MY WIFE

Take, dear, my little sheaf of songs,

For, old or new,

All that is good in them belongs

Only to you;

And, singing as when all was young,

They will recall

Those others, lived but left unsung—

The bent of all.

W. E. H

APRIL 1888

SEPTEMBER 1897.

ADVERTISEMENT

My friend and publisher, Mr. Alfred Nutt, asks me to introduce this re-issue of old work in a new shape.  At his request, then, I have to say that nearly all the numbers contained in the present volume are reprinted from ‘A Book of Verses’ (1888) and ‘London Voluntaries’ (1892–3).  From the first of these I have removed some copies of verse which seemed to me scarce worth keeping; and I have recovered for it certain others from those publications which had made room for them.  I have corrected where I could, added such dates as I might, and, by re-arrangement and revision, done my best to give my book, such as it is, its final form.  If any be displeased by the result, I can but submit that my verses are my own, and that this is how I would have them read.

The work of revision has reminded me that, small as is this book of mine, it is all in the matter of verse that I have to show for the years between 1872 and 1897.  A principal reason is that, after spending the better part of my life in the pursuit of poetry, I found myself (about 1877) so utterly unmarketable that I had to own myself beaten in art, and to addict myself to journalism for the next ten years.  Came the production by my old friend, Mr. H. B. Donkin, in his little collection of ‘Voluntaries’ (1888), compiled for that East-End Hospital to which he has devoted so much time and energy and skill, of those unrhyming rhythms in which I had tried to quintessentialize, as (I believe) one scarce can do in rhyme, my impressions of the Old Edinburgh Infirmary.  They had long since been rejected by every editor of standing in London—I had well-nigh said in the world; but as soon as Mr. Nutt had read them, he entreated me to look for more.  I did as I was told; old dusty sheaves were dragged to light; the work of selection and correction was begun; I burned much; I found that, after all, the lyrical instinct had slept—not died; I ventured (in brief) ‘A Book of Verses.’  It was received with so much interest that I took heart once more, and wrote the numbers presently reprinted from ‘The National Observer’ in the collection first (1892) called ‘The Song of the Sword’ and afterwards (1893), ‘London voluntaries.’  If I have said nothing since, it is that I have nothing to say which is not, as yet, too personal—too personal and too a afflicting—for utterance.

For the matter of my book, it is there to speak for itself:—

‘Here’s a sigh to those who love me

And a smile to those who hate.’

I refer to it for the simple pleasure of reflecting that it has made me many friends and some enemies.

W. E. H.

Muswell Hill, 4th September 1897.

CONTENTS

IN HOSPITAL

PAGE

I.

Enter Patient

3

II.

Waiting

4

III.

Interior

5

IV.

Before

6

V.

Operation

7

VI.

After

9

VII.

Vigil

10

VIII.

Staff-Nurse: Old Style

13

IX.

Lady Probationer

14

X.

Staff-Nurse: New Style

15

XI.

Clinical

16

XII.

Etching

19

XIII.

Casualty

21

XIV.

Ave, Caeser!

23

XV.

‘The Chief’

24

XVI.

House-Surgeon

25

XVII.

Interlude

26

XVIII.

Children: Private Ward

28

XIX.

Srcubber

29

XX.

Visitor

30

XXI.

Romance

31

XXII.

Pastoral

33

XXIII.

Music

35

XXIV.

Suicide

37

XXV.

Apparition

39

XXVI.

Anterotics

40

XXVII.

Nocturn

41

XXVIII.

Discharged

42

ENVOY

44

THE SONG OF THE SWORD

47

ARABIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS

57

BRIC-À-BRAC

Ballade of the Toyokuni Colour-Print

79

Ballade of Youth and Age

81

Ballade of Midsummer Days and Nights

83

Ballade of Dead Actors

85

Ballade Made in the Hot Weather

87

Ballade of Truisms

89

Double Ballade of Life and Death

91

Double Ballade of the Nothingness of Things

94

At Queensferry

98

Orientale

99

In Fisherrow

100

Back-View

101

Croquis

102

Attadale, West Highlands

103

From a Window in Princes Street

104

In the Dials

105

The gods are dead

106

Let us be drunk

107

When you are old

108

Beside the idle summer sea

109

The ways of Death are soothing and serene

110

We shall surely die

111

What is to come

112

ECHOES

I.

To my mother

115

II.

Life is bitter

117

III.

O, gather me the rose

118

IV.

Out of the night that covers me

119

V.

I am the Reaper

120

VI.

Praise the generous gods

122

VII.

Fill a glass with golden wine

123

VIII.

We’ll go no more a-roving

124

IX.

Madam Life’s a piece in bloom

126

X.

The sea is full of wandering foam

127

XI.

Thick is the darkness

128

XII.

To me at my fifth-floor window

129

XIII.

Bring her again, O western wind

130

XIV.

The wan sun westers, faint and slow

131

XV.

There is a wheel inside my head

133

XVI.

While the west is paling

134

XVII.

The sands are alive with sunshine

135

XVIII.

The nightingale has a lyre of gold

136

XIX.

Your heart has trembled to my tongue

137

XX.

The surges gushed and sounded

138

XXI.

We flash across the level

139

XXII.

The West a glimmering lake of light

140

XXIII.

The skies are strown with stars

142

XXIV.

The full sea rolls and thunders

143

XXV.

In the year that’s come and gone

144

XXVI.

In the placid summer midnight

146

XXVII.

She sauntered by the swinging seas

148

XXVIII.

Blithe dreams arise to greet us

149

XXIX.

A child

152

XXX.

Kate-A-Whimsies, John-a-Dreams

154

XXXI.

O, have you blessed, behind the stars

155

XXXII.

O, Falmouth is a fine town

156

XXXIII.

The ways are green

158

XXXIV.

Life in her creaking shoes

169

XXXV.

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies

161

XXXVI.

I gave my heart to a woman

163

XXXVII.

Or ever the knightly years were gone

164

XXXVIII.

On the way to Kew

166

XXXIX.

The past was goodly once

168

XL.

The spring, my dear

169

XLI.

The Spirit of Wine

170

XLII.

A Wink from Hesper

172

XLIII.

Friends. . . old friends

173

XLIV.

If it should come to be

175

XLV.

From the brake the Nightingale

179

XLVI.

In the waste hour

178

XLVII.

Crosses and troubles

181

LONDON VOLUNTARIES

I.

Grave

185

II.

Andante con Moto

187

III.

Scherzando

192

IV.

Largo e Mesto

186

V.

Allegro Maëstoso

200

RHYMES AND RHYTHMS

PROLOGUE

207

I.

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade

209

II.

We are the Choice of the Will

211

III.

A desolate shore

214

IV.

It came with the threat of a waning moon

216

V.

Why, my heart, do we love her so?

217

VI.

One with the ruined sunset

218

VII.

There’s a regret

219

VIII.

Time and the Earth

221

IX.

As like the Woman as you can

223

X.

Midsummer midnight skies

225

XI.

Gulls in an aery morrice

227

XII.

Some starlit garden grey with dew

228

XIII.

Under a stagnant sky

229

XIV.

Fresh from his fastnesses

231

XV.

You played and sang a snatch of song

233

XVI.

Space and dread and the dark

234

XVII.

Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook

236

XVIII.

When you wake in your crib

239

XIX.

O, Time and Change

242

XX.

The shadow of Dawn

243

XXI.

When the wind storms by with a shout

244

XXII.

Trees and the menace of night

245

XXIII.

Here they trysted, here they strayed

247

XXIV.

Not to the staring Day

249

XXV.

What have I done for you

251

EPILOGUE

256

IN HOSPITAL

On ne saurait dire à quel point un homme, seul dans son

lit et malade, devient personnel.—

BALZAC.

I

ENTER PATIENT

THE morning mists still haunt the stony street;

The northern summer air is shrill and cold;

And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old,

Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet.

Thro’ the loud spaciousness and draughty gloom

A small, strange child—so agèd yet so young!—

Her little arm besplinted and beslung,

Precedes me gravely to the waiting-room.

I limp behind, my confidence all gone.

The grey-haired soldier-porter waves me on,

And on I crawl, and still my spirits fail:

A tragic meanness seems so to environ

These corridors and stairs of stone and iron,

Cold, naked, clean—half-workhouse and half-jail.

II

WAITING

A SQUARE, squat room (a cellar on promotion),

Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight;

Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware;

Scissors and lint and apothecary’s jars.

Here, on a bench a skeleton would writhe from,

Angry and sore, I wait to be admitted:

Wait till my heart is lead upon my stomach,

While at their ease two dressers do their chores.

One has a probe—it feels to me a crowbar.

A small boy sniffs and shudders after bluestone.

A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers.

Life is (I think) a blunder and a shame.

III

INTERIOR

THE gaunt brown walls

Look infinite in their decent meanness.

There is nothing of home in the noisy kettle,

The fulsome fire.

The atmosphere

Suggests the trail of a ghostly druggist.

Dressings and lint on the long, lean table—

Whom are they for?

The patients yawn,

Or lie as in training for shroud and coffin.

A nurse in the corridor scolds and wrangles.

It’s grim and strange.

Far footfalls clank.

The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged.

My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . .

O, a gruesome world!

IV

BEFORE

BEHOLD me waiting—waiting for the knife.

A little while, and at a leap I storm

The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,

The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.

The gods are good to me: I have no wife,

No innocent child, to think of as I near

The fateful minute; nothing all-too dear

Unmans me for my bout of passive strife.

Yet am I tremulous and a trifle sick,

And, face to face with chance, I shrink a little:

My hopes are strong, my will is something weak.

Here comes the basket?  Thank you.  I am ready.

But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle:

You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!

V

OPERATION

YOU are carried in a basket,

Like a carcase from the shambles,

To the theatre, a cockpit

Where they stretch you on a table.

Then they bid you close your eyelids,

And they mask you with a napkin,

And the anæsthetic reaches

Hot and subtle through your being.

And you gasp and reel and shudder

In a rushing, swaying rapture,

While the voices at your elbow

Fade—receding—fainter—farther.

Lights about you shower and tumble,

And your blood seems crystallising—

Edged and vibrant, yet within you

Racked and hurried back and forward.

Then the lights grow fast and furious,

And you hear a noise of waters,

And you wrestle, blind and dizzy,

In an agony of effort,

Till a sudden lull accepts you,

And you sound an utter darkness . . .

And awaken . . . with a struggle . . .

On a hushed, attentive audience.

VI

AFTER

LIKE as a flamelet blanketed in smoke,

So through the anæsthetic shows my life;

So flashes and so fades my thought, at strife

With the strong stupor that I heave and choke

And sicken at, it is so foully sweet.

Faces look strange from space—and disappear.

Far voices, sudden loud, offend my ear—

And hush as sudden.  Then my senses fleet:

All were a blank, save for this dull, new pain

That grinds my leg and foot; and brokenly

Time and the place glimpse on to me again;

And, unsurprised, out of uncertainty,

I wake—relapsing—somewhat faint and fain,

To an immense, complacent dreamery.

VII

VIGIL

LIVED on one’s back,

In the long hours of repose,

Life is a practical nightmare—

Hideous asleep or awake.

Shoulders and loins

Ache - - - !

Ache, and the mattress,

Run into boulders and hummocks,

Glows like a kiln, while the bedclothes—

Tumbling, importunate, daft—

Ramble and roll, and the gas,

Screwed to its lowermost,

An inevitable atom of light,

Haunts, and a stertorous sleeper

Snores me to hate and despair.

All the old time

Surges malignant before me;

Old voices, old kisses, old songs

Blossom derisive about me;

While the new days

Pass me in endless procession:

A pageant of shadows

Silently, leeringly wending

On . . . and still on . . . still on!

Far in the stillness a cat

Languishes loudly.  A cinder

Falls, and the shadows

Lurch to the leap of the flame.  The next man to me

Turns with a moan; and the snorer,

The drug like a rope at his throat,

Gasps, gurgles, snorts himself free, as the night-nurse,

Noiseless and strange,

Her bull’s eye half-lanterned in apron,

(Whispering me, ‘Are ye no sleepin’ yet?’),

Passes, list-slippered and peering,

Round . . . and is gone.

Sleep comes at last—

Sleep full of dreams and misgivings—

Broken with brutal and sordid

Voices and sounds that impose on me,

Ere I can wake to it,

The unnatural, intolerable day.

VIII

STAFF-NURSE: OLD STYLE

THE greater masters of the commonplace,

REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER—only these

Could paint her all to you: experienced ease

And antique liveliness and ponderous grace;

The sweet old roses of her sunken face;

The depth and malice of her sly, grey eyes;

The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds, defies;

The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace.

These thirty years has she been nursing here,

Some of them under SYME, her hero still.

Much is she worth, and even more is made of her.

Patients and students hold her very dear.

The doctors love her, tease her, use her skill.

They say ‘The Chief’ himself is half-afraid of her.

IX

LADY-PROBATIONER

SOME three, or five, or seven, and thirty years;

A Roman nose; a dimpling double-chin;

Dark eyes and shy that, ignorant of sin,

Are yet acquainted, it would seem, with tears;

A comely shape; a slim, high-coloured hand,

Graced, rather oddly, with a signet ring;

A bashful air, becoming everything;

A well-bred silence always at command.

Her plain print gown, prim cap, and bright steel chain

Look out of place on her, and I remain

Absorbed in her, as in a pleasant mystery.

Quick, skilful, quiet, soft in speech and touch . . .

‘Do you like nursing?’  ‘Yes, Sir, very much.’

Somehow, I rather think she has a history.

X

STAFF-NURSE: NEW STYLE

BLUE-EYED and bright of face but waning fast

Into the sere of virginal decay,

I view her as she enters, day by day,

As a sweet sunset almost overpast.

Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,

Superbly falls her gown of sober gray,

And on her chignon’s elegant array

The plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.

She talks BEETHOVEN; frowns disapprobation

At BALZAC’S name, sighs it at ‘poor GEORGE SAND’S’;

Knows that she has exceeding pretty hands;

Speaks Latin with a right accentuation;

And gives at need (as one who understands)

Draught, counsel, diagnosis, exhortation.

XI

CLINICAL

HIST? . . .

Through the corridor’s echoes,

Louder and nearer

Comes a great shuffling of feet.

Quick, every one of you,

Strighten your quilts, and be decent!

Here’s the Professor.

In he comes first

With the bright look we know,

From the broad, white brows the kind eyes

Soothing yet nerving you.  Here at his elbow,

White-capped, white-aproned, the Nurse,

Towel on arm and her inkstand

Fretful with quills.

Here in the ruck, anyhow,

Surging along,

Louts, duffers, exquisites, students, and prigs—

Whiskers and foreheads, scarf-pins and spectacles—

Hustles the Class!  And they ring themselves

Round the first bed, where the Chief

(His dressers and clerks at attention),

Bends in inspection already.

So shows the ring

Seen from behind round a conjurer

Doing his pitch in the street.

High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow ones,

Round, square, and angular, serry and shove;

While from within a voice,

Gravely and weightily fluent,

Sounds; and then ceases; and suddenly

(Look at the stress of the shoulders!)

Out of a quiver of silence,

Over the hiss of the spray,

Comes a low cry, and the sound

Of breath quick intaken through teeth

Clenched in resolve.  And the Master

Breaks from the crowd, and goes,

Wiping his hands,

To the next bed, with his pupils

Flocking and whispering behind him.

Now one can see.

Case Number One

Sits (rather pale) with his bedclothes

Stripped up, and showing his foot

(Alas for God’s Image!)

Swaddled in wet, white lint

Brilliantly hideous with red.

XII

ETCHING

TWO and thirty is the ploughman.

He’s a man of gallant inches,

And his hair is close and curly,

And his beard;

But his face is wan and sunken,

And his eyes are large and brilliant,

And his shoulder-blades are sharp,

And his knees.

He is weak of wits, religious,

Full of sentiment and yearning,

Gentle, faded—with a cough

And a snore.

When his wife (who was a widow,

And is many years his elder)

Fails to write, and that is always,

He desponds.

Let his melancholy wander,

And he’ll tell you pretty stories

Of the women that have wooed him

Long ago;

Or he’ll sing of bonnie lasses

Keeping sheep among the heather,

With a crackling, hackling click

In his voice.

XIII

CASUALTY

AS with varnish red and glistening

Dripped his hair; his feet looked rigid;

Raised, he settled stiffly sideways:

You could see his hurts were spinal.

He had fallen from an engine,

And been dragged along the metals.

It was hopeless, and they knew it;

So they covered him, and left him.

As he lay, by fits half sentient,

Inarticulately moaning,

With his stockinged soles protruded

Stark and awkward from the blankets,

To his bed there came a woman,

Stood and looked and sighed a little,

And departed without speaking,

As himself a few hours after.

I was told it was his sweetheart.

They were on the eve of marriage.

She was quiet as a statue,

But her lip was grey and writhen.

XIV

AVE CAESER!

FROM the winter’s grey despair,

From the summer’s golden languor,

Death, the lover of Life,

Frees us for ever.

Inevitable, silent, unseen,

Everywhere always,

Shadow by night and as light in the day,

Signs she at last to her chosen;

And, as she waves them forth,

Sorrow and Joy

Lay by their looks and their voices,

Set down their hopes, and are made

One in the dim Forever.

Into the winter’s grey delight,

Into the summer’s golden dream,

Holy and high and impartial,

Death, the mother of Life,

Mingles all men for ever.

XV

‘THE CHIEF’

HIS brow spreads large and placid, and his eye

Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still.

Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfill—

His face at once benign and proud and shy.

If envy scout, if ignorance deny,

His faultless patience, his unyielding will,

Beautiful gentleness and splendid skill,

Innumerable gratitudes reply.

His wise, rare smile is sweet with certainties,

And seems in all his patients to compel

Such love and faith as failure cannot quell.

We hold him for another Herakles,

Battling with custom, prejudice, disease,

As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.

XVI

HOUSE-SURGEON

EXCEEDING tall, but built so well his height

Half-disappears in flow of chest and limb;

Moustache and whisker trooper-like in trim;

Frank-faced, frank-eyed, frank-hearted; always bright

And always punctual—morning, noon, and night;

Bland as a Jesuit, sober as a hymn;

Humorous, and yet without a touch of whim;

Gentle and amiable, yet full of fight.

His piety, though fresh and true in strain,

Has not yet whitewashed up his common mood

To the dead blank of his particular Schism.

Sweet, unaggressive, tolerant, most humane,

Wild artists like his kindly elderhood,

And cultivate his mild Philistinism.

XVII

INTERLUDE

O, THE fun, the fun and frolic

That The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Scatters through a penny-whistle

Tickled with artistic fingers!

Kate the scrubber (forty summers,

Stout but sportive) treads a measure,

Grinning, in herself a ballet,

Fixed as fate upon her audience.

Stumps are shaking, crutch-supported;

Splinted fingers tap the rhythm;

And a head all helmed with plasters

Wags a measured approbation.

Of their mattress-life oblivious,

All the patients, brisk and cheerful,

Are encouraging the dancer,

And applauding the musician.

Dim the gas-lights in the output

Of so many ardent smokers,

Full of shadow lurch the corners,

And the doctor peeps and passes.

There are, maybe, some suspicions

Of an alcoholic presence . . .

‘Tak’ a sup of this, my wumman!’ . . .

New Year comes but once a twelvemonth.

XVIII

CHILDREN: PRIVATE WARD

HERE in this dim, dull, double-bedded room,

I play the father to a brace of boys,

Ailing but apt for every sort of noise,

Bedfast but brilliant yet with health and bloom.

Roden, the Irishman, is ‘sieven past,’

Blue-eyed, snub-nosed, chubby, and fair of face.

Willie’s but six, and seems to like the place,

A cheerful little collier to the last.

They eat, and laugh, and sing, and fight, all day;

All night they sleep like dormice.  See them play

At Operations:—Roden, the Professor,

Saws, lectures, takes the artery up, and ties;

Willie, self-chloroformed, with half-shut eyes,

Holding the limb and moaning—Case and Dresser.

XIX

SCRUBBER

SHE’S tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face

With flashes of the old fun’s animation

There lowers the fixed and peevish resignation

Bred of a past where troubles came apace.

She tells me that her husband, ere he died,

Saw seven of their children pass away,

And never knew the little lass at play

Out on the green, in whom he’s deified.

Her kin dispersed, her friends forgot and gone,

All simple faith her honest Irish mind,

Scolding her spoiled young saint, she labours on:

Telling her dreams, taking her patients’ part,

Trailing her coat sometimes: and you shall find

No rougher, quainter speech, nor kinder heart.

XX

VISITOR

HER little face is like a walnut shell

With wrinkling lines; her soft, white hair adorns

Her withered brows in quaint, straight curls, like horns;

And all about her clings an old, sweet smell.

Prim is her gown and quakerlike her shawl.

Well might her bonnets have been born on her.

Can you conceive a Fairy Godmother

The subject of a strong religious call?

In snow or shine, from bed to bed she runs,

All twinkling smiles and texts and pious tales,

Her mittened hands, that ever give or pray,

Bearing a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns:

A wee old maid that sweeps the Bridegroom’s way,

Strong in a cheerful trust that never fails.

XXI

ROMANCE

‘TALK of pluck!’ pursued the Sailor,

Set at euchre on his elbow,

‘I was on the wharf at Charleston,

Just ashore from off the runner.

‘It was grey and dirty weather,

And I heard a drum go rolling,

Rub-a-dubbing in the distance,

Awful dour-like and defiant.

‘In and out among the cotton,

Mud, and chains, and stores, and anchors,

Tramped a squad of battered scarecrows—

Poor old Dixie’s bottom dollar!

‘Some had shoes, but all had rifles,

Them that wasn’t bald was beardless,

And the drum was rolling Dixie,

And they stepped to it like men, sir!

‘Rags and tatters, belts and bayonets,

On they swung, the drum a-rolling,

Mum and sour.  It looked like fighting,

And they meant it too, by thunder!’

XXII

PASTORAL

IT’S the Spring.

Earth has conceived, and her bosom,

Teeming with summer, is glad.

Vistas of change and adventure,

Thro’ the green land

The grey roads go beckoning and winding,

Peopled with wains, and melodious

With harness-bells jangling:

Jangling and twangling rough rhythms

To the slow march of the stately, great horses

Whistled and shouted along.

White fleets of cloud,

Argosies heavy with fruitfulness,

Sail the blue peacefully.  Green flame the hedgerows.

Blackbirds are bugling, and white in wet winds

Sway the tall poplars.

Pageants of colour and fragrance,

Pass the sweet meadows, and viewless

Walks the mild spirit of May,

Visibly blessing the world.

O, the brilliance of blossoming orchards!

O, the savour and thrill of the woods,

When their leafage is stirred

By the flight of the Angel of Rain!

Loud lows the steer; in the fallows

Rooks are alert; and the brooks

Gurgle and tinkle and trill.  Thro’ the gloamings,

Under the rare, shy stars,

Boy and girl wander,

Dreaming in darkness and dew.

It’s the Spring.

A sprightliness feeble and squalid

Wakes in the ward, and I sicken,

Impotent, winter at heart.

XXIII

MUSIC

DOWN the quiet eve,

Thro’ my window with the sunset

Pipes to me a distant organ

Foolish ditties;

And, as when you change

Pictures in a magic lantern,

Books, beds, bottles, floor, and ceiling

Fade and vanish,

And I’m well once more . . .

August flares adust and torrid,

But my heart is full of April

Sap and sweetness.

In the quiet eve

I am loitering, longing, dreaming . . .

Dreaming, and a distant organ

Pipes me ditties.

I can see the shop,

I can smell the sprinkled pavement,

Where she serves—her chestnut chignon

Thrills my senses!

O, the sight and scent,

Wistful eve and perfumed pavement!

In the distance pipes an organ . . .

The sensation

Comes to me anew,

And my spirit for a moment

Thro’ the music breathes the blessèd

Airs of London.

XXIV

SUICIDE

STARING corpselike at the ceiling,

See his harsh, unrazored features,

Ghastly brown against the pillow,

And his throat—so strangely bandaged!

Lack of work and lack of victuals,

A debauch of smuggled whisky,

And his children in the workhouse

Made the world so black a riddle

That he plunged for a solution;

And, although his knife was edgeless,

He was sinking fast towards one,

When they came, and found, and saved him.

Stupid now with shame and sorrow,

In the night I hear him sobbing.

But sometimes he talks a little.

He has told me all his troubles.

In his broad face, tanned and bloodless,

White and wild his eyeballs glisten;

And his smile, occult and tragic,

Yet so slavish, makes you shudder!

XXV

APPARITION

THIN-LEGGED, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,

Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face—

Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,

Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,

The brown eyes radiant with vivacity—

There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,

A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace

Of passion and impudence and energy.

Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,

Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,

Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:

A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,

And something of the Shorter-Catechist.

XXVI

ANTEROTICS

LAUGHS the happy April morn

Thro’ my grimy, little window,

And a shaft of sunshine pushes

Thro’ the shadows in the square.

Dogs are tracing thro’ the grass,

Crows are cawing round the chimneys,

In and out among the washing

Goes the West at hide-and-seek.

Loud and cheerful clangs the bell.

Here the nurses troop to breakfast.

Handsome, ugly, all are women . . .

O, the Spring—the Spring—the Spring!

XXVII

NOCTURN

AT the barren heart of midnight,

When the shadow shuts and opens

As the loud flames pulse and flutter,

I can hear a cistern leaking.

Dripping, dropping, in a rhythm,

Rough, unequal, half-melodious,

Like the measures aped from nature

In the infancy of music;

Like the buzzing of an insect,

Still, irrational, persistent . . .

I must listen, listen, listen

In a passion of attention;

Till it taps upon my heartstrings,

And my very life goes dripping,

Dropping, dripping, drip-drip-dropping,

In the drip-drop of the cistern.

XXVIII

DISCHARGED

CARRY me out

Into the wind and the sunshine,

Into the beautiful world.

O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!

The stature and strength of the horses,

The rustle and echo of footfalls,

The flat roar and rattle of wheels!

A swift tram floats huge on us . . .

It’s a dream?

The smell of the mud in my nostrils

Blows brave—like a breath of the sea!

As of old,

Ambulant, undulant drapery,

Vaguery and strangely provocative,

Fluttersd and beckons.  O, yonder—

Is it?—the gleam of a stocking!

Sudden, a spire

Wedged in the mist!  O, the houses,

The long lines of lofty, grey houses,

Cross-hatched with shadow and light!

These are the streets . . .

Each is an avenue leading

Whither I will!

Free . . . !

Dizzy, hysterical, faint,

I sit, and the carriage rolls on with me

Into the wonderful world.

THE OLD INFIRMARY, EDINBURGH, 1873–75

ENVOY

To CHARLES BAXTER

DO you remember

That afternoon—that Sunday afternoon!—

When, as the kirks were ringing in,

And the grey city teemed

With Sabbath feelings and aspects,

LEWIS—our LEWIS then,

Now the whole world’s—and you,

Young, yet in shape most like an elder, came,

Laden with BALZACS

(Big, yellow books, quite impudently French),

The first of many times

To that transformed back-kitchen where I lay

So long, so many centuries—

Or years is it!—ago?

Dear CHARLES, since then

We have been friends, LEWIS and you and I,

(How good it sounds, ‘LEWIS and you and I!’):

Such friends, I like to think,

That in us three, LEWIS and me and you,

Is something of that gallant dream

Which old DUMAS—the generous, the humane,

The seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven!—

Dreamed for a blessing to the race,

The immortal Musketeers.

Our ATHOS rests—the wise, the kind,

The liberal and august, his fault atoned,

Rests in the crowded yard

There at the west of Princes Street.  We three—

You, I, and LEWIS!—still afoot,

Are still together, and our lives,

In chime so long, may keep

(God bless the thought!)

Unjangled till the end.

W. E. H.

CHISWICK, March 1888

THE SONG

OF THE SWORD

(To Rudyard Kipling)

1890

The Sword

Singing—

The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword

Clanging imperious

Forth from Time’s battlements

His ancient and triumphing Song.

In the beginning,

Ere God inspired Himself

Into the clay thing

Thumbed to His image,

The vacant, the naked shell

Soon to be Man:

Thoughtful He pondered it,

Prone there and impotent,

Fragile, inviting

Attack and discomfiture;

Then, with a smile—

As He heard in the Thunder

That laughed over Eden

The voice of the Trumpet,

The iron Beneficence,

Calling his dooms

To the Winds of the world—

Stooping, He drew

On the sand with His finger

A shape for a sign

Of his way to the eyes

That in wonder should waken,

For a proof of His will

To the breaking intelligence.

That was the birth of me:

I am the Sword.

Bleak and lean, grey and cruel,

Short-hilted, long shafted,

I froze into steel;

And the blood of my elder,

His hand on the hafts of me,

Sprang like a wave

In the wind, as the sense

Of his strength grew to ecstasy;

Glowed like a coal

In the throat of the furnace;

As he knew me and named me

The War-Thing, the Comrade,

Father of honour

And giver of kingship,

The fame-smith, the song-master,

Bringer of women

On fire at his hands

For the pride of fulfilment,

Priest (saith the Lord)

Of his marriage with victory

Ho! then, the Trumpet,

Handmaid of heroes,

Calling the peers

To the place of espousals!

Ho! then, the splendour

And glare of my ministry,

Clothing the earth

With a livery of lightnings!

Ho! then, the music

Of battles in onset,

And ruining armours,

And God’s gift returning

In fury to God!

Thrilling and keen

As the song of the winter stars,

Ho! then, the sound

Of my voice, the implacable

Angel of Destiny!—

I am the Sword.

Heroes, my children,

Follow, O, follow me!

Follow, exulting

In the great light that breaks

From the sacred Companionship!

Thrust through the fatuous,

Thrust through the fungous brood,

Spawned in my shadow

And gross with my gift!

Thrust through, and hearken

O, hark, to the Trumpet,

The Virgin of Battles,

Calling, still calling you

Into the Presence,

Sons of the Judgment,

Pure wafts of the Will!

Edged to annihilate,

Hilted with government,

Follow, O, follow me,

Till the waste places

All the grey globe over

Ooze, as the honeycomb

Drips, with the sweetness

Distilled of my strength,

And, teeming in peace

Through the wrath of my coming,

They give back in beauty

The dread and the anguish

They had of me visitant!

Follow, O follow, then,

Heroes, my harvesters!

Where the tall grain is ripe

Thrust in your sickles!

Stripped and adust

In a stubble of empire,

Scything and binding

The full sheaves of sovranty:

Thus, O, thus gloriously,

Shall you fulfil yourselves!

Thus, O, thus mightily,

Show yourselves sons of mine—

Yea, and win grace of me:

I am the Sword!

I am the feast-maker:

Hark, through a noise

Of the screaming of eagles,

Hark how the Trumpet,

The mistress of mistresses,

Calls, silver-throated

And stern, where the tables

Are spread, and the meal

Of the Lord is in hand!

Driving the darkness,

Even as the banners

And spears of the Morning;

Sifting the nations,

The slag from the metal,

The waste and the weak

From the fit and the strong;

Fighting the brute,

The abysmal Fecundity;

Checking the gross,

Multitudinous blunders,

The groping, the purblind

Excesses in service

Of the Womb universal,

The absolute drudge;

Firing the charactry

Carved on the World,

The miraculous gem

In the seal-ring that burns

On the hand of the Master—

Yea! and authority

Flames through the dim,

Unappeasable Grisliness

Prone down the nethermost

Chasms of the Void!—

Clear singing, clean slicing;

Sweet spoken, soft finishing;

Making death beautiful,

Life but a coin

To be staked in the pastime

Whose playing is more

Than the transfer of being;

Arch-anarch, chief builder,

Prince and evangelist,

I am the Will of God:

I am the Sword.

The Sword

Singing—

The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword

Clanging majestical,

As from the starry-staired

Courts of the primal Supremacy,

His high, irresistible song.

ARABIAN NIGHTS’

ENTERTAINMENTS

(To Elizabeth Robins Pennell)

1893

‘O mes chères Mille et Une Nuits!’—Fantasio.

ONCE on a time

There was a little boy: a master-mage

By virtue of a Book

Of magic—O, so magical it filled

His life with visionary pomps

Processional!  And Powers

Passed with him where he passed.  And Thrones

And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed,

Thronged in the criss-cross streets,

The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields,

Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades,

Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul

Pavilioned jealously, and hid

As in the dusk, profound,

Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.—

I shut mine eyes . . . And lo!

A flickering snatch of memory that floats

Upon the face of a pool of darkness five

And thirty dead years deep,

Antic in girlish broideries

And skirts and silly shoes with straps

And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks

Plain in the shadow of a church

(St. Michael’s: in whose brazen call

To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed),

Sedate for all his haste

To be at home; and, nestled in his arm,

Inciting still to quiet and solitude,

Boarded in sober drab,

With small, square, agitating cuts

Let in a-top of the double-columned, close,

Quakerlike print, a Book! . . .

What but that blessed brief

Of what is gallantest and best

In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance?

The Book of rocs,

Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris,

Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars,

And ghouls, and genies—O, so huge

They might have overed the tall Minster Tower

Hands down, as schoolboys take a post!

In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman,

Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade

The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour,

Cairo and Serendib and Candahar,

And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk—

Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms—

Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles,

The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!

Old friends I had a-many—kindly and grim

Familiars, cronies quaint

And goblin!  Never a Wood but housed

Some morrice of dainty dapperlings.  No Brook

But had his nunnery

Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites,

To cabin in his grots, and pace

His lilied margents.  Every lone Hillside

Might open upon Elf-Land.  Every Stalk

That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed

Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs

You climbed beyond the clouds, and found

The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged

And drowsy, from his great oak chair,

Among the flitches and pewters at the fire,

Called for his Faëry Harp.  And in it flew,

And, perching on the kitchen table, sang

Jocund and jubilant, with a sound

Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals

The shy thrush at mid-May

Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn;

Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still,

In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring,

For Pan’s own whistle, savage and rich and lewd,

And mocked him call for call!

I could not pass

The half-door where the cobbler sat in view

Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun,

In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes,

Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know

Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched

His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists

And elbows.  In the rich June fields,

Where the ripe clover drew the bees,

And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind

Lolled his half-holiday away

Beside me lolling and lounging through my own,

’Twas good to follow the Miller’s Youngest Son

On his white horse along the leafy lanes;

For at his stirrup linked and ran,

Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped

From wall to wall above the espaliers,

But in the bravest tops

That market-town, a town of tops, could show:

Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail

A banner flaunted in disdain

Of human stratagems and shifts:

King over All the Catlands, present and past

And future, that moustached

Artificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots!

Or Bluebeard’s Closet, with its plenishing

Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood,

And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases—

Odd-fangled, most a butcher’s, part

A faëry chamber hazily seen

And hazily figured—on dark afternoons

And windy nights was visiting of the best.

Then, too, the pelt of hoofs

Out in the roaring darkness told

Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm

Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit,

Between his hell-born Hounds.

And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear,

Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall,

The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls

Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins;

For, listening, I could help him play

His wonderful game,

In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners

Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.

But what were these so near,

So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought

The run of Ali Baba’s Cave

Just for the saying ‘Open Sesame,’

With gold to measure, peck by peck,

In round, brown wooden stoups

You borrowed at the chandler’s? . . . Or one time

Made you Aladdin’s friend at school,

Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp

In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair

For all the embrowning scars in their white breasts

Went labouring under some dread ordinance,

Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while,

Strange Curs that cried as they,

Till there was never a Black Bitch of all

Your consorting but might have gone

Spell-driven miserably for crimes

Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . .

Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night,

While you lay wondering and acold,

Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon

Queen Labé, abominable and dear,

Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom,

Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw

Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk),

And muttered certain words you could not hear;

And there! a living stream,

The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags

And cresses, glittered and sang

Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness,

Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .

I was—how many a time!—

That Second Calendar, Son of a King,

On whom ’twas vehemently enjoined,

Pausing at one mysterious door,

To pry no closer, but content his soul

With his kind Forty.  Yet I could not rest

For idleness and ungovernable Fate.

And the Black Horse, which fed on sesame

(That wonder-working word!),

Vouchsafed his back to me, and spread his vans,

And soaring, soaring on

From air to air, came charging to the ground

Sheer, like a lark from the midsummer clouds,

And, shaking me out of the saddle, where I sprawled

Flicked at me with his tail,

And left me blinded, miserable, distraught

(Even as I was in deed,

When doctors came, and odious things were done

On my poor tortured eyes

With lancets; or some evil acid stung

And wrung them like hot sand,

And desperately from room to room

Fumble I must my dark, disconsolate way),

To get to Bagdad how I might.  But there

I met with Merry Ladies.  O you three—

Safie, Amine, Zobëidé—when my heart

Forgets you all shall be forgot!

And so we supped, we and the rest,

On wine and roasted lamb, rose-water, dates,

Almonds, pistachios, citrons.  And Haroun

Laughed out of his lordly beard

On Giaffar and Mesrour (I knew the Three

For all their Mossoul habits).  And outside

The Tigris, flowing swift

Like Severn bend for bend, twinkled and gleamed

With broken and wavering shapes of stranger stars;

The vast, blue night

Was murmurous with peris’ plumes

And the leathern wings of genies; words of power

Were whispering; and old fishermen,

Casting their nets with prayer, might draw to shore

Dead loveliness: or a prodigy in scales

Worth in the Caliph’s Kitchen pieces of gold:

Or copper vessels, stopped with lead,

Wherein some Squire of Eblis watched and railed,

In durance under potent charactry

Graven by the seal of Solomon the King . . .

Then, as the Book was glassed

In Life as in some olden mirror’s quaint,

Bewildering angles, so would Life

Flash light on light back on the Book; and both

Were changed.  Once in a house decayed

From better days, harbouring an errant show

(For all its stories of dry-rot

Were filled with gruesome visitants in wax,

Inhuman, hushed, ghastly with Painted Eyes),

I wandered; and no living soul

Was nearer than the pay-box; and I stared

Upon them staring—staring.  Till at last,

Three sets of rafters from the streets,

I strayed upon a mildewed, rat-run room,

With the two Dancers, horrible and obscene,

Guarding the door: and there, in a bedroom-set,

Behind a fence of faded crimson cords,

With an aspect of frills

And dimities and dishonoured privacy

That made you hanker and hesitate to look,

A Woman with her litter of Babes—all slain,

All in their nightgowns, all with Painted Eyes

Staring—still staring; so that I turned and ran

As for my neck, but in the street

Took breath.  The same, it seemed,

And yet not all the same, I was to find,

As I went up!  For afterwards,

Whenas I went my round alone—

All day alone—in long, stern, silent streets,

Where I might stretch my hand and take

Whatever I would: still there were Shapes of Stone,

Motionless, lifelike, frightening—for the Wrath

Had smitten them; but they watched,

This by her melons and figs, that by his rings

And chains and watches, with the hideous gaze,

The Painted Eyes insufferable,

Now, of those grisly images; and I

Pursued my best-belovéd quest,

Thrilled with a novel and delicious fear.

So the night fell—with never a lamplighter;

And through the Palace of the King

I groped among the echoes, and I felt

That they were there,

Dreadfully there, the Painted staring Eyes,

Hall after hall . . . Till lo! from far

A Voice!  And in a little while

Two tapers burning!  And the Voice,

Heard in the wondrous Word of God, was—whose?

Whose but Zobëidé’s,

The lady of my heart, like me

A True Believer, and like me

An outcast thousands of leagues beyond the pale! . . .

Or, sailing to the Isles

Of Khaledan, I spied one evenfall

A black blotch in the sunset; and it grew

Swiftly . . . and grew.  Tearing their beards,

The sailors wept and prayed; but the grave ship,

Deep laden with spiceries and pearls, went mad,

Wrenched the long tiller out of the steersman’s hand,

And, turning broadside on,

As the most iron would, was haled and sucked

Nearer, and nearer yet;

And, all awash, with horrible lurching leaps

Rushed at that Portent, casting a shadow now

That swallowed sea and sky; and then,

Anchors and nails and bolts

Flew screaming out of her, and with clang on clang,

A noise of fifty stithies, caught at the sides

Of the Magnetic Mountain; and she lay,

A broken bundle of firewood, strown piecemeal

About the waters; and her crew

Passed shrieking, one by one; and I was left

To drown.  All the long night I swam;

But in the morning, O, the smiling coast

Tufted with date-trees, meadowlike,

Skirted with shelving sands!  And a great wave

Cast me ashore; and I was saved alive.

So, giving thanks to God, I dried my clothes,

And, faring inland, in a desert place

I stumbled on an iron ring—

The fellow of fifty built into the Quays:

When, scenting a trap-door,

I dug, and dug; until my biggest blade

Stuck into wood.  And then,

The flight of smooth-hewn, easy-falling stairs,

Sunk in the naked rock!  The cool, clean vault,

So neat with niche on niche it might have been

Our beer-cellar but for the rows

Of brazen urns (like monstrous chemist’s jars)

Full to the wide, squat throats

With gold-dust, but a-top

A layer of pickled-walnut-looking things

I knew for olives!  And far, O, far away,

The Princess of China languished!  Far away

Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief

Of Eunuchs and the privilege

Of going out at night

To play—unkenned, majestical, secure—

Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped

Like Tigris shore for shore!  Haply a Ghoul

Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon,

A thighbone in his fist, and glared

At supper with a Lady: she who took

Her rice with tweezers grain by grain.

Or you might stumble—there by the iron gates

Of the Pump Room—underneath the limes—

Upon Bedreddin in his shirt and drawers,

Just as the civil Genie laid him down.

Or those red-curtained panes,

Whence a tame cornet tenored it throatily

Of beer-pots and spittoons and new long pipes,

Might turn a caravansery’s, wherein

You found Noureddin Ali, loftily drunk,

And that fair Persian, bathed in tears,

You’d not have given away

For all the diamonds in the Vale Perilous

You had that dark and disleaved afternoon

Escaped on a roc’s claw,

Disguised like Sindbad—but in Christmas beef!

And all the blissful while

The schoolboy satchel at your hip

Was such a bulse of gems as should amaze

Grey-whiskered chapmen drawn

From over Caspian: yea, the Chief Jewellers

Of Tartary and the bazaars,

Seething with traffic, of enormous Ind.—

Thus cried, thus called aloud, to the child heart

The magian East: thus the child eyes

Spelled out the wizard message by the light

Of the sober, workaday hours

They saw, week in week out, pass, and still pass

In the sleepy Minster City, folded kind

In ancient Severn’s arm,

Amongst her water-meadows and her docks,

Whose floating populace of ships—

Galliots and luggers, light-heeled brigantines,

Bluff barques and rake-hell fore-and-afters—brought

To her very doorsteps and geraniums

The scents of the World’s End; the calls

That may not be gainsaid to rise and ride

Like fire on some high errand of the race;

The irresistible appeals

For comradeship that sound

Steadily from the irresistible sea.

Thus the East laughed and whispered, and the tale,

Telling itself anew

In terms of living, labouring life,

Took on the colours, busked it in the wear

Of life that lived and laboured; and Romance,

The Angel-Playmate, raining down

His golden influences

On all I saw, and all I dreamed and did,

Walked with me arm in arm,

Or left me, as one bediademed with straws

And bits of glass, to gladden at my heart

Who had the gift to seek and feel and find

His fiery-hearted presence everywhere.

Even so dear Hesper, bringer of all good things,

Sends the same silver dews

Of happiness down her dim, delighted skies

On some poor collier-hamlet—(mound on mound

Of sifted squalor; here a soot-throated stalk

Sullenly smoking over a row

Of flat-faced hovels; black in the gritty air

A web of rails and wheels and beams; with strings

Of hurtling, tipping trams)—

As on the amorous nightingales

And roses of Shíraz, or the walls and towers

Of Samarcand—the Ineffable—whence you espy

The splendour of Ginnistan’s embattled spears,

Like listed lightnings.

Samarcand!

That name of names!  That star-vaned belvedere

Builded against the Chambers of the South!

That outpost on the Infinite!

And behold!

Questing therefrom, you knew not what wild tide

Might overtake you: for one fringe,

One suburb, is stablished on firm earth; but one

Floats founded vague

In lubberlands delectable—isles of palm

And lotus, fortunate mains, far-shimmering seas,

The promise of wistful hills—

The shining, shifting Sovranties of Dream.

BRIC-À-BRAC

1877–1888

‘The tune of the time.’—HAMLET, concerning OSRIC

BALLADE OF A TOYOKUNI COLOUR-PRINT

To W. A.

WAS I a Samurai renowned,

Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow?

A histrion angular and profound?

A priest? a porter?—Child, although

I have forgotten clean, I know

That in the shade of Fujisan,

What time the cherry-orchards blow,

I loved you once in old Japan.

As here you loiter, flowing-gowned

And hugely sashed, with pins a-row

Your quaint head as with flamelets crowned,

Demure, inviting—even so,

When merry maids in Miyako

To feel the sweet o’ the year began,

And green gardens to overflow,

I loved you once in old Japan.

Clear shine the hills; the rice-fields round

Two cranes are circling; sleepy and slow,

A blue canal the lake’s blue bound

Breaks at the bamboo bridge; and lo!

Touched with the sundown’s spirit and glow,

I see you turn, with flirted fan,

Against the plum-tree’s bloomy snow . . .

I loved you once in old Japan!

Envoy

Dear, ’twas a dozen lives ago;

But that I was a lucky man

The Toyokuni here will show:

I loved you—once—in old Japan.

BALLADE

(DOUBLE REFRAIN)

OF YOUTH AND AGE

I. M.

Thomas Edward Brown

(1829–1896)

SPRING at her height on a morn at prime,

Sails that laugh from a flying squall,

Pomp of harmony, rapture of rhyme—

Youth is the sign of them, one and all.

Winter sunsets and leaves that fall,

An empty flagon, a folded page,

A tumble-down wheel, a tattered ball—

These are a type of the world of Age.

Bells that clash in a gaudy chime,

Swords that clatter in onsets tall,

The words that ring and the fames that climb—

Youth is the sign of them, one and all.

Hymnals old in a dusty stall,

A bald, blind bird in a crazy cage,

The scene of a faded festival—

These are a type of the world of Age.

Hours that strut as the heirs of time,

Deeds whose rumour’s a clarion-call,

Songs where the singers their souls sublime—

Youth is the sign of them, one and all.

A staff that rests in a nook of wall,

A reeling battle, a rusted gage,

The chant of a nearing funeral—

These are a type of the world of Age.

Envoy

Struggle and turmoil, revel and brawl—

Youth is the sign of them, one and all.

A smouldering hearth and a silent stage—

These are a type of the world of Age.

BALLADE

(DOUBLE REFRAIN)

OF MIDSUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS

To W. H.

WITH a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams

The full world rolls in a rhythm of praise,

And the winds are one with the clouds and beams—

Midsummer days!  Midsummer days!

The dusk grows vast; in a purple haze,

While the West from a rapture of sunset rights,

Faint stars their exquisite lamps upraise—

Midsummer nights!  O midsummer nights!

The wood’s green heart is a nest of dreams,

The lush grass thickens and springs and sways,

The rathe wheat rustles, the landscape gleams—

Midsummer days!  Midsummer days!

In the stilly fields, in the stilly ways,

All secret shadows and mystic lights,

Late lovers murmur and linger and gaze—

Midsummer nights!  O midsummer nights!

There’s a music of bells from the trampling teams,

Wild skylarks hover, the gorses blaze,

The rich, ripe rose as with incense steams—

Midsummer days!  Midsummer days!

A soul from the honeysuckle strays,

And the nightingale as from prophet heights

Sings to the Earth of her million Mays—

Midsummer nights!  O midsummer nights!

Envoy

And it’s O, for my dear and the charm that stays—

Midsummer days!  Midsummer days!

It’s O, for my Love and the dark that plights—

Midsummer nights!  O midsummer nights!

BALLADE

OF DEAD ACTORS

I. M.

Edward John Henley

(1861–1898)

WHERE are the passions they essayed,

And where the tears they made to flow?

Where the wild humours they portrayed

For laughing worlds to see and know?

Othello’s wrath and Juliet’s woe?

Sir Peter’s whims and Timon’s gall?

And Millamant and Romeo?

Into the night go one and all.

Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed?

The plumes, the armours—friend and foe?

The cloth of gold, the rare brocade,

The mantles glittering to and fro?

The pomp, the pride, the royal show?

The cries of war and festival?

The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow?

Into the night go one and all.

The curtain falls, the play is played:

The Beggar packs beside the Beau;

The Monarch troops, and troops the Maid;

The Thunder huddles with the Snow.

Where are the revellers high and low?

The clashing swords?  The lover’s call?

The dancers gleaming row on row?

Into the night go one and all.

Envoy

Prince, in one common overthrow

The Hero tumbles with the Thrall:

As dust that drives, as straws that blow,

Into the night go one and all.

BALLADE

MADE IN THE HOT WEATHER

To C. M.

FOUNTAINS that frisk and sprinkle

The moss they overspill;

Pools that the breezes crinkle;

The wheel beside the mill,

With its wet, weedy frill;

Wind-shadows in the wheat;

A water-cart in the street;

The fringe of foam that girds

An islet’s ferneries;

A green sky’s minor thirds—

To live, I think of these!

Of ice and glass the tinkle,

Pellucid, silver-shrill;

Peaches without a wrinkle;

Cherries and snow at will,

From china bowls that fill

The senses with a sweet

Incuriousness of heat;

A melon’s dripping sherds;

Cream-clotted strawberries;

Dusk dairies set with curds—

To live, I think of these!

Vale-lily and periwinkle;

Wet stone-crop on the sill;

The look of leaves a-twinkle

With windlets clear and still;

The feel of a forest rill

That wimples fresh and fleet

About one’s naked feet;

The muzzles of drinking herds;

Lush flags and bulrushes;

The chirp of rain-bound birds—

To live, I think of these!

Envoy

Dark aisles, new packs of cards,

Mermaidens’ tails, cool swards,

Dawn dews and starlit seas,

White marbles, whiter words—

To live, I think of these!

BALLADE OF TRUISMS

GOLD or silver, every day,

Dies to gray.

There are knots in every skein.

Hours of work and hours of play

Fade away

Into one immense Inane.

Shadow and substance, chaff and grain,

Are as vain

As the foam or as the spray.

Life goes crooning, faint and fain,

One refrain:

‘If it could be always May!’

Though the earth be green and gay,

Though, they say,

Man the cup of heaven may drain;

Though, his little world to sway,

He display

Hoard on hoard of pith and brain:

Autumn brings a mist and rain

That constrain

Him and his to know decay,

Where undimmed the lights that wane

Would remain,

If it could be always May.

Yea, alas, must turn to Nay,

Flesh to clay.

Chance and Time are ever twain.

Men may scoff, and men may pray,

But they pay

Every pleasure with a pain.

Life may soar, and Fortune deign

To explain

Where her prizes hide and stay;

But we lack the lusty train

We should gain,

If it could be always May.

Envoy

Time, the pedagogue, his cane

Might retain,

But his charges all would stray

Truanting in every lane—

Jack with Jane—

If it could be always May.

DOUBLE BALLADE

OF LIFE AND FATE

FOOLS may pine, and sots may swill,

Cynics gibe, and prophets rail,

Moralists may scourge and drill,

Preachers prose, and fainthearts quail.

Let them whine, or threat, or wail!

Till the touch of Circumstance

Down to darkness sink the scale,

Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.

What if skies be wan and chill?

What if winds be harsh and stale?

Presently the east will thrill,

And the sad and shrunken sail,

Bellying with a kindly gale,

Bear you sunwards, while your chance

Sends you back the hopeful hail:—

‘Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.’

Idle shot or coming bill,

Hapless love or broken bail,

Gulp it (never chew your pill!),

And, if Burgundy should fail,

Try the humbler pot of ale!

Over all is heaven’s expanse.

Gold’s to find among the shale.

Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.

Dull Sir Joskin sleeps his fill,

Good Sir Galahad seeks the Grail,

Proud Sir Pertinax flaunts his frill,

Hard Sir Æger dints his mail;

And the while by hill and dale

Tristram’s braveries gleam and glance,

And his blithe horn tells its tale:—

‘Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.’

Araminta’s grand and shrill,

Delia’s passionate and frail,

Doris drives an earnest quill,

Athanasia takes the veil:

Wiser Phyllis o’er her pail,

At the heart of all romance

Reading, sings to Strephon’s flail:—

‘Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.’

Every Jack must have his Jill

(Even Johnson had his Thrale!):

Forward, couples—with a will!

This, the world, is not a jail.

Hear the music, sprat and whale!

Hands across, retire, advance!

Though the doomsman’s on your trail,

Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.

Envoy

Boys and girls, at slug and snail

And their kindred look askance.

Pay your footing on the nail:

Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.

DOUBLE BALLADE

OF THE NOTHINGNESS OF THINGS

THE big teetotum twirls,

And epochs wax and wane

As chance subsides or swirls;

But of the loss and gain

The sum is always plain.

Read on the mighty pall,

The weed of funeral

That covers praise and blame,

The —isms and the —anities,

Magnificence and shame:—

‘O Vanity of Vanities!’

The Fates are subtile girls!

They give us chaff for grain.

And Time, the Thunderer, hurls,

Like bolted death, disdain

At all that heart and brain

Conceive, or great or small,

Upon this earthly ball.

Would you be knight and dame?

Or woo the sweet humanities?

Or illustrate a name?

O Vanity of Vanities!

We sound the sea for pearls,

Or drown them in a drain;

We flute it with the merles,

Or tug and sweat and strain;

We grovel, or we reign;

We saunter, or we brawl;

We answer, or we call;

We search the stars for Fame,

Or sink her subterranities;

The legend’s still the same:—

‘O Vanity of Vanities!’

Here at the wine one birls,

There some one clanks a chain.

The flag that this man furls

That man to float is fain.

Pleasure gives place to pain:

These in the kennel crawl,

While others take the wall.

She has a glorious aim,

He lives for the inanities.

What comes of every claim?

O Vanity of Vanities!

Alike are clods and earls.

For sot, and seer, and swain,

For emperors and for churls,

For antidote and bane,

There is but one refrain:

But one for king and thrall,

For David and for Saul,

For fleet of foot and lame,

For pieties and profanities,

The picture and the frame:—

‘O Vanity of Vanities!’

Life is a smoke that curls—

Curls in a flickering skein,

That winds and whisks and whirls

A figment thin and vain,

Into the vast Inane.

One end for hut and hall!

One end for cell and stall!

Burned in one common flame

Are wisdoms and insanities.

For this alone we came:—

‘O Vanity of Vanities!’

Envoy

Prince, pride must have a fall.

What is the worth of all

Your state’s supreme urbanities?

Bad at the best’s the game.

Well might the Sage exclaim:—

‘O Vanity of Vanities!’

AT QUEENSFERRY

To W. G. S.

THE blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean

We bowled along a road that curved a spine

Superbly sinuous and serpentine

Thro’ silent symphonies of summer green.

Sudden the Forth came on us—sad of mien,

No cloud to colour it, no breeze to line:

A sheet of dark, dull glass, without a sign

Of life or death, two spits of sand between.

Water and sky merged blank in mist together,

The Fort loomed spectral, and the Guardship’s spars

Traced vague, black shadows on the shimmery glaze:

We felt the dim, strange years, the grey, strange weather,

The still, strange land, unvexed of sun or stars,

Where Lancelot rides clanking thro’ the haze.

ORIENTALE

SHE’S an enchanting little Israelite,

A world of hidden dimples!—Dusky-eyed,

A starry-glancing daughter of the Bride,

With hair escaped from some Arabian Night,

Her lip is red, her cheek is golden-white,

Her nose a scimitar; and, set aside

The bamboo hat she cocks with so much pride,

Her dress a dream of daintiness and delight.

And when she passes with the dreadful boys

And romping girls, the cockneys loud and crude,

My thought, to the Minories tied yet moved to range

The Land o’ the Sun, commingles with the noise

Of magian drums and scents of sandalwood

A touch Sidonian—modern—taking—strange!

IN FISHERROW

A HARD north-easter fifty winters long

Has bronzed and shrivelled sere her face and neck;

Her locks are wild and grey, her teeth a wreck;

Her foot is vast, her bowed leg spare and strong.

A wide blue cloak, a squat and sturdy throng

Of curt blue coats, a mutch without a speck,

A white vest broidered black, her person deck,

Nor seems their picked, stern, old-world quaintness wrong.

Her great creel forehead-slung, she wanders nigh,

Easing the heavy strap with gnarled, brown fingers,

The spirit of traffic watchful in her eye,

Ever and anon imploring you to buy,

As looking down the street she onward lingers,

Reproachful, with a strange and doleful cry.

BACK-VIEW

To D. F.

I WATCHED you saunter down the sand:

Serene and large, the golden weather

Flowed radiant round your peacock feather,

And glistered from your jewelled hand.

Your tawny hair, turned strand on strand

And bound with blue ribands together,

Streaked the rough tartan, green like heather,

That round your lissome shoulder spanned.

Your grace was quick my sense to seize:

The quaint looped hat, the twisted tresses,

The close-drawn scarf, and under these

The flowing, flapping draperies—

My thought an outline still caresses,

Enchanting, comic, Japanese!

CROLUIS

To G. W.

THE beach was crowded.  Pausing now and then,

He groped and fiddled doggedly along,

His worn face glaring on the thoughtless throng

The stony peevishness of sightless men.

He seemed scarce older than his clothes.  Again,

Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song,

So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong,

You hardly could distinguish one in ten.

He stopped at last, and sat him on the sand,

And, grasping wearily his bread-winner,

Stared dim towards the blue immensity,

Then leaned his head upon his poor old hand.

He may have slept: he did not speak nor stir:

His gesture spoke a vast despondency.

ATTADALE WEST HIGHLANDS

To A. J.

A BLACK and glassy float, opaque and still,

The loch, at furthest ebb supine in sleep,

Reversing, mirrored in its luminous deep

The calm grey skies; the solemn spurs of hill;

Heather, and corn, and wisps of loitering haze;

The wee white cots, black-hatted, plumed with smoke;

The braes beyond—and when the ripple awoke,

They wavered with the jarred and wavering glaze.

The air was hushed and dreamy.  Evermore

A noise of running water whispered near.

A straggling crow called high and thin.  A bird

Trilled from the birch-leaves.  Round the shingled shore,

Yellow with weed, there wandered, vague and clear,

Strange vowels, mysterious gutturals, idly heard.

FROM A WINDOW IN PRINCES STREET

To M. M. M‘B.

ABOVE the Crags that fade and gloom

Starts the bare knee of Arthur’s Seat;

Ridged high against the evening bloom,

The Old Town rises, street on street;

With lamps bejewelled, straight ahead,

Like rampired walls the houses lean,

All spired and domed and turreted,

Sheer to the valley’s darkling green;

Ranged in mysterious disarray,

The Castle, menacing and austere,

Looms through the lingering last of day;

And in the silver dusk you hear,

Reverberated from crag and scar,

Bold bugles blowing points of war.

IN THE DIALS

TO Garryowen upon an organ ground

Two girls are jigging.  Riotously they trip,

With eyes aflame, quick bosoms, hand on hip,

As in the tumult of a witches’ round.

Youngsters and youngsters round them prance and bound.

Two solemn babes twirl ponderously, and skip.

The artist’s teeth gleam from his bearded lip.

High from the kennel howls a tortured hound.

The music reels and hurtles, and the night

Is full of stinks and cries; a naphtha-light

Flares from a barrow; battered and obtused

With vices, wrinkles, life and work and rags,

Each with her inch of clay, two loitering hags

Look on dispassionate—critical—something ’mused.

THE GODS ARE DEAD

THE gods are dead?  Perhaps they are!  Who knows?

Living at least in Lemprière undeleted,

The wise, the fair, the awful, the jocose,

Are one and all, I like to think, retreated

In some still land of lilacs and the rose.

Once higeh they sat, and high o’er earthly shows

With sacrificial dance and song were greeted.

Once . . . long ago.  But now, the story goes,

The gods are dead.

It must be true.  The world, a world of prose,

Full-crammed with facts, in science swathed and sheeted,

Nods in a stertorous after-dinner doze!

Plangent and sad, in every wind that blows

Who will may hear the sorry words repeated:—

‘The Gods are Dead!’

To F. W.

LET us be drunk, and for a while forget,

Forget, and, ceasing even from regret,

Live without reason and despite of rhyme,

As in a dream preposterous and sublime,

Where place and hour and means for once are met.

Where is the use of effort?  Love and debt

And disappointment have us in a net.

Let us break out, and taste the morning prime . . .

Let us be drunk.

In vain our little hour we strut and fret,

And mouth our wretched parts as for a bet:

We cannot please the tragicaster Time.

To gain the crystal sphere, the silver dime,

Where Sympathy sits dimpling on us yet,

Let us be drunk!

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

WHEN you are old, and I am passed away—

Passed, and your face, your golden face, is gray—

I think, whate’er the end, this dream of mine,

Comforting you, a friendly star will shine

Down the dim slope where still you stumble and stray.

So may it be: that so dead Yesterday,

No sad-eyed ghost but generous and gay,

May serve you memories like almighty wine,

When you are old!

Dear Heart, it shall be so.  Under the sway

Of death the past’s enormous disarray

Lies hushed and dark.  Yet though there come no sign,

Live on well pleased: immortal and divine

Love shall still tend you, as God’s angels may,

When you are old.

BESIDE THE IDLE SUMMER SEA

BESIDE the idle summer sea

And in the vacant summer days,

Light Love came fluting down the ways,

Where you were loitering with me.

Who has not welcomed, even as we,

That jocund minstrel and his lays

Beside the idle summer sea

And in the vacant summer days?

We listened, we were fancy-free;

And lo! in terror and amaze

We stood alone—alone at gaze

With an implacable memory

Beside the idle summer sea.

I. M.

R. G. C. B.

1878

THE ways of Death are soothing and serene,

And all the words of Death are grave and sweet.

From camp and church, the fireside and the street,

She beckons forth—and strife and song have been.

A summer night descending cool and green

And dark on daytime’s dust and stress and heat,

The ways of Death are soothing and serene,

And all the words of Death are grave and sweet.

O glad and sorrowful, with triumphant mien

And radiant faces look upon, and greet

This last of all your lovers, and to meet

Her kiss, the Comforter’s, your spirit lean . . .

The ways of Death are soothing and serene.

WE SHALL SURELY DIE

WE shall surely die:

Must we needs grow old?

Grow old and cold,

And we know not why?

O, the By-and-By,

And the tale that’s told!

We shall surely die:

Must we needs grow old?

Grow old and sigh,

Grudge and withhold,

Resent and scold? . . .

Not you and I?

We shall surely die!

WHAT IS TO COME

WHAT is to come we know not.  But we know

That what has been was good—was good to show,

Better to hide, and best of all to bear.

We are the masters of the days that were:

We have lived, we have loved, we have suffered . . . even so.

Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow?

Life was our friend.  Now, if it be our foe—

Dear, though it spoil and break us!—need we care

What is to come?

Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,

Or the gold weather round us mellow slow:

We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare

And we can conquer, though we may not share

In the rich quiet of the afterglow

What is to come.

ECHOES

1872–1889

Aquí está encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcías.

GIL BLAS AU LECTEUR.

I

TO MY MOTHER

CHIMING a dream by the way

With ocean’s rapture and roar,

I met a maiden to-day

Walking alone on the shore:

Walking in maiden wise,

Modest and kind and fair,

The freshness of spring in her eyes

And the fulness of spring in her hair.

Cloud-shadow and scudding sun-burst

Were swift on the floor of the sea,

And a mad wind was romping its worst,

But what was their magic to me?

Or the charm of the midsummer skies?

I only saw she was there,

A dream of the sea in her eyes

And the kiss of the sea in her hair.

I watched her vanish in space;

She came where I walked no more;

But something had passed of her grace

To the spell of the wave and the shore;

And now, as the glad stars rise,

She comes to me, rosy and rare,

The delight of the wind in her eyes

And the hand of the wind in her hair.

1872

II

LIFE is bitter.  All the faces of the years,

Young and old, are grey with travail and with tears.

Must we only wake to toil, to tire, to weep?

In the sun, among the leaves, upon the flowers,

Slumber stills to dreamy death the heavy hours . . .

Let me sleep.

Riches won but mock the old, unable years;

Fame’s a pearl that hides beneath a sea of tears;

Love must wither, or must live alone and weep.

In the sunshine, through the leaves, across the flowers,

While we slumber, death approaches though the hours! . . .

Let me sleep.

1872

III

O, GATHER me the rose, the rose,

While yet in flower we find it,

For summer smiles, but summer goes,

And winter waits behind it!

For with the dream foregone, foregone,

The deed forborne for ever,

The worm, regret, will canker on,

And Time will turn him never.

So well it were to love, my love,

And cheat of any laughter

The fate beneath us and above,

The dark before and after.

The myrtle and the rose, the rose,

The sunshine and the swallow,

The dream that comes, the wish that goes,

The memories that follow!

1874

IV

I. M.

R. T. HAMILTON BRUCE

(1846–1899)

OUT of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

1875

V

I AM the Reaper.

All things with heedful hook

Silent I gather.

Pale roses touched with the spring,

Tall corn in summer,

Fruits rich with autumn, and frail winter blossoms—

Reaping, still reaping—

All things with heedful hook

Timely I gather.

I am the Sower.

All the unbodied life

Runs through my seed-sheet.

Atom with atom wed,

Each quickening the other,

Fall through my hands, ever changing, still changeless

Ceaselessly sowing,

Life, incorruptible life,

Flows from my seed-sheet.

Maker and breaker,

I am the ebb and the flood,

Here and Hereafter.

Sped through the tangle and coil

Of infinite nature,

Viewless and soundless I fashion all being.

Taker and giver,

I am the womb and the grave,

The Now and the Ever.

1875

VI

PRAISE the generous gods for giving

In a world of wrath and strife

With a little time for living,

Unto all the joy of life.

At whatever source we drink it,

Art or love or faith or wine,

In whatever terms we think it,

It is common and divine.

Praise the high gods, for in giving

This to man, and this alone,

They have made his chance of living

Shine the equal of their own.

1875

VII

FILL a glass with golden wine,

And the while your lips are wet

Set their perfume unto mine,

And forget,

Every kiss we take and give

Leaves us less of life to live.

Yet again! Your whim and mine

In a happy while have met.

All your sweets to me resign,

Nor regret

That we press with every breath,

Sighed or singing, nearer death.

1875

VIII

WE’LL go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.

November glooms are barren beside the dusk of June.

The summer flowers are faded, the summer thoughts are sere.

We’ll go no more a-roving, lest worse befall, my dear.

We’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.

The song we sang rings hollow, and heavy runs the tune.

Glad ways and words remembered would shame the wretched year.

We’ll go no more a-roving, nor dream we did, my dear.

We’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.

If yet we walk together, we need not shun the noon.

No sweet thing left to savour, no sad thing left to fear,

We’ll go no more a-roving, but weep at home, my dear.

1875

IX

To W. R.

MADAM Life’s a piece in bloom

Death goes dogging everywhere:

She’s the tenant of the room,

He’s the ruffian on the stair.

You shall see her as a friend,

You shall bilk him once and twice;

But he’ll trap you in the end,

And he’ll stick you for her price.

With his kneebones at your chest,

And his knuckles in your throat,

You would reason—plead—protest!

Clutching at her petticoat;

But she’s heard it all before,

Well she knows you’ve had your fun,

Gingerly she gains the door,

And your little job is done.

1877

X

THE sea is full of wandering foam,

The sky of driving cloud;

My restless thoughts among them roam . . .

The night is dark and loud.

Where are the hours that came to me

So beautiful and bright?

A wild wind shakes the wilder sea . . .

O, dark and loud’s the night!

1876

XI

To W. R.

THICK is the darkness—

Sunward, O, sunward!

Rough is the highway—

Onward, still onward!

Dawn harbours surely

East of the shadows.

Facing us somewhere

Spread the sweet meadows.

Upward and forward!

Time will restore us:

Light is above us,

Rest is before us.

1876

XII

TO me at my fifth-floor window

The chimney-pots in rows

Are sets of pipes pandean

For every wind that blows;

And the smoke that whirls and eddies

In a thousand times and keys

Is really a visible music

Set to my reveries.

O monstrous pipes, melodious

With fitful tune and dream,

The clouds are your only audience,

Her thought is your only theme!

1875

XIII

BRING her again, O western wind,

Over the western sea:

Gentle and good and fair and kind,

Bring her again to me!

Not that her fancy holds me dear,

Not that a hope may be:

Only that I may know her near,

Wind of the western sea.

1875

XIV

THE wan sun westers, faint and slow;

The eastern distance glimmers gray;

An eerie haze comes creeping low

Across the little, lonely bay;

And from the sky-line far away

About the quiet heaven are spread

Mysterious hints of dying day,

Thin, delicate dreams of green and red.

And weak, reluctant surges lap

And rustle round and down the strand.

No other sound . . . If it should hap,

The ship that sails from fairy-land!

The silken shrouds with spells are manned,

The hull is magically scrolled,

The squat mast lives, and in the sand

The gold prow-griffin claws a hold.

It steals to seaward silently;

Strange fish-folk follow thro’ the gloom;

Great wings flap overhead; I see

The Castle of the Drowsy Doom

Vague thro’ the changeless twilight loom,

Enchanted, hushed.  And ever there

She slumbers in eternal bloom,

Her cushions hid with golden hair.

1875

XV

THERE is a wheel inside my head

Of wantonness and wine,

An old, cracked fiddle is begging without,

But the wind with scents of the sea is fed,

And the sun seems glad to shine.

The sun and the wind are akin to you,

As you are akin to June.

But the fiddle! . . . It giggles and twitters about,

And, love and laughter! who gave him the cue?—

He’s playing your favourite tune.

1875

XVI

WHILE the west is paling

Starshine is begun.

While the dusk is failing

Glimmers up the sun.

So, till darkness cover

Life’s retreating gleam,

Lover follows lover,

Dream succeeds to dream.

Stoop to my endeavour,

O my love, and be

Only and for ever

Sun and stars to me.

1876

XVII

THE sands are alive with sunshine,

The bathers lounge and throng,

And out in the bay a bugle

Is lilting a gallant song.

The clouds go racing eastward,

The blithe wind cannot rest,

And a shard on the shingle flashes

Like the shining soul of a jest;

While children romp in the surges,

And sweethearts wander free,

And the Firth as with laughter dimples . . .

I would it were deep over me!

1875

XVIII

To A. D.

THE nightingale has a lyre of gold,

The lark’s is a clarion-call,

And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,

But I love him best of all.

For his song is all of the joy of life,

And we in the mad, spring weather,

We two have listened till he sang

Our hearts and lips together.

1876

XIX

YOUR heart has trembled to my tongue,

Your hands in mine have lain,

Your thought to me has leaned and clung,

Again and yet again,

My dear,

Again and yet again.

Now die the dream, or come the wife,

The past is not in vain,

For wholly as it was your life

Can never be again,

My dear,

Can never be again.

1876

XX

THE surges gushed and sounded,

The blue was the blue of June,

And low above the brightening east

Floated a shred of moon.

The woods were black and solemn,

The night winds large and free,

And in your thought a blessing seemed

To fall on land and sea.

1877

XXI

WE flash across the level.

We thunder thro’ the bridges.

We bicker down the cuttings.

We sway along the ridges.

A rush of streaming hedges,

Of jostling lights and shadows,

Of hurtling, hurrying stations,

Of racing woods and meadows.

We charge the tunnels headlong—

The blackness roars and shatters.

We crash between embankments—

The open spins and scatters.

We shake off the miles like water,

We might carry a royal ransom;

And I think of her waiting, waiting,

And long for a common hansom.

1876

XXII

THE West a glimmering lake of light,

A dream of pearly weather,

The first of stars is burning white—

The star we watch together.

Is April dead?  The unresting year

Will shape us our September,

And April’s work is done, my dear—

Do you not remember?

O gracious eve!  O happy star,

Still-flashing, glowing, sinking!—

Who lives of lovers near or far

So glad as I in thinking?

The gallant world is warm and green,

For May fulfils November.

When lights and leaves and loves have been,

Sweet, will you remember?

O star benignant and serene,

I take the good to-morrow,

That fills from verge to verge my dream,

With all its joy and sorrow!

The old, sweet spell is unforgot

That turns to June December;

And, tho’ the world remembered not,

Love, we would remember.

1876

XXIII

THE skies are strown with stars,

The streets are fresh with dew

A thin moon drifts to westward,

The night is hushed and cheerful.

My thought is quick with you.

Near windows gleam and laugh,

And far away a train

Clanks glowing through the stillness:

A great content’s in all things,

And life is not in vain.

1877

XXIV

THE full sea rolls and thunders

In glory and in glee.

O, bury me not in the senseless earth

But in the living sea!

Ay, bury me where it surges

A thousand miles from shore,

And in its brotherly unrest

I’ll range for evermore.

1876

XXV

IN the year that’s come and gone, love, his flying feather

Stooping slowly, gave us heart, and bade us walk together.

In the year that’s coming on, though many a troth be broken,

We at least will not forget aught that love hath spoken.

In the year that’s come and gone, dear, we wove a tether

All of gracious words and thoughts, binding two together.

In the year that’s coming on with its wealth of roses

We shall weave it stronger, yet, ere the circle closes.

In the year that’s come and gone, in the golden weather,

Sweet, my sweet, we swore to keep the watch of life together.

In the year that’s coming on, rich in joy and sorrow,

We shall light our lamp, and wait life’s mysterious morrow.

1877

XXVI

IN the placid summer midnight,

Under the drowsy sky,

I seem to hear in the stillness

The moths go glimmering by.

One by one from the windows

The lights have all been sped.

Never a blind looks conscious—

The street is asleep in bed!

But I come where a living casement

Laughs luminous and wide;

I hear the song of a piano

Break in a sparkling tide;

And I feel, in the waltz that frolics

And warbles swift and clear,

A sudden sense of shelter

And friendliness and cheer . . .

A sense of tinkling glasses,

Of love and laughter and light—

The piano stops, and the window

Stares blank out into the night.

The blind goes out, and I wander

To the old, unfriendly sea,

The lonelier for the memory

That walks like a ghost with me.

XXVII

SHE sauntered by the swinging seas,

A jewel glittered at her ear,

And, teasing her along, the breeze

Brought many a rounded grace more near.

So passing, one with wave and beam,

She left for memory to caress

A laughing thought, a golden gleam,

A hint of hidden loveliness.

1876

XXVIII

To S. C.

BLITHE dreams arise to greet us,

And life feels clean and new,

For the old love comes to meet us

In the dawning and the dew.

O’erblown with sunny shadows,

O’ersped with winds at play,

The woodlands and the meadows

Are keeping holiday.

Wild foals are scampering, neighing,

Brave merles their hautboys blow:

Come! let us go a-maying

As in the Long-Ago.

Here we but peak and dwindle:

The clank of chain and crane,

The whir of crank and spindle

Bewilder heart and brain;

The ends of our endeavour

Are merely wealth and fame,

Yet in the still Forever

We’re one and all the same;

Delaying, still delaying,

We watch the fading west:

Come! let us go a-maying,

Nor fear to take the best.

Yet beautiful and spacious

The wise, old world appears.

Yet frank and fair and gracious

Outlaugh the jocund years.

Our arguments disputing,

The universal Pan

Still wanders fluting—fluting—

Fluting to maid and man.

Our weary well-a-waying

His music cannot still:

Come! let us go a-maying,

And pipe with him our fill.

When wanton winds are flowing

Among the gladdening glass;

Where hawthorn brakes are blowing,

And meadow perfumes pass;

Where morning’s grace is greenest,

And fullest noon’s of pride;

Where sunset spreads serenest,

And sacred night’s most wide;

Where nests are swaying, swaying,

And spring’s fresh voices call,

Come! let us go a-maying,

And bless the God of all!

1878

XXIX

To R. L. S.

A CHILD,

Curious and innocent,

Slips from his Nurse, and rejoicing

Loses himself in the Fair.

Thro’ the jostle and din

Wandering, he revels,

Dreaming, desiring, possessing;

Till, of a sudden

Tired and afraid, he beholds

The sordid assemblage

Just as it is; and he runs

With a sob to his Nurse

(Lighting at last on him),

And in her motherly bosom

Cries him to sleep.

Thus thro’ the World,

Seeing and feeling and knowing,

Goes Man: till at last,

Tired of experience, he turns

To the friendly and comforting breast

Of the old nurse, Death.

1876

XXX

KATE-A-WHIMSIES, John-a-Dreams,

Still debating, still delay,

And the world’s a ghost that gleams—

Wavers—vanishes away!

We must live while live we can;

We should love while love we may.

Dread in women, doubt in man . . .

So the Infinite runs away.

1876

XXXI

O, HAVE you blessed, behind the stars,

The blue sheen in the skies,

When June the roses round her calls?—

Then do you know the light that falls

From her belovèd eyes.

And have you felt the sense of peace

That morning meadows give?—

Then do you know the spirit of grace,

The angel abiding in her face,

Who makes it good to live.

She shines before me, hope and dream,

So fair, so still, so wise,

That, winning her, I seem to win

Out of the dust and drive and din

A nook of Paradise.

1877

XXXII

To D. H.

O, FALMOUTH is a fine town with ships in the bay,

And I wish from my heart it’s there I was to-day;

I wish from my heart I was far away from here,

Sitting in my parlour and talking to my dear.

For it’s home, dearie, home—it’s home I want to be.

Our topsails are hoisted, and we’ll away to sea.

O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree

They’re all growing green in the old countrie.

In Baltimore a-walking a lady I did meet

With her babe on her arm, as she came down the street;

And I thought how I sailed, and the cradle standing ready

For the pretty little babe that has never seen its daddie.

And it’s home, dearie, home . . .

O, if it be a lass, she shall wear a golden ring;

And if it be a lad, he shall fight for his king:

With his dirk and his hat and his little jacket blue

He shall walk the quarter-deck as his daddie used to do.

And it’s home, dearie, home . . .

O, there’s a wind a-blowing, a-blowing from the west,

And that of all the winds is the one I like the best,

For it blows at our backs, and it shakes our pennon free,

And it soon will blow us home to the old countrie.

For it’s home, dearie, home—it’s home I want to be.

Our topsails are hoisted, and we’ll away to sea.

O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree

They’re all growing green in the old countrie.

1878

NOTE.—The burthen and the third stanza are old.

XXXIII

THE ways are green with the gladdening sheen

Of the young year’s fairest daughter.

O, the shadows that fleet o’er the springing wheat!

O, the magic of running water!

The spirit of spring is in every thing,

The banners of spring are streaming,

We march to a tune from the fifes of June,

And life’s a dream worth dreaming.

It’s all very well to sit and spell

At the lesson there’s no gainsaying;

But what the deuce are wont and use

When the whole mad world’s a-maying?

When the meadow glows, and the orchard snows,

And the air’s with love-motes teeming,

When fancies break, and the senses wake,

O, life’s a dream worth dreaming!

What Nature has writ with her lusty wit

Is worded so wisely and kindly

That whoever has dipped in her manuscript

Must up and follow her blindly.

Now the summer prime is her blithest rhyme

In the being and the seeming,

And they that have heard the overword

Know life’s a dream worth dreaming.

1878

XXXIV

To K. de M.

Love blows as the wind blows,

Love blows into the heart.—NILE BOAT-SONG.

LIFE in her creaking shoes

Goes, and more formal grows,

A round of calls and cues:

Love blows as the wind blows.

Blows! . . . in the quiet close

As in the roaring mart,

By ways no mortal knows

Love blows into the heart.

The stars some cadence use,

Forthright the river flows,

In order fall the dews,

Love blows as the wind blows:

Blows! . . . and what reckoning shows

The courses of his chart?

A spirit that comes and goes,

Love blows into the heart.

1878

XXXV

I. M.

MARGARITÆ SORORI

(1886)

A LATE lark twitters from the quiet skies;

And from the west,

Where the sun, his day’s work ended,

Lingers as in content,

There falls on the old, grey city

An influence luminous and serene,

A shining peace.

The smoke ascends

In a rosy-and-golden haze.  The spires

Shine, and are changed.  In the valley

Shadows rise.  The lark sings on.  The sun,

Closing his benediction,

Sinks, and the darkening air

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night—

Night with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep.

So be my passing!

My task accomplished and the long day done,

My wages taken, and in my heart

Some late lark singing,

Let me be gathered to the quiet west,

The sundown splendid and serene,

Death.

1876

XXXVI

I GAVE my heart to a woman—

I gave it her, branch and root.

She bruised, she wrung, she tortured,

She cast it under foot.

Under her feet she cast it,

She trampled it where it fell,

She broke it all to pieces,

And each was a clot of hell.

There in the rain and the sunshine

They lay and smouldered long;

And each, when again she viewed them,

Had turned to a living song.

XXXVII

To W. A.

OR ever the knightly years were gone

With the old world to the grave,

I was a King in Babylon

And you were a Christian Slave.

I saw, I took, I cast you by,

I bent and broke your pride.

You loved me well, or I heard them lie,

But your longing was denied.

Surely I knew that by and by

You cursed your gods and died.

And a myriad suns have set and shone

Since then upon the grave

Decreed by the King in Babylon

To her that had been his Slave.

The pride I trampled is now my scathe,

For it tramples me again.

The old resentment lasts like death,

For you love, yet you refrain.

I break my heart on your hard unfaith,

And I break my heart in vain.

Yet not for an hour do I wish undone

The deed beyond the grave,

When I was a King in Babylon

And you were a Virgin Slave.

XXXVIII

ON the way to Kew,

By the river old and gray,

Where in the Long Ago

We laughed and loitered so,

I met a ghost to-day,

A ghost that told of you—

A ghost of low replies

And sweet, inscrutable eyes

Coming up from Richmond

As you used to do.

By the river old and gray,

The enchanted Long Ago

Murmured and smiled anew.

On the way to Kew,

March had the laugh of May,

The bare boughs looked aglow,

And old, immortal words

Sang in my breast like birds,

Coming up from Richmond

As I used with you.

With the life of Long Ago

Lived my thought of you.

By the river old and gray

Flowing his appointed way

As I watched I knew

What is so good to know—

Not in vain, not in vain,

Shall I look for you again

Coming up from Richmond

On the way to Kew.

XXXIX

THE Past was goodly once, and yet, when all is said,

The best of it we know is that it’s done and dead.

Dwindled and faded quite, perished beyond recall,

Nothing is left at last of what one time was all.

Coming back like a ghost, staring and lingering on,

Never a word it speaks but proves it dead and gone.

Duty and work and joy—these things it cannot give;

And the Present is life, and life is good to live.

Let it lie where it fell, far from the living sun,

The Past that, goodly once, is gone and dead and done.

XL

THE spring, my dear,

Is no longer spring.

Does the blackbird sing

What he sang last year?

Are the skies the old

Immemorial blue?

Or am I, or are you,

Grown cold?

Though life be change,

It is hard to bear

When the old sweet air

Sounds forced and strange.

To be out of tune,

Plain You and I . . .

It were better to die,

And soon!

XLVI

To R. A. M. S.

The Spirit of Wine

Sang in my glass, and I listened

With love to his odorous music,

His flushed and magnificent song.

—‘I am health, I am heart, I am life!

For I give for the asking

The fire of my father, the Sun,

And the strength of my mother, the Earth.

Inspiration in essence,

I am wisdom and wit to the wise,

His visible muse to the poet,

The soul of desire to the lover,

The genius of laughter to all.

‘Come, lean on me, ye that are weary!

Rise, ye faint-hearted and doubting!

Haste, ye that lag by the way!

I am Pride, the consoler;

Valour and Hope are my henchmen;

I am the Angel of Rest.

‘I am life, I am wealth, I am fame:

For I captain an army

Of shining and generous dreams;

And mine, too, all mine, are the keys

Of that secret spiritual shrine,

Where, his work-a-day soul put by,

Shut in with his saint of saints—

With his radiant and conquering self—

Man worships, and talks, and is glad.

‘Come, sit with me, ye that are lovely,

Ye that are paid with disdain,

Ye that are chained and would soar!

I am beauty and love;

I am friendship, the comforter;

I am that which forgives and forgets.’—

The Spirit of Wine

Sang in my heart, and I triumphed

In the savour and scent of his music,

His magnetic and mastering song.

XLII

A WINK from Hesper, falling

Fast in the wintry sky,

Comes through the even blue,

Dear, like a word from you . . .

Is it good-bye?

Across the miles between us

I send you sigh for sigh.

Good-night, sweet friend, good-night:

Till life and all take flight,

Never good-bye.

XLII

FRIENDS . . . old friends . . .

One sees how it ends.

A woman looks

Or a man tells lies,

And the pleasant brooks

And the quiet skies,

Ruined with brawling

And caterwauling,

Enchant no more

As they did before.

And so it ends

With friends.

Friends . . . old friends . . .

And what if it ends?

Shall we dare to shirk

What we live to learn?

It has done its work,

It has served its turn;

And, forgive and forget

Or hanker and fret,

We can be no more

As we were before.

When it ends, it ends

With friends.

Friends . . . old friends . . .

So it breaks, so it ends.

There let it rest!

It has fought and won,

And is still the best

That either has done.

Each as he stands

The work of its hands,

Which shall be more

As he was before? . . .

What is it ends

With friends?

XLIV

IF it should come to be,

This proof of you and me,

This type and sign

Of hours that smiled and shone,

And yet seemed dead and gone

As old-world wine:

Of Them Within the Gate

Ask we no richer fate,

No boon above,

For girl child or for boy,

My gift of life and joy,

Your gift of love.

XLV

To W. B.

FROM the brake the Nightingale

Sings exulting to the Rose;

Though he sees her waxing pale

In her passionate repose,

While she triumphs waxing frail,

Fading even while she glows;

Though he knows

How it goes—

Knows of last year’s Nightingale

Dead with last year’s Rose.

Wise the enamoured Nightingale,

Wise the well-belovèd Rose!

Love and life shall still prevail,

Nor the silence at the close

Break the magic of the tale

In the telling, though it shows—

Who but knows

How it goes!—

Life a last year’s Nightingale,

Love a last year’s Rose.

XLVI

MATRI DILECTISSIMÆ

I. M.

IN the waste hour

Between to-day and yesterday

We watched, while on my arm—

Living flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone—

Dabbled in sweat the sacred head

Lay uncomplaining, still, contemptuous, strange:

Till the dear face turned dead,

And to a sound of lamentation

The good, heroic soul with all its wealth—

Its sixty years of love and sacrifice,

Suffering and passionate faith—was reabsorbed

In the inexorable Peace,

And life was changed to us for evermore.

Was nothing left of her but tears

Like blood-drops from the heart?

Nought save remorse

For duty unfulfilled, justice undone,

And charity ignored?  Nothing but love,

Forgiveness, reconcilement, where in truth,

But for this passing

Into the unimaginable abyss

These things had never been?

Nay, there were we,

Her five strong sons!

To her Death came—the great Deliverer came!—

As equal comes to equal, throne to throne.

She was a mother of men.

The stars shine as of old.  The unchanging River,

Bent on his errand of immortal law,

Works his appointed way

To the immemorial sea.

And the brave truth comes overwhelmingly home:—

That she in us yet works and shines,

Lives and fulfils herself,

Unending as the river and the stars.

Dearest, live on

In such an immortality

As we thy sons,

Born of thy body and nursed

At those wild, faithful breasts,

Can give—of generous thoughts,

And honourable words, and deeds

That make men half in love with fate!

Live on, O brave and true,

In us thy children, in ours whose life is thine—

Our best and theirs!  What is that best but thee—

Thee, and thy gift to us, to pass

Like light along the infinite of space

To the immitigable end?

Between the river and the stars,

O royal and radiant soul,

Thou dost return, thine influences return

Upon thy children as in life, and death

Turns stingless!  What is Death

But Life in act?  How should the Unteeming Grave

Be victor over thee,

Mother, a mother of men?

XLVII

CROSSES and troubles a-many have proved me.

One or two women (God bless them!) have loved me.

I have worked and dreamed, and I’ve talked at will.

Of art and drink I have had my fill.

I’ve comforted here, and I’ve succoured there.

I’ve faced my foes, and I’ve backed my friends.

I’ve blundered, and sometimes made amends.

I have prayed for light, and I’ve known despair.

Now I look before, as I look behind,

Come storm, come shine, whatever befall,

With a grateful heart and a constant mind,

For the end I know is the best of all.

1888–1889

LONDON VOLUNTARIES

(To Charles Whibley)

1890–1892

I

Grave

ST. MARGARET’S bells,

Quiring their innocent, old-world canticles,

Sing in the storied air,

All rosy-and-golden, as with memories

Of woods at evensong, and sands and seas

Disconsolate for that the night is nigh.

O, the low, lingering lights!  The large last gleam

(Hark! how those brazen choristers cry and call!)

Touching these solemn ancientries, and there,

The silent River ranging tide-mark high

And the callow, grey-faced Hospital,

With the strange glimmer and glamour of a dream!

The Sabbath peace is in the slumbrous trees,

And from the wistful, the fast-widowing sky

(Hark! how those plangent comforters call and cry!)

Falls as in August plots late roseleaves fall.

The sober Sabbath stir—

Leisurely voices, desultory feet!—

Comes from the dry, dust-coloured street,

Where in their summer frocks the girls go by,

And sweethearts lean and loiter and confer,

Just as they did an hundred years ago,

Just as an hundred years to come they will:—

When you and I, Dear Love, lie lost and low,

And sweet-throats none our welkin shall fulfil,

Nor any sunset fade serene and slow;

But, being dead, we shall not grieve to die.

II

Andante con moto

FORTH from the dust and din,

The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare,

The odour and sense of life and lust aflare,

The wrangle and jangle of unrests,

Let us take horse, Dear Heart, take horse and win—

As from swart August to the green lap of May—

To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts

Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware

In any of her innumerable nests

Of that first sudden plash of dawn,

Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large,

Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day

In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn

Forward and up, in wider and wider way,

Shall float the sands, and brim the shores,

On this our lith of the World, as round it roars

And spins into the outlook of the Sun

(The Lord’s first gift, the Lord’s especial charge),

With light, with living light, from marge to marge

Until the course He set and staked be run.

Through street and square, through square and street,

Each with his home-grown quality of dark

And violated silence, loud and fleet,

Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp,

The hansom wheels and plunges.  Hark, O, hark,

Sweet, how the old mare’s bit and chain

Ring back a rough refrain

Upon the marked and cheerful tramp

Of her four shoes!  Here is the Park,

And O, the languid midsummer wafts adust,

The tired midsummer blooms!

O, the mysterious distances, the glooms

Romantic, the august

And solemn shapes!  At night this City of Trees

Turns to a tryst of vague and strange

And monstrous Majesties,

Let loose from some dim underworld to range

These terrene vistas till their twilight sets:

When, dispossessed of wonderfulness, they stand

Beggared and common, plain to all the land

For stooks of leaves!  And lo! the Wizard Hour,

His silent, shining sorcery winged with power!

Still, still the streets, between their carcanets

Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep.

But see how gable ends and parapets

In gradual beauty and significance

Emerge!  And did you hear

That little twitter-and-cheep,

Breaking inordinately loud and clear

On this still, spectral, exquisite atmosphere?

’Tis a first nest at matins!  And behold

A rakehell cat—how furtive and acold!

A spent witch homing from some infamous dance—

Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade

Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!

And now! a little wind and shy,

The smell of ships (that earnest of romance),

A sense of space and water, and thereby

A lamplit bridge ouching the troubled sky,

And look, O, look! a tangle of silver gleams

And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams,

His dreams that never save in our deaths can die.

What miracle is happening in the air,

Charging the very texture of the gray

With something luminous and rare?

The night goes out like an ill-parcelled fire,

And, as one lights a candle, it is day.

The extinguisher, that perks it like a spire

On the little formal church, is not yet green

Across the water: but the house-tops nigher,

The corner-lines, the chimneys—look how clean,

How new, how naked!  See the batch of boats,

Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung beam!

And those are barges that were goblin floats,

Black, hag-steered, fraught with devilry and dream!

And in the piles the water frolics clear,

The ripples into loose rings wander and flee,

And we—we can behold that could but hear

The ancient River singing as he goes,

New-mailed in morning, to the ancient Sea.

The gas burns lank and jaded in its glass:

The old Ruffian soon shall yawn himself awake,

And light his pipe, and shoulder his tools, and take

His hobnailed way to work!

Let us too pass—

Pass ere the sun leaps and your shadow shows—

Through these long, blindfold rows

Of casements staring blind to right and left,

Each with his gaze turned inward on some piece

Of life in death’s own likeness—Life bereft

Of living looks as by the Great Release—

Pass to an exquisite night’s more exquisite close!

Reach upon reach of burial—so they feel,

These colonies of dreams!  And as we steal

Homeward together, but for the buxom breeze,

Fitfully frolicking to heel

With news of dawn-drenched woods and tumbling seas,

We might—thus awed, thus lonely that we are—

Be wandering some dispeopled star,

Some world of memories and unbroken graves,

So broods the abounding Silence near and far:

Till even your footfall craves

Forgiveness of the majesty it braves.

III

Scherzando

DOWN through the ancient Strand

The spirit of October, mild and boon

And sauntering, takes his way

This golden end of afternoon,

As though the corn stood yellow in all the land,

And the ripe apples dropped to the harvest-moon.

Lo! the round sun, half-down the western slope—

Seen as along an unglazed telescope—

Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day:

Gifting the long, lean, lanky street

And its abounding confluences of being

With aspects generous and bland;

Making a thousand harnesses to shine

As with new ore from some enchanted mine,

And every horse’s coat so full of sheen

He looks new-tailored, and every ’bus feels clean,

And never a hansom but is worth the feeing;

And every jeweller within the pale

Offers a real Arabian Night for sale;

And even the roar

Of the strong streams of toil, that pause and pour

Eastward and westward, sounds suffused—

Seems as it were bemused

And blurred, and like the speech

Of lazy seas on a lotus-haunted beach—

With this enchanted lustrousness,

This mellow magic, that (as a man’s caress

Brings back to some faded face, beloved before,

A heavenly shadow of the grace it wore

Ere the poor eyes were minded to beseech)

Old things transfigures, and you hail and bless

Their looks of long-lapsed loveliness once more:

Till Clement’s, angular and cold and staid,

Gleams forth in glamour’s very stuffs arrayed;

And Bride’s, her aëry, unsubstantial charm

Through flight on flight of springing, soaring stone

Grown flushed and warm,

Laughs into life full-mooded and fresh-blown;

And the high majesty of Paul’s

Uplifts a voice of living light, and calls—

Calls to his millions to behold and see

How goodly this his London Town can be!

For earth and sky and air

Are golden everywhere,

And golden with a gold so suave and fine

The looking on it lifts the heart like wine.

Trafalgar Square

(The fountains volleying golden glaze)

Shines like an angel-market.  High aloft

Over his couchant Lions, in a haze

Shimmering and bland and soft,

A dust of chrysoprase,

Our Sailor takes the golden gaze

Of the saluting sun, and flames superb,

As once he flamed it on his ocean round.

The dingy dreariness of the picture-place,

Turned very nearly bright,

Takes on a luminous transiency of grace,

And shows no more a scandal to the ground.

The very blind man pottering on the kerb,

Among the posies and the ostrich feathers

And the rude voices touched with all the weathers

Of the long, varying year,

Shares in the universal alms of light.

The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires,

The height and spread of frontage shining sheer,

The quiring signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires—

’Tis El Dorado—El Dorado plain,

The Golden City!  And when a girl goes by,

Look! as she turns her glancing head,

A call of gold is floated from her ear!

Golden, all golden!  In a golden glory,

Long-lapsing down a golden coasted sky,

The day, not dies but, seems

Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed

Upon a past of golden song and story

And memories of gold and golden dreams.

IV

Largo e mesto

OUT of the poisonous East,

Over a continent of blight,

Like a maleficent Influence released

From the most squalid cellarage of hell,

The Wind-Fiend, the abominable—

The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light—

Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,

Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;

And in a cloud unclean

Of excremental humours, roused to strife

By the operation of some ruinous change,

Wherever his evil mandate run and range,

Into a dire intensity of life,

A craftsman at his bench, he settles down

To the grim job of throttling London Town.

So, by a jealous lightlessness beset

That might have oppressed the dragons of old time

Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime,

A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams,

Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet,

The afflicted City, prone from mark to mark

In shameful occultation, seems

A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting,

With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting,

Rent in the stuff of a material dark,

Wherein the lamplight, scattered and sick and pale,

Shows like the leper’s living blotch of bale:

Uncoiling monstrous into street on street

Paven with perils, teeming with mischance,

Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread,

Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet

Somewhither in the hideousness ahead;

Working through wicked airs and deadly dews

That make the laden robber grin askance

At the good places in his black romance,

And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose

Go pinched and pined to bed

Than lurk and shiver and curse her wretched way

From arch to arch, scouting some threepenny prey.

Forgot his dawns and far-flushed afterglows,

His green garlands and windy eyots forgot,

The old Father-River flows,

His watchfires cores of menace in the gloom,

As he came oozing from the Pit, and bore,

Sunk in his filthily transfigured sides,

Shoals of dishonoured dead to tumble and rot

In the squalor of the universal shore:

His voices sounding through the gruesome air

As from the Ferry where the Boat of Doom

With her blaspheming cargo reels and rides:

The while his children, the brave ships,

No more adventurous and fair,

Nor tripping it light of heel as home-bound brides,

But infamously enchanted,

Huddle together in the foul eclipse,

Or feel their course by inches desperately,

As through a tangle of alleys murder-haunted,

From sinister reach to reach out—out—to sea.

And Death the while—

Death with his well-worn, lean, professional smile,

Death in his threadbare working trim—

Comes to your bedside, unannounced and bland,

And with expert, inevitable hand

Feels at your windpipe, fingers you in the lung,

Or flicks the clot well into the labouring heart:

Thus signifying unto old and young,

However hard of mouth or wild of whim,

’Tis time—’tis time by his ancient watch—to part

From books and women and talk and drink and art.

And you go humbly after him

To a mean suburban lodging: on the way

To what or where

Not Death, who is old and very wise, can say:

And you—how should you care

So long as, unreclaimed of hell,

The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable,

Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him down

To the black job of burking London Town?

V

Allegro maëstoso

SPRING winds that blow

As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may;

Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow,

Like matrons heavy bosomed and aglow

With the mild and placid pride of increase!  Nay,

What makes this insolent and comely stream

Of appetence, this freshet of desire

(Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day!),

Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam

In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre?

Why does that nymph unparalleled splash and churn

The wealth of her enchanted urn

Till, over-billowing all between

Her cheerful margents, grey and living green,

It floats and wanders, glittering and fleeing,

An estuary of the joy of being?

Why should the lovely leafage of the Park

Touch to an ecstasy the act of seeing?

—Sure, sure my paramour, my Bride of Brides,

Lingering and flushed, mysteriously abides

In some dim, eye-proof angle of odorous dark,

Some smiling nook of green-and-golden shade,

In the divine conviction robed and crowned

The globe fulfils his immemorial round

But as the marrying-place of all things made!

There is no man, this deifying day,

But feels the primal blessing in his blood.

There is no woman but disdains—

The sacred impulse of the May

Brightening like sex made sunshine through her veins—

To vail the ensigns of her womanhood.

None but, rejoicing, flaunts them as she goes,

Bounteous in looks of her delicious best,

On her inviolable quest:

These with their hopes, with their sweet secrets those,

But all desirable and frankly fair,

As each were keeping some most prosperous tryst,

And in the knowledge went imparadised!

For look! a magical influence everywhere,

Look how the liberal and transfiguring air

Washes this inn of memorable meetings,

This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings,

Till, through its jocund loveliness of length

A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore,

A brimming reach of beauty met with strength,

It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream,

Some vision multitudinous and agleam,

Of happiness as it shall be evermore!

Praise God for giving

Through this His messenger among the days

His word the life He gave is thrice-worth living!

For Pan, the bountiful, imperious Pan—

Not dead, not dead, as impotent dreamers feigned,

But the gay genius of a million Mays

Renewing his beneficent endeavour!—

Still reigns and triumphs, as he hath triumphed and reigned

Since in the dim blue dawn of time

The universal ebb-and-flow began,

To sound his ancient music, and prevails,

By the persuasion of his mighty rhyme,

Here in this radiant and immortal street

Lavishly and omnipotently as ever

In the open hills, the undissembling dales,

The laughing-places of the juvenile earth.

For lo! the wills of man and woman meet,

Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared,

As once in Eden’s prodigal bowers befell,

To share his shameless, elemental mirth

In one great act of faith: while deep and strong,

Incomparably nerved and cheered,

The enormous heart of London joys to beat

To the measures of his rough, majestic song;

The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell

That keeps the rolling universe ensphered,

And life, and all for which life lives to long,

Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

RHYMES AND RHYTHMS

1889–1892

PROLOGUE

Something is dead . . .

The grace of sunset solitudes, the march

Of the solitary moon, the pomp and power

Of round on round of shining soldier-stars

Patrolling space, the bounties of the sun—

Sovran, tremendous, unimaginable—

The multitudinous friendliness of the sea,

Possess no more—no more.

Something is dead . . .

The Autumn rain-rot deeper and wider soaks

And spreads, the burden of Winter heavier weighs,

His melancholy close and closer yet

Cleaves, and those incantations of the Spring

That made the heart a centre of miracles

Grow formal, and the wonder-working bours

Arise no more—no more.

Something is dead . . .

’Tis time to creep in close about the fire

And tell grey tales of what we were, and dream

Old dreams and faded, and as we may rejoice

In the young life that round us leaps and laughs,

A fountain in the sunshine, in the pride

Of God’s best gift that to us twain returns,

Dear Heart, no more—no more.

I

To H. B. M. W.

WHERE forlorn sunsets flare and fade

On desolate sea and lonely sand,

Out of the silence and the shade

What is the voice of strange command

Calling you still, as friend calls friend

With love that cannot brook delay,

To rise and follow the ways that wend

Over the hills and far away?

Hark in the city, street on street

A roaring reach of death and life,

Of vortices that clash and fleet

And ruin in appointed strife,

Hark to it calling, calling clear,

Calling until you cannot stay

From dearer things than your own most dear

Over the hills and far away.

Out of the sound of the ebb-and-flow,

Out of the sight of lamp and star,

It calls you where the good winds blow,

And the unchanging meadows are:

From faded hopes and hopes agleam,

It calls you, calls you night and day

Beyond the dark into the dream

Over the hills and far away

II

To R. F. B.

WE are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word

That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;

Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw,

And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law.

East and west and north, wherever the battle grew,

As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will to do.

Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease—

(Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!)—

Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire,

Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire.

Road was never so rough that we left its purpose dark;

Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet more stark;

We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of their very thrones;

The secret parts of the world were salted with our bones;

Till now the name of names, England, the name of might,

Flames from the austral fires to the bounds of the boreal night;

And the call of her morning drum goes in a girdle of sound,

Like the voice of the sun in song, the great globe round and round;

And the shadow of her flag, when it shouts to the mother-breeze,

Floats from shore to shore of the universal seas;

And the loneliest death is fair with a memory of her flowers,

And the end of the road to Hell with the sense of her dews and showers!

Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade and die,

While the living stars fulfil their round in the living sky?

For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their father’s debt,

And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw was set;

And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that none shall brave,

Is but less strong than Time and the great, all-whelming Grave.

III

A DESOLATE shore,

The sinister seduction of the Moon,

The menace of the irreclaimable Sea.

Flaunting, tawdry and grim,

From cloud to cloud along her beat,

Leering her battered and inveterate leer,

She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,

Her horrible old man,

Mumbling old oaths and warming

His villainous old bones with villainous talk—

The secrets of their grisly housekeeping

Since they went out upon the pad

In the first twilight of self-conscious Time:

Growling, hideous and hoarse,

Tales of unnumbered Ships,

Goodly and strong, Companions of the Advance,

In some vile alley of the night

Waylaid and bludgeoned—

Dead.

Deep cellared in primeval ooze,

Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled,

They lie where the lean water-worm

Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides

Bulge with the slime of life.  Thus they abide,

Thus fouled and desecrate,

The summons of the Trumpet, and the while

These Twain, their murderers,

Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued,

Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft

As in the shining streets,

He as in ambush at some accomplice door.

The stalwart Ships,

The beautiful and bold adventurers!

Stationed out yonder in the isle,

The tall Policeman,

Flashing his bull’s-eye, as he peers

About him in the ancient vacancy,

Tells them this way is safety—this way home.

IV

IT came with the threat of a waning moon

And the wail of an ebbing tide,

But many a woman has lived for less,

And many a man has died;

For life upon life took hold and passed,

Strong in a fate set free,

Out of the deep into the dark

On for the years to be.

Between the gloom of a waning moon

And the song of an ebbing tide,

Chance upon chance of love and death

Took wing for the world so wide.

O, leaf out of leaf is the way of the land,

Wave out of wave of the sea

And who shall reckon what lives may live

In the life that we bade to be?

V

WHY, my heart, do we love her so?

(Geraldine, Geraldine!)

Why does the great sea ebb and flow?—

Why does the round world spin?

Geraldine, Geraldine,

Bid me my life renew:

What is it worth unless I win,

Love—love and you?

Why, my heart, when we speak her name

(Geraldine, Geraldine!)

Throbs the word like a flinging flame?—

Why does the Spring begin?

Geraldine, Geraldine,

Bid me indeed to be:

Open your heart, and take us in,

Love—love and me.

VI

ONE with the ruined sunset,

The strange forsaken sands,

What is it waits, and wanders,

And signs with desparate hands?

What is it calls in the twilight—

Calls as its chance were vain?

The cry of a gull sent seaward

Or the voice of an ancient pain?

The red ghost of the sunset,

It walks them as its own,

These dreary and desolate reaches . . .

But O, that it walked alone!

VII

THERE’S a regret

So grinding, so immitigably sad,

Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad . . .

Do you not know it yet?

For deeds undone

Rankle and snarl and hunger for their due,

Till there seems naught so despicable as you

In all the grin o’ the sun.

Like an old shoe

The sea spurns and the land abhors, you lie

About the beach of Time, till by and by

Death, that derides you too—

Death, as he goes

His ragman’s round, espies you, where you stray,

With half-an-eye, and kicks you out of his way;

And then—and then, who knows

But the kind Grave

Turns on you, and you feel the convict Worm,

In that black bridewell working out his term,

Hanker and grope and crave?

‘Poor fool that might—

That might, yet would not, dared not, let this be,

Think of it, here and thus made over to me

In the implacable night!’

And writhing, fain

And like a triumphing lover, he shall take

His fill where no high memory lives to make

His obscene victory vain.

VIII

To A. J. H.

TIME and the Earth—

The old Father and Mother—

Their teeming accomplished,

Their purpose fulfilled,

Close with a smile

For a moment of kindness,

Ere for the winter

They settle to sleep.

Failing yet gracious,

Slow pacing, soon homing,

A patriarch that strolls

Through the tents of his children,

The Sun, as he journeys

His round on the lower

Ascents of the blue,

Washes the roofs

And the hillsides with clarity;

Charms the dark pools

Till they break into pictures;

Scatters magnificent

Alms to the beggar trees;

Touches the mist-folk,

That crowd to his escort,

Into translucencies

Radiant and ravishing:

As with the visible

Spirit of Summer

Gloriously vaporised,

Visioned in gold!

Love, though the fallen leaf

Mark, and the fleeting light

And the loud, loitering

Footfall of darkness

Sign to the heart

Of the passage of destiny,

Here is the ghost

Of a summer that lived for us,

Here is a promise

Of summers to be.

IX

‘AS like the Woman as you can’—

(Thus the New Adam was beguiled)—

‘So shall you touch the Perfect Man’—

(God in the Garden heard and smiled).

‘Your father perished with his day:

‘A clot of passions fierce and blind,

‘He fought, he hacked, he crushed his way:

‘Your muscles, Child, must be of mind.

‘The Brute that lurks and irks within,

‘How, till you have him gagged and bound,

‘Escape the foullest form of Sin?’

(God in the Garden laughed and frowned).

‘So vile, so rank, the bestial mood

‘In which the race is bid to be,

‘It wrecks the Rarer Womanhood:

‘Live, therefore, you, for Purity!

‘Take for your mate no gallant croup,

‘No girl all grace and natural will:

‘To work her mission were to stoop,

‘Maybe to lapse, from Well to Ill.

‘Choose one of whom your grosser make’—

(God in the Garden laughed outright)—

‘The true refining touch may take,

‘Till both attain to Life’s last height.

‘There, equal, purged of soul and sense.

‘Beneficent, high-thinking, just,

‘Beyond the appeal of Violence,

‘Incapable of common Lust,

‘In mental Marriage still prevail’—

(God in the Garden hid His face)—

‘Till you achieve that Female-Male

‘In Which shall culminate the race.’

X

MIDSUMMER midnight skies,

Midsummer midnight influences and airs,

The shining, sensitive silver of the sea

Touched with the strange-hued blazonings of dawn;

And all so solemnly still I seem to hear

The breathing of Life and Death,

The secular Accomplices,

Renewing the visible miracle of the world.

The wistful stars

Shine like good memories.  The young morning wind

Blows full of unforgotten hours

As over a region of roses.  Life and Death

Sound on—sound on . . . And the night magical,

Troubled yet comforting, thrills

As if the Enchanted Castle at the heart

Of the wood’s dark wonderment

Swung wide his valves, and filled the dim sea-banks

With exquisite visitants:

Words fiery-hearted yet, dreams and desires

With living looks intolerable, regrets

Whose voice comes as the voice of an only child

Heard from the grave: shapes of a Might-Have-Been—

Beautiful, miserable, distraught—

The Law no man may baffle denied and slew.

The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze

To let the marvel by.  The grey road glooms . . .

Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O, there where it fades,

What grace, what glamour, what wild will,

Transfigure the shadows?  Whose,

Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours?

Ghosts—ghosts—the sapphirine air

Teems with them even to the gleaming ends

Of the wild day-spring!  Ghosts,

Everywhere—everywhere—till I and you

At last—dear love, at last!—

Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death,

Twin-ministers of the unoriginal Will.

XI

GULLS in an aëry morrice

Gleam and vanish and gleam . . .

The full sea, sleepily basking,

Dreams under skies of dream.

Gulls in an aëry morrice

Circle and swoop and close . . .

Fuller and ever fuller

The rose of the morning blows.

Gulls, in an aëry morrice

Frolicking, float and fade . . .

O, the way of a bird in the sunshine,

The way of a man with a maid!

XII

SOME starlit garden grey with dew,

Some chamber flushed with wine and fire,

What matters where, so I and you

Are worthy our desire?

Behind, a past that scolds and jeers

For ungirt loins and lamps unlit;

In front, the unmanageable years,

The trap upon the Pit;

Think on the shame of dreams for deeds,

The scandal of unnatural strife,

The slur upon immortal needs,

The treason done to life:

Arise! no more a living lie,

And with me quicken and control

Some memory that shall magnify

The universal Soul.

XIII

To James McNeill Whistler

UNDER a stagnant sky,

Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,

The River, jaded and forlorn,

Welters and wanders wearily—wretchedly—on;

Yet in and out among the ribs

Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles

Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls,

Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,

Lingers to babble to a broken tune

(Once, O, the unvoiced music of my heart!)

So melancholy a soliloquy

It sounds as it might tell

The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,

The terror of Time and Change and Death,

That wastes this floating, transitory world.

What of the incantation

That forced the huddled shapes on yonder shore

To take and wear the night

Like a material majesty?

That touched the shafts of wavering fire

About this miserable welter and wash—

(River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams!)—

Into long, shining signals from the panes

Of an enchanted pleasure-house,

Where life and life might live life lost in life

For ever and evermore?

O Death!  O Change!  O Time!

Without you, O, the insuperable eyes

Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,

These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!

XIV

To J. A. C.

FRESH from his fastnesses

Wholesome and spacious,

The North Wind, the mad huntsman,

Halloas on his white hounds

Over the grey, roaring

Reaches and ridges,

The forest of ocean,

The chace of the world.

Hark to the peal

Of the pack in full cry,

As he thongs them before him,

Swarming voluminous,

Weltering, wide-wallowing,

Till in a ruining

Chaos of energy,

Hurled on their quarry,

They crash into foam!

Old Indefatigable,

Time’s right-hand man, the sea

Laughs as in joy

From his millions of wrinkles:

Laughs that his destiny,

Great with the greatness

Of triumphing order,

Shows as a dwarf

By the strength of his heart

And the might of his hands.

Master of masters,

O maker of heroes,

Thunder the brave,

Irresistible message:—

‘Life is worth Living

Through every grain of it,

From the foundations

To the last edge

Of the cornerstone, death.’

XV

YOU played and sang a snatch of song,

A song that all-too well we knew;

But whither had flown the ancient wrong;

And was it really I and you?

O, since the end of life’s to live

And pay in pence the common debt,

What should it cost us to forgive

Whose daily task is to forget?

You babbled in the well-known voice—

Not new, not new the words you said.

You touched me off that famous poise,

That old effect, of neck and head.

Dear, was it really you and I?

In truth the riddle’s ill to read,

So many are the deaths we die

Before we can be dead indeed.

XVI

SPACE and dread and the dark—

Over a livid stretch of sky

Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train

Of huge, primeval presences

Stooping beneath the weight

Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;

While in the haunting loneliness

The far sea waits and wanders with a sound

As of the trailing skirts of Destiny,

Passing unseen

To some immitigable end

With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this

Thrilling the wilderness to life

As with the bodily shape of Fear?

What but a desperate sense,

A strong foreboding of those dim

Interminable continents, forlorn

And many-silenced, in a dusk

Inviolable utterly, and dead

As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes

In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life—life—let there be life!

Better a thousand times the roaring hours

When wave and wind,

Like the Arch-Murderer in flight

From the Avenger at his heel,

Storm through the desolate fastnesses

And wild waste places of the world!

Life—give me life until the end,

That at the very top of being,

The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,

Out of the reddest hell of the fight

I may be snatched and flung

Into the everlasting lull,

The immortal, incommunicable dream.

XVII

CARMEN PATIBULARE

To H. S.

TREE, Old Tree of the Triple Crook

And the rope of the Black Election,

’Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule

Can never achieve perfection:

So ‘It’s O, for the time of the new Sublime

And the better than human way,

When the Rat (poor beast) shall come to his own

And the Wolf shall have his day!’

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam

And the power of provocation,

You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful fruit

Till your fruit is mere stupration:

And ‘It’s how should we rise to be pure and wise,

And how can we choose but fall,

So long as the Hangman makes us dread,

And the Noose floats free for all?’

So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign

And the trick there’s no recalling,

They will haggle and hew till they hack you through

And at last they lay you sprawling:

When ‘Hey! for the hour of the race in flower

And the long good-bye to sin!’

And for the lack the fires of Hell gone out

Of the fuel to keep them in!’

But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough

And the ghastly Dreams that tend you,

Your growth began with the life of Man,

And only his death can end you.

They may tug in line at your hempen twine,

They may flourish with axe and saw;

But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs

In the living rock of Law.

And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork,

When the spent sun reels and blunders

Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit

As it seethes in spate and thunders,

Stern on the glare of the tortured air

Your lines august shall gloom,

And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed

In the ruining roar of Doom.

XVIII

I. M.

MARGARET EMMA HENLEY

(1888–1894)

WHEN you wake in your crib,

You, an inch of experience—

Vaulted about

With the wonder of darkness;

Wailing and striving

To reach from your feebleness

Something you feel

Will be good to and cherish you,

Something you know

And can rest upon blindly:

O, then a hand

(Your mother’s, your mother’s!)

By the fall of its fingers

All knowledge, all power to you,

Out of the dreary,

Discouraging strangenesses

Comes to and masters you,

Takes you, and lovingly

Woos you and soothes you

Back, as you cling to it,

Back to some comforting

Corner of sleep.

So you wake in your bed,

Having lived, having loved;

But the shadows are there,

And the world and its kingdoms

Incredibly faded;

And you group through the Terror

Above you and under

For the light, for the warmth,

The assurance of life;

But the blasts are ice-born,

And your heart is nigh burst

With the weight of the gloom

And the stress of your strangled

And desperate endeavour:

Sudden a hand—

Mother, O Mother!—

God at His best to you,

Out of the roaring,

Impossible silences,

Falls on and urges you,

Mightily, tenderly,

Forth, as you clutch at it,

Forth to the infinite

Peace of the Grave.

October 1891

XIX

I. M.

R. L. S.

(1850–1894)

O, TIME and Change, they range and range

From sunshine round to thunder!—

They glance and go as the great winds blow,

And the best of our dreams drive under:

For Time and Change estrange, estrange—

And, now they have looked and seen us,

O, we that were dear, we are all-too near

With the thick of the world between us.

O, Death and Time, they chime and chime

Like bells at sunset falling!—

They end the song, they right the wrong,

They set the old echoes calling:

For Death and Time bring on the prime

Of God’s own chosen weather,

And we lie in the peace of the Great Release

As once in the grass together.

February 1891

XX

THE shadow of Dawn;

Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams

Of Life and Death and Sleep;

Heard over gleaming flats, the old, unchanging sound

Of the old, unchanging Sea.

My soul and yours—

O, hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts,

Into the ghostliness,

The infinite and abounding solitudes,

Beyond—O, beyond!—beyond . . .

Here in the porch

Upon the multitudinous silences

Of the kingdoms of the grave,

We twain are you and I—two ghosts Omnipotence

Can touch no more . . . no more!

XXI

WHEN the wind storms by with a shout, and the stern sea-caves

Rejoice in the tramp and the roar of onsetting waves,

Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life

Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife—

Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before,

When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore,

Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong,

Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire’s old song—

O, you envy the blesséd death that can live no more!

XXII

TREES and the menace of night;

Then a long, lonely, leaden mere

Backed by a desolate fell,

As by a spectral battlement; and then,

Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,

A vast, gray, listless, inexpressive sky,

So beggared, so incredibly bereft

Of starlight and the song of racing worlds,

It might have bellied down upon the Void

Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.

Hist!  In the trees fulfilled of night

(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)

Is it the hurry of the rain?

Or the noise of a drive of the Dead,

Streaming before the irresistible Will

Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land

Between their place and ours?

Like the forgetfulness

Of the work-a-day world made visible,

A mist falls from the melancholy sky.

A messenger from some lost and loving soul,

Hopeless, far wandered, dazed

Here in the provinces of life,

A great white moth fades miserably past.

Thro’ the trees in the strange dead night,

Under the vast dead sky,

Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead

Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,

And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.

XXIII

To P. A. G.

HERE they trysted, here they strayed,

In the leafage dewy and boon,

Many a man and many a maid,

And the morn was merry June.

‘Death is fleet, Life is sweet,’

Sang the blackbird in the may;

And the hour with flying feet,

While they dreamed, was yesterday.

Many a maid and many a man

Found the leafage close and boon;

Many a destiny began—

O, the morn was merry June!

Dead and gone, dead and gone,

(Hark the blackbird in the may!),

Life and Death went hurrying on,

Cheek on cheek—and where were they?

Dust on dust engendering dust

In the leafage fresh and boon,

Man and maid fulfil their trust—

Still the morn turns merry June.

Mother Life, Father Death

(O, the blackbird in the may!),

Each the other’s breath for breath,

Fleet the times of the world away.

XXIV

To A. C.

NOT to the staring Day,

For all the importunate questionings he pursues

In his big, violent voice,

Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude,

The Trees—God’s sentinels

Over His gift of live, life-giving air,

Yield of their huge, unutterable selves.

Midsummer-manifold, each one

Voluminous, a labyrinth of life,

They keep their greenest musings, and the dim dreams

That haunt their leafier privacies,

Dissembled, baffling the random gapeseed still

With blank full-faces, or the innocent guile

Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade,

And disappearances of homing birds,

And frolicsome freaks

Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs.

But at the word

Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night,

Night of the many secrets, whose effect—

Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread—

Themselves alone may fully apprehend,

They tremble and are changed.

In each, the uncouth individual soul

Looms forth and glooms

Essential, and, their bodily presences

Touched with inordinate significance,

Wearing the darkness like the livery

Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,

They brood—they menace—they appal;

Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they wring

Wild hands of warning in the face

Of some inevitable advance of the doom;

Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing

As in some monstrous market-place,

They pass the news, these Gossips of the Prime,

In that old speech their forefathers

Learned on the lawns of Eden, ere they heard

The troubled voice of Eve

Naming the wondering folk of Paradise.

Your sense is sealed, or you should hear them tell

The tale of their dim life, with all

Its compost of experience: how the Sun

Spreads them their daily feast,

Sumptuous, of light, firing them as with wine;

Of the old Moon’s fitful solicitude

And those mild messages the Stars

Descend in silver silences and dews;

Or what the sweet-breathing West,

Wanton with wading in the swirl of the wheat,

Said, and their leafage laughed;

And how the wet-winged Angel of the Rain

Came whispering . . . whispering; and the gifts of the Year—

The sting of the stirring sap

Under the wizardry of the young-eyed Spring,

Their summer amplitudes of pomp,

Their rich autumnal melancholy, and the shrill,

Embittered housewifery

Of the lean Winter: all such things,

And with them all the goodness of the Master,

Whose right hand blesses with increase and life,

Whose left hand honours with decay and death.

Thus under the constraint of Night

These gross and simple creatures,

Each in his scores of rings, which rings are years,

A servant of the Will!

And God, the Craftsman, as He walks

The floor of His workshop, hearkens, full of cheer

In thus accomplishing

The aims of His miraculous artistry.

XXV

WHAT have I done for you,

England, my England?

What is there I would not do,

England, my own?

With your glorious eyes austere,

As the Lord were walking near,

Whispering terrible things and dear

As the Song on your bugles blown,

England—

Round the world on your bugles blown!

Where shall the watchful Sun,

England, my England,

Match the master-work you’ve done,

England, my own?

When shall he rejoice agen

Such a breed of mighty men

As come forward, one to ten,

To the Song on your bugles blown,

England—

Down the years on your bugles blown?

Ever the faith endures,

England, my England:—

‘Take and break us: we are yours,

‘England, my own!

‘Life is good, and joy runs high

‘Between English earth and sky:

‘Death is death; but we shall die

‘To the Song on your bugles blown,

‘England—

‘To the stars on your bugles blown!

They call you proud and hard,

England, my England:

You with worlds to watch and ward,

England, my own!

You whose mailed hand keeps the keys

Of such teeming destinies

You could know nor dread nor ease

Were the Song on your bugles blown,

England,

Round the Pit on your bugles blown!

Mother of Ships whose might,

England, my England,

Is the fierce old Sea’s delight,

England, my own,

Chosen daughter of the Lord,

Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient sword,

There’s the menace of the Word

In the Song on your bugles blown,

England—

Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

EPILOGUE

These, to you now, O, more than ever now—

Now that the Ancient Enemy

Has passed, and we, we two that are one, have seen

A piece of perfect Life

Turn to so ravishing a shape of Death

The Arch-Discomforter might well have smiled

In pity and pride,

Even as he bore his lovely and innocent spoil

From those home-kingdoms he left desolate!

Poor windlestraws

On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time

And Chance and Change, I know!

But they are yours, as I am, till we attain

That end for which me make, we two that are one:

A little, exquisite Ghost

Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes

Seen in this world, and calling, calling still

In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties

Of sweetness, thrilling back across the grave,

Break the poor heart to hear:—

‘Come, Dadsie, come!

Mama, how long—how long!’

July 1897.

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Table of Contents

POEMS

TO MY WIFE

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CONTENTS

IN HOSPITAL

I ENTER PATIENT

II WAITING

III INTERIOR

IV BEFORE

V OPERATION

VI AFTER

VII VIGIL

VIII STAFF-NURSE: OLD STYLE

IX LADY-PROBATIONER

X STAFF-NURSE: NEW STYLE

XI CLINICAL

XII ETCHING

XIII CASUALTY

XIV AVE CAESER!

XV ‘THE CHIEF’

XVI HOUSE-SURGEON

XVII INTERLUDE

XVIII CHILDREN: PRIVATE WARD

XIX SCRUBBER

XX VISITOR

XXI ROMANCE

XXII PASTORAL

XXIII MUSIC

XXIV SUICIDE

XXV APPARITION

XXVI ANTEROTICS

XXVII NOCTURN

XXVIII DISCHARGED

ENVOY To Charles Baxter

THE SONG OF THE SWORD

ARABIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS

BRIC-À-BRAC

BALLADE OF A TOYOKUNI COLOUR-PRINT

BALLADE (DOUBLE REFRAIN) OF YOUTH AND AGE

BALLADE (DOUBLE REFRAIN) OF MIDSUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS

BALLADE OF DEAD ACTORS

BALLADE MADE IN THE HOT WEATHER

BALLADE OF TRUISMS

DOUBLE BALLADE OF LIFE AND FATE

DOUBLE BALLADE OF THE NOTHINGNESS OF THINGS

AT QUEENSFERRY

ORIENTALE

IN FISHERROW

BACK-VIEW

CROLUIS

ATTADALE WEST HIGHLANDS

FROM A WINDOW IN PRINCES STREET

IN THE DIALS

THE GODS ARE DEAD

To F. W.

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

BESIDE THE IDLE SUMMER SEA

I. M. R. G. C. B. 1878

WE SHALL SURELY DIE

WHAT IS TO COME

ECHOES

I TO MY MOTHER

II

III

IV I. M. R. T. HAMILTON BRUCE (1846–1899)

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX To W. R.

X

XI To W. R.

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII To A. D.

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII To S. C.

XXIX To R. L. S.

XXX

XXXI

XXXII To D. H.

XXXIII

XXXIV To K. de M.

XXXV I. M. MARGARITÆ SORORI (1886)

XXXVI

XXXVII To W. A.

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLVI To R. A. M. S.

XLII

XLII

XLIV

XLV To W. B.

XLVI MATRI DILECTISSIMÆ I. M.

XLVII

LONDON VOLUNTARIES

I Grave

II Andante con moto

III Scherzando

IV Largo e mesto

V Allegro maëstoso

RHYMES AND RHYTHMS

PROLOGUE

I To H. B. M. W.

II To R. F. B.

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII To A. J. H.

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII To James McNeill Whistler

XIV To J. A. C.

XV

XVI

XVII CARMEN PATIBULARE To H. S.

XVIII I. M. MARGARET EMMA HENLEY (1888–1894)

XIX I. M. R. L. S. (1850–1894)

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII To P. A. G.

XXIV To A. C.

XXV

EPILOGUE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE